Chapter Forty-Six

The Road

 

 

LEA WAS ONLY a few metres from the far side of the lake bridge. If she ran into the bushes the powerful searchlight would spot her through the cover. She would be seen as easily as if she was moving through open territory. But there was no way back.

At the edge of the lake was a covered walkway that offered daytime shelter from the sun. It had a curved steel roof, and allowed the maintenance staff to pass between buildings. She reached it knowing that even though the chopper could probably see her, its marksmen would not be able to shoot through the canopy.

She ran as hard as she could, covering the five hundred metre span to the park edge.

When she looked ahead, she swore. She had run the wrong way. Straight ahead lay the entrance to Dream Ranches. The two young guards had reappeared at their post. They seemed bemused by the helicopter. Craning up and shielding their eyes against the spotlight, they were trying to see what was happening. Lea realised that nobody had yet informed them of the search. It meant that she might be able to brazen it out and walk right through.

She tried to control her breathing and calm herself. She still had her ID card, but it would look odd being on foot. Nobody walked anywhere here.

The guards looked even more surprised to see her step from the undergrowth onto the road in front of them.

‘My car broke down,’ she called cheerfully, hefting her bag onto her shoulder. ‘I couldn’t find a torch, and can’t see to fix it—the power’s out.’ Getting no reaction, she pointed to the street lights. Still nothing. The guards looked at one another.

She pulled out her ID card and handed it to the one who had always seemed friendlier towards her. The chopper was banking and coming nearer. Lea waited while her card was slowly passed between them. The searchlight swung over the trees behind the guard booth.

‘Come on,’ she said under her breath. ‘Come on.’

‘Where are you going?’ asked the guard.

‘To the other side of the highway. To get a taxi.’ The searchlight was creeping nearer.

‘There are no taxis from there. You can’t get across the road.’ He was right. The city had not been built for pedestrians. There was no walkway.

‘I’m hot,’ she said. ‘Can I wait in your box? Do you have air-con?’ She darted inside just as the helicopter beam reached them.

‘You can’t go in there—security,’ said the other guard, but now the pair of them were arguing with each other and looking up into the chopper’s light, unable to hear what was being announced from above. The beam crossed back and forth, checking the entrance, and found nothing.

Seconds after it passed overhead, Lea stepped from the box and quickly walked away. The guards were still arguing. She had left her ID card behind, but figured she would no longer need it.

When she glanced back, she saw one of them opening his cell phone. They were going to run a check on her. She needed to get off the road.

It means he’s got a signal from another phone mast, she realised. Lea checked her phone and watched as it picked up reception. She kept a taxi service on speed-dial, and tried it now.

The chopper was tilting back. She didn’t dare look up at it, but kept moving forward. Cars and trucks roared past her on the eight lane highway. There was no possibility of getting across it, or of flagging anyone down. The taxi service answered.

She remembered that there was an Arabic grocery store somewhere up ahead, a cracked red and green plastic fascia tacked on a breezeblock building, one of the old local shops that had been left behind in the gold rush. What the hell was it called? ‘Hi, I need to be collected from the Palm Supermart,’ she said.

‘I don’t know where that is, miss.’

‘It’s a few hundred yards past the main entrance to Dream Ranches, maybe a bit further. I think there’s a slip road.’

The steel and glass chopper swung back and forth over the highway like an immense dragonfly, but could not descend because of the power cables. Frustrated, it passed up and down the lanes, finally heading off.

She needed to call Colette and Betty, to warn them of what might happen if they stayed. Her thumb hovered over the speed-dial. They would ridicule her, blame her. She pocketed the phone instead.

She had no idea how long she walked. All she remembered was the noise of the passing traffic, dust and gravel, petrol fumes, the sound of the overhead blades approaching and receding.

The long curve of the neon-lit supermarket occupied the corner of a road she had never paid much attention to before. Displays of shiny crimson tomatoes and lurid green cucumbers stood in ranks before her.

She entered the store and looked about. Her heart was in her mouth as she walked to the ATM. There was a limit on the amount she could withdrew in a single day. She waited and watched while the machine read her Visa card. She punched in a request for the maximum withdrawal, and felt a pang of relief as the money slid into the tray.

The supermarket was as overlit as any garage forecourt. She felt sure someone was checking for her on a bank of TV screens, but there was only the cashier, watching an old Arabic film on his monitor. She studied the locals drifting through a nearby shopping arcade, seemingly without a care in the world, shopping for fruit and vegetables.

She tried to work out her next step, and was still staring at the shoppers indecisively as a blue and white ABC taxi slid to a stop beside her.

Lea instructed the driver to head for the airport and fell back into the seat, feeling the cool air wash over her. As she watched the traffic slide past, she wondered if there was any point in attempting to get out of the country. It was unlikely that she would clear airport security. Her name would already have been relayed to the police on some trumped-up charge by now. Why else would they have sent a helicopter into the compound?

She supposed it was possible to go up to Sharja and fly out from there, at least take a flight to Greece, Turkey, down to Africa even. There had to be a way. But they would stop her credit cards as soon as they realised that she was missing.

As the taxi approached Dubai International Airport she saw a line of squad cars waiting in the drop-off zone’s slip road with their lights off, and her nerve failed. ‘Take the nearest exit,’ she told the driver. ‘I’ve forgotten something.’

The silent driver was not being paid to question her instructions. He deftly turned away from the main highway as Lea checked her phone.

She found what she needed just outside a small town on the edge of the scrubland that led to the desert; a locally-owned garage that rented battered old cars.

Paying off the driver, she headed into the AYMAN garage and picked out a sand-covered Jeep with cracked plastic windows and no air-con, renting it with her Visa card. While the forms were being processed, she headed back to the washroom.

She stood looking at herself in the filthy mirror, wondering what she could do to make herself look more presentable. Throwing some cold water on her face, she tried to flatten her hair in place. She had no comb or makeup bag.

Facing terrorist charges and on the run from the police, that’ll be one for the CV, she thought with bitter amusement.

She wondered what was happening back at Dream Ranches. Her imagination ran wild; troublemakers being rounded up in a single swoop, a frenzy of arrests, the burial of secrets before they tidied everything away and continued exactly as before. We accept such corruptions as normal now. We’ve all been taught to assume the worst. I never thought it would involve the man I married.

It was possible, she supposed, that Cara and her friends might decide to act and survive as agitators, forever changing their IPs, hiding behind a thicket of fluctuating code, staying one step ahead. It was possible, wasn’t it? Or would the infinitely-resourced DWG always outpace them?

She tried not to think about what lay in the future. Speed was of the essence. Having decided to run, she had no choice but to go on. She could reach Sharja in a little over an hour. Cleaning the dirt from her jacket as best as she could she left the bathroom, and forced herself to stop thinking about Cara. Back at the beach house her daughter had seemed calm and confident, suddenly mature, yet she was really little more than a child.

Lea had wanted to sweep Cara up and crush her to her chest. My husband, my daughter. The sense of loss had barely begun to bite.