The Secret Soldier jw-5

by Alex Berenson

  “I was in Pakistan at the time, the North-West Frontier. Didn’t get much news.”

  “So the muttawa”—the religious police—“came, and you must imagine, this is Mecca, they are even more conservative there than anywhere else. They blocked the entrance to the school. They wouldn’t let in the firefighters. And they would only let out the girls who were wearing abayas. They made the other girls go back. The firefighters and the civil defence said, ‘This is not the time to enforce these laws.’ But while they argued, the school was burning. The girls were stuck inside. Screaming, ‘Let us out! Let us out!’ They started to jump out the windows. By the time the firefighters got inside, fifteen of them died and fifty were terribly hurt. Little girls. A tragedy. And the newspapers wrote about it. Saudi newspapers criticizing the religious police and calling for an investigation of the school. It had never happened before. And Abdullah and I, you understand, we welcomed this.”

  “But not Saeed.”

  “Not Saeed. Not Nayef, the interior minister, either. After a few days, Nayef called all the newspaper editors in. He told them it was time for the investigations to end. And once the interior minister tells you to stop investigating, you stop, or you go to jail. And he said that the muttawa had not blocked the gate and that they had behaved properly. He said they were there to make sure that the girls didn’t face ‘mistreatment’ outside the building. And Saeed — Saeed went even further. He called the muttawa ‘heroes.’ ”

  “Abdullah couldn’t get involved?”

  “At the time, he wasn’t the king. And the religious police, the clerics, they don’t think this fire is a tragedy. Because to them, the girls shouldn’t be in school at all. So the fire is Allah punishing them. And Saeed and Nayef, I’m not sure whether they believe that, but they know the clerics do.”

  “They sound like sweeties.”

  “Then, a few months later, Nayef said that the Saudis weren’t the ones who hijacked the planes on September 11. The Americans shouted so much that he took it back. But Saeed not only repeated it — he made a big speech about it. He doesn’t trust the United States, and he never will. He thinks the clerics are right, that there’s only room for one religion. And Saeed, when he dies, he’ll be no different than Abdullah. He’ll want his son on the throne.”

  “Mansour.”

  “Yes. And I’ve decided that Abdullah is right about Mansour. He believes only in power.”

  “Is Abdullah faithful?”

  “Yes. More than I am. But you don’t understand what it’s like to be our age. We see death around every corner. We can’t pretend that Allah will protect us any longer. But then Allah’s kept his bargain with us. We’ve had our lives. What I mean is that whether you believe matters less at our age. What will be will be. Allah will judge us all on his own scale, heaven or hell. And if it turns out to be nothing at all on the other side — and yes, we all wonder that, too — we can’t help that, either.”

  Wells found himself liking this old man. “You think Khalid will be a good king?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s what Abdullah wants, and I’ve pledged to help him.” Miteb looked Wells over. “I know what you think. You think, Why help these men? What gives them the right to all this money that comes out of the ground? But this is our system. Maybe in fifty years, we’ll have something different. A constitutional monarchy like Jordan. But it’s impossible now. The princes and the clerics won’t allow it. And look at Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela, Libya. Wherever there’s oil, there are dictators and war.”

  As Miteb had said, Wells was inclined to stay out of this battle for a sticky black throne. Yet Miteb had made a persuasive case. He hadn’t pretended that Khalid would be a perfect ruler. He had said only that Khalid was better than the alternatives.

  “All right. Let’s say I’ll help you. Tell me, how do the attacks last week relate to all this?”

  “Possibly they don’t. Possibly it’s coincidence, Al Qaeda picked last week for more attacks. But I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t think so, either.”

  “So it’s a new group. One capable of launching three attacks at once. Avoiding detection from America. Hitting a hotel in the center of Riyadh. They’re well-trained and well-financed. They must have had friends inside the muk. Maybe the very top, maybe not, but certainly some help.”

  “Say you’re right. What’s the point?”

  “To create instability. Anger my brother, make him overreact. His temper gets worse every week. I think because he’s in so much pain. So he lashes out at his brothers and the senior clerics. Then Saeed goes to the other princes and says, ‘We all love Abdullah, but we can’t trust him anymore. He needs to step down.’ Already they whisper that he’s paranoid.”

  From what Wells had seen of Abdullah, the scenario was plausible. “That’s why Abdullah can’t strip Saeed and Mansour of their power quietly?”

  “If he tries to move openly against Saeed, Saeed will say that Abdullah is losing his mind. Abdullah made a mistake when he said that he wanted his son to be king. We have a proverb, ‘Your tongue is your steed. Guard it and it guards you, abuse it and it abuses you.’ My brother spoke too soon. That gave Saeed the opening, set everything else in motion. But what’s done is done. Abdullah couldn’t help himself.”

  “What if Saeed has won already?” Wells said.

  “It’s possible. But my brother has been popular. Especially among ordinary people. And if Saeed and Mansour were sure they’d won, they’d have no need to provoke Abdullah. They would just wait for the succession.”

  “So. Now that I understand, what is it you want me to do?”

  A brown leather satchel lay at Miteb’s feet. Miteb reached down and slipped his palsied fingers through the handle. He pulled it up, his wrists shaking. Wells could almost feel him straining.

  “Prince—” Wells reached over.

  “No. Let me.” Inch by inch, Miteb edged the satchel higher, his lips quivering. I’ll never be that old, Wells promised himself. Never. Even if I am. Finally Miteb dropped the satchel on the seat — and let out a giant fart that filled the Maybach.

  “Smells like a barrel of oil,” Wells said.

  Suddenly, both men were laughing. “One day you’ll understand.”

  “Inshallah, I hope not.”

  INSIDE THE SATCHEL, WELLS found a spy’s treasure trove.

  An Algerian passport, real, with a name and date of birth but no photo. What operatives called a blank. A battered cell phone, its screen cracked. An empty wallet, its brown leather splattered with blood. A Nikon D300, a professional-grade SLR, with a telephoto lens. A second camera, a Canon small enough to be hidden inside a man’s palm. A half-dozen flat white plastic rectangles embedded with black strips — passkeys for a hotel or office building. Three architectural maps of a fan-shaped neighborhood that Wells didn’t recognize. A plastic police evidence bag that contained a wad of riyals, the Saudi currency, and a money clip of hundred-dollar bills.

  “The police in Riyadh found all this a few days ago. We were fortunate. Mansour’s men weren’t involved. There was an auto accident. A big truck ran through a traffic light, hit a car, crushed it and killed the driver. When the police came, they found the car was stolen and the driver had no identification. When the police opened the trunk, they found the passport and the camera and called their captain.”

  “Why didn’t they tell the Interior Ministry?”

  “The head of the police in Riyadh is loyal to Abdullah. He’s ordered that this type of material be passed to him so that he can give it to the mukhabarat himself. Sometimes files are lost before they reach the muk. You understand?”

  “Saeed and Mansour don’t know you’ve found all this.”

  “Correct.”

  “But you told me the police haven’t identified this man. How can you be so sure that he’s connected to the men behind the attacks last week?”

  Miteb had no answer.

  “If this is all you have, you and your brother
are really drawing thin.”

  “‘Drawing thin’? I don’t understand.”

  Wells held up the phone and the plastic evidence bag. “The phone and money were in the driver’s pocket?”

  Miteb nodded. “The phone doesn’t work anymore. But it still has its memory. And it shows three calls from mobile phones with Lebanese area codes.”

  Which might not have been made from Lebanon at all, Wells thought. “Did he have anything else? Receipts? Credit cards? A map with a big black X marking the spot of his hideout?”

  Miteb smiled. “No map. As for the rest, I can ask, but I don’t think so. Everything the police found is here. You see they even kept the money from the wallet.”

  “We’re lucky for that.”

  Wells took the money from the plastic bag. He set the clip with the hundred-dollar bills aside and thumbed through the Saudi currency, thirty or so bills, ranging from one-riyal to five-hundred-riyal notes, their edges streaked with blood.

  “You don’t need to take that,” Miteb said. “If you need money, tell me.”

  “Here’s a thirty-second tutorial on tradecraft, Prince. The man who died in that crash was a professional. Or at least professionally trained. He kept almost everything in his head. But nobody can remember everything.” Wells thumbed through the hundred-dollar bills, then examined the riyals more closely. “You’ve got to give yourself help. And even the most careful cops aren’t likely to check your banknotes for hidden information.”

  Wells held up a one-riyal note. Four numbers were written in tiny Arabic script in the upper-right corner: 5421. On the next note, four more numbers in the lower-right corner: 8239.

  “See these? I find three more bills like this, I have a sixteen-digit credit-card number with a three-digit pin — personal identification number. Let’s say my handlers are giving me a new card once a month. And they don’t want me to keep the physical cards. That’s a lot to remember, nineteen digits. This way I don’t have to. I put the bills together and I have my card. I can use it on the Internet whenever I like. And if the card gets canceled and I need a new one, I spend the money and get fresh banknotes and repeat the process.”

  “Very good.”

  “I didn’t invent it.”

  “So now that you have the credit card, what will you do?”

  “I’m not planning to do anything.”

  “Please, Mr. Wells. My brother and I, we can offer you whatever you like, but you told us yesterday that money didn’t matter, and I believe you. I don’t know how to convince you.”

  “Convince me to what?”

  “Find out who was paying this man. Where they’re located. What we’d ask our mukhabarat to do if we trusted them.”

  “Even if you’re right that the muk are involved, the chain won’t run all the way up to Saeed or Mansour. At best, I’ll find somebody a couple steps removed.”

  “That’s closer than we are now. Then you infiltrate, stop the next attack.”

  “I don’t know what Pierre Kowalski told you about me. But that’s not how it works. I can’t just find these men and tell them I want to join the war against Abdullah.”

  Miteb sagged against his seat. Wells saw the prince’s exhaustion in the slump of his shoulders. None of this could be easy for a man his age.

  “All right,” Wells said. He slipped the money into the plastic bag and put the bag and everything else back into the satchel and put the satchel at his feet. “I’ll make a few calls, see what I can find.”

  Miteb put his arms around Wells, kissed Wells’s cheeks with his papery lips. His trembling fingers skittered over Wells’s back. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. I haven’t done anything.”

  “But you will.”

  “Maybe.” But Wells knew he was lying. He’d chosen a side already.

  AT THE HOTEL, WELLS called a number that would be burned into his brain even if he lived to be older than Abdullah. The phone rang once. Then: “Shafer here.”

  “Ellis. I need your help.”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 10

  JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA

  FROM A DISTANCE, THE TWO HUNDRED WOMEN IN THE CONFERENCE center in Jeddah’s InterContinental Hotel appeared identical, a dozen rows of black-robed ghosts. Up close, their uniforms varied subtly. Some dressed in full burqa, covering their faces with veils and their hands with gloves. Others, less conservative, wore niqabs that allowed their mascaraed eyes to be seen, or raised the hems of their gowns to reveal polished black boots that seemed more appropriate for Paris than Jeddah.

  And a few trendsetting women had rejected burqas entirely in favor of abayas, neck-length black gowns. In place of veils, they wore shayla—scarves that draped over their hair but left their faces uncovered. In this room, where the only men were bodyguards, a few had even allowed their scarves to slip, revealing tangles of lustrous black hair. Technically, by uncovering their hair, they risked the anger of the religious police.

  But no one in this room expected to be harassed. Not today, anyway. These women were the elite of Jeddah, the most cosmopolitan city in the Kingdom. Traders and tourists had visited Jeddah for thousands of years, and until 1925, when Abdul-Aziz took over, its rulers were moderate Muslims comfortable with the West.

  Jeddah’s liberal tilt could be overstated. The city was part of Saudi Arabia, after all. The House of Saud monitored it closely, especially because it served as the gateway to Mecca, which lay forty miles east. Still, Jeddah’s tradition of openness had not disappeared entirely. Religious police were less visible here than in Riyadh. Public discussions were freer. Unmarried women and men could discreetly charter boats and meet on the Red Sea. So Jeddah was the most fitting place in Saudi Arabia for a speech on women’s rights from Princess Alia, King Abdullah’s oldest granddaughter.

  THE QURAN COMMANDED RULERS to seek advice from their subjects. Princes and government officials held meetings where any Saudi citizen could complain or ask for help. Even Abdullah followed the tradition, though his assemblies were largely ceremonial, lasting only minutes.

  But the women of the House of Saud were seen rarely, heard even less. And so an air of expectation filled the conference room at the InterContinental as the women inside waited for Alia to appear.

  Security for the speech had been planned for months, well before the invitations were sent. After the bombings in Bahrain and Riyadh, the National Guard colonel who managed protection for Alia asked that the princess move the speech to Abdullah’s palace on the Red Sea, a fortress that no terrorist could enter. Alia turned him down. She was speaking not just for herself and the elite but for every Saudi woman. Moving the speech into the palace would undercut her message.

  “Anyway, you’ll protect me, won’t you, colonel?”

  So the speech stayed, and the colonel did his best to turn the hotel into a fortress. Only registered guests and the women invited to hear the princess were allowed into the InterContinental on the day of the speech. Their names were checked at the hotel’s front gate, while bomb-sniffing dogs from the National Guard searched their vehicles. Everyone had to pass through metal detectors. Purses and luggage were x-rayed. Security agents patted down anyone who set off an alarm, their searches thorough and careful. The Interior Ministry checked the names and passports of all 142 hotel guests against national and international watch lists.

  A second layer of security protected the conference room. Bomb-sniffing dogs checked the room before anyone was allowed inside. The women had to pass through another metal detector before they entered. Six security agents watched the crowd, two behind the lectern, two on the sides, and two beside the door at the back. They formed a hexagon that covered the room. Another five officers handled the dogs and metal detectors, and three women patted down any women who set off the detectors. All this to watch a handpicked audience of one hundred fifty women. The colonel knew he was being overly cautious, but better safe than sorry.

  The princess had arrived at the hotel in her armo
red limousine an hour before the speech was scheduled to begin. The InterContinental’s manager escorted her to a suite overlooking the Red Sea. As women slowly filed into the conference room seven floors below, Alia sipped a bottle of water and reread her speech. She wore a black abaya and a gray head scarf loose enough to allow tendrils of her hair to swing free. By Western standards, she was a few pounds too heavy to be beautiful. But her eyes were deep and black, her mouth soft and wide. She was twenty-five and had gone to high school in Geneva and spoke Arabic and French and English.

  The National Guard colonel who served as her personal bodyguard watched her wordlessly. The colonel was married, but after three years of watching over Alia, he was half in love with her. He’d have cut out his tongue sooner than admit that truth.

  The hour passed, and then another twenty minutes. The colonel was just about to ask Alia if she wanted him to call downstairs when his phone rang. He listened for a moment. “They’re ready.”

  Alia flashed the smile he’d grown to adore. “Then let’s go.”

  Before the hour was over, they would both be dead.

  “MY SISTERS, MY SISTERS.”

  Alia looked at the crowd. “Our enemies say we want a revolution. But I don’t see any revolutionaries in this room. What about me? Do I look like a revolutionary to you? In my hijab? Did I drive a tank to get here? Is that what happened? Did you see my tank outside?”

  A few women tittered. Most were silent, too aware of the importance of the occasion even to laugh.

  “A year ago, I read a sermon by a famous cleric — I won’t say his name — who says what we want is un-Islamic. But we can read the Quran, too. And I ask you, does the Quran say that women can’t drive? Hardly, my sisters. The wife of the Prophet — peace be upon Him — we know that she rode a horse with him. The very wife of Muhammad. Why, then, can’t we drive? We don’t ask for anything that the Quran forbids. In other Muslim nations, we drive freely. And this law, forbidding driving, it’s foolish. Male servants must drive us. Does that make sense? I tell you it doesn’t. If we could drive ourselves, there would be no need for this.