“Sayedi?”
“Why should I not put you out of my house, have you followed and killed in an alley? Then I will scratch your name off my list.”
Bin Rajab’s lips worked for an elusive reply. Abd al-Aziz pressed him.
“Perhaps I could give you to the Americans. And who knows who they would give you to?”
The prince waited. Kemal had written nothing yet.
“Tell me why I should not do this?”
“Because I am a Saudi citizen.”
Abd al-Aziz smacked a flat palm on the List of 85.
“These are all Saudi citizens, too. And none of them have come to my house. Why are you here? Who sent you?”
Bin Rajab licked his lips. His gaze tumbled, cutting back and forth as if scanning the floor for crawling things. The prince turned the folder around to close it.
“Let me help you. You wish for amnesty.”
“Yes, sayedi.”
Nephew Kemal’s pen began to move.
“You wish to recant the aims of al-Qaeda. You renounce your membership.”
“Yes, sayedi.”
“You will accept a prison term. After you’re done, you’ll enter rehabilitation. Following that, you will take a new oath, to be a proper Saudi citizen. Understand, I will take a personal interest in you keeping your word.”
“Yes, sayedi.”
The prince pulled his hands from the sleeves of his thobe. He propped his elbows on the great desk to rub his palms together, causing a hiss. Behind bin Rajab, big Tariq nodded.
“None of this will happen if you do not tell me where you got the information on this drive. You will be escorted from my house. And so you understand. What will happen after that, I cannot say.”
This raised bin Rajab’s thin face. The tiredness was gone. He seemed resolved, a flush in his cheeks.
“Yes, sayedi.”
Bin Rajab drew in his sandaled feet to stand. Behind him, Tariq fingered the grip of the 9 mm at his waist, inching forward. The prince motioned him to hold back. Tariq halted with the gun half-drawn, scowling at the back of bin Rajab’s hat, clearly wanting to press the muzzle of his pistol to it.
The terrorist gestured to the cheap cell phone on the desk. “I have a number to call.”
“And who will answer?”
“I do not know. I suspect you may.”
The prince took the phone in hand. This was a break; he’d not guessed he would actually speak with the one who’d sent bin Rajab. There was still a chance, then, that the damage could be contained.
“Kemal.”
The young man, tall and spare, pale for a Saudi male, was the eldest boy of Abd al-Aziz’s sister. He spent too much time indoors. Kemal looked up from his note taking.
“Yes, Uncle.”
“Get out.”
Kemal left with a white flutter of robes. Behind bin Rajab, Tariq did not budge.
Bin Rajab accepted the phone and flipped it open. His right index finger hovered above the keys while his lips moved silently, recalling the number, or praying. Quickly he punched in a long series of numbers, an international call.
Bin Rajab extended the phone at arm’s length to the prince.
The phone trilled several times. The speaker clicked. A reedy voice emerged.
“Merhabba?”
Bin Rajab blinked away sudden tears.
The prince came from behind his desk. Around the pistol’s grip, Tariq’s knuckles whitened. The prince moved carefully, slowly, reaching for the phone bin Rajab held out. Bin Rajab’s hand trembled as the prince closed in. Again, the answering voice inquired.
“Merhabba?”
Instantly bin Rajab reeled the phone back in. He hung up the connection.
The prince flexed his fingers. “Give it to me.”
Bin Rajab clutched the phone tight to his chest so that the prince could not wrest it away. Abd al-Aziz surged forward, reaching. Tariq drew his pistol fully. He shouted.
“Let it go!”
Bin Rajab screamed back.
“Allah hu akbar!”
Bin Rajab punched one more key, a series of beeps, a speed dial.
A red, wet explosion knocked Abd al-Aziz backward off his feet. He wound up sitting on his desktop, lifted there like a child out of his sandals, bare toes dangling. Warm bits slipped down his cheeks and forehead, clung on his lips and in his beard. His ears rang and his chest hurt from the jolt. Blood marred his vision but he could not wipe his eyes for the red spray on his hands and the front of his thobe. A haze smelling of chemicals, spicy like burning coal, clouded the office, but the prince saw well enough to watch Tariq climb off the floor to a wobbling stance. The big security chief held his arms wide to look at himself, also spattered in shreds of gore, still clutching his pistol. The office had been splashed crimson and brown near the spot where bin Rajab had blown himself up and chairs were tossed about, but beyond that the room was barely wrecked.
Abd al-Aziz slid off the desk into his sandals, left where they’d been when the blast hit. From a drawer he took a box of tissues to clear his eyes and wipe his face. He tossed the carton to Tariq.
“This is what you call searched?”
Tariq opened his mouth to say something. With a raised hand, the prince shut him up. Tariq’s failure would be part of the investigation that started now. Besides, Abd al-Aziz would be barely able to hear for a few more minutes, though he was aware of Kemal pounding and shouting at the door.
“Tariq, tell him to be silent. And to keep everyone away until I say.”
The prince stepped beside the detonated remains of bin Rajab. The corpse lay chestdown, missing its head and Yemeni hat from a jagged and charred neck. Smoke curled out as if from a gun barrel. The carotid artery dribbled onto the carpet. The tip of bin Rajab’s spinal cord protruded; the exposed vertebra was sooty and the meat around the bone had been fried gray.
The prince knelt into the stench of blood and bile. The left sleeve of bin Rajab’s peasant tunic lay vacant; scarlet stained it from the empty shoulder socket. Tariq busied himself searching the upturned office for the missing head and arm. The prince lay a hand on the back of bin Rajab’s warm blouse. The little terrorist’s torso caved under his touch, collapsing like a sponge. Beneath the flesh, the rib cage had been shattered, all the organs popped, containing the blast.
Abd al-Aziz tugged up bin Rajab’s futa skirt to expose the man’s small buttocks. Using his thumbs, he pried apart the cheeks to peek between them. As expected, he found the dented, silver bottom of a metal tube tucked inside the anus and a tiny wire antenna trailing from it.
The prince stood, moving to his desk. He planted his hands and leaned over them. His left wrist, the one clutching for the phone at the point of the explosion, felt wrenched. He closed his eyes to thank Allah for his life and for the stupidity of bin Rajab. His hands trembled on the desktop. He did not lift them until they stilled.
Abd al-Aziz stood erect, lifting his eyes to the ceiling. His jaw fell. The gathering smoke there slipped upward through a fifty-centimeter-wide hole.
The prince gasped, agog, laughing that he just now thought to look up from the mess at his feet.
“Tariq.”
The prince stood again over bin Rajab. He peered up through the blood-smeared hole in the ceiling, past busted plaster and broken boards in the floor above, at the shocked brown face of his Filipino servant gaping down from the dining room overhead. Before Abd al-Aziz could speak to him, the servant turned his own face up to the hole punched in the ceiling above him. The deafening of Abd al-Aziz’s ears had eased enough to allow him to hear the screams of his teenage niece from her room on the third floor. There was a mangled head under her dressing table.
Tariq had found the arm. He moved beside the prince with the cell phone from bin Rajab’s dead hand.
Tariq nudged bin Rajab with hi
s boot, to dishonor the man’s body by touching it with a shoe. Bin Rajab had plenty of shame on his own; he lay decapitated, armless, soft as a stuffed doll with a wire hanging out of his bare teez. He or someone had packed a lethal amount of plastic explosive—probably PETN, by the telltale bituminous stink—into a metal tube, perhaps a cigar canister. It had been inserted into his rectum, with the failure to calculate that bin Rajab carried this directional charge. When his phone signal sparked the blasting cap, the detonation followed the shape of the container, jetting vertically through his bowels and chest cavity, blowing into his shoulders, neck, and head. Bin Rajab’s suicide became a grim and comic waste, his skull turned into a cannonball that plowed three stories straight up, to land in Abd al-Aziz’s niece’s bedroom.
The prince did the same as Tariq; he shoved bin Rajab with his sandal.
“I want the house locked down. All the phones, electronics, everything. No word of this gets out. Tell your men. All the staff. I’ll speak to my family.”
“What about your computer?”
“Don’t scrub it yet. Someone’s in there. I want him to stay a little longer.”
The prince took the cheap phone from Tariq.
“How long until you know who answered this?”
“One hour. Two at the most.”
“And where he is.”
“Tomorrow morning.”
Down through the two ceilings, past the ringing in his ears, the prince’s niece would not stop screaming.
“And get that damned head out of my niece’s room.”
Abd al-Aziz stood unwashed in his gory thobe before his wife and niece, to impose the seriousness of what he was going to demand. At the sight of him, they covered their hearts in shock and dropped to their knees to thank Allah for his safety. They cursed the terrorists of the world as cowards and evil. He lifted them both to their feet, thanking them for their prayers and kind words. To relieve them, he made them laugh with the story of the launching of the man’s head three stories high, a silly thing; the niece now giggled to report that the head had landed on her bed and bounced beneath her makeup table.
The prince informed them that Tariq would be taking away their phones, tablets, and laptops. They were not to leave the house or contact anyone on the outside until Abd al-Aziz gave permission. Three or four days at the most. His niece threw her arms wide and wailed. No, she had to go out. She needed her phone. The prince’s wife hissed like a cat, making the girl recoil.
Bin Rajab’s body and parts were removed to the kitchen’s walk-in freezer, covered, and locked away. The house staff and guards were banned from the first-floor office and surrendered all cell phones and computers. They were told to find cots and cushions to sleep on over the next few days. Tariq rolled up the office carpet, mopped the floor, and laid another rug. He washed down the desk and walls and replaced the chairs, then nailed sheets of plywood over the holes in the floors and ceilings. Abd al-Aziz showered and changed. He smashed bin Rajab’s thumb drive with a hammer.
By himself in the office, he sat at his desk, drumming his fingers before his laptop, the cleaned keyboard and computer screen, a direct link to the unknown assailant who’d tried to kill him. He ached to type invectives: fuck you, go to hell, you missed me, you simpleton shit. But with one keystroke, the watcher would know he was alive. The best way to nab whoever was looking back through this black screen was silence, make him wonder, make him sit in place and wait.
The prince was not disturbed for an hour, until Tariq knocked. Even then, with the big guard lumbering behind him, he did not turn from the dark screen, as if facing away from his enemy was to give an edge.
“Do you know?”
“Yes.”
Abd al-Aziz spun on Tariq. The advantage was about to shift.
“Who?”
Tariq retreated a step.
“Your son-in-law. Arif al-Bahaziq.”
The name stunned Abd al-Aziz into slow, blank moments, as if it had lit a fuse. When it did go off, his gut buckled, even seated. He rushed both hands to his knees to keep from doubling over. The prince bit down hard to stop his tongue. Like bin Rajab, he contained the blast.
He wiped a hand down his face, stopping it across his lips to press them shut until he could speak without screaming.
“Is there doubt?”
“None.”
Abd al-Aziz froze. He gazed into the middle distance at nothing. Around him the office blurred and became insubstantial; he was besieged elsewhere, in a senate of angry, passionate voices. They roared from all sides. You knew this would happen! Twenty years ago! You never trusted him, and you did nothing! He took Nadya away, turned her against you! Nadya! You gave him chances, over and over, then this! This!
What does Nadya know? Did Arif show her the files?
Did she know Arif would try to kill her father?
Where are they? Find them!
The prince could not say when Tariq left the room. His head pounded. He caught himself panting. His hands trembled on either side of the laptop on his desk. He pushed back his chair away from the computer, before he could swing a fist at it.
The prince raised both arms over his head to quell the voices, as if they were real and shouting at him what he ought to do to Arif al-Bahaziq.
When they were quiet and he could think, Abd al-Aziz rolled his chair close again to the laptop.
“I want him dead.”
He marveled at the statement, how fully he wished it. He was grateful to Arif for no longer skulking in cyberspace, an elusive irritant. He’d become so openly vile, and that made the choice plain.
Abd al-Aziz opened bin Rajab’s file and took from it the List of 85. With a pen, he added his son-in-law’s name.
He summoned Tariq again.
“Update the list.”
Tariq read the addition in the prince’s handwriting.
“Of course.”
“Get me the American COS on the phone.”
Tariq left for his station. With folded arms, Abd al-Aziz sat back to address the laptop’s dark computer screen.
“You lied to me. You stole my personal records. You tried to kill me.”
He bared his teeth.
“You took away my daughter.”
Again, he yearned to type all this for his son-in-law’s eyes waiting on the other side of the black glass of the screen. He ached to let Arif the deceiver know he was coming for him.
The phone rang. The prince exhaled a long, hot breath at the computer.
“Sit right there. I’ll be with you soon.”
Abd al-Aziz was not fond of the CIA’s chief of station in Riyadh. Mr. Fulton was a cheerless man with a difficult job. The Saudi state was a monarchy. As such, the flow of information in the Kingdom, the lifeblood of all intelligence agencies, tended to follow personal relationships, family and tribal links, more than bureaucracy, the way it did in more modern countries. Americans, a people from a democracy, preferred dealing with governments over individuals. This made them reliant on their Saudi hosts for information. The prince made frequent use of the imbalance, and was about to again.
He put Mr. Fulton on speakerphone so that he could walk behind his desk while speaking. His nerves were still jangled.
“Thank you for calling me back so quickly, Mr. Fulton.”
“Your man was pretty insistent. I figured it was important. Is it?”
He was not bothered by the CIA man’s casual brusqueness. Within the last two hours, the prince had escaped death.
“I will let you be the judge of that, Mr. Fulton.”
Abd al-Aziz explained how Walid Samir bin Rajab, #34 on the List, had come to his private home, to surrender.
“Bin Rajab. That’s a good haul. He’s AQAP. We’d like to have a word with him, too.”
“That will be impossible.”
“O
h?”
“Let me continue. Bin Rajab arrived at my house with a data stick. This contained some of my personal banking information.”
“He hacked you?”
“Someone else did.”
“Was it compromising?”
“Yes, Mr. Fulton.”
“Jesus Christ.”
He gave a disinterested ear to this common American blasphemy. On another day, perhaps, he might react.
“I invited him into my presence to question him, of course. Then he blew himself up.”
The CIA station chief gagged.
“He what?”
“He blew himself up, Mr. Fulton.”
“Holy—” The man bit off another curse. “You all right?”
“No casualties but the bomber and my carpet.”
“Didn’t you search him?”
“Of course. But the device was in his rectum. We Muslims are not accustomed to searching there, though that may have to change. Fortunately for me, the charge was shaped. It detonated vertically. Bin Rajab blew off one arm and his own head. That was all.”
The secure line stayed quiet for seconds, until Mr. Fulton chuckled. He drew out his words.
“You, sir, are a lucky man.”
“What I am, Mr. Fulton, is a faithful servant of Allah. I will report to your office all the details before the day is over. At the moment I have a separate, and time-sensitive, request.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“I will rely on that. I know who is behind the hacking of my computer, and who sent bin Rajab to kill me.”
“You know this already?”
“There was little effort to conceal it from me. The expectation, I suppose, was that I would be dead with the knowledge.”
“Who was it?”
“My son-in-law. Arif al-Bahaziq.”
“Prince.” The American stumbled for words. “Prince, I’m shocked. I’m sorry.”
“I’ve added his name to the List of 85.”
“I can see why.”
“Here is what you can do for me. You understand, I will be grateful. Personally and officially.”
“Tell me.”
“I want him added to your country’s disposition matrix.”
The Empty Quarter Page 12
