The Secret Soldier (14 page)

Then he did. Abdullah, the king of Saudi Arabia. The richest man in the world. Everything made sense. The overwhelming security. The one-million-dollar fee. The ridiculous opulence of the plane. Everything except the question of why he was here.

“Salaam aleikum,”
the man in the front passenger seat said. He turned to face Wells. He was almost as old as Abdullah, with swollen cheeks and a quiet, wheezy voice. Wells guessed he had heart trouble.

“You are John Wells.”

“I am Miteb bin Abdul-Aziz. This is my brother, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”—the official title of the Saudi kings.

“Prince Miteb. King Abdullah. I’m honored to meet you.”

“Please excuse our precautions. They’re for our protection, and yours, too.” Miteb’s Arabic was the most perfect that Wells had ever heard, a smooth stream. Wells’s own Arabic was rough and visceral.

“I understand.” Though Wells didn’t. The king’s security team should have been Saudi, not European. And this meeting should have happened at the Saudi embassy in Paris, or in Riyadh. Did the king mistrust his own security detail?

“You speak Arabic,” Abdullah said, his first words to Wells. He looked Wells over, a cool appraisal, then broke off, coughed into his hand, a wet, soft murmur. He wiped his mouth with a white handkerchief embroidered with gold thread. When Abdullah put the kerchief away, Wells thought he saw flecks of blood on the fabric. Wells wondered how long Abdullah had left.

“Yes. But I’m American.”

“And a spy.”

“A retired spy.”

“Do spies ever retire?”

“Do kings?”

“My brother Saud, he retired. Because he was weak. From whiskey. It fogged his eyes and his mind. Made him too weak to rule. And too weak to fight when we told him he wasn’t our king anymore. That we could no longer trust him with our fate.” The king looked at the front seat, as if waiting for his brother to explain further. But Miteb stayed silent, and Abdullah returned his focus to Wells.

“The fate of the king is the fate of the people. You don’t understand this. No American can. We told Saud to leave our land. Go wherever he wanted. Here. Switzerland. We sent him into exile, and he accepted our decision like a child. Oh, he whined, but he never once raised a hand to save himself. He knew he was weak. Do I look weak to you? Answer me,
Ameriki.
”

“If you weren’t weak, I wouldn’t be here.”

“You don’t lie? Not even to a king?”

“Especially not to a king.”

The Maybach turned up a narrow road hemmed by walled villas on both sides. Abdullah closed his eyes. He seemed too old for this, whatever
this
was. “Some of my family is against me,” he said, his eyes still closed, his voice low. “I look into their hearts. They have turned.” He coughed. His voice vibrated. “They’re feckless. Spoiled. All of us are to blame. We drown in our own luxuries. We thought that it was Allah who left us the oil, but I know better now—”

“Abdullah—” Miteb said.

“Hush, brother. My nephews, they’ll agree to anything the clerics say to keep their power.” Abdullah opened his eyes, waved at the hills around them. “All Gaul is divided into three parts—”

“Caesar—” Wells said.

“Of course Caesar.” He dug his fingers into Wells’s arm, surprising Wells with his strength. “You think I never learned about Caesar? You think I’m too old to remember? The kingdom is mine, and it will be my son’s. No one but his. Do you understand?”

Had old age destroyed Abdullah’s reason? Wells wasn’t sure. Everything he’d said made a sort of sense, though not as much as Wells would have liked.
It will be my son’s. No one but his.
Wells understood that much, anyway.

Abdullah leaned toward Wells. He exuded a bitter mix of coffee and stomach bile. He smelled like a rusty V-8 burning oil from a leaky cylinder. He smelled like an old man who’d scare the grandkids if they got too close. He grabbed Wells’s cheek and looked Wells over like an angry lover.

“Ameriki.”
Abdullah relaxed his grip. He leaned back and grunted as though a stone had fallen on his chest. After a few moments, his breathing slowed. His eyes opened. He touched his goatee as if seeing Wells for the first time. “You’ve come a long way to see us.” His voice was smooth and low, all trace of his madness gone. “Do you know why you’re here?”

“I assume it’s related to what happened last week, the attacks.”

“Yes and no. I don’t have long to live, Mr. Wells.” Abdullah spoke with an authority Wells wouldn’t have expected from a man who’d seemed so unhinged a minute before. “I’ve lived my life. My bones grind like beetles. The doctors say they can fix me, but they’re lying. One day you’ll be old, and you’ll cough as if your soul means to escape through your mouth, and you’ll understand. But for now I still breathe. And before I die, I want to lay my kingdom on its foundation. Do you see?”

“I see you want me to help your son become the next king.”

The king waved at Miteb and settled back in his seat, as if this portion of the conversation was beneath him.

“We need someone from the outside to help us,” Miteb said. “Someone unconnected with our security forces. A private citizen. Someone Muslim. Someone who can handle the most difficult situations.”

“Your enemies are within your family?”

“Yes, but not only. We should never have let the radicals and the clerics get so powerful,” Miteb said. “We thought we would give them a few tokens, let them send men to Afghanistan, they’d be satisfied. But these men, once you give them power, you never get it back, not without war.”

“Your brothers don’t agree.”

“Our brothers, our nephews. Some believe what the Wahhabis preach. They want jihad. But the middle, most of them, they just want the oil to flow. Or to gain power. To become ministers, have planes and palaces.”

“Their blood is thin,” Abdullah said. “When I was a child, there was only desert. To both ends of the sky. We were proud to be Bedouin. We knew we lived where no one else could. In all of Arabia, there were a few hundred thousand of us. Now Riyadh has five millions all by itself. We’ve forgotten the desert. And it’s forgotten us. It won’t have us anymore.”

“Abdullah—” Miteb said, apparently nervous that his brother would erupt again.

“Some of my brothers, nephews, they don’t care about their people. They have their accounts in Swiss banks. Whatever side wins, they’ll give their loyalty.”

“But I don’t understand. Who’s on the other side?” Wells was genuinely confused. “These terrorists, it’s not like they can be king.”

“No. But if Khalid isn’t king, it will probably be Saeed. And Saeed will give the jihadis what they want, as long as they don’t interfere with him or try to take the oil. He doesn’t care if women have to stay covered, if the Shia have no rights. I think he’s working with them already.”

“Why don’t you arrest him, then? You’re still king. You have the
mukhabarat
”—the secret police.

“No. Mansour, Saeed’s son, is the head of the
muk.
They belong to him.”

“If we trusted them, we wouldn’t be in this car,” Miteb said.

“On the Côte d’Azur.” Wells was tired. And not from jet lag. When he looked at Miteb and Abdullah, he saw Vinny Duto and the spy chiefs at the top of the Washington bureaucracy. Using Wells to fight battles that only they could win. “You talk about clerics and jihadis. But this, it’s about power. Nothing else. Abdullah, sooner or later he’s going to die. Probably sooner.”

“You dare speak to me this way?”

“Every king needs his fool, and I guess that’s me. So let’s call it like it is. The king is dead, long live the king. When that sad day comes, you want Junior to take over. But your brothers don’t agree. Especially Saeed.” Wells wondered if anyone had ever lectured Abdullah this way. Probably not. So be it. He would fly commercial home.

“Only Khalid has the strength to fight the clerics,” Miteb said.

“With you as his closest adviser, no doubt.”

The king twisted toward Wells. “You think I want to waste my last days spitting clever words with you? You Americans are all the same. Too cynical and not cynical enough. The poison in my land, it’s real.”

Wells almost laughed. These two old men, asking him to help them save their people from religious repression. As if their family hadn’t ruled Saudi Arabia for eighty years. Abdullah, sitting in a three-hundred-thousand-dollar car and complaining that luxury had poisoned his family. “No wonder you couldn’t meet me in Riyadh,” Wells said.

“Saeed will set our country back a generation,” Miteb said.

“Saeed has a thousand eyes, and they all watch me,” Abdullah said.

“I’ll bet he’s got sons, too.”

“His sons are nothing. They scuttle through my kingdom like crabs.”

“Your kingdom. I suspect our ambassador is too polite to tell you so, but Americans don’t like kings much, Abdullah. Not for two hundred years.”

“You don’t even know what we’d like,” Miteb said. “Or what we’re willing to pay. I promise, it’s more than you can imagine.”

Wells was angry now. He should have guessed they would eventually dangle a fortune. “First you appeal to my better instincts. Then you offer cash. Next you’ll promise me a woman. The oldest game there is. At Langley, they call it MICE. Money, ideology, compromise, ego. Will you drop me at the airport, or do I have to catch a cab?”

Abdullah leaned toward the driver. “Take him to the airport, be done with it.”

“Please,” Miteb said. The word seemed directed at both Abdullah and Wells. “We have a villa for you. At the Eden-Roc. Relax this afternoon, and we’ll talk tomorrow morning. If we can’t reach agreement, you can fly home as you like.”

The Maybach crested a hill, giving Wells a view of the smooth, blue waters of the Mediterranean. He hadn’t heard of the Eden-Roc, but he guessed its villa would have the same view, or better. And truth be told, his curiosity was piqued. He still had no idea what these two octogenarians wanted from him. He could do worse than spend the night.

Hashish, god of partiers.

The Bekaa Valley has both.

A rocky, hilly plateau that lies between Lebanon’s coastal mountains and a lower range on the Syrian border, the Bekaa has had a fierce reputation for centuries. Like Napa Valley, its hot, dry summers and cool winters make it ideal for growing grapes. Unlike Napa Valley, it is controlled by Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Muslim group that aims to destroy Israel.

 

 

AHMAD BAKR HATED ISRAEL
as much as Hezbollah did. Even so, Bakr did not enjoy coming to the Bekaa. Bakr was Saudi, and like most Saudis, he was a Sunni Muslim. Hezbollah’s members were Shia, followers of the other major branch of Islam.

Both types of Muslims agreed that the Quran was the word of Allah. But unlike the Sunni, the Shia revered early Muslim rulers as “imams,” nearly godlike figures. They eagerly awaited the return of the twelfth imam, whose arrival would herald the End of Days. To conservative Sunnis like Bakr, the Shia belief in the twelfth imam amounted to idol worship—a serious offense against Islam.

But when he was in Lebanon, Bakr kept his views to himself. He was simply being practical. In the Bekaa, Hezbollah served as judge, jury, and executioner. And Bakr ran a jihadi training camp in the Bekaa that needed the group’s approval to exist.

To get that approval, Bakr had met nine months earlier with a Hezbollah general at a farm near Baalbek, the dusty town that served as the group’s headquarters. A friendly Saudi intelligence agent arranged the meeting. “I can guarantee you safe passage,” the agent said. “After that, it’s up to you.”

The next day, Bakr flew to Beirut. As he’d been instructed, he rented a car and attached a red strip of tape to the trunk. He drove to Baalbek and parked in the lot beside the Roman ruins that loomed over the town. The site included the remnants of the Temple of Jupiter, a giant Roman shrine. The temple’s columns stood seventy feet tall and were mounted on one-thousand-ton stone blocks. But the ruins left Bakr cold. To him, they were just another site for idol worship, like the golden-domed shrines in Iraq where the Shia buried their martyrs. He would have been happier if they were all blown to rubble.

A few minutes after he parked, a black Toyota 4Runner stopped beside him. A man in a long-sleeved black shirt and black pants knocked on his window. The man frisked him and waved him into the 4Runner. Bakr wondered if he’d be blindfolded, but no one seemed overly concerned. These men didn’t need to protect themselves, not here. Attacking Hezbollah in the Bekaa was a fool’s errand. The Israelis had tried in 2006. Even with their planes and missiles, they hadn’t touched the group’s leaders. Hezbollah had come away from that war stronger than ever.

The Toyota headed north. A few minutes later, it turned east onto a rough dirt road with vineyards on both sides. The road dead-ended at a concrete wall that protected a massive beige house, three stories high, with balconies and turrets and a green Hezbollah flag flapping from a pole. A golden-domed mosque, a miniature version of the shrines in Iraq, stood beside the building. The 4Runner stopped at a black gate guarded by two militiamen. They saluted as the gate swung open.

 

 

THE HEZBOLLAH GENERAL WAS
a small man with deep-set brown eyes. In his cream-colored shirt and gray slacks, he could have passed for a Beirut businessman, except for the long white scar that hooked around his neck. He had nearly died in a 1996 car bombing that had been blamed on both the Israelis and the Syrians. He sat on the house’s back balcony, looking out over the garden, where an old man tended to scraggly tomato plants and a half-dozen lemon trees. “Coffee?”

“Please.”