Free The Sand Men by Christopher Fowler

the third road on the right.’
    ‘Turn around at the first available opportunity,’ said the sat-nav, as if in corroboration.
    ‘Thank you, but what—’
    The guard had already turned smartly on his polished heel and was heading back for the white wooden box.
    Lea did as she was instructed. When she glanced in her rear view mirror, she saw the sentries in their shadowed huts, as immobile as nutcracker soldiers, boles of beige dust blustering around them.
    As she followed the road beside the barracks she realised how close they were to her compound, and was surprised that she hadn’t noticed them before. But through the acacia bushes at the end of her street she realised she could now glimpse them, even if she could only see the tips of the roofs.
    On an impulse, she drove past her front door in the direction of the perimeter wall. The houses soon petered out. The central reservation’s sprinklers were spread further apart and the grass withered to scrub. The estate housed over a thousand residences, but most were gathered around the golf club at its centre.
    On the outskirts the lawns turned to empty lots. The sun shone dully, baking the dead earth into rock. A few wild dogs scratched at the dirt. The Renault coasted quietly along the back roads, mapping the topography of the compound. Drifts of wind-carved sand shimmered between a handful of maroon and yellow desert hyacinths. Most of the stems had been strangled by tough parasitic plants. Little else grew in the salt-heavy soil.
    The first three streets proved to be dead ends. The furthest point of the fourth dipped beneath a wide, noisy highway. It appeared to be an unmanned exit from the compound. The sat-nav failed to recognise it, and told her to continue straight on.
    She slowly drove toward the embankment, trying to see into the deep shadows of the underpass, but her eyes had trouble adjusting. Something had caught her attention, a faint wavering movement in the darkness.
    By the time she realised her mistake, it was too late.
    Braking sharply, she narrowly avoided a young man. Gathered in the gloom of the underpass were at least thirty people, who grew agitated as soon as they saw her car steadily approaching. She attempted to make a U-turn, but realised that the road was too narrow. If she left the tarmac, there was a danger that her tyres would slip in the loose sand.
    Suddenly the crowd surged forward. There was a dull thud behind her. Someone had thrown a chunk of sunbaked earth at the car. It bounced and broke on the trunk, to be followed by a second and a third, this last one skittering across the roof.
    Panicking, she ground the gears and frog-hopped the Renault, trying to reverse it. A hubbub of complaint rose around her. Forced onto the waste ground at the side of the road, she slammed the accelerator and fantailed gravel, pulling away as the crowd retreated back into the penumbral harbour of the tunnel.
    She found another exit and drove for a while, passing beneath a vast poster that read: Visit the largest shopping mall in the world. She was heading in the direction of the Dubai Mall.
    Later, standing in the icy blue light of the outsized aquarium, where sharks drifted behind magnifying crystal, shrinking observers to the size of children, she practiced breathing exercises and lowered her pulse. The mall’s bright anonymity removed any sense of time and place, calming her more effectively than any pharmaceutical prescription.
    She took tea beneath a dizzying man-made waterfall through which a dozen sculpted steel divers burst in inverse cruciform. Many of the stores she had left behind were replicated by the same English brands here. There was even a Patisserie Valerie. It was odd to think that a tiny cake shop that had first opened in a bohemian part of Soho could now be found in an Arabic country, its louche clientele replaced with severe Muslim wives.
    Outside, she smoked a cigarette and stared up at the dazzling gilded towers of the Burj