But the biggest secret of all was the Pythagorean theory that the universe is constructed of numbers, each having Divine properties. These magical ratios of numbers appeared everywhere in nature, including—according to Pythagoras—in the sounds made by the vibrating planets as they moved through the black void. “There is geometry in the humming of the strings,” he said. “There is music in the spacing of the spheres.”
So what did this have to do with the Montglane Service? I knew that a chess set had eight pawns and eight pieces to a side; and the board itself had sixty-four spaces—eight squared. There was a formula all right. Solarin had called it the formula of the Eight. What better place to hide it than in a chess set comprised entirely of eights? Like the golden mean, like the Fibonacci numbers, like the ever-ascending spiral—the Montglane Service was greater than the sum of its parts.
I yanked a piece of paper out of my briefcase in the moving cab and drew a figure eight. Then I turned the paper sideways. It was the symbol for infinity. I heard the voice pounding in my head as I stared at the shape hovering before me. The voice said: Just as another game … this battle will continue forever.
But before I joined the fray, I had a bigger problem: to stay in Algiers at all I had to be certain I had a job—a job with enough éclat to make me mistress of my own fate. I’d had a taste of North African hospitality from my pal Sharrif, and I wanted to be sure in any future arm wrestling my credentials matched his. Then, too, how was I to hunt for the Montglane Service when, by the end of the week, my boss Petard would be hanging over my shoulder?
I needed space, and there was only one person who could arrange that for me. I was on my way to sit in the interminable rows of waiting rooms to try to get in to meet him. He was the man who’d approved my visa but stood up Fulbright Cone’s partnership for a tennis match, the man who’d foot the bill for a major computer contract if only they could get him to sign the paper. And somehow I felt his support would be indispensable to the success of the many endeavors ahead of me. Though at the time, I could not have imagined to what degree. His name was Emile Kamel Kader.
My taxi came into the bottom of Algiers along the vast sweep of open port. Facing the sea was the high arcade of white arches that fronted the government buildings. We pulled up before the Ministry of Industry and Energy.
As I entered the marble lobby, enormous, dark, and cold, my eyes slowly adjusted to the light. Clusters of men stood about, some dressed in business suits, others in flowing white robes or black djellabas—those hooded robes that protected against the drastic swings in desert climate. A few were wearing headcloths in red-and-white checks that looked like Italian tablecloths. All eyes turned to gape at me as I entered the lobby, and I could see why. I seemed to be one of the few people in the place wearing pants.
There was no building directory or information desk, and there were three truckloads of guys for every available elevator. Besides, I didn’t relish riding up and down with the bug-eyed oglers, when I wasn’t sure what department I was looking for. So I headed for the wide marble stairs that led to the next floor. I was waylaid by a swarthy fellow in a business suit.
“May I assist you?” he said abruptly, placing his body squarely between me and the staircase.
“I have an appointment,” I said, trying to push past him, “with Monsieur Kader. Emile Kamel Kader. He’ll be expecting me.”
“The minister of petrol?” said the fellow, looking at me in disbelief. To my horror, he nodded politely and said, “Certainly, madame. I shall conduct you to him.”
Shit. I hadn’t much choice but to let him escort me back to the elevators. The fellow had his hand under my elbow and was clearing a path for me through the throng as if I were the Queen Mother. I wondered what would happen when he discovered I had no appointment.
To make matters worse, it suddenly occurred to me as he commandeered a private elevator just for the two of us, that I wasn’t as competent at fast talking in French as I was in English. Oh, well, I could plan my strategy as I waited in the anterooms for the many hours that Petard had told me were de rigueur. It would give me time to think.
When we got off the elevator on the top floor, a bevy of white-robed desert dwellers milled about near the reception desk, waiting to have their briefcases checked for firearms by the little turbaned receptionist. He sat behind the high desk with portable radio blaring music, casually passing inspection on each case with a wave of his hand. The crowd around him was fairly impressive. Though their clothes looked like bedsheets, the gold-and-ruby cabochon fingerwear would have made Louis Tiffany faint dead away.
My escort was dragging me through the throng, pardoning himself as he plowed among the shroudlike array. He spoke a few words in Arabic to the receptionist, who leapt up from behind his desk and trotted past us down the corridor. At the end, I saw him pause to speak to a soldier with a rifle slung over his shoulder. They both turned to stare at me, and the soldier disappeared around the corner. After a moment the soldier returned and motioned with a wave of the hand. The chap who’d escorted me from the lobby nodded and turned to me.
“The minister will see you now,” he said.
Taking a last quick glance at the Ku Klux Klan around me, I picked up my briefcase and trotted down the hall after him.
At the end of the corridor, the soldier motioned me to follow him. He goose-stepped around the corner and down another, longer hallway toward a pair of carved doors that must have been twelve feet high.
The soldier stopped, stood at attention, and waited for me to go through. Taking a deep breath, I opened one of the doors. Inside was a tremendous foyer that had dark gray marble floors emblazoned with a pink marble star at center. The open doors opposite revealed an enormous office with wall-to-wall Boussac carpeting in black with squares of fat rosy chrysanthemums. The back wall of the office was a curved sweep of multipaned French windows, all opened so the sheer draperies floated back into the room. The tips of tall date palms beyond partially masked a view of the water.
Leaning on the wrought-iron railing of the balcony, his back to me, was a tall, slender man with sand-colored hair who was looking out to sea. He turned as I came in.
“Mademoiselle,” he said warmly, coming around the desk to greet me with outstretched hand. “Permit me to introduce myself. I am Emile Kamel Kader, the minister of petroleum. I’ve looked forward to meeting you.”
This entire introduction was delivered in English. I nearly fell on the floor. Quel relief.
“You’re surprised at my English,” he said with a smile, and not the “official” kind I’d received from the locals. This was one of the warmest smiles I’d ever seen. He continued to press my hand for a bit too long.
“I grew up in England and attended Cambridge. But everyone in the ministry speaks some English. It is, after all, the language of oil.”
He also had the warmest voice, rich and golden like honey pouring into a spoon. His coloring reminded me of honey, too: amber eyes, wavy ash-blond hair, and skin that was golden olive. When he smiled, which he did often, the weblike crinkles appeared around his eyes, traces of being too often in the sun. I thought of the tennis match and smiled back.
“Please do be seated,” he said, putting me on a beautifully carved rosewood chair. Going to his desk, he pushed the intercom and said a few words in Arabic. “I’m having tea brought up,” he told me. “You’re at the El Riadh, I understand. The food there is mostly tinned, quite unpalatable, though the hotel is lovely. I’ll take you to lunch after our interview, if you haven’t any plans? Then you can see a bit of the city.”
I was still confused about this warm reception, and I suppose my face showed it, for he added: “You’re probably wondering why you were shown into my office so quickly.”
“I have to admit, I’d been told it would take a little longer.”
“You see, mademoiselle … may I call you Catherine?… Fine, and you must call me Kamel, my so-called Christian name. In our culture, it’s considered
very rude to refuse a woman anything. Unmanly, actually. If a woman says she has an appointment with a minister, you don’t leave her moldering in waiting rooms, you show her in at once!” He laughed in his wonderful golden voice. “You may get away with murder during your stay here, now that you know the recipe for success.”
Kamel’s long Roman nose and high forehead made him look as if his profile had been copied from a coin. Something about him looked familiar.
“Are you Kabyle?” I said suddenly.
“Why, yes!” He looked very pleased. “How did you know?”
“Just a guess,” I said.
“A very good guess. A great portion of the ministry are Kabyle. Though we make up less than fifteen percent of Algeria’s population, we Kabyle hold eighty percent of the high official posts. The golden eyes always give us away. It comes of looking at so much money.” He laughed.
He seemed to be in such a good mood, I decided it was time to broach a most difficult subject—though I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about it. After all, the partnership had been thrown out of his office for disrupting a tennis match. What would prevent me from being tossed out on my ear for foot-in-mouth disease? But I was in the inner sanctum—a chance like this might not come again soon. I decided to press my advantage.
“Look, there’s something I must discuss with you before my colleague arrives at the end of the week,” I began.
“Your colleague?” he said, taking a seat behind his desk. Was it only my imagination that he seemed suddenly guarded?
“My manager, to be precise,” I said. “My firm has decided since we don’t have a signed contract yet, they need this manager on site to supervise things. In fact, I’m countermanding orders by coming here today. But I’ve read the contract,” I added, whipping a copy from my briefcase and slapping it on his desk, “and frankly I couldn’t see that it called for so much supervision.”
Kamel glanced at the contract and back at me. He folded his hands in prayerful attitude and bowed his head over them as if thinking. Now I was sure I’d gone too far. At last, he spoke.
“So you believe in breaking the rules?” he said. “That is interesting—I should like to know why.”
“This is a ‘blanket contract’ for the services of one consultant,” I told him, gesturing at the still untouched packet on the desk between us. “It says I’m to do analyses of petroleum resources, both underground and in the can. All I need is a computer to do that—and a signed contract. A boss might only get in the way.”
“I see,” said Kamel, still not smiling. “You’ve given me an explanation without answering my question. Let me ask you another. Are you familiar with the Fibonacci numbers?”
I decided not to let out a gasp. “A little,” I admitted. “They’re used for stock market projection. Could you tell me what your interest is in a subject so—shall I say erudite?”
“Certainly,” said Kamel, pushing the button on his desk. A few moments later a serf came in bearing a leather folder, handed it to Kamel, and departed.
“The Algerian government,” he said, taking out a document and handing it to me, “believes our country has only a limited supply of petroleum, enough to last perhaps eight more years. Maybe we will find more in the desert, maybe not. Oil is our only major export at this time; it completely supports the country paying for all our imports, including food. We’ve very little arable land here, as you’ll see. We import all our milk, meat, grain products, lumber … even sand.”
“You import sand?” I said, looking up from the document I’d begun reading. Algeria had hundreds of thousands of square miles of desert.
“Industrial-grade sand, to use in manufacturing. The sand in the Sahara is not suitable quality for industrial purposes. So we are completely dependent upon oil. We have no reserves, but we do have a very large strike of natural gas. So large that we may in time become among the world’s biggest exporters of this product—if only we can find a way to transport it.”
“What does this have to do with my project?” I said, quickly scanning the pages of the document, which, though written in French, had no reference either to petrol or gaz naturel.
“Algeria is a member country of the OPEC cartel. Each member country currently negotiates contracts and sets petroleum prices on its own, with different terms for different countries. Much of this is subjective and sloppy bartering. As the host country of OPEC, we propose to swing our members over to the concept of collective bartering. This will serve two purposes. First, it will dramatically increase the price per barrel of oil, while retaining the fixed cost of development. Second, we can reinvest this money in technological advance, much as the Israelis have done with Western funds.”
“You mean in weapons?”
“No,” said Kamel with a smile, “though it’s true we all seem to spend plenty in that department. I was referring to industrial advances, and more than that. We can bring water to the desert. Irrigation is the root of all civilization, you know.”
“But I see nothing in this document that reflects what you’re telling me,” I said.
Just then the tea arrived, wheeled in on a cart by a valet wearing white gloves. He poured the now familiar mint tea in a steaming spurt through the air. It hit the tiny glasses with a hiss.
“This is the traditional way of serving mint tea,” Kamel explained. “They crush spearmint leaves and soak them in boiling water. It contains as much sugar as it can absorb. In some quarters it’s thought to be a health tonic; in others, an aphrodisiac.” He laughed as we tilted our glasses toward one another and sipped the heavily scented tea.
“Perhaps we could continue our conversation now,” I said as soon as the door had closed behind the valet. “You’ve got an unsigned contract with my firm that says you want to calculate oil reserves; you’ve got a document here that says you want to analyze the import of sand and other raw materials. You want to project some kind of trend, or you wouldn’t have brought up the Fibonacci numbers. Why so many different stories?”
“There is only one story,” said Kamel, setting down his teacup and looking at me closely. “Minister Belaid and I reviewed your résumé closely. We agreed you’d be a good choice for this project—your track record shows you are willing to throw the rule book out the window.” He smiled broadly as he said this. “You see, my dear Catherine, I have already refused a visa for your manager, Monsieur Petard—only this morning.”
He pulled the copy of my vaguely worded contract across the desk, took out a pen, and slashed his name across the bottom of the page. “Now you have a signed contract that explains your mission here,” he said, handing it to me across the desk. I stared at the signature for a moment, and then I smiled. Kamel smiled back.
“Great, boss,” I said. “Now will somebody please explain what I’m supposed to be doing?”
“We want a computer model,” he said softly. “But prepared in the utmost secrecy.”
“What’s the model to do?” I clutched the signed contract to my chest, wishing I could see Petard’s face when he opened it in Paris—the contract the entire partnership couldn’t get signed.
“We would like to predict,” Kamel said, “what the world will do, economically, when we cut off their supply of petroleum.”
The hills of Algiers are steeper than those of Rome or San Francisco. There are places where it’s even hard to stand up. I was winded by the time we reached the restaurant, a small room on the second floor of a building overlooking an open plaza. It was called El Baçour, which Kamel explained meant “The Camel’s Saddle.” In the tiny entrance and bar, hard leather camel saddles were scattered about, each embroidered in beautifully colored patterns of leaves and flowers.
The main room had tables with crisply starched white tablecloths and white lace curtains blowing gently in the breeze from the open windows. Outside, the tops of wild acacias tapped against the open windowpanes.
We took a table in a round window alcove, where Kamel ordered pastilla au pigeon: a pie
with crispy crust dipped in cinnamon and sugar, stuffed with a delectable combination of ground pigeon meat, minced scrambled eggs, raisins, toasted almonds, and exotic spices. As we worked our way through the traditional five-course Mediterranean lunch—the crisp home-grown wines flowing like water—Kamel regaled me with stories of North Africa.
I’d not realized the incredible cultural history of this country I now called home. First came the Tuaregs, Kabyle, and Moors—those tribes of the ancient Berber who’d settled the coast—followed by the Minoans and Phoenicians, who’d formed garrisons there. Then the Roman colonies; the Spaniards, who’d taken the Moorish lands after winning back their own; and the Ottoman Empire, which held token sway over the Barbary Coast pirates for three hundred years. From 1830 onward, these lands had been under French rule until—ten years before my arrival—the Algerian revolution had ended outside rule.
In between, there’d been more dynasties of deys and beys than I could count, all with exotic-sounding names and more exotic practices. Harems and beheadings seemed to be the order of the day. Now that Muslim rule was in force, things had calmed down a bit. Though I’d noticed Kamel had drunk his share of red wine with the tournedos and saffron rice, and white wine to chase the salad, he still professed to be a follower of al-Islam.
“Islam,” I said as they served the syrupy black coffee and dessert. “It means ‘Peace,’ doesn’t it?”
“In a way,” said Kamel. He was cutting up the rahad lakhoum into squares: a jellylike substance coated with powdered sugar and flavored with ambrosia, jasmine, and almonds. “It is the same word as ‘shalom’ in Hebrew: peace be with you. In Arabic, it’s ‘salaam,’ accompanied by a deep bow until the head touches the earth. It signifies total prostration to the will of Allah—it means complete submission.” He handed me a square of rahad lakhoum with a smile. “Sometimes submission to the will of Allah means peace—sometimes not.”