Candleburn (23 page)

Another
handbrake turn.

The
Audi bolted along the highway.

“I
know that spies and special forces tend to hate one another,” Asp said. “It’s the nature of the game. After all, special forces rely on intelligence from groups like the CIA, so they tend to mistrust them – dodgy intel getting people killed.”

“Yes,
in part,” Blake said. “But it’s not that simple. The CIA also operates bespoke missions behind enemy lines. The split between the two is rough but works something like this: if the job is in a city and involves information gathering – true spying – over wet work, it tends on average to be CIA. If it’s in the field, say outside a town, somewhere in the savannah of Africa or steppes of the ‘stans – or it requires an assassination, or has a military target – then you’d expect that it’s taken on by special forces. Except where the mission is covert. Then, supposedly, someone else does it... but in practice...”

With
Dubai Mall far in the distance, the Audi slowed to the natural speed of the traffic. Blake checked his mirrors to ensure they’d lost their tail. He changed lanes and settled in to blend with the other road users.

“Okay,”
Asp broke in, “it sounds complicated. So why make it more so with another agency. What was Rubicon?”

“That,
it would probably be unwise for me to tell you,” Blake said. “All of what you’ve been told is classified – so, for your own safety we’ll draw the line there.”

Blake
took the car through one of Dubai’s many four-leaf clover junctions and onto a new motorway that led towards the Rub’ Al Khali – the ‘Empty Quarter’.

At
250,000 square miles, Rub’ Al Khali was the largest sand desert in the world. It stretched in a crescent from Yemen in the south, across Oman and Saudi Arabia and all the way through to the United Arab Emirates in the north. When people imagined the Middle East, replete with camels and Lawrence of Arabia backdrops, it was the Rub’ Al Khali they pictured.

“Do
you remember how we met?” Asp said after a few minutes.

“I
do,” Blake replied. “I was ordering a drink from the bar at that dull, dull British Consular party. You tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was Blake Helliker of the Journal.”

“And
you remember what I said next?” Nate nodded in agreement.

“You
asked me if I worked with a lady called Alice Thorne,” Blake said.

The
mention of her name caused him to shudder; even though he knew she was dead – a carbonised cadaver, now probably cold on some mortuary slab. The ghost of her torment during the last eighteen months haunted him.

“You
then proceeded to tell me,” Blake continued, “that you’d been to many parties in Dubai, as all expats do, and that I needed ‘to be careful of her because if I wasn’t aware already, I should know that she was going from event to event blackening my name to anyone who would listen’.”

“Which
is why I feel I have to ask: given your particular skill set and background, why did you end up a journalist and allow yourself to be treated like that for so long?”

“Why
a journalist?” Blake took his eyes from the road briefly and looked at Asp. “That one’s easy. Aside from the capacity for violence, the skills required to do the job complimented those I’d been trained in: observation, research, finding information others wanted hidden and understanding people.”

Blake
returned his attention to driving.

“I
could have done what most people who leave Rubicon do and move to another special operations unit or go private. You can earn a six-figure salary providing protection to some commodities baron or Singaporean businessman. But that would have defeated the point of leaving.”

“You
left because you met Cathy and fell in love, I’m assuming?” Asp said.

“Yes,”
Blake replied. “It was no life for a man about to get married. But my reasons ran deeper. That was the trigger. However, I’d been in Rubicon for nearly a decade by that point. It is not the sort of agency people retire from. The mortality rate was ridiculous. Probably half the people I’d worked with died in the field. Those of us that survived were different from the idealistic, gung-ho youths who joined.”

A
sign for a petrol station whipped past the car. Blake eased across to the inside lane in preparation for the forecourt a mile down the road.

“It
is trite – perhaps almost cliché – to say that every time you kill a person, you lose something of yourself,” Blake said. “When you live through it, it is anything but a cliché. You physically – and I mean viscerally – feel your soul leaching away. After ten years, I was hollow.”

“That’s
why you allowed yourself to be treated so badly,” Asp said quietly. “It was a self-imposed penance.”

Blake
suppressed a huffed laugh.

“Not
a conscious one,” he said. “If my training has taught me anything, it is that the subconscious part of the mind is very much more powerful than we ever admit. All pretty stupid, huh?”

“It
doesn’t seem stupid at all,” Asp said. “It seems entirely understandable – if a little misguided.”

The
Audi decelerated as it slipped onto a side road that led to the petrol station, a gleaming modern oasis surrounded by the dunes that marked the beginning of the Empty Quarter.

Like
all outlying stations, it had a small set of shops attached, complete with fast food outlets and a miniature supermarket. Blake pulled up next to the pump and an Indian attendant began to fill the car with fuel. He then jogged to the front and slopped a soapy sponge across the windscreen.

Nate
turned to say something. Blake put a finger to his lips for silence and with hand signals he indicated to get out of the car. Both men climbed into the already cloggy desert air.

They
closed their doors and stepped away from the Audi.

“I
don’t want to take any chances with these people, so from now on, let’s assume the car is bugged,” Blake said.

“Agreed.”

“How much cash do you have on you?” Blake asked.

“There
will be a cash machine inside,” Asp replied.

“Like
I said, no chances,” Blake shrugged. “If they have access to the banking system...”

“Then
using the cash machine will mean they’ll know where we are and might be able to track back to see what you buy,” Asp completed the sentence.

He
opened his wallet. It brimmed with more money than a counterfeiter’s stash.

“Christ!”
Blake’s eyes widened.

“I’m
the regional director of a corporate spying agency,” Asp said. “When I need money...”

“Right,”
Blake agreed. “Are you okay with driving for a while?”

“What
are you planning on buying?”

“I
need a brick, 12 bottles of water and an automatic tyre pump,” Blake said. “And maybe a remote controlled car.”

“I
understand the tyre pressure pump and water – but what about the brick and toy car?” Asp asked.

“I’ll
also need a few household chemicals, mixed in the right proportions,” Blake winked.

46

Fifty minutes later, the road had thinned down to a simple two lane tarmac strip that rippled across the untamed desert. Banks of low, artificially irrigated bushes and saplings ran parallel ten metres away, a vain attempt to keep the encroaching sand from clogging this artery to the outlying southern villages.

“Pull
to the side here,” Blake said.

He
hopped out and opened the boot. He removed the house brick.

“I
haven’t done much wadi bashing,” Asp said.

Blake
placed the brick a centimetre from each tyre and let the air out until the sagging rubber bowed and touched the clay.

“I can take over,” Blake replied. “I haven’t been dune driving here; however, I did get some experience in Iraq.”

With
the car prepared to cross the desert, Blake pulled the P90 out of the airline bag. He checked it over thoroughly and reloaded it with a fresh ammunition clip.

“Let’s
go,” he said.

“Do
you have a plan?” Asp asked.

Blake
grinned.

“What
am I saying? Of course you have a plan,” Asp shook his head. “Is it a good plan?”

“Trust
me, I’m a spy,” Blake’s said, his grin widening.

***

Peroxide-blonde dunes surrounded them in undulating banks, some as high as twenty metres. The rolling waves of the stormiest sea disappeared in all directions into the distance.

They
were the smallest of rowing boats adrift in midst of a sandy Atlantic.

The
wind blew gusty at this height above the surrounding land, lifting a fine layer from the top of each crest. In their most silent moments Blake and Nate could hear the song of the desert; the fine, raspy whistle – lips blowing gently across an open bottle top – as the individual grains resonated while lifting into the sky.

Blake
returned to the car, brushing his hands vigorously against one another.

“That’s
the last of them buried,” he said.

His
neck, face and hands we already red from the sun. He panted as he grabbed one of the four water bottles that remained and glugged half of it down in a single breath.

“How
many IEDs did you bury?” Asp asked.

“Eight,”
Blake replied. “Four on each side. We’re at the crest of the highest dune here. They’ll pull alongside so that we don’t have the advantage of height and, unless they’re stupid, they’ll stop a respectable distance away. I can’t say which side they’ll be, so I’ve mined both. A reasonable estimate is 30 metres.”

“What
then?”

“You’ll
walk out to make the exchange,” Blake continued. “Hopefully there will be no problems. He’ll check the box, you’ll need to pad the girls down – that’s important because he may have put bombs on them. Check even for anything that looks like surgery. Terrorists in the region have been known to imbed IEDs inside people.”

“Where
will you be?”

“Covering
you, using the P90,” Blake said. “I’ll be behind the front wheel of the car, using the engine block for cover. It’s the only part with enough mass to stop a high velocity round.”

Nate
stroked his beard and squinted. He pulled a reflective pair of Ray Bans out and planted them on his nose.

“Hopefully
that’s everything,” he said. “So, what now?”

“We
get out of this heat and wait,” Blake said. “You watch front and left side. I watch right and back. They know where we are.”

Climbing
hot and sweaty into the Audi, Blake was invigorated by the cool draft of the air conditioning on his face. Asp flipped the radio on. A classic riff from a Beatles track pounded over the speakers.

Blake
instantly switched it off.

“We
need all senses alert,” he said. “The music will lull you.”

Asp’s
head swivelled as he watched the horizon for any sign of movement.

“Besides,”
Blake continued. “It’ll remind me again of that awful party. Did you get stuck with the idiot passport clerk?”

“Chandler,”
Nate said. “I took great pains to avoid him at every shindig I attended. He was MI6, you know. He was the idiot that got Chrome mixed up in this mess.”

“Figures,”
Blake replied. “That’s the way six likes its operatives – so magnolia dull that you look straight over them and don’t even notice they exist. All he kept doing was cornering people and asking that stupid question: ‘so – are you a Beatle or a Rolling Stone’.”

“That’s
because he’s a big Rolling Stones junkie,” Asp replied. “You can tell a Stones fan instantly. They’re the only ones who care how you answer.”

Blake
took another two deep mouthfuls of water before offering the bottle. Asp accepted it and sipped gently, his eyes never leaving the wing mirrors.

“How
did you answer, out of interest?” Blake asked.

Asp
puffed as he screwed the cap back on the bottle.

“The
same way I always do,” he replied wearily. “I told him it was a stupid question. The answer isn’t even open for debate. It’s quite obviously: ‘The Kinks’.”

Blake
snorted. Before he could respond, Asp pointed with his finger.

“There!
A big dust cloud behind us!”

Blake
saw the approaching plume and swore loudly. He leapt out with the rifle.

“What?”
Asp called out.

“There’re
three cars – two Jeeps and a Land Cruiser,” Blake shouted. “It’s brilliant, why didn’t I think of it? They’re going to park two alongside us and one on the dune opposite this one. They’ll want the exchange in the middle, between the two dunes. That will force us to walk down into the valley. We’ll be flanked and on lower ground than the two back up cars.”

“Do
we need a new plan?” Nate asked.

“We
don’t have time to prepare one.”