We came to Dubai the way sins come to the desert: quietly, extravagantly, and impossible to wash away.
The Mi-8 ran out of fuel over the Black Sea. Djinn caught us on a thermal updraft he pulled from nowhere, wind screaming around the rotors until we glided dead-stick into a deserted airstrip in northern Iran. From there we paid a smuggler in gold bars to fly us across the Gulf in a twin-engine Cessna Caravan stripped for cargo runs. He asked no questions when five silent men climbed aboard smelling of cordite and winter.
We landed at dawn on a private helipad in the middle of the Empty Quarter, two hundred kilometers from anywhere. A convoy of blacked-out Land Cruisers waited—Rei’s last favor from a Saudi prince who’d once owed him his life in a Rio back alley. The drivers wore shemaghs
