Exit wound

We came to a massive floor-to-ceiling glass screen, the other side of which was Switzerland. Acres of blindingly white snow glittered under a brilliant blue sky. Chairlifts carried skiers over snowmen and tall fir trees. You could almost smell the gluhwein. We stopped and had a quick look at all the Arab lads wrapped up in their hired cold-weather gear. As usual, the women in burqas had drawn the short straw. They couldn’t get the skiwear on over their other clobber. Their breath hung around them in clouds as they waited at the bottom of the toboggan run for their kids to appear at warp speed. They must have been freezing.

Dex took another suck from his juice container. ‘They’re still with us, chaps. They really need to sharpen their skills.’

We turned to walk away from the skiers. He was right. The two of them were directly in our eye-line, trying to look normal as they window-shopped for women’s clothes.

We took the escalator to the roof and walked out into forty degrees of overwhelming heat. Like any other mall on the planet, a queue of people with shopping bags stretched back from the taxi rank. There must have been space in the car park for at least a thousand cars, but only a third of it was occupied.

‘Recession.’ Dex shook his head as well as his drink. ‘It’s everywhere.’

The sun was low in the sky. Red Ken checked his watch. ‘Ten past six. Last light in about fifty.’

We moved into the shade of the ski slope. It ran up the side of the mall and above the car park to dominate the skyline. We admired all the massed ranks of sparkling 4x4s and Lamborghinis, and tried to look like we were waiting for someone to join us.

Neither of the shirts made an appearance. Red Ken pulled out his cigarettes and I admired the scenery. ‘They can’t be that shite. We’re up here for one of two reasons. To get a taxi, or meet someone with a vehicle. Bet they’ve gone back to the Toyota. They’ll be staking out the exit.’ I turned to the click of a disposable lighter and was met with a cloud of smoke.

‘Good. Fuck ’em. Let them wait. Dex, you keep an eye out for them. Nick, look out there.’

From our vantage-point, the area round the mall was littered with patches of barren ground and half-finished buildings draped in scaffolding. Over the constant background rumble of traffic came the rhythmic thud of pile drivers. Little ant-like bodies scurried about in yellow or blue hard hats. It must have been a fucker labouring in Gas Mark Ten.

The whole city was criss-crossed with highways that looked like giant concrete flumes. A monorail was also under construction. We had seen the elevated strip of concrete heading towards the city centre from the airport. The partly built stations looked like golden cocoons wrapped around the track. Red Ken, of course, thought they were shite. I quite liked them.

We could see all the way to the sea. The Burj Al-Arab hotel looked like a giant sail a couple of K away on the coast. The needle-like Burj Dubai was well on its way to being the world’s tallest building. In all directions, the rows of dominoes gleamed in the sun. But we weren’t there for the view.

He leant against one of the concrete supports for the ski slope and sucked hard on his B amp;H. ‘Dunes. You got it?’

The hotel, like a black glass pyramid, would have looked at home in Las Vegas.

‘Got that.’

‘OK, that’s your axis. Go half right. Five hundred.’ He was using a fire-control order format to get me onto the target. I looked half right, scanning the five-hundred area.

‘You’ve got a ten-storey building with an all-black ground floor. Seen?’

‘Seen.’ The boring ten-storey cube’s shop fronts were all black marble.

‘OK, go left of the building, into the wasteground, at about a K. You’ve got a one-storey flat-concrete-roofed building – rectangular, with a wall surrounding it. Seen?’

‘Seen.’

‘That’s the target. The surrounding wall is five metres away from the building. The wall is three metres high and the wall gate and building shutters are facing us. All the damage we do must be within the wall, inside the compound. That way it’ll be months, maybe years, before anyone gets to see our handiwork. And when they do, they won’t even know what was in the building. The outside wall will not be touched.’

I couldn’t see much detail from this distance but I had a visual on what Red Ken and Dex had described to me. We couldn’t do a walk-past to soak up more detail. No one walked in this city.

20

The perimeter gate, the only way in and out of the compound, directly faced a doorway set into rolled-steel shutters wide enough to admit a vehicle into the building. Either side of the shutters was a window, the one on the right larger than the one on the left. I couldn’t see from this distance, but Red Ken said they were iron-barred. He and Dex had been on-target during their last recce. There were no other entrances or exits.