Routine.
As a bonus, the high-vis clothing was emblazoned with the name of the service company – Brown, Smith & Hudson – that looked after the target building.
The climbing gear she’d purchased in a local store. She had it slung around her person now, her high-vis suit sprouting harness and coiled ropes, plus some unusual extra pieces of kit that should come in very handy.
To the lay observer it would all look like standard maintenance gear. With her hair bunched up under her fluorescent orange safety helmet, and her figure obscured by the bulky suit, she would appear gender-neutral; unrecognisable as female, at least from a distance.
And she didn’t intend for anyone to get a closer look at her.
Brown, Smith & Hudson held the contract for external maintenance for the Al Mohajir Tower. Not Dubai’s tallest by a long chalk, but still a seventy-seven-floor space-age monolith of strengthened glass and steel. Internal security was another company’s responsibility, but Narov didn’t plan to blag her way into the meeting that way.
It was too obvious. Too many security personnel would be in place to stop her.
Hence the pre-dawn start, and the journey she’d made in the tower’s external elevator – the one reserved for taking workmen to the higher reaches of the exterior. The code to access the elevator had been easy enough to extract from the drunken workman, especially as he’d believed that Narov was intent on getting down and dirty with him on the seventieth floor.
Seventieth, because that was as far as the elevator went.
Floors seventy-one to seventy-seven were cantilevered outwards, the Al Mohajir Tower seeming to bloom like a flower at its zenith. It was designed so that the upper floors cast cooling shade over those below. Plus the interior of the flower sheltered its own massive roof garden, complete with a forest of tropical ferns.
Those top floors, reaching out over the city, could only be accessed externally by climbing them. At first Narov had considered simply acting as though cleaning or inspecting the glass, hanging outside the window of the room where the meeting was scheduled to take place.
But there was a problem. She needed a voice recording of the man she hunted, to be absolutely certain.
The more she’d studied Isselhorst’s photographs – she’d transferred several from his phone to her laptop, to view them at the highest resolution possible – the more she’d become convinced that they did show the man she sought. Yet he’d changed. Subtly, but enough to ensure he wouldn’t easily be recognised.
Narov had a good idea how he’d achieved such a clever transformation, but it made nailing him somewhat more challenging. His eyes – those killer eyes – appeared to be unaltered, but she couldn’t be absolutely certain. The secret was his voice: whatever else he might have doctored, his vocal cords would remain unchanged.
And that meant she needed a recording.
There was no way to secure that through several inches of toughened, soundproofed triple glazing. She needed to get inside the meeting room; or at least to insert a microphone.
Typically, the level of security inside the Al Mohajir Tower lessened the higher you climbed. At the ground floor it was a veritable Fort Knox: there were metal detectors, detailed ID checks, scanners, security guards frisking would-be visitors, and CCTV cameras at every turn. Getting into the lifts was equally challenging.
But by the time you hit the seventy-seventh floor, there was very little of that. The philosophy seemed to be that if you’d reached that far, then by default you must have every right to be where you were.
Hence the present plan.
Narov leant out from the elevator’s cage, reached up and attached the first double suction device, placing it flat on the glass, her hand gripping the tough aluminium handle that ran between the cups. Suction pads firmly applied, she flipped down the locking handles that secured the apparatus in place.
Designed for construction workers, the suction cups allowed for teams to carry large panes of glass in relative safety – crucial when building a complex skyscraper. But in a typical piece of lateral thinking, the elite of the world’s military had realised that such devices could also enable the scaling of otherwise unassailable structures.
Narov reached higher, attaching another double cup and testing it with her weight. Each device was designed to hold one hundred kilograms; Narov, at five foot nine, weighed just under sixty.
She attached one more at thigh height, the handle positioned horizontally to make a foothold. Then she levered herself upwards until she had three points of contact with the glass – feet on the lower suction pad and her weight supported by the thin climbing slings that she looped through the two middle cups. She took out one last device, reached up as high as she could and fastened it in place.
Then she carefully swung out over the abyss.
The routine was simple: the two central cups held her weight, whilst she stood on the lower one. She then lifted herself up and forward, reached as high as she could and reattached the top cup. Shifting her weight onto that, she began to move the lower cups upwards.
Then she repeated the process.
It took time, and it was all about moving calmly and efficiently, letting her legs and the cups do the work. Otherwise she would tire quickly.
In such a fashion, Narov inched her way up the first few feet of glass, being careful not to snag the bulging pack of gear she had strapped to her front for ease of access. She had a second, smaller pack strapped to her back, but she wouldn’t be needing that if all went to plan. The glass flared outwards at thirty degrees. Scaling seven floors – maybe one hundred feet – at such an angle was hugely tiring.
But it was doable if she paced herself, scaling one massive pane at a time, clinging to it like some kind of giant spider.
13
As she passed the seventy-second floor, Narov could detect a faint bluish tinge to the horizon: first light was maybe an hour away. Plenty of time to get to the top. It was never truly dark in this city: the glare thrown off by the jungle of brightly lit skyscrapers ensured that she had more than enough light by which to climb.
She’d opted to scale the building at night chiefly because of temperature. Come dawn, the heat and humidity would rise and the fierce Dubai sunlight would be reflected off the glass, making the present task near-impossible.
At least at this hour it was still relatively cool.
She felt her heart rate rising as she edged further and further away from the safety of the elevator cage. She ensured that she was always secured by at least three cups, yet still it was daunting hanging off the wall of glass.
She’d first learnt this climbing technique in England, courtesy of Will Jaeger. Following their mission to stop Kammler, Jaeger had been invited to the passing-out parade of a group of Royal Marines recruits at the Commando Training Centre in Lympstone, Devon, known simply as CTCRM.
Eighteen young men had just completed the gruelling thirty-two-week selection course, and they were scheduled to be awarded their coveted green berets.
Jaeger, a former commando officer, had asked Narov to join him for the ceremony. He’d intended to take his wife, but at the last minute he’d realised that her behaviour was far too unpredictable these days.
Since her rescue, Ruth Jaeger had grown increasingly introverted, spurning most of their family and friends. Jaeger had confided all this to Narov during one of their quieter moments. He hadn’t told her that Ruth was growing increasingly moody and prone to violence, but Narov knew as much from what others had said. It pained her to think of Will Jaeger being on the receiving end of so much psychological – and physical – hurt.