The Asr, an imam’s late-afternoon recorded call to prayer, played out from atop an ancient sandstone minaret. It could be heard for miles across Ta’if in eastern Saudi Arabia. As the sun baked the aerial-ridden flat roofs Dan Crane left a cab and walked across a marble-tiled quadrangle decorated with date palms and water features. He wore a pair of taupe-coloured pants and a matching sports jacket, and was carrying an empty black-leather sports bag.
When he reached the revolving doors of the local branch of the Arab National Bank, the doorman nodded to him, a wry smile crossing his lips. Crane was sweating like a steelworker.
At a private booth, he handed over his passport to a female teller and accepted a glass of water. Ten minutes later, he placed the crisp stacks of hundred-dollar bills into the bag, his arm dropping down under the weight as he lifted it off the table, even though he was only carrying a tenth of what had been deposited for him. The money had been transferred there by the ISI, and everything had been in order.
Leaving the bank, he felt the damp patches under his arms begin to seep sweat. The air was still and dusty, the temperature in the early hundreds. Walking slowly to the kerb, he saw a black Lexus with tinted windows cut out from behind a parked truck and race towards him. The front passenger window was down, a handgun just visible as it got level with him. He struggled to lift the bag in front of his face and took two rounds in the chest before toppling over. As the car screeched away a small crowd gathered around his still body.
Across the street, a Pakistani core collector dressed as a local in a dishdasha and keffiyeh headdress lowered his cellphone, having just videoed what had transpired. Ten seconds later, he emailed it to the ISI HQ in Islamabad.
At the Saudi Embassy in Islamabad, Hasni sat opposite the ambassador, who’d told him that the ISI had done well. Well! Hasni thought. His people had killed a wealthy arms manufacturer, Swiss, and worst of all, as far as he was concerned, a top CIA man, Crane. He could think of a lot of words to describe what had happened, but that adverb wasn’t one of them.
The two men drank coffee and discussed their families then, but Hasni’s mind was on other things.
The Saudis had risked a lot. He’d wondered at first why they’d decided to go down this route. Then it had struck him. The Shia-Sunni civil war in Iraq was going one way. The Shias would win within a few months. That meant that allied to having Iran facing them just across the Persian Gulf, the Saudis would have the Shias stretched across their northeast border. Despite his innate intelligence and grasp of international affairs, he had no idea of the Chinese dimension, and probably would have dismissed it even if a Saudi asset had whispered it to him. He trusted the Saudis on their rationale for the secretary’s abduction, if nothing else.
The threat of the Iraqis pouring jihadists and ordnance over the border had sent the Saudis into overdrive, he thought, fearing their own country would erupt into civil war as half the Middle East had already. Cutting off the head of the Shia snake was the only way to ensure the body died.
Ten minutes later, as Brigadier Hasni left the embassy en route to his meeting with Mullah Kakar at his home in the Blue Area, he saw an elegant young woman walking along the sidewalk, whom he took for a well-educated Pakistani citizen. She reminded him of his daughter, Adeela. She wore a turquoise pantsuit and a silk hijab, her gold jewellery shimmering in the sunlight. As the door to his armour-plated limo opened she appeared to trip on a groove between the paving stones, her ankle twisting.
Leaving his bodyguards standing still, he rushed over to her and helped her to her feet. She smiled and thanked him. It was only a second or two later that he realized he’d pricked himself, probably on a brooch or hem pin, he imagined. Maybe even a sharp edge on a piece of her expensive jewellery.
As the limo drove off, sandwiched between four SUVs, a dozen police motorcyclists front and back, he rubbed the mark, which had started to turn red, a circle about the size of a dime. It itched like crazy. Twenty seconds later, he felt nauseous. A minute after that, he was throwing up and sweating. A bodyguard told the driver to head for the nearest hospital. Hasni held his chest, thought he was having a heart attack. Two minutes later, he died of cardiac arrest.
The woman was an operational officer in Al Mukhabarat Al A’amah, the Saudi secret service. In a secluded alley, shaded from the sun, she took out an adapted cellphone and rang the Saudi ambassador.
“Plato will die of a heart attack, if he hasn’t already,” she said, using the pro-word for Brigadier Hasni.
“And the mullah?” the ambassador asked.
“His body already covers half the street.”