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his tiny room at the top of the ramshackle two-storey apartment above his father’s carpet shop. It was a mild night coming into winter, which in Dubai meant the temperature would normally be in the high twenties during the day. But the nights could be cold, with a chill wind coming in from the desert.
    The room was lit with a single low-wattage lamp on Abu’s desk. He had his school books piled to one side; on the other stood a glass of water and the remnants of some date cake from his party. The laptop took pride of place on his desk. He stared at the screen in wonderment.
    ‘This is just sooo cool,’ he thought to himself.
    He ran his fingertips over the worn keys. One of them was missing – the ‘F’. But that was okay, he could make it work by touching the little pad that lay beneath where the key should have been. With a flick of the mouse, Abu had Google up on the screen.
    The boy loved computers but not just for their own sake. He loved them for what they could do, for what he could do with them. For, one day – he had been telling himself for as long as he could remember – one day he would be a whizz of cyberspace just like his ultimate hero, Tom Erickson of E-Force.
    In fact, Abu, empowered now beyond his wildest dreams, announced to the room, ‘One day I will be a member of E-Force.’

10
    Sky Mall, Floor 198, Cloud Tower, Dubai, 12 December, 7.50 am
    Jessica Frantelli never ceased to be amazed by the Cloud Tower. She had been in Dubai for three weeks now, the latest stop on her around-the-world trip and for two of those three weeks she had turned up each morning for work at the Tower.
    This morning started out no differently. The bus taking her from the youth hostel in Al Manara followed the Sheikh Zayed freeway for 10 kilometres before turning southeast into Muscat Street and there, dead ahead, stood the tallest building in the world.
    Jessica recalled the data on the tower she had read in the guidebook the day she arrived, information she had excitedly passed on in an email to her two older sisters back home in Montgomery, Alabama. The Cloud Tower had been completed only five weeks before her arrival in Dubai and was 188 metres taller than the famous Burj Tower finished in 2010. It was the first building in the world to top a height of 1 kilometre and it had 202 floors. The top eight floors (storeys 195–202) made up the Sky Mall, the world’s highest galleria with hundreds of retail outlets. At a construction cost of over 4 billion euros, the Cloud Tower was almost never finished because the GFC had hit partway through its construction. An international consortium of investors had saved it.
    But none of these stats altered the sheer wonder of seeing the Cloud Tower as it rose up from the desert city like a needle. Behind it stretched a backdrop of pure blue, cloudless sky. The metal struts running its entire height caught the brilliant sunlight of early morning, making the whole thing shimmer. It reminded Jessica of old films of the Saturn V rocket as it had stood on the launch pad at Cape Kennedy. The Cloud Tower, though, was 10 times bigger than the Saturn V .
    Jessica loved Dubai, but she was looking forwards to beginning the next leg of her journey. For two weeks, she had been working on the nail counter in Saks Department Store on Floor 198 and it was beginning to get her down. She planned to be out of there within seven days with enough money saved to get her to Mumbai, the next stop on her itinerary. The pain of her former life still gnawed at her – the sense of failure she could not shake, the cloying feeling that she had let everyone down. But she shrugged off depressing memories, exited the bus and strode towards the tower.
    The best part of the working day was the last stage of the journey when she stood at the foot of the colossal building and stared up, shading her eyes from the blazing sun with her hand. Once inside and in the high-speed elevator, the day went into sharp