Seated at the head of the table and master of the council was Prince Fedallah, chief of the Internal Security Section of the Ministry of the Interior — a secret police apparatus that worked directly for the King.
Fedallah was a royal, but only a minor princeling, one from a line far removed from the inner circle of the ruling class. His present prominence testified to his ability; he'd won his post as the King's trusted spy and hatchet man not through family connections but through a ruthless mastery of intrigue.
He was lean, wiry, balding, with leathery skin stretched taut across a long, bony face. His eyebrows rose in points in their middles. The hairs looked like individual copper wires. His nose was beaklike; his mouth was downturned.
He wore a red-and-white checked kaffiyeh headpiece and a khaki outfit that fell somewhere between a military uniform and a safari suit. It was custom-tailored, with crisp, sharp edges.
He provided his own security. Elite troopers from the enforcement arm of his Special Section guarded the building. A pair of them stood watch outside the closed conference room doors.
The others at the table were a mixed group of royals, clerics, and military intelligence officers. Most of them wore white ceremonial robes over business suits or Western-style clothes.
Conservative ceremonial attire for a tradition-bound land. Good protective cover for the council, whose task had already set them well on the way toward perdition according to the more ulfraorthodox-minded of their coreligionists.
The majority were senior officials, graybeards, with a scattering of middle-aged members.
One of the youngest — and he was in his mid-forties — was Tariq bin Tassim. He was a prince, too. His family was much more closely connected to the ruling royals than Fedallah's.
He was one of the new breed, Western-educated, including a graduate degree from the Harvard Business School. He spoke English fluently; he had spent much time in America. He handled a number of major investments for leading royals, princes within the direct line of descent for the throne. He swam in a global monetary environment of the twenty-four-hour business cycle; of hedge funds, shell corporations, interlocking directorates and cartels, commodities and credits.
He piled up fortunes on Wall Street. He socialized with powerful U.S. politicians in Washington, D.C. He skied in Aspen, gambled at Monte Carlo, and yachted in the Aegean.
His friends included an ex-president of the United States, several current cabinet heads, a half-dozen or more senators, and a dozen senior congressional representatives.
A handsome man, he had dramatic features: thick, dark, wavy hair; dark brown eyes; a neatly trimmed ginger-colored beard.
He sat at the middle of the table, on Minister Fedallah's right-hand side. He was not the youngest council member. That role belonged to Prince Hassani.
Hassani had excellent royal connections but a somewhat checkered past. He was in his late thirties but looked younger. His watery-eyed gaze was blurred and unfocused behind the thick lenses of his black plastic-framed spectacles. His spade-shaped chin beard was thin and wispy.
Hassani's Western sojourns had been disappointing and unsuccessful. He'd had personal problems. He'd attended college in California and had lost direction, going off his moral compass. Repatriation to the kingdom, and extensive reimmersion in the ultraorthodox tenets of the kingdom's fundamentalist Wahabi sect, were the cure to his malaise, which was, at bottom, spiritual.
Farther up the table, seated in the penultimate place of power on Fedallah's right hand, was Imam Omar, better known throughout the kingdom and beyond as the Smiling Cleric.
He projected the image of a sweet, good-natured older uncle. He wore a white headpiece, glasses, and a bushy gray beard. His eyes were bright and merry. He smiled readily and often, and was ever ready with an old saw or pious saying.
The Imam represented a different source of power than royal connections or oil wealth. His was the power of faith and of the faithful. Traditionalist tenets are encoded in the Saudi Arabian operating system, at every level of the society. Even the highest are careful not to provoke the disapprobation of the powerful fundamentalist clerics, whose wrath has been known to unleash a whirlwind of mass fervor that can topple a throne.
Wahabism, the state religion of Saudi Arabia, is one of the strictest and most rigorously fundamentalist branches of Islam. The variety of Wahabism preached and practiced by Imam Omar was harsh and ascetic, rejecting much of the modern world, even the modern Muslim world.
Yet no matter how harsh his decrees, or uncompromising his rejectionism, his demeanor was unfailingly merry, with a twinkle in his eye. He was the spiritual leader of an influential mosque in Riyadh, one attended by some of the most devout and observant members of the royal dynasty.
The mosque was the beneficiary of royal patronage and largesse, receiving hundreds of millions of petro- dollars. Some of this money was used to fund a network of madrassas, religious schools, throughout not only the kingdom but also in Yemen, Jordan, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
A second branch of his organization was an equally far-flung chain of charities.
A third branch was the Imam's connections to the kingdom's religious police, the self-styled Committee for the Prevention of Vice and the Propagation of Virtue. Established in every city, town, and village, it consisted of thousands of zealots who volunteered to patrol and police their fellows to ensure orthodox obedience and suppress all deviations from the fundamentalism line. They had the authority to make arrests, close buildings, and administer whippings on the spot to violators of religious law.
Not a private army, perhaps, but a private police force, and one not necessarily under the sway of royal overlordship.
Which made Imam Omar a powerful man indeed. His influence reached both the urban masses of the Arab street and the desert dwellers of the inland settlements. He was a powerful force for tradition. His opposition to a government plan or decree was often enough to kill it.
A dangerous man, in a kingdom so precariously balanced on the edge of a sword.
The meeting having been called to order, Minister Fedallah addressed the other members of the council. 'As you know, the King has charged me with carrying out a program vital to the security of the realm,' he began.
The others knew it, all right. Fedallah never missed a chance to remind them of his position of preferment near the throne.
He went on, 'His Majesty has charged me to carry out his plan, and I picked each and every one of you to serve as instruments of his will. Our task is not an easy one. It will continue to increase in difficulty. The purity of our intent is subject to misunderstanding by the very countrymen we seek to help. But there is no other alternative.
'To safeguard kingdom and throne, we must bestow a supreme gift to those very forces who would destroy us — the Americans. We must gift them with a surplus of the oil which they crave like a creature of Satan craves the blood of the innocent. This is our sacred task.'
The planners and policymakers in Washington had labeled the mission Operation Petro Surge.
The Saudis of the secret council called it Cloak of Night.
Behind it lay the age-old enmity between the two leading branches of Islam, the division between Sunni and Shi'a. The Arab sect was the Sunnis; the Iranian sect was the Shiites.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, the leading Shiite power of Iran was offset by the Iraqi regime of dictator Saddam Hussein, a Sunni. Saddam and the Iranian ayatollahs fought a war in the 1980s that saw titanic clashes and bloodletting on a scale not seen since the battles of World War II. It ended in a draw.
The First Gulf War drastically checked Saddam's dreams of conquest, yet left the balance of power between Baghdad and Tehran fundamentally unchanged. The Second Gulf War, the American liberation of Iraq, demonstrated the unpalatable truth that whatever else his faults were, Saddam knew how to rule his country. He ruled it with instant obliteration of foes and dissenters, mass executions, wholesale torture, and relentless terror. Thereby welding the fractious Iraqis into a nation.
Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. The hole in the landscape left by the absence of Saddam was filled with the Iranians.
Iran's prospects for regional supremacy were bright. Few riper or more tempting targets for takeover existed in the region than the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Its numbers were thin and threadbare compared to the far more
