The Secret Soldier (11 page)

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 directly at his master only a handful of times. “Anything else, Your Highness?”

“No. Go on.” Hamoud left. “Was your flight smooth?” Mansour had flown in this morning from Riyadh, the capital, five hundred miles east.

“Yes, Your Highness,
hamdulillah
”—thanks be to God.

“Good. Tell me you’ve found these devils.”

Mansour shook his head.

“Tell me you’ve found them, Mansour.”

“We will find them. In the meantime, may I report what we have discovered so far?” He didn’t wait for an answer but pushed ahead. “We’ve discovered the identities of eight of the bombers. I regret to tell you that they are all Saudi. The four who attacked the drinking establishment in Bahrain, they were from the Najd”—the high Saudi desert in the center of the Arabian Peninsula. “They disappeared a few months ago. We’re speaking with their fathers to determine where they might have trained. So far, all the fathers insist that they had no idea what the boys were planning. The local clerics say the same. It’s disappointing that they aren’t being more honest. If we must, we’ll bring them in for interviews in Riyadh”—a reference to the
mukhabarat
headquarters.

“And the other four?”

“All from Taif”—a town in western Saudi Arabia, not far from Jeddah. “The same situation. None on our watch lists.”

“You have found nothing.”

“Whoever’s training these men is canny. These attacks were months in the making. Years. It will take time to unravel this.”

“Why do you waste my time if you have found nothing?”

“You asked me to come here from Riyadh, Your Highness.” A hint of ice crept into Mansour’s voice. “I assure you that all of us are frustrated. We won’t let these criminals attack your name. You are the state, Abdullah. We live and die with you—”

“Spare me this recital.” Abdullah was fully awake now, his anger quickening him. “If you live and die with me, you won’t live much longer—”

“Then let me say. We all want these terrorists caught.”

“I wish I were certain of that.”

“What are you implying, Abdullah?”

“I am your king, Mansour.” Abdullah knew he needed to control himself, hide his anger and distrust from his nephew. But he couldn’t. His weakness rubbed him raw. He upended the silver coffeepot, sent a gusher of black liquid onto the antique Persian rug that stretched across the study. “Never again shall you take that tone with me.”

Mansour looked sidelong at Miteb and shook his head. Abdullah pushed on, compounding his mistake.
Someday you’ll be old,
he thought.
Someday you’ll know.

“I am your king. Say it.”

“You are my king.”

“Go back to Riyadh, then, and find these men. Whoever they are. Foreign or Saudi. We will cut off their heads and let the world know that we don’t stand for this. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

 

 

MITEB LEFT WITH MANSOUR
but promised to return in a few minutes. In the meantime, Abdullah’s steward cleared away the coffeepot and wiped up the stain. Abdullah ignored him until he finished.

“Shall I bring another pot, Your Highness?”

“No.”

“Something else?”

“Leave me, Hamoud. Now.” Hamoud left. Abdullah sat alone in his study. He wanted to call Saeed, Mansour’s father, and scream at him about his son. But he knew losing his temper again would further weaken his position. He would have to go back to Riyadh. He couldn’t stay here. He needed to talk to the other senior princes. The conversations would be unpleasant. They’d burn a hole in his stomach. He shouldn’t need to beg for support.

But in his heart he knew he’d brought this disaster on himself.

The door opened. Miteb returned. “You mustn’t do that, Abdullah,” he said without preamble.

“These jihadis, they call us apostates, brother. The world is upside down when these men say they speak for our religion. They won’t frighten me. Not in this world or the next. They think the Prophet, peace be upon Him, wants them to attack their own people? I’ll pluck out their eyes and pour salt down their throats—”

“My brother. Everything you say, it’s true. But we have something else to talk about.”

“Don’t bother me with this.”

“These matters can’t wait anymore.”

“
You
dare to tell
me
what waits?”

“Abdullah. Listen now. Yes, you to me. You can’t treat your nephew this way. He was furious. He told me, ‘I am forty-eight years old. I have my own sons and grandsons, and that man insults me like a child. No more, Miteb.’ He wouldn’t even use your name, Abdullah. ‘That man’ was all he’d say. And do you know that I was actually glad to hear his anger? Because if he’s still willing to complain, it means that he may still be loyal. If he held his tongue to me, it would mean he’d given up on you and was nursing his anger in private.”

“You think Mansour is loyal? You’re a fool. It’s exactly the opposite. He speaks that way only because he knows that if he didn’t complain, you’d suspect him.”

“If you don’t think he’s loyal, why do you bring him here?”

“I bring him here because he expects it of me. Just as I know he’ll lie to me.”

“And I suppose losing your temper is part of your act, too. Come on, my brother. I saw your face when he told you that they hadn’t found anything. It wasn’t an act.”

“Let Mansour complain. Mansour is nothing.”

“Mansour is something. And Saeed is more than something.”

“I treat Mansour like a child because he is a child. He thinks I don’t see that he’s mocking me. I should have rid myself of him years ago.”

Miteb reached out and squeezed the king’s hand. “Abdullah—you can no more rid yourself of Mansour than of these walls.”

“They wait for me to die. My brothers and my nephews. So be it. When Allah calls me, put my corpse on the pyre and light the flames and let my ashes join the desert. It makes no difference. Mansour, Saeed, they can say whatever they like. Khalid”—Abdullah’s eldest son—“will be king.”

“He is your son, but that doesn’t mean he’ll be king.”

“He will be king.”

“Say it as many times as you like, but words alone won’t make it so. You’ve stirred the scorpions with this. You know our brothers don’t agree. They say the system has worked and why change it?”

 

 

THE FULL NAME OF
the first Saudi king was Abdul-Aziz ibn Abd al-Rahman ibn Faisal al-Saud. Abdul-Aziz, son of Abd, son of Rahman, son of Faisal, son of Saud. In its length, the name highlighted the importance that Arabs placed on their lineage. Abdul-Aziz had died in 1953, twenty-one years after uniting the Arabian peninsula. He had named the new nation after his own family: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.