Layover in Dubai Read online

  The nature of Nanette’s job meant that it would be difficult to find out much about her. People who made it their business to pry into the affairs of others were often skilled at keeping their own lives a secret. It was the age-old conundrum of espionage and detection: Who watched the watchers? Surely her work at Pfluger Klaxon was subject to an annual audit. The question was who had access to the information. The Internet offered a starting point. Pfluger Klaxon’s Web site had password-only portals for its globe-trotting employees, to allow constant access to encrypted information. And Sam, being an auditor, rated a fairly high security clearance.

  He finished his coffee and went on the prowl. Laleh’s door was locked. No surprise, but no problem. He easily sprang the lock with the thin, flat edge of a kitchen spatula.

  The room was a revelation, a museum of arrested development that clearly displayed her status as a businesswoman still confined by the rules of girlhood. In the far corner by the window were the relics of her recent past. The wall was plastered with torn-out magazine photos of pop stars and film idols. A set of shelves was crammed with books—English editions of all seven Harry Potter titles were lined up in a row—along with music CDs and loads of silly knickknacks, the kind that a girl might get as party favors at her best friend’s Sweet Sixteen. An iPod was docked in a set of Bose speakers next to a small television, the one he had heard blaring the other day. It was of modest size, but had an LCD flat screen.

  The princess trappings grew sparser the farther you moved from the window, and the decor was correspondingly more mature—two prints of Matisse cutouts, professionally framed; an artsy color photo of a desert bluff at sunrise. The open door of her bathroom seemed to emanate her scent on a cloud of herbal shampoo and body lotion. Just inside the door, a blue towel was curled on the tile floor next to a shower cap and a loofah sponge. He tried not to dwell on how she must have looked when she dropped the towel to the floor.

  By the time the view reached her desk, the transformation was complete. Here she was all business, having stacked and shelved thick hardback textbooks on marketing, accounting, and other entrepreneurial topics. A calendar that doubled as a blotter was marked with the month’s morning appointments. There were issues of The Economist and The Week, plus a few tattered pink sections from the Financial Times. Off to one side was a glossy page torn from UAE Business, a local magazine devoted to puff pieces on the region’s start-ups and commercial superstars. The story, only a few months old, profiled Laleh’s marketing firm, and the photo took his breath away. She was covered nearly head to toe in a black abaya, but it was her face that really got his attention—an ultra-sober expression nearly as stern as her mother’s had been at the breakfast table. She could have passed for thirty, and looked utterly, prudently competent. You would have trusted her with your last million.

  Beneath the picture was a lengthy quote from her, highlighted in boldface type: “All of the wealth is very heady, but I sometimes wonder if in our rush to prosperity our elders haven’t embraced the new ways of doing business a little too readily. There is a certain sense of recklessness to the whole enterprise, which I think makes it a very good time to stay low to the ground.”

  He wondered how dear old dad must have reacted to that—an implicit generational slam, yet a seeming endorsement of his more traditional values. An oddly appealing mix, he thought, especially from someone who looked so good in a short skirt. But he still couldn’t shake the sense that she must be something of a dabbler, a rich girl who had talked Daddy into forking over some start-up capital to give her an excuse to get out of the house.

  Sam reminded himself he was there for business, not pleasure, and he turned his attention to Laleh’s desktop computer, a powerful HP with a liquid crystal monitor that flashed to life when he nudged the mouse. Viewing the desktop icons, he knew he was in luck. She had one of those broadband connections that was always active. When he clicked on her Internet icon, a Google homepage flashed to life.

  At the same moment, an instant-messaging box popped up in the screen’s upper right corner, with remnants of an IM conversation from only a few hours ago. The screen names had been trading girl gossip. He guessed that “LaSha” was Laleh’s, and he blushed as he read her parting dispatch, a gloomy emoticon of a cartoon frown followed by “He may be leaving today.”

  Both her friends frowned back, then everyone declared “GTG,” got to go.

  Sam was surprised by how much it pleased him. He also experienced a pang of sympathy for Laleh, realizing what a departure from the norm his visit must represent in such a cloistered life. He X’ed out the messaging box, drew a deep breath, and refocused, typing and clicking his way to the Pfluger Klaxon homepage and its drop-down menu for cleared employees. A prompt asked for his password, and he obliged.

  Access denied. Password invalid.

  He tried it twice more, slowly, in case he had mistyped.

  No luck.

  Nanette had moved quickly. Discouraging, but also intriguing. He knew from auditing experience that whenever barricades began to appear there was usually something worth finding out farther down the road. She wouldn’t have blocked him otherwise. And there were other passwords out there, some with even better access than his. The question was how to get one.

  It was time to use the telephone. A call to Manhattan from Sharaf’s house would be risky, especially if Nanette had sounded the alarm on him to Pfluger Klaxon. A transatlantic call could easily be traced through phone records. But that would be a minor problem as long as Sharaf found him a safer location by day’s end.

  Who to call, then? Any supervisor would be too chancy. So would friends from other departments, who probably couldn’t help much anyway. That left his six fellow auditors. He quickly ruled out Ansen and Greenberg, who toed the company line even when it meant taking shortcuts with their work. Paar and Lukins were at the other extreme, but their reckless cowboy tendencies might do him more harm than good. Gupta, the newest hire, was the least known. With only two months’ experience he would probably be reluctant to stick his neck out for anyone, much less an official pariah. That left only Stu Plevy. An up-and-comer. A conniver even, with a reputation for playing every angle. His talents were such that he could hold a conversation with two people at odds with each other, and both would came away convinced that Stu agreed with them. Plevy would be looking out for himself, meaning he would almost certainly report any call. But if Sam could dangle the possibility of some kind of benefit, Plevy might also help, in his own sneaky fashion. Better still, it was 2 a.m. in Manhattan, meaning Sam could phone Plevy at home, where the line wouldn’t be monitored. Even if Plevy blabbed, Pfluger Klaxon wouldn’t learn of the call for another seven hours. By then Sam would be in a new location.

  A brief Internet search turned up a home number at an address on the upper East Side. Sam moved to the phone in the kitchen to punch in the numbers. After two rings the receiver clattered as if someone had knocked it loose in the dark.

  “Hello?” The voice was scratchy.

  “Plevy? Sorry to wake you, but this is urgent. It’s Sam Keller, calling from Dubai.”

  “Keller? What time is it?”

  “Around two your time. Ten in the morning here.”

  “Aren’t you in some kind of trouble?” Plevy already sounded eager and alert. Sam heard a drawer open, as if Plevy was retrieving something to write with. “Heard about the thing with Charlie. Terrible. There were also rumblings of some kind of sexual assault involving No No Nanette. By you, even? What’s up with that?”

  So she had indeed poisoned the well. To hook Plevy he would have to lace the bait with some embellishments of his own.

  “I was a dupe on the thing with Charlie. The assault charge is a frame-up to keep me quiet. From what I can tell, Nanette has some connections to a local hood. Between you and me, that’s what I was sent here to check out.”

  “By Gary?” Their boss.

  “Gary’s out of the loop. This goes higher. Meaning it won’t
exactly hurt your career if you can help.”

  “Sounds like you’ve already got plenty of backing. Why not just go to your sugar daddy?”

  “Because this isn’t official, and we didn’t plan for this kind of contingency. So you can understand if I’m in a bit of a bind.”

  Plevy paused, then said, “Especially if you’re blowing smoke out your ass. Even if you’re not, the whole setup sounds toxic. Where are you now?”

  Fat chance he’d answer that.

  “Working with some undercover people. Locals. I don’t need much, Plevy.”

  “I heard some scuttlebutt about the babysitting assignment Nanette gave you. But I guess that could explain why they’d have picked you for an undercover job.”

  “Very good. But keep it to yourself.”

  “Did she give you one of her special phones?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “She’s done it before, keeping tabs on naughty boys like Charlie. No disrespect to the dead, of course. They’ve got GPS tracking and she receives the signal, so she always knows where you are. Remember that veep she busted in Africa? Same deal. So if you’re still carrying, better ditch it.”

  No wonder she got so upset when Sam switched off the phone. And when he switched it back on, the Russian thugs had closed in on the York within minutes. Fortunately, the phone was still back at the Shangri-La.

  “Keller?”

  “I’m here. Don’t worry, I ditched the phone.”

  “Not that I don’t believe you, but you do realize that helping you isn’t exactly a risk-free proposition?”

  “Go ahead and report this call, Plevy. I’d do the same. Cover your ass all you need. All I want is a Web site password. Mine’s blocked.”

  “Whoa, now. You think I’m stupid enough to report you but let you go snooping around the database under my name?”

  “Yeah, well …”

  Sam didn’t have an easy answer, and his hopes faded. There was a pause of a few seconds with nothing but static, which Sam supposed was better than a flat refusal. Unless, of course, Plevy had grabbed his cell phone and was punching in the home number for one of Nanette’s assistants.

  “You don’t need my password,” Plevy said at last. “I’ll give you Ansen’s.”

  “How do you know Ansen’s?”

  “I know yours, too. The whole department’s. Dumb-ass Gary left them up on his screen about a week ago. Seemed like the sort of thing a good auditor ought to file away for future reference. Not that it would do me much good, since we change them every month.”

  “If I need anything more …”

  “No, no, Keller.”

  “Just as a hypothetical.”

  Plevy paused, still calculating. “What kind of hypothetical?”

  “I don’t know. Someone I could send up a flare to, if all else fails.”

  “If you have to, shoot a message to my personal address. Better still, send it to my sister’s. Hold on, I’ll get it.”

  Plevy returned a few seconds later and spelled out an AOL e-mail address.

  “Put my name in the subject line, she’ll know not to look. Which means she’ll look anyway, so be as vague as possible.”

  Like brother, like sister, Sam supposed.

  “Thanks, Plevy.”

  “Don’t says thanks. I was no help at all, officially and otherwise. Unless you turn out to be right, of course.”

  Ansen’s password worked fine. The first thing he found was Nanette’s corporate bio.

  She had been with Pfluger Klaxon for four years, having come to the job after six years with the Bureau of Diplomatic Security of the U.S. Foreign Service. Before that she had spent two years as a risk-assessment manager with Intermax, a global security consultant, right after graduating with honors from Brown.

  Sam checked her Foreign Service postings. The first one was to Paris. The second was far more interesting: three years in Moscow.

  The corporate bio was predictably glowing. Three particular programs were cited. The most intriguing was a 2007 project in Dubai in which Pfluger Klaxon, “in close cooperation with customs officials and local police,” had financed the formation of a special squad at the port of Jebel Ali to ferret out the shipments of counterfeits. Probably when she met Lieutenant Assad, just as Sharaf had guessed.

  Sam scrolled back through archived press releases until he found the retirement notice for her predecessor. It mentioned that a search had commenced for his replacement, and a boilerplate job description noted, “Pfluger Klaxon’s chief of corporate security is a vice presidential position subject to an internal audit every four years by an outside consultant, reporting to the Chairman of the Board. Additionally, the vice president for security must file quarterly reports to the audit committee of the Board, with copies to the corporate legal officer, ethics officer, and audit officer.”

  The audit officer was Sam’s boss, Gary Grimshaw. If Gary was lax enough to leave departmental passwords up on his screen, then a smooth operator like Plevy could probably easily find Gary’s copies of Nanette’s most recent quarterly reports.

  Sam called up his personal account on Gmail and dashed off a message to the AOL address for Plevy’s sister, keeping it as vague as possible:

  “Need N’s last five quarterly reports, copies filed to G.”

  That would cover her time on the Jebel Ali project. He pecked around awhile longer on the off chance the audits were available online, but to no avail.

  He then searched a State Department Web site for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Press releases were archived for the previous six years, long enough to include Nanette’s last two years on the job. Three stood out.

  The first was an announcement of a meritorious honor award Nanette had won for “sustained excellence as a whistle-blower in identifying fraud and waste.” There were no specifics, but Sam knew from his own experience that this brand of “excellence” more often resulted in embarrassment than advancement. Sure enough, six months later she showed up in a press release outlining changes among the embassy’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security staff, when she was reassigned from investigations to consular affairs. Probably no pay cut involved, but her status and responsibility were certainly diminished. It made Sam recall a remark she’d made the other night. Even while she was taking pains to entrap him on the bogus sex charge, she hadn’t been able to resist an offhand complaint about her occasional lack of support from the board of directors. He wondered if being thwarted by higher-ups was a recurring theme in her role as a security cop. If so, resentment might have compelled her to take a few liberties of her own.

  The third press release, toward the end of her tenure, was the most intriguing. It was an announcement of an import-export seminar for visiting American executives, organized by commercial attaché Hal Liffey. Five Russian companies had pitched in as local sponsors. One was RusSiberian Metals and Investment, the firm that was now providing business cover in Dubai for crime boss Anatoly Rybakov. The press release helpfully instructed anyone interested in participating to contact staff security officer Nanette Weaver, who was handling visa questions and security clearances. So there they were, comrades in commerce for the betterment of East-West relations. And now here they were in Dubai, perhaps continuing their fruitful cooperation. But to what end?

  He checked the Web site for the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates and found a thumbnail bio of Liffey. His photo showed him smiling in front of an American flag. Liffey had been posted to the UAE two years ago. His previous postings overlapped with Nanette’s in Paris and Moscow. A long, productive friendship, no doubt.

  All of it was promising, but it proved nothing. His last order of business on the desktop was to erase his Internet footprints from Laleh’s computer. Then he went looking for his wallet and passport. He searched the house room by room—every drawer, closet, and box, plus the pockets of Sharaf’s shirts, jackets, trousers, and kandouras, which were hanging all in a row like choir robes. An hour later, still unsuccessfu
l, he even tried the refrigerator, unwrapping foil parcels in the freezer just to make sure. No luck.

  He searched Laleh’s room last, then logged back onto her computer just long enough to check his Gmail account, on the off chance that Plevy had already sent a message. No luck there, either.

  Sam then went to the kitchen, poured a tall glass of water and downed it at the sink while pondering where to look next. Perhaps Sharaf had taken the items with him. Glancing out the back window, he spotted another possibility—a storage shed at the rear of the carport.

  Just then the phone rang, loud and jarring in the silence of the empty kitchen. He stared at the receiver, debating whether to pick it up. He supposed it could be Sharaf with new marching orders. But if someone in New York had already traced the phone call, it could also be Nanette, or the police, trying to verify his location.

  He swallowed the last of the water and headed out the door while the phone continued to ring. Outside it was sunny and the temperature was already in the mid-eighties.

  The shed was locked, so he circled to the back, where a small mullioned window offered a view into a dim chamber. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw that it was mostly a repository for gardening equipment and discarded household items such as an old television. Then he saw a corrugated aluminum tub, filled with water. Were those his trousers, for God’s sake? They were. His shirt was there, too, sopping wet, and if his passport and wallet were still in his pants pockets, they also would be sodden.

  Now what was the point of this outrage, other than sheer maliciousness? His first instinct was to smash in a pane, unlock the window, and climb in. But he didn’t want to risk cutting himself, so he ran back to the house, his anger building, and grabbed the damp blue towel from the floor of Laleh’s bathroom. He returned to the rear of the shed, balled up his fist inside the towel, and took aim at the pane just above the window lock.

  That’s when he heard the cars come roaring up the drive. He lowered his fist and peeped around the corner. Blue bubble lights flashed atop a police cruiser, followed closely by the same black BMW SUV that Assad had driven into the desert. Doors opened on the cruiser and four cops in khaki uniforms piled out. Two headed for the front door of the house, and two for the back. A fifth shouted orders from the driver’s seat. The door of the BMW opened, and Lieutenant Assad stepped into the drive, hands on his hips as he watched the search unfold.