Assassin

19

Jake Tolland drove past the endless blocks of Dubai's building sites, each tower higher than the last, its design more flamboyant, its promises to prospective tenants more outrageous. Yet many of those glittering towers lay empty; many of the building sites were idle. The boom was over, the miracle exposed as a financial sleight of hand. The giant steel skeletons looked like a dinosaur graveyard, Ground Zero for the global economy.

Tolland turned into a quiet residential street in the Jumeirah district, parked his car and approached a metal door set into a high concrete wall. He pressed the button on the intercom and then said, 'Hello? This is Jake Tolland, from the London Times. I have an appointment to see Mrs Khan.'

There was no response, just a buzzing sound as the door unlocked. Tolland, a tall, bespectacled stringbean in his mid-twenties, with the first signs of hair loss already eating away at his temples, made his way across a dusty yard, dotted with spindly trees. Three small children were playing a game in the dirt, scattering the ground with cheap, brightly coloured plastic toys. A flight of concrete steps led up to a small, boxy, modern villa.

Tolland rang the bell beside the glass front door and watched as a woman, dressed in a plain black trouser suit, her head covered by a grey scarf that wrapped around her neck, crossed the tiled floor of the hallway and opened the door.

He gave a friendly, ingratiating smile. 'Good morning,' he said. 'I'm-'

'I know who you are, sweetie,' said the woman in the hallway, in an accent that came direct from the back streets of Brooklyn. 'I read you all the time online. Why don't you come right on in?'

Jake Tolland had always wanted to be a foreign correspondent. Reckoning that a significant proportion of all the bad news – and thus good stories – in the world came from a bloodstained smear of revolution, war, disorder and crime that stretched from Russia, through the Balkans and into the Middle East, he had studied Russian at Cambridge University and then learned Arabic at the Language Centre of London University's School of Oriental and African Studies. Armed with these two qualifications and an inquisitive nature, Tolland soon amassed an impressive portfolio of freelance articles and a couple of well-received books that earned him a contract at The Times.

His work also brought him to the attention of talent scouts at MI6, who have long used Fleet Street journalists as auxiliary spies. For the past three years, Tolland had been carrying out low-risk intelligence jobs, gathering information and acting as a conduit between field agents and London. So he had not been in the least surprised to get a call from Bill Selsey, tipping him off to a juicy little yarn about a mysterious Englishman who had been buying and then freeing trafficked prostitutes in Dubai.

'Go to a place called the House of Freedom,' Selsey had told him. 'It's a refuge run by an American woman called Sadira Khan. She's married to a Pakistani, hence the name. We think there's a girl at the refuge called Lara. She was sent there by an Englishman, who appears to have bought her at some sort of slave auction and then freed her – proper Scarlet Pimpernel stuff. We're interested in him, so be a good chap, see what you can find out, pass it all on to us, and get yourself an exclusive. All I ask is have a word with me before you file. Let me run an eye over what you've written, make sure there's nothing in there we'd rather keep private.'

Like any refuge, the House of Freedom was filled with vulnerable, traumatized women. It had taken Tolland an hour of patient persuasion on the telephone to arrange an appointment, and still more negotiation, sitting around a dining table in a bare, magnolia-painted room, before Sadira agreed to speak to Lara Dashian on his behalf.

'But I'm not promising anything,' she said. 'If Lara doesn't want to talk, that's it, you leave. And even if she does talk, there are no names, no photographs, nothing that could identify her. I don't know how much you know about the men who traffick young women like Lara, but there is nothing, absolutely nothing they won't do. Her life is at stake.'

'I understand,' said Tolland, cheerfully imagining how well Sadira Khan's warning would read, suitably framed by his own dramatic prose, right up at the top of the piece. For the next twenty minutes, he waited in the room before Sadira Khan reappeared with a tiny slip of a girl whose dark, almost black hair framed a pretty, fine-boned face. Two huge brown eyes peered out from beneath her fringe. They were lovely eyes. They should have shone with life. But all Tolland could see was a veneer of blank numbness, stretched tight over a limitless depth of pain. In that moment all his professional, cold-hearted objectivity disappeared through the window. He could understand precisely why the man Bill Selsey had described as a Pimpernel had paid so much to free her. Tolland would happily have done the same himself. He wanted to take her under his wing, to be her knight in shining armour. And because he was above all else a reporter, he wanted to tell her story.

Gradually, gently, with infinite care, Tolland led Lara down the road from innocent schoolgirl to brutalized prostitute. He made no attempt to hide his shock at what he was hearing, his anger at the vile obscenities of which his fellow-men were capable, or his compassion for the suffering Lara Dashian had endured. Yet all the while, another part of him was exulting. He knew that she was telling a tale that would make his name. And now they came to the final act.

Lara told him about the nightclub. She described her encounter with an Indian, Tiger Dey, and an Englishman who called himself Pablo. She talked about the moment she knew she had been bought and the walk up to the Englishman's suite.

'Did Pablo ever tell you his full name?' Tolland asked. 'What was he called?'

Lara chewed at her lips. It was obvious that she had been given a name.

'You can tell us, it's all right,' said Tolland, his voice reassuring yet quietly insistent.

'He was kind to me. I do not want to get him into trouble with the police.'

'But I am not a policeman. I will not tell them anything.'

Tolland saw Lara looking at Sadira Khan, silently begging for her guidance. He willed himself to stay silent, not even turning to see the older woman's response.

'It's all right, honey, you can tell him,' she said.

Lara looked once more at her protector, seeking a last iota of reassurance, then her eyes returned to Tolland. He could tell she was still nervous, not yet quite convinced that it was wise as she murmured, 'He said his name was Carver.'