Chapter 28

 

The Dubai police arrived at Expatriatedotcom’s warehouse the next day to carry out a raid, but they were too late. It seemed that Jacks did have a contingency plan after all and the place had been burned to the ground. The police suspected arson but showed a reluctance to investigate it further. Maybe this was a parting gift from his royal partner. There was no way he was going to get back to the Middle East now. All airports were on full alert and so one last phone call to a friendly ear had sorted out the destruction of any evidence of his existence left in Dubai.

He was probably in Germany, but Milton knew he could be just about anywhere.

In the 24 hours since the match, England’s World Cup bidders proclaimed to have smashed the hooliganism ring while Germany’s bidders were praising their own police operation for thwarting mass violence instigated by the English. Gold stars all round.

Milton’s evidence was digested by his bosses, but without the ringleaders in jail they had little to celebrate. The bank statement was not evidence enough to prove the German link - the payments could relate to legitimate business transactions, he was told. And spouting off a story that a trained English cell based in the Middle East was funded by the Germans to wreak havoc on European football matches would be just too much for the public to believe. It would have sounded like one last desperate bid to rubbish the German World Cup campaign.

One piece of evidence that could have proved the story had been lying on a stone slab in a German hospital mortuary, but mysteriously Pups’s body had been removed and no one knew where it was. In what must have been a major embarrassment for the German authorities, they had lost a dead body. Milton smirked when he heard the news. It made sense now why Stardust was jotting down the name of the hospital. As Jacks had proved in the Gulf War, he did not like to leave a man dead in the field of battle, so they had somehow managed to grab Pups back.

In the days that followed, Milton was commended by his bosses and was promoted. He did not give a damn anymore. His resignation landed on Deputy Assistant Commissioner Dobson’s desk along with his detailed report. He was a different person now to the one that had gone undercover in Dubai. The city had changed him; a fact that his wife found out too when he decided that enough was enough and went his separate way.