by David Lender
She saw the barrel of a rifle emerge from behind the shed, followed by the man carrying it. She waited until he was fully in view and then leaped out as he jerked his head to the side, obviously seeing her in his peripheral vision. It was too late for him. She drove a hammer fist strike to the side of his chin, then grabbed him around the neck as he fell and twisted his head to the side. She heard his neck crack and felt his body go limp in her arms. She dragged his dead body back behind the shed and shouldered his AK-47.
When she’d last seen the second man, he’d been heading for the front of the shed or the car. She crept down the side of the shed, the AK-47 poised to fire if necessary. When she reached the front of the shed, she stood up and peered around it. The man was standing with his back to her looking into Saif’s backyard. He was about 12 feet away, so she put down the AK-47 and tensed herself to strike. She ran three strides toward him and launched herself into the air feet first, landing a flying leg kick to the side of the man’s head just as he started to turn at the sound behind him. He fell to the ground, motionless. Sasha felt his neck for a pulse. Nothing.
She heard the crackle of a walkie-talkie from beneath the man, reached under him and found it.
“Where are you?” a man said over the walkie-talkie in Arabic.
Sasha hesitated, then whispered, “The shed. Come. All of you.” She dragged the man’s body between the shed and the car, then positioned herself around the other side of the car, trying to see into the darkness.
She heard a few quick rounds from an automatic weapon behind her set to single-shot.
Saif!
In the darkness she saw two starbursts of flame from automatic weapons returning fire, heard the bullets slamming into the side of Saif’s house. She took aim at the starburst on the left, waited for another flash and then fired. The starburst on the right flashed again and she hurled herself backward as the rounds clanged into the car. Her heart was hammering as she got up and ran to the rear of the car. She heard more bursts from automatic weapons.
Two left?
She ran to the back of the shed and peeked out from beside it, looking for the flashes.
No, three of them.
She took aim at the one farthest to the right, fired a short burst, and then took cover behind the shed again. She heard more firing, then the bullets slamming into the shed, some passing through it, narrowly missing her.
Move!
She dived behind the car, and saw the shape of something thrown from Saif’s backyard toward the darkness where the firing was coming from.
Grenade?
A moment later she got her answer as a flash of light as bright as day and the blast of a concussion grenade erupted near two of the muzzle flashes. After the concussion grenade, she heard another explosion, this one less loud, with almost no flash. Then she saw another shape hurled from Saif’s backyard in the same direction, another explosion like the second one.
Shrapnel grenades.
She still heard firing from one automatic weapon, the bullets raking against the side of Saif’s house. She ran to the back of the shed again, took aim and fired at the starburst from the muzzle. The firing stopped.
She crawled back behind the car again and waited. Thirty seconds, a minute. Then another minute, still no more firing.
After another minute, Saif ran to her.
“I think we got them all,” he said.
“Only one way to find out, but I’ll pass,” Sasha said.
“Yes, let’s get out of here. My father’s car is on the other side of the house.”
They drove off in the opposite direction from where the firing had come. Sasha’s pulse was still throbbing in her ears and her arms and legs trembling from adrenaline. After they were safely out of the neighborhood, she let out a long sigh and said, “First, I’d like to know what exactly went on back there at the building next to the mosque.”
“I told you I’d met Khalid. And Abdul and Waleed. Perhaps I downplayed it a bit. They’ve been trying to recruit me since I returned from university. When I didn’t hear or see anything after I set off the concussion grenade, I assumed they’d captured you. I knew it was risky to walk in there, but as you saw it didn’t raise Khalid’s suspicions. I just prayed to Allah that he had you stashed someplace where I could get to you.”
“What would you have done if they hadn’t put me in the back room?”
Saif shrugged. “I would have pulled the pin on the concussion grenade and hoped either you or I woke up first.”
Sasha let out a long sigh. She realized her hands were trembling, maybe only now appreciating how close she had come to dying. That, and catching up to the reality of what else she’d done in the last two days. She’d killed at least 10 people. God. Where would her life go from here? Who, what am I now?
“What are you going to tell Yassar?”
“The truth.”
“Everything?”
“I confessed worse to him this morning. Besides, he’s the one who needs to reconcile himself to what Nibmar and Ali were planning. And to what Nibmar had been planning with Ibrahim. I’m sure that will be a blow. And I’m sure I can help him get past it.” She felt the purity of her emotions as she said it, but her raw nerves gave her an ominous sense of a dark future.
#
Dawn was just beginning to color the sky as Saif and Sasha saw the outskirts of Riyadh appear on the horizon. Saif turned to Sasha and said, “Believe it or not, even after all this I’d like to see you again.”
Sasha smiled, placed her hand on top of his on the steering wheel and squeezed it.
By the time they drove into the streets of Riyadh, the sun had risen. They passed nondescript gray and brown-colored commercial shops and residential apartment buildings, piled on top of each other in angular cinderblock and concrete. Throngs of average Saudi citizens were already gathered on the sidewalks, on line for buses. They clustered in ragtag groups with parcels under their arms and babies cradled against their chests, hot wind whipping at their robes and scarves. This was the other side of Saudi Arabia. Given her life as a privileged consort to the royal family, she had seen it but never really taken it in, and after the events of the last two days she now experienced it through fresh eyes.
Then the twenty-two carat gold onion-shaped domes of the 1,700-room Royal Palace came into view, glittering in the sun. As the car neared the white stucco perimeter walls surrounding the Royal Palace’s grounds, she forced herself to look at peddlers inching carts of their wares along the streets, their robes already sweat-stained, and women walking beside them with hopelessness in their faces, their melancholy children at their sides.
In that moment she realized that it would inevitably come to war between these two worlds in Saudi Arabia, and that her life here could never be the same.
#
Once inside the Royal Palace, Sasha had one of the Royal Guards escort her to the entrance to the women’s quarters. Two young women in white Eisenhower-styled waist-cut jackets trimmed with gold braid met her on the other side of the double doors.
“Miss Sasha,” one woman said and lowered her eyes.
“Is Nafta in?” Nafta, her best friend and fellow concubine to Ibrahim.
The woman nodded and started walking down the corridor. Sasha followed. When they reached Nafta’s room, Sasha knocked and entered.
“Sasha!” Nafta said and jumped up from the bed, naked, and then crossed the room. “What happened? You’re hurt!”
They kissed each other on each cheek.
“It would take too long to explain. I need to get cleaned up and see Yassar immediately.” Sasha crossed the room toward Nafta’s bathroom, saying, “I’ll be in and out of the shower in two minutes. Can you lay out an abaya for me?”
Nafta peppered Sasha with questions during her shower, as she dried herself, as she threw on her abaya, and as she hurried toward the door. Sasha paused with her hand on the doorknob and said, “I’ll explain later, but in a nutshell, two nights ago I shot and k
illed Ibrahim because he was going to kill Yassar and be installed as a puppet ruler by the al-Mujari. Nibmar and Ali were continuing the same plan, and last night they kidnapped and took me to Buraida to be raped and killed by the al-Mujari, and I shot and killed both of them. And now I’m afraid that plans may still be in motion to kill Yassar that I need to stop.” She opened the door and strode out, closing it on Nafta’s astonished face.
Exiting the doorway from the women’s quarters, Sasha said to one of the Royal Guards stationed there, “Take me to Yassar, please.” Her heart started pounding as she said it, the emotions of yesterday morning rising anew. She again felt the despair and anguish she’d experienced as she’d anticipated facing Yassar to tell him she had killed Ibrahim. Not knowing if he could accept it, if he would understand that she had no choice. Her bond with Yassar had survived that conversation, but would it survive this? She’d killed Nibmar and Ali. After Ibrahim, could he still forgive her? What would he do?
She felt almost as if she was divorced from her body as she walked down the corridor behind the Royal Guard, a shell, bloodless, heartless.
They arrived at the door to Yassar’s quarters, where two Secret Police officers were stationed. She nodded to the Royal Guard who’d accompanied her. He knocked.
Another Secret Police officer opened the door from the inside.
“I need to speak with Prince Yassar.”
“Remain here,” the man said, crossed the room and entered the door to Yassar’s study. A moment later he came back out and waved Sasha in. When she entered, Yassar said, “Leave us,” to two more Secret Police officers stationed inside.
Sasha was now fully aware of every fiber in her body. Her head was throbbing, and her legs were almost numb from exhaustion.
“Yassar, I—”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“We broke a man early this morning. He told us everything. Nibmar. Ibrahim. Ali. Taking you to Buraida. Their plans beyond that with the al-Mujari.”
Sasha felt a rush of shock, then a dawning sense of relief.
Yassar continued. “He also told us the location of Khalid’s headquarters next to the mosque. Our Secret Police found it and the bodies inside and around it, including Ali’s.”
Sasha opened her mouth to speak but Yassar raised his hand to cut her off.
“And a block away, Nibmar’s body.”
“It was me,” Sasha said, as tears flushed into her eyes.
“I assumed as much.”
She rushed to him, beginning to sob. “Yassar, I’m so sorry.”
He opened his arms and hugged her as she reached him. She felt his great body heaving with her face pressed against his chest.
“I know they were going to kill me as part of the al-Mujari’s plans.” He removed his arms from her and held her by the shoulders, stood back from her. “But it isn’t over.”
Sasha’s eyes searched his face, saw the torment he was feeling.
Yassar said, “Someone inside the Royal Palace is still planning to murder me to foster the al-Mujari’s agenda. We don’t know who the man is, but it is a member of the royal family, a prince.”
The words slapped Sasha awake, and her anger forced away her exhaustion.
#
Director Assad sat in his office, spartan by Royal Palace standards and yet opulent compared to his real office in the Secret Police building across Riyadh. He was fascinated, unable to take his eyes off the reports from his men from the last 12 hours in Buraida about the activities of this concubine, Sasha.
Remarkable.
The woman—only a girl, really, of 19—seemed to have accomplished something on the order of what one would have expected from a half dozen of his men, and then some.
Six al-Mujari killed at and surrounding the mosque, including Khalid, and also Ali, Yassar’s son. Nibmar lying dead from a single gunshot wound in the street a block away. Those in the mosque had been killed execution-style with single bullets from an expert marksman—or woman—and the others with equal efficiency. Six more dead in the backyard of a house in the northern region of Buraida, two from a highly lethal martial arts practitioner.
Assad sat back, reflecting. What could an agent like Sasha do for the regime? As he thought that he felt a sense of disquiet. Why had he always supported them, the royals? They were so out of touch. At least Yassar was receptive to his input about where the Saudi populace was leaning: not good for the royals.
He thought about the royals’ positions on most of what he had to deal with on a daily basis. Women forbidden to drive. Women not allowed to walk in public without male accompaniment. Women not allowed to work in shops unless approved by the Mutawwa’iin, the religious police, who supervised sharia, Islamic law. Most menial jobs held by foreign workers. Saudis getting out of college with few job prospects. A good portion of the Saudi populace on social welfare. Rigid adherence to sharia, with its attendant punishments, including beheadings. And so on.
He shook it off and looked back down at the reports on Sasha. He nodded his head. This young woman had promise. Promise beyond the next few days. Perhaps she would agree to a longer-term arrangement. But first, the next few days. They were essential. Essential for the protection of Prince Yassar, the Saudi regime, and their way of life, including Assad’s.
#
Yassar insisted that Sasha return to Nafta’s room until the situation was resolved. He’d already ordered an additional bed moved in and would have Royal Guards stationed outside Nafta’s door, despite the fact that men were forbidden in the women’s quarters. Sasha was reluctant, fought Yassar on the idea, saying he needed protection. He’d responded with, “My dear, in addition to the Royal Guards, a dozen Secret Police stationed in my study, my anteroom, my living room and outside my door isn’t enough?”
She’d felt patronized, but realized at times that’s what fathers did. And Yassar was the closest thing to a father she’d ever known. It touched her and angered her at the same time. Someone in the Royal Palace was after Yassar and he forbade her from trying to intervene because he was more worried about her than himself.
An hour later, after she’d taken a luxuriously long shower, then been attended to by the medical staff, then lounged with Nafta in her room and told her the story of the last 48 hours in detail, there was a knock on the door.
“Enter,” Nafta said.
The door opened and Assad stepped into the room. His eyes widened. Both Sasha and Nafta were naked. He turned around and stood in the doorway. Sasha and Nafta jumped to their feet and ran to the closet to put on robes.
“Forgive me, ladies. I realize this is a breach, but I must speak with Sasha urgently.”
Sasha waved her head at Nafta, who nodded and then walked into the bathroom, closing the door behind her.
“I’m dressed now,” Sasha said to Assad.
Assad turned around and said, “I apologize again for entering the women’s quarters, but I know of your relationship with Minister Yassar, and I believe he needs your help.” Assad stood at attention. He was a formal man, always dressed in his blue-gray uniform with stripes on the sides of the pants, a white belt over his jacket, and always the blue-gray shirt with a black tie. He was bearded, with a prominent Arab nose.
“Of course, please sit.” She motioned to the sitting area and they took cushioned chairs.
“I will be brief,” Assad said, sitting with his back straight, his head erect. “I am impressed with your—” he paused as if searching for the right word, “—lethal capabilities. Dispensing with Ibrahim, the scenes that were described to me in Buraida, the man we apprehended in your suite, unconscious and with a broken sternum, obviously from a skilled karate kick.” He paused again.
“And?”
“Minister Yassar is in danger. You’ve obviously seen that we have Secret Police surrounding him. A substantial force of my men against, for example, a mercenary assault team, would be effective. But the nature of this risk, a lone assassin with royal blood in
side the Royal Palace, with privileges and unfettered access to any of its entrances, exits, corridors and even the catacombs beneath it, presents an unusual security problem that must be handled very differently.”
“I can save you a long attempt at a subtle introduction, Director Assad. I’ve been thinking along the same lines. I accept. But I am unarmed.”
“Assad reached into his pocket and pulled out a semiautomatic pistol. I’m told your weapon of choice is a Beretta Cheetah. This one is armed with an oversized magazine of 15 rounds.”
Sasha took the gun and hefted it. She said, “The larger magazine gives it a different balance than what I’m used to. I suspect it also alters the recoil when fired.”
Assad held his hand out and retrieved the Beretta from her. “I’ll have one of my men deliver one to you with an eight-round magazine within ten minutes. Forgive me.”
Sasha resisted the urge to smirk. The head of the Saudi Secret Police, sitting in a concubine’s room in the women’s quarters of the Royal Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, asking a concubine—former concubine—to forgive him for handing her a weapon with different characteristics than the one she was accustomed to. It was an irony she never expected to experience.
Sasha said, “How do we proceed?”
“My men are ascertaining the whereabouts of every prince within the Royal Palace, and, under Minister Yassar’s orders, assembling them in one of the ballrooms. Inside of thirty minutes we should know who is unaccounted for. At that point we will take steps to locate them. But in this matter, stealth and surprise will be more important than the usual bluster of a squad of armed officers. I will inform you once we know who the suspects are. But one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Minister Yassar mustn’t know of this.”
Sasha nodded. “He’s already forbidden it.”
