The New Girl

by Daniel Silva

  There was no recording of the session—Khalid wouldn’t permit it—and no contemporaneous notes, only the memo Omar hastily composed after returning to his office. He e-mailed a copy to Hanifa for safekeeping. She was shocked when she read it. Khalid predicted that in twenty years, the price of oil would fall to zero. If Saudi Arabia was to have any future, it had to change, and quickly. He wanted to modernize and diversify the economy. He wanted to loosen the Wahhabi shackles on women and draw them into the workforce. He wanted to break the covenant between the Al Saud and the bearded Ikhwan from the Nejd. He wanted Saudi Arabia to be a normal country, with movie theaters, music, nightclubs, and cafés where people of both sexes could mingle without fear of the Mutaween.

  “He even talked about allowing hotels and restaurants to serve alcohol so Saudis wouldn’t have to make the drive across the causeway to Bahrain every time they wanted a drink. It was radical stuff.”

  “Omar was impressed?”

  “No,” said Hanifa. “Omar wasn’t impressed. Omar was in love.”

  There soon appeared in the pages of the Arab News many flattering articles about the dynamic young son of the Saudi monarch who went by the initials KBM. But Omar turned on Khalid not long after he became crown prince, when he ordered a roundup of scores of dissidents and pro-democracy activists, including several of Omar’s closest friends. The Arab News was editorially silent on the arrests, but Omar unleashed a barrage of criticism on social media, including a blistering Twitter post that compared KBM to the ruler of Russia. The chief of KBM’s court sent Omar a message instructing him to refrain from any further criticism of His Royal Highness. Omar responded by ridiculing KBM for purchasing more than a billion dollars’ worth of homes, yachts, and paintings while ordinary Saudis suffered under his economic austerity measures.

  “After that,” said Hanifa, “it was game on.”

  But in a country like Saudi Arabia, there was only one possible outcome for a contest between the royal family and a dissident journalist. The Royal Data Center monitored Omar’s phones and intercepted his e-mails and text messages. The center even tried to disable his social media feeds. And when that failed, they attacked them with thousands of fake postings from bots and trolls. But the last straw was the bullet, a single .45-caliber round, delivered to Omar’s office at the Arab News. He left Saudi Arabia that night and never returned.

  He moved into Hanifa’s apartment, married her in a quiet ceremony, and found work at Der Spiegel. As his social media posts grew ever more critical of KBM, his number of online followers increased dramatically. Saudi agents brazenly trailed him through the streets of Berlin. His phone was besieged by threatening e-mails and texts.

  “The message was unmistakable. It didn’t matter that Omar had left the Kingdom, they could still get to him. He became convinced he was going to be kidnapped or killed.”

  Nevertheless, he decided to risk a trip to Cairo to write a story about life in Egypt under the new pharaoh, whom Omar despised almost as much as Khalid. And in the lobby of the Hotel Sofitel, he happened upon a minor Saudi prince whom Khalid had fleeced in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The minor prince, like Omar, was now living in exile. They agreed to have dinner that night at a restaurant in Zamalek, an affluent quarter of Cairo located on Gezira Island. It was late summer, August, and the night was stifling. Even so, the minor prince insisted on dining al fresco. When they were seated, he instructed Omar to switch off his phone and remove the SIM card. Then he told Omar about a rumor he had heard concerning a plot to remove Khalid from the line of succession.

  “Omar expressed skepticism over the plot’s chances for success. KBM had been the target of numerous assassination and coup attempts, and all had failed because he controlled the security services and the Royal Data Center. But the prince insisted this plot was different.”

  “Why?”

  “A foreign power was involved.”

  “Which one?”

  “The prince didn’t know. But he told Omar the plot involved Khalid’s daughter. The conspirators were planning to kidnap her in order to force Khalid to abdicate.”

  “You’re sure it was August?”

  “I can show you the text messages Omar sent from Cairo.”

  “Did they contain any reference to the plot against Khalid?”

  “Of course not. Omar knew the Royal Data Center was monitoring his communications. He waited until he was back in Berlin before telling me. We spoke in the Tiergarten, no phones. I’m afraid Omar didn’t care much for my reaction.”

  “You wanted Omar to tell Khalid about the plot.”

  “I said he was obliged to.”

  “Because Khalid’s daughter might be killed?”

  She nodded. “And because, despite all his faults and failings, Khalid was better than the alternative.”

  “I take it Omar disagreed.”

  “He said it would be journalistically unethical for him to tell Khalid what he’d learned.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He went back to the Middle East to try to turn a rumor into an actual news story.”

  “And you?”

  “I pretended to be Omar.”

  “How?”

  She created a Yahoo account with an address that was a play on Omar’s name: omwaf5179@yahoo.com. Then she sent a series of e-mails to the Saudi Ministry of Media requesting an interview with His Royal Highness Prince Khalid bin Mohammed. There was no reply—not unusual where the Saudis were concerned—so she dispatched a warning to an address she found in Omar’s contacts. It was someone close to KBM, a senior man in his royal court.

  “You told him about the plot?”

  “Not in any detail.”

  “Did you mention Reema?”

  “No.”

  A few days later Hanifa received an e-mail from the Saudi Embassy in Berlin. Khalid wanted Omar to return to Riyadh so they could meet. Hanifa’s response made it clear Omar would never set foot in the Kingdom again. A week passed. Then she received a final e-mail from the address of the senior man in Khalid’s court. He wanted Omar to come to the consulate in Istanbul the following Tuesday at one fifteen in the afternoon. Khalid would be waiting.

  45

  Berlin

  When Omar returned to Berlin, Hanifa told him what she had done in his name. Once again, they spoke in the Tiergarten, no phones, but this time it was obvious they were being followed. Omar was furious with her, though he hid his anger from the watching Saudi agents. His reporting trip to the Middle East had borne fruit. He had confirmed everything he had been told by his source in Cairo, including the involvement of a foreign power in the plot against Khalid. Omar now faced a difficult choice. If he wrote what he knew in the pages of Der Spiegel, Khalid would use the information to crush the coup and consolidate his grip on power. But if Omar allowed the conspiracy to unfold as planned, an innocent child might be harmed, or even killed.

  “And the invitation to come to Istanbul?” asked Gabriel.

  “Omar thought it was a trap.”

  “So why did he agree to go?”

  “Because I convinced him.” Hanifa was silent for a moment. “I’m to blame for Omar’s death. He would have never walked into that consulate were it not for me.”

  “How did you change his mind?”

  “By telling him he was going to be a father.”

  “You’re pregnant?”

  “I was pregnant. I’m not anymore.”

  Their conversation in the Tiergarten occurred on the Friday. Hanifa sent an e-mail to the address of Khalid’s aide and informed him that Omar would arrive at the consulate the following Tuesday, as requested, at 1:15 p.m. He spent Saturday and Sunday turning his recordings and notes into a coherent story for Der Spiegel, and on Monday he and Hanifa flew to Istanbul and checked into the InterContinental Hotel. That evening, as they strolled along the Bosporus, they were followed by both Saudi and Turkish surveillance teams.

  “On Tuesday morning, Omar was so nervous I was afraid he might
have a heart attack. I managed to calm him down. ‘If they’re going to kill you,’ I said, ‘the last place on earth they would do it is inside one of their consulates.’ We left the hotel at twelve thirty. The traffic was so terrible we barely made it on time. At the security barricades, Omar gave me his phone. Then he kissed me and went inside.”

  It was 1:14 p.m. Shortly after three, Hanifa rang the consulate’s main number and asked if Omar was there. The man who answered said Omar had never arrived for his appointment. And when Hanifa called back an hour later, a different man said Omar had already left. At four fifteen she saw several men walk out of the building with large pieces of luggage. His Royal Highness Prince Khalid bin Mohammed was not one of them.

  When Hanifa finally returned to the InterContinental, the room had been ransacked and Omar’s laptop was missing. She rang ZDF headquarters and filed an urgent report about a journalist from Der Spiegel who had disappeared after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Within forty-eight hours, much of the world was asking the same question: Where was Omar Nawwaf?

  Ten days later, after finally being allowed to enter the consulate, the Turkish police declared that Omar had been murdered while he was inside and that his body had been gruesomely dismembered and disposed of. Almost overnight, KBM, the great Arab reformer, beloved by the financial and intellectual elites of the West, became an untouchable.

  Hanifa remained in Istanbul until late October, monitoring the Turkish investigation. When she finally returned to Berlin she found that her apartment, like her room at the InterContinental, had been torn to pieces. All of Omar’s papers had been stolen, including the notes he had taken during his last reporting trip to the Middle East. Heartbroken, Hanifa consoled herself with the knowledge she was carrying Omar’s child. But in early November she suffered a miscarriage.

  Her first assignment after returning to work took her, of all places, to Geneva. Posing as the wife of a security-conscious Jordanian diplomat, she visited the International School, where she observed the afternoon exodus of the student body. One child, a girl of twelve, departed the school in an armored Mercedes limousine. The headmaster intimated the girl was the daughter of a wealthy Egyptian construction magnate. Hanifa, however, knew the truth. She was Reema bint Khalid Abdulaziz Al Saud, the child of the devil.

  “And you never tried to warn the devil his child was in danger?”

  “After what he’d done to Omar?” She shook her head. “Besides, I didn’t think I needed to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Khalid had Omar’s computer and his notes.”

  Unless, thought Gabriel, it wasn’t the Saudis who had taken them. “And when you heard Khalid had abdicated?”

  She wept with joy and posted a taunting message on her Twitter feed. A few days later she returned to Geneva to watch the afternoon departure of students from the International School. The child of the devil was nowhere to be seen.

  “And yet you remained silent.”

  Her dark eyes flashed. “If Khalid had killed your—”

  “He’d be dead already.” After a silence, Gabriel said, “But Khalid isn’t solely to blame for Omar’s death.”

  “Don’t you dare try to absolve him.”

  “It’s true he authorized it, but it wasn’t his idea. In fact, he wanted to meet with Omar to hear what he had to say.”

  “Why didn’t he?”

  “He was told Omar intended to kill him.”

  She was incredulous. “Omar never hurt anyone in his life. Who would say such a thing?”

  “Abdullah,” said Gabriel. “The next king of Saudi Arabia.”

  Hanifa’s eyes widened. “Abdullah engineered Omar’s murder so Khalid wouldn’t learn of the plot against him—is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “It all fits together very nicely, doesn’t it?”

  “Your version of the story matches Khalid’s perfectly. There’s one part, though, that makes no sense at all.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s no way a pair of veteran Middle East reporters like you and Omar didn’t make a copy of the story.”

  “Actually, Mr. Allon, I never said we didn’t.”

  They had made several, in fact. Hanifa had e-mailed encrypted copies of the story to her work account at ZDF and to a personal Gmail account. Fearful of the hackers at the Royal Data Center, she had also loaded the file onto three flash drives. One was carefully hidden in her apartment, and another was locked in her desk at ZDF’s Berlin bureau, which was protected by round-the-clock security.

  “And the third?” asked Gabriel.

  Hanifa produced a flash drive from a zippered compartment of her handbag and laid it on the table. Gabriel opened his laptop and inserted the device into one of the USB ports. An unnamed folder appeared on the screen. When he clicked it, a dialogue box requested a user name.

  “Yarmouk,” said Hanifa. “It’s the refugee camp—”

  “I know what it is.” Gabriel entered the seven characters, and a single icon appeared.

  “Omar,” said Hanifa as tears washed over her cheeks. “The password is Omar.”

  46

  Gulf of Aqaba

  It was a few minutes after four in the afternoon when El Al Flight 2372 from Berlin landed at Ben Gurion Airport. Gabriel, Mikhail, and Sarah squeezed into the backseat of an Office SUV waiting on the tarmac. Yossi Gavish, the bookish head of Research, was in the passenger seat. As the SUV lurched forward, he handed Gabriel a file. It was a forensic analysis of Crown Prince Abdullah’s checkered business career, based in part on the material supplied by Khalid during his visit to Gabriel’s home.

  “We’ve got it cold, boss. All the money came from you-know-who.”

  The SUV stopped next to a private Airbus H175 VIP helicopter that stood, rotors drooping, at the northern end of the airport. Khalid’s pilot was behind the controls. Yossi handed a Jericho .45 pistol to Mikhail and a Beretta 9mm to Gabriel.

  “The IAF will shadow you as far as they can. Once you get into Egyptian airspace, you’re on your own.”

  Gabriel left his Office BlackBerry and laptop in the SUV and followed Mikhail and Sarah into the Airbus’s luxuriously appointed cabin. They flew southward along the coast, over the towns of Ashdod and Ashkelon, then turned inland to avoid the airspace of the Gaza Strip. Fires burned in fields of grain on the Israeli side of the armistice line.

  “Hamas starts them with incendiary kites and balloons,” Mikhail explained to Sarah.

  “It’s not such an easy life.”

  He pointed toward the chaotic skyline of Gaza City. “But it’s better than theirs.”

  Gabriel read Yossi’s file twice as the Negev passed beneath them. The sky outside his window darkened slowly, and by the time they reached the southern end of the Gulf of Aqaba the sea was black. Tranquillity lay at anchor off Tiran Island, aglow with its distinctive neon-blue running lights. A shore craft hovered protectively off the massive superyacht’s port side, another off its starboard.

  The Airbus alighted on Tranquillity’s forward helipad—there were two—and the pilot shut down the engine. Mikhail exited the cabin and was confronted by a pair of Saudi security men in nylon jackets bearing Tranquillity’s insignia. One of the men held out a hand, palm up.

  “I have a better idea,” said Mikhail. “Why don’t you shove—”

  “It’s all right,” Khalid called down from somewhere in the upper reaches of the ship. “Send them up right away.”

  Gabriel and Sarah joined Mikhail on the foredeck. The two guards scrutinized them, Sarah especially, but made no offer to escort them to Khalid’s quarters. Unchaperoned, they wandered Tranquillity at their leisure, through the piano lounge and the discotheque, the conference room and the movie cinema, the billiards room, the steam room, the snow room, the ballroom, the fitness center, the archery center, the rock-climbing room, the children’s playroom, and the undersea observation center, where the many species of Red Sea aquatic life
darted and frolicked for their private amusement on the other side of the thick glass.

  They found Khalid on Deck 4, on the terrace outside the owner’s suite. He was wearing a zippered North Face fleece, faded jeans, and a pair of elegant Italian suede moccasins. The wind was making waves on the surface of a small swimming pool and fanning the flames of the inferno that crackled and spat in the outdoor fireplace. It was the last of his wood, he explained. Otherwise, he was well provisioned with food, fuel, and fresh water. “I can remain at sea for a year or more if necessary.” He rubbed his hands vigorously together. “It’s cold tonight. Perhaps we should go inside.”

  He led them into the suite. It was larger than Gabriel’s apartment in Jerusalem. “It must be nice,” he said as he surveyed his opulent surroundings. “I don’t know how I ever managed without a private discotheque or a snow room.”

  “They mean nothing to me.”

  “That’s because you’re the son of a king.” Gabriel displayed the file Yossi had given him at Ben Gurion. “But you might feel differently if you were merely the king’s half brother.”

  “I take it you reviewed the documents I gave you in Jerusalem.”

  “We used them only as a starting point.”

  “And where did they lead you?”

  “Here,” said Gabriel. “To Tranquillity.”

  The primary system by which the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia funnels the country’s immense oil wealth to members of the royal family is the official monthly stipend. Not all Saudi royals, however, are created equal. A lowly member of the House of Saud might collect a cash payment of a few thousand dollars, but those with direct blood ties to Ibn Saud receive far more. A grandchild of the Founder typically receives about $27,000 a month; a great-grandchild, about $8,000. Additional payments are available for the construction of a palace, for a marriage, or for the birth of a child. In Saudi Arabia, at least for members of the royal family, there is a financial incentive to procreate.