The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 8

The day after Reina died, Princess Shamma bint Bandar arrived in Dubai, bearing the Chrysalis diamond. I watched, bags already packed, as Leena met her aunty and her entourage outside the hotel.

“Darling, you look beautiful!” exclaimed her aunt, and squeak, so much to tell you, oh my God, it’s been amazing, replied Leena.

No one mentioned Reina.

I stood awhile in the sun, ignoring the taxi the porter had called to take me to the airport.

“Ma’am?” he said, and when I didn’t answer, “Ma’am? Do you still want the cab?”

“No, thank you,” I replied, and was surprised by the certainty in my voice. “I think perhaps I’m not yet done here.”

So saying, I picked my suitcase up, and walked back into the hotel.

I gathered tools for my crime.

Security can spot a scout a mile off, but security never remembered me long enough to care. I stalked queens and princes, shook hands with diplomats and spies, and no one looked twice. No one ever looks twice at me.

The plastic explosive I acquired from an ex-demolitions expert who’d been sacked from his job in Qatar after eight workers died on his shift.

“People die out there all the time,” he explained, as he handed over the goods in a drawstring bag. “People are cheaper than steel. Why does it matter? Scapegoat, they made me. Hypocrisy; the death of the middle man.”

Shutting down the electricity on cue was harder, but far from impossible. The virus for the job I purchased from a supplier called BarbieDestroyedTheMoon. She — I hoped she was a she — had no issues selling to me over the darknet since, as she pointed out, Cop, thief, spy or fool, you ain’t never tracing me.

And what exactly, I asked, was it I was purchasing for my bitcoins?

It’s ripped off a CIA design, she explained. They went and used it on Iran to shut down its nuclear program, but it went public on their asses. CIA are fucking pussies. NSA are the ones you gotta respect.

I set a timecode, and implanted the virus on the laptop of a junior engineer going through an unhappy and, it turned out, entirely irrational romantic trauma.

“My wife is sleeping with another man!” he wailed, as we shared sushi and green tea at a Japanese café whose walls were coated with images of pink, wide-eyed could-be cats. “She denies it, and I tell her I’d forgive her if she admits it, but she won’t, and so I will never forgive her, never, not until the day she dies.”

I smiled, skimming sushi over soy. Never over-dip sushi; a chef once screamed at me for this sin, but the waitress apologised on his behalf, explaining that his favourite newt had died that morning, and he was a very passionate man. I quite understand, I’d replied. It can be devastating, losing a newt you love.

“Of course I can’t find any proof of her treachery,” sighed my almost-certainly-not-cuckolded junior engineer. “But that just proves how well she’s covering it up!”

I implanted the virus into his laptop while he was having a piss, and the following day he, unwitting, uploaded it to the sub-station computers where he worked along with his timesheets and a series of home-penned poems about the passions of despised love.