Brad Winters stared at himself in a garish gilt mirror that took up half the wall as he waited in the antechamber for Abdulaziz to allow him admittance. His hair was cut short but impeccably groomed, with a sharp part and an old-fashioned rise in the front, like a small wave curling toward a beach. A Princeton, they used to call this haircut, on the old illustrated 1950s haircut charts.
White boy cut, his barber had called it with a laugh, back in the inner-city Baltimore neighborhood where Winters grew up. The man was used to African-American hair; he could never get the Princeton right.
Winters had it just right now, though, even if it had been five days since his last trim. He had gone gray over the last few years, but he was lucky: the hair was stone white and distinguished, with just a bit of color at the temples. He made his face as blank as possible and stared into his own eyes, but he couldn’t find anything hidden there. Good. If he couldn’t find his true self in his face, then neither could anyone else.
Clooney-esque, he thought, tipping his chin a quarter inch to the right and allowing himself a mirthless smile.
“Mr. Winters,” the prince’s male secretary said, opening the door.
He went inside, the computer tucked under his arm. He had brought the largest flat-screen he could find, for effect.
“What do you have for me now, Mr. Winters?” Abdulaziz sighed. Winters could see the strain under his eyes. The man hadn’t been sleeping. Just wait, my prince. It gets worse.
“I’ll let the video do the talking,” he said, even though the video had been recorded, possibly accidentally, without sound.
He set up the computer and found the bookmarked site, while the prince sighed impatiently. He was in his late sixties and pampered; he had no use for computers. But his eyes widened when he saw the majordomo in the alley with his phone in his hand, and the gaunt figure stepping into the frame behind him. He didn’t flinch when the man cut his majordomo’s fingers off with a ludicrous sword, nor did he flinch when his head came off with one blow. He had seen these kinds of things before. He lived by them. But Winters knew the death had unnerved him.
“Where did you get this?” Abdulaziz demanded.
“We monitor the fanatic websites. It’s a valuable part of our job. The video appeared this afternoon, shortly after the noon prayers.”
“Is it real?”
Winters nodded. “Yes. And there are seven others with earlier time stamps, all the same assailant, all beheadings.”
The prince stared at the screen, although the image had gone black. He wasn’t thinking about the majordomo. He was thinking about his son, out there somewhere, with this fanatic nearby.
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know his true name, but he has a nickname by which he is known.”
The prince looked up as Winters paused for effect. “Yes?” he said.
“The Wahhabi,” Winters said solemnly, knowing the name would hit Abdulaziz hard. The man was a Saudi. The man was a Sunni religious fanatic. The man would lead the prince’s mind exactly where Winters wanted it to go: to a palace conspiracy, to the rival faction, to Prince Khalid.
“Anything else?” the prince asked, pointedly looking away. Winters could almost feel his mind churning. Abdulaziz was paranoid, unstable, and surrounded by enemies. He was not a man to be pushed too far.
“Not right now, my prince.”
“Then please go. And take this blasted machine.”
One less loose end, Winters thought with a small smile, as he tucked the blasted machine under this arm. One more push.
That push was happening forty kilometers away, in al Ha’ir prison. Even as Brad Winters was slipping into the backseat of his chauffeured car, contemplating how to find Prince Farhan, or at least how to keep him from escaping Sinjar, Mishaal was on his knees, begging his faceless attendant for his cure.
“I am nothing,” the prince was saying. “I am unclean. I am”—anything you want me to be, if it means one more shot—“yours.”
“Now you see the truth,” the attendant said, as he pulled the hypodermic needle from his robes, and plunged it into the base of Mishaal’s skull.
The prince felt the relief sweeping over him, like desert rain, like the Nile flooding its banks in the spring and covering the dry fields with the basic nutrients of life, the dead plants, the rotten timbers, the broken-down shit. He felt his cells open to receive, crying out, and then collapse on themselves. He found himself crying, his face to his prayer rug, his lips intoning silently the glory of the father.
Six minutes later, he was dead.