The Sand Men (30 page)

She knew that Roy had been occupying an area on the seventh floor of the North tower, and that Ben most likely had an office on the same level, so it made sense to try there. The main plaza was deserted; it was still too hot to spend any more time than was absolutely necessary outside. She searched the windows of the surrounding buildings but saw no-one.

Most of the exterior work had now been completed. Inside the buildings, trunking was being routed through floors and ceilings, marble had been polished and the last few chandeliers were wired in. Somewhere an angle-grinder yowled and scratched. When it ceased, the site fell completely silent, but there had to be men somewhere, burrowed deep below the gardens, in the delivery tunnels, in the maintenance rooms.

She parked and walked to the sea-facing tower. Emerald lizards darted across her path like rush-hour pedestrians. The main doors were unguarded but the bank of silver elevators was taped off, so she searched around for another way up. The shining marble halls reminded her of a grand mausoleum, a monument to a forgotten race. In the centre of the hall stood the immense figure, a leaping athlete carved in indigo glass, his musculature as sharply defined as the compressor blades of a jet engine. He rose from a sunburst of inlaid flooring to tower above visitors’ heads, like a shrine to a dead dictator.

Passing beneath the statue, she found herself facing a glass observation elevator. The main security CCTV globes would have already noted her features by now and matched them to a list of personnel permitted to visit the site. Her ID card opened the doors.

The gleaming curved pod rose smoothly to the seventh floor, the doors opening to reveal ice-blue walls. The hiss of air-conditioning was discernable through the partially exposed ceiling cavities.

Apparently Roy was attending a meeting in the city’s garment district to talk about the tracking for the thirty-metre curtains that would eventually screen the Persiana’s atrium. She tried his number but the call went directly to voicemail.

His office was on the shore side of the great open floor. The architects’ cubicles were filled with building plans, meticulously constructed working models and half-eaten meals in cardboard boxes. She found his briefcase and papers scattered around his computer. Picking up his favourite work-shirt, she carefully folded it on a chair. It smelled of sweat and Dior aftershave.

In one drawer she found a set of swipe cards in a plastic wallet with his ID on the back, along with a photograph of the three of them, taken when Cara was a baby in the garden in Chiswick, in happier times.

She went to the window and looked down into the settling darkness. The view of the vast brown land was extraordinary. From here you could be forgiven for believing that you were the king, living far above your subjects, surveying all that you owned. As she removed her hands from the glass, her palm-prints evaporated like ghosts.

On the other side was an immense quadrangle bordered with clipped trees, steel walkways, newly planted date palms, arabesques of copper fountain jets. Mosaic murals were arranged in low geometries. The final plants had gone in, the auto-watering system installed.

I’m missing something,
she thought.
I have to see it through Rachel’s eyes. She hadn’t come here looking for anything—it had jumped out and caught her attention.

She took out the map and unfolded the single sheet. It felt like years since she had opened an old-fashioned paper map, and orienting herself on it proved difficult. Rachel had ringed a building in blue biro. She turned slowly around, examining the resort’s perfectly symmetrical ground plan, but could see nothing that matched it.

Her iPhone rang, startling her. She checked the name on the screen: Leo Hardy.

She froze. It seemed to her that Hardy appeared whenever anything bad was about to happen. She caught the call just before it went to voicemail.

‘Mr Hardy.’

‘Mrs Brook, I need to find your husband quickly, but he’s not answering his phone. Do you know where he is?’

‘He’s at a meeting in the old town, something to do with the screens for the atrium, and he has other appointments after that. I didn’t really expect to hear from him today, with the opening coming up.’ She looked out at the aquamarine sky, wondering how Hardy had got hold of her number. He had never rung it before. ‘Why? Is there a problem?’

‘I have to talk to him.’ A pause. ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m—’ She thought for a moment. Something made her lie, even though she knew the lie could be found out. ‘I’m at the Mirdif Mall.’

‘I think you need to get back to the compound.’

‘I still have quite a bit of shopping to do.’

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes, why?’

‘I’m not sure it’s safe for you to stay out by yourself.’

‘That’s ridiculous, I come here by myself all the time.’

‘I’ll send someone for you.’

‘No, it’s fine. What’s wrong?’

‘I need to discuss this with your husband—’

‘I’ll go home as soon as I’ve finished.’

‘All right, but get Roy to call me as soon as you hear from him, ya?’

She rang off and went back to the window, looking down at the concrete patterns below, wondering who to call for help.

Behind the buildings, the dying day held the glowing contrails of arriving flights, sewn across the sky like golden threads. The first stars of the evening were starting to appear. The constellations seemed as ordered as the grounds below. A pair of workmen in green resort overalls walked across a connecting bridge, vanishing into a side entrance of the Persiana.

Rachel had come to deliver the sweater to Ben and had looked out on this scene, the very heart of Dream World. Then she’d gone home and left the house early on Wednesday morning. Colette said she went to the desert whenever she needed to clear her mind. Rachel couldn’t decide who to talk to. Why not? Because she had no idea who to trust anymore. Lea felt her stomach shift as phantoms stepped from the shadows.
What did you see, Rachel?
she wondered.
What did you realise when you looked out on all this?

On an octagonal concrete building behind the flowerbeds, an exuberant mosaic pattern had been engraved in emerald green tiles. A row of sprinklers fussed into life, popping and fizzing as they doused the hibiscus bushes and acacias, splashing the main concourse between the landscaped gardens. The walls of the building darkened like poisonous night blooms.

She checked Rachel’s map again. She had ringed the octagonal building. Next to the circle she had written something that looked like:
2,400 yards.
No, not yards,
years.

Sealed behind glass in the air-conditioned tower, Lea rubbed her shivering shoulders. She headed downstairs. In the reception area of the hall that bordered the North tower, a guard sat behind a hectare of grained glass and stared blankly at his phone, like an electrical device waiting to be powered up. He barely took in what she had started to say.

‘My husband, Roy Brook, he might return here tonight. It’s important that you get him to call me straight away. I can’t get hold of him.’

‘It’s very busy,’ he told her. ‘Everyone is in meetings. For tomorrow. You can leave a message.’ He slid a pad toward her and indicated that she should write the message. She scrawled a hasty note, passed it back across the desk and headed outside, running across to the green-tiled building.

Colette had told her that she and Rachel regularly came here and watched Ben pore over the plans for the resort. What was so special about this place?

The building was little more than a concrete stump, probably an air vent of some kind. An unassuming iron door marked its entrance. As she got closer, she saw that its swipe-card box had been disconnected and the lock had been drilled out. In the last-minute rush to change all of the pass-protected doors, it had not yet been re-sealed. It opened easily, but with a metallic whine.

Without thinking twice, she stepped inside the vault.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The Conspiracy Of Men

T
HE DARKNESS WAS
so palpable that she hardly dared move for fear of falling. She turned on her cell phone and used it as a torch. The interior was disappointing, a bare space with some stacked gardening implements. A black square on the floor.

The square turned out to be an unlit stairwell. There were wall-lamps, but she could not find a switch. She held out the cell phone but its feeble light illuminated nothing.

There was nothing sinister here. A flight of clean stone steps, bare walls, no handrail, the smell of bleach. She descended slowly.

A small low-ceilinged vault, blank, empty and dull. Some gritty sand on the floor. A square iron grating set in the floor. A couple of channels leading away from it. Flood drainage. Her torch followed the wall. Another staircase down, half as wide as the last. She listened and heard no-one, nothing. These steps were wooden and creaked. They led beneath the grating.

This room was smaller still. There was nothing to see here either. Standing beneath the iron grille, she knelt and placed her hands flat on the floor. It was soothingly cold and wet. That was to be expected, she supposed—it was below sea level. Around the edges of the room was the sludge of drainage, just run-off. It was all very disappointing.

Under her phone-light, she looked at her fingertips and saw that they were covered in blood.

No, not blood—rust. Wet rust from the grating.

She searched the floor again, using her phone. In one corner, caught down a narrow crevice, something shone dully. A short piece of chain. For no particular reason, she pocketed it.

At the back of the room was a standard metal door with a fire exit bar. Pushing it, she found herself in an ordinary service corridor with an automatic lighting system that detected her presence and flickered on. The floor and ceiling were tiled cheaply and plainly. The pale blue illumination made her feel as if she was moving underwater.

At the end of the long corridor was an extravagantly panelled hardwood door, an absurdity considering its location. Digging into her jeans, she removed the plastic wallet she had taken from Roy’s desk and tried the swipe card.

The door swung back in silence, its automatic lighting revealing a blandly decorated foyer partitioned off by a floor-to-ceiling red curtain. She pulled the curtain aside, feeling like Bluebeard’s wife, expecting the worst.

Instead she found herself looking at some sparse white leather Italian furniture, two tall steel lamps, a fan of design magazines on a marble table, several plush rugs in teal and stone, a panoramic glass wall of the city and the sea which proved to be fake dioramas discreetly illuminated by LEDs. It could have been the room from the photographs in Milo’s bin.

At the back of the main living room was a large bedroom furnished with photographic blow-ups of Bedouin women in traditional head-dresses. The bathroom had empty cabinets and freshly folded towels. There was nothing more to see.

She left the same way she entered, from the octagonal vault, and skirted the deepening shadows that had dropped across the resort grounds like chasms.

The rust beneath her fingernails still looked like blood.

Driving away from the coast, she caught the heavy homegoing traffic and sat creeping forward, anxiously waiting for lights to change. Her head was filled with lies and betrayals.

The lights changed and she edged the Renault ahead.
Move
, she wanted to yell at the Porsche in front. The traffic filtered to a single lane, where a pair of mirror-shaded cops bent to see through car windshields before waving them on. It was impossible to tell what they might be looking for. They barely glanced at her, a woman no longer young, before moving to the next vehicle.

Fears looped themselves through her mind. Rachel had figured something out. She had gone to the desert, planning to return that day because she had taken no spare clothes with her. Couldn’t she have talked to the authorities? No, she was worried that she wouldn’t be believed.
The crazy grandmother who gets drunk with Milo at parties.

As the road widened again she stepped on the accelerator, opening the window as she overtook, feeling the hot sea air on her sweating face. The book with the faded green cover was still lying on the passenger seat.

The book.

She pulled the Renault over so suddenly that the Mercedes behind her gave a long, angry blast on his horn. As she tipped to a stop, a cloud of dust settled over the car, then drifted across the road to the sands.

She threw the hardback open and flicked through the pages. Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion. The Wonderful Wizard.

Look behind the curtain
, Rachel had written. What had she been trying to tell her? Had she seen the story as some kind of parable? Oz, the distant land into which they had all been blown, including the wizard himself, a carnival trickster who set himself up as its all-powerful ruler.

If you wanted to become all-powerful, what would you do?

The Renault rocked violently as a truck roared past.

She looked down at the illustration once more.

The Emerald City. The people of Oz. The visitors.

Reaching for her phone, she typed an address into it. An instant later the shimmering DWG website unfolded. She flicked beyond the home page to a display of the company’s corporate structure, represented in a scrolling, spidery graph.

At its head was the cabal of directors, existing only as a company logo, a neat little gravatar, a hotlink revealing no more than a basic paragraph about the founders, Oxford and Harvard educations, corporate fellowships and societies, the kind of undetailed information James Davenport was paid to invent on a daily basis. There were no other names or images. None at all.

As she glanced back at the book and studied the drawing again, it became clear that she had made a mistake.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz did not blow in from a far-off place and reinvent himself. He was created to control Oz.