The Secret Soldier

“Isn’t that good news?”

“Barbara. There’s something we need to talk about.”

“No, there isn’t.”

“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“I don’t want you to leave. I want you to consider leaving.”

“Is there a difference?”

He sipped his coffee. He’d known she would say no, but he had to keep trying. “It’s for your safety.”

“I’ve never felt safer. Every time I turn around, I see a marine. And Joshua himself couldn’t bring down these walls.”

“It seems like overkill, but it’s not. Trust me.”

“When my book’s done, I’ll think about it.” His wife was writing a novel set in Riyadh and centered on the lives of rich Saudi women. Her second book. “These ladies, the chance to talk to them, it’s once in a lifetime.” A couple times a month, a black-clad ghost arrived at Quincy House to chat with Barbara. Once the women were inside, their burqas came off, revealing the fanciest designer clothes Kurland had ever seen. He wondered if they intentionally wasted money on Chanel skirts and Dior jackets to spite the regime that made them cover themselves.

“That’s at least a year away.”

“Problem solved, then.” She drained her water glass and stood. “I’ve got to wash before I start to smell like one of those camels.” Months before, Kurland and Barbara had visited a ranch where King Abdullah kept hundreds of prize camels. At the king’s urging, Kurland had sat on one. He’d encouraged his wife to do the same. She still hadn’t forgiven him.

She kissed his bald head and walked off. He watched her go, amazed, as always, that he still loved her so much after so many years.

HIS GOOD FEELING LASTED only until he arrived in his office on the embassy’s top floor, where Dwayne Maggs waited. Maggs, who didn’t speak Arabic, had gotten the job after an extraordinary tour as a CIA security officer in Pakistan. Kurland didn’t know exactly what Maggs had done, and Maggs wouldn’t say. But it had turned him into a legend. Maggs and his team were half the reason that Kurland hadn’t insisted that Barbara leave. The other half being that he hated fighting with her.

“This came in this morning,” Maggs said, handing over a flashcoded cable.

Beneath the usual security warnings, the cable explained that the National Security Agency had intercepted calls and e-mails between Al Qaeda’s lieutenants in Pakistan — now called AQM, short for Al Qaeda Main — and the group’s cells in Saudi Arabia, called AQAP, for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. An attachment detailed the messages, leaving Kurland wishing for a dictionary that translated NSA and CIA lingo to English.

02:23:01 GST: TM from mobile phone +92-91-XXX–XXX [Peshawar,PAK] to +966-54-XXX–XXXX [Jeddah, KSA]: ????

02:25:37 GST: TM from mobile phone +966-54-XXX–XXXX tomobile phone +92-91-XXX–XXX: La. La.

03:01:18 GST: IM from [email protected] [IP address,Karachi, PAK] to [email protected] [IP address, Riyadh,KSA]: What is this?

03:14:56 GST: IM from [email protected] [email protected]: Inshallah. [God’s will.]

And so on, for three more pages. Kurland read the attachment twice, didn’t get it. These crazy kids, with their IMs and their TMs and their suicide bombs. “Explain,” he said to Maggs.

“TM, that’s text message. IM, that’s instant message. The bracketed information is the location of the phone or computer where the messages were sent. NSA redacts the precise location, if we have it, and the exact phone number or e-mail address, for OPSEC.”

“Operational security,” Kurland said, glad to be able to play along at last. “Dwayne, I spent the last thirty years building houses for hicks.” In fact, Kurland had run one of the largest residential construction companies in the Midwest. “Help me out here. Isn’t there always traffic like this before these attacks?”

“Yes, sir. But the timing, these e-mails, they’re all after the attacks. Not before. These guys, what you have to remember about them, sir, the dumb ones are dead. We’ve killed them. The weak ones, they’ve surrendered. The ones who are left, they’re tough. And smart. They’re hiding up there in the mountains, and they know the risk they run every time they pick up a phone. They know we’re on them, and they don’t make these calls lightly. And look, they’re not taking credit or congratulating each other. They’re asking what happened. It looks like AQM—”

“Al Qaeda Main—”

“Right. The guys closest to bin Laden. I’ll try to keep the acronyms to a minimum, sir. Bottom line, looks like they didn’t have a clue this was coming. And the ones here, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, they didn’t know, either. One message, they say they didn’t. The other, they keep their options open, like they’re waiting to see if maybe they can get credit even though they didn’t do it.”

“Is it possible they would hide their involvement? Make these calls to trick us?”

“Possible. But that hasn’t been their style the last few years. And given the risk of making these calls, they’d need a good reason to play that game.”

“I see.”

“There’s something else. As you can see from these intercepts, we have these guys pinned tight. If they do manage to get an op going, we usually hear about it pretty damn quick. We don’t always have enough intel to stop it, but we at least know it’s coming. This time, nothing.”

“So add it all up; you’re telling me this wasn’t Al Qaeda.”

“I had to bet, I’d say no.”

“Who was it, then?”

“I wouldn’t even venture to guess. When I get any intel, you’ll be the first to know. But right now we don’t have anything.”

“I understand,” Kurland said. Though he didn’t, not entirely. The United States spent fifty billion dollars a year on intelligence. He didn’t expect all his questions to be answered right away, but he would have liked some idea what was happening.

Maggs seemed to sense his dissatisfaction. “Sir. I promise you there are literally a thousand people in Langley and Fort Meade, and here, too, working on getting the answer. In Qatar, the FBI can examine the tanker, and in Bahrain the FBI will have access to the bar. But from what I hear, it’s a real mess, and it’s going to take time to sort out. Here, we’ll have to depend on the Saudis. They should be able to trace the car that hit the Khozama. If it wasn’t stolen.”

“And can we expect them to cooperate? Since an American citizen was killed.”

“One American, three British, eight Kuwaitis, twelve Japanese, and twenty-five Saudis, sir. I think we can expect that they’ll give us what they choose when they choose.”

“What about the cell they broke up last night? That should help.”

“I’ve only heard bits and pieces, but I think that’s unlikely. Typically, something like this happens, the mukhabarat arrest whoever’s on their lists, try to prove they’re on top of things.”

Kurland had already left a condolence message for King Abdullah. He wondered if he ought to call Abdullah again. Or Saeed, the defense minister. Or even Nayef, the interior minister. But he decided to wait. He didn’t have anything concrete to offer, and Abdullah was difficult to reach. He was spending a lot of time in his palace in Jeddah, the Kingdom’s second city. Which didn’t make sense to Kurland. Shouldn’t the king be here, in Riyadh? Kurland had started to wonder if the king, now nearly ninety, was turning senile. Or worse.

Saeed, the second most powerful man in the Kingdom, still seemed sound enough mentally, but Kurland