Locked On

Twenty minutes after Domingo Chavez left Embling and al Darkur’s flat, there was a knock at the door. The Pakistani major was on the phone with his staff in Peshawar, so Embling went to answer it. He knew there was security in the building that would not allow anyone off on this floor of private residences who did not have permission from one of the occupants, so he was not concerned about his security. As he looked through the peephole he saw a waiter in a white tuxedo jacket holding a wine bucket full of ice and a bottle of Champagne.

“May I help you?” he asked through the door. Then he mumbled to himself, “By taking that lovely bottle of Dom Perignon off your hands?”

“Compliments of property management, sir. Welcome to Dubai.”

Embling smiled, opened the door, and then he saw the other men rushing up the hallway. He made to slam the door shut, but the waiter had flung his wine bucket aside, drawn a Steyr automatic pistol, and leveled it at Nigel Embling’s forehead.

Embling did not move.

From around the side of the doorway, hidden from sight from the peephole, General Riaz Rehan of Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous appeared. He carried a small automatic pistol himself.

“Indeed, Englishman,” he said. “Welcome to Dubai.”

Nine other men burst into the apartment, past Nigel, with handguns held high.

56

Caruso had finished his sandwich, and he and Ryan were in the process of powering down the bug-bot surveillance devices in order to save battery power. They would wait until evening to fire them up again, hoping that Rehan would be back by then.

The sat phone on the table rang, and Caruso answered it.

“Yeah?”

“Dom? It’s Bell.”

“What’s up, Rick?”

“We’ve got a problem. When we got into the office, we started at the beginning of your transmission of the audio, so we’ve been about fifteen minutes behind on the translations.”

“Not a problem. Rehan took off a little while ago so we are powering down the—”

“There is a problem. We just translated what he said before he walked out the door.”

Domingo Chavez was stuck in traffic just a quarter-mile from the exit to the airport. On his way back from picking up his sniper rifle and ammo from the Hendley Associates Gulfstream, he got caught behind a bad traffic accident on the Business Bay Bridge, and now he sat in the BMW, very glad at the moment that the air conditioner was saving him from the brutal heat, because it looked like he’d be going nowhere soon.

In front of him, some three miles away, he could see the Burj Khalifa reach up into the sky. On the other side of that, all the way over at the coast, was Palm Jumeirah, his destination.

Just then his mobile rang. “Go for Ding,” he said.

It was Ryan, his voice rushed and intense. “Rehan knows Embling and al Darkur are at Burj Khalifa! He’s headed there now with a crew of goons.”

“Shit! Call Nigel.”

“I did. No answer. Tried the landline to his place, too. Nobody picked up.”

“Son of a bitch!” Chavez said. “Get over there as fast as possible. I’m stuck in gridlock.”

“We’re moving, but it will be twenty minutes, at least.”

“Just haul ass, kid! They are our only link to Sam! We can’t lose them!”

“I know!”

In the BMW just west of Business Bay Bridge, Domingo Chavez slammed his hands into the steering wheel in frustration. “Dammit!”

Both Mohammed al Darkur and Nigel Embling had been secured with plastic restraints, their hands behind their backs, their ankles zip-tied together. Rehan had ordered his men to stand the men up against the floor-to-ceiling windows in the sunken living room with their backs against the glass. General Rehan sat in front of them on the long couch, his legs crossed and his arms back over the cushions. He was a man in his element, comfortable here with prisoners at his mercy.

Rehan’s men — Colonel Khan and an eight-strong security force — stood around the room. Another sentry remained outside in the hallway. They each carried a pistol of their own choosing — Steyrs and SIGs and CZs were represented in the force, and Rehan and Khan both carried Berettas in shoulder holsters.

If Nigel Embling still harbored any faint shred of doubt as to the trustworthiness of ISI Major Mohammed al Darkur, that doubt was dispelled. Rehan’s men bashed al Darkur’s face into the glass window multiple times, and the thirty-five-year-old Pakistani shrieked curses at his elder countryman.

Nigel did not need forty years of in-country experience in Pakistan to recognize that these two Pakistanis did not care for each other.

Al Darkur shouted at Rehan. He spoke in English. “What did you do with the American in Miran Shah?”

The calm general smiled and answered in English. “I met with the man personally. He did not have much to say. I ordered him tortured for information about your plans. I suppose your future plans are not as important to me now as they were when I gave that order, seeing how you now have no future.”

Al Darkur kept his chin high. “Others are on to you. We know you are working with the coup organizers, we know you have trained a foreign force at the Haqqani camp near Miran Shah. Others will come behind me and they will stop you, inshallah!”

“Ha,” Rehan laughed. “Inshallah? If Allah wills it? Let’s see if Allah wills you to succeed, or if he wills me to succeed.” Rehan looked to his two guards standing near the prisoners by the window. “It is stuffy in this pretentious apartment. Open a window.”

The two guards drew their pistols, turned as one, and fired over and over into a ten-by-ten-foot pane of the thick floor-to-ceiling window glass against wh?>Thich the two prisoners stood. It did not shatter immediately, but as the number of holes increased in the pane, from five to ten to twenty, white fissures spread between the bullet holes. The men reloaded their handguns while the cracking and popping of the glass continued, growing in volume until the massive glass square shattered outward, sending razor-sharp shards falling 108 stories down.

Warm wind blew into the luxury apartment, some pebble-sized flecks of glass with it, and Rehan and his men had to shield their eyes while the dust settled. The whine of the airflow up the side of the building rushing into the open panel in the window forced Rehan to stand up from the couch and come nearer to his prisoners to be heard.

He looked at Major al Darkur for a moment before turning to Nigel Embling, propped against the window glass, hands and legs bound, next to the huge opening to the bright sky. “I’ve looked into your background. You are from another century, Embling. The expatriate spy of a colonial power that has somehow missed the message that it no longer has any colonies. You are a pathetic man. You and the other infidels of the West have so long raped the children of Allah that you can no longer understand that your time has passed. But now, old fool, now the caliphate has returned! Can you not see it, Embling? Can you not see how the destruction of British colonialism has so perfectly set the stage for my ascendance to power?”