The prince knitted his fingers waiting for Mr. Fulton to reply.
“What you’re saying is you want your son-in-law on our drone hit list.”
“Exactly.”
“You want us to kill your son-in-law for you.”
“That is what I am saying.”
On Mr. Fulton’s end of the secure line, computer keys tapped.
“Okay, let’s see. Arif al-Bahaziq. Mujahideen in the late eighties, Afghan war. Longtime computer specialist, so there you go. Entered Saudi prison five years ago. Never formally charged. What’d he do?”
“He is a malcontent. A reformer.”
“And you put him in jail for that.”
“I am a liberal man, Mr. Fulton. I allowed my daughter, his wife, to be fully educated. She is a French-trained doctor. But the pace of change in the Kingdom does not suit Arif. He has resorted to more expedient methods, like slander and murder. You see?”
“I’m not paid to judge, Prince. All right, let’s take a look. He got out of jail two years ago. Disappeared two months later.”
“With my daughter.”
“That’s got to be tough.”
“More than I can tell you.”
“Did you lose sight of them?”
“They have been living very quietly.”
“But you know where he is now.”
“I will by tomorrow morning.”
“So, what do you think’s changed? Other than fighting in Afghanistan, his record is nothing but nonviolent protest. Why, all of a sudden, has Arif al-Bahaziq gone from hacker to killer?”
“Clearly he’s fallen in with al-Qaeda. Bin Rajab is proof of that. Mr. Fulton, Arif has made an attempt on the life of the Saudi chief of intelligence. I worry he may have also converted my daughter to his extremism. I suspect there is no end to what he is willing to do to attack me and the Saudi state.”
“I can appreciate that. But see, there’s the sticking point. Al-Bahaziq has attacked the Saudi state. Not the US. Until he becomes an imminent threat to an American noun, my hands are tied. It’s in the drone playbook11. You know this.”
“An American noun” meant an American person, place, or thing. The wiggle room was in the word imminent.
“I know this well.”
“So how can I help?”
“I have an idea.”
The quiet tapping noise through the speakerphone was not the CIA man typing, but a more hollow sound. Fingers on a desk.
“Mr. Fulton?”
“All right. Shoot.”
* * *
11 US government standards and processes, otherwise known as the disposition matrix, for approving operations to capture or use lethal force against terrorist targets.
Chapter 8
Al-Husn
Ma’rib
Yemen
In the morning, leaving the bed, Nadya kissed him. She’d not done so for a full week. Arif grabbed her wrist to pull her back down. She lay with her head on his shoulder until the rising sun filled the room. She patted his chest when she rose again.
Nadya was gone when he came into the kitchen; he’d just missed her. The pickup truck scrabbled away. A candle flickered on the counter beside flatbread and jam, a paltry breakfast. Even this meager gesture had been absent since Arif had broken into her father’s computer.
Like she’d asked, he did not tell Nadya what he’d found. She would have been devastated, without being surprised. Nadya knew who her family was. She loved them and rejected them, and this was hard. Arif had benefited from the Al Saud’s generosity, but spent time in their prisons. He didn’t struggle with disappointment in the prince, only with how to hurt him and not Nadya.
After breakfast Arif climbed the stairs. He threw open the balcony doors to let in the sun, still rising above the town and the desert beyond. Sitting at his computer, he called up his covert server. Four mornings in a row, Arif expected to find the prince’s security had severed their illicit cyber connection. But the link remained.
This was odd. He should have been shut down sooner. Was the prince careless, inattentive, overconfident? That seemed unlikely; he’d known Abd al-Aziz for twenty years and never was the man less than cunning and wary. Perhaps the prince knew his computer was compromised and was staying patient, laying his own snares. Arif didn’t worry that the GIP could reverse engineer the malware to find him; he’d put too many fail-safes in place for that to happen. But could the prince trick him, trap him?
Arif reviewed the last seventy-two hours of the hack. For the first two days, the prince had busily used his laptop, typing emails, calendar entries, notes to himself and his office network.
On the third afternoon, after a dull morning watching Abd al-Aziz work and craft common emails, Arif snoozed in the heat of his office. He awoke just in time to see the prince close a spreadsheet and the screen go blank.
The exact banking records Arif had copied out of his computer. The prince had just seen them.
Why did he do this? Did he suspect something?
Arif scrambled for Ghalib’s calling card. He dialed the cell number.
“Merhabba, Arif.”
“I just saw Abd al-Aziz open the spreadsheet. You sent him the information I took.”
“Yes. I did. This is wonderful news.”
“We didn’t agree to do that.”
“No.”
“He knows his computer’s compromised now.”
“Does that matter? You have the information you sought.”
“Why did you do it?”
“To vex him. Rob him of sleep. To let him know we are coming. There’s nothing he can do, Arif. You have no concern.”
Arif contained his tongue, though he wanted to lash Ghalib for this breach of trust.
“Will it be published soon?”
“You will see results very quickly now. A day or two more. Masha’allah, Arif.”
With this, Ghalib hung up.
Arif sat riveted to his computer. He let his ire with Ghalib pass. Arif imagined his father-in-law raging at the invasion into his privacy, the disgrace he would suffer, furious that the hands manipulating him were unknown. Perhaps Ghalib had a point; this made the attack sweeter and, without Abd al-Aziz even knowing it, personal.
An hour passed. The prince had not touched his keyboard again. The link between their computers had remained in place, though it couldn’t last much longer.
Arif jumped, jarred from his recollection. His cell phone rang. The call came from a number he didn’t recognize. After several rings, he answered.
“Merhabba?” No one replied. “Merhabba?”
The caller hung up. Only Nadya had his private number. Arif chalked it up to a mistaken call, but it made him wary that the rest of that afternoon and night, all activity on Abd al-Aziz’s laptop stopped.
That evening, the link stayed in place. Expecting it to disappear any moment, Arif used the time to delve deeper into his father-in-law’s private records, the man’s banking and communications, web-browsing history. He found only common iniquities—messages to a mistress, sly references to business dealings. Little to compare with what he already had. Arif went to bed.
The next morning, still with no keystrokes from the prince, he stopped rummaging. Arif worried he might stray into a noose hidden somewhere in the files and folders and trip himself up. From then on, he kept a passive vigil, sunrise to midnight, observing only. He answered the adhans to prayer, came down for evening meals at Nadya’s request, and went to bed long after she was asleep. He waited for the link to be broken, for fresh secrets to spill from the prince’s fingers, or for Nadya to declare that she was out of patience. Arif got none of these. Instead, he had more empty watching.
He marked the passage of his day by prayers, catnaps, and refilling his water bottle. Heat climbed in the office. Th
e village clattered past below his balcony. Arif kept an eye on Saudi and international news sites, though nothing yet had come from Ghalib’s guarantee. He’d sworn and convinced Arif that if the scandal were put in his hands, it would quickly be posted on al-Qaeda’s global online magazine, Sada al-Malahim (Echoes of Battles), and picked up by every jihadi Internet forum. The Arab television network al Jazeera would follow, the BBC, then the rest of the world’s news services. The impact to the Al Saud would be worldwide.
But now that the prince knew what was to befall him, had he somehow managed to quash the spread of his whoring bank records? This was not impossible. The prince was a powerful man, the Al Saud jealous of their name. Had Ghalib’s plan backfired?
Arif intended to see Ghalib tomorrow, to ask after the progress.
He slept for short periods in his chair. In the late afternoon, the village muezzin called for the ’asr prayer. The adhan pulled Arif to the balcony. The thermometer had climbed into the low nineties.
The ’asr asked of Muslims to break with their daytime labors and remember the greater meaning of life. Praying on his knees under a high sun, Arif did this only half-focused. Instead he pondered the oddities of the unbroken cyber link, the absence of the story in the Arab press, and the long silence from the prince.
Chapter 9
US embassy
Sana’a
Yemen
A mile and a half above sea level, Sana’a dissuaded the few Westerners who lived here from ever taking the stairs. Josh pushed himself up three flights to the ambassador’s floor. He wanted to acclimate and so refused the elevator. Pausing to catch his breath at the landing, he admitted that there were some places in the world folks from Louisiana just should not live. Sana’a might be one of them.
The summons had come in a call from the ambassador’s secretary five minutes ago, at Josh’s first-floor desk in the Cultural Affairs Office. The secretary did not say what the ambassador wanted. Josh had spent his morning so far reviewing the menu of an upcoming diplomatic dinner for a Chinese trade delegation next month, tasked with making sure nothing served would be offensive or inedible to the Chinese. The Chinese were like the Cajuns back home; they’d eat every part of any animal tail to snout. He expected no problems.
Stopping outside the main office suite, Josh ran a hand over his hair and smoothed his suit coat before entering the double doors. The anteroom was empty; the young male secretary was not at his desk.
Josh took in the panorama from the ambassador’s windows. From his own ground-level desk, the view was only of the compound’s concrete wall, razor wire, cameras, shrubs, and a cloudless sky. On occasion an armed marine or a Yemeni security guard strolled past.
The ambassador’s excellent view ran southwest. A clear afternoon let Josh see a long way. One of the oldest cities on earth, Sana’a stood on a high plain broken by mountain ranges and ashen wadis, dotted by sparse and spindly vegetation. The antique architecture was decorative, mainly mud-brick buildings packed along narrow cobble lanes, gingerbread facades studded with geometric shapes, Arabian parapets, and limestone accents. The streets and sidewalks were dense with pedestrians, vendor carts, three-wheeled tok tok taxis, and sputtering motorbikes. A thousand years ago, Sana’a had been an outpost in the center of a forbidding terrain, a destination for caravans on the spice and incense routes to the sea. Today it was a remote place of two million souls struggling on the edges of modernity, staggering between the calls of Islam, the seductions of the West, and the past.
Josh shot his cuffs and rubbed his shoes against the backs of his legs to look sharp. No one else had arrived; this meeting was just between him and the boss.
Three years ago, Josh had been in a different uniform from this warm-weather gray suit. He’d been not in those distant Yemeni hills but hills like them, with the US Army Rangers, talking to tribal chiefs, building goodwill, working to make a difference village by village, changing hearts and minds and spilling blood against the forces that would come to change them back.
The ambassador’s young assistant came in sipping from a steel go-cup. “Sorry. I was out for a minute.”
“Is he in?”
“Yes. He said he wanted to see you as soon as you arrived. Go on in.”
Josh rapped a knuckle against the windowpane at the millennium-old city. Nodding to the secretary, he pulled back the heavy wooden door and stepped inside the large office. Ambassador Silva was on his feet beside his desk, back turned, naked except for the pair of white boxer shorts he was tugging over his bare buttocks. The ambassador was short, hairy, and not a muscular man except for strong calves. Tan lines separated his skin into parts: upper, lower, middle.
Silva peered over his shoulder at Josh and finished wriggling into his underpants. The rest of his suit lay across the back of his office chair.
“Tennis. Be right with you.”
Josh backed out of the room, clicking the door shut. He stood facing it, unsure what, if anything, to say.
The secretary put down his coffee.
“What?”
His answer came from his intercom buzzer faster than Josh could provide one. The secretary answered, then flushed in the face.
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, I misunderstood. Yes, sir.”
Josh returned to the windows. Outside, the city buzzed and honked. The far-off red hills remained unconcerned.
The intercom piped again. The secretary answered and hung up.
“He’ll see you now.”
“You sure?”
“Don’t start. Go in.”
Josh pulled back the heavy door. Inside, the ambassador was still on his feet, this time behind the desk, fully dressed, extending his hand as Josh crossed.
“Josh. Come in. Sorry about that.”
“No worries.”
“What I told young Tyler was that I wanted to see you the moment you arrived. That didn’t mean for him to let you in without telling me you were here.”
For a small man, the ambassador had a firm handshake. Guthrie Silva was a known Middle East expert. He’d served in embassies in Pakistan, Iraq, and Qatar; his posting to Sana’a showed the emphasis the United States put on relations here, particularly in the battle against terrorism in Yemen. Silva, swarthy and intellectual, was a Jew and because of that would not have been ambassador here or anywhere else in the Arab world were he not a consummate diplomat.
“I apologize for not taking the time before now to welcome you to the embassy.”
The ambassador indicated the upholstered chair across from him. Josh settled his girth.
Despite the informal and accidental beginning, this was not a social call. Two manila folders and a cardboard carton lay open on the desk between them. Whatever this was about, it had just landed in Silva’s lap, interrupting his tennis game.
Josh hadn’t been in this office before. His few encounters with Silva had been in the second-floor conference room, always with others. The man’s private office was big, clean, sparse, without art on the walls, only maps and certificates. The furnishings were chrome legged and inexpensive, as if built to be abandoned. This made sense in light of recent events: two months before Josh arrived in Sana’a, five hundred Yemenis tried to breach the embassy. The marine contingent and local cops stopped them in the front courtyard. The embassy got some spray paint, busted windows, scorch marks on the pavement from burned flags, and a day of international news coverage.
Silva leaned back, not closing the files.
“You’ve been here a month?”
“Five weeks, sir.”
“You came from Riyadh. How’s it going?”
“A step up from stamping visas.”
“I stamped my share in Beirut. You enjoying Cultural Affairs?”
“Well enough, sir.”
“Good. I’m going to ask you a few questions. Then I might have a job for you.
Okay?”
A job? Other than Cultural Affairs? Josh had to respond without sounding eager. No sense signaling Silva that he was already raring to do something more than prepare menus.
“Fine.”
Silva traced fingertips over a page in one of the files.
“Your parents are both professional aid workers. Your father’s in Engineers Without Borders at Virginia Tech. Your mother works for the International Red Cross.”
“They met in the Peace Corps. They’re both hippies.”
“They sound wonderful.”
“My sister runs a social service office in DC. She’s the toughest one in the bunch.”
“And you chose to serve in the military. Graduated VMI, language major. Entered the army. Took more Arabic, got a three out of five. Made the Rangers. Two tours in Iraq, two in Afghanistan. Finished as a captain. Your record shows nothing but outstanding service.”
“I gave it my best.”
“I see that. So, my first question.”
“Yes, sir.”
“After all that excitement in the army, are we boring you here?”
Josh’s back pressed against the chair.
“No, sir. Why would you ask me that?”
“Don’t bristle, son. Nothing in particular. I’d just like a candid answer.”
Josh couldn’t be honest about this. What had he done for Silva to say this to him? Was he in hot water?
He had to answer, couldn’t sit in front of the man mute.
Silva read his discomfort.
“Let me restate. In the Rangers, almost every day, you had an immediate impact on something or someone. An irrigation ditch, a village school, some bad guy or other to hunt down, life and death decisions. Why’d you quit all that to come do this?”
“Same reasons. I just wanted to see if I could do it on a bigger scale.”
“Like your parents.”
“We’re a family of meddlers.”
“I understand. My father was in the State Department, too. And here I am. But early on, I had to accept something. To paraphrase Longfellow, the mills of diplomacy grind slowly yet exceedingly fine. Now I ask. Can you make that adjustment?”
The Empty Quarter Page 13
