A Second Chance

Part 76 - The Rescue

The landing woke Charlotte up.

She'd fallen asleep somewhere over Europe, a movie still playing, headphones half falling off, and the wheels hitting the runway jolted her back into the world with a sharp inhale and both hands gripping the armrests.

"You good?" I asked. 

She looked out the window. "It's so dark."

By the looks of it, she got used to it. Takeoff and landing may be the opposite, but it feels similar. 

"Well, it's late here. Different time zone and all."

She pressed her face against the glass and even through the dark you could see it, the sprawl of lights extending in every direction, dense and bright and enormous, the city running all the way to the horizon without any visible end.

"Is that Dubai?" she asked.

"Looks good, doesn't it?"

"It's so bright," she said. "Like, even from up here it's just, it goes everywhere doesn't it. There's no edge to it."

She was quiet for the rest of the landing, which I was fairly sure was because she was still half asleep and processing the last fourteen hours simultaneously.

Dubai International Airport was so much different from O'Hare.

The scale of it was the first thing, ceilings that went up further than they needed to, corridors that seemed to continue past any reasonable length, everything polished and lit and moving with the specific efficient energy of an airport that handled something like ninety million passengers a year. Charlotte walked out of the jet bridge and stopped for just a second taking it in.

"Woah, this is so much bigger than the last airport!" she said.

"One of the biggest in the world, I'm pretty sure," I said. "The contact is here. Let's keep going."

We followed the arrivals signs through the terminal and I was scanning the crowd at the barriers before we even cleared customs, looking for someone I didn't have a face for yet, just a name Justin had sent through.

Rami.

I found him before he found us. 

He was in his 30's, sharp eyes, a nametag with his name on it that wasn't mine, which was either Justin's idea of operational security or just his sense of humor. He was leaning against the barrier with the relaxed posture of someone who spent a lot of time waiting in airports and had made their peace with it.

I walked over. He straightened up and looked at me and then at Charlotte and then back at me with an expression that was asking a question without asking it.

"She's with me," I said. "Justin knows."

"How old are you?"

"17!"

"A teenager?"

"She's relevant to the mission," I said. "The students we're looking for are from her city."

Rami looked at Charlotte for a moment. Charlotte looked back at him with the polite but direct expression of someone who was used to being underestimated and had decided not to address it unless necessary.

"Fine," he said. "Car's outside. I'll brief you on the way."

We followed him out through the arrivals hall and the doors opened and the heat hit both of us immediately, the specific dry warmth of a desert city at night that was still somehow warmer than a Chicago afternoon.

Charlotte made a small sound. "It's so warm!!!"

"Just a desert!"

"Welcome to the UAE," Rami said, already moving toward the car park.