Chapter 77
To his credit he didn’t hesitate, braked us smoothly but quickly to a halt between two big assembly plants guarded by tall chainlink fences. My door was open even before we stopped moving. “Everyone out,” I ordered, “scatter, now!”
Jesse, Lisa and Sophie didn’t dispute or question my claim; my panic convinced them. Ahmed was slower to move. He didn’t understand the urgency, and was probably trained not to leave his vehicle. I solved that problem by opening his door, grabbing him, and physically pulling him out.
“Sir, I must request that you release me,” Ahmed pleaded as I dragged him across the wide road – and as an all too familiar whine began to tickle my eardrums, from directly above us.
His shock was just beginning to turn to anger when a gray blur fell from the sky into the Silver Ghost like a cormorant diving for fish. Death from above.
I threw myself and Ahmed to the ground just in time. We didn’t hear the crash, only the explosion. My eyes were squeezed shut, my whole body was turned away from the blast, but the light was so bright that for a fleeting moment I actually saw the world through my eyelids, like a lightning strike illuminating darkness. The pulse of heat was scalding. The shockwave rattled my bones like dice in a cup.
I got up wobbling and dazed and half-deaf; but I got up, and around me the others did the same, with varying degrees of alacrity, shaken but not broken by the explosion. I smelled my own scalded hair. I was grateful that carbon fibre tended to melt rather than turn to shrapnel, and that the bits of the Rolls-Royce had been driven downwards rather than horizontally.
“Merciful God,” Ahmed said beside me. He must have shouted it for me to hear him. His voice was full of awe and wonder, as if this had been a religious experience rather than an attempted slaughter. I supposed the line was fine.
We reassembled in the middle of the road, not far from the smoking carcass that had once been a luxury automobile. The ground within a thirty-foot radius had been transformed from smooth tarmac and sand into something that looked more like churned mud, pockmarked with bits of Rolls-Royce.
“Everyone OK?” Lisa asked.
We gave our uncertain assent. Sophie looked pale and on the verge of collapse. I reached out and put a steadying hand on her shoulder. It won me a grateful look.
A set of headlights appeared in the distance, coming our way, fast.
“Guys,” I said, “either the Dubai police respond with freaking inhuman speed, or we need to get out of here now.”
I matched action to word, turned and ran. Lisa was right behind me. When I glanced over my shoulder I saw Jesse and Sophie following a little further behind. Ahmed stood where he was, bewildered.
The explosion-harrowed earth acted as a huge speed bump, but wouldn’t buy us enough time to reach an intersection. The chainlink fences that walled both sides of the road extended for hundreds of metres in either direction, and were topped with overhanging strands of barbed wire; but about fifty metres away, some of that wire had wilted. I charged straight for that weak point.
When I reached the fence I leaped up it and climbed. Lisa started behind me, but reached the top first. She avoided the flaccid barbed wire with ease; I teetered dangerously as I negotiated my way past, but reached the horizontal pole atop the fence without getting hooked.
We turned to aid the others. Sophie, unused to bomb attacks and physical exertion, had fallen further behind, and Jesse had slowed to stay with her. They were not yet at the fence when the SUV cleared the patch of mangled pavement and leapt towards us with snarling engine. They had only just begun to climb when it screeched to a halt and men with guns, Slavic men in Arabic robes, emerged.
I was about to throw myself at them from above, to distract them, to give Sophie and Jesse a chance to get away. Then Lisa’s hand pulled me backwards. I fought for balance, lost, fell inside the fence and landed hard on gravel. I cried out from the pain, but it was only contusions, no broken bones. Lisa shimmied down the fence with a rattle and landed beside me.
For a moment all I could see was Sophie’s aghast and terrified face through the chainlink. Then they pulled her and Jesse off the fence, and Lisa yanked me up to my feet and shouted, “Run!”
They must have fought like wildcats. It took the four armed men so long to subdue Jesse and Sophia that Lisa and I had almost covered the distance between us and the nearest building, a big trailer like a portable classroom, before they turned their attention to us. One of their bullets kicked up a cloud of dust not three feet away from me just before Lisa and I flung ourselves around the corner of that building into safety.
By the time we dared to peek back, the SUV was gone, along with Jesse, and Sophie, and as far as I could tell, all hope whatsoever. In coming to Dubai we had marched straight into our enemy’s jaws.
Chapter 78
“The dragonflies,” I said, “they’re drones. Miniature drones that look like dragonflies, with cameras and radios and who knows what else.”
Lisa stared at me like I was on some combination of crack and LSD.
“Interesting,” LoTek said thoughtfully into our ears. We had conference-called him on the Android phones he had distributed at the hotel. “Not the first I’ve heard of the possibility. They might not even be completely mechanical. There were stories as far back as 2005 about the US Department of Defense trying to grow live insects with computer chips and radio antennae in them.”
Lisa looked stunned. “Are you serious? Cyborg insects?”
“A brave new world indeed.”
“I hope so,” I said miserably, “because the old one’s about to end.”
“You certainly managed to fuck things up with record speed.” LoTek sounded more disgusted than distraught. “You’ve only been gone half an hour. You were just supposed to go take a look-see. What a fucking pear-shaped shambles.”
“We know,” Lisa muttered.
She too looked exhausted and beaten. Not only had we failed to stop them, but they now had Sophie, the ultimate prize, and Jesse, who knew all there was to know about Grassfire. There was nothing we could do now except hope against hope that the Russians might decide not to launch. Our roller coaster had gone off its rails and crashed.
“But when an ill wind blows you lemons, and all that,” LoTek mused. “This might work to our advantage.”
The sheer unlikeliness of that reaction startled me halfway out of my despair. “
“Don’t think of it as two captured. Think of it as two infiltrated into their factory.”
Lisa said, “We don’t even know they’ve been taken to the factory.”
“Yes, we do. They just entered its grounds.”
“How do you know?”
“Because unlike some people I could mention,” he said testily, “I wasn’t completely unprepared for suboptimal eventualities. Those phones I gave you all are rigged so they don’t actually switch off when you push the button. Even if you remove the battery, there’s a hidden spare.”
I took a moment to absorb the implications. “You mean you can track them?”
“I can and I am. We’ve been here in sunny Dubai long enough for me to have bent all the local networks to my will.”
“Cute, but what good does it do?” Lisa asked. It seemed to me as well like pointless hacker trickery. “What are you going to do, call the police on them?”
“In a manner of speaking. Not exactly. You’ll see.” He actually sounded amused. “I don’t think you quite understand what it means to own the networks. Normally we hackers can’t actually exercise the mighty powers at our fingertips, or we’d be noticed. Always be invisible. LoTek’s Law. But one silver lining about the onrushing end of
