Prince Abdulaziz frowned at his son Mishaal, who was sitting across the aisle from him in a plush red leather seat. Around them, the curved walls of the private airplane were gold-plated, polished, and etched with an intricate, interlocking pattern. The red and gold were echoed in the prayer rug on the floor, which quivered like a compass needle on a rotating platform. To a Western eye, the jet was gaudy, like red lipstick had exploded inside its gold tube, but in Saudi Arabia, the look was only slightly out of date. The prince’s primary plane was more stylish, but he had brought his smaller jet, since this trip was only for father and son, not his important contacts. Still, even in the smaller space, it felt like the two men were miles apart. Or more accurately, Abdulaziz was cruising at thirty thousand feet, while Mishaal was sinking into the ground.
“It was simple,” the father said.
Mishaal shook his head. “So you keep saying, but that doesn’t make it true.”
“All you had to do was pick up a briefcase.”
“I picked up the briefcase.”
“I paid five billion dollars on your promise that all was in order.”
“All was in order.”
“And less than one hour later, you bury our family in shame.”
“It’s only money . . .” The younger prince sighed, although he knew money wasn’t the point.
“There’s no such thing as only money,” the older prince said, glaring at his son. When Abdulaziz was a boy in the 1960s, $5 billion would have been his family’s entire net worth. He’d worked hard all his life to turn that pittance into a fortune, and it seemed his eldest son had been working his whole life to squander everything he’d accomplished.
“I understand.”
“You don’t understand,” Abdulaziz snapped. “There are fifteen thousand members of the royal family. Ten thousand are like you: fools. I have outmaneuvered, outstrategized, and outmuscled most of the others to give our family this opportunity. I worked for a year to put this deal in place. I have spent considerable capital, Mishaal, the personal kind, the kind you have never bothered to accumulate, calling in favors. I have been to Bangladesh. Do you understand that sacrifice? You should have seen the squalor. The streets were crawling with vermin.”
Abdulaziz paused, remembering the grubby beggars and the neediness of the middlemen. It was preposterous that they called themselves patriots.
“I trusted you with one task,” he continued. “One. To bring a briefcase from Paris to Riyadh. Our future rests on the contents of that briefcase, and I could trust only a member of our family to make the pickup. That person was you. And what do you do? What do you decide to do? You decide to fail.”
“They had guns.”
“So did you.”
“They were going to cut off my hand. With a saw.”
“It would have shown your faith.”
“It would have killed me!”
“Better to be a martyr than a fool!”
Mishaal turned away, appalled but not surprised. His father was always ruthless, never kind, forever ambitious. Certainly not a father.
“I’m not going to die,” Mishaal muttered, staring out the window like a teenager, even though he was forty-two, “simply because I’m your son.”
Abdulaziz felt the plane shifting, banking toward home. He watched the prayer rug rotate, finding its true direction facing Mecca. Why did they keep having this conversation? Why did it have to be so hard? He had given so much for his children, his whole life, and yet he had received nothing in return.
Why had Allah cursed him? How could a man with five wives have only two worthless sons?
“The older generation is dying,” he said, trying to control his anger. “When King Abdullah dies there will be no more sons of al-Saud to take the throne. And his health is failing. For the first time in my life, there will be meaningful change in the Kingdom. Generational change. And our family will be part of it, Mishaal. We have been given this opportunity, through my hard work, to set the Kingdom on a new course. And we will succeed. Salman will become King of Saudi Arabia, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and Head of the House of Saud. This is not a debate. We are Sudairi blood, just like Salman, and we will help him outmaneuver his rivals for the throne. In return, he will grant the Abdulaziz family a place on his Foreign Council.”
“You mean Farhan.”
“I mean the family, Mishaal.”
“Farhan is your chosen,” Mishaal said, slumping in his seat. “No matter what he does, you forgive. With me . . .”
Abdulaziz turned away, a gesture both symbolic and disrespectful. He didn’t have to listen to Mishaal and his petty grievances against his younger brother. He never had. Farhan was superior in every way, even if Farhan had let him down. But fanaticism in the young was far better than degeneracy in the old. He could turn Farhan’s passion; he could do nothing with Mishaal.
“None of this is your concern anymore,” he said, allowing the anger in his voice to kill the rising regret. “You are going to Ha’il, to the desert, to be cleansed.”
Mishaal shot out of his slouch. Ha’il meant drug rehabilitation in one of the notorious Wahhabi religious institutions, and the thought of living without his medicine was unbearable. The Wahhabis were unkind to men like him; his time in Ha’il would be torture. But he knew the sentence was worse than that. This was exile. From the family. From his father’s influence. And maybe, because Abdulaziz was a cruel man, from his wealth.
“You can’t—” he stammered, but Abdulaziz raised his hand.
“Prince . . . Father.”
Abdulaziz bowed his head. The midmorning call to prayer had started over the jet’s sound system. The elder prince lifted his considerable bulk and knelt on the prayer rug. He touched his forehead to the golden silk, in a pose of supplication. The plane banked, and Abdulaziz’s rotund figure rotated on the rug, his head bowed toward Mecca in humility before the vast numinousness of Allah.
Mishaal watched, his lip curling in disgust. He hated this false piety. But more than that, he hated this man.
The man curled his torso to the ground as the midmorning prayer call rose toward its conclusion. As a Wahhabi Muslim, he was more pious than most, some might have said extreme. But the judgments of man did not concern him; only submission to God mattered.
He held his hands in front of him, his forehead nearly touching the carpet in supplication. The exact position had taken him more than a year to perfect, but now it was a part of him. That was the nature of ritual. It became automatic to the body, something that existed beyond the need to think or consider. Then you could free your mind to understand tawhid, the oneness of God. Or to size up your fellow worshippers.
The Wahhabi sat up, his eyes calmly scanning the eight other men in the mosque. The women had their own worship corner behind the cubbyholes for shoes, but he never concerned himself with them. In fact, for all his practiced watchfulness, he didn’t know if there were women present at all.
The Rüstem Pasha Mosque of Istanbul was small but old, accessed by one nondescript door and a dark flight of stairs. Thousands walked past without realizing it was there, because the mosque was in the middle of the downtown spice market, and merchants’ stalls covered the ground floor, while pigeons and their filth obscured the windows. Many who found the mosque considered its blue-tiled dome the most beautiful in Istanbul, especially in the softer morning light, but as the Wahhabi raised his head from prayer, he didn’t even glance at the artistry above. He studied the men instead, searching their lack of piety. They were small and poor, from the underclass of Turkish society, but that was no excuse. The Wahhabi had once been small and poor himself.
Prayers ended. The Wahhabi bowed one last time. Allahu Akbar. Dear Father. Raise up your son.
He rose. Another man rose with him. Neither looked at the other. They walked to the back of the room to retrieve their shoes. The Wahhabi put his on slowly, with deliberate care, as he did everything now. He was a tall man, long and angular in every way, from his skeletal fingers to his thin face. He wasn’t young or old but of indeterminate age. It was a number that didn’t matter to him anyway, and was in fact something he’d begun to forget. He preferred not to think of his childhood or young adulthood, but only of his rebirth, after he’d found his purpose and awoken into the joys of submission to God.
The small man bumped him, fumbling with his shoes. The Wahhabi stared down his nose at him. The man was inefficient, full of unnecessary movement. He was unworthy. Or worse, an apostate.
The Wahhabi reached over and, in one smooth motion, snatched the purse and a piece of paper from the other man’s hands. The paper was a photograph, but the Wahhabi didn’t bother to look at it. There was no escape. If the man in the photograph had been given to the Wahhabi, the man was dead already.
“Allahu akbar,” the informant said, lowering his eyes. God is the greatest.
True, little man, the Wahhabi thought. And I am his instrument.