She pulled aside the drapes and blinked at the sun and the flat blue water a few blocks distant. Though their room was only on the fifth floor, the lobby was as tall and cavernous as a casino, and they had had an unobstructed view of the azure sea.
She told herself that when she was safely back in the United States—assuming she made it back there—she would talk to a lawyer. One step at a time. The important thing right now was to get back to her own hotel, make up a man from the night before if anyone asked, and be in the lobby at eleven fifteen. She had a feeling that she wasn’t going to breathe easy until the plane lifted off the runway. No, she knew in her heart that she wasn’t going to relax even then. At least not completely. Of all the horrible things she had done when she was drunk, nothing topped leaving behind a body that had bled out in the bed beside her.
And, much to her dismay, she was doing this sober.
* * *
? ?
She left the “Do Not Disturb” sign dangling by its elegant gold braid around the hotel room doorknob to keep Alex’s body undiscovered for as long as possible, and stood for a moment trying to remember where the hell the elevator was. The hotel was massive, with corridors that seemed to snake in all directions. Finally she started off, walking quickly down empty hallways, and eventually she found the elevator bank. The lift seemed to take forever to arrive, but she reassured herself that time was just passing slowly because she was nervous. No, not nervous: she was terrified. She calmed herself by thinking how she could still tell someone at the front desk what had happened and tell them—insist—that she had done nothing wrong. After all, at this point, she had done nothing irrevocable: she was simply getting into the elevator (which was empty, too, a good omen). But then she was crossing the magnificent lobby with its palm trees and oriental carpets and opulent Moorish canopies (and, yes, security cameras), her face hidden behind her sunglasses and the scarf that she’d bought before leaving the Dubai airport yesterday, and then she was passing the row of stores inside the hotel. The shop for Christian Louboutin shoes. The one that sold nothing but Hermès scarves. A rather elegant arts and trinkets boutique. She remembered now, the images a fog, that she had ventured into all three of them. It was after dinner, on her way to the elevator. When she was waiting for Alex to return from his meeting. In one of the stores she had seen a leopard-print scarf—luminous, black and yellow swirls of spots, gold beading along the borders—that she had longed for but knew she couldn’t afford.
And now she walked ever faster, risking eye contact with no one, ignoring the concierge and the bellmen and the greeters offering tea, and then she was back outside in the world of blistering desert heat and the hotel’s line of fountains around twin reflecting pools. She almost climbed into a cab, but then stopped herself. Why give anyone additional proof that she had ever been at this hotel since, it seemed now, she had made her choice? She was outside. She was leaving. And with every step she took the idea of turning around grew more problematic—if not impossible—because every step took her from perceived innocence to perceived guilt. She was corroborating the allegations that this Miranda person was sure to make.
She checked her watch: she guessed she was a ten-minute walk from her own hotel, which would give her perhaps fifteen minutes to change into her uniform and get downstairs to the lobby. Maybe even twenty, because obviously they wouldn’t leave without her. She started to text Megan that she was on her way, but then stopped herself. Texts left a trail. For a moment, she took comfort in the fact that Megan hadn’t texted her, but then she was hit hard by a revelation: she disappeared in foreign cities, even here in the Middle East, with such disturbing frequency that Megan, the person she had flown with most often over the years, didn’t seem at all worried by her absence.
God, she was a mess. An absolute mess.
And yet she moved forward because like the planes on which she lived so much of her life, that was the only direction that allowed for survival. Think shark. She turned right, down the great oval of the hotel’s driveway. She gazed one last time at the palms and the fountains and the long line of town cars with their bulletproof glass windows, and started toward the airline’s less opulent accommodations. She sighed. She had made her choice—just one more bad choice in a life riddled with them—and there was no turning back.
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.”