The Power of Five Oblivion (35 page)

“If there are any hospitals…”

“Yeah. Take a look at this…” He handed something to her, a thick wallet made of pale brown leather.

“What is it?”

“It’s Rémy’s. It was in his pocket.”

Scarlett opened the wallet. Inside, in one of the compartments, there was a wad of banknotes; American one-hundred-dollar bills, neatly pressed together. Scarlett flicked them with her thumb. “How much is there here?” she asked.

“There’s fifty of them. Five thousand dollars.” Richard took the spade in both hands. “I guess he was keeping them for a rainy day.”

“Not much chance of that out here.”

“It’s funny though. There are no photographs. No pictures of his wife or kids. Nothing about him. Just a pile of cash. We’ll never know anything about him.”

“He tried to help us. That’s enough.” Scarlett closed the wallet. “The money may help us. Maybe it’ll buy us a ticket out.”

The sand was soft and it only took Richard about half an hour to cut a trench a metre deep. That was enough. He threw down the spade, then he and Scarlett went over and dragged Rémy in. As she took hold of the dead man’s ankles, Scarlett had one of those moments where she seemed to be looking at herself and couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. What would Mrs Ridgewell say if she were here now? she wondered. Somehow she doubted that the head teacher at her old school in Dulwich would have any advice on how to bury dead Frenchmen in the Arabian desert.

Keep the feet together, Scarlett. And try not to get any more blood on your hands. You’re covered enough already…

Had this really happened to her? How had her life come to this?

The body slumped into the grave. Before Richard could do any more work, Scarlett snatched up the spade and began to fill it in. Richard took out a canister of water and drank, his face covered in sweat and grime. At least they still had water. They had been careful, rationing themselves over the course of the journey. They couldn’t be sure what the water situation would be in Dubai. Neither of them said the obvious, even if both of them secretly thought it. Rémy had drunk more than either of them in the last three days. And it had all been wasted.

Scarlett finished her work. “Do you want to say anything?” she asked.

“You mean – a prayer?” Richard handed her his canister. “I was never really the religious sort.”

“Me neither. I used to hate chapel at school.”

“Let’s get’s back in the car.”

“Actually, I’ve got something to tell you, Richard.” Scarlett had been waiting for the right moment. “I saw Matt last night.”

“Matt?” Richard’s face brightened. “He was in the dreamworld?”

“He called us all together. We were all there. Matt, Pedro, Jamie, Scott…”

“That’s great news. How is he?”

Scarlett hesitated. She knew how close Richard was to Matt and how much he’d worried about him – but she was determined not to lie. “I don’t know, Richard. I got the feeling there was something he wasn’t telling me. He was very serious. I thought he was upset about something.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s in Brazil. Lohan is with him.”

Quickly, Scarlett told Richard everything that had happened outside the library. The sun was rising and although the colour of the sky hadn’t changed, it was getting hotter. They needed to set off soon. Without the Land Cruiser’s air-conditioning, they would both melt.

“We have to get to Antarctica,” she said.

“Antarctica!” Richard shook his head. “That’s a funny thing to be talking about in the middle of the desert! Right now we must be, what, ten thousand miles away?”

“Rémy said there were planes flying in and out of Dubai.”

“That was a while ago. Things may have changed.”

“We’d better find out. And at least we’ve got money now. We can pay.”

“You’re right.” Richard nodded. “Maybe that’s where it all ends … this whole thing. On the ice.”

“I really hope so,” Scarlett said.

The two of them got back into the car and drove off. The unmarked grave dwindled into the distance behind them. Neither of them looked back.

Dubai took them by surprise. One moment they were driving through the unremitting emptiness of the desert, the next they were boxed in, with modern streets and buildings appearing all around them, as if the city had been lying in the sand and had leapt up to ambush them. Their first impression, particularly after Cairo, was one of extraordinary cleanliness. There was no war going on here and they had left the sandstorms behind. In fact the sky was a dazzling blue, the shops and offices gleaming – as if they had only just been built. The streets were wide and evenly spaced with what might once have been lawns stretching their entire length. All the grass had died but the earth that remained was neat and symmetrical. The city didn’t seem to have grown. It could have been laid out deliberately, piece by piece.

And it was completely deserted.

Richard and Scarlett had driven down half a dozen empty avenues before they saw what should have been obvious from the start. There were cars parked everywhere, many of them very expensive ones… Ferraris, Jaguars, Rolls Royces. But there were no drivers and they were alone on the road. The traffic lights were still working uselessly, blinking from green to yellow to red, but nothing moved. There was nothing to move. Most of the shops had been stripped but they saw fridges, furniture, plasma screen TVs and even grand pianos on display. They were too heavy to carry so they had simply been left behind. As they continued forward, they passed fountains without water and palm trees which, against the odds, had managed to survive. The traffic lights changed and changed again. After a while, they learnt to ignore them.

All around them, huge hotels, shopping centres and skyscrapers seemed almost to mock them – or to mock each other. The buildings were extraordinary, the visions of architects with all the money in the world and the desire only to outdo each other. There were constructions that curved and rippled and shone silver or white. They were shaped like knives, like rockets, like the sail of a ship. And at their very centre, soaring above all of them, stood the Burj Dubai, which had briefly been the tallest building in the world and which appeared like a futuristic steel syringe, desperately trying to puncture the upper atmosphere. They were all empty. Scarlett wasn’t sure quite why she could be so certain. But they had the same sort of lifelessness as a group of statues in a museum that has closed for the night. They faced each other, solid and unmoving. Dead. There wasn’t a flicker of movement anywhere. And the very motion of the car as they rolled slowly forward seemed alien and unwanted.

“It’s quiet,” Richard said, as much to hear the sound of his voice as to say anything that mattered.

“There’s no one here.”

“But there hasn’t been any fighting. There are no smashed windows. Look at these cars! They could have been parked overnight.”

It was true. All the parked cars were clean and polished and looked as if they would start at the turn of a key. There was no litter blowing in the street, no rubbish waiting to be collected. It was as if the city had woken up one morning and the people simply hadn’t been there.

“Richard … what are we going to do?”

“We could find a five-star hotel.”

“I don’t think I want to stay here.”

“Then let’s see if there’s a way out.”

They drove past a Shell garage and Scarlett wondered if they would be able to refill the Land Cruiser. After they had buried Rémy, they had filled their tanks, using the last of their fuel. The pumps all looked in working order and clearly the electricity supply hadn’t failed, at least in this part of the city. The forecourt was spotless. But if they were going to continue driving, where exactly could they go? Scarlett vaguely remembered old geography lessons. Dubai was on the northern coast of the United Arab Emirates. Oman was next door. Or there was always Iran just opposite, on the other side of the Persian Gulf. It was completely hopeless. They could drive for weeks or months and even assuming they could find more fuel on the way, they wouldn’t necessarily arrive anywhere they wanted to be. Scarlett wondered about Mecca, another sixteen hundred kilometres to the west. They needed a door like the one that had brought them to Cairo. The doors were supposed to be in religious places. Surely they would find one there?

But Richard had other ideas.

He had been following a six-lane motorway towards a roundabout with a slightly more antique-looking monument, two giant pincers supporting a clock that had, perhaps ominously, stopped at one minute to midnight. They drove past it, curving around some very ordinary blocks of flats, and there was the airport ahead of them – a great swathe of empty concrete almost the size of a small city itself, with a few low-rise buildings and a single control tower, vague and indistinct on the other side of the heat haze. Scarlett’s heart sank. She hadn’t expected any signs of activity here, not after what she had seen so far. There would be no passengers, no airport workers, no ground crew. But Rémy had told them there were planes here and as far as she could see, there wasn’t so much as a glider. If she and Richard were going to find their way out, then flying wasn’t going to be an option.

“Don’t worry. The airport’s huge,” Richard said, echoing her thoughts. “There might be a plane somewhere.”

They drove through the main entrance, past a security barrier that was raised and a control post that was empty. Both of them felt as if they were entering another desert … this one made of concrete. There was no point even looking for a car park. It wasn’t as if someone was going to leap out and give them a parking ticket. They left the car between a silver Aston Martin and a Rolls Royce – both of them could have been driven here direct from the sales room. They didn’t have to worry about the Land Cruiser being stolen either. If there was a thief in the area, he would have a hundred much more luxurious cars to choose from.

They walked into the main terminal, glad to be out of the car. Ahead of them, on the other side of a gleaming marble floor, dozens of check-in desks stretched in long lines, waiting for passengers who would never arrive. Escalators stood, frozen. All the TV screens that might once have announced the departures were blank. The atmosphere inside was warm and clammy – it had been a long time since the air-conditioning had been turned on – and the palm trees had wilted and died in their pots. The terminal was huge. Scarlett was reminded first of a factory, then of a cathedral. Everything here – the floors, the windows, the desks, the stairs – was hard and brittle. It was a place with no comfort at all.

“Do you want to go on?” Scarlett asked. Her voice sounded very small.

“Why not? Maybe we can pick up a drink in Duty Free.”

They passed through the departure gate (PASSENGERS ONLY) and through the security area with its silent conveyor belts, its metal detectors and X-ray screens. It was a reminder of how the world had once been, the endless fear and suspicion that went with people’s determination to keep on travelling. Then there were the passport controls, modern cubicles at the end of a long stretch of marble.
You are now leaving Dubai and entering the no-man’s-land of an international airport. You have hours of shopping and hanging around ahead. Thank you for coming
.

Only the Duty Free area was empty. All the shelves had been wiped clean. Richard and Scarlett found themselves in a long, subterranean arcade that ran the entire length of the terminal, with shops everywhere, a sports car parked at one end (WIN THIS CAR – US$25 A TICKET) and a bar decorated with a plastic palm tree. It was the same as the city. There had been people here, and then, quite suddenly, they had gone. It was as if they had bought everything that could be bought, right down to the last packet of cigarettes and the last king-sized tube of M&M’s and then leapt on the first plane and gone home.

Richard and Scarlett kept going. Neither of them spoke. They didn’t want to express their disappointment. There was nothing here for them. They weren’t going to get so much as a drink.

They reached a window looking out onto the runway. Richard pointed. “Look!”

It was there after all, right in front of them. A plane. Perhaps the only plane in the whole airport. An Emirates airline Airbus, sitting on its own in the middle of the tarmac. A flight of steps had been wheeled against the cabin door and there was a man sitting there, dressed in dark blue trousers, a white shirt and sunglasses. The pilot. It had to be. He seemed to be waiting for them.

Richard grabbed hold of Scarlett and the two of them set off, looking for a way out.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Despite its name, getting out of the departure building was much harder than it had been getting in. Richard and Scarlett became increasingly frustrated as they followed winding corridors past door after door, each one of them locked with security codes known only to ground staff who had left long ago. Even though the electricity inside the terminal had either failed or been switched off, the magnetic locks hadn’t released themselves and the doors refused to open. Huge windows gave them tantalizing views of the tarmac they were trying to reach. Richard would have been tempted to pick up a chair and smash the glass but the chairs were bolted down, and anyway, the glass was probably too thick.

Eventually they found what they were looking for. There was a boarding desk with a British Airways sign and, next to it, an open door with one of those long passageways that bent back on themselves and that used to lead directly onto an aircraft. This one jutted into open space. When Richard and Scarlett reached the end, they found themselves looking at a square of bright light with a drop to the ground that would break both their ankles if they weren’t careful. But there was no other way. They clambered over the edge, taking their full weight with their hands and their arms outstretched, then dropped. Even so, it was a hard landing. And the tarmac was burning hot.

“You OK?”

“Yeah.” Scarlett dusted herself down and looked around. The Airbus that they had spotted was now some distance away but the man was still there, smoking a cigarette.