House on Fire

by Bonnie Kistler

  He dropped his head into his hands as a busty blonde writhed on one screen and the circle-backslash symbol lit up on the other. Prohibited. He’d been trying every day, from this computer, his own, his dad’s, even Shelby’s, but he struck out every time. He might as well give up, on this and everything else.

  Yana was still asleep when he went back outside. He stripped again and plunged headfirst in the pool and swam lap after lap through the bottomless black water. Here and now, he reminded himself. He recited it rhythmically in his mind, like a mantra; he swam until his arms burned and his lungs heaved for breath; but it was like everything else he did these days. A total failure.

  He dried off and got dressed. In the pocket of his cargo shorts was a thick roll of twenties. It was every dollar of the money Yana had paid him for this pretend job, and he placed it gently on the taut white skin of her abdomen. He looked around for a pen and paper, and when he couldn’t find any, he sent a text to her phone. I can’t do this anymore. Then he booked an Uber ride to Hollow Road and went out front to wait for it.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The phone jangled on the bedside table, and Leigh bolted upright, her heart stuttering. Somebody died. Don’t let it be somebody died. She lurched across Peter’s side of the bed and grabbed up the phone and gasped a breathless “Hello?” A boating accident, a heart attack on the golf course, a nail gun shooting wild.

  There was no answer. A prank call at what?—she squinted at the luminous digits on the alarm clock—3:00 a.m. She started to hang up as a faint sound perforated the speaker. White noise in the background. It sounded like the distant roar of a waterfall. Or the blast of a shower.

  “Devra?”

  Another noise, this one red hot. It was the rupture of a sob.

  “Devra, what is it?” She groped for the lamp switch. “What happened?”

  “I—I did as you advised. I refused him—”

  “Did he hurt you?” The background noise was no longer faint. She could hear shouts, the hammer of fists, men’s voices, guttural snarls in another language. “Are you someplace safe?”

  “Leigh, my friend, please! I want to leave. Help me—please!”

  She heard the crash of splintering wood, a bellow and a long, piercing shriek before the line went dead.

  In fifteen minutes she was racing for the city. She tried calling as she drove, cycling between Devra’s burner phone and the embassy switchboard. No one answered on the burner, and the switchboard answered with a recording in Arabic, followed by one in English advising that business hours were Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Her next call to the burner was answered by a recording, too. We’re sorry. Your call cannot be completed as dialed.

  Her next call was to the police.

  “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

  “A woman’s been attacked. She’d being held prisoner—”

  The operator cut her off. She wanted her name—Leigh Huyett, she shouted—and location—at that moment, speeding across the Key Bridge into the District. “She’s being held against her will at this address: 2355 Belmont Road Northwest. Her name is Devra bin Jabar. I’m her attorney. She locked herself in the bathroom and called me for help, then two or more men crashed through the door and her phone went dead. I haven’t been able to reach her since.”

  “A patrol car has been dispatched. Are these men are armed?”

  She felt certain they must be. “Yes!”

  “Pull over. Do not approach the scene.”

  She drove on, east on O Street, north on Massachusetts. The embassy was in the Kalorama section of the city, one of Washington’s most elite residential neighborhoods, and Belmont was a tree-lined street of century-old architecture. She looked for the flashing red-and-blue lights on a Metro police car, but the only spots of light on the dark street came from the mercury-vapor bulbs glowing through the decorative streetlamps.

  She cruised slowly down the block in search of number 2355 until she found it mounted in brass numerals on a pair of steel gates. She cut in close to the curb and parked in a NO PARKING zone. A guardhouse stood just inside the gate, and beyond it a circle drive looped around to a gray stone mansion. Spotlights shone on a fountain in the middle of the circle spurting a geyser of sparkling water toward the sky. On a brick pillar beside the gate was a modest plaque identifying the complex as the Embassy of the State of Qatar. Below that was a buzzer. Above it, a security camera.

  She pressed the buzzer, and a man emerged from the guardhouse. He wore a long dishdasha, a white ghutra and a long jewel-encrusted dagger at his waist. Ceremonial, she hoped. He said something to her in Arabic. “My name is Leigh Huyett,” she said. “I’m the attorney for Devra bin Jabar, and I demand to see her at once.”

  He turned with a flap of his robes and picked up a phone in the guardhouse. He watched her closely as he listened, then returned to the gate. “Business hours are nine a.m. to five p.m.,” he said in careful English.

  “I’m not here on embassy business. I’m here on Devra’s personal business. She called me an hour ago and asked me to come get her. I demand to see her.”

  “The sheikha is in bed.”

  “If she is, it’s against her will. Open these gates. Let me in.”

  “You leave. You leave now. Come back at nine a.m.”

  Another man came trotting down the drive from the mansion, this one dressed in Western attire. Half-dressed, anyway. He was buttoning his shirt as he ran. The guard whispered to him in furious Arabic punctuated with repeated finger stabs at Leigh. The second man listened and nodded and stepped around him. “You are trespassing on the sovereign territory of the State of Qatar,” he said in unaccented English. “Leave at once or we will have the police remove you.”

  “I’ve already called the police. Diplomatic immunity doesn’t give your boss the right to assault his wife or to imprison her. What’s your name?”

  “I am attaché to the ambassador, and I command you to leave.”

  A third man ran up—Hassan, fully dressed in a dark suit. She grabbed the steel bars. “Hassan, where is the sheikha? Go tell her I’m here. Bring her to me.”

  A light switched on in the mansion across the street. Hassan turned his back on her and spoke in a mutter to the attaché. That man nodded once, and Hassan thrust his hand in his suit coat and turned back with a gun trained on Leigh.

  She lurched back from the bars. Something flickered in the corner of her eye, then flashed red and blue. A patrol car was turning down the street. She ran out to meet it, flapping her arms in giant semaphores to signal it to stop. It let out a single belch of its siren and pulled in behind the rear bumper of her own car. Two officers emerged and two more neighbors’ lights came on.

  “I’m Leigh Huyett,” she shouted to the cops. “That man just pulled a gun on me.”

  “You were directed not to approach,” one of the officers said, a well-built man with a shaved head gleaming pink before he put on his uniform hat.

  “Yes, but—” She glanced back. Hassan had holstered his gun, and all three men were standing calmly behind the gate.

  The cop squinted at the plaque on the brick pillar. “This is a foreign embassy?”

  “Yes, but diplomatic immunity doesn’t apply—”

  “Where’s your vehicle?”

  She pointed to it. “Officer, my client’s being held captive in there. They won’t let her leave, and they’ve disabled her phone. I believe she’s been beaten—”

  “Officers?” The embassy man beckoned from behind the gates. “A word, if you please.”

  “Get her in her vehicle,” the first cop said to his partner.

  “This way, ma’am,” the second cop said.

  She didn’t resist. She let him take her elbow and steer her to her car, but she wouldn’t let him close the door until she told him the whole story. He showed no reaction, only kept cutting his eyes from her to the other conversation in progress.

  After a few minutes the bald cop stepped away
from the gates and his partner shut Leigh’s car door, and the two of them went into a huddle on the sidewalk, exchanging their he said/she said reports, Leigh imagined. The bald one stepped out of the huddle. “Lemme call this in to the watch commander,” he said, reaching for his radio handset. “Let him make the ruling.”

  “No.” She jumped out of the car again. “I’m a lawyer. I can tell you what the rules are. You can’t arrest the ambassador, but I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to rescue my client. You have a duty to do that much.” She scoured her memory for the official language. “To prevent further grave crimes from being committed.”

  “Back in your vehicle, ma’am.”

  This time she did resist. She planted her feet and stood firm. “I have a right to be on a public sidewalk.”

  The bald cop jerked his chin at the trio of men behind the gates. “They’ve accused you of harassment and making terroristic threats. So either you get back in your vehicle, or we can cuff you and put you in the back of ours.”

  She returned to her car, fuming, as a man in a seersucker bathrobe stepped out on the porch next door. “What’s going on?” he called out to Leigh.

  “The ambassador kidnapped a woman,” she called back. “He’s holding her captive in the embassy.”

  “Get back in your vehicle!” the cop roared.

  She retreated to her car. The cops climbed back in their cruiser, and the neighbor pulled a cell phone from the pocket of his robe and snapped photos of the scene before he got bored and went back inside.

  An hour passed. A second police car arrived, and an older, gray-haired officer got out. He didn’t wear the same blue uniform shirt that the first two did; his shirt was white with gold insignia displayed on the shoulder epaulettes. He conferred briefly with the patrol cops, and all three returned to their vehicles as the sun started to glow a rosy pink over the rooftops to the east.

  Leigh typed up her notes on her phone while she waited. She recorded the time of her 911 call and the five-digit license plate number of the patrol car still parked behind her. She wished she could have gotten the names of the two other men behind the gates or snapped their photo. She made a note of the address of the picture-taking neighbor; later she’d follow up and see if he’d captured them on film. She started to draft a habeas petition, though she knew it was a stretch. Devra was a detainee but she wasn’t being held by the government. Not this government, at any rate.

  She felt sick with fear for Devra. Her cries of Help me, that final ear-splitting scream as the door crashed in—they played in an unrelenting loop inside her head. She felt sick with guilt, too. She was the one who told Devra that the way to establish separation from bed and board was to refuse sex. Devra took her advice and her husband beat her for it. For the first time in twenty years he raised his hand to her, and it was all Leigh’s fault.

  A trash truck rattled down the street. Men in sweatpants emerged from their houses with tiny dogs on leashes that scurried ten paces for every two of their masters’. A housekeeper arrived at one of the mansions, hauling her own vacuum cleaner up its marble steps. Blinds were raised in upstairs windows, and faces peered out at the scene on the street.

  Shortly after six Leigh caught a movement in the rearview mirror, and her head snapped up as the three cops converged at the side of her car. They formed a phalanx so tight there was barely room for her to open the door. “You need to move along,” the senior officer said.

  “I need to see my client. She’s being held in there against her will. She’s been beaten—”

  “There’s nothing we can do about it,” he said. “He’s got immunity. We can’t arrest him, charge him—”

  “I’m not asking you to!”

  He set his jaw. “—or enter or search his residence. We got an official State Department ruling on the matter. It’s out of our hands.”

  She demanded to know who made that ruling, but they were under no obligation to tell her, and they didn’t. She protested, she took down their badge numbers, she threatened to sue the department, but it was like shouting into the wind. There was nothing she could do to convince them to breach the embassy walls and rescue Devra.

  The State Department was her only recourse. She went straight to the office dressed as she was, and as soon as the government switchboards opened, she called the main number and asked the operator to connect her to the Office of General Counsel.

  “Do you mean the Office of Legal Adviser?”

  “Whatever you call it, I want to talk to a State Department lawyer. Now.”

  There were probably hundreds of them there but none who would take her call. She asked next for the country desk for Qatar and learned there wasn’t one. After a long hold, she was transferred to the Bureau for Near Eastern Affairs. There she was punted from one lowly bureaucrat to another as she pressed to talk to someone, anyone, willing to discuss the Qatari ambassador and his actions outside the scope of his diplomatic duties. It played like a game of hot potato as her call was passed from one harassed-sounding bureaucrat to the next, all of them responding that the issue of diplomatic immunity for the Qatari ambassador was way above their pay grades. Three different people told her there was nothing they could do to help; the fourth suggested she call the police.

  “Yes, what is it you want to know?” snapped the fifth person she was transferred to.

  Leigh blinked at the phone in her hand. That voice— “Emily?”

  There was a beat of silence before a soft chuckle sounded over the line. “Why, Ms. Huyett, you’ve found me out.”

  She lurched to her feet. “You—you work for the State Department? What possible interest does State have—? This is a private matter between Devra and her husband!”

  “Who happens to be the ambassador of a country with great strategic value to us in our war on terror. And who does not wish for his wife to pursue a divorce.”

  “You’re interfering with her lawful rights!”

  “You mean the laws of Virginia? You interfered with sharia law and the laws of the State of Qatar. Not to mention the Vienna Convention. I warned you divorce was impossible.”

  “Are you honestly telling me that the State Department would prevent an ambassador’s wife from divorcing him?”

  “Officially? No. Some matters are necessarily handled off-book.”

  Leigh plopped back in her chair. Now she understood. Emily was moonlighting. Serving as facilitator/henchman for the ambassador. “And compensated off-book, too, I assume.”

  “Don’t be vulgar, Ms. Huyett. The currency in Washington is favors, not money.”

  “Oh, I get it.” She clamped the phone to her shoulder and brought up the State Department website on her computer. “You scratch the ambassador’s back, and he rewards you with—what? What’s the ambitious young bureaucrat looking for these days? Chief lobbyist for the government of Qatar?”

  “Watch this space,” the woman said coyly. “But don’t really watch it,” she added. “I’ll have security evict you if you try to come over here and find me.”

  Leigh clicked vainly through the State Department website. She already knew Emily Whitman wasn’t her real name, so she wasn’t going to find her listed there. She probably worked at main headquarters in the Truman Building, not far from the restaurant in Foggy Bottom where she spotted her that day, but an estimated eight thousand people worked in that building. Short of standing at every exit all day every day and scanning every employee who passed through, she’d never find out who Emily Whitman really was. She felt hot with frustration. “I won’t forget this,” she swore.

  Emily abandoned her breezy nonchalance. “You’d better. You may not be afraid of your own government, Ms. Huyett, but trust me. You do not want to tangle with the State of Qatar.”

  She hung up, and Leigh stared flabbergasted at the phone. She dialed the State Department again and tried to retrace her steps through all the employees she’d been transferred to and from, and when that didn’t work, she called her own office
switchboard to see if they could identify each of the extensions she’d been connected to. But they didn’t have that technology and it all came to nothing. In the end all she could do was call the Qatari embassy.

  “Tell the ambassador I know all about his cozy arrangement with the woman at State,” she said hotly to the clerk who answered. “And if he doesn’t want to be exposed and have his credentials yanked, he’d better call me back at once.”

  She could hear a hesitancy in the man’s murmurs as he took down her message. For a second she hoped she might actually get through to the ambassador this time. Until in halting English, the clerk asked, “How does this word cozy mean?”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “Your witness,” Shelby Randolph said and returned to her seat at the defense table.

  Her counterpart rose to his feet across the aisle. He was Jonathan Garcia, a former Justice Department lawyer still in his thirties but already famous for winning convictions in high-profile cases across the country. He strode to the lectern, and Kip shifted his weight in the witness stand, watching warily as the prosecutor squared his notes and looked up at the judge. “Your Honor.”

  “Proceed, Mr. Garcia.”

  He turned toward Kip. “Good morning, Christopher.”