Daliyah’s plan
"You don't get to call for help." DREADFUL PENNY Ep. 4
From Episode 3: Daliyah reveals how Penny must compromise Timur with a specific knock-out drug: “If untreated, you would be paralyzed, catatonic, and maybe dead.”
“You could say it with a little less enthusiasm.”
One of the rottweilers jogged over and put his nose between her legs, tail waving. Penny had to push back against his weight to keep from toppling but was glad for the distraction. “What a good boy, such a good boy,” she cooed, digging her fingers into his thick hide.
“Max, not now,” Daliyah clucked. “Stupid dogs. Here, go play.” She picked up a branch fallen from the great cedar inside the compound. Max jumped in anticipation and followed the stick’s arc toward where Fuad parked his Audi, a Jeep and his collection of Ducati motorcycles. Jamal had come outside, a cigar lit between his blubbery fingers. The cousin kept Max distracted so Daliyah and Penny could keep talking.
“So how do I keep this thing from sending me into a coma?”
“The gel reacts to water—to saliva. If placed dry on the skin, it will take time to permeate the cells and affect the nervous system.”
“How long?”
“Ten minutes.”
“So I smear this stuff on my breast and I have ten minutes to get him to suck it off.”
“Otherwise, depending on how much longer it stays on you, you will suffer anything from drowsiness to paralysis. But we suggest you do not put any midozolam directly on the nipple. Put it…here.” She traced a finger on Penny’s breast.
Daliyah knew every millimeter of her and wanted her creature to remain in awe of her Creator’s omniscience. The surety of Daliyah’s words also told Penny that this wasn’t the first time the Chamouns had attempted this particular snare…should she be grateful she hadn’t been the guinea pig?
She batted Daliyah’s hand away. “What if Timur doesn’t all of it lick it off? Or what if it takes me more than ten minutes to get him where I need him?”
“There is an antidote. We have adapted flumazenil into a topical cream. It will be inside your hand lotion container.”
“Flumazenil. That only works when it’s injected.”
“No, this cream will do it. But you need to apply it no later than ten minutes. Use it right away.”
Penny used to deal with these absurdities by remembering why she kept doing this job. The money was good but just a means to an end. For a time, libertine living had been enough. Beats getting an office job, right? The answer had always been yes, but Penny had forgotten why.
“Etienne is preparing everything for you: the midozolam in a contact lens case, the flumazenil in a hand cream container, small enough to take through an airport.”
“How do I let Stack know when Timur’s unconscious?”
“Veronique’s Tinder account. Stack will be in close proximity. He’ll go under the Tinder handle Majaplaya.” She began to spell it.
“I know how it goes.” Daliyah’s handling of the slang was too clumsy to bear.
“Swipe right when you’re ready. Then he’ll hack your cell.”
“What if they don’t let me take my phone?”
“You’ll need someone’s phone, anyone’s phone, to log in.”
“That’s not a security risk?”
“We can’t control everything, Penny. You must access a smartphone. Use Buribaev’s, if you have to.”
“Okay,” she sighed. “Is there any way for me to contact Stack otherwise? Can I Tinder him, swipe the other way?”
“Not without blowing your cover.”
“But what if I need to call for help?”
Daliyah crushed her cigarette beneath the toe of her high heel. “For two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, ma petite, you don’t get to call for help.”
The Burj al Arab looked solid from the outside. Inside, however, it was a pyramid of space, with duplex suites—no mere single rooms at this hotel—crowded around a vast atrium.
Penny followed Timur to the entrance of their suite on the twenty-fourth floor, near the apex, accompanied by three Oxford-accented Arabs in black tie.
“Welcome to the most amazing hotel experience in the world,” intoned a butler as he threw open the double doors.
It was as garish as it was vast: anything capable of gold plating was plated gold. Everything else—the carpets, the pillow cushions, the marble tabletops—swirled in primary-color arabesques, and the stairway sweeping upwards boasted gilded rails.
A blond European man in a trim suit waited inside to greet the chief executive of KazPetro. The welcome was profuse and Timur, bored, waved him to silence. The manager bowed out, gesturing to a table adorned with a magnum of Ruinart Blanc de Blancs, a box of white truffle chocolates and a box of Romeo y Julieta cigars.
“Vodka,” Timur said.
“Of course, Mr. Chairman,” a butler replied. The full-service kitchen’s freezer was stocked with Belvedere, Grey Goose, and Snow Queen, the vodka brand of Kazakhstan; the hotel had done its homework.
Veronique ran agog—honey, look at this and baby, look at that. Penny was recording every detail of the layout, lingering an extra moment in a side room decked out as an office. Herman Miller chairs, green leather baize over the table…Apple computers.
“There is also HDTV,” a butler said, “and an iPad.”
Even the iPad was gold-plated. Penny lifted it. The frame made it heavy as a textbook.
Stack and Lev, the new programmer, would be in another suite on a floor below, taking turns to monitor their screens, waiting for her to make contact.
“Let’s see upstairs,” she suggested.
A butler led the entourage up the winding staircase. Against the high wall was projected a digital clock, reminding her that time was running out.
The upper level’s rooms were a complex arrangement around an H-shaped corridor. The master suite was an apartment unto itself, with a kitchen and dining rooms; the closets could have housed families, but for now just secured the Louis Vuitton steamer trunks and a panoply of striped hotel robes that suggested, somewhere, a safari park was missing a few big cats.
The en suite bath really was a bath, in the old Turkish sense, a hammam, with a deep Jacuzzi tub surrounded by marble pilasters and framed in back by a thick scarlet curtain, held open by gold tassels.
Opposite this wound a counter with his and hers sinks, each guarded by a phalanx of products for skin, hair and teeth. Penny needed both hands to pick up a heavy dispenser of Bulgari, which probably contained more scent than her neighborhood cosmetics store.
Everything was covered with marble that knew no shame: desert yellows, mountain whites, meadow violets. Blood red marble columns surrounded the shower at the end of the tubular chamber. Metallic-colored mosaics smothered any lingering emptiness.
“If you’d like me to pour your bath, miss, please just let me know,” the head butler told her.
“Wouldn’t that be fun?” she cooed into Timur’s ear but he just grunted.
They returned to the master bedroom. Dominating the scene was another panorama. From this height the Gulf was not in view, and only glowing sky filled the room.
The bed was so high she’d need a stepladder or a running jump to get in it. It was draped in the purple of a Roman emperor’s toga, with a canopy stretching over the top.
Within the canopy’s roof was raised a mirror. Its frame and dimensions were human-sized, and it was tilted at a minor angle, to maximize the viewing pleasure of anyone whose head lay in the vicinity of the pillows.
“Interesting detail,” Penny purred, sliding into Timur’s arm. His wide face remained passive, but he regarded the mirror for a few seconds, long enough to register interest. She gave him a peck on his jowl and wandered to the windows, to see the non-view, and to clear her mind.
Her white skirt had pockets, just big enough to hold a smartphone. Penny took out her iPhone. The WiFi worked. Veronique liked to surf fashion and sport sites. A decade’s worth of Facebook profile had been constructed for her: friends, a mother and an aunt, clean-cut former boyfriends, girlfriends whose backstories she knew by heart—a slice of upper-crust Switzerland.
“And I take that,” Kasym said, plucking the phone from her fingers.
She hadn’t noticed him slip behind her.
“Hey!”
Kasym thumbed the screen. “It will be safe, along with your passport.” He seemed disappointed not to find anything alarming and switched it off.
“That’s my phone!”
“Yes, it is,” he said, putting it in his own pocket.
“Give it back.”
“Is security risk.”
“Timur!”
But Timur had wandered off, a sure sign that he had accepted Kasym’s whispered warnings about digital threats.
Kasym smirked with mock sympathy. “You are here for pleasuring of Chairman Buribaev, not to entertain yourself.”
She considered a retort but opted for slyness. “Can I have it back if I’m good?”
His fingers seized her chin. “What did you say?”
How had she let this one creep up without detecting him?
“Nothing.”
He released her. “Many girls hold his interest, for a time. A very short time.”
“I’m not a girl.”
“You play good game,” Kasym said. “Maybe you might have made something of your life other than…whatever is you really do, Veronique Goetzle.”
She forced herself to subdue the alarms ringing in her brain. Kasym glided across the stateroom toward his own quarters. She had to assume he’d dissect her phone’s memory and its catalog of Veronique’s friends, history and tastes. Penny’s legend had to hold up for just three more days.