“The one in the middle is Hagen,” she said. “The other two, we’re not sure. His entourage, I suppose.”
“Who’s the professorial-looking fellow?”
“The curator of the Maltese Oceanic Museum.”
“I don’t get it,” Kurt said. “Museum curators don’t normally rub elbows with terrorists and those trafficking in nerve gas and biological weapons. Are you sure there’s a connection?”
“We’re not sure of anything,” she admitted. “Except that Hagen has been meeting with this man on a regular basis, intent on buying some artifacts the museum is about to put up for auction after a gala party two days from now.”
Kurt didn’t like it. “Everybody has their hobbies,” he said. “Even terrorists.”
She sat down. “Collecting ancient artifacts isn’t one of Hagen’s. He’s never shown an interest. Not until now.”
“Okay,” Kurt said. “But surely he wouldn’t be stupid enough to go back there.”
“That’s what I thought,” she replied. “Except that someone just put two hundred thousand euros into Hagen’s account on Malta. An account he opened the day after he met with the museum curator. Interpol confirmed the transaction. It was initiated several hours after the incident on Lampedusa.”
Kurt saw the logic. There was no denying it. This Dr. Hagen was alive, he’d escaped Lampedusa and moved money into the Maltese account after the fact. Whatever the reason, it sounded like the fugitive doctor was headed back there for another meeting with the head curator of the Maltese Oceanic Museum.
“So the question is,” she asked, closing the file and crossing one leg over the other, “do you care to take a look?”
“I’ll do more than look,” Kurt promised.
An expression of appreciation came his way. “I’ll meet you there once I’m certain all the patients are properly hospitalized and being cared for. I have to ask you not to take action until I arrive.”
Kurt stood, grinning. “Observe and report back,” he said. “I can handle that.”
They both knew he was lying. If he saw Hagen, Kurt would grab him, even if he had to take him right off the street.
13
The quiet of the White Desert was broken by the staccato beat of helicopter blades as a French-made SA-342 Gazelle raced above the scalloped sand dunes at five hundred feet.
The copter, clad in a desert-camouflage pattern, was an older model. It had once belonged to the Egyptian military before its transfer, at a marginal price, to the current owner. As it crossed the largest of the towering dunes, it turned sideways and slowed.
The odd style of flight allowed Tariq Shakir to watch a group of vehicles racing across the blistering sands down below. There were seven in all, but only five were moving. Two of the vehicles had collided badly and were now stopped dead in a trough between the last two dunes.
Shakir raised his expensive mirrored sunglasses and held up a pair of binoculars. “Two of them are out,” he said to another passenger. “Have the men go pick them up. The rest are still going strong.”
The remaining vehicles climbed the last immense dune, carving lines in the smooth surface, tires spitting sand, four-wheel-drive systems straining to the limit. One of them seemed to have left the pack behind, perhaps having found firmer sand and a better path to the summit.
“Number four,” a voice informed Shakir via his headphones. “I told you he would not be outdone.”
Shakir glanced into the aft section of the helicopter’s cabin. A short man in black fatigues sat there, grinning from ear to ear.
“Don’t be so sure, Hassan,” Shakir admonished. “The race is not always to the swift.”
With that, Shakir pressed the radio’s talk switch. “It’s time,” he said. “Allow the others to catch him and then shut them all down. We shall see who has spirit and who is prone to giving in.”
This call was received by a chase car trailing the group of racers. A technician listening in did as ordered, quickly tapping several keys on his laptop before hitting ENTER.
Out on the dunes, the leading SUV began to smoke. It slowed rapidly and then stalled completely. The others gained on it, spreading out and preparing to speed past the unlucky driver en route to the far side of the dune and the finish line of this strange race, which was itself the culmination of a grueling month of tests to see whom Shakir would choose to join the upper echelon of his growing organization.
“Quite unfair of you,” Hassan shouted from the aft section of the cabin.
“Life is unfair,” Shakir replied. “If anything, I have just leveled the playing field. Now we shall see who is a real man and who is unworthy.”
Out on the sand, the other vehicles stalled in rapid succession and soon the noise of roaring engines and grinding transmissions was replaced with cursing and slamming doors. The drivers, drenched in sweat, clad in grimy clothes and looking as if they’d been through war or hell or both, clambered out of their machines in stunned disbelief.
One opened the hood of his vehicle to see if he could fix the problem. Another kicked the quarter panel, leaving a nasty dent in the sheet metal of the expensive Mercedes SUV. Others committed similar acts of frustration. Fatigue and exhaustion seemed to have sapped their strength of mind.
“They’re giving up,” Shakir said.
“Not all of them,” Hassan replied.
Down on the sand, one of the men had made the choice Shakir was hoping for. He’d looked at the others, gauged the distance to the top of the dune and then taken off, running.
Several seconds passed before the others realized what he intended: to finish the race on foot and win the prize. The finish line was no more than five hundred yards away and, once he crested the dune, it would be mostly downhill.
The others chased after him and soon five men were charging up the dune, over the crest and down the other side.
In some ways, descending the soft sand was harder than climbing up it. The wind had shaped this dune into a steep wave and two men stumbled forward, fell and began to roll uncontrollably. One of them realized that it might be faster to simply slide, and when he reached the steeper section, he launched himself into the air and slid on his stomach for sixty yards.
“We shall have a winner after all,” Shakir said to Hassan. He then turned to the pilot. “Take us to the finish line.”
The helicopter turned and descended, following a long diagonal scar that cut across the desert in a straight line. That scar was known as the Zandrian pipeline. A pumping station at its base served as the finish line to the race.
The Gazelle touched down beside it, kicking up grit and dust in a swirling little sandstorm. Shakir pulled off his headset and opened the door. He climbed from the cockpit and kept his head low as he made his way toward several men in black fatigues similar to Hassan’s.
In another time and another place, Shakir might’ve been a movie star. Tall and lean, with a tanned face, coarse brown hair and a solid square jaw that seemed capable of withstanding a camel’s kick, he was handsome in the sun-burnished way of an outdoorsman. He exuded confidence. And though he wore the same uniform as the men who stood beside him, his bearing was as different from theirs as a king’s would be from a commoner.
In years past, Shakir had been a member of the Egyptian secret police. Under the Mubarak regime, which had ruled Egypt for thirty years, he’d been second in command of the service, hunting down enemies of the government and holding back the tide of insurgents until the so-called Arab Spring had come and turned Egypt upside-down, ushering in what seemed to Shakir and others like him an age of chaos. Years later, that chaos was only just beginning to subside, with no small amount of help from Shakir and others, who were rebuilding the power structure of the country from their new perch in the shadows of private industry.