SHEPHERD STOOD UP, found the field glasses, and walked back to the window. He scanned the field and found the hanger with the green roof. But he didn’t see the plane any longer.
“I think Harvey’s gone,” he said.
“They couldn’t have taken off that quickly,” Rachel said. “They would have to fuel after the flight from Thailand. It can’t be done that fast.”
She walked over and took the glasses from Shepherd, then studied the place where they had seen Harvey park.
“The hanger doors are closed now,” she said. “They must have towed the plane inside.”
“How do you get off the field from there?” Shepherd asked. “Would the passengers have to go over to the passenger terminal to clear immigration?”
“Theoretically, yes,” Rachel said, “but there’s an exit gate in the airport boundary right behind the hanger. Since the facility actually belongs to the UAE government, it’s accessible from there.”
“That means people can come and go from that hanger without any interference at all, right? No customs or immigration?”
“Yes, that’s right. That’s what it means.”
“Is the gate manned?” Shepherd asked.
“No, there’s not enough traffic for that. Access is by a security card and a code entered into a keypad. You’ve got to have both to get through the gate and we change the code weekly.”
“Who changes the code?”
“I do.” Rachel pointed to the computer sitting on her desk. “From right there.”
Shepherd thought about that for a moment.
“I guess you probably have trouble with the gate occasionally,” he said.
“Not really.”
“I mean with it breaking down and jamming so that people can’t open it to get out.”
“No, as far as I remember, that gate has never…”
Rachel trailed off into silence and looked at Shepherd.
“If the code were changed,” he said, “and nobody knew it, the gate wouldn’t open. To anyone who tried to use the old code, it would seem like the gate had broken down, wouldn’t it?”
Keur roared with laughter again. “Damn, Jack, I do like your style.”
“What would happen if somebody came out of that hanger, tried to operate the gate, and discovered it didn’t work?” Shepherd asked.
“They could go across the airport and exit on the other side, or go through the freight facility and get off the field that way,” Rachel said. “But they would have to get permission from ground control to move around the field. It would be a bit of a nuisance and it might take a while.”
“So the odds are they would just call somebody instead. They would tell them they were waiting there to leave the field and to send somebody to fix the goddamn gate right the hell now.”
Rachel nodded slowly. “That would be my guess.”
“How interesting,” Shepherd said. “And would you be informed if that happened?”
“I might be. Particularly if I had arranged to be informed.”
“Who would you send to fix the gate?”
“You have anybody in particular in mind?” Rachel smiled.
“Now that you ask,” Shepherd said, “I just might.”
Rachel used her computer to change the gate code. Then she called someone and told them to route any complaints about that particular gate directly to her. She also found a light cotton jacket and a blue baseball cap in her closet and gave them to Shepherd. As disguises went, it wasn’t much, but it didn’t have to be. He wasn’t intending to fool anyone for very long.
A few minutes later, Shepherd’s phone binged. He checked his email and found a message from his new anti-American lawyer. The guy’s pet judge had already signed an emergency order impounding Harvey pending a full hearing on a claim that the lease payments were in default. That hearing had been set for the next day, but the lawyer said he had heard a rumor the judge felt a bout of flu coming on and would probably be forced to postpone it for a day or two. That was about as much as he could do, he said. How sick could one judge actually be before eyebrows were raised?
Shepherd and Keur sat back to wait. They kept an eye on CNN for any further reports about the explosions in Bangkok, but something called World Sport was on instead of the news. As far as Shepherd could tell, World Sport meant extended coverage of any sport not played anywhere in the United States. The planet’s twenty-seventh largest city was in flames and all CNN could talk about was Italian league soccer.
Rachel did paperwork at her desk and took several calls during the next half hour. As each call was put through to her she shook her head at Shepherd. Then she took a call and didn’t shake her head.
“Here we go,” she said.
When the call was put through, Rachel murmured apologies for the gate malfunction in a throaty voice with just a trace of an accent. She sounded pretty good to Shepherd. If he heard a voice like that coming down the telephone line, he figured he would accept an apology for World War II. From the look on Rachel’s face, however, whomever she was talking to was far less enamored by the sound of her voice than Shepherd was.
When she put down the telephone, she gave Shepherd a long look. “You didn’t tell me how charming your Mr. Darling was.”
“He called you himself?”
“In person, the asshole. He wants me to send someone to fix the gate. He seems to be in a hurry.”
“Well then. Let’s not keep the man waiting.”
They all trooped downstairs to the garage and got into Rachel’s official vehicle. It was a Toyota Land Cruiser with a blue bubble light on the roof and a couple more blue lights behind the front grill. It took only a few minutes for them to cross the main road and enter the airport through a manned security gate right on the other side.
Once on the field, Rachel switched on her blue lights and turned into a perimeter road just inside the fence. The road circled around the runways to the other side of the field where Robert Darling was fuming in front of a gate that wouldn’t obey him.
“This is fun,” Shepherd said. “Let’s switch on the siren, too.”
“I don’t have a siren.”
“Damn.”
A big commercial jet passed directly overhead and the thunder of its engines enveloped them like a rainstorm. The plane was so close that Shepherd could pick out the individual rivets peppering its skin. They looked like a bad attack of metallic acne. He knew all the scientific explanations about why airplanes flew, of course, and he believed them. Up to a point. But when he was a couple of hundred feet directly beneath one of those aluminum monsters, watching it hang there in the air without any visible explanation for the apparent miracle of it all, he could only hold his breath and hope that science wasn’t just blowing one out its ass.
When the engine noise had died away, Keur cleared his throat. “I think I should be the one to talk to Darling, Jack.”
“Too late,” Shepherd said, holding up the jacket and baseball cap. “I got the disguise.”
“That’s not going to fool anyone.”
“It will just long enough for me to walk up to his car.”
“And then what are you going to do?”
It was a good question, but a little embarrassing since Shepherd hadn’t worked that part out yet.
“Look, Jack, I’m a trained law enforcement officer. I do this kind of thing for a living.”
“It’s my play, Keur. Don’t try to pull rank on me.”
“But what do you think you’re going to accomplish?”
Damn, another good question.
“Make up your minds, boys,” Rachel said. “ETA three minutes.”
Shepherd twisted around in his seat and looked at Keur.
“I know Darling,” he said. “Even better, I irritate him. I’m going to ambush him and piss him off and see if he screws up.”
“Screws up what?”
“Look, Keur, think about what we know here.”
“That won’t take long.”
“Darling owns half of Blossom Trading,” Shepherd went on undeterred, “which you say is really an arms dealer. He’s just arrived in Dubai from Thailand, which seems to be on the verge of civil war. He arrived on an airplane operated by a CIA front company, which I’m told is being used regularly to run guns into Thailand. Charlie owns the other half of Blossom Trading. He’s disappeared. Three days ago, Charlie’s assistant turned up in Thailand hanging beneath a bridge with this head cut off. Now what connects all of that?”
“I don’t know,” Keur said. “You tell me. What connects all of that?”
“I have no goddamned idea either. So I’ll ask Darling. Maybe he’ll explain it to me.”
“There’s the car,” Rachel interrupted.
A white Mercedes sedan was sitting in a driveway that ended at the airport’s perimeter fence in front of a closed gate. Next to the gate was a small grassy area shaded by a half dozen palm trees with a white picnic table and two benches. It looked like the quarantine area for smokers. No one was in sight, so Shepherd assumed Darling had to be inside the Mercedes. The question he really ought to be asking himself, he knew, was who else might also be inside the Mercedes?
But he didn’t ask. He already had a matched set of questions he couldn’t answer. What use was one more?
“Stop in the blind spot on the driver’s side,” Shepherd said to Rachel.
He pulled on the jacket and pushed the baseball cap down on his head.
“Block him in against the gate, but don’t be too obvious about it.”
Rachel glanced at Shepherd. She looked like she might be about to say something, but instead she just nodded.
As soon as the big SUV stopped, Shepherd pushed the door open and jumped out. He tilted his head down so that the bill of the cap hid his face and pretended to study something in his hands as he walked quickly toward the Mercedes.
The driver’s door started to open just as Shepherd reached the car, but he shoved it shut and pushed his hip against it. The driver lowered his window and Shepherd bent over to look inside.
Darling was in the driver’s seat. And he was alone.