“Yeah,” I said again, inadequately.
He tried and failed to make a joke out of it. “I sure can pick ‘em, eh?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Anyway.” He visibly pulled himself together. “No time for recriminations. This is so fucked up. Options. What did she mean by that? I don’t see any options at all.” He shook his head as if to dislodge a brilliant idea, to no avail. “We need some serious help. There’s some high-level Grassfire people in town, I’ll call them, maybe they’ll have some ideas.”
“Who?”
“LoTek, for one. Maybe he’s got some wild card up his sleeve. And one of our feds came over with the G8 security team, she might have some ideas.”
“Yeah,” I muttered, and swung my legs onto the couch. “I’m just gonna lie down here for a bit.”
There I spiralled down into the black-hole gravity well of sleep. When I next opened my eyes Jesse had somehow morphed into Lisa Reyes.
Chapter 66
“Kowalski,” she said briskly, “did I not specifically tell you to stay out of trouble, last time I saw you?”
I stared at her, uncertain whether I was dreaming or hallucinating, then pinched myself experimentally. It hurt.
“You actually look worse than the last time I saw you,” she went on. “I didn’t think that was even possible.”
As I gaped Jesse walked into my field of vision, accompanied by a man and a woman I didn’t know. “James, meet Keiran and Danielle.” He nodded to Lisa. “I gather you two have already met.”
I stared at him, and then at her again.
“You weren’t the only one keeping secrets,” she admitted, with a tinge of guilt in her voice. “I’ve been part of Grassfire pretty much since it got started. Me investigating Kostopoulos? Not a coincidence.”
I looked up at Jesse, still speechless.
“Up, Maverick! The world awaits!” he declaimed, sounding himself again: cheerful, insouciant, confident that the world revolved around him. But I knew him well enough to know it was only a facade. “And soon it will tremble before us. For you see, we have a cunning plan. You know how they’ve imprisoned Sophie in a maximum-security prison in the heart of a massive US military base in the world’s most dangerous and unstable nation?”
I nodded. Coherent speech still seemed beyond me.
“Well,” Jesse said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to break her out.”
Part 5. Death Spiral
Chapter 67
As Tolstoy might have said, all five-star hotels are the same. This one should have seemed superior – it billed itself as the world’s only seven-star hotel – but our suite’s spacious ultra-luxe interior was not noticeably distinguishable from that of the Meridien in London.
The view, however, was very different. I stood on our balcony and looked down the coastline at the colossal lattice of light, steel and concrete that was Dubai: half ultramodern city, half postmodern arcology. A forest of cranes and construction projects surrounded a dense thicket of skyscrapers, including the world’s tallest, straining into the sky as if it sought to escape earthbound living forever. Further out to sea, the lights of a manmade archipelago protected by a colossal artificial reef gleamed in the night. In the other direction, two artificial peninsulas shaped like palm trees jutted into the ocean, each several kilometres long. It was hard to believe they were real. They looked crudely Photoshopped.
The night air was warm and smelled of the sea. I stepped closer to the edge and looked straight down the vertiginous thousand-foot wall of our hotel, the famous Burj Al-Arab, shaped like a magnificent sail of shining metal and glass, set on its own private island. If I squinted I could see the pair of Rolls-Royce Silver Ghosts parked out front.
“Jump!” Lisa suggested, from behind me.
“Don’t tempt me.”
“Your Christmas present came.”
I took the card from her hand. It had an embedded chip, a magnetic stripe, and my own face staring out next to the words U.S. ARMY CONTRACTOR.
“Oh, goody,” I said glumly. “I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to be part of the military-industrial complex.”
According to the card, and also the US passport I had been given in London, my new name was Jason Kasperski. Close enough to my real name that my instinctive reactions shouldn’t raise eyebrows. I wondered how long I would use it. Days? Weeks? Years?
“Come on in,” Lisa said, “you can meet the biohackers.”
“Oh joy.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she put a hand on my shoulder. “You OK?”
“What do you think?” What we were about to do felt like suicidal insanity. I felt like I was strapped into a roller coaster from which no passenger emerged unscathed, as it inched its way up to its first breakneck dive.
“Want to talk about it?”
I sighed, shrugged, pulled myself together, and shook my head. “I’ll be fine. Thanks. I’ll do some deep breathing. Enjoy the moment, right?”
“Right.”
The biohacker twins, Ravi and Ratri, sat in the dining room with Jesse, LoTek, and LoTek’s girlfriend Danielle. They were short and squat. LoTek was a tall man with thinning hair, pale skin and green eyes; Danielle was slim and fit, with short dark hair and traces of crow’s feet.
He had brought the tools of his trade. A nearby mahogany desk was strewn with the carcasses of computers and mobile phones. Metal suitcases yawned open like giant chrome clamshells full of technological accoutrements. LEDs winked on a squat metal box that looked like an unholy cross between a cannon and a small refrigerator. The overall effect amid that seven-star luxury was a bit like Versailles as conquered by Hiro Protagonist.
As we entered the mood was light-hearted and jovial, which seemed incredible, given that we were days from massive planetary disaster and about to declare war on the U.S. military. I supposed the others had a mindset which allowed you to do that sort of thing and keep smiling. Maybe that was part of what made extraordinary people extraordinary. It was harder for me.
Jesse looked up at me. “Looks like everything’s ready. And time’s a-wasting.”
I nodded grimly, and quoted: “If ‘twere done when ‘twere done, then ‘twere well ‘twere done quickly.”
“Everybody got everything?” Danielle asked, in her honey-smooth American voice. “Any last-second second thoughts?”
There was no reply.
“Then let us do this thing.” Jesse stood. H grabbed one of the packs resting on the wall behind him. Lisa and I took the others.
“Don’t do anything crazy,” Danielle warned us. “You’re no good to anyone dead.”
“Luck is for amateurs,” LoTek muttered.
She gave him a long-suffering look.
Lisa and I followed Jesse to the elevator. It descended and opened to the Burj al-Arab’s eight-hundred-foot-high atrium, decorated in marble and solid gold. I did not find it as overwhelming as I had on first acquaintance. I felt queasy, and it was not the elevator’s fault. I felt like we were en route to our doom.
First, though, Sharjah, a satellite city some twenty kilometres north of Dubai. From inside a taxi it seemed little more than an endless smear of steel and concrete. Its cargo airport was a hive of activity, perfumed with jet fuel and soundtracked by howling propellers.
Lisa somehow navigated us through the madness to a battered Russian-built turboprop cargo plane. Its interior was a cave of nicked and dented metal, labelled in faded Cyrillic. Only a table adorned by a samovar relieved the feeling of having been eaten by a steel maw. A small staircase led up to the cockpit, where I caught a glimpse of our pilots, one slight and bearded, the other obese and bald. The propellers sputtered into life and we taxied forward. Some thing or things clanked and rattled loudly beneath my feet as we roared down the runway, but we made it into the air.