Read Online Rotten Gods by Greg Barron - Free Book Online Page B

exhibitions, but can be a little vague, and might sit on the message until she decides what to do with it.
    Almost a year earlier Isabella was approached by a Director at MI6 to provide intelligence on the East African and Middle Eastern region — just incidental stuff  — and since then she has passed on bits and pieces as they cropped up, nothing serious or consequential. In this way she has met Tom Mossel half a dozen times. She freezes inside when she thinks of him. He is just one of many people who must feel let down by what she did. They would all know by now — of course they would.
    Again she holds the phone low between her knees. Mossel is both smart and discrete — she will not need to spell things out.
    How can I explain? Was tricked and used. Girls abducted Aden airport, acted under duress. Please find them, heart is breaking. One m’tant asleep. AKA awake and Zhyogal. How can I help? IJT
    Without stopping to think too hard she thumbs the ‘send’ tab.
    Looking around, she moves her hand inside the waistband of her skirt and all the way to her knickers, slipping the phone underneath. Out of despair, worry and fear, a new determination is rising.
    Day 1, 20:30
    Abdullah bin al-Rhoumi, head of GDOIS division, Dubai police, sits in his office with his head in his hands. He is a tall man, sixty-seven years of age, with faint crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes. His nose has a prominent dorsal hump falling away just above the nostrils. He wears the white kandoura robe at home and when going about the city, but at work he prefers a grey, off-the-peg Western suit, coupled with a shemagh head cloth, tied with the black woollen aqal rope. A city engineer has just briefed him on the possibility of building a tunnel from Interchange Number Seven to the fortified bunker that lies deep beneath the Rabi al-Salah Centre.
    This is his Dubai. His world. That makes it hard to believe that al-Muwahhidun have brought their abhorrent brand of terror to the city that he has loved from its beginnings.
    Â 
    In the earliest years of Abdullah’s childhood, Dubai was a nondescript, local port centred around Dubai Creek, a silted,disturbed channel of water. Pearl diving and the trading of dates and copra were the main economic activities. Oil had recently been discovered in the area and, while men whispered of its potential, nothing changed until hired barges came and dredged the creek. The biggest oil discoveries were a hundred and fifty kilometres to the north, and it seemed that little would change here.
    Like most of his peers, Abdullah lived in a thatched hut without running water or electricity, and received a basic schooling in the local madrasah. His family were of the merchant al-Tujjar class, and thus wealthy. They ate yoghurt and flat bread each day for breakfast, washed down with dark coffee. Lunch, the main meal of the day, was a happy, chatty event with the brothers sitting with their father. The women ate in the kitchen. All dined on fish or meat, rice and vegetables, supplemented at times with dates or olives.
    When he was ten, the British, long-term rulers in this part of the world, packed up and left. The United Arab Emirates were formed in 1971, from a rabble of Sheikhdoms. To Abdullah, this changed his life only a little. The Sheikh of Dubai, Mohammed, once titular ruler for the British, was now de facto head of the greater Emirates government. Abdullah’s father moved from trading pearls to importing Western consumer goods for a growing market.
    Abdullah’s passion was his horse, a roan gelding called Mulham, the inspired one. Like the other children, he rode bareback, yet with a skill that amazed his contemporaries: moulded to the back of his mount; becoming one organism; swifter than the wind; gliding over the desert sands. Arab horses are among the most beautiful of all living creatures, and over thousands of years of Bedouin life only those of good