Clean Kill

NINE MORE MINUTES OF rest, with Delara in his arms. Swanson thought of the immense potential for catastrophe that would soon be exposed, forcing untold actions and reactions. Ten minutes might be all that he had left. It might be all any of them had left.

18

AL-KHOBZ, SAUDI ARABIA

RISHA AL-HARBI AND HER best friends, Hanaa and Taja, were rocking at the mall. The three teenagers wore identical flowing black abayas that covered them from their shoulders to their feet. It was above the shoulders where their conservative nation’s customs could be bent a bit, and the girls had colorful scarves over their heads and had spent hours applying makeup to their eyes while shaping and polishing their nails, the only parts of their bodies that were visible. They were total social rebels.

Risha was the worst offender. Beneath her cumbersome and tent-like abaya, she even wore pink sneakers, pink socks, a T-shirt, and a short denim skirt. Her crimson nails flashed with flecks of gold.

“He is so cute!” Hanaa checked out the picture of a boy on Risha’s cell phone, a strong and smiling youngster with a thick mop of black hair and piercing eyes. She passed it to Taja.

“I cannot believe that you really called him,” said Taja. “Why do you do these things, Risha? We get numbered all the time, but I would never actually call a boy. My family would freak.”

“I have never actually spoken to him. We just text,” Risha argued. “What’s the harm? It’s not like we’re mingling or anything.” A tune from the latest boy band pounded through the iPod ear buds beneath her pink scarf and she nodded with the rhythm. The slang language of the West came easily to them because of their access to cell phones and satellite television. They were even more technologically advanced than the earlier Saudi girls of the Oprah generation. They were connected!

“That picture is a lot more than just being texted,” Taja warned. She lifted her full niqab veil, sipped some mocha frappachino, and wiped foam from her lips. Even the Starbucks at the Khobz Mall could be a dangerous place for girls. “Erase that picture. Please. I don’t want you to get into trouble.”

“What’s his name?” asked Hanaa.

“Gabir,” replied Risha as she theatrically hugged the portable cell phone to her body.

“Please tell me that you did not give him your real name!” Hanaa’s eyes were wide. The risk that her friend was taking was incredible.

“Yes. Of course. He loves me!”

Both of her shocked friends laughed nervously. Hanaa said, “This boy, your dreamy Gabir, did not even know you existed until two days ago! He and his friends spotted you coming out of this mall and when we got into your father’s Mercedes limo, they followed us. I remember them blaring their horns and cutting around in their cars and holding out cardboard signs with their telephone numbers. You actually checked them out while I was screaming in terror.”

Risha looked again at the picture. “Remember how Gabir actually opened the door of the car he was in and stepped out while it was still moving at fifty kilometers an hour, sliding along the pavement on his leather slippers like he was a surfer? So brave. I just had to contact him. He is my beautiful lion!”

“Your lion wants to drive you out to the desert and rape you,” scoffed Taja. “Then it would only be a question of who would kill you first: your father, your brothers, or the Committee on Virtue.”

Risha looked hard at her friends. “I won’t be raped. Ever.” She opened her fashionable shoulder bag wide enough for them to see the slim knife that she always carried, a little four-inch switchblade with a smooth ivory handle that she had taken from her father’s collection. She defiantly shifted the contents of her purse some more to also show them a narrow can of pepper spray, then she snapped the purse shut. “I will kill anyone who tries to attack me or kill myself before it can happen.”

“Nothing good can come of this. Think about what you’re doing.”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing,” Risha argued. “We’re all sixteen years old now and are stuck in this awful, oily place. I’m a faithful girl and follow the teachings of the Prophet, praise be unto him, but I reject being controlled by men and stupid laws that are not in the Koran. They just make up this stuff! Women can’t ride horses. Women can’t vote. Women can’t be seen in public with unrelated males, so we cannot go on innocent dates. There is not a movie theater for us to go see in the entire country and the censors clip out the good pictures in magazines before we can see them. I’m really, really tired of all of it.” She paused and took a deep breath. “I want out.”

Hanaa pushed back in her chair. “You have been watching too much MTV, Risha. You will be soon wearing a bikini top and bootie shorts in public. Calm down and face reality. You will stay here, just like us, and we will all be married off to some distant cousins or friends of our fathers. A dull but pleasant life with a rich man who pampers us, just like our mothers and our grandmothers.”

“You want to leave, too,” Risha shot back. “I know you do. Remember that Victoria’s Secret catalogue that we found? What’s the point in wearing that sexy stuff if you cannot show it off?”

Taja was not as brave. She loved Risha and Hanaa but both of them pushed the bounds of propriety. “Be quiet, Risha. People can hear.”

“So let them listen. I don’t care.” She went back to her cell phone when it buzzed in her palm, and passed it over to Hanaa. “Gabir wants me to send him a picture.”

“Don’t you dare!” Taja was horrified.

“Oh, I won’t.” Then the dark eyes flashed beneath the long bangs of dark hair that swept across her forehead. She spun the cell phone around, held it at arm’s length and snapped a picture of herself, holding up the cardboard coffee cup with the company’s green logo in plain view. She attached it to a text message and hit the SEND button.

“You fool!” Taja hissed. “Don’t you understand what you just did? He already knew your name and now he knows exactly where we are because this is the only Starbucks in Khobz. What will we do if he comes here with his friends? He can blackmail you into doing anything he wants just by threatening to show your picture to your family, or even to the muttaween. He owns you now, Risha. He owns you! We must leave.”

“Well, you didn’t do anything at all, Taja,” said Risha. “Anyway, Gabir would never betray me, so nothing is going to happen. The Religious Police cannot monitor cell phone traffic and Wi-Fi. So we can go, but let’s do some shopping first. I feel like buying a bright new scarf with daddy’s money. And wouldn’t it be just terrible if Gabir actually decided to come down to the mall for a cafe au lait?”

RISHA WAS THE FIRST one grabbed when the girls emerged from the upscale clothing boutique on the second floor, then rough hands snatched Hanaa and Taja and pinned them both against the glass display window.

“You little whore!” roared a deep voice as a man with a shaggy beard and in the robes of the muttaween, the feared Religious Police, hurled Risha to the floor. As she fell backward, the abaya rode up past her ankles, and then was snatched upward further along with the edge of her denim skirt to expose her knees and thighs. The first stroke of the camel-hide whip was instant and hard, and laid a bloody stripe across her right shin.

Risha screamed, more from surprise than pain. She had hit the floor so hard that she bounced and slid a few feet, and clawed for balance. The second whip stroke slashed her right knee and brought another yelp, this time in pain. Two muttaween were wielding the whips, one on each side of her, the signature loose red clothes circling their heads and with their eyes lustfully on her naked legs. She heard Taja and Hanaa scream and saw them being held against the storefront by other muttaween.

“Stop! Don’t hurt me! I have done nothing wrong,” she yelled as loud as possible.

Another whip stroke came down, but she rolled away from it, only to go into the path of the whip of the second man. It sliced her thigh with a deep sting and blood flowed from the wound. A crowd was gathering and some young men were laughing, one of them recording the beating on his video camera. In the front row, cheering on the whip handlers, was Gabir.