When he entered the terminal, it felt like he’d stepped into a walk-in cooler. It was the kind of massive carbon footprint only a net exporter of oil could love. He saw too much space, saw too few passengers. The brand-new marble floors were already dirty and scuffed, and stacks of unclaimed luggage sat behind empty check-in counters. Airports were showcase facilities, commissioned by governments, so when this terminal had been designed, the efficient transport of passengers was likely a secondary concern to visual impressiveness. It was only here to upstage whatever was in Addis Ababa or Damascus. Bigger and better.
Davis made his way through customs and took a hard stare from a pair of guards at the exit. He was traveling on his real passport. Larry Green had forwarded an offer from the CIA to provide something else, but that had only struck Davis as a get-into-jail-free card. He retrieved his bag from a conveyor belt that worked, then went outside to find a cab. Davis spotted a sign that said taxi at the far end of the terminal. He started walking.
“Hey mister!”
Davis turned.
“You need taxi?”
Davis saw a smiling man who had probably never seen a dentist in his life. He was pointing to a cab parked on the curb behind him. The car looked a lot like the guy’s teeth, chipped and dinged. The front right fender reminded Davis of a crumpled beer can. But he saw a dozen other cabs coming and going, parked on other curbs, and they all looked the same.
Davis said, “Sure.”
He climbed in and threw his suitcase on the seat beside him. The cab had no meter, and since they were only going to the far side of the airfield, Davis negotiated his price in advance. The driver didn’t haggle, which seemed strange. In Davis’ previous forays to the Middle East, the art of negotiating prices for things like cab rides was a veritable art form.
They got under way, and the driver kept one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the horn as he weaved through a sea of cars, scooters, donkey carts, and darting pedestrians, all the while keeping up a commentary in choppy English. A tiny fan on the front dash oscillated back and forth, taking the place of an air conditioner. The windows were the old-fashioned kind with crank handles, and all were half open, allowing hot air to wash the interior in thick waves.
“You like our new airport?” the driver asked.
Davis had never seen the old one. He said, “It’s great.”
“You are U.N.? Relief agencies?”
“Yeah, that’s me. I’m the U.N.”
“If you want, I will take you into town while you are here. Our lovely city was designed one century ago by the British Lord Kitchener. The streets, they are very good, very wide. And if you look from above, they make the shape of the Union Jack.”
Davis thought, I can’t imagine why they don’t like Westerners. He said, “How interesting.”
The airport was surrounded by a ring road, and as they swung east to the far side, the bustle of the passenger terminal disappeared. Here Davis saw nothing but desert, although not desert in its purest form, not the massive sand swales of Saudi Arabia or southern Egypt. The earth was dry and cracked, baked into hard layers by a relentless sun. Stunted bushes grasped the rocky soil, their brown and green shades muted as if the pigment had been seared right out of them. The driver turned off the perimeter road and onto a side street. He had gone quiet, which was fine with Davis. The only sounds now came from the car, the low hum of the engine, groans from the undercarriage, and the little fan in front banging back and forth.
But something felt wrong.
Davis had always been blessed with a kind of internal compass. It was a thing he’d never really understood. Maybe it had to do with the way he sensed the sun and the stars, or how he saw the terrain. Maybe he was like a migratory bird or sea turtle, some deep part of his brain registering the earth’s magnetic field. Whatever it was, it was working right now. They were heading east, away from the airport. Larry Green had shown him satellite photos that covered the whole complex, so Davis knew exactly where FBN Aviation was situated. It wasn’t down this road.
Davis ran through possible explanations. The driver wasn’t running up the meter because there was no meter. He wasn’t padding time or mileage. He wasn’t avoiding rush hour traffic because it was the wrong time of day and the wrong part of the planet. And he wasn’t giving a trial version of his tour. There was nothing to see here. Only sand and dust and waves of heat.
“Is this the right way?” he asked.
The driver glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “There is much construction on the main road. This is only way to get where you are going. We will be there in two, perhaps three minutes.”
Davis hadn’t seen any construction. When the pace of the car slowed, more ideas came and went. The road wasn’t in great shape, a marginal stretch of graded earth and crushed stone. Still, Davis had taken a lot of cabs, in cities all over the world, and they all had one thing in common — the drivers were always in a hurry. Eager to drop off their fare so they could get back to the queue. The car slowed further, no more than ten miles an hour. No faster than Larry Green could run one of his races. The only sound was the soft crush of sand and gravel under rubber, the mechanical gyration of the little fan in front. Back and forth.
Something was definitely wrong.
Davis studied the front dash. In any cab in the states there would have been a license or registration with a picture of the driver. He saw a spot where there had been something, a hardened blob of dried glue on the glove compartment, but whatever had been there was gone. The driver was completely silent now, eyeing him steadily in the rearview mirror. Davis looked outside, scanning ahead. The desert was taking over, thick scrub lining the margins of the road. He sensed the driver’s foot easing further off the accelerator. A hundred feet ahead on the right, Davis spotted a dull black tube extending from behind a large bush. A gun barrel.
There wasn’t time to think. Davis vaulted the seat.
The startled driver yelled something in Arabic, but it was cut off when Davis wheeled an elbow hard into the guy’s head. Davis slid sideways until he was behind the wheel, actually sitting on the driver, his feet planted on the floorboard and pressing like he would on a squat rack in the gym. The stunned driver tried to move but was completely immobilized, frozen by Davis’ weight and the power of his legs. With the steering wheel now in hand, Davis looked for his primary threat — the gun barrel. He saw it fifty feet ahead, attached now to a man wearing a long robe. Another guy appeared on the opposite side of the road with a machete in his hand. That made three.
The driver was crushed beneath him. The man with the machete was holding it out like a pirate ready for a sabre duel. The gunman was craning his neck, trying to see what was going on inside the car. That was Davis’ tactical situation.
The taxi was barely moving now because the dazed driver’s foot could no longer reach the accelerator. Davis changed that. He stomped on the gas and whipped the steering wheel hard right. The car lunged ahead, its spinning wheels spewing dirt and rock. The man holding the gun was suddenly faced with the most important decision of his life. Try to shoot? Or jump aside? He did both, which was like doing neither. He was half a step to his right, with the gun barrel rising through forty-five degrees, when the car hit him. The gun exploded a round into the front grill, and the gunman went sprawling across the hood, hit the windshield with a thump, and rolled off. The gun stayed on the hood.