The Secret Soldier (10 page)

But recently the partnership had frayed. Blaming bin Laden for the problems was the easy answer, Ambassador Kurland thought. But bin Laden spoke for millions of Saudis who felt they were living under a dictatorship disguised as a monarchy.

Now the terrorists had struck again. The dead in the Khozama bombing included an American, David Landie, a reporter for the
Chicago Tribune.
The day before the bombing, Landie had interviewed Kurland at Quincy House. The embassy’s public-relations officer had warned Kurland to stick to his talking points. Even so, Kurland was happy to talk to an American journalist. Few visited Riyadh anymore, aside from a couple stalwarts from
The New York Times.

Landie was researching an article about the success, or lack thereof, of the camps where the Saudis “re-educated” former Guantánamo detainees. The camps had gained a reputation as a joke, since so many ex-Gitmo prisoners had returned to terrorism. Now, instead of waiting to see whether Landie quoted him accurately, Kurland had the grim task of helping repatriate what was left of his body. Kurland wondered if the Khozama bombers included any ex-prisoners. He suspected that Landie’s family would not appreciate the irony.

 

 

THE PHONE ON THE
bedside table trilled. “Yes.”

“Mr. Ambassador.” The voice belonged to Clint Rana, the career foreign service officer who served as Kurland’s personal aide and translator. “Dwayne Maggs would like to meet this morning. Says it’s urgent.” Maggs was deputy chief of the CIA station in Saudi Arabia, as cool as they came. Kurland couldn’t remember Maggs using the word
urgent
before. He checked his Rolex: 8:15.

“Tell him nine. Thank you, Clint.”

Kurland looked through his bedroom’s bulletproof windows to the embassy’s tennis court. His wife was practicing forehands with Roberto, a cook who doubled as her trainer. Roberto favored 70s-style headbands that showed off his long hair, and tight white shorts that showed off his other good qualities. Kurland wasn’t worried. He and Barbara had been married longer than Roberto had been alive. As he watched, Barbara banged a line drive into the net and grunted, “Gosh dang.”

Kurland couldn’t hear the words, but after thirty-six years, he knew. He gingerly made his way down the back staircase, wincing with each step. He’d torn his left ACL skiing five years before. The knee had never fully recovered. Now the first slivers of arthritis had come to his hips, scouts of what would no doubt be an occupying army. Getting old stank. The poets could dress it up all they liked, but the reality was simple: Getting old stank. Though it came with a few compensations, Kurland thought, like knowing what your wife would murmur when she shanked a forehand.

And here she was, in a blue skirt and white top, tall and longlimbed. She still looked exactly like the sophomore he’d seen at his spring formal at the University of Illinois. Well, not
exactly
. But close.

“Morning, darling.”

“Morning, dear.”

“You looked great.”

“Not how I felt.” She mimed a couple of forehands. “Practice, practice.”

“Well, you looked great.”

“Roberto looked great. As he always does.”

“Quién es más macho,”
Kurland murmured.

“Are we finished for the morning, Mrs. Kurland?” Roberto shouted.

“Indeed we are, Roberto.”

“May I?” Kurland took her racket. “Make sure to tell him to wear tighter shorts tomorrow.”

“Oh, I will.”

“Do you think he gets the joke?”

“I think. I’m not sure.”

They walked side by side to the white wicker table at the edge of the court. A jug of ice water and a pot of steaming coffee awaited. Kurland pulled back a chair for his wife and poured water for her and coffee for himself. From the table he could just see the gun emplacements atop the walls around the court. At the moment, they were unmanned.

“Another day in paradise.”

“Amen to that.” She raised her water glass in a mock toast. “Anything new?”

“They broke up another cell last night.” In the wake of the attacks, the classified cables had been even more disturbing than usual. Saudi police had arrested a four-person cell planning an assault on an Aramco compound in Dhahran, home to the foreign engineers who maintained the Saudi oil fields.

“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.

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 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.”

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.