*****
Khalid woke from his afternoon nap as the call to Isha, the last prayer of the night, died in a slow echo down the narrow street outside his hotel room. He’d overslept, he’d intended to go to the prayer, but now it was too late to go to the mosque a block away. Instead he got up and stood on the floor facing North toward Mecca and began to recite the verses as the imam would be doing at the mosque.
When he was finished he sat on the bed again to collect his thoughts. He was hungry, but that would have to wait: nothing would be open around town on a Friday night anyway, and the men in the small hotel restaurant would not be back from prayer themselves and re-organized to produce any food for at least another thirty minutes. Thirty minutes to think, then.
The afternoon was not as pleasant as the day started. Something had definitely gone horribly wrong in England after that bloody-minded General arrived. It was like someone rolled up the entire bottom and middle layers of the al-Qaeda network all over the bloody country, just like Paris only a day or two earlier. There was too much damage done in too short a time for the presence of the General in both places to have been a coincidence. Everyone’s cellular phone had gone quiet. He’d discarded his after erasing all the numbers in memory, and bought a new one. Cash. Prepaid. No account. Khalid was a little worried.
Then, there was the message on the website at around four o’clock today, with a photo of the General and his family in Amman, Jordan, saying they’d arrived the evening before. There was no more information, and since then the original source of this tidbit had disappeared somewhere in Amman, along with a fair number of other operatives who were normally reliable, although low level. So the disease spread with this General, and this General was getting around too fast. Khalid once again saw that awful picture of the square, the grate, and the sword as it swam through his conscious thought and had to be suppressed.
Dismal as it was, the picture galvanized him into motion. He rose and slipped into his sandals, pocketed his wallet and left, heading for the lobby. The hotel was not one of the big Western chains, so it didn’t have a big internet cafe, but it had a small closet of a room with a sign out front labeled “business center” in Arabic and English, and inside was one desktop computer tied to the internet. There was nobody there, so he held up a hand to the clerk at the desk and stepped inside. It took just a few moments to link to the site he wanted, to link from there to another, and to find the third. Then a couple of clicks and he found the message board that would tell him the latest news in a code he knew by heart.
The Amman story was not improving, it was getting worse, but the new bit was that someone thought the French had done that, not the Americans, and that made things worse still. It was one thing to fight the Americans, who despite their corruption were devilishly clever and completely relentless. It was a similarly difficult thing to fight the British, who were even more clever and quicker to act. But the French? Khalid had only once been to France, but he knew a few things about the French. They had no notion of “rules” like the Brits or the Americans for one thing. Everyone in the Brotherhood knew the stories from Lebanon in the 80’s, when someone got a little carried away and kidnapped a prominent French citizen when they were kidnapping just about everyone else. It was a costly mistake. Seven well known and pretty high-ranking members of the Hezbollah group were found hanging from street lights along a major public highway. All of them were missing their hearts and their penises—and nobody ever found the missing body parts. The Americans would be patient, refuse to negotiate, apply political pressure everywhere, but they were relatively slow to act and not really ruthless. The Brits were a notch up. But the French? You did not screw with the French unless you were willing to play very, very hard. Having them in the game and playing hard gave Khalid a headache.
Nothing else from Europe, though, so he hoped that might mean the worst was over. He found his messages and read them. One was interesting—there was a phone message waiting for him somewhere. He looked at the number, very wary. He didn’t want to call any cellular phones at this point, at least none he’d ever called before. But this number was a landline in Dhahran, he could tell by the area code, “03”. He rocked back in his chair and thought a moment. Deciding, he dialed from his new cellular and waited.
Five rings, and an answering machine picked up. He recognized the voice, thought quickly, remembered the code, entered it on his keypad. A series of beeps and then a voice in Arabic: “An Air Force Brigadier just crossed into the Kingdom at al-Kaf. He travels with his family: two women, a teenager, and a small boy, four Saudi men, and three Americans. They’re moving in three GMC Suburban vehicles. The time is ten-thirty.” Khalid stabbed the “end” button on the phone and rocked back in the chair again, stunned. “The General, the damned General, may he burn in Hell. He’s back in Saudi Arabia! What day would that have been, I wonder?”
It took a little thinking, but he decided it had to have been yesterday. The General was in Amman on Thursday night, and then the network there began to go down. So this must have been—today? Not yesterday, that was Thursday. Today at ten-thirty in the morning. But where is al-Kaf? He’d never heard of it. He turned back to the computer and looked for a map, found the place easily. A border crossing in the far northwest, Jordan. So, they are traveling on the Tapline Road, but going where? Ahhh. A smile lit his broad, brown face. Finally, Allah smiled with him. “The General is going home to Al-Ha’il, to meet his family, possibly to return to Dhahran, or possibly to make trouble for me here in the Kingdom. Well, my friend, I will have a surprise for you. My people will be waiting, and I will be rid of you. Who is ahead in this game now?
His people would indeed be there. Mohammed and he spoke much earlier this morning, and he knew that they would meet his larger party tomorrow at Buraydah, they would move to al-Ha’il and be waiting. In two days the General would be gone and Khalid's plan would be secure.
That would have made a much finer ending to what had been a relatively miserable day of news for Khalid, except replaying the taped message in his head he came upon an inconvenience he’d overlooked. The tape had said “three Americans,” had it not? Who were these Americans, and what were they doing with a Saudi General out in the middle of the God-forsaken desert? Why go to al-Ha’il with him, why go that way? There were easier ways—why not fly from Amman to Jeddah or Dhahran? This was a dangerous thing. The thought of slave virgins in Khartoum sounded suddenly much better to him that it had even a day or two ago. He looked at his watch, felt his stomach grumble. Time for food. But first he found his travel website and exchanged his Monday flight to Cairo for one on Sunday at noon. The connection onward to Khartoum could not be fixed for the same day, but the connection for Monday would be all right. As long as he was out of Saudi Arabia before Mohammed took the compound on Sunday night . . .