Tom Callaghan - A Summer Revenge

When I turned, Saltanat was staring at me, as ever her expression unfathomable.

“What’s your plan?” she said, and then looked more closely at me. “You do have a plan, I suppose?”

I nodded. “They’ve no reason to leave me alive once they can access the money. So they’ll try to ambush me, take the SIM card, then kill me. Probably leave me out in the desert so my bones can turn a fetching shade of white in the sun. Maybe someone will stumble across me twenty years from now and assume I was a stupid tourist who got lost.”

Saltanat said nothing, so I continued.

“I’ve got a plan. Simple but effective.”

I paused and not for dramatic effect. I almost whispered, though there was no one else in the room beside the two of us.

“I’m going to kill them.”

“Look at the windows in the hotel opposite,” I’d said as we made our way down into the lobby. “They’re tinted against the sun. Which means it’s impossible for anyone to actually see into your suite during daylight. Different at night of course, when the lights are on, but during the daytime, no way.”

We stepped out once more into heat that I would never be able to get used to and beckoned to an idling taxi. I asked the driver to take us somewhere we could rent a four-wheel drive, and we set off once more down Sheikh Zayed Road. It was a journey I was bored of making, but it was best not to use Saltanat’s Porsche, in case the authorities traced it.

“So?” Saltanat asked. I could tell by her voice that she was becoming impatient with me.

“So whoever fired those shots into your room wasn’t actually aiming at you. Or me. They probably didn’t even know I was there. It was done to warn you to go back to Tashkent and not interfere. They don’t know you’re the sort of person something like that only makes more determined.”

Saltanat nodded, acknowledging the possible truth of what I said.

“So they know you exist, and they know I exist, but they don’t know we’re working together. As far as they’re concerned, we’re two separate issues to be dealt with.”

“Which means we’ll have the advantage over them when we meet,” Saltanat said, a new enthusiasm in her voice.

“Exactly. Instead of trapping us, we’ll trap them.”

We took a couple of turnings and found ourselves crawling through traffic. This was Karama. The streets were narrow, crowded with shops selling paint, hardware, vegetables. The pavements were packed as well, with Indian men riding bicycles, Arab families with children, Filipina girls arm in arm, chattering away on their mobiles. I felt I’d discovered the true heart of Dubai, a world away from luxury brands housed in glass and steel monuments to consumerism.

The taxi driver pulled over to the pavement, pointed to a shabby shopfront with the legend QUALITY CARS in Russian, and, I assumed, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic and English as well. All nationalities catered for.

“My brother,” he said. “He will give you best price. You want I wait?”

I thought of the meter going for the next hour while we haggled over insurance, driving license and money, shook my head. I thrust a handful of dirhams at him, and we clambered out into the furnace, narrowly avoiding being hit by a cyclist going the wrong way. I could smell spices, herbs, different kinds of cooking, the scent of roasting meat.

Inside the shop an elderly, wheezing air conditioning unit did its best to calm things down, but I’ve still been cooler in the banya sauna on Ibraimova.

Renting a car proved just as laborious as I’d imagined, but finally we selected a dark blue Pajero four-wheel drive that had seen better times cosmetically but seemed to run efficiently enough. Saltanat walked around the vehicle, pointing out to the brother all the scratches and dents. From his downcast look and his nod of unwilling acceptance, he obviously realized he wouldn’t be able to jack the hire fee up for damages when we brought the car back.

Saltanat decided she would do the driving, without bothering to consult me. That was fine as far as I was concerned. The narrow streets and the terrifying driving on Sheikh Zayed Road were not at all to my taste. I tugged at the seat belt, strapped myself in and suggested we find a suitable ambush point somewhere on the edge of the city where the desert began.

We followed the green and white signs pointing the way to Abu Dhabi, passing endless tower blocks and dramatic skyscrapers, the work of insane giant children by the look of them, ornate curves and fluting on one building, the next designed to look like a brutal steel obelisk. And, rising like silver birches nestling between the towers, slim white minarets topped by golden crescent moons that glinted in the sun.

Heat haze made the road surface shimmer and waver, as if we were driving along a black silk scarf fluttering in the wind. Ripples of sand blown across the road twisted and turned upon themselves as if snakes were moving just below the surface. Vague shapes on the other side of the road grew nearer and resolved themselves into cars, trucks, buses. The air was gritty with dust and petrol fumes.

I couldn’t imagine a greater contrast to the roads, often no more than stony tracks, that lead up into the cool air of the Tien Shan mountains. There was nowhere I would rather have been at that moment.

“They’ll kill her, you know,” Saltanat said, her tone as calm as if she was discussing what to order from a menu. “Whether you give them the SIM card or not.”

“What else can I do?” I said. “Just let her get butchered, then go back to Tynaliev and say, I don’t have the girl, I don’t have the codes, but maybe you know some good hackers who can crack them. Oh and, by the way, do I still get my old job back?” I shook my head at the hopeless absurdity of the situation. “He’ll have my balls beaten to a pulp. That’s if he’s feeling merciful. And I don’t think that’s ever happened.”

“So you’ll risk these guys killing you?”

“You don’t think they might kill you as well?” I replied.

Saltanat’s smile was enough to tell me that wasn’t going to happen any time this century.

“I don’t worry about dealing with amateur talent, Akyl—you know that.”

It struck me that an attitude like that might prove fatal one day, but I knew better than to say so. There’s always a gunman out there somewhere who’s quicker on the draw than you are.

We were on the outskirts of the city, and the skyscrapers had become low-rise blocks of apartments, with desert stretching out behind them, gentle dunes thrown into shadow by the setting sun. I pointed to a half-built apartment building, the cranes now still, the site deserted.

“That’s as good a place as any,” I said. “Why don’t you pull over and park outside the next building?”

Just as I’d anticipated, Saltanat ignored my advice. She drove a little further on, until a gap appeared between two buildings. We drove off the road and onto sand, then, once we were behind the buildings, we stopped behind the apartment block I’d pointed out.

“Here we’ve got a number of directions we take, if we have to,” Saltanat explained. “Out front we’re easily trapped, boxed in.”

As usual Saltanat was at least two steps ahead of the opposition, and me.

“You’re armed?” I asked.

“Always,” she replied and pulled out one of her throwing knives from a boot. Only amateurs and action-movie fans think that throwing a knife is easy; I know that it takes years of practice to stand a reasonable chance of hitting a stationary target. A man’s throat as he runs toward you is even harder. But Saltanat had put in the years, and her skills were honed to an edge as sharp as the blades she carried. Perhaps more importantly, she’d used those skills in situations where a mistake carried the ultimate penalty.