The Secret Soldier

big speech about it. He doesn’t trust the United States, and he never will. He thinks the clerics are right, that there’s only room for one religion. And Saeed, when he dies, he’ll be no different than Abdullah. He’ll want his son on the throne.”

“Mansour.”

“Yes. And I’ve decided that Abdullah is right about Mansour. He believes only in power.”

“Is Abdullah faithful?”

“Yes. More than I am. But you don’t understand what it’s like to be our age. We see death around every corner. We can’t pretend that Allah will protect us any longer. But then Allah’s kept his bargain with us. We’ve had our lives. What I mean is that whether you believe matters less at our age. What will be will be. Allah will judge us all on his own scale, heaven or hell. And if it turns out to be nothing at all on the other side — and yes, we all wonder that, too — we can’t help that, either.”

Wells found himself liking this old man. “You think Khalid will be a good king?”

“I don’t know. But it’s what Abdullah wants, and I’ve pledged to help him.” Miteb looked Wells over. “I know what you think. You think, Why help these men? What gives them the right to all this money that comes out of the ground? But this is our system. Maybe in fifty years, we’ll have something different. A constitutional monarchy like Jordan. But it’s impossible now. The princes and the clerics won’t allow it. And look at Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela, Libya. Wherever there’s oil, there are dictators and war.”

As Miteb had said, Wells was inclined to stay out of this battle for a sticky black throne. Yet Miteb had made a persuasive case. He hadn’t pretended that Khalid would be a perfect ruler. He had said only that Khalid was better than the alternatives.

“All right. Let’s say I’ll help you. Tell me, how do the attacks last week relate to all this?”

“Possibly they don’t. Possibly it’s coincidence, Al Qaeda picked last week for more attacks. But I don’t think so.”

“I don’t think so, either.”

“So it’s a new group. One capable of launching three attacks at once. Avoiding detection from America. Hitting a hotel in the center of Riyadh. They’re well-trained and well-financed. They must have had friends inside the muk. Maybe the very top, maybe not, but certainly some help.”

“Say you’re right. What’s the point?”

“To create instability. Anger my brother, make him overreact. His temper gets worse every week. I think because he’s in so much pain. So he lashes out at his brothers and the senior clerics. Then Saeed goes to the other princes and says, ‘We all love Abdullah, but we can’t trust him anymore. He needs to step down.’ Already they whisper that he’s paranoid.”

From what Wells had seen of Abdullah, the scenario was plausible. “That’s why Abdullah can’t strip Saeed and Mansour of their power quietly?”

“If he tries to move openly against Saeed, Saeed will say that Abdullah is losing his mind. Abdullah made a mistake when he said that he wanted his son to be king. We have a proverb, ‘Your tongue is your steed. Guard it and it guards you, abuse it and it abuses you.’ My brother spoke too soon. That gave Saeed the opening, set everything else in motion. But what’s done is done. Abdullah couldn’t help himself.”

“What if Saeed has won already?” Wells said.

“It’s possible. But my brother has been popular. Especially among ordinary people. And if Saeed and Mansour were sure they’d won, they’d have no need to provoke Abdullah. They would just wait for the succession.”

“So. Now that I understand, what is it you want me to do?”

A brown leather satchel lay at Miteb’s feet. Miteb reached down and slipped his palsied fingers through the handle. He pulled it up, his wrists shaking. Wells could almost feel him straining.

“Prince—” Wells reached over.

“No. Let me.” Inch by inch, Miteb edged the satchel higher, his lips quivering. I’ll never be that old, Wells promised himself. Never. Even if I am. Finally Miteb dropped the satchel on the seat — and let out a giant fart that filled the Maybach.

“Smells like a barrel of oil,” Wells said.

Suddenly, both men were laughing. “One day you’ll understand.”

“Inshallah, I hope not.”

INSIDE THE SATCHEL, WELLS found a spy’s treasure trove.

An Algerian passport, real, with a name and date of birth but no photo. What operatives called a blank. A battered cell phone, its screen cracked. An empty wallet, its brown leather splattered with blood. A Nikon D300, a professional-grade SLR, with a telephoto lens. A second camera, a Canon small enough to be hidden inside a man’s palm. A half-dozen flat white plastic rectangles embedded with black strips — passkeys for a hotel or office building. Three architectural maps of a fan-shaped neighborhood that Wells didn’t recognize. A plastic police evidence bag that contained a wad of riyals, the Saudi currency, and a money clip of hundred-dollar bills.

“The police in Riyadh found all this a few days ago. We were fortunate. Mansour’s men weren’t involved. There was an auto accident. A big truck ran through a traffic light, hit a car, crushed it and killed the driver. When the police came, they found the car was stolen and the driver had no identification. When the police opened the trunk, they found the passport and the camera and called their captain.”

“Why didn’t they tell the Interior Ministry?”

“The head of the police in Riyadh is loyal to Abdullah. He’s ordered that this type of material be passed to him so that he can give it to the mukhabarat himself. Sometimes files are lost before they reach the muk. You understand?”

“Saeed and Mansour don’t know you’ve found all this.”

“Correct.”

“But you told me the police haven’t identified this man. How can you be so sure that he’s connected to the men behind the attacks last week?”

Miteb had no answer.

“If this is all you have, you and your brother are really drawing thin.”

“‘Drawing thin’? I don’t understand.”

Wells held up the phone and the plastic evidence bag. “The phone and money were in the driver’s pocket?”

Miteb nodded. “The phone doesn’t work anymore. But it still has its memory. And it shows three calls from mobile phones with Lebanese area codes.”

Which might not have been made from Lebanon at all, Wells thought. “Did he have anything else? Receipts? Credit cards? A map with a big black X marking the spot of his hideout?”

Miteb smiled. “No map. As for the rest, I can ask, but I don’t think so. Everything the police found is here. You see they even kept the money from the wallet.”

“We’re lucky for that.”

Wells took the money from the plastic bag. He set the clip with the hundred-dollar bills aside and thumbed through the Saudi currency, thirty or so bills, ranging from one-riyal to five-hundred-riyal notes, their edges streaked with blood.

“You don’t need to take that,” Miteb said. “If you need money, tell me.”

“Here’s a thirty-second tutorial on tradecraft, Prince. The man who died in that crash was a professional. Or at least professionally trained. He kept almost everything in his head. But nobody can remember everything.” Wells thumbed through the hundred-dollar bills, then examined the riyals more closely. “You’ve got to give yourself help. And even the most careful cops aren’t likely to check your banknotes for hidden information.”

Wells held up a one-riyal note. Four numbers were written in tiny Arabic script in the upper-right corner: 5421. On the next note, four more numbers in the lower-right corner: 8239.

“See these? I find three more bills like this, I have a sixteen-digit credit-card number with a three-digit pin — personal identification number. Let’s say my handlers are giving me a new card once a month. And they don’t want me to keep the physical cards. That’s a lot to remember, nineteen digits. This way I don’t have to. I put the bills together and I have my card. I can use it on the Internet whenever I like. And if the card gets canceled and I need a new one, I spend the money and get fresh banknotes and repeat the process.”