Arabian Collusion

by James Lawrence

  “No, he got hit by the perfect trifecta— Crimea, Ukraine and Turkey. The last three years of the previous administration were kind of rough on the Central Asian Desk.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “When I took over the Middle East in 2014, I had no place to go but up. Seriously, things were that bad after Arab Spring.”

  “Timing is everything.”

  “It is. Which reminds me that it’s time for food.”

  “What do you feel like? Steak? Chicken? Veal? Fish? I’ll tell you what, let me surprise you.”

  I muddled through the order for both of us. I even managed to find a bottle of Tuscan red, a Solaia 2013 that showed great promise, according to the Vivino wine app I checked on my cell phone.

  We finished our meal, left the St. Regis, and walked six blocks to the Divine Brasserie and Jazz Club, still in the Nisantasi District. It was hot, and by the time we reached the bar, we had worked up a thirst. It was dark downstairs in the club area. We were given a seat against the wall, not far from the five-person band. The music was loud, so it was a good place to talk shop. We both ordered a draft beer.

  I relayed the conversation I had with Avashi. To compensate for the music, our heads were almost touching. When I finished, Mike sat back in his chair. We listened to the rest of the set without conversation. The band was very skilled. The lead singer was a tall, dark-haired Turkish beauty in a black evening gown who did a pretty fair Billie Holiday imitation.

  “Avashi wants Omer off the target list,” Mike said.

  “He wants his guys to surveil instead.”

  “And then what?”

  “After the announcement of the Qibla is made and all hell breaks loose, we find who hired Omer and target them.”

  “Just because somebody is providing funding to Omer doesn’t make him the head of the snake. Omer could be pursuing his own agenda and be receiving funding from someone with a similar aim.”

  “Either way, we wait and then we roll up Omer and whoever his backers are.”

  “Because it’s already too late to stop the chaos.”

  “That’s Avashi’s viewpoint.”

  “What’s your plan?”

  “I was going to hang out in Istanbul and see what kind of chaos a thirteen-hundred-year-old book can create.”

  “I need to fly back tomorrow morning; otherwise I’d join you.”

  “In the meantime, I suggest we drink heavily, for the end is near.”

  I woke the next morning with a bit of a hangover. I had a suite at the St. Regis, and I heard a noise outside my door. I assumed it was the butler setting up for breakfast. I grabbed the bathrobe at the base of the bed and walked out into the living room. I was barely a step out of the room when Cheryl wrapped her arms around me. I hugged her back.

  “You don’t look so good. What did you do last night?” asked Cheryl.

  “Mike and I went on a bit of a bender.”

  “What was the occasion?”

  “End of the world party.”

  “Not funny. Take a shower; I’ll order breakfast.”

  “Just hit the buzzer and ask for Bader.”

  “Who’s Bader?”

  “My personal butler.”

  “Seriously?”

  “He came with the room. Like a house elf. He needs work, but I never have anything for him to do. I’m too low maintenance. I think he feels insulted that I don’t ask him to do stuff.”

  “Walsh problems are unique to only you.”

  “Just order breakfast while I make myself presentable.”

  We ate breakfast in the dining area. Eggs Benedict and bacon did wonders for my condition. Cheryl had fruit, yogurt, and tea.

  “What a view,” she said while looking out at the Bosporus and the Asian side of Istanbul beyond.

  “I never get tired of this view. Imagine what it was like during the Crusades when the Templars landed to lay siege to Constantinople.”

  “Did they land here?”

  “Yeah, I think so. We should go to Old Town and check out the palaces, museums, the Hagia Sophia, and the rest of the sights.”

  “Let’s do that in the afternoon. I didn’t sleep well on the plane; I could use a nap.” She said with a sly smile. I gulped and took her by the hand and led her toward the bedroom. On the way, I asked Bader to reserve a car for the afternoon. Filled with purpose, he finished clearing the table and left like a man on a mission.

  I woke up from a short nap and turned on the television. Sitting up in bed, I turned on CNN. The lead story was a violent Palestinian protest in Gaza. The grievance was Jerusalem and the restricted access for the Palestinians imposed by the Israelis. Flicking between BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera, the picture became clear; the Muslim world was once again in a state of heightened unrest. Reports of protests in Iran were the most concerning. Because of the media restrictions, the footage was not nearly as dramatic as in Palestine and Egypt, but based on my conversations with Mike, I was sure they would be the protests with the most far-reaching consequences.

  Cheryl was curled up next to me sleeping. I was anxious to go outside and see the reaction of the Istanbul citizens to the revelations announced by their local imams about the lost Koran and the Qibla. It was past two in the afternoon; prayer and the weekly holy day Friday lectures from the imams should have all been finished by now. I decided to stick to the TV and let Cheryl sleep in for a while. Watching the world news would let me gauge the reaction as word swept east from time zone to time zone.

  It was nearly six when Cheryl woke up and got out of bed. She dressed, and we went out for a walk. It was a beautiful weekend summer day in Istanbul. The St. Regis is bordered by Macka Park on one side and by the upscale Nisantasi district shopping area on the other. We had an eight o’clock seating at Nicole’s for dinner. Nicole’s is my favorite restaurant in Istanbul and is located on an office building rooftop in the Taksim area. We had skipped lunch and I was really looking forward to whatever Chef Nicole had planned for tonight’s twelve-course set menu. I took Cheryl’s hand as we exited the hotel. We were both dressed for dinner. She was wearing a floral summer dress and sandals, and I was wearing jeans, loafers and a black button-down shirt.

  We walked south along the beautifully manicured, tree-lined trails of Macka Park. As we approached the southern exit, we heard sounds of protest coming from the vicinity of Taksim Square. We stopped at the Macka Park exit gate to get our bearings. The protests didn’t sound much different from the many I’d seen over the years at Taksim. From our vantage point, looking south we could see the Dolmabahce Clock Tower and beyond that, the blue waters of the Bosporos. To our west was Vodafone Sports Stadium and hidden behind it to the west was Taksim Square. Farther to the east, out of our view, was the Dolmabahce Mosque.

  The police presence intensified as we came nearer to Taksim Square. Once we reached the boundary of the Square, there were hundreds of police decked out in full riot control gear with shields and helmets. There was a cacophony of megaphone-amplified rally speakers shouting over each other in Turkish. The square was packed with thousands of people. The crowd was a mixture of young and old, although mostly young. Cheryl and I didn’t enter the Square; protests are common in Istanbul and the Taksim is almost always the center for them. Democracy and the frequent military coups have always made for a tumultuous government in Turkey and this Qibla-inspired protest didn’t look much different from what I had witnessed in the past.

  “Let’s head back and grab a taxi to the restaurant,” Cheryl said.

  “OK,” I said. We both turned away from the crowd, and before I could take a single step, I heard a loud whack and saw Cheryl in my periphery sprawl forward onto the sidewalk face first. I dropped my head and raised my left arm as I turned to my left. I felt the sting of a club against my upper back and my left arm went temporarily numb. I dropped to one knee as a stinging pain shot down my spine and watched another man with a raised club step forward to deliver another blow. I sprang at the man at a speed he couldn�
��t comprehend and definitely didn’t expect. I felt his jaw shatter like glass from the impact of my right fist. The mob descended on me from every direction. It was impossible to isolate a single target as the men came at me fast and hard; it was a blur. Clubs, fists, and kicks rained onto me. I countered in a whirling dervish of blows of my own.

  For every strike I gave, I took three in return. The big difference is that I can take a punch, and when I connect with a hit, it’s a game ender for the poor son of a bitch on the receiving end. It felt like an eternity, but in a matter of minutes, the swarming mob backed away. I was out of breath and exhausted as I took stock of the situation. Five men were unconscious and unmoving on the ground. Another three were down, crying out in pain. At least two had their femurs snapped with straight kicks. I walked over to Cheryl who was lying unconscious on the sidewalk and I threw her over my still-tingling left shoulder. I picked up a stray Billy club and held it at the ready in my right hand. A new crowd of angry Turks was forming all around us. For the time being, they maintained their distance. The police were nowhere to be found.

  Cheryl began to stir. I let her down and held her by the waist.

  “Can you walk?” I asked.

  “Yes, I’m OK,” she said, as she gingerly bent down and picked up two sticks no longer used by our assailants.

  “I’ll clear a path through the crowd. Stay close behind me,” I said.

  “I’m with you,” Cheryl replied.

  My face and shirt were covered in blood. I could see fear in the eyes of the crowd in front of me, but I could also see anger. The sight of my six foot five, 220 pounds in full bloodlust would have been enough to cause any rational man to back down. Unfortunately, the psychology of the mob always leads to false bravado, and this case was no different.

  The first attacker made his move and came at me from the front with a club raised in his hand. I cracked his skull open with a brutal overhand stroke of my baton. Fists and clubs rained down on me from both sides. I advanced forward through the assault and snapped the leg of the next Turkish man in front of me with a straight right kick. I followed the kick with a right forehand sweep of the club that shattered the teeth of a Turk who nearly took my head off with a swinging club strike of his own. I used the baton as a spear and drove it into the throat of a man to my right who connected with a solid punch to my jaw. I continued the same combination of overhand, kick, sweep, and spear several more times. I could feel Cheryl struggling behind me.

  My heart was pumping a mile a minute, and I was beginning to slow from fatigue. I wasn’t going to last much longer. My arms were burning, but I could see daylight through the crowd. I dropped the last two Turks in front of me and turned around to check on Cheryl. She was holding the two batons nunchuk style. Blood was covering her face from the hit she had taken on the head that started the conflict. The crowd didn’t follow us as we crossed the street and headed toward the Vodafone stadium. Police sirens and amplified protest speeches filled the air. I tried to hail two taxis, but neither would stop. Cheryl and I were a frightening sight.

  We entered the park and moved north toward our hotel on the same trail we had started on. We found a public restroom next to the fountains and we both went into the men’s room and cleaned up as best we could. Still carrying the nightsticks, we wiped them down and left them in the trash. The bleeding from the cut on top of Cheryl’s head had slowed. She held a wad of paper napkins against it as we returned to the park trail to finish our trek back to the hotel.

  Despite our attempt to clean up earlier, we both looked like we had just gone a couple of rounds with Muhammad Ali. When we reached the hotel, we found security guarding the entrances to the lobby. They checked our names against the list of guests and ushered us inside. Two men were seated in the lobby holding towels to their faces. Cheryl and I were not the only guests who had run afoul of the agitated locals.

  One of the managers intercepted us on the way to the elevator.

  “Do you need help?” he asked.

  “Yes, please send the hotel doctor to our room; she’s going to need stitches,” I said.

  Inside our suite, Badar immediately got us some ice. Cheryl went to the shower and returned to the living area wearing a hotel bathrobe and holding a damp towel against her head. I went into the shower and returned feeling fresh and clean. Except for a small bruise on the right cheek and huge welt on my left shoulder, as luck would have it, I was barely injured. Cheryl, on the other hand, looked terrible. Both of her eyes were bruised and puffy, and she was looking through narrow slits. She had a swollen lip and a big scrape on her cheekbone where she fell against the concrete sidewalk. On top of her head, she had a deep cut that was going to take a few stitches to close. Her delicate five-foot-seven-inch, 110-pound frame was battered and bruised everywhere.

  We both sat on the couch waiting for the house doctor to arrive. I called my charter service and requested a plane for an immediate flight to Germany. The earliest we could fly out would be six the next morning. I arranged for a limo to pick us up at the hotel at four.

  “Do you think it’s safe to stay here tonight?” I asked Cheryl.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” she asked.

  “I’m worried about the police. Our little rumble had to have resulted in some fatalities.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so. At least three, probably more.”

  “You fight like a barbarian.”

  “Bad idea to hit my girl.”

  “We’re lucky to be alive. They were worked up to a frenzy.”

  “About what, exactly? What did the imams say after the afternoon prayer that would have caused them to attack us? I thought the enemy would be the Saudis or the Israelis.”

  “Turkey has been on a heavy populist path lately, ever since Erdogan. Somehow, the shifting of the Qibla has stoked those flames even higher.”

  “Saudi and UAE have had a travel warning in Turkey for the past several weeks because of a number of harassing incidents. US citizens have been detained and harassed by the police ever since we backed the wrong horse during the coup a few months ago. I guess today’s message was to stop with the soft stuff and get tough with the infidels.”

  “Hopefully, the police will be too preoccupied with the protests to chase us down.”

  “I’m sure they will be. But one of the things that struck me was how the police did nothing while we were being attacked.”

  “Yeah, it was pretty obvious whose side they were on. But even if they have been given direction to let the mobs kill the foreigners, they’ll still be kept busy protecting property. Mobs get out of control easily.”

  The doctor came and stitched up Cheryl. He didn’t give her any painkillers beyond a local anesthetic because he said she had a mild concussion. He didn’t ask what happened; he had no doubt already treated other hotel guests and the news across the city made it too obvious.

  We fell asleep watching the news. There were reports of riots from every country in the Middle East. The government-controlled news service in Saudi kept the details of the unrest to a minimum.

  We flew out the next morning on a Gulfstream G5. It was more airplane than we needed, but I accepted it because it was the first one available.

  Chapter 14

  Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

  A group of slightly more than a hundred protestors arrived and began to mill around soon after evening prayer. They started to collect on the sidewalk but soon spilled over into the streets and before long blocked traffic at the intersection of King Saud and King Fahad streets. By ten in the evening, the crowd had swelled to more than twenty thousand. In a country where protest is illegal and has historically been met with deadly gunfire from the government, the size of this demonstration was unprecedented. A phalanx of police officers in riot control gear formed a line ten deep across King Saud Street blocking the way to the huge Ministry of Interior complex that was only two hundred yards from the assembled crowd.

  The protestors were
all men; they sported heavy beards, wore local dress, and many carried prayer beads in their hands. These men were religious conservatives—Wahhabis. The last protests in the Kingdom took place during the Arab Spring in 2011. At the time, many of those protestors were gunned down by police for seeking increased liberalization and democracy. Today’s crowd had an opposite agenda; they were protesting liberalization. The kingdom was changing; women were being allowed to drive and to leave the home unescorted. Cinemas, previously illegal, were sprouting up in malls and contaminating the people with Western culture. The religious police, the Mutawa, were being restrained. They were prohibited from making arrests and discouraged from wielding the stick against inappropriate behavior. The crowd was most incensed by the blasphemy of a second version of the Holy Quran and the attempts by their co-religionists to move the Qibla. These were all signs that it was time for action. All across the Kingdom, the faithful were assembling in protest for what had been promoted in the mosques as a Day of Rage.

  Imams took turns inciting the crowd using the speaker system from the closest neighborhood mosque, which was located across the street from the King Saud Conference Center. It was almost midnight when two of the cars parked on the street in front of the Mosque exploded. The blast from the car bombs killed dozens and wounded many more. Constrained by buildings on both sides of the street, the blasts had a disastrous effect on the crowd. The location of the blast and the instinctive reaction of the crowd to flee the mayhem funneled the protestors toward the Ministry of Interior complex.

  The sound of the two explosions that were seconds apart stunned the police commander. The sight of the panicked crowd stampeding toward the phalanx of police officers guarding the gates of the MOI terrified him. Without hesitation, he keyed his radio and issued the order to fire. By the time his command reached the rank and file, the running crowd had already breached the first line of police holding riot control shields. A melee ensued. Trapped between the wall surrounding the MOI building and the rushing crowd, the terrified back rows of the police line fired indiscriminately into the intermingled mass of police and protestors.