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11

Sky Mall, Floor 199, Cloud Tower, Dubai, 12 December, 8.45 am

Mohammed bin Faizook felt utterly bewildered. He had been in the city for 18 hours and it still felt like an alien world. Everything here was so loud, so blaring, it was almost unbearable. And this building . . . He had seen it as he had been driven into the city on the coach from Al Ain but it wasn't until he stepped out of the elevator nearly a kilometre above the city that he realised quite how terrifying it was.

This was Mohammed's first visit to Dubai and he was missing home already. His family lived 300 kilometres away, in the Bedouin village of Al Alifa, deep in the desert to the east. He was the first of his family in many years to travel more than 20 kilometres from the village and if it had not been for the matter of urgent family business, he would never have volunteered.

His soul was of the desert; he did not understand how people could live the way they did in the city. Here everything shouted at you, the noise was unfathomable and he found the only way he could survive was to close his mind off to everything but the essentials. Without doing that, he believed, he would have gone crazy.

In the elevator, he caught his reflection. He was wearing an ill-fitting suit that belonged to his uncle. The pants itched and the sleeves were too short. He hated it and yearned for his robe and shemagh to cover his head. But Father had insisted on the suit. It would make him look like a serious businessman, the Elder had said. He had also been forced to trim his beard and, in the hotel room, he had followed another of his father's instructions and brushed his hair into a side parting.

Mohammed stepped out of the elevator and there all around him was marble, steel, neon, flashing lights and more noise! People everywhere, women with their legs on display, arms exposed, men in shorts. Everywhere he went, people were holding mobile phones to their ears and talking endless talk.

He had heard of mobiles. The village had one telephone, an old thing from the 1980s, but he had not realised how many there were of the things, nor how people were so preoccupied with talking and walking and tapping on their bits of plastic. Everyone around him seemed to be in their own world, cut off from everyone around them. But at the same time the shops drew them in, gelled them with commercial glue. It was all very, very strange.

He remembered the directions and where he was to meet the businessman, Saeed Khalid. He had the documents with him and he knew the lawyer would also be there to settle everything legally. He walked along the thoroughfare, blocking out the clashing sounds of music spilling from jeans shops and computer stores. Ahead, he could see a sign – Café 199 – and there at a table outside close to the walkway, he saw two men, Saeed Khalid and the lawyer Fouad Bitar.

The two men stood up as he approached. Saeed was tall, perhaps 1.8 metres, well-built, broad shoulders. He looked immaculate in his white thoub robe and pristine headdress, white shemagh and black ogal wrapped just above his brows. He was wearing expensive looking sandals. His beard was trimmed professionally and he carried the faint odour of cologne. On his wrist was a large, vulgar watch.

Mohammed had expected a playboy, a spoilt rich kid and his expectations were immediately confirmed. He knew that Saeed had been educated at Oxford and was being groomed to take over his father's vast business empire. Fouad Bitar was a smaller man in a western suit and tie. He was entirely bald, short, coming only to Saeed Khalid's shoulder, and he had a smile that Mohammed disliked.

‘Good day, my friend,' Saeed said in Arabic, taking a pace towards Mohammed. He embraced the new arrival then held him at arm's length. ‘Your father spoke well of you to my father,' he added. ‘He said you were the pride of his family.'

Mohammed took a small step back and gave a slight bow.

‘This,' Saeed said and waved a hand towards the lawyer, ‘is Fouad Bitar, the man our fathers have agreed upon to do the paperwork.'

Mohammed shook the small man's hand and found it limp.

‘Saeed's father suggested we meet up informally first, to make sure we're all in agreement,' the lawyer said. He had a slight American accent.

‘I am honoured,' Mohammed said seriously and the three men sat down. Coffee was ordered for Saeed and Bitar, and Mohammed asked for a glass of tap water.

‘Now as you know, Mohammed, the documents relating to the sale of your father's land have been checked by your father and I understand he has a friend who is a legal expert.'

Mohammed noticed Bitar flick Saeed an almost imperceptible glance that would have revealed nothing to most people, but Mohammed had a gift for reading what westerners called ‘body language'. It came naturally to him, a talent he had nurtured since childhood. And in that brief glance, Mohammed could detect deception, over-confidence.

‘Yes, that is so,' Mohammed said slowly. ‘However, I would like to look through the documents again, if I may.'

The lawyer held Mohammed's eyes for a second. Then he said, ‘Yes, yes, of course. I have them with me here.' He bent down and withdrew a sheath of papers covered with Arabic symbols.

‘I think you'll find it is word-for-word what your father has seen,' Saeed Khalid commented and looked from Mohammed to Bitar.

Mohammed saw the young businessman raise his chin just a little too high, shift his left shoulder a little too far as he turned from him to the lawyer. He also detected an almost inaudible undercurrent to the word ‘seen'. Combined, these tiny signs spoke volumes to Mohammed. Saeed was hiding something. To almost all outward appearances, the billionaire's son was the epitome of politeness and refinement but just below the surface he was feeling impatient, longing to get away from this shabby peasant.

Bitar handed over the document. The drinks arrived and Mohammed noticed Saeed giving the retreating waitress a lascivious look. He read the first page carefully, sensing growing impatience in the movement of the two men at the table. He was just about to turn to page two when they all heard a low growl.

‘What was that?' Saeed exclaimed, his large hands gripping the edge of the table.

Mohammed looked up and saw the alarm in the eyes of the other two. The table began to vibrate and the sound grew louder and ascended in pitch. The three men watched, confused, as their coffee cups and glasses of water skidded across the table top and crashed to the floor.

12

Souk District, Dubai, 12 December

Abu Al-Rashid set his alarm clock to go off an hour earlier than usual and leapt out of bed, immediately excited by the prospects of the day ahead. It was the day after his party and he would soon be lining up for the school bus, but before then he planned to immerse himself in the cyberworld, which in some ways he preferred to the ‘real world' of everyday life.

Outside, the morning was already hotting up and Abu could hear the sound of market traders setting out their wares. Then, at 6.15 precisely, the sky still shredded with predawn orange, the Fajr started up – the first call to prayer. The Al-Rashids' carpet store and the four-room apartment above it where Abu lived with his parents and sister was only 20 metres along the road from the local mosque. He knew his parents would be praying and that he was not expected to join them at this time.

He tapped at the keyboard, relishing the freedom, the opening up of the world this old laptop offered him. He could not have wished for a better present and he would be eternally grateful to his kind Uncle Jahib for giving it to him. But then, just as Abu was about to move to a new website and try to open his very first Facebook account, the door to his tiny room opened. He turned and saw his father. The man was about to speak when he noticed the glowing laptop screen, the light from it illuminating the shock on Abu's face.

Abu's father, Heydar, froze. For a second he looked confused, then his expression darkened. He took two paces into the room. ‘Abu. What is this?' he said, his voice low, calm.

‘Father . . . I –'

‘Abu. Where did you get this?'

It took a few seconds for Abu to overcome his shock and to speak properly. ‘I cannot say, Father.'

Then Heydar's face changed. ‘Ah, I think I know,' he said slowly, carefully. He came close to the desk and closed the lid. The old machine emitted a squeal. ‘I will not allow it,' he said, his voice still calm.

‘But Father.'

‘No buts, Abu. I do not approve.'

‘Please!' Abu exclaimed and went to open the lid again.

‘No, Abu.' Heydar pulled the mains cable from the back of the machine, scooping the laptop up into his arms.

‘Father!'

‘Enough, Abu!' Heydar snapped angrily and strode from the room.

Abu burst into tears. When, after several minutes, he could cry no more, he simply sat in silence staring at the wall opposite, the sound of the muezzin beginning to draw to the conclusion of the prayers. Barely breathing, he picked up his school books, stuffed them into his bag, pulled it over his shoulders and headed out into the narrow corridor.

Abu saw his mother at the sink in the tiny kitchen. Father was nowhere in sight. He would be arranging the carpets and rugs outside the doorway of the shop, ready for the day's meagre trade and would have hidden the laptop. The boy gave his mother a sullen wave.

‘Abu? What about breakfast?' she said.

‘I'm not hungry.'

‘Oh, my son.' She had obviously learned of the computer.

He struggled to hold back the tears. ‘I'm not hungry,' he repeated. Turning, he gave his 18-month-old sister, Ghayda, a peck on the cheek and headed for the door, feeling his eyes welling up. Outside in the courtyard, he rubbed at his eyes. The last thing he needed was someone to see him cry.

Along the road, sunlight burst between the abra, the boats that took people across the Creek from the souk district to the modern suburbs of Downtown Dubai. He walked along the wharf, found a seat on the nearest abra and gave the few dirham fare to the collector just before the boat pulled away from the shore.

Five minutes later, Abu was stepping onto the quay in Bur Dubai. He saw Pierre, one of the boys from his class and waved to him. The boy came over. Pierre was French and only in Dubai for a year. He could not speak Arabic but he and Abu were both fluent English-speakers so they met on common ground there.

‘Looking forwards to the maths test?' the kid asked.

Abu looked at him, his expression vacant. He snapped out of his reverie. ‘Of course!'

‘See ya later then,' the other boy said and ran off towards the main road where a school bus waited for the kids to disembark from the abra and make their way over.

Abu stared after his friend and then around at the Creek, the sunlight glazing the rippling water red. He suddenly felt a wave of rage pass through him. He had harboured so many resentments during his short lifetime. He loved his father but sometimes he also hated him and this was one of those times.

What weird twist of fate was it that had landed him this existence? He knew he was talented with computers, that he had a natural affinity with them and yet here he was, the son of a man whose head was stuck in a previous era, opposed to progress and new technology. Wasn't that just such bitter irony? He felt like screaming.

Instead, he simply sat down on the pavement, the backpack with his school books and bits and pieces pulling down on his shoulders. He looked around, feeling the morning warmth, watching gulls swoop to the Creek, squawking. He jumped up.

‘I will not take this,' he said to himself. ‘I am a free individual. I will not be,' he searched for the right word, ‘repressed.'

Turning, he walked away from the school bus. If his father refused to understand him, then he had no choice. He would leave home.

13

30 kilometres southwest of Dubai, 12 December

He had crossed the border between Saudi Arabia and the UAE completely unnoticed. This was not surprising, because he was passing between the states some 50 kilometres south of the tiny coastal outpost of Silah. There were few more remote spots on earth.

He liked isolation. In fact, he thrived on it. He was a professional assassin who travelled under the name of Azrael, the English translation of the Arabic
Azra'eil
, the Angel of Death and he cared for no one.

Fifty kilometres inside the border, Azrael picked up a tarmac road. It was covered with sand and dust – a desolate strip laid down only a couple of years ago, a road that led from nowhere to a slightly more purposeful stretch of highway. This longer road went in one direction: towards Dubai, some 80 kilometres to the northwest. On the road, Azrael saw absolutely no one. Indeed, he saw no living thing. To left and right stretched the sand, endless expanses of amber without a single feature. He relished this intense solitude. He could not remember the last time he had felt so relaxed, so far from the cloying presence of other human beings.

Azrael also felt comfortable in his Land Cruiser. It was packed with the latest communications equipment and he was armed to the teeth. He had hand-picked and loaded everything himself at the base near Ar Riyad in Saudi Arabia. He had the usual guns: a couple of Barrett M107s, a 500 S&W magnum and, tucked into his waistband, the favourite of killers everywhere, a Glock 17. But the really interesting item in his armoury was not to be found on any website or arms catalogue in the world. Well, at least not yet.

Azrael's paymasters, men he had never met and who referred to themselves collectively as the Four Horsemen, had supplied him with the prototype of a missile launch system that was so new and so secret it did not even have a name. Azrael referred to it as the Collector, because that is how he viewed the device – as a taker of lives, a gatherer of souls, an exterminator that collected on the debt the world owed him.

Ten years ago, Azrael, or Marcus Hewson as he was then known, had been a normal human being, a pretty regular guy, a good guy, in fact, a British soldier. He was married to a fine woman, a schoolteacher called Emily, and they had a four-year-old daughter, Charlotte. He had been a captain in the SAS, had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan before teaching other soldiers at the army base in Aldershot. But he had been consistently passed over for promotion and, for a career soldier, that was like being branded – there was nowhere else for him to go. He simply had to accept that his life would be one long, ongoing slog until retirement.

Then, on a winter afternoon while he was up to his elbows in cold mud on a training course with raw recruits, Emily and Charlotte were hacked to death in a shopping mall in Bracknell by an escaped mental patient from Broadmoor. The killer had then gone on to murder six other innocent bystanders before shooting his brains out with a sawn-off shotgun.

Marcus Hewson had never recovered. He found he was quickly repelled by the sympathy people offered him. He was enraged by the incompetence of the police and the authorities at Broadmoor. Within a day of the terrible events that had taken the lives of his wife and child, he had slipped into such a deep depression he was inconsolable. But being a genuine tough guy, a war hero no less, a man who had witnessed a great deal of death and torment, he did not want anyone to see his pain. And so he forced it inward where it festered and then calcified.

Perhaps he had always been a pure, analytical killer. It was just that once upon a time he had worked for the forces of democracy and good. The worse thing for Marcus Hewson was the fact that the man who had murdered his family, an insect named Norman Gardener, had killed himself. There was nothing left for Hewson to do about the murders. He could not exact revenge. The scumbag's suicide had rendered him impotent.

It was this that had pushed Hewson over the edge. Within six weeks he had transformed himself into Azrael, an assassin for hire, a man who no longer considered himself part of the human race, a man who wanted to kill and kill and to never be caught. A man who wanted revenge but never to be known for his actions. And as is the way with these things, in the twilight world in which he began to exist and thrive, he discovered that like attracts like. He quickly found himself in the employ of the Four Horsemen, four beings who, for their own individual reasons, shared an almost identical worldview to his own.

Azrael stopped the Land Cruiser and lifted the high-powered binoculars to his eyes. Across the flat expanse of desert he could see, 30 kilometres to the northwest, the vague shape of his target: downtown Dubai. He then turned to a control panel in the middle of the console. A flat screen display about 20 centimetres across had been positioned where car stereos or sat navs were usually situated. He touched the screen and it lit up to show the PTP, the Personal Tracking System. This was a very distant cousin of an advanced radar receiver. The PTP used an uplink to a hacked Russian satellite network that was ordinarily employed by the Kremlin. It provided Azrael with an early warning system should anyone decide to stick their nose into his affairs.

Jumping from the vehicle, Azrael strode around to the back door, opened it and stared down at two steel boxes taking up the space inside. The Collector was the most advanced missile launcher in the world. It had been developed in a private lab on Trista da Cunha, approximately 2500 kilometres west of South Africa in the Atlantic Ocean. There, a team of researchers had spent three years and almost 200 million euros of the Four Horsemen's money designing a range of new weapons that would not be rivalled by legal weapons builders for at least a decade.

The Collector was the pride and joy of the designers on Trista da Cunha. Conventional rocket launchers came in two flavours. The simplest were solo-operated bazooka-style devices, with a range of up to 1000 metres. Such weapons could seriously damage a tank. The other type was a Multiple Launch Rocket System, or MLRS. These babies were transported on trucks. They had a vastly greater range than the sort of device a single soldier might operate and one of them could destroy a building from 15 kilometres away. But no one had yet developed a launcher with the power of a truck-based launch pad
and
the versatility of a bazooka. No one, that is, until a group of eggheads working on a speck of land in the South Atlantic had been funded to the tune of 200 mill.

The Collector had a range of 40 kilometres and fitted into two steel boxes. Azrael pulled the first box along the back of the Land Cruiser, levering it to the desert floor. He then tugged at the second box and settled it beside the first. Opening both lids, he lifted out a dozen steel-carbon alloy tubes. Next he removed three concertinaed lattices made from a titanium silicon composite 20 times stronger than steel and weighing just 6 per cent of its metal equivalent. Lastly, Azrael extracted a collection of aluminium boxes, each containing electronic components.

He had spent a week on Trista da Cunha learning everything there was to know about the Collector and he had achieved a personal-best construction time of 6 minutes 13 seconds, from opening the box lids to having the launcher ready to go. Today the construction took a fraction longer thanks to the intense heat and the sand and dust getting in the way.

Six minutes 24 seconds after prising open the first box, he surveyed his handiwork. The Collector stood just 2 metres high. The superlightweight structure of the platform com- bined with its remarkable strength meant that it could hold two 3-metre-long launch tubes, each encasing a
Scourge
missile. The
Scourge
was almost as large as a
Patriot 3
used by armies around the world and requiring a truck-sized launch platform. It could deliver a relatively small warhead but one with an explosive power equivalent to 450 kilograms of TNT – a destructive force comparable to a cruise missile. Travelling at a fraction over 1000 kilometres per hour, the
Scourge
would reach its designated target from Azrael's location in approximately 128 seconds, a little over 2 minutes.

Azrael had just pulled himself into the driver's seat of the Land Cruiser to complete the set-up procedure and had switched on the car battery to power the telemetry and guidance initiators, when he heard a burst of noise coming from the PTP. He glanced over and saw the screen light up with red lettering. ‘ALERT. ALERT. SATELLITE TRACKING HAS LOCKED ONTO APPROACHING UNIDENTIFIED GROUND VEHICLE. ALERT. ALERT.'

Azrael felt his pulse quicken as he leaned over and tapped at the screen.

‘MILITARY VEHICLE,' the machine announced. ‘FOUR-POINT-TWO KILOMETRES SOUTH-SOUTHWEST, HEADING 21' 44'' 03'''.'

‘Excellent,' he said under his breath. ‘Coming straight this way. Something to make this all a little more interesting.'

‘IDENTIFY VEHICLE,' he tapped into the PTP. The machine sent an instruction to the uplink. The ‘borrowed' Russian satellite analysed the approaching vehicle, photographed it and found its thermal signature. It then sent this information to the PTP. The data was displayed on the screen. Azrael read it. ‘A troop carrier,' he said to himself. ‘Driver, co-driver, six troops in back. ETA 2 minutes 6 seconds.'

He leapt from the car, ran around the front and slid into a narrow space behind the control panel of the Collector. His fingers flitted expertly over an arrangement of keys as he kept his eyes fixed on a digital display showing operational parameters. A whirring sound came from deep within the latticework platform as a series of electric motors turned the structure. Numbers flowed down the digital display and Azrael made some final adjustments to the angle of the launchers.

He glanced at his watch. It was one minute to nine. Turning back to the screen, he tapped two more keys then lifted his binoculars to view the horizon and the distant towers of Dubai. From this distance they looked like a clutch of stalagmites projecting upwards from the floor of a cave. A haze of pollution hung over the city and just above the desert floor, super-heated sand shimmering.

Azrael checked his watch again and moved his index finger a few centimetres upward, letting it hover over a red button slightly to the left of the centre of the console.

He felt the plastic against his skin and relished the extra- ordinary sensation of possessing power over life and death. He wanted the moment to last forever. But then if it did, he thought, no one would die and that would never do. He pushed down, hearing a click as the device engaged.