TEN

Loubna’s driver dropped me off at the back entrance of the hotel. Despite the hour, there were a good number of people lingering in the parking area near the door. Most were decked out in snazzy party attire, their night of fun and entertainment nearing its end. Just an ordinary Dubai scene. A guard asked me whether I was staying in the hotel, then abruptly turned his attention to a woman who was trying to enter next to me and blocked her way.

“Is this lady with you, sir?” he asked. I shook my head, and he motioned with both hands for the woman to scamper.

“Sorry, sir,” he said as he turned his attention back to me. “I had to stop this person. No professional women allowed in this hotel. Management is cracking down on this. Please proceed.”

I had to smile. I thanked the guard for his vigilance and walked toward the elevators. As the elevator door opened, two scantily dressed women waltzed out. One of the women, who with her stiletto heels was considerably taller than I, looked at me suggestively and turned the palms of her hands in a questioning motion. “No thank you,” I said as I walked past them into the elevator. Before the door closed, I could hear them laugh. Apparently the hotel’s crackdown was not exactly as advertised. The forces of supply and demand were just too powerful.

Back in my room, I took a shower and got into bed, but after only a few minutes I knew that I had zero chance of falling asleep. The conversation with Loubna, and especially the images of her sister’s violent rape, kept playing in my head. I got up and sent Khalid a text message. Instead of a reply, he called immediately.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” I asked.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Khalid said. “Besides, I had to get up for prayers. What’s your excuse?”

He was right; insomnia was becoming the norm for me. “I just got back to the hotel. I spent the night with Loubna,” I said, then quickly added, “Sorry, that came out wrong!”

Khalid laughed. “I told you to beware of Syrian women.”

I recounted the conversation with Loubna to Khalid, everything from dinner at Flooka to the long wine-infused hours at her home. Khalid listened without interrupting. When I finished, he took a deep breath.

“I hope you’ve not bitten off more than you can chew, habibi,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Loubna told me where I can find Anas. Once I make contact, I’ll try to find out what he knows about Paul Blocher, and then I’m out of here.”

“Hmm, just like that?” Khalid asked in a sarcastic tone. “That’s an excellent plan, just march up to him and ask him for the information. Or, even better, appeal to his conscience and his humanity. He seems to suffer from an abundance of both.”

I knew that Khalid was right. My adrenaline could cause me to overestimate myself and discount some of the dangers that lurked in an interaction with Anas. Still, I demurred. “Come on, Khalid, I never said it would be easy. I have no illusions about the person I am dealing with. But I’ve got to do this, it’s what I came to Dubai for—to find a path to Anas and, through him, to Paul Blocher.”

“Just remember, you have to be prepared. Plan your work, and then work your plan. And trust me, you need a plan for when you’ll be face-to-face with this guy, this vile specimen. This rapist. He comes from a different world, a world that is poles apart from ours. You and I, we believe that humans are great when they are good. Anas believes that he is great when he is bad. We might understand that with our intellect, but we are never really prepared for it.”

Khalid’s words felt dark and heavy.

“And another thing,” Khalid went on. “You need to be ready for the possibility of a physical altercation. What someone like Anas lacks in kindness, he makes up for in thuggery. I don’t think you should go by yourself.”

I considered Khalid’s suggestion. My worry was that any of my friends in Dubai would want to know more about the reason for this trip to the Méridien compound and about the person I was hoping to meet. It was the same reason I had decided not to inform Fouad al-Zayat before my trip to Beirut to meet the Sheikh, even though it would have been reassuring to have a safety plan in case things went wrong. My friends were just a little too curious.

“I’ll think about it,” I lied.

“I know you better than that, Daniel,” Khalid shot back. “But if you must go by yourself, make sure you always sit with your back to the wall.”

“What do you mean?”

“At their core, people like Anas are cowards. They never fight straight up. Their specialty is beating up on the defenseless and stabbing in the back. If your back is protected by the wall, you can just focus on not being defenseless.”

Khalid had a gift of reducing things to their bare essentials. I promised to keep his advice in mind. By now, it was seven-thirty in the morning and I was too wired to sleep, so I got dressed and went up to the lounge, where I was welcomed by Dalia with a high five. Charles poured the coffee, and Dev greeted me with a warm smile. Dalia brought the orange-carrot juice, and a few minutes later Kevin walked to my table holding a delicious-smelling plate of akoori, Indian scrambled eggs. “Compliments of the chef,” he said with a grin. Dev waved shyly from behind the counter.

I looked out the window and saw the Méridien hotel complex in the Garhoud area in the distance, on the way to the airport. I thought about Khalid’s admonition to go there with a plan. Traffic on Sheikh Zayed Road was light at this time of day, and I decided to head to the Méridien to scout it out. I finished my breakfast, took the elevator to the ground floor, and asked the doorman to hail a taxi. The air was surprisingly fresh, almost cool. Fifteen minutes later, I was there. I walked around the hotel and the outdoor restaurant area for a few minutes. Everything was closed, and the only people in sight were the cleaning crews in their overalls. At Casa Mia, I sat at one of the empty tables and tried to get a sense of the restaurants and bars in the immediate vicinity. Loubna was right—from that spot I had an excellent view of the entrance to Jules Bar next door. One table in particular provided the perfect angle to see and not be seen, and I made a mental note to look for Anas in that very spot. Just as I was about to leave, a Méridien employee came up to me and asked if everything was okay. I nodded and tried to walk past him.

“The action over there starts in the evening.” He pointed at Jules Bar.

I played dumb. “What kind of action?”

“Oh, you know, sir, those loose girls,” he said. “The ladies of the night.”

“Thanks,” I said as I left. I wondered whether anything about my demeanor had betrayed my interest in that bar or whether the hotel employee had simply assumed that any man in the area could only be there for one reason. Either way, I resolved to be more alert and surreptitious when I came back in the evening. Before I left, I walked one more time around the hotel and jotted down the various entrances and exits in my notebook. Next, I went inside and explored the lobby and reception areas in order to familiarize myself with possible corners where I could remain undetected in case things got ugly. Part of the exercise was also to memorize the spots that had good cell phone reception so that I wouldn’t find myself unable to reach an emergency contact. Ten months earlier, at a different hotel in Dubai just a few miles from the Méridien, I had agreed to meet an unverified middleman who claimed to be in possession of valuable evidence on the whereabouts of a missing journalist. I regretted my decision the moment he showed up with two thugs and vowed never again to expose myself to such threatening situations without at least mapping out an escape route or hiding place.

Once I was satisfied with my reconnaissance expedition, I got into a taxi and returned to my hotel.

As soon as I opened the door to my room, I dropped into bed and fell asleep instantaneously. I dreamed that I was sitting on a swing that was going higher and higher. Just as I was about to reach the highest point, I jumped off. Instead of landing, I kept on flying, at first upward, then down, ever faster and faster. I woke up drenched in sweat. I had not had this dream in over forty years, since I was a little boy. I used to compete with other kids in the neighborhood by jumping off a swing and seeing who could fly the farthest. I often won and had the bloody knees and elbows to show for it, which had more to do with my recklessness than with any particular mastery of the laws of aerodynamics. In those days, I would frequently have this nightmare of jumping off a swing and never landing. At some point, I figured out that I had the nightmare only on the days that I played this game with my friends. Eventually, I stopped playing the game and the nightmares stopped, too.

I changed out of my soaked T-shirt and went back to sleep. I found myself in the same dream again, jumping off the swing, at first soaring high, and then plunging lower and lower into the abyss. As I fell, I saw my own face. But suddenly the face morphed into the face of Paul Blocher, his eyes wide open in horror. I woke up with a scream and a cramp in the calf of my left leg. I leaped out of bed and stepped with all my weight on my left foot until the cramp was gone. My left leg was stiff and the calf hard as a rock. I limped to the bathroom and splashed my face with cold water. It was time to end the sleep experiment for the day.

As soon as my calf recovered, I went for a swim in the hotel pool, and after thirty minutes I felt rejuvenated and clear minded. I got out of the water just as my phone vibrated. It was my prosecutor friend—the same one I had invoked to help out Dev in the hotel lounge—who asked me to let him know when I would next be in Dubai. Even though the timing of his call was eerily on point, I knew that it was a coincidence, as he usually called me every few days for a quick hello and, also, given his suspicious and slightly possessive nature, in order to make sure that I wouldn’t even think of coming to Dubai without letting him know. Feeling busted, I sheepishly told him that I had just arrived. There was no way to wiggle out of seeing him, and we agreed to meet for a late lunch.

We met at Sammach in a Jumeirah mall, his regular lunch venue, which was usually pretty empty at this time of day. The only other patrons at the restaurant were a large Kuwaiti family. The father was dressed in a blue kandura that revealed his Kuwaiti identity: it was tight fitting, with a one-button band collar and cuff links, as opposed to the loose-fitting local Emirati kanduras with a long tassel and neither collar nor cuff links. He was seated at the head of a large table, with four children on each side. His wife was sitting next to the youngest child at the other end of the table. She was dressed in a beautiful black abaya with embroidered golden flowers and a matching headscarf; it was unusual for a Kuwaiti woman not to have her face veiled in public either by a niqab or an all-concealing burka, but sometimes a woman would take liberties in Dubai that she wouldn’t take in another, more conservative place in the Gulf. The eldest son had just returned from a shopping expedition at the sports apparel store in the mall with two pairs of brand-new Nike Air Jordan sneakers. One of the shoes had apparently fallen out of his bag on the walk from the store to the restaurant, and the mother was berating the teenager for his carelessness. She ordered him to retrace his route and try to find the missing shoe. As the boy stood up, the father reached into his pocket, handed his son a one-thousand-dirham note, and told him to buy another pair of sneakers rather than waste his time looking for the missing shoe. The boy took off with a wide, triumphant grin, and his mother shook her head.

“Typical Kuwaitis,” my prosecutor friend sneered. “Too much money. They are so wasteful, I can’t even watch.” He then proceeded to order an enormous amount of food—way more than he and I could possibly eat.

Over delicious meze dishes and fresh fish, I alluded, as inconspicuously as I could, to an interesting meeting that I was looking forward to that evening and mentioned that I might have to ask him for a favor if things got more than just interesting. He was gracious and offered his support, no matter what. I could tell that his senses were heightened and that he would in all likelihood come looking for me if he did not hear from me in the course of the night. I was grateful for his backing and relieved to have this contingency plan with such a reliable friend. After ending our meal as always with dibs el-kharroob, thick carob molasses with some added tahini—the world’s tastiest and most effective digestif—we walked together to the mall exit. Outside, a young laborer ran up to us. My prosecutor friend searched his pockets, gave the man fifty dirhams, and thanked him for watching his car. Only then did I realize that he had left the engine and the air conditioner running throughout our meal so that the car would be nice and cool when he returned. I hailed a taxi, and we parted with a cordial embrace.

Around seven, after the sun had set, I got into another taxi and drove back to the Méridien compound. On the way, my anxiety started to build. What if I was too late and had missed Anas again, just as in Amman? Every day that passed, even every hour, could mean a tragic turn of events for Paul Blocher, assuming he was still alive. Time was not my friend, as Khalid had told me.

The outdoor scene at the Méridien was very different from the early-morning hours. The restaurants were bustling with people, and raucous music was blasting from many directions. I went straight to Casa Mia. I noticed that the table I had identified in the morning as Anas’s ideal lookout was empty. None of the guests in the restaurant looked even remotely like Anas. I sat down at the table just next to the one where I had speculated I might find Anas and ordered a mineral water. When the waiter returned with the water, I asked him whether he knew a fellow called Anas. I could tell from his expression that he was genuinely drawing a blank, so I described Anas to him based on the pictures Mike had shown me as well as Loubna’s account. Immediately, the waiter’s face lit up. “Oh, you mean Mr. Big Time,” he said with a wide grin. “No, I have not seen him in a few days. Why don’t you have a look in the bar over there.” He pointed to Jules Bar. “And if you see him, tell him we miss him here. He’s our best tipper!”

I promised to pass on the message, paid for the water, and made my way to Jules Bar. I tried to avoid two men who were walking straight at me. One of them tumbled into my side just as I was passing them. He appeared drunk and cursed me out loudly in English with a strong Australian accent, flicking his cigarette at my chest. I was about to pick it up and flick it right back at him but stopped myself. I could hear their full-throated laughter and swearing as I continued toward Jules Bar. I was almost at the entrance when the door flung open, and another drunk man came tumbling out. He appeared to be in his fifties and was holding on to a woman who looked no older than eighteen. He bumped into me with a loud, alcohol-reeking burp and stumbled on with his young companion.

Inside, the techno beat was ear shattering, and on the stage a live band was getting ready to perform. The scene was mind blowing. I felt like I had landed on some crazy planet. For every man present, there were at least five women of all ethnicities. Within seconds, two young Chinese women came up to me. “One thousand dirham for the night,” the first one said. Before I even had a chance to shake my head, the second one added, “Discount for two. Just for you.” I walked past them without replying. I tried to find a good spot near the side wall, where I would be able to look for Anas without being accosted. But after a few steps, another woman grabbed my sleeve. “How about it? Why we don’t disappear from here?” she asked in broken English with a heavy Hungarian accent. This place had the charm of a grungy meat market next to a slaughterhouse. Even if Anas happened to be here, it would be impossible to approach him and talk to him. Better to wait outside or at Casa Mia.

As I turned toward the exit, a man crossed my path. He was dragging a young woman, a girl really, by her hair, cursing at her and telling her to shut up. She was screaming in agony. He was holding a bottle of beer in the other hand and threatened to break it over her head if she did not stop bawling. But the girl’s earsplitting screams continued; they had a low pitch, coming deep from her gut, then turning into groans that sounded like rolling thunder. Her childlike features were distorted by pain. As the man loosened his grip briefly, the girl’s groans turned into quiet whimpers, but as soon as he yanked her again with full force, the anguished screams were back. Strangely, nobody seemed to pay attention, and everyone in the vicinity moved casually aside to clear his path.

I tapped the man on the shoulder. “Let go of her, please,” I said.

He looked at me with a stare of total disbelief, which immediately mutated into glowering rage. “Get the hell out of my way, asshole, or I’ll fuck you up!”

“Let go of her. Now!” I demanded. A circle of people had quickly formed around us, expecting a spectacle.

The man let go of the girl and squared up. “You’re going down, asshole!” he shouted, then swung his beer bottle at my face. I stepped into his swing, placing my right leg behind him as I struck him in the nose with the palm of my hand. It was a move I had practiced thousands of times in all those years of martial arts training, but that awful, familiar sensation of torn skin and crunched bones still triggered a sense of nausea, suppressed only by the rush of adrenaline.

The man fell backward and hit his head on the floor. Remarkably, he managed to hold on to the bottle of beer and keep it from shattering, even though he was now bleeding profusely. One of his companions bent down and helped him to his feet. His nose looked like it was broken, and he was bleeding from the back of his head. He was wobbling badly but still had the presence of mind to take a swig from his bottle, which he was still clutching in his hand. The girl was nowhere to be seen.

“What the fuck’s your problem, asshole!” His words were slurred. “What’s that bitch to you?”

“She’s my daughter,” I said, pushing past him. It was the first thing that came to my mind, possibly because I hadn’t been able to stop thinking of my own daughter since the evening with Loubna. I was haunted by those poor Syrian girls who were taken from their homes by Anas and his gang. As soon as I uttered those words, the crowd parted like the Red Sea, and I hurried toward the door. I was just about to open it when two security guards intercepted me.

“Could you please come with us, sir?” one of them demanded.

“What for?” I asked.

“You’ve caused a scene here,” he said. “We have to escort you out of this establishment.”

I was incredulous. “I’ve caused a scene? Are you serious? Some man is hauling a young girl, who happens to look no older than fourteen, by her hair, threatening to break a bottle of beer over her head, and I’m the one you need to escort out of this establishment?”

“Sir, we don’t make the rules. We just enforce them. Please come with us.”

I walked out of the bar, flanked by the two security guards. Outside, one of the two turned to me with an apologetic look. “I’m really sorry, sir. We don’t enjoy this either. But in that establishment, the men can do whatever they want with the girls. The client is king, as they say. You are free to go now.”

I stared at the two guards for a moment, then turned away, shaking my head in disbelief. I walked toward the taxi area, exhaling deeply in an attempt to keep my adrenaline rush in check. This was not the time to connect with Anas. I needed to go back to my hotel to decompress.

There were two people in front of me in the taxi queue waiting, when I heard a breathless voice behind me. “Excuse me, sir, excuse me, sir.”

I turned around and saw a girl, who looked no older than sixteen or seventeen, running up to me. She was petite, with long dark hair and large brown eyes, and was wearing a short denim skirt with a white sleeveless blouse. I had never seen her before and was not sure she was talking to me, so I pointed at myself and looked at her with a questioning expression. She nodded. “Excuse me, sir,” she repeated as she reached me. “May I please talk to you for a moment?” Her Arabic was not a local Emirati dialect; I couldn’t quite place her accent.

I was not in the mood for any more talk, but there was something sweet and gentle about this person, so I stepped out of the queue, allowing the couple behind me to move up. “How can I help you?” I asked her.

“Please forgive me for chasing you down. I saw what you did in the bar,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind if I ask you, but why did you help that girl?”

“Like I said to that man, she’s my daughter,” I said tersely, in the hope of quickly ending the conversation.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think she’s your daughter.”

“Why not?” I asked, taken aback at being challenged by this stranger.

“Because she’s my sister. And I think I’d know if you were our father.” She spoke without a trace of sarcasm.

I was speechless. I now recognized the strong resemblance to the girl at the bar, even though her sister’s face had been distorted by pain. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You are right. I’m not her father and not your father either.”

She smiled. “Actually, I just wanted to thank you for coming to my sister’s defense.”

I felt a warm gush of pride and joy overcome me. “It’s all right,” I said, embarrassed that I was blushing.

“I hope you don’t mind the question, but may I please ask you why you did that? Why did you intervene?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Instinct, I suppose. I just didn’t like what that guy was doing to your sister. I wasn’t really thinking it through. I just reacted.”

“I understand,” she said. “Thank you. It was nice meeting you.”

She started to walk away. I went to the back of the taxi queue and watched her. She had a bounce in her step, like a child skipping at a playground. Suddenly she stopped dead in her tracks, turned around, and came back toward me.

“Please don’t take this the wrong way, but reacting without thinking can get you killed in a place like that,” she said in a serious voice.

“I’ll take that under advisement.” Right away, I wished I could have retracted my flippant words.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, looking at me with a disappointed expression. “It’s just that there are some really bad people in Jules Bar. You don’t look like someone who belongs there. It doesn’t seem to be the proper kind of place for you.”

“You’re right,” I said in a softer tone, trying to compensate for my earlier tartness.

“If I may ask,” she said politely, “what were you doing there?”

“I was looking for someone.”

“A friend?”

“Not really. It’s not someone I’ve ever met before. I just know his name.”

“What’s his name?” she asked.

“Anas.”

The girl stared at me in complete shock, as if she had seen a ghost. Gone was the warm, bright look in her eyes. They were suddenly filled with fear. “Anas?” she whispered. “What do you want from him? He is so evil that even the devil himself wants to have nothing to do with him. We call him Shaytan.”

“You know this man?” I asked.

She glanced at the people around us. “Is it okay if we talk somewhere else?” Her voice was hushed. We walked to the side of the building where we found a bench.

“What is your name?” I asked her as we sat down.

“Reem.”

For some reason, Reem instantly reminded me of little Aliya at the green house in Beirut. “Pleased to meet you, Reem. I am Daniel.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Daniel,” Reem said.

“Please, just call me Daniel.”

“Okay, Mr. Daniel,” she said, then corrected herself. “I mean Daniel.”

“Tell me, Reem, if you don’t mind the question, how old are you?”

“I am seventeen,” she said. “And my sister Samar is almost fifteen.”

Fifteen. The same age as my daughter.

“So, Reem, do you know this Anas?”

Reem looked down at her hands, which were folded in her lap. She did not answer immediately. “I do,” she finally said in a whisper. “He owns me and my sister.”

“What do you mean, he owns you?” I asked wearily.

“He brought us here from Syria. We are from Qatana, a city in the south of Syria. His men took us from our family and brought us to Dubai.”

The expression on Reem’s face was pure sadness, and I shuddered as I remembered Loubna’s description of the Syrian girls she used to tend to after they were shipped to Dubai. Hearing Loubna talk about it had been awful, but nothing compared to the gut-wrenching experience of being face-to-face with someone who had suffered this fate herself.

“How does he own you?” I asked again. “Why did your parents let you and your sister leave with him? Did he threaten them?”

“This evil man does not threaten. He just kills,” Reem said in a detached manner. “I don’t know why my parents told us to go with his men. On the day they came for us, our mother was crying in the kitchen. Our uncle tried to calm her down, but she would not stop. Our father walked us to their car, and he also had tears in his eyes. He kept telling us to do everything these men asked us to do because they owned us now. When he kissed me goodbye, he told me to take care of Samar. The last thing he said was that we would meet again in heaven.”

There was nothing I could say to relieve the despair of Reem’s words. She pulled a tissue out of the front pocket of her skirt and blew her nose. “When we arrived in Dubai, Shaytan, I mean Anas, did something that I can never forgive him for. Samar had been holding on to her little doll since we were taken from our home in Qatana. It was her one and only toy, her pretend baby and her security blanket all in one. Our parents had given it to her for her fifth birthday, and she had never let go of it since. She slept with the doll, she took it to school, she ate with it—everything. The doll was dirty and tattered, but it was so real for Samar that the rest of us also considered it to be part of the family. My mother even knitted clothes for the doll—an outfit for summer and one for the cold winters.

“As soon as we got here, we were forced to line up in front of Anas. He immediately zeroed in on the doll in Samar’s hand. He marched straight up to her and told her what a nice doll she had. Samar’s eyes lit up. Anas asked her if he could play with it for a moment. Samar, who always shared her possessions with others, handed her doll to Anas. Anas took it from her and repeated how pretty this doll was. Then, without any warning, he ripped off the doll’s head. He laughed in this really loud and disgusting way that I will never forget and threw the head of the doll far away. Then he handed the headless stump back to Samar. I cannot describe to you the look on Samar’s face. And I don’t even want to relive it by talking about it. There are no words. All life drained from my little sister. That was when she became faceless, like her doll and the rest of us.”

“My goodness,” I mumbled.

“Anas then told the other girls to listen up,” Reem continued. “He said that what we had just seen would happen to any one of us who dared to disobey him or who tried to run away. ‘This will happen to any bitch who tries to pimp the pimp’—those were his words. Then he said that he would kill us in this world, and after that he would follow us to hell and kill us again. He told us that from now on, we were his. His property. He said that we were no longer girls but prostitutes, nothing but bodies, fresh meat, which we would remain until our last day. I had no idea what he meant. Until my first time. Then I understood.”

Reem blew her nose again and took a deep breath. “Shaytan sent me on to Riyadh. Samar stayed here. Separating from my sister was even worse than being taken from my parents. I will never forget the look in Samar’s eyes when they told us that I was going to Riyadh. It was this look of horror, of betrayal, of abandonment. It was the look of death, and I died right there with her.”

I felt tears welling up in my eyes. “I’m so sorry,” I said in a barely audible whisper. It was hard to speak.

“It’s okay,” Reem said. “I’m back with my sister now. Though everything else is still the same. The same daily nightmare.”

I suddenly was aware that Reem and I had been sitting on the bench for a while, and I worried that someone, perhaps Anas or one of his goons, would come looking for her. “Tell me, Reem, is it okay for you to be talking to me, to be gone this long?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, they will think I’m with a client. When I get back to Jules, I will tell them that the client changed his mind and left without paying. This will cover the time we’ve been here—not more and not less.”

“I see. So, if you don’t mind talking about it, what happened in Riyadh?”

“Riyadh was a three-month rotation,” Reem answered matter of factly. “It’s different from what we have to do here in Dubai. In Dubai . . . well, I suppose you got a pretty good sense of our job here based on what you just saw in Jules. In Riyadh, it was a little different. There, they used us as a form of payment. We were treated more like money, like a currency.”

“I don’t understand. What do you mean, like a currency?”

A group of three men passed us. They looked at me, then at Reem, then again at me with dirty, knowing grins. She waited until they were out of earshot. “What I mean is that we were used as payment, as barter, for other services. For example, if a businessman stayed in a nice hotel, he would ask for two or three of us to go with him. When it was time to pay for the bill—the hotel bill, an expensive meal, or some other debt—we would be offered up instead of cash. We then had to go with the man who was owed the money. There were different prices for different packages.”

“Different packages?”

“Yes. Let’s say two girls are offered together. If they are not related, it’s called the Basic Package. If they are sisters, it’s called the Bonus Package.”

“Sisters?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes,” Reem replied. “It is not uncommon for sisters to be offered together. I don’t know why they separated me from Samar and kept her in Dubai. Anas must have had his reasons.”

“How awful!”

“Yes. So sisters are the Bonus Package. The next level up is virgins. If both girls are virgins, it’s called the Jackpot. It’s very expensive. Probably because it’s only a one-time use. Though I think Anas and his guys lie about it—they seem to be recycling some of the Jackpot girls. And then you have the highest level, the most expensive package. That’s when the girls are virgins and sisters. That package is called Jannah—heaven, or paradise. You know, the place where seventy-two virgins are offered to the martyrs. I guess this is good practice for the virgins,” she added sardonically.

I just shook my head. It was beyond awful. Unfathomable.

“Anyway, Daniel, now that you know my story, and now that you know what Shaytan—what Anas—does for a living, why do you want to meet him?”

I decided to tell Reem about Paul Blocher and, in broad terms, about the path that had led me to Anas. She listened intently. “I’m afraid you missed him today. He was here yesterday, then flew to Riyadh. From what I was told, he is expected back tomorrow. Would you like me to let you know when he shows up?”

I nodded. I gave her my mobile phone number.

“He usually comes here around eight in the evening, so expect a message any time after that,” Reem said as she got up. “If you don’t mind, could you stay seated for a few moments while I walk back to Jules? It’s better for us not to be seen together.”

“Of course. Thank you for everything you’ve told me, and thank you for letting me know when Anas arrives. Are you sure it’s safe for you to contact me?”

Reem nodded. “One more thing.” She sat down again. “As you must realize by now, Shaytan is a very bad person. A monster. He will not just hand you the information about this missing person. You cannot appeal to his feelings, because he doesn’t have any. Or at least not the kind of feelings that will make him help you. Before you meet him, you may want to think of something you can offer him, something he will want, or at least something that will make him curious. Or maybe even something that will make him scared, though that might not be easy. He’s really evil and extremely cruel. But he’s not stupid.”

Reem’s depiction of Anas matched what Loubna had told me, and her advice to think of something I could offer him for the information I was seeking was so similar to Khalid’s counsel. Reem got up a second time. “Thank you again for helping my sister. It was the first nice thing anyone has done for us since we left Syria.”

I remained seated on the bench for twenty minutes after she left. My mind went completely numb, unable to process the depravity that Reem had described. I pulled out my notebook and wrote down everything she had told me. When I stood up, my body felt like it weighed four hundred pounds. I shuffled over to the taxi queue. Five minutes later, I was in the back of a taxi, stuck in terrible gridlock.

“Sorry for the bad traffic. You like rock music, sir?” the friendly driver asked.

I nodded. The young driver fiddled with his phone. Suddenly a loud rock song filled the taxi, a song I had not listened to in many years: Frank Zappa’s “Broken Hearts Are for Assholes!” As the driver sang along with gusto, I had to laugh at the absurdity of it all. “This is a great song, sir, great song!” he shouted over the blaring music. “And you know the best part, sir? The name of the album is Sheik Yerbouti! Get it? Sheik Yerbouti—shake your booty!” He laughed so hard that he accelerated inadvertently and had to brake violently in order to avoid crashing into the car in front of us. I had not buckled my seatbelt, and my head hit the back of the seat in front of me. But I was too drained to register any pain.

Back in the hotel, I sent a short text message to my prosecutor friend to let him know that the interesting meeting I had mentioned to him over lunch had been postponed, probably by a day, so that he would not worry and come looking for me. Then I sent Khalid a message on Skype, informing him of a possible meeting with Anas the next evening.

As I climbed into bed, I couldn’t stop thinking about Reem and Samar. One day they are innocent children playing with their friends, and the next day they are tormented sex slaves, existing at the mercy of evil, rapacious men. I could not fathom how Reem found the courage and the strength to survive, let alone the ability to maintain her composure. How would she ever again interact with any man without feeling hatred and revulsion?

Eventually, I fell asleep. I dreamed of a train ride in Switzerland that kept making stops at increasingly remote alpine stations. At each station, I tried to find a chocolate bar I was suddenly craving but was told by a cascade of the main characters in my search for Paul Blocher—Huby, Khalid, Jamil, Imad, Mike, Loubna, Reem, and finally Anas—that it wasn’t available. By the time I had reached Anas at the last station, I had shrunk to a tiny gnome-like figure standing before this giant who dismissed me with a caustic smirk.

I woke up on my back completely paralyzed with my mouth wide open, chin raised high, compressing the nape of my neck. I felt a searing pain in the back of my skull, as if the valves intended to allow the blood to leave my head were all blocked. Only after ten minutes of deep belly breathing was I slowly able to move my fingers, then my hands, arms, and gradually the rest of my body. As the pain subsided, I felt forlorn. Every detail of the dream remained unusually vivid, except that I was unable to recapture the sounds of the voices. I sat up and scribbled the dream on the nightstand notepad before it had a chance to evaporate. The dream made me think of “Spanish Train” by the Irish songwriter Chris de Burgh, a song I used to love as a teenager but had not heard in decades. It was about God and the devil playing poker for the souls of the dead. God has a good hand—a straight—and is confident he will win but doesn’t notice how the devil slips another ace from beneath his cloak. Again and again, the devil keeps cheating and winning more souls, while God, well, “he’s just doing his best.”

I was suddenly overcome with a gloomy premonition that Paul Blocher was no longer alive. I tried to convince myself that the dream wasn’t based on any facts and could only have been an expression of my own anxieties rather than some oracle about Paul’s fate. It didn’t work. I began questioning whether Paul was actually a good person, someone worth all this effort and sacrifice by people who didn’t even know him. After all, the information Huby had received from his French intelligence friend could well mean that Paul himself might have been involved in the Captagon trade or some other unsavory dealings. But then I remembered the two pictures of Paul that Huby had shown me. In them, Paul’s eyes had the look of an innocent, melancholy person. And I remembered the tender words Huby had used to describe Paul. I knew that I needed to continue my search and that the honor code of “leave no one behind,” which had been instilled in me during my military service, applied just as much to unfortunate wanderers as it did to wounded warriors. But I could not escape the wretched grief I was feeling.

Thankfully, I had a meeting scheduled that morning with my close friend Salem from Abu Dhabi, which I hoped would distract me and calm me down. Salem was a retired official in the UAE government who had remained a confidant of several members of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family and was still responsible for special projects. He was assisting the foundation in coordinating our efforts in Libya with the powers that be in the Gulf so that our wires would not get crossed in an unforeseen clash of interests and initiatives. Our Libyan initiative was similar to Project Bistar in Syria a few years earlier, and Salem’s insights were extremely useful in identifying which Libyan candidates could play a role in the future rebuilding of the country.

Salem had proven to be invaluable in our past interactions because he had the ability to bypass the mighty gatekeepers of his country’s rulers and connect us directly with the right decision makers, thus sparing us endless frustrations and inefficiencies that were so often part of the Gulf experience. He had been the first person to predict—at a time when no one else uttered this opinion—that Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, would end up being the most powerful and influential ruler in the Gulf, ahead of the Saudi king, the emir of Qatar, and the crown prince’s own half brother, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, the president and nominal head of the United Arab Emirates.*

We had agreed to meet at nine in the morning at my hotel, and at five to nine, true to form, Salem called to let me know that he was five minutes away. I stepped out of the elevator just as he was walking into the lobby. After a cordial embrace, we found a quiet corner. Salem updated me on the particular individuals and militias that Abu Dhabi wished to support and on the increasing efforts to prevent the rise of an Islamist party in Libya. We parted after one hour and agreed to meet again the following month in Abu Dhabi.

Back in my room, I spent the rest of the morning trying to think of a plan that would draw Anas into a discussion and entice him to tell me what had happened to Paul. All kinds of ideas were spinning through my brain faster than I could process them. I needed to write down my thoughts in order to unscramble the chaos in my head. I took six sheets of the hotel’s stationery and plastered them on the wall with some tape.

I thought of Reem’s parting words and came up with three possible approaches. Plan A: Need. I had to think of something Anas would desire, something valuable enough that he would be willing to exchange Paul’s information for this thing he needed. Plan B: Curiosity. What could pique his interest to the point where he would volunteer Paul’s information just to learn what I had to tell him? Plan C: Fear. How could I threaten Anas or insinuate the possibility of a threat to the point where he would agree to tell me what had happened to Paul?

I ordered a large pot of coffee and started to map out the three plans in all their tactical minutiae—two wall-mounted pages for each plan. Plan A was both the easiest and the hardest. The easiest, because it seemed clear what someone like Anas desired—money and power. The hardest, because I was unable to offer him money for Paul, and in any event I could not possibly put enough money on the table to entice someone like Anas, who was accustomed to astronomical profits. Moreover, the things that Anas was likely to covet would probably all be so repulsive that I would not be able to maintain the illusion of the end justifying the means. I tried to come up with other things Anas might want, but every single thing I could think of was either not enough of a tease or so hideous that I saw no tolerable way to offer it up.

Plan B was tricky. I tried to envisage some intriguing piece of information that would be valuable to Anas, something I knew only through confidential and privileged sources. Details of the recent crackdown of the Turkish authorities on drug dealers in the Kurdish areas, which would force Anas and his partners to find new distribution routes for his Captagon? New anti–money laundering rules that could complicate his cash-only business, even though the ingenuity of his cash couriers and their willing accomplices in many reputable banks turned this idea into a dud? Recent strikes by French intelligence against certain criminal Syrian rings around Rifaat al-Assad, which forced some of the principal players even further into the shadows? A conversation currently taking place between the leadership in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh about human trafficking and its potential for international embarrassment? The tracing of a prisoner-for-drugs swap between Syrian Alawi militias and an Islamist group? The problem was that all these pieces of information came with two significant handicaps: First, these nuggets were off the record. I had received them from Emirati and French government contacts during the search for two other missing persons and the negotiations over proof of life, and I would not be able to give Anas more than a superficial tease. Second, Anas was too shrewd to give me anything of value in exchange for just the tease of new information. Besides, even if I managed to obtain the approval to give him more than simply a hint of the valuable information, I knew that Anas was the last person on earth who deserved to know more about things that could be a threat to his evil empire. Again, as much as I tried, I could not convince myself that the end justified the means.

So I was down to Plan C. How does one put the fear of God into someone who does not believe in God? Or into someone who might believe in God but who does not fear him? Or, hardest of all, into someone who thinks he is God? After meeting Loubna, I had been convinced that Anas was a very bad person, hard as nails, rotten to the core. But after listening to Reem, I now believed that he was evil incarnate. Shaytan. How do you intimidate the devil? Or, to borrow from Mike’s favorite movie, The Usual Suspects, how do you convince the devil that he does not exist? It would take more than showing up with a prominent local, the way Loubna had done with her Abu Dhabi sheikh. I thought of my prosecutor friend, who was fearless, but concluded that he would not have the authority and the firepower to move the needle. I wondered whether I should call another good friend, a local poet who was close to one of the Emirati rulers, or perhaps involve Salem, who had unfettered access to the country’s head of intelligence.** But in the back of my mind I kept remembering how Khalid had once described the voracious appetite that some of the potentates in the region had for very young women, just like other powerful men all over the world, because it was, as Khalid put it, about power more than about sex. I had to consider the possibility that some of these mighty fellows could be Anas’s clients—hardly an ideal starting point to exert pressure on him.

I thought of a Turkish intelligence officer I knew, who was in charge of tracking and intercepting unwanted incursions from Syria, but his focus was the prevention of terrorist attacks, not the disruption of drug and prostitution trade routes. He once told me that he couldn’t care less about the drug dealers and the pimps, because they would never blow themselves up in a crowd—all around bad for business, as he put it. So I could not expect anything useful from him. I went through all my other contacts who could possibly pose a threat to Anas and his empire, but those who possessed the necessary capacity and perhaps even the willingness to help would only do so if I briefed them in full detail in person on what I was trying to accomplish—something I did not have the time to do. Anas would supposedly be returning to Dubai today, and my encounter with him could not be postponed. It was now or never. Plan C was no good either.

I was terribly discouraged. The six sheets of paper on the wall were covered with my scribbles, yet not one of my three plans appeared viable, and it seemed that I had turned into that car-chasing, barking dog Khalid had warned me about. Now that I was actually close to meeting Anas, I didn’t have a blueprint for how to wring out information from him on Paul Blocher. I leaned back on the couch and closed my eyes.

Just moments after dozing off, I was awakened by my phone’s ping. It was a text message from a local number I did not recognize: “A back in d, at cm this pm. R.” Reem had kept her word and just let me know that Anas was back in Dubai and would be at Casa Mia this evening.

This was it! Finally! Reem’s message was the jolt I needed. It immediately sharpened my mind. I suddenly understood that I had been thinking about this whole thing the wrong way. It was embarrassing how backassed my assumptions had been, how flawed my reasoning. Instead of starting with Anas’s weaknesses and reverse-engineering my approach from there, I had stupidly been trying to map out three plans in a vacuum, without taking the traits of this particular adversary into account. Of course Anas would not be susceptible to my meager temptations, and of course he could not be intimidated into surrendering the information I was seeking. That was not who he was. He was the king in his kingdom, with all the means and the arsenal to preserve his power. I had missed the clues Loubna and Reem had given me. This was a person who referred to himself as Mr. Big Time, who exercised fanatically to build humungous muscles, which—as Loubna told me full of contempt—he constantly admired by flexing them in front of any mirror he could find, even in his reflection on the lenses of a stranger’s sunglasses. This was not a person I could threaten. This was a person I had to flatter. A person whose ego could perhaps be stroked to the point of getting him to puff himself up and brag about his accomplishments. I thought of the Sheikh’s despised “fist of flattery” that Jamil had explained to me when we were traveling from Istanbul to Beirut. This was the trap I needed to set.

I spent the next hour refining my new approach, which became clearer with every passing minute. I had to allow for the possibility that Anas had been warned about me by Mike or, more likely, by Imad, and there was a remote chance that he might have been made aware of my interaction with Loubna by some of the curious Syrian ears she was trying to elude. There also was a chance that last night’s waiter at Casa Mia had told Anas that some bald fellow had inquired about him or that Anas had heard about the brawl at Jules Bar. Most worryingly, he might know about my conversation with Reem.

There was nothing I could do at this point to mitigate those risks other than to be vigilant for early signs of hostility by Anas, which would have to trigger my immediate exit. Despite all the contingency planning, I knew that it was impossible to anticipate each and every situation, and it was plausible that the evening could turn unpleasant or even dangerous. For a moment, I thought about calling home to hear the voices of my wife and children. But I fretted that it would weaken my resolve and my concentration and that they would pick up on my anxiety and worry. Instead, I grabbed another piece of paper and wrote down all the different scenarios, with my action and reaction options under each bullet point. Once I felt comfortable with the full set of plots and their permutations, I went for a swim to clear my mind. For once, this dog would know what to do when he caught up with the car.

* Salem was also the only person who had predicted within a year of the death of the Saudi king Abdullah bin Abdulaziz in 2015 that Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed would play a major role in the ascent of the ambitious Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman by leveraging his deep relationships in Washington, DC, both directly and through the ubiquitous, copiously networked Emirati ambassador to the United States, Yousef Al Otaiba. Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed’s prodding of President Trump, and even more effectively of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, toward an enthusiastic embrace of Prince Mohammed bin Salman proved to be decisive for the young Saudi crown prince’s rise to unchecked power.

** When I called Salem two weeks later to schedule our follow-up meeting in Abu Dhabi for the foundation’s Libya project, he asked me whether I still might need his assistance in that unpleasant matter in Dubai. Noticing my confusion, he told me that I had mentioned something cryptic that morning when he had come to meet me in my hotel. I have no recollection of having mentioned anything to him about possibly requiring his help with Anas, but the fact that he brought it up means that I must have said or hinted at something.