2

“You could film science fiction here. Crazy science fiction. Imagine giving a filmmaker like Tarkovsky this palette. Look out a window on the ninety-ninth floor of the Burj Khalifa, especially when the fog is just right in the morning. The spikes are above the clouds. The spires are in the sky—literally in the sky. They’re growing from the mist. The best new buildings in this city? I tell you, they were built for the Martians.”

Elena nodded. She’d seen plenty of pictures of Dubai before arriving and watched hours of video. She’d had a window seat on her flight, and though she hadn’t been able to glimpse those massive man-made harbors that were shaped like palms as the plane descended, on their final approach she’d enjoyed the Blade Runner-esque skyscrapers. Even this hotel bar was a series of futuristic black columns, glass obelisks, and chandeliers that fell from the ceiling like slender icicles. The barstools were the highest she’d ever seen in her life. Dubai was a vertical world between the flatness of sand and the flatness of sea, a cutting-edge outpost just across the Persian Gulf from Iran. It was utterly different from Gaziantep, the Turkish city where she’d spent most of the last month stalking her prey. Parts of that city still felt like B-roll footage from a movie set in the Middle East during the First World War. She half expected to see Peter O’Toole in his Lawrence of Arabia garb in the souk.

“How was your meeting?” she asked Viktor. He’d just come from NovaSkies.

“They have a drone that hunts drones,” he said, not really answering her question, and she couldn’t decide if he was dismissing what he saw or whether he was still ruminating on its potential for Syria. Then: “Any trouble with Alex’s computer?” He was wearing a black suit and a white oxford shirt without a necktie. The bar was air-conditioned—it was easily a hundred degrees outside, though no more than sixty-five inside the lounge—but he had seemed utterly impervious to the heat when they had walked here. She had nearly wilted. But then she had been melting ever since the moment she had first emerged from the airport terminal.

“Not at all,” she said, handing him a flash drive that masqueraded as the sort of tiny toothpaste tube that came with an airline travel kit. “The Dubai police are good. They’ll presume it was some angry investor. They know we have a tendency to overreact.”

“You are an angry investor. At least you should be. He was stealing from you, too.”

“I know.”

She was drinking iced tea because of all the Stoli she’d had to drink last night to keep up with that pair of idiot Americans. But, then, she rarely drank at lunch. Viktor was savoring a cocktail made with rye and Arabian bitters. The bar was on the first floor, and she gazed out at the midday sun. “Yes, the Dubai police are good. Very good,” he said, echoing her darkly. “Excellent, really. So are the security forces. I was thinking of that story from a couple of years ago, when that Hamas leader was murdered in his hotel room.”

She nodded. She knew the story; they all did. The Dubai authorities were able to track the executioners with the cameras they had placed across the city. They followed them from the airport to a tennis club, where they rendezvoused, and then to the hotel where they executed the military commander. It was Mossad, of course—and Dubai was so furious that no one had told them the hit was coming that they had burned the agents. They’d published the security camera footage and outed them all. “It was more than a couple years ago. More like ten. I was still in college,” she corrected him.

“Of course you were. Of course. Your father was still alive,” he said, and he offered a smile tinged ever so slightly with meanness. Not outright cruelty, but spite: he didn’t like to be corrected. He knew how much she had loved her father, and reminding her of his death was a small rebuke. But once he had made his point, his face changed: “And Alex was asleep?”

“He was. Passed out would be more accurate.”

“You didn’t shoot him?”

“I brought the twenty-two and a silencer, but no, in the end I didn’t. I saw no reason to risk any noise at all. And, I imagine, this will be viewed in some circles as especially Arabian justice—and a more dramatic message.”

He dabbed at his mouth with the back of his hand, and then glanced at his watch. “I don’t like drama.”

On some level, she knew this. It was why she hadn’t yet told him about the flight attendant. She’d planned to, but couldn’t decide now whether she should. After all, the woman had been hammered; she’d barely remember anything from her one-night hookup with Sokolov. Besides, who would she tell? Why would she tell? When the woman announced that she was going to leave—return to her own hotel—because she had a flight to Paris the next morning, Elena had decided to wait. She’d leave, too, and return later to take care of Sokolov. He was at least as drunk as his new acquaintance, and so it had been easy to slide one of his room keys off the side table and into her purse.

“I was efficient,” she said. “Don’t worry.” She watched the bartender mixing chocolate liqueur and raspberries, and tried to pick out the lightweight in the bar who it was for. She decided the likely recipient was the American blonde with a man twice her age. In a moment, she saw she was right.

“I do worry. You should, too. It’s when we stop worrying that we grow careless and bad things happen.”

She hated it when he lectured her, but it never made sense to try and defend oneself to a man like Viktor—especially after a comment that was pretty damn innocuous by his standards. He was capable of far worse. He’d come of age in the Spetsnaz, the Soviet army’s special forces, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and had proven particularly adept at convincing Mujahideen to talk. In places like Kunduz and Faizabad, her father told her, Viktor’s superiors had often had to look the other way: he got results, but his methods were reminiscent of the Lubyanka basement in the 1950s. Today he was among those who didn’t give a damn about the Chemical Weapons Convention, and shrugged at the dead children of Khan Sheikhoun. Before traveling back to Dubai, he’d been in Damascus.

Moreover, it was certainly possible that she had been careless—though not in the way he was suggesting. The truth was, when she had discovered that Sokolov had company, she simply couldn’t bring herself to execute the pathetic, inebriated flight attendant who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That wasn’t what she did; that wasn’t who she was. Besides, there would have been blowback from that decision, too. “You’re right,” she said contritely. “I know you are.”

“And so Alex had been drinking when you met him. I imagine he did not make a very good first impression.”

“No, not really.”

He smiled ever so slightly. “You don’t approve of sloppy drunks, do you?”

“I don’t,” she replied. “I don’t approve of sloppiness, period.”