Expensive media consultants were duly engaged by the exiled Bin Hazzim to make the ease that life in Matar under the emir, decadent and even downright naughty as he may have been, had been more benign than the Matar that the neo-conservative Maliq had in mind. Religious converts often try to make up for lost piousness with heightened fervor. Maliq's motto was a perverse paraphrase of Saint Augustine: Oh God. make me bad—right now: Within days of taking over, he had revoked driving privileges for women; reinstituted the veil; made it illegal for women to leave the house except with a male blood relation: and decreed female laughter punishable by twenty lashes, on the theological grounds that if a woman laughed, she was probably happy about something, and that would not do.
The citizens of Matar did not embrace this new pietism with open arms, but then Maliq had never said he cared what they thought one way or the other. A large construction crane was driven into Robespierre (formerly Churchill) Square, and several counterrevolutionary Matari citizens were duly suspended from it by the neck. Several women, frisky enough to venture out in broad daylight without their heads covered—and, if you please, without male chaperones—were swiftly made an example of. It was quite obvious, declared the mukfellah official who announced their sentences, that they had been on their way to fornicate with loathsome blackamoor cooks. There was no actual evidence of this, but the advantage of a religious judiciary is that you don't need evidence. The unfortunate women insisted that they were just going out to pick up milk and the dry cleaning, but you can't be too careful.
Much as he enjoyed a flogging or beheading, or even the occasional stoning, Maliq could take or leave them. He would much rather watch NASCAR and formula One racing on television (though he now had to be a bit discreet about this). It was his Wasabi patrons who were behind all the chopping and lashing. They insisted. And since it was they who had put him on his throne, Maliq had no choice but to play along.
TV Matar and his late half brother Gazzir—whose helicopter had been brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade, not a tree—had caused the House of Hamooj nothing but ridicule and humiliation. Now it was payback time: time, moreover, to set an example for all the Wasabi women back at home who had gotten all sorts of dangerous ideas from all those months of watching TV Matar.
How different was its programming now! Recipes, tips on how to please the husband, how to keep from being trampled during the hajj, comedies about greedy Israelis and fat infidel Americans. Thursday nights at eight. Everyone Loves Imam!, with Maliq reading aloud from the Book of Hamooj and giving his own unique textural interpretations. True, ratings were a sliver of what they once had been. But then you need to give new shows time to build.
France. Wasabia's co-partner in the Maliq installation, was not altogether thrilled by this grim slate of affairs. But as the Ministere de Petrole (Ministry of Oil) was about to sign an entente economique (sweetheart deal) with Wasabia for a 20 percent discount. France was not disposed to make too loud a bruit (noise) about it.
Confronted in the men's room at the IN Security Council by the U.S. permanent representative, the French permanent representative shook his head and rolled his eyes and said. "Yes, yes, yes, but what can one do with these people— they are impossible." leaving the American representative with an even more deeply beetled brow and requiring further instruction from Washington.
France was also about to sign a mutual security pad with Matar, providing her with a deep-water naval base in the Gulf. The new government in Paris was manifesting neo-Gaullist (some said neo-Napoleonic) designs in the Proche-Orient, where the tricolor had once flapped proudly in the breezes. All the insults of 1922 were finally being avenged. Another distinguished historian— there seemed to be no end of them—said on public television that France was no longer content to sit back and watch the United States screw things up in the region. Did not France have her own proud history of screwing things up? Took at Algeria, Vietnam, Syria, Haiti—Quebec—all still reeling from their days of French rule. Clearly. France was ready and eager to show the world that she, too. could wreak disastrous, unforeseen consequences abroad, far more efficiently and almost certainly with more flair than America.
There was, meanwhile, yet another wave of anti-French sentiment in the United States. French maitre d's were assaulted by gangs of thugs, champagne was poured into gutters, baguettes were angrily torn in two and hurled across restaurants. Peugeots were splattered with vegetables and their windshield wipers bent. The French embassy in Washington, once the scene of glittering soirees, was attacked by a mob of evangelical Christians hurling (innocent) frogs. One member of Congress introduced a bill calling for exhuming and repatriating the remains of American soldiers buried in Normandy. "Digging Up Private Ryan."
The cries of "Who lost Matar?" grew more clamorous, despite polls showing that for two thirds of the American people, the more relevant question was "Where exactly is Matar?" However, when informed by the pollsters that "perfidious Frogs" and "filthy Wasabis" had taken over the country in order to "make America look bad" and "drive up the price of oil," Americans by a distinct majority responded that their government must do "something" about it, as long as it wouldn't cost too much and could be done from thirty-five thousand feet. There was little appetite at this point for another Pentagon "boots on the ground" intervention in the region.
Such, at any rate, was the situation two weeks after Florence left Mr. Dera'a's appliance store carrying her shopping bags of electronics.
Renard and George were back in Washington following their watery exfiltration off Blenheim Beach. The submarine had been smaller than advertised, and its medical officer had had to sedate the claustrophic George with a hypodermic before they could get him down the hatch. The submarine transferred them to an aircraft carrier. They were flown off the carrier—along with crew mail and the corpse of a despondent, homesick sailor who had committed suicide by drinking the hydraulic fluid of an F-14—to Bahrain, and from there by commercial aviation to Rome, and from there on to Washington, where they arrived to find that all traces of their mission had been deleted, as if by a single stroke on some master keyboard.
The Alexandria safe house that had been their staging area was now occupied by a middle-aged couple who insisted that they had bought the house on the Internet six months before, and who didn't seem disposed to argue the point with the two forlorn-looking men on their doorstep. George and Rick felt like sailors who come across a ship in the middle of the ocean, eerily empty of human presence but for cups of still-warm coffee and cigarettes burning in the ashtray.
George telephoned his old desk at the State Department and got through to Duckett’s deputy, who said he was under the impression that George had been transferred to Guatemala City. They didn't seem to care whether George came back to the Near East desk. George found himself in a bureaucratic Sargasso Sea.
When he and Rick went separately to get money from their ATMs. They each found in his checking account the inexplicable but not unwelcome sum of $I million. It could have had only one source: the now vanished Uncle Sam. This was, evidently, their severance pay. The sudden largesse left them confused, all the more so when, a few days later, the sum disappeared from their accounts only to reappear the next day, doubled. They debated the meaning of this now-you-see-it-now-you-don't deposit and concluded that it was a message: Keep quiet, or all this money will go away for good. Behave, and it might double.
The discovery that they were millionaires twice over left them temporarily elated, then profoundly depressed, for by now the cataclysmic events in Matar had played on their television screens, and their thoughts were not on how to spend this munificence but on what had happened to Florence.
They were sitting glumly in Rick's apartment off Dupont Circle one evening, eating Chinese takeout and drinking Alsatian beer and watching a television news program in which several Middle Eastern experts, each beamed in from a different city, were screaming at one another about the need to remain calm, when the host interr
upted his guests to say that the network's Manama bureau had received a videotape, apparently taken inside Matar. Inasmuch as the country had been sealed off from outside media by order of the emir Maliq, the announcer was excited by what was about to be shown.
Rick and George put down their Kung Pao chicken and intently watched Rick's spiffv new fifty-five-inch plasma-screen home-entertainment system. Rick thought they might as well spend some of the money, to the dismay of a censorious George, who had not yet decided on the moral propriety of spending the mysterious deposits. Their maxillofacial muscles gaped as a grainy simulacrum of Florence came on-screen, accompanied by scratchy but quite audible sound.
"I speak from inside occupied Matar. An iron veil has descended upon the country. The sheika Laila, widow of the late emir, is being held prisoner by the usurper Maliq and his Wasabi and French puppetmasters. Women are being tortured and executed. But their spirit is unbroken. They cry out to the civilized nations of the world. Do not allow the forces of corrupted Islam, which make a mockery of a great religion and of its founder, the prophet Mohammed. They cry out to you: freedom! freedom! freedom!"
The announcer said that not much was known about the person on the videotape, other than that she had apparently once worked in some capacity at TV Matar, the formerly pro-women's-rights satellite network. It was thought that she might be an American citizen, a fact that, he pointed out. "could complicate the situation as far as the United States government is concerned."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The scaffold had been erected in the center of the mall over a fountain so that the spectators could see.
Florence maneuvered her way as close as she could to the platform without drawing attention. She had contrived a shoulder harness for the video camera, which was tucked under her left arm. A small hole cut in the abaaya provided an aperture for the lens. There are advantages to a system that forces its citizens to cover themselves from head to toe.
At each corner of the platform stood a mukfellah. Mukfelleen had been trucked into Matar from Wasabia in great numbers, to enforce the religious codes. They were like secret police anywhere: they liked a bit of bowing and scraping. When Florence—accompanied by the required male escort—passed one in the street, if the mukfellah was looking especially sour, she would bow and say. "God be praised, brother, for your presence here!" Her male escort, his Western features obscured by gutra and large sunglasses, would lug at her and say, "Come along, sister, do not disturb these well beloved of Allah al their blessed labors." To reinforce the illusion that she was just another Matari wife. Florence carried a wicker basket full of fruit and other fresh items from the market. Underneath the produce was a nine-millimeter pistol, and the more she saw of the mukfelleen and their blessed labors, she more she yearned to use it on them. Whatever misgivings she may have had about Bobby killing Maliq's man back in the garage were gone now. Her weeks in occupied Matar had taught her how to hate.
The crowd stirred. The captain of the detail pushed his way through to the scaffold, four mukfelleen stood at the corners of the platform. They called for silence and respect.
The captain climbed the steps of the platform and read the sentence. The woman, one Ardeesha, had been caught not only driving a car but trying to escape Matar. The imam Maliq. blessings be upon him and his holy work, had compassionately commuted the sentence from death to one hundred lashes. Allah is merciful.
Ardeesha was brought out, trembling and whimpering and begging for mercy. She was tied down. The muk brought the four-foot-long rattan cane down again and again on the writhing black shape on the platform. She screamed throughout the first thirty blows and then fell silent. The women closest to the platform began to cry and beg for mercy. The whole business took about ten minutes.
When it was over, the mukfclleen captain who had read the sentence praised the imam's compassion, and the order was given for the crowd to disperse. Most of the audience's male escorts had been smoking or having coffee at Starbucks. They gathered up their charges and left. Some decided to remain and do some shopping. The mall's shopkeepers look advantage of the Punishment Day crowds and announced sales. Florence's male escort collected her. and together they left. As they walked past the mukfelleen guard al the mall's entrance, her escort did not compliment him on his blessed labors.
They got into their car and drove off in silence. Florence pressed the PLAY button and watched to make sure she had gotten it on tape. Bobby listened to the sound of the cane blows coining from the camera's speaker and said quietly, "Turn it off."
Amo-Amas teemed with Wasabi Friendship Troops. Maliq had also requested French soldiers, but Paris, already having enough to explain at the United Nations, demurred: France did, however, dispatch hundreds of advisers to help with infrastructure. Thousands of Mataris had fled (mostly for the South of France), producing the usual brain drain.
Bobby and Florence drove north, off the main roads. Traffic slowed to a crawl. Bobby leaned his head out the window and saw police vehicles ten cars ahead. Roadblocks and identity checks had become the norm. Florence removed the tape from the video camera hidden underneath her abaaya and substituted a tape containing images of children playing on the beach. Were the camera confiscated, the images would be innocent.
The basket of fruit was between them. They edged forward toward the police.
"God be praised." Bobby said to the policeman, who leaned in and demanded his and his wife's papers. Bobby's Arabic was without accent and he had darkened his skin with cosmetics. He looked as Matari as the next man.
'The soldier did not return the greeting. He examined their papers, flipping through the pages of the Matari passports. "Where are you going?"
"Home, with your permission."
The policeman lingered over Florence's passport. "Wife?"
"I've got three. But this is the good-looking one. so I took her to see the punishment at the mall. So she won't get ideas. A good example our imam sets."
The policeman looked closer at Florence, who sat staring straight ahead. "What's in the basket?"
"Figs from the Mashulf Valley." Bobby held the basket to the policeman. "Have one. as a token of our thanks for protecting us from our enemies. They're delicious."
The policeman reached for the basket's handle.
"Brother, please." Bobby grinned. "They're for the children's supper." He moved his left foot, with its ankle holster, within reach.
The policeman hesitated, he picked the plumpest figs off the top and gave the basket back and waved the car forward. "Go," he said.
"And Allah be with you." Bobby said. He edged forward and muttered. "Asshole."
There were no more roadblocks, and half an hour later, they reached their drab concrete house in the Sherala district, one of Amo-Amas's poorer neighborhoods, a place of broken glass and spiked walls, starving dogs and Filipino "guest" workers who had been granted permission by their Matari employers to live outside the home. There was an enclosure for the car.
Inside. Florence made duplicates of the videotape. She took off the hated abaaya. Bobby aimed the camera at her.
"This footage that you are about to witness was taken inside occupied Matar on March twenty-seventh at the Chartwell Mall, which the usurper Maliq has turned into a place of public execution ..."
When they were finished, Bobby put a copy of the tape inside a packet of cigarettes and drove to the airport. On the way, he called Fouad, a ground-crew chief with Air Matar whom Bobbv had recruited years ago. Seven hours later, the tape was in Nicosia, Cyprus, and in the hands of an Armenian named Hampigian, with whom Bobby had also been doing business for years. In another eight hours, it had arrived at the CNN bureau in Rome. Within an hour, following a conference with headquarters in Atlanta that included the chairman of the board, the tape was broadcast.
Among the millions who watched were Renard and George. They had set up a makeshift command center in Rick's office, using more of Uncle Sam's severance pay. The tape made for very difficult vie
wing. Even the cynical Renard was unable to speak after it was over. George had to get up and leave the room after five minutes. But then few people in the West had watched a woman being slowly beaten to death.
The network was flooded with phone calls, mostly from people appalled that it would show such a gruesome thing—the worst, some said, since the pictures of Americans torturing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison. But there was intense interest in the American woman who had taken the footage, obviously at great personal risk. She was now an object of official curiosity—in Washington. Paris, Kaffa and Amo-Amas; indeed, all over the world. Naturally, the media couldn't resist. They dubbed her "Florence of Arabia."
IMAN MALIQ BELOVED OF ALLAH, emir of the Royal Kingdom of Matar, high prince of the House of Bin Haz, sharif of the Um-Katush, was less than pleased to hear that Delame-Noir of the Onzieme Bureau was in Matar and requesting an "audience." It did please Maliq that he had put it that way. "audience" being more august than "meeting."
Still, he felt that Delame-Noir was condescending to him. He didn't like Delame-Noir to begin with, and now that he had achieved the throne, if there was any condescending to do, by Allah, he would do it. He was in no mood for one of Delame-Noir's interminable pedantic lectures about the historicity of Hegelian dichotomies. Nor did Maliq desire to be reminded that it was Delame-Noir who had put him on the throne with the scheme of transforming him from a cheating race-car driver into a religious leader.
King Tallulah and Prince Bawad had been imperious beyond belief, reminding Maliq in every phone call, every e-mail, every meeting that it was their troops, their mukfelleen. their money and, God be praised, their oil that had put him on the throne. Between Paris and Kaffa. Maliq was tired of being grateful. Dammit, they should be grateful to him! Had he not selflesslv put himself forward, giving up a brilliant career as a race-car driver, to restore Matar to its glory? (Assuming
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