“Yes, it burns me!” Longbeard shouted, finally snapping and pushing his chair back from the table as he threw his arms up in the air. “But we can do no more than try to prolong his exile as far as possible, keep him out of his own home until he is old and gray, broken and weak.”
“What about a fatwa?” said Redbeard. “We can issue a fatwa, can we not? An open call for any Muslim to take Zaal’s life in exchange for a bounty. Yes! A fatwa!”
“A fatwa is a religious decree, not a legal one,” said Longbeard, patting down his fluffed-up tunic and stroking his beard with trembling hands as he got his breathing under control. “We cannot issue a fatwa for treason, because that is a legal issue, not a religious one.”
“But if we could, it would make our goal so easy,” said Baldbeard. “He is in America, is he not? The land of the free gun-permits? Bang bang and it is done, yes? Justice like in Hollywood!”
Longbeard flashed a grim smile. “And then bang-bang we are done, my brother. If it is ever discovered that the Regents of an Islamic kingdom have sanctioned a murder within American borders, then that buzzing sound you hear is not your hearing aid but the CIA drones bombing the Royal Palace.”
“It is not murder. It is justice. And once we issue the fatwa and assign a sufficient bounty, we will not have to hire any assassins. They will emerge out of the woodwork in the land of the capitalists,” said Goatbeard.
“Or out of the bushes,” offered Redbeard with a smirk.
“There is no basis for fatwa, I should remin—” Longbeard began to say before catching himself. “There is no basis for fatwa unless we charge him with a violation of ancient Islamic law. Religious law and not penal law.”
“So then let us charge him with a violation of ancient Islamic law,” said Baldbeard, a twisted smile appearing as that darkness in his eyes made him look manic. “Let us issue the fatwa for the religious law he has indeed violated when he touched our wives!”
Goatbeard stared aghast. “You would have the world know that this man seduced your wife? Seduced all our wives? Ya Allah, you are mad! It will make us look like fools! Weak and impotent! Our goal was to bring shame and disgrace upon the lascivious Sheikh Zaal, not upon ourselves and our wives!”
Baldbeard shook his head, leaning close and looking directly at Goatbeard and then Longbeard. “No, my brothers-in-shame. Seduced is not the correct word. Remember, the way the old scriptures are written, a married woman is the sacred property of her husband. Her body no longer belongs to herself. She is no longer authorized to give herself to another without her husband’s permission. Do you see, my brothers? Do you see how we can phrase the fatwa to protect our dignity while still being true to the letter of the old Islamic laws? Do you see that even if our wives smiled and spread their filthy legs for that fiend, in the eyes of Allah it is not consensual because our wives do not have the power to consent. Therefore it is not seduction, it is—”
“Rape,” said Longbeard, slowly nodding as he stroked his beard and leaned back in his camel-leather swivel. “It is rape. And it is also genius, because now . . . now . . . ya Allah, now even the CIA will step away from him! The Sheikh will truly be an outcast! An untouchable!”
“Untouchable,” said Redbeard, cackling and drumming on the table with his greasy fingertips.
“Untouchable!” cried the four bearded ones together as the creatures of fantasy’s darkest underbelly grunted in approval and scratched their crusty crotches in the shadows.
Untouchable.
24
Untouchable, John Benson thought as he stared at the printout that lay on the hard-plastic workdesk in the basement bunker of the CIA’s safehouse just outside Bahrain, where Benson had been supervising an operative’s debriefing. He glanced up at the junior agent who had slipped the printout across his desk, nodding briefly in acknowledgment before sighing and rubbing his forehead. This was problematic. Not just problematic. This was fucked. It was fucked!
“My friend Zaal,” he muttered as he stepped away from the others and instinctively reached for his cigarette pack even though he had quit over a year ago. “Shit’s about to get real for you, Zaal. And I can’t touch you now. Not with an accusation—true or not—of rape against you. Not in today’s America. The CIA can save a murderer’s ass, sure. But we can’t be known for being in the business of saving an international rapist’s royal cock. Nope. You’re on your own, great Sheikh. Now it’s your chickens that are coming home to roost. Good luck, and God bless.”
25
“God bless you,” said Fran, smiling as she watched the Sheikh cover his mouth with a silk handkerchief and turn away from her as he sneezed again. “You aren’t getting a cold from all that ice-cream, are you?”
“I do not get colds,” said the Sheikh as he dabbed his nose and mouth and then tossed the expensive-looking handkerchief into the trash bin over by the door. “And I also do not get why anyone would invent an ice-cream that contains . . . what are these things?”
“Bubble gum,” Fran said with a frown, eyebrows moving like gummy-worms breakdancing as she chewed and cocked her head. “You’ve never heard of bubble gum? What kind of a kingdom is Kirwaan, anyway?”
The Sheikh smiled, reached for the paper cup with the Ben & Jerry’s vanilla bean scoop that they had been sharing before Fran had squealed and pointed at the just-replaced tub of bubble-gum ice-cream with strawberry swirl and chocolate chips.
Fran blinked and took another bite as she reminded herself not to swallow the bubble gum like she had done for oh, several years as a kid before someone told her it would make her fat. They probably meant the ice cream, not the gum, but the memory had stuck. In a way that was her real coming of age moment: when getting fat was something a woman had to dread as much as nuclear war.
She glanced back up at the Sheikh, taking in the bold lines of his handsome face, the olive smoothness showing a deep tan from the past three days . . . three days she had spent with him at his palace in the Burlington hills, walking through forest trails, skipping stones across ponds, making love in the shade at noon, coupling under the moonlight on his back porch.
That feeling hadn’t gone away, and by the end of the second day it occurred to Fran that God, if we keep spending time together like this, the feeling is only going to get stronger, isn’t it? So if it feels like this after a couple of days, what’s it going to feel like in ten days, a week, a month, nine months . . .
She giggled as the thought didn’t even make her hesitate, and now she shook her head and took another bite of the ice cream and put the pink-and-white paper cup back on the little round table that was nestled against the window of the Ben & Jerry’s in downtown Burlington. Outside it was summer in all its glory. Bearded dudes in Birkenstocks, most of them vaguely smelling like weed. Smiling young women with sharp eyes and very large iPhones. Panhandlers with signs that said “Pay me because I’m lazy!” and “Will smile for weed!” And then across from her the Sheikh, this tall, broad, dark man in the fitted linen shirts and snug cotton pants, hand-made silk underwear that she now loved to watch come down past his thick brown thighs as his cock sprung out, straight and long, hard and erect with need, with need for her.
That insane night with him had not just unlocked something in Fran, it had blasted the floodgates wide open, it seemed to her. There was a confidence soaring now, a feeling of comfort with her body, with his body, with how their bodies fit together, how he fit inside . . . fit so tight, filling her so perfectly each time, from every angle, stretching her in the most magnificent way, opening her both physically and mentally, perhaps even spiritually.
Last night they had done it on the back porch under the moon and stars, the trees swaying in rhythm with his thrusts, the breeze whispering in tune with her moans, the crickets chirping as she came, the wolves howling as he roared. How could she suddenly feel so open and free about a part of her that had been closed off for so long? It was like those stories of kids who wouldn’t speak for ten years and then suddenly s
tart chattering to a complete stranger who strikes up a conversation with them.
Perhaps that was it, Fran had thought earlier that day, when she awoke in that royal bed with this man asleep beside her, his smooth brown body relaxed and perfect as he took each effortless breath.
Yes, perhaps it was because he was a stranger, and sometimes it is liberating to open up completely to a stranger, is it not? So perhaps that triggered something in me, she had thought, opened a passageway that was blocked, pushed aside the mental barriers that felt as immovable as a boulder but turned out to be trivial as a pebble when the right man came along?
But there was something else that was opening up in her, Fran knew. The lovemaking of the past three days had been intense, the sweetness of that first time quickly progressing to the animalistic fury of how she came on the back porch with him the previous night, climaxing again and again, easily and hard, first when he slipped his tongue deep into her cunt and curled it up against her front inner wall, then by her own hand as she made him stand against the wall so she could squat before him and take his magnificent manhood into her warm mouth, making him groan in pleasure as he held her head tight and thrust into her. She had choked her way through the initial shock of how long and thick he was, managing to open her throat and contain him as she sucked and swallowed, massaging his heavy brown balls as he called out the name of his God and poured his hot semen down her throat while she slid three fingers of her other hand into herself and brought forth her own peak as she squatted there before him, the eyes of the forest on her naked form.
And when he recovered his strength and took her from behind on that wooden porch, spreading a thick blanket on the floorboards and then spreading her wide and licking her wet from beneath, long strokes of his tongue coating the entire length of her rear cleavage with his clean saliva before he kissed her rear pucker in a way that almost made her come right then and there. The Sheikh gripped her buttocks firmly as he entered her from behind and below, pushing his cock up her cunt quick and deep. But Fran could sense that he was still holding himself back, in a way. And more than that, she could sense that she was perhaps holding herself back as well!
Holding what back, came the thought now as she realized she was slightly wet from her daydream, her thin satin panties woefully inadequate to stop the dampness from reaching her thighs as she shifted on her plastic chair and swallowed hard, blinking as she glanced at the Sheikh, who was scrolling through something on his phone.
“Angry Birds? Candy Crush? Or just Facebook?” she teased, reaching out and pushing the phone down against the table. But his half-smile and quick blink told her his mind was elsewhere. “You’re checking to see if there’s any news about your country, about your cousin taking over as Sheikh,” she said quietly, squeezing his meaty paws as she looked at him with compassion, for a moment seeing this powerful Sheikh’s vulnerability, sensing the anger and frustration he felt at not being in control of some part of his life—a pretty big part of his life!
He had told her everything, opening up to her in that easy, natural way like how she had opened up to him. Indeed, the past three days had been a whirlwind of strange names and exotic laws and traditions, Regents Committees, even the CIA!
“So this Regents Committee voted to exile you for treason?” she had asked earlier that day, when he first tried to explain the tangled web which had somehow trapped him in a million-dollar home in the idyllic land of Vermont. “What is it you did, exactly?”
The Sheikh had taken a deep breath, shifting against her on the couch by the window as Fran caught an uncharacteristic flinch, a change in expression, a glint of something in his eyes, something that she knew all too well. Guilt? Shame? What?
“I told you about those strange Islamic schools that the Regents Committee had sanctioned, yes?”
Fran nodded.
The Sheikh swallowed and went on. “Well, after I had them shut down, I remembered something my cousin had said: that there was some level of demand for that kind of orthodox, fundamentalist education. And that worried me, because in my view Kirwaan is on the road to becoming more progressive, not more conservative. Certainly we are an Islamic country and so religion is woven into our culture and our laws, but it is quite possible to be a liberal capitalist and an excellent Muslim at the same time.”
“Well, of course,” Fran had said, shrugging. “Capitalism is awesome.”
“I agree. Without it I would be worth only a few hundred million instead of billions. Anyway, so when the schools closed down, I had my people check up on all the older students, to make sure they were back in their hometowns, back in regular schools or colleges and so on. And it turned out that four eighteen-year-old boys were missing.”
“Missing. Like, their parents were frantically looking for them? Missing like that?”
The Sheikh shook his head. “Not really. The boys had told their parents they were traveling in the region for the next few months. Not unusual, but all their cell phones had been turned off, which was pretty damned unusual. Still, their parents were not much help. You have to understand, many Kirwaani parents are, as you say, hands-off—which happens in a country with almost zero crime and where everyone receives a monthly stipend that is enough to buy a Mercedes.”
“So everyone in Kirwaan has a Mercedes?”
“No,” the Sheikh had said matter-of-factly. “I just mean that the stipend is enough that each person could actually buy a new Mercedes every month. But most Kirwaanis simply keep a fleet of Toyota Land Cruisers. They work very well in the desert. Better than Range Rovers even.”
Fran had tried to smile politely as she processed the fact that everyone in this man’s country was essentially on welfare, and they were all millionaires. OK. That made sense. Carry on.
“So the four missing students,” she said quietly, taking his hand as they sat together on the couch and faced the open window, the smell of the woods coming through on the summer breeze.
“Yes. So I immediately went to the Regents and asked them to assign the Kirwaani Security Force—who are like both the internal police as well as national defense—to locate these kids, these eighteen-year-olds who I feared had swallowed a little too much of the fundamentalist grape-juice and were susceptible to being manipulated and recruited by an extremist group in one of our neighboring countries.”
Fran had swallowed hard, wondering for a moment if she should even be hearing this. Too late, she had thought as she nestled closer into his warm body as he hugged her tight and kissed her head. She relaxed as she heard him sigh against her, like he was relieved to be able to share the burden with someone. With her. The woman he had said he loved. Was this still part of the act? Were they still in a play, reading from that cosmic script, playing their parts as they hurtled towards the finale of a production that she wasn’t yet sure would be a love story or a tragedy.
“And so the Kirwaani Security Force found your missing boys?” she asked quietly.
He shook his head against her. “Two weeks, and they came back empty handed. Phones were still dead, so no way to trace them via GPS. The boys had also made very large cash withdrawals from their Kirwaani bank accounts right before leaving, so no credit card transactions either. And the KSF does not have the resources—nor the expertise, I will admit—to do much more than basic search and electronic investigation.” He sighed. “By this point even the parents were beginning to fear what I feared, and when we were able to get into one of the boys’ email accounts, we found some cryptic communications with a since-discontinued email that sounded like one of those underground recruiters. Nothing was clear, and so the KSF and the Regents eventually closed the investigation when they ran out of leads. Which left things in my hands. I had to decide what to do next, I thought. It is what a ruler does. What a king does. What I will have to do every day when I become Sheikh. And once I thought about it, the decision was simple. Brutally simple. By staying silent I was in effect protecting these boys, condoning their decision to step a
way from the light and into what I consider the dark side of Islam. As the future leader of a nation, my actions are symbolic as well as practical. So faced with the inadequacies of my own nation’s intelligence and security forces, I chose to reach out beyond our borders.”
“The CIA?” Fran had said, her heart beating faster for a moment as she pressed against his hard body and gazed out through the window, the juxtaposition of the lazy Vermont forest and the strange conversation making her head spin. “Are you serious?”
The Sheikh shrugged. “I have an old friend—Sheikh Rizaak Al-Khawas. He put me in touch with the head of the CIA’s Dubai field office. I explained who I was, told him of my suspicions. Then I sent over photographs of the boys.”
“And that was enough to find them? Photographs?”
The Sheikh snorted. “Turns out the CIA takes in feeds from thousands of cameras all over the region—closed-circuit security footage, street corner surveillance, stationary cameras planted by agents, drone cameras with incredible zoom capabilities. And they are constantly running sophisticated facial-recognition programs against all this footage.”
“Like how Facebook recognizes people before you’ve even tagged them!” Fran said.
“I will take your word for it,” the Sheikh said with an amused grunt. “Anyway, so within a few days they came up with a match on one of the boys.”
“Oh, shit! Where?” Fran said, finger in her mouth, eyes wide open.
“Damaar, on the border between Syria and Jordan. A small but densely packed town that wasn’t really on the CIA’s map. But when they sent in a couple of local contacts to get a closer look at where this Kirwaani boy was staying, they picked up footage of a known extremist leader. Very much a wanted man. A man known to be preparing to . . . to become famous, let us say. A dangerous man.”
“And then?”
Untouched for the Sheikh: A Royal Billionaire Romance Novel (Curves for Sheikhs Series Book 6) Page 12
