‘Freeze, you fuck. Don’t move!’
Two guards were standing at the top of the ramp, their big old Colts trained on him. He raised his hands. He still had the mask on. They mustn’t hear his voice.
Cautiously they approached, one a chubster, the other skinny with bow legs. ‘Okay, we’re calling this in. You stay right there.’
Tom gestured at his chest and mouth.
‘Hey, Sal, maybe he ain’t breathin’.’
Sal wasn’t so sympathetic. ‘Fuck him. Wait till the cops get here.’
The skinny one had his doubts.
‘He stops breathin’, we’ll get it in the neck. He can see we’re carrying. He ain’t goin’ nowhere.’
‘Okay, okay.’
Sal swiped a card on the reader and the gates lurched open.
Tom collapsed onto his knees, clutching his chest.
‘Jeez, will you look at what he done to the Jag-war?’
The skinny one stood over him and reached down with his left hand to pull off the vegetable bag.
Tom grabbed the weapon barrel and simply twisted. The shock the guy got when this happened so quickly made it easy to yank it out of his hands. The hard bit was then making use of the weapon fast and in such a way that the other one knew he had a problem. Shooting them was the ideal option, but that wasn’t going to happen and Tom jammed hard between his skinny legs. That always grabbed people’s attention.
Tom put on his best and worst American accent. ‘Tell him to throw me his weapon — now!’
The command was quickly shouted out and ended with a ‘Jesus, Sal, just do it.’
Tom took off on foot, not looking back, just making distance as he wiped the weapon and dumped it as soon as he could. It was maybe a kilometre of hard-sweat running before he spotted a cab and flagged it down. The driver began to pull away.
‘No way — you’re fucking rank, man!’
‘There’s an extra hundred in it if you take me.’
‘Okay, get in.’
65
The phone woke Tom from a brief but incredibly deep sleep.
‘You find anything?’ Beth was on the move, walking quickly. He heard the sound of a car unlocking.
‘Yeah, maybe. We should talk.’
‘I’ve got a crash meeting with Carter, my contact agent. He’s flying in from DC.’
‘How come?’
‘I called him about Zuabi, asked him to run a check. I guess he has something big, so we should meet after that. I’ll give you the address.’
It was a motel out on an exit from the Loop to the south-west.
‘Why there?’
‘His choice. We should be done by noon. Text me when you’re near.’
He picked up the keys to his hire car at the desk and headed out into the hot, smoggy morning. A silver Toyota Camry was about as anonymous as you could get, the automotive equivalent of a Styrofoam cup. He took out his iPad and tapped in his destination, the Tijuana Motel, then searched for the location of Zuabi’s mosque and put that in as well. He had some time to kill before meeting Beth; a good opportunity to check it out.
Before he set off he called Phoebe again on his throwaway phone. She sounded stressed: phones were ringing and beeping in the background. ‘Tom, have you talked to Rolt?’
‘Why?’
‘He’s over the moon about something, but hasn’t said what. He’s keeping his composure in public but when he’s in the office it’s as though Christmas has come early. And everyone wants to talk to him, government, media — even more than before. It’s gone mental.’
‘Well, he’s got some new investment. Another name for you: Aaron Stutz. That one ever come up there?’
‘Can you give me more of a steer on it?’
‘Big shot. Chairs a software company called Oryxis. He’s the guy Invicta’s getting new funding from. Rolt and Stutz are close. Also anything that cross-references the name “Fortress” with either of them.’
‘Doesn’t mean anything but, as you know, there are whole channels of his activity we don’t have eyes on.’
‘Well, you need to get eyes on them. Woolf needs to raise his game. You need to go a lot deeper.’
‘Why the change of heart?’
‘Because I don’t like what I’m finding out.’
66
Tom slowed the Camry and pulled into the parking lot of a dry-cleaner’s where he stopped, facing the building site of the mosque. Maybe Stutz’s interest in Zuabi had nothing to do with the construction. None of it made sense.
It was the scale of the place that struck him first: not just one hall of worship but a whole complex of buildings rising out of the ground in an otherwise forgotten neighbourhood. A high wall of pale pink stone had already been built. The minaret was complete, and where the main dome would be there was a huge edifice of scaffolding. He was weighing the pros and cons of trying to do a decent recce when a coach pulled to a halt in front of the entrance. Out poured a group of about twenty people, most of them in suits, who gathered round the luggage hatch at the back where white hard hats and hi-viz safety vests were being handed out.
He left the car and crossed the road, then came round the side of the coach and joined the queue for kit. When he got to the front the guy doing the handing out gave him a strange look. His name tag said ‘International Confederation of Structural Engineers’. ‘You on the list?’
‘Roger Symes, Royal Institute of British Architects. I only just landed — got a bit delayed. They probably didn’t have time to add me. I’m most awfully sorry.’
The guy handed him a hat and a vest. ‘Whatever.’
Tom inserted himself into the group as they headed through the entrance, following an enthusiastic guide in a yellow hat, who was in full flow.
‘… and to produce the activation heat for this system, we’re using roof-mounted parabolic solar collectors, working on a higher than usual temperature…’
Tom soon tuned out. He was in the building, which was what mattered. He smiled at a woman studying her BlackBerry, who rolled her eyes. ‘There’s only so much of this stuff I can take.’ She leaned towards him. ‘How many mosques d’you think there are now, operating in the US?’ He smiled again and shrugged. ‘Twelve hundred.’
‘Wow.’
‘And eighty per cent of them built since Nine/Eleven. How does that work?’
‘Are they all this big?’
She shook her head. ‘Oh, no, this fella’s in a whole different league.’
‘Know anything about the guy behind it?’
Another member of the party who appeared equally bored chipped in, ‘Got his hand deep in Saudi pockets. Which ain’t right.’
At this point a third man, the only one of the party who looked like he might have actually built anything, waded in. ‘Hey, give the guy a break. He’s spending his dough here, not on guns for A-rabs.’ He drawled the ‘a’ so it came out as ‘Ayrab’. He waved in the direction of a cluster of men erecting a crane. ‘They’re all American workers too.’
‘Guy’s a refugee, came here with nothing.’
‘Yeah, so did my granddaddy, but then they start sending for their families an’ all.’
‘I heard it’s gonna be dedicated to his daughter.’
‘What happened to her?’ Tom asked.
The third man shrugged. ‘Guess she didn’t make it. They got all kinds of trouble in Syria now, ain’t they?’
They moved towards the scaffolding where the dome would be. Another man with a well-scuffed hat came forward and was introduced as the site manager.
Tom tried to listen but his attention was caught by the purple folder under the man’s arm and the logo in the corner. It was the same castle design and the same colour as the one in Stutz’s apartment. He turned to the BlackBerry woman. ‘D’you know that logo at all?’