The Comet
She pretended she wasn't his extinction event. DREADFUL PENNY Ep. 1
This is the serialized thriller DREADFUL PENNY, dropping episodes twice a week.
The light filling the Learjet’s interior turned harsh, as unforgiving as the haze of the desert below. Penny was the last to put on sunglasses, as though she had nothing to hide.
“We’ve received clearance to land,” the pilot said over the intercom. “Seatbelts, please.”
She reached across the stocky torso of the man beside her, the man she fawned over, the man she aimed to ruin.
His cell phone seemed glued to his broad cheek; she was surprised it didn’t leave a permanent indent. Whether or not he relished the non-stop dialogues, rare was the moment when someone didn’t need to speak with the CEO of a multi-billion dollar oil company.
She plucked the seatbelt that Timur was ignoring and tried to secure its buckle. He swatted her away, nestled the phone in the crook of his barely visible neck, and tried to secure it himself. He was grinning, though, so Penny knew he still got a rise out of her attention.
It would have been a different story had she been his wife, but that woman was far away in a golden tower with an unbeatable view over lonely mountains.
“I’m talking,” he growled.
“Landings get bumpy.”
He would soon tire of her, but not yet—not yet; she needed to keep him interested another three days.
She stuck her tongue in his ear.
He pushed her away, the gesture both playful and annoyed. His grin widened, though. Penny fell into the plush leather chair across from his. She wasn’t just putting on an act with Timur. It wasn’t that she liked him, exactly. More that she had come to dread the little silences, the in-between moments when she was left with nothing but her own thoughts.
The chaos of the past six weeks had kept her focused. That’s how long she had danced in his orbit. Not like the parade of other celestial objects that got caught in the pull of his gravity: those he consumed and then flung back out to the starry nothing. Timur Buribaev was not the sun, but a king Jupiter, with his own constellation of pale, demur moon-faced girls and mistresses flashing perfumed rings.
Penny knew how to win the attention of Jupiter’s raging eye. She had arranged for him to catch a glimpse of her at the Bolshoi on the arm of a competitor. Then at a private room at Café Pushkin, where he had been perusing its famous vodka menu when he saw her with a private-equity director.
Timur was Kazahk, not Russian, but he spent plenty of time in Moscow and Penny and her handlers had noted he tended to play the field with impunity. What with the wife away in Almaty, counting his oil money.
He was ready for her. Two weeks ago—September bowing to October in 2015, Muscovites taking the first snowfall in stride—she had crossed Jupiter’s orbit at a cocktail event at Tretyakov Gallery. Timur hadn’t recognizing her bright comet’s tail for an incoming asteroid even as she whispered promises of supernova kink if he’d rescue her from incoming winter for his upcoming business trip to Dubai.
The private jet bumped and jostled on air pockets. She pretended to look anxious, leaning across the aisle to squeeze Timur’s big hand. As though she weren’t his extinction event.
Outside her window, Dubai’s towers sprouted like a dark forest above the haze. Timur’s plane was not landing at Dubai International, but at the newer al-Maktoum airport. Still surrounded by frenetic construction and a maze of concrete, it catered to arrivals preferring discretion.
Kasym Shokay, seated opposite his boss, addressed Timur in the sonorous Kazakh language while keeping his inky eyes on her. He was still trying to lasso her comet’s tail and spin her in a different direction. He’d been there at the gallery when she insinuated herself into Timur’s conversation, and as soon as she began to flatter the big man with Russian endearments, he’d switched the conversation to Kazakh.
She didn’t understand a lick of their native tongue, but words weren’t necessary to decode Kasym. He looked at her with unfeigned distaste, and murmured a protest to the chairman.
Initially Penny hadn’t needed to retaliate. She was pretty sure that Timur Buribaev, chairman and president of the thirty-two-billion-dollar KazPetro Corporation, didn’t take to having a lieutenant question his personal lifestyle.
But having won her place on his trip to Dubai, she knew she was now on borrowed time. Grow too familiar and she might stop amusing the chairman.
She cut off Kasym’s quiet stream of protest. “You’re not going to leave me alone all weekend, are you, Timur?”
Timur scrolled on his phone, inscrutable behind his Ray-Bans. “You will enjoy, Veronique.”
The Learjet’s cabin could comfortably seat twelve but today it contained only five passengers, plus a stewardess: chairman and CEO Buribaev, executive vice president Kasym Shokay, two bodyguards, and the woman whom they thought was named Veronique.
The Learjet banked. The landing strips were huge and surrounded by half-built towers, beyond which stretched flat desert, featureless other than new crisscrosses of roads. The glitzy business capital of the Middle East: work in progress.
They were down with a bump.
“Welcome to Dubai World Central al-Maktoum International Airport,” said the pilot, repeating it in Russian.
Russia had imprinted itself on Timur’s existence. Kazakhstan had once been part of the Soviet Union and Russian was still a fact of their lives, welcome or not. Even ethnic Kazakh elites like Timur had to walk a tightrope tied on one end to the ex-mother country. Timur’s bodyguards and security personnel were Russian-speaking, Moscow-trained Kazakhs; Penny wondered if he trusted them, or if he had even hired them.
Kasym stood to open the luggage bin. He pulled out a pair of shiny black carbon-fiber briefcases. One of them contained their passports.
She leaned forward and touched Timur’s knee. “Darling, how long before we get there?”
“Fast. Always fast with me, is it.”
“I know,” she replied with a smile. “I just want to make sure you don’t miss that call you told me about.”
“No, no,” Timur said, pushing his Ray-Bans up his thick nose.
Kasym watched her stretch to collect her handbag from the overhead locker. She wasn’t sure how much of his hostility was jealousy.
Penny was wearing all white: a polo and a sporty skirt, with scanty gold sandals, and the outfit showed off her healthy limbs and her taut waist. A dose of sun gilded her skin, but the essential creaminess of her color was thrown into relief by her black hair. Her eyes, obsidian scimitars bared beneath luxurious eyebrows, were the variable that enabled her to blend nearly anywhere, just as her blood was a blend of East and West. Depending on the outfit, the language and the posture, she could be French, Japanese or, at a pinch, any of the tribes in between.
She pulled down her handbag and the big puff coat that she would no longer need. As she assembled her winter things, Kasym got in her face, that mustache of his almost kissing her brow.
“Don’t forget your scarf,” he hissed, “you won’t be staying.”
“Says who?” she said, louder.
“You think you can whore your way—”
A bimbo would have accepted that with nothing more than a squeal of protest. Veronique Goetzle was not scripted to be an airhead sex toy. Penny slapped him. Kasym paused, as though considering returning the gesture, but merely whistled a lonesome note.
“Enough!” Timur’s bellow had a way of concluding the moment, leaving Penny and Kasym with an enforced armistice. Their eyes traded silent bombardments over their demilitarized zone.
The bodyguards adjusted their ties and their aviator sunglasses before opening the exit. Bright heat assaulted the interior. The pilot was the first to disembark and the outside’s glare seemed to obliterate him. When he returned a moment later, he was already perspiring. “Passports, please.”
Kasym opened one briefcase by touching a button on the top of the handle. The briefcase frame was made of Madagascan ebony, or so he had boasted. She had been more interested in how it opened, noting the button only recognized certain thumbprints. Kasym pulled out five passports, four of them bright azure, and one Swiss red, an expert forgery.
Penny declined the stewardess’s drink; she didn’t want to have to pee later. She uncrossed and switched her legs, a gesture noted by Timur with the passivity of ownership. Kasym’s eyes burned a little darker.
She looked ghostly on her passport photo. Today the forgery’s quality didn’t matter: the customs officials probably didn’t bother to even look at Learjet passengers’ paperwork. The pilot returned with their documents all stamped with the United Arab Emirates’ immigration mark, and handed them back to Kasym, who locked them in the briefcase. He took the extra measure of pulling a cord from the case’s top and securing it around his wrist. Penny would have to figure out a way to get Veronique’s passport if she was going to get out alive.
Timur, summoning his gentlemanly side, gestured for her to step out first. He filled most of the corridor and she brushed against him as she advanced, lingering just long enough to remind him why she was there.
The light on the tarmac was blinding and the air was like syrup, humidified by the haze from the nearby Gulf. A quartet of white-gowned Emirati officials waited for them by a limousine.
“Welcome to the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Chairman,” said one.
“Hot,” Timur grunted as he ducked inside the car.
“Welcome, ahlan wa sahlan, welcome.”
The arrivals packed into the limo, Timur flanked by the bodyguards, the three big men comically stuffed into the rear facing the slender Penny and Kasym enjoying plenty of room in the opposite seat.
Beyond the rows of private jets emerged the city in a panorama of cranes, diggers and the skeletons of towers-to-be.
The driver, one of the Arab envoys, came on the speaker. “This is Jebel Ali, part of Dubai World Central,” he said, “a new concept city dedicated to logistics and aviation. The construction you see will soon house nearly one million people servicing al-Maktoum International Airport, here, and Dubai International. Imagine, the equivalent of the entire population of Stockholm or San Francisco will soon live and work here, at the largest international airport in the world.”
Timur made a grumpy gesture and the speaker fell silent.
They passed by the control tower and then across the apron fronting a vast hangar. A jumbo Airbus 830 rolled past like a brontosaurus. They drove on to a landing area for helicopters. One was descending now.
The bodyguards got out on either side of the limo, scanning the helipad. Satisfied, they gestured for Timur to follow them, trailed by Kasym and Penny. The Arab officials escorted them toward the helicopter as its skids touched the tarmac. It was a Eurocopter, a twin-engine light utility chopper with an enclosed fantail. Penny had never piloted one of those, but she knew the design was meant to provide a more stable, quieter ride. She always had preferred vehicles with speed and a little danger.
Inside the cockpit the Arab pilot, dressed in military garb, tracked the party as his rotors calmed to lazy circles.
“You are going to have the most amazing tour,” said one Emirati. He focused on her. “This is your first time to Dubai, yes?”
“Yes,” Penny said.
“No,” Kasym said, catching up from behind. “We are not tourists. This is just transport, you understand? Only transport.”
They reassembled in the helicopter without the Arab minders, this time Penny sitting beside Timur, leaving Kasym to scrunch between the two bodyguards. The seats were expensive leather. The engine was still loud so they donned clunky headphones attached to the ceiling.
“Everyone buckled up?” asked the pilot into their headphones. Veronique was the only one to nod. The Emiratis closed the chopper’s door and backed away.
The Eurocopter lifted off. They cleared the construction around al-Maktoum and sprinted over a grid of brown residential streets and beige courtyards overlaying desert. They flew low enough for her to see cars and even people, until they reached the hard blue of the Gulf. Below, a thick spit of land lengthened and fanned out, all of it recently reclaimed and shaped like a vast palm tree across the water.
“Below to your left is Palm Jumeriah,” said the pilot, his voice diamond clear in their headphones. He went on a bit, but the chopper was veering east, and the Palm faded from view, replaced by the bland cobalt of the sea.
Several minutes passed. Timur stared out his window with an expression as blank as the Gulf. The bodyguards gazed out on either side. She felt Kasym, stuck in the middle, staring at her legs—until he panicked, his voice lost in the noise of the chopper but his finger protesting to something out the window.
The chopper banked sharply toward land. As they skimmed in low, the pilot said, “We have a surprise request from Chairman Buribaev to give Veronique a special look at beautiful Dubai.”
Penny smiled girlishly and squeezed Timur’s hand. She leaned over to kiss him, but the edges of their headphones knocked.
Kasym slumped in humiliation. Timur hadn’t informed his deputy of this little detour, any more than he had revealed she’d be joining them for this trip. Ever since Veronique Goetzle crashed the chairman’s party at the Moscow gallery, posing as the marketing chief for a Swiss engineering company, Kasym Shokay had lost one battle after another. She wasn’t like the usual grasping women hurling themselves at the chairman, and Kasym had no way to counter someone who turned shop gossip into pillow talk.
It felt good, putting the factotum in his place.
More low-rise homes rushed below and above loomed the new city center, a phalanx of ambitious glass towers. The urban cluster emerged from the desert like a sci-fi dream, an army of glass rockets launching from the red sands. But they were dwarfed by the spaceship in their center: Khalifa Tower, named after the country’s most powerful emir.
“Ahead is Burj Khalifa,” said the pilot. “Named after our country’s former president, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan, it is the tallest man-made structure in the world.”
The sheikh’s tower was a knife of obsidian in the bright sky. It rose up as a series of slick tubes resembling minarets, black glass winnowing to the wispiest of tendrils.
The Eurocopter gained altitude as they headed straight for the skyscraper. She winced. The flash of terror surprised her, but for six weeks she had been wearing Veronique Goetzle’s fake skin, six weeks of pirouetting lies to get into Timur’s bed, six weeks of resolutely ignoring everything that could expose her.
This isn’t going to work. The thought had been buried in her gut and now bubbled up like bile.
The chopper hoisted itself above the final spire and Penny felt the needle’s presence, poised like a blade eager to open her from chin to belly, to let all the secrets coiled within her slither out.