Airport Novel

Chapters 3 to 9. Excerpt.

Dennis “Pickles” Branston did not panic. You do not get to be one of the planet’s richest men by panicking. You do not get to be the kind of person who can dictate US military policy, despite being born in Somerset, by panicking. You do not end up owning half of the world’s youngest democracy – the Jumeirah Coast – by panicking.

First, he took a shower. Nothing excessive, just five minutes or so under hot water. His boner didn’t go down, but he didn’t let it worry him. Getting dressed was a touch uncomfortable, but he managed to tuck everything away inside a pair of starched white boating trousers and a smart pale-blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt. Underwear, he’d always felt, was for the poors.

As he collected his mobile and wallet from the nightstand, he took a moment to read the directions on the side of the box the pills came in.

“Warning,” he said. “Exceeding the recommended dosage may result in priapism, heart palpitations, high blood pressure or stroke.”

He looked at the hooker.

“Why didn’t you stop me taking so many of these damn things?” he demanded of her comatose form. What had her name been? Suzi? Suki? Something like that. Tremendous fun, but obviously looked like much too light a sleeper, to the average ex-London thug-for-hire. Which was probably ironic, now.

Branston was irritated that Flenser, or his underling Georgie, had felt it necessary to interfere with the poor girl. They should have just woken her up and kicked her out. She was a professional, just like the rest of them. He had been planning to give her a very large tip, and book her for Friday night, after his journey into space.

Space. Branston stood frozen in the middle of the suite. Today he was going to space, in a vehicle he’d built and paid for, along with thirty-one other millionaires and billionaires. The first commercial launch to reach actual Earth orbit. None of this 100-mile, ten minutes of free-fall rubbish. This was the real thing: straight up, four orbits of the world in 40 hours, and then straight back down again.

Branston tried to imagine why someone would hire Flenser and his band of trained monkeys to attempt to scare him off from launching. What was the point? What possible threat did TruOrbit pose to anyone? Not those amateurs at Virgin Galactic. Sixty 100-mile launches and they still hadn’t made nearly enough money to pay for their bloated and misdirected development costs. SpaceX? SpaceX was basically NASA, had been for 20 years, permanently fused to the government teat. And everyone else was either mired in development hell, or one of a dozen or so charcoal-colored smears dotted across New Zealand’s increasingly fed-up North Island.

There was no competition. No one else was anywhere near what Branston was about to achieve. Two days in actual space for a fraction of the cost of a luxury villa. Less than a million US dollars, if you were happy to sit strapped into a tiny chair sharing a twenty-inch porthole with two other travelers. Meanwhile, two million US bought you a spot in the upper lounge of the vehicle, with a 42-inch viewport and champagne in a squeeze-box.

And the two other guests who had paid ten million apiece would join Branston on the flight deck, and witness launch, orbit and re-entry through the enormous cockpit windows, and exchange witty banter with the vehicle’s AI pilot.

It had cost him a pretty penny, that was for sure, thought Branston. But two years’ worth of weekly trips would pay for it, and he already had bookings for the first six months. Rich pricks wanted this, it was a sort of taste of immortality, to be able to sit up there and see the earth spread out below them. Present company in no way excepted. This was the future.

But who the hell was trying to stop it?

Flenser had helpfully left Branston’s gun sitting on the black marble coffee table next to the remains of the fruit platter. Branston looked at it and sighed irritably. He was sure his prints were all over it. The fact the gun was completely illegal would only complicate things with the local authorities – a very new police force that was determined to prove itself worthy of the new democracy it had been created to protect and serve. The real issue of course, because of the principle that some things never change, would be the girl.

“Damn I miss the Sheik,” muttered Branston. He squared his jaw. “House!” he demanded.

“Good morning Mr Branston,” said a silky female voice. It was piped from discreet speakers mounted in the corners of the room. “How may I assist you?”

“Show me the security video footage for this room, from four-thirty this morning.”

“Certainly sir, on the main display?” asked House.

Branston nodded. An 85-inch OLED television mounted on the wall closest to the sunken lounge lit up and showed images from the six cameras mounted in various parts of the suite. They showed the main doors open at a little before five, showed Branston and the hooker stagger in obviously drunk, showed Branston take far too many of the little blue pills, showed Branston attempt to mount the hooker, showed him fail miserably, showed the pair of them collapse into drunken sleep, and then continued to show them sleeping for the next two hours until the footage suddenly snapped to Branston coming in from the balcony and getting dressed.

Flenser had hacked and edited his security footage, because the man was, if nothing else, distressingly good at his job.

“Goddamn it,” Branston muttered.

“The Jumeirah Coast Police Department is requesting access to your private floor,” House murmured, its electronic voice calm and emotionless.

“Goddamnit,” Branston spat.

“The JCPD has overridden your private elevator access,” House informed him.

Branston buried his face in his hands.

And moments later, when House added: “JCPD officers are now outside the room,” Branston began to sob in pure, inconsolable, British expatriate fury.

4

Someone hammered on the main doors. No, Branston corrected himself, not someone, the police. The police hammered on the main doors.

“Just a minute!” he called.

Thinking quickly, he hauled the naked hooker off the bed, slung her over his shoulder, staggered through to the enormous bathroom, dumped her unceremoniously in the shower and turned the taps on full. Then he ran back into the main living area, closing the bathroom door behind him. Then he opened the bathroom door and ran back to the shower, and tried to wrestle the ball gag off the girl’s head. Then he gave up and ran toward the bathroom door, paused, ran back and turned off the shower, because he didn’t want her to drown. Then he ran back into the main living area.

For a brief split second he allowed himself to feel like a complete bastard. A girl was drugged, possibly to an injurious degree, and gagged in complete contravention of the small print on her web site, and now dumped in a shower stall in a way that was probably going to bruise and cause her short-term commercial disadvantage, all over a business deal someone was trying to sour. It was grotesque. It was horrific. And yet Branston couldn’t find it in himself to care very much about her, not really. Possibly because he might be facing, literally, fifty lashes for solicitation.

He disported himself on one of the leather lounges. Then leapt up and closed the bathroom door, and disported himself back on one of the leather lounges. By this point, he was sweating fairly heavily.

“Come in,” he said, casually, waving a hand. As the doors burst open he remembered the pistol sitting near the fruit platter, and hurriedly grabbed it and threw it under the lounge. He took a deep breath and glanced over at the entryway.

Oh God, thought Branston as he saw who was leading the police charge. It was a woman. Dark, serious, with deep black eyes. She wore a navy blue hijab as part of her uniform. She also wore a bit of a sneer. The three men who followed her in all carried computer-augmented sub-machine guns.

“Sergeant Amara,” said Branston, almost managing to keep the quaver out of his voice. “To what do I owe the very slightly impolite pleasure?”

“That’s Sergeant Amara to you!” spat the woman.

There was a pause that was very much awkward, not calculated at all.

“Yes well,” said Branston.

Amara’s eyes flickered all over the room. She took in the half-eaten fruit platter. She took in Branston’s polo shirt. She took in the rumpled sheets. She took in the open packet of pills on the nightstand. She took in the closed bathroom door.

“Where’s the prostitute?” she demanded.

Branston raised his eyebrows.

“Sergeant!” he exclaimed. “Prostitution is of course quite illegal, and I’m sure my lady companion would be most offended to be considered a...” he made a show of searching for the right word, “a whore.”

“If she consorts with you out of wedlock, she is a cheap whore,” Amara said dismissively, her eyes continuing to crawl around the room. Branston managed to resist the urge to make some crack about how he would certainly never engage a cheap whore, because he’d always been pretty good at judging his audience. One of Amara’s men approached the nightstand and poked at the pills with the barrel of his SMG.

“It is the sex pills,” he announced gravely.

Branston’s stomach lurched.

Another of the cops approached the bathroom door. He glanced uncertainly at his Sergeant. The strict moral code these cops operated under of course prevented him from entering where he might encounter a woman in a state of undress. Something Branston had been banking on.

“I have a cliché,” announced Amara.

“Huh?” Branston said, for the second time in barely half an hour.

“We received an anonymous tip-off. That a prostitute, a known prostitute, was seen entering this floor of the hotel, and this room, by several witnesses.”

“I thought you said it was anonymous?”

“It is anonymous. The witnesses will come forward if required but also not, if not required. Perhaps an honorable man would spare them the embarrassment.”

Branston felt a headache starting to form. At least it would take the focus off the discomfort in his groin.

Amara marched across the room and rapped smartly on the bathroom door.

“Madam!” she snapped. “This is the police. Please finish your ablution and emerge into the main area.”

There was no reply, of course. Amara wheeled on Branston.

“She is an accomplice and a very clever one. You both know I am prohibited from entering. You think you are very smart.”

Branston shrugged modestly.

“But no. House!” Amara demanded. “Know my voice! Authority override! Display security video footage from twenty minutes previous!”

Oh fuck, thought Branston.

5

Please refuse the authority override, Branston pleaded internally. There was no chance, of course, but prayer was always worth a try.

“Override acknowledged. Thank you Sergeant Amara. How nice to see you again. Would you like the footage on the main display?” replied the House, every word like a dagger into Branston’s heart.

“The main display, yes.”

Everyone in the room swiveled like they were mounted to a pivot, to regard the enormous television.

A few moments later, it lit up showing Branston sitting at the leather lounge, eating from a fruit platter. On the bed, an attractive blonde woman sat in a pair of men’s pajamas, combing her hair. A few moments later, she rose, walked to the lounge, kissed Branston demurely on the cheek, then strolled graciously into the bathroom and closed the door behind her.

It was footage from two days ago. The woman was a completely different hooker.

That is one smart House AI, Branston thought.

Sergeant Amara stared at him through narrowed eyes.

“I still believe the woman is a prostitute,” she said. “We shall wait until she completes her shower and ask directly.”

“Fine,” said Branston, with an angry air that was almost the complete opposite of the abject terror he felt inside. How the sainted fuck was he going to get out of this?

Then he noticed one of the other cops was looking under the lounge.

“Sergeant! I believe I see an object!” he announced.

Amara crouched down beside him, and the two other cops crowded around as well. They may have been the world’s newest and least-corrupt police force, Branston thought, but they knew shit-all about keeping a suspect covered. He leapt up and sprinted for the balcony doors.

“Stop!” shouted Amara.

“It is a gun!” shouted the other cop at exactly the same moment.

It was probably the resulting confusion that saved him. In the time it took the four cops to figure themselves out, he was through the doors and had them closed and latched.

“House! Lockdown!” he screamed, and felt the bolts shoot home as the House AI secured the suite. It was a time-delay lock, a panic-lock. It turned the suite into a virtually impenetrable fortress, and kept it that way for forty minutes. It also alerted the police automatically, but Branston wasn’t so keen on that particular feature this morning.

“Branston!” demanded Amara from the other side of the doors, her voice muffled by the glass. “Open this door immediately!”

Branston just shrugged.

“Panic mode activated,” said House, its voice clearly audible even on the balcony. “The police have been informed. Doors will automatically open in T-minus thirty nine minutes unless panic mode is reactivated. Do you wish to extend the duration of panic mode?”

“Yes!” cried Branston. “Extend it indefinitely!”

Through the tinted glass, Sergeant Amara’s lips twisted into a sneer. She pulled her Glock and pointed it directly at Branston’s head.

“I wouldn’t do that!” he shouted. “The glass is bullet-proof! Very dangerous to shoot, at that distance!” He couldn’t help himself smirk. He wanted to, but he couldn’t.

Amara lifted one black eyebrow. Not taking her eyes off Branston, she fished around on her utility belt and pulled something out. It looked like a stick of chewing gum. She peeled the wrapper off and pressed the gum to the glass. That’s when Branston realized it wasn’t gum.

It was plastic explosive.

6

Terrified, Branston backed away from the glass doors. This was going too far. This wasn’t playing fair. The JCPD carried demolitions now? Wasn’t that dangerous? Branston was British – in his part of the world the police didn’t even carry guns unless they were part of a special squad.

He was beaten. There was no other way of looking at it. He was trapped on a tiny balcony, 600 feet above the ground, with nowhere to go but back into the suite to face the very harsh brand of justice the people of the Jumeirah Coast had voted themselves.

Ten years for soliciting a prostitute, and two more for possession of “the sex pills”. And the fifty lashes, of course.

Branston’s brain might have given up, but his body valued its freedom. He felt the desperate urge to run. As Amara prepared her small explosive charge to shatter the balcony doors, he looked to his right. Nothing but a potted plant. He looked to his left. Nothing but another potted plant and a tall woman in some kind of commando uniform with a small US flag pin in one lapel. He looked back at the doors.

Then Branston looked to his left again.

“Hi,” said the woman. She was leaning casually against the barrier wall that separated Branston’s balcony from the next suite on the floor, which was owned by the hotel’s executive chef. An abseiling cable dangled from a maintenance ladder, a hundred feet further up the tower. The excess length pooled around the woman’s feet.

“Um, hello?” Branston asked.

“I’m a friend,” said the woman, with a thin smile. She had very short black hair, green eyes, and skin that might once have been pale and milky had it not obviously been blasted by almost every kind of weather the planet was capable of generating. A scar ran through her left eyebrow, splitting it in two.

“Most of my friends have names,” Branston said, that old self-defense smartassery kicking in automatically.

“Call me Mirage,” she answered.

“Okay Mirage, what are you doing here?”

She consulted a military-grade mobile strapped to her forearm.

“Apparently I’m rescuing you from a mercenary named Flenser,” she said.

“Oh,” Branston tried a dismissive wave, the effect spoilt by the way his hand was shaking so much. “He left a while ago. And anyway, he told me he’s not a mercenary anymore. At the moment I need rescuing from the JCPD, who are about to blow up my balcony doors.”

Mirage pushed away from the wall and leaned past Branston to examine where Sergeant Amara was carefully forcing a detonator into the strip of plastic explosive. When the policewoman caught sight of Mirage, her eyes widened and she redoubled her efforts to prepare the charge.

Mirage pulled an antique automatic pistol from a holster, regarded it thoughtfully, then reholstered it.

“Just doing her job,” she said.

“Well yes, but unfortunately her current job is to arrest me. I’m afraid I’ve been framed for the solicitation of a prostitute.”

Mirage raised her scarred eyebrow.

“Not a good thing to be framed for, in this country.”

“Okay fine, I hired the prostitute in full knowledge she was a prostitute, but the generic sildenafil I bought from that spotty kid worked too well, if you know what I’m saying, which is just typical of these Indian...”

“Yeah I don’t care,” said Mirage. She peered over the balcony at the dizzying fall below. “Have you ever base-jumped?” she asked suddenly.

Branston didn’t like where this was going.

“Yes,” he replied truthfully but uneasily. “Several times actually. Mostly for advertising campaigns.”

“Ever done it with a sticky-chute?”

“No. Can’t say I have.”

Mirage nodded, and glanced at Sergeant Amara’s preparations.

“Take off your shirt,” she commanded.

“What?”

“I need bare skin. Take it off.”

For a second or two, Branston wondered if he had an option. If there was some other way to get out from what was beginning to appear to be between a rock and a hard place. Or in a frying pan sizzling over glowing coals. He took off his shirt.

“Back to me.”

He obeyed, stomach churning. Mirage thumped him hard on the back, and when she stepped back he could feel a weight stuck between his shoulder-blades.

“You’re absolutely joking,” he said, regarding her with a baleful eye.

Mirage smiled, a little cruelly. “Don’t worry,” she said. “The glue will hold. That stuff is so powerful there’s a greater chance of the chute ripping your entire skin off.”

“Okay but in the time it took you to say all that, couldn’t I just have strapped into a normal chute?” Branston said, feeling gorge rise in his throat.

Mirage ignored him and climbed up on the balcony railing. She stood, perfectly balanced, perfectly at ease, hundreds of feet above the ground. At least it wasn’t windy.

Shakily, Branston climbed up next to her, steadying himself on her arm. She felt muscled and powerful beneath the jumpsuit, and Branston would probably have become slightly aroused at the touch of her, were it not for the permanent medicinal erection he still sported, despite the morning’s events.

He glanced behind him. The suite seemed deserted. There was just the pale stripe of Sergeant Amara’s plastic explosive on the door, and two wires leading back from the detonator to the sunken lounge. The cops had taken cover behind the couches.

“Oh shi...” Branston began, and then the doors exploded.

7

Branston fell. He fell despite the updraft that resulted from hot morning air striking the smooth face of the Burj al-Arab tower. Like its predecessor, it resembled a giant sail, the hotel did, almost 1000 feet tall. It was surrounded by a tiny but immaculately groomed beach, and stood 919 feet off the coast, at the very edge of Jumeirah. Everything restored, just as it had been before the day of the cruise missile. Look in one direction, you could see the struggling Emirate of Dubai. Look in another, you could see the world’s youngest democracy, the Jumeirah Coast.

Branston wasn’t looking at the scenery. He’d seen it thousands of times, in any case. Sure this was a unique angle, but he’d seen it less than an hour ago from another unique angle, and there were only so many unique angles from which a man could see a familiar view, before the whole thing lost its charm. So instead, he was looking at the ocean, as it rushed to meet him. Vaguely, he remembered seeing a television series that demonstrated, with the help of a crash-test dummy, that if you free-fell from a height of even a hundred feet or so, you hit the surface of the water with a deceleration force of well over 200 gravities, and your legs got ripped right off by the impact.

Branston still pointed his feet and held his breath. He couldn’t help himself.

Seconds later something grabbed all the skin between his shoulder-blades and tried to tear it off. He screamed. He yelled. He was in such excruciating pain, it took him almost a full minute to realize he wasn’t plummeting out of control, but rather drifting beneath a parachute.

He looked up. Red and white smart fabric spread out above him, forming a shape that precisely allowed his particular weight to drift at a specific speed toward the ground. Although Branston didn’t know it, Mirage had given the sticky-chute a GPS2 location, and the computer in the module on Branston’s back was tweaking the control lines to bring him down within ten feet of its programmed destination.

“Hey!” Mirage yelled from somewhere off to Branston’s left. He searched for and found her. She was a few dozen yards off, hanging under an identical chute, although hers was attached by a far more comfortable looking harness. “Enjoying the flight?” she asked.

“It fucking hurts!” screamed Branston.

“Oh yeah. But spare a thought for me pal, when I did my sticky-chute training, I had to have my tits out. Forty SEALs thinking all their goddamn Christmases had come at once!”

Obviously fancies herself, Branston thought.

“Heads up Lord Fauntleroy, we’re coming in for a landing!”

Seconds later, Branston was plunged into freezing water. Well, in fact the Gulf was a very pleasant temperature at this time of year, but after being blown off a balcony only minutes earlier, it was a rude shock.

Branston’s chute collapsed into the sea behind him, and he felt the module stuck to his back automatically sever the cords so he couldn’t get tangled in them and ironically drown like so many brave pilots had ironically drowned before him.

“Now what?” he bellowed to where he could see Mirage had fallen.

“Get on board!” she yelled back, in feigned consternation.

Branston looked around. Less than ten yards away, his cruiser lay at anchor, with his captain staring in astonishment at where his boss bobbed shirtless in the Arabian Gulf.

“Helmut!” Branston cried. “Don’t stand there gawking man, lower the painter!”

Helmut pointed. Branston spun around in the water and followed the man’s arm. Three police launches were speeding across the ocean toward them. And the cops on the flying bridge didn’t look happy.

I haven’t even had breakfast yet, thought Branston, and struck out for his own boat.

8

Mirage trod water with a smooth and easy rhythm. She watched Branston thrash his way toward the ostentatious yacht, and ran her mind through the practiced mantra.

Ours not to reason why. Ours just to fulfill the Fifth Phase.

What she’d briefly seen of Dennis Branston had not been especially impressive. Of course she’d reviewed hours of media footage of the man, had read several of his books (The Hard Road, about Branston’s meteoric rise from mere riches to true megawealth had shown that anyone could make something of themselves if they just invested their $45 million trust-fund wisely), but Mirage knew no amount of research could compare to actually meeting a person.

Branston appeared to be self-possessed, self-confident, self-ish. Although not without a well-developed sense of self-preservation, which was a surprisingly rare and valuable commodity these days.

Mirage sighed, and kicked easily into a loping freestyle. She wasn’t worried about the police launches closing on their position. Her research had included detailed technical documents on the capabilities of Branston’s boat.

Dennis Branston. Another rich asshole who, for some reason, warranted unusually elaborate levels of personal protection, to be administered whether he wanted them or not. Such was life in the Fifth Phase.

She watched the multi-billionaire shimmy up a stainless-steel access ladder, his skinny white legs flashing in the morning sunlight. A man in a white uniform met him and the pair gesticulated at each other. Beneath them, in tall black letters across the spotless white transom, stenciled large enough so every poor bastard would be sure to read it if they came within a mile of this damn thing, was the boat’s name: Lady Hubris.

Mirage reached out one lightly scarred and pock-marked arm and gripped the ladder. She was up in two swift movements and dripping on the aft deck, which doubled as a swimming platform that could be lowered into the water at the push of a button.

In front of her, Branston was arguing with the man who was obviously some kind of steward, or perhaps even the captain, given his short blonde beard, blue blazer, and, well, captain’s hat. In front of them, a glorious continental breakfast of fruit, pastries and coffee was laid out across an enormous table.

“… because plans change!” Branston was squealing, pointing out at where the police launches were closing rapidly. The captain seemed to see them for the first time, his eyes widened.

“Mein Gott!” he cried, and then scurried toward the flying bridge, taking the steps three at a time.

Branston ran his hands down his face.

“We’d leased the boat to one of the surviving industrialists from Dubai,” he explained. “They were coming out for breakfast, to broker a deal. There’s going to be real trouble.”

Mirage arched an eyebrow. Her close-fitting combat fatigues were already almost dry, the high-tech fabric channeling the water to her ankles, where it pooled on the teak decking. Branston just dripped all over.

She glanced at the police launches. They were a few hundred yards away now. She could make out the snub-nosed sub-machine guns in the hands of the officers hanging off the bows.

“We should leave,” she suggested.

Branston swung around, the slack remains of the sticky-chute slapping wetly against his shoulder-blades. The skin around the glue was red and inflamed. He’d have some serious bruises to show off, if he survived.

“They take prostitution way too seriously in this new country,” he complained. “Too much to prove, you know.”

“Police will be police,” said Mirage, who’d run from more than a few beat cops in her life. It was either that or kill a bunch of clock-punchers for just doing their jobs, and that wasn’t the Fifth Phase way.

The old expression brought a sudden image of Sidekick, face wreathed in smoke, grinning around an illegal cigar. A brief stab of guilt and anguish struck Mirage. It had been a long two years since that fateful night in Iran, but the old wounds were still raw.

Branston slapped the gunwale and looked up toward the bridge.

“Come on!” he screamed at his captain. “They’re not getting any further away!”

“Three hundred forty eight degrees, and fucking punch it buddy!” Mirage added.

She heard a burst of Teutonic invective, and the Lady Hubris suddenly growled like an animal. The water below the stern boiled, thrashed into foam, and the yacht lurched forward, nearly knocking her on her ass.

Branston, for his part, fell on his ass.

The Lady Hubris might have looked like a dilettante’s picnic boat, a great white confection of decadence and riches, but her elegant saloon and two outdoor dining areas belied true power in her capacious engine room.

Twin V16 diesels producing 4,000 horsepower apiece accelerated her from a standstill to 40 knots in under 30 seconds. Put enough pedal to the metal, and she’d lift out of the water onto a unique hydrofoil system designed by Branston’s favorite shipbuilder, the mad Dutchman Linden van der Vegt. And with 20,000-gallon diesel tanks and two backup engines, Lady Hubris had a range of well over 4,000 nautical miles. Lady Hubris was no mere day boat. She was a genuine passagemaker, the real deal. Assuming she was fully fueled, and her pantries fully stocked, they could drive this baby to goddamn Madagascar. Not that she would need to today, Mirage reflected, thinking of their impending rendezvous.

As the Lady swung onto a more-or-less north-westerly heading, she scanned the sea ahead. No sign of the pickup yet, but that was to be expected.

“Fucking cocksucker!” screamed Branston.

It seemed, as the boat had accelerated, and after falling on his ass, that Branston had caught most of the continental breakfast as it slid backwards off the table and smashed onto his teak decking. Mirage looked down at him.

“Doesn’t a fancy boat like this have fiddles?”

“Yes!” said Branston from the deck. “But you don’t put them up when you’re sitting in the bay waiting for VIPs, for fuck’s sake.”

As the boat gathered speed and the billionaire tried fruitlessly to scoop raspberry jam off his deckwork, the hydrofoils kicked in and the whole bow lifted six feet out of the water, tilting the deck to an angle of nearly fifteen degrees. More crockery slid off the table and Branston lost his footing again, going down with a proper crash.

Seconds later, the stern lifted slightly onto two shorter, stubbier foils, leaving only the twin aquajets submerged, to hurl the yacht away from her pursuers. With the hull almost entirely out of the water, drag was reduced to a fraction of the Lady’s low-speed profile, and she shot forward.

Mirage had been watching the police launches the whole time. They had kept pace… for about nine seconds. Then they flagged, then dropped, and now they dwindled. Pretty soon the pilots would realize the chase was pointless and they would wheel about and head back to shore, leaving it up to the helicopters, of which oddly, Mirage could see none.

The boats peeled away, and Mirage nodded with satisfaction.

She turned back to the table, to see Branston standing with handfuls of jam and crushed fruit. He glared at her, marched to the side rail, and hurled the gunk into the sea. Then he tried to reach the sticky-chute between his shoulders.

“Now you’ve saved my life,” he said, “do you mind getting this thing off my back?”

9

Branston knew the fussing he’d done over the ruined breakfast had been little more than a survival mechanism. After being threatened by thugs, hassled by the cops, blown off a balcony and then, to top it all, having had to convince his temperamental Austrian captain not to quit on the spot over a matter of a breakfast said captain had personally spent “seven and forty minutes” laying out, Branston had needed space for his brain to catch up with his situation.

He stood quietly while the commando woman sponged his back with some kind of solvent. He imagined it dissolving his skin – the process stung quite a bit – but when she peeled the husk of the sticky-chute off, it was like bliss.

Branston collapsed onto one of the benches that ran alongside the dining area, not even caring what kind of mess he was making of the white leather.

“Okay,” he said. “A moment’s peace. The first question that springs to mind is this: what the fuck? But as we ponder that, let’s consider a second and possibly more answerable question: where are we going?”

Mirage blinked, and smirked. It seemed to be all she did. That and jump off tall buildings.

“I mean,” Branston went on, “we have range to get all the way to Nosy Be, but I don’t really fancy a ten-day voyage, at least not without getting someone to clean all this crap off my deck.” He indicated the ruined breakfast.

“We won’t have to go nearly that far,” Mirage said. She glanced briefly at the sun, and at the diminishing shore behind them. “We’re on the right heading. How about that. Is it just the captain on board?”

“Helmut? Yes. He’s a perfectionist.” Branston reflected on the many fights he had endured with the forty-something year-old captain, just so he could continue to enjoy the quality of his service. “Most of these guys, they make you hire a staff of a dozen stewards or more, good money spent on fork-polishers. Helmut likes to do everything himself. It has its… advantages.”

“Right,” said Mirage.

“This is what I do,” Branston explained, “when I’m totally freaked out. I talk bullshit. If you want me to stop, a good way would be to explain just what the hell is going on.”

Mirage nodded, and helped herself to another bench seat. She sat like a soldier, in that careful pose that meant she could leap to her feet in an instant, ready to punch a man down or shoot him in the face. Branston began to notice the astonishing array of weaponry she was still carrying, despite having just plummeted into the ocean and swum the length of an Olympic pool to get onto the Lady Hubris.

“I represent an agency within the US Government,” she began.

“Oh God,” moaned Branston. This couldn’t end well. Whenever a US operative started talking about being in “an agency” without naming the agency, they meant one of the US’s increasing number of overly-complex “black ops” services. He tried to imagine what the Defense Department’s budget sheet looked like these days. Fifteen per cent in declared projects, tops, and the rest swallowed up by a giant black hole of utter secrecy.

Mirage shrugged. “I take all sorts of assignments.”

“I bet.”

“This latest one is to protect you. It’s as simple as that, and I’m afraid that’s all the information I have to share. Protect you, and transport you to a pickup, at an ocean location not far from here.” She glanced at a GPS2 readout on her right forearm, as if to confirm their position.

Branston rubbed at his eyebrows. The powerful thrumming of the Lady’s twin engines was comforting. He suddenly thought of the girl in the shower of his hotel room. The drugs Flenser had given her should have worn off by now. He hoped she would be able to slip away in all the confusion surrounding the explosion. Sergeant Amara would have some serious explaining to do to the Burj al-Arab’s owners about the giant charred hole where Branston’s balcony doors should have been.

He suddenly had an image of Sergeant Amara giving testimony to a Royal Commission or something. “It was the sex pills!” she would insist, and Branston barely suppressed a crazed giggle. Oh God he hoped that girl was able to get the ball gag off.

“The thugs, the ones you didn’t get to meet,” he explained, “took time out from their busy schedules to dangle me off the balcony and warn me not to launch today.”

“You mean the orbital flight?”

Mirage, it seemed, had done her research. Branston wasn’t surprised, but he was impressed, and at the same time a little resentful. The whole point of today’s flight was for it to be as secret as possible. Sure, every citizen of the Jumeirah Coast and anyone in the shell-shocked remains of Dubai would learn about it in an instant, as the main launch vehicle Tower of Babel lifted out of the desert on a column of white fire, but the first the rest of the world was supposed to know that Branston had achieved true orbit and taken tourists with him, was when he made a television broadcast from space.

“How did you know it was today?” Branston demanded. Thunder rumbled, somewhere off to the west.

“It was in the briefing documents,” the commando replied simply.

Branston rolled his eyes.

“Anyway,” he said, “an old friend of mine – well I say friend, really he’s a sort of tormentor – a charming fellow named Flenser, told me not to launch today. Then he left.”

“Why didn’t he kill you?” Mirage asked.

“No idea. He had me, as they say, bang to rights. He did call the cops on me, and given the nature of my, um, bedtime companion, that was as good as killing me. Perhaps,” Branston considered, more thunder rumbling as he paused, “it was very clever. He wouldn’t have to deal with the mess of my body, and I should be in a JCPD cell right now, rotting away for the next ten years, or at least until my attorneys could put enough pressure on the ambassador to get me out. Either way, I would surely have missed the launch.”

Mirage wasn’t listening. She was staring out the back of the yacht, at the sky.

“You might still miss it,” the commando said, standing up and pointing a long somehow deadly-looking finger. Branston was suddenly afraid.

Then he saw it. A tiny speck, darting through the air. And as it drew closer he realized the dull rumble he’d been hearing wasn’t thunder at all.

It was a jet fighter, headed straight for them.