The Secret Soldier

didn’t trust him. He was more conservative than Abdullah, and Kurland sometimes wondered what would happen if Saeed became king.

Another question occurred to Kurland. He hesitated, wondering whether he would sound dumb for asking, then decided that he needed an answer. “Dwayne. This kind of operation, is it hard to pull off?”

“Harder than it looks, sir. Three operations, at least twelve guys, timed to cause maximum damage, in two countries and on the Gulf. That requires planning and operational support we haven’t seen since — well, since September eleventh. And these came out of nowhere.”

“I asked Barbara this morning if she’d go home,” Kurland said. Immediately, he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. His conversations with his wife were his own business. But what Maggs had told him weighed heavy. He’d known living here wouldn’t be easy, but he hadn’t expected the strain to reach this level.

“Sir?”

“My wife. Barbara. She said no.” Kurland felt almost as though he’d betrayed some elemental weakness, confessed his own desire to leave.

“I understand your concern, Mr. Ambassador.”

“Please. Call me Graham.”

“Graham. But trust me, she’s safe. With our marines, these defenses, it would take an army to get inside this place. I mean that literally. An army.”

“We just have to worry about the rest of the country, then.”

“Yessir. Got that right.”

CHAPTER 5

JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA

CONSERVATIVE MUSLIMS BELIEVE THAT MAKING IMAGES OF THE world or the people in it is disrespectful to Allah. They don’t like having their photographs taken. The only art on their walls is calligraphy of Quranic verses. The billboards on Saudi Arabian expressways don’t show people. Clothing brands — including Victoria’s Secret, which has stores in the Kingdom — advertise themselves with scarves and bottles of perfume rather than models. Even the happy families eating pizza on Sbarro signs have their eyes pixelated out.

But the prohibition against human images doesn’t apply to everyone. The face of the Saudi monarch, Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz, looms on billboards, posters, even on the Kingdom’s pastel-colored currency. Everywhere, Abdullah smiles under his ghutra, his white head scarf. His portraitists have been gentle. He is a big man with a heavy black goatee and wide, kind eyes. He is everyone’s favorite uncle.

Once, maybe, Abdullah was the man the billboards depicted.

* * *

THE KING SAT ALONE in his third-floor study in his palace in Jeddah, the second-largest city in Saudi Arabia. The palace compound occupied a mile of Red Sea beachfront. A twenty-foot concrete wall separated it from the city. Signs along the wall warned drivers against stopping or taking pictures.

A few months before, a French doctor visiting Jeddah for a conference had made the mistake of ignoring the warnings. In search of a souvenir of his trip to the Kingdom, he snapped photos of the wall and its entrance. Before he got back in his car, a half-dozen unmarked cars and Jeeps screamed out of the palace to surround him and his driver. Only the immediate intercession of the French consulate and the doctor’s abject apologies had saved him from a nasty run-in with the Saudi judicial system.

Behind the wall, the compound included dormitory quarters for maids, police, and drivers, a garage with a dozen armored limousines, even a firehouse and helipad. The palace itself contained more than one hundred rooms. From the outside, it appeared squat and thick-walled, like the mud forts that had once protected Riyadh. The exterior was an illusion. Inside, the palace was a modern Versailles, a maze of long rooms with fifteen-foot ceilings, filled with gold saucers, antique wool carpets, and crystal chandeliers. It had four elevators, one capable of lifting a car to the third floor, so the king could come and go without having to step outside. At full blast, its cooling system could chill the entire building to fifty degrees Fahrenheit, even in July and August, when the air outside was seventy degrees warmer.

Abdullah’s quarters occupied the third floor of the palace. The royal bedroom took up the entire south end. Besides the obligatory marble-and-Jacuzzi bathroom, it included a separate sauna and a massage room. On the north end of the palace was his study, which included a balcony overlooking the Red Sea, which divided Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In happier days, Abdullah had sat safely behind a bulletproof partition on the balcony and sipped pomegranate juice and watched boats putter along the water. But he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been outside.

Abdullah was tired. Beyond tired. Weariness had crept into his bones, joints, even his skin. He didn’t understand how skin could be tired. But his was, papery and dusky. His veins tunneled through it. At the mirror, he didn’t recognize himself, the puffy bags that had grown under his eyes, the deep cave of his mouth. Once he had been the hardiest of his brothers, a true Bedouin. He loved the desert. In 1953, after his father died, he took servants and camels and made his way south into the Empty Quarter, the Rub al-Khali, where hundreds of miles separated the oases and even the scorpions barely survived.

His father and sixty warriors had lived in the Empty Quarter in the winter of 1902, before Abdul-Aziz led the attack on Riyadh that was the first step in creating modern Saudi Arabia. To honor his father’s memory, to prove he could survive the desert, Abdullah had lived in the Quarter for a month. Now he could hardly walk. With every step, he felt his legs quiver under his big body. He forced himself to push on, though he wanted to sit and sleep for days. When had this happened to him? When had his flesh lost its vigor?

He didn’t tell his doctors, but the world was turning monochromatic, the white desert light fading to gray. Dates tasted like they were wrapped in plastic, their sticky ooze only faintly sweet. He knew what was happening to him. He had all the money in the world, the very best doctors. And nothing could stop it.

If Allah wanted to take him, he would have to succumb. All men did. The dead are children of the dead, the preachers said. But while he was alive, no one would steal his kingdom. He imagined the attack on the hotel in Riyadh, his own people killed in their beds, and a fresh fury coursed through his veins. He would raise his sword over the heads of these terrorists and—

A KNOCK STARTLED HIM. Had he been sleeping? He napped more and more. He wiped his mouth, looked at the gold Patek Philippe clock he’d installed on his desk a month before when he realized that he could no longer read his watch. A quarter past eleven. “Yes.”

“It’s Miteb. With Mansour.”

“Come in, then.” Abdullah pressed a button under the desk to alert his steward that he wanted coffee. Miteb, Abdullah’s half-brother, stepped in. Miteb was Abdullah’s closest adviser and dearest friend, the only man he could truly say he trusted. But Miteb was nearly as old as Abdullah. In the last five years, he’d had two heart attacks. He could barely walk.

Mansour, the director of the Saudi mukhabarat—the country’s secret police — followed. Mansour was the son of Saeed, another of Abdullah’s many half-brothers, and thus was Abdullah’s half- nephew. His mother was a legendary beauty, and Mansour had inherited her round face and light skin. He was nearly fifty, but his eyes were unlined and his robes flowed smoothly over his flat stomach. In truth, Mansour was unmanly, Abdullah thought. He had never understood the desert. He limped slightly, the result of a motorcycle accident two decades earlier.

“You’re late.”

Mansour knelt, kissed Abdullah’s hand. “I apologize, Your Highness.”

“Sit, then. Hamoud is bringing coffee.” Abdullah pulled himself up from his desk and shuffled over to his favorite leather chair, a gift from the first President Bush. Miteb sat across from him on a yellow eighteenth-century French couch that had cost the Kingdom a few thousand barrels of oil. And Mansour took a low wooden stool beside Abdullah’s chair.

A faint knock. “Come, Hamoud.”

Hamoud arranged the coffee, keeping his eyes down. In thirty years as Abdullah’s steward, he had looked