Assassin Read Free Page A

collapse.
    Dey’s semi-legendary status, the controversy that surrounded him and the gruesome predictability of his demise attracted the kind of blanket media coverage that Dubai’s rulers do not particularly enjoy. Outside the hospital, cameramen and reporters jostled for position. Inside, Dey’s doctors tried their best to ease his pain. That aside, there was nothing they could do. There are few good ways to die, but this is arguably one of the worst.
    Khat, whose given name was Kajoshaj Bajrami, met a swifter, more merciful end. He was shot in the back of the head, at point-blank range, when he went to collect his car in the lot behind the Karama Pearl hotel. No one heard the silenced shots or saw his assailant. His wallet was missing, however, and several witnesses testified to the fact that Khat had spent the evening at the bar in the basement club, boasting to anyone who would listen that he had just taken fifteen thousand euros in cash off Tiger Dey for a whore he’d bought for less than three thousand and was past her best earning days. The motive for his murder was therefore obvious, even if the culprit was, as yet, unknown.
    At around 1.55 a.m., the man who had called himself both Samuel Carver and Pablo stopped by a dumpster behind a fast-food restaurant in the Deira district just north of the airport. He deposited a brown wig within the dumpster, making sure that it was well covered by a thick pile of stinking waste. He had already flushed his green contact lenses down a lavatory and swapped his white shirt for a black one. Back with his natural colouring of deep red hair and icy blue eyes, he made his way to Dubai International. Having checked in online and carrying only hand baggage he was in plenty of time to walk straight through security and on to the 2.45 a.m. Emirates flight to London. His ticket had been issued in the name of Damon Tyzack.
    Tired by his hard work, but delighted by its outcome, Tyzack settled himself into a first-class private suite, lay back and soon fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

5

    Several thousand miles away to the west, Samuel Carver was hurtling across the night sky like a human dart. With every second that passed he travelled 175 feet forwards through the air, and fell 50 feet closer to the surface of the earth.
    For six weeks, Carver had been planning and training, gradually dropping out of sight, going off-grid. Nobody who knew him knew where he was. The people who had encountered him lacked any clue to his true identity. The chartered De Havilland Twin Otter aircraft from which he had just jumped, almost five miles up, was routed from Richmond, Virginia to the island of Bermuda, several hundred miles out to sea. The crew were men who worked on the same principles as Carver. They did the job, took the money and kept their mouths shut. They did not know or want to know what he intended to do once he left their aircraft. They got him to a specified point at the time required, and then they flew away.
    Now he was lying face down with his back straight and his head tilted slightly downwards to streamline his shape and encourage maximum velocity. His arms were extended behind him at forty-five degrees from his body and his legs were wide apart. Thin membranes of rip-stop fabric formed wings that stretched between his arms and his torso, and from his crotch down to his ankles. There were four minutes to go before he hit his drop zone. But there were a myriad ways he could die before he got there.
    The higher you go, the colder it gets: a little less than two degrees centigrade for every thousand feet of altitude. Speed merely adds to that problem by generating intense wind-chill. Carver faced roughly the same risk of death from hypothermia as if he’d walked out of the Amundsen-Scott research station, down at the South Pole, straight into an Antarctic blizzard, but his only protection from the intense cold came from two layers of full-length thermal undergarments beneath his