Carte Blanche - Jeffery Deaver [60]
The two men climbed out. With an hour and fifteen minutes to sunset, the air was cooling, even as the ground radiated heat banked during the day.
Hydt heard a voice, carried on the dusty wind. ‘Please! My friend, please come in!’ The man waving his hand was in a white dishdasha robe – in the uniquely Emirates style – and had no head covering. He was in his mid-fifties, Hydt knew, although, like many Arab men, he looked younger. A studious face, smart glasses, Western shoes. His longish hair was swept back.
Mahdi al-Fulan strode over sprays of red sand, which drifted along the tarmac and sloped against the kerb, the walkways and the sides of buildings. The Arab’s eyes were bright, as if he were a schoolboy about to show off a treasured project. Which wasn’t far from the truth, Hydt reflected. A black beard framed his smile; Hydt had been amused to learn that, while hair colouring was not a good product to market in a land where both male and female heads were usually covered, beard dye was a bestseller.
Hands were gripped. ‘My friend.’ Hydt didn’t try to offer an Arabic greeting. He had no talent for languages and believed it a weakness to attempt anything you were not skilled at.
Niall Dunne stepped forward, his shoulders bouncing as they always did in his gangling walk, and also greeted the man, but the pale eyes were gazing past the Arab. For once, they were not searching for threats. He was staring raptly at the bounty that the warehouse held, which could be seen through the open door: perhaps fifty or so machines, in every shape a geometrician could name, made of raw and painted steel, iron, aluminium, carbon fibre . . . who knew what else? Pipes protruded, wires, control panels, lights, switches, chutes and belts. If robots had pleasant dreams, they would be set in this room.
They entered the warehouse, which was devoid of workers. Dunne paused to study and occasionally even caress some device or other.
Mahdi al-Fulan was an industrial product designer, MIT educated. He shunned the kind of high-profile entrepreneurship that gets you on the cover of business magazines – and often into the bankruptcy court – and specialised instead in designing functional industrial equipment and control systems for which there was a consistent market. He was one of Severan Hydt’s main suppliers. Hydt had met him at a recycling-equipment conference. Once he’d learnt about certain trips the Arab took abroad and about the dangerous men to whom he sold his wares, they’d become partners. Al-Fulan was a clever scientist, an innovative engineer, a man with ideas and inventions important to Gehenna.
And with other connections too.
Ninety dead . . .
At that thought, Hydt involuntarily consulted his watch. Nearly six.
‘Follow me, please, Severan, Niall.’ Al-Fulan had caught Hydt’s glance. The Arab led them through the various rooms, dim and still. Dunne again slowed his step to examine some machinery or a control panel. He’d nod approvingly or frown, perhaps trying to understand how a system worked.
Leaving behind the machines with their scent of oil, paint and the unique metallic, almost blood-like odour of high-powered electrical systems, they entered the offices. At the end of a dim corridor al-Fulan used a computer key to open an unmarked door and they stepped into a work area, which was large and cluttered with thousands of sheets of paper, blueprints and other documents on which were words, graphs and diagrams, many of them incomprehensible to Hydt.
The atmosphere was eerie, to say the least, both because