Silence, except for the sharp intake of Boon’s breath in my ear. Then Wildman whispered, “You’re fucking me.”
I waited, watching the room. Everyone looked so tense that I couldn’t help but smile. Chords played in my head, Gottschalk’s “A Night in the Tropics,” an orchestra tangoing with itself. I’d guessed right, that much was clear, and the infectious swooping rhythm of the notes were the sound of my happiness, but also my caution. Gottschalk, a nineteenth-century Cajun pianist who took Europe by storm, died at forty in the Empire of Brazil, at the height of his powers.
I popped a cookie into my mouth, to show that I was at ease. It was truly delicious, surprisingly so. It tasted like marzipan, with a soft center, baked within the last few hours. If I closed my eyes, I could taste belle époque Paris on a balmy midsummer’s evening. But I wasn’t about to close my eyes. Not even to blink.
“Good, right?” It was the guard on Abu Nadel’s right.
“Absolutely,” I said, tossing another one in my mouth, as the prince removed his turban and black robes and sat cross-legged across from me, as if this were merely a casual business meeting. I wasn’t fooled by his ease. The tension hadn’t left the room.
“Abu Nadel, as you call him, was once a baker in Aleppo. He has laid in quite a stash of supplies.”
“My compliments to the chef,” I said. “But surely he didn’t bake these for me? He didn’t have time.”
“No,” Farhan said. “You’re right. He didn’t bake them for you.”
Farhan did not look like a Saudi princeling but rather an Army Ranger. He was over six feet tall and stacked. His beard had the dark black of a man in his twenties, yet his eyes watched me like a man double that age.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Wildman said over my earpiece. He didn’t need to see the prince to know he was part of our world. He could hear it in his voice.
I started to respond in code that I was fine. Then I noticed. Farhan wasn’t eating. I put down my third cookie, hoping the food wasn’t poisoned.
The prince chuckled. “The sweets are fine, but I won’t eat while others go hungry, even though this extravagance was prepared to celebrate my return.”
Poor Abu Nadel, I thought, to have his great gift spoiled. “You recently arrived?”
“In the night, hours before you. The road was more dangerous than I anticipated.”
And it was only getting worse.
“Why?” I said, shoveling in another sweet. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was.
“Why return?”
“No. Why grow that hideous beard?”
Farhan smiled with ease. “I came to Syria nearly two years ago. There were twenty of us then, old friends, mostly sons of the men who worked for my father. We would gather at our madrassa in Riyadh. One Friday after prayers we met a man our age, a boy, really. He had grown up in Homs, Syria, but fled the Shiites. The situation, he said, was very bad. Civilians being gunned down in the street, children starving. People burned alive.”
“Assad is ruthless.”
“That night, all twenty of us declared jihad to save our brothers. It was easy to find sponsorship in the Kingdom. A week later, we were fighting in the Farouq Brigades.” He paused, but he didn’t look away. “A month later, only three of us remained.
“That’s when Abu Muhammad al-Adnani found me. He commanded the Emni, the ISIS special forces. He told me I was God’s chosen.”
I had heard of the Emni, but thought it was battlefield legend.
“The next day I was driven to Adnani’s camp in the desert outside Raqqa. There were a dozen recruits: Moroccans, Egyptians, a Tunisian, an Indonesian, two Germans, a Canadian, a Belgian, and a man from Virginia. They dropped us off in the middle of nowhere and told us, ‘We are here.’ We thought to ourselves, ‘What’s going on?’ When I looked more closely, I realized there were cave dwellings around us. Everything aboveground was painted with mud and invisible to drones. Each dwelling received two cups of water a day. The purpose was to test us.”
He reached for a glass of water.
“Then the training began: hours of running, jumping, push-ups, parallel bars, crawling. By the second week, we were each given an AK-47 and told to sleep with it between our legs until it became like a third arm. One day during training, the Tunisian collapsed from exhaustion. They beat him, but he could not stand. So they tied him to a pole in the desert and left him there. We never returned.”
Savages, I thought.
“We were sent to Aleppo, where I killed many enemies of the Caliphate. But I came to realize that the jihad was a farce, and I a murderer.”
A guard put a hand on his shoulder in sympathy. Farhan didn’t flinch. He hadn’t looked away. He was testing me, like the desert had tested him.
“I fled, knowing the punishment was death. Outside of Aleppo, I ran into a group of refugees. They cried and begged me to spare their lives, as if I were a monster. I helped them.”
I nodded. I knew that transition. I had made it myself. But I’d never been a monster. Right?
“We moved northeast, sprinting and crawling toward Turkey and freedom. We were ambushed. I tried to fight our attackers off, but they were too many. Most of the refugees were slaughtered. When I awoke three days later, I was chained to a bed in a Riyadh cell, my father standing over me. Six months, I played the dutiful son, but I thought only of the friends I had abandoned here.”
I nodded again. I knew that feeling, too, that you’d abandoned the only things that mattered in your life. “You came to fight?”
“I came to rescue them.”
“Then call your father.” I handed him my sat phone.
“You don’t know my father.”
“It’s the only way.”
“My father is head of Saudi intelligence, black-ops division,” Farhan said. He was watching for my reaction. I didn’t have one. “He is a killer.”
“He wouldn’t offer a million dollars to have you back, alive, if he didn’t care.”
The prince scoffed. “A million dollars is nothing to my father. I had a second cousin who went on a $20 million Paris shopping spree and skipped out on the bill. Her second uncle paid her debts to preserve the family name. The year before I left, my father spent $100,000 in bribes to get our family slaves travel visas into the EU. Yes, I said slaves. Are you surprised? Rafik”—he motioned toward the baker—“was born a slave. His family has served us for generations. It is the Saudi way.”
“Call your father.”
“He will kill her.”
“Who?”
Silence. For the first time, Farhan glanced away.
“Who will your father kill?”
“His wife,” a voice said from behind me, and I turned to see a beautiful young woman with feline eyes, a delicately hooked nose, and a cascade of black hair.
“You’re Iranian,” I said, before I could stop myself. Iranians were Persian, not Arabic, and like all ethnicities, they had distinctive features, if you knew what to look for.
“I’m American,” she said. “From Los Angeles.”
She had a modern woman’s attitude about her social place. But even more important, she had a very swollen belly.
“How long?” I asked.
“One week, if I make it full term.”
Farhan was staring at me again. He seemed to think this was a superpower. It was growing tiresome. “Will you help us?” he asked.
“Your father won’t kill her. Not if she’s carrying your child.”
“That’s why he’ll kill her,” Farhan said.
“How can you say such a thing?”
“Because he’s already tried. The men who ambushed us on the road to Turkey weren’t ISIS. They were working for my father.”
I didn’t believe it. “Are you sure?”
Farhan nodded. “My father’s majordomo was with them. He was directing them. I saw him on the battlefield, and I recognized his white suit. Even in the dirt, he always wears a white suit.” My heart sank. Farhan must have seen it falling down my chest. “You know him?”
I nodded.
“He hired you?”
“Worse,” I said. “I called him two hours ago. He’s on his way.”