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it's Friday. I thought. . ."
    "What? Hey, all bets are off, buddy, if you're going to believe what they're saying on TV."
    "What are they saying?"
    "Well, you said it, too. Sunday it'll be nine-eleven again. Only Sheik Mohammed isn’t talking. He’s got some military adviser as a mouthpiece."

    Host : "Please, your Excellency, do you wish to ask anything of the American President?"
    Emir : "Only that he end this outrage immediately!"
    Host : "Thank you, your Excellency. And what would you ask of the citizens of Dubai?"
    Emir : "That they return to their homes and their lives, Allah be praised."
    Host : "Thank you. Is there any other matter you wish to discuss?"

    An amateur video of the Dynamic Tower crash was shown next, taken from a distance of about a mile and a half. Chillingly, the nearly silent drone aircraft had first drawn the attention of the cam-toting tourist when it appeared almost directly overhead, side-lit by reflection and flying right past the Burj Khalifa , over the fronting lake, at a height of roughly four hundred feet. Imaging on the night video became less sharp as a zoom lens was deployed in tracking the drone to its target. But then, upon impact, a pressure wave could be seen rippling outward across the buckling glass of the illuminated building an instant before a fireball filled the frame with its exploded shower of debris. A moment later the sound wave arrived at the camera, echoing like a sonic boom.
    "Holy horsehead," Doug said.
    Next up, the building's own video surveillance camera revealed the same impact, but with clearer and more dramatic focus, the angle taken from the roof, aiming down to the courtyard below. The nose of the drone was shown penetrating the glass in slow motion, deforming it and the framing steel around it an instant before detonation. Then even the camera shook with the blast, and went dark.
    After the videos were repeated three times in succession, with a voiceover commentary about the CIA's hopeful use of this visual evidence in retracing the flight path and identifying the drone's origin of manufacture, Doug cut off the TV. Next he picked up his cell phone and called Nasheed , only reaching his answering machine. "Can't take any more of this," he confessed, at last. "Going stir crazy. How about a little sightseeing drive?"
    David considered the other option--that of waiting for the sky to fall, cooped up with the same doom and gloom he'd come here to escape. "I'm ready if you are," he said, at last.
    ~ * ~
    They took the elevator down to the parking garage, reclaimed the Jaguar, and soon edged out of the building into Baniyas Road, expecting gridlock at the nearest intersection. But the streets were oddly quiet now. So much so that Etherton laughed. "Never seen it like this before, old man," Doug said, and roared ahead to beat the traffic light. "Even on a Ramadan Friday."
    On their way to Jumeirah Beach, they searched for a talk radio station, settling on Dubai Eye, 103.8 FM. Although he wanted to close his   eyes for needed sleep, maybe even to drift off, sunken down into the Jag's plush leather cushioning, David was kept awake, not just by the talk show host and Etherton's newly exuberant driving---as though he'd just won the car in a lottery---but also by the most delicious eye candy he'd ever seen. Despite news helicopters, the skyline was ravishing.
    "Oops," Doug interrupted his reverie, turning away from a police checkpoint on the Business Bay loop. "I know a shortcut."
    As they roared for the beach, occasionally passing a Maserati or Porsche out for a typical high speed joy ride, the CNN-styled Dubai Eye host came up with a surprise---a news flash factoid gleaned, no doubt, from the wire services and presented as though just heard from Allah's lips in an octave too high for the competition to plagiarize:

    Host : "Mark Swann wasn’t the only casualty at the target
    condo. Mrs. Dorothea Swann, wife of real estate mogul
    Gregg Swann, was apparently