Portrait of a Spy

and the Emirates, across Saudi Arabia, and into portions of Yemen. Dunes the size of mountains roam the desert floor in the relentless wind. Some stand alone. Others link themselves into chains that meander for hundreds of miles. In summer the temperature routinely exceeds one hundred forty degrees, cooling to a hundred degrees at night. There is almost no rain, little in the way of plant or animal life, and few people other than the Bedouin and the bandits and the terrorists from al-Qaeda who move freely across the borders. Time matters little in the Sands. Even now, it is measured in the length of the walk to the next well.
    Like most Saudis, Nadia al-Bakari had never set foot in the Empty Quarter. That changed three hours after her abduction, though Nadia was unaware of it. Having been injected with the general anesthetic ketamine, she believed herself to be wandering lost through the gilded rooms of her youth. Her father appeared to her briefly; he wore the traditional robes of a Bedouin and the angry face known as the juhayman . His body had been pierced by bullets. He made her touch his wounds, then chided her for conspiring with the very men who had inflicted them. She would have to be punished, he said, just as Rena had been punished for bringing dishonor upon her family. It was the will of God. There was nothing to be done.
    It was at the instant her father condemned her to death that Nadia felt herself beginning to float upward through the layers of consciousness. It was a slow rise, like a diver ascending from a great depth. When she finally reached the surface, she forced her eyes open and drew an enormous breath. Then she took stock of her surroundings. She was lying on her side on a rug that smelled of male body odor and camel. Bound at the wrists, she was cloaked in a thin garment of sheer white cotton. It was aglow with moonlight, as was the Salafi-style thobe of the man watching over her. He wore a taqiyah skullcap with no headdress and carried an automatic weapon with a banana-shaped magazine. Even so, his eyes were unusually gentle for an Arab man. Then Nadia realized she had seen them before. They were the eyes of Ali, the talib of Sheikh Marwan Bin Tayyib.
    “Where am I?” she asked.
    He answered truthfully. It was not a good sign.
    “How’s Safia?”
    “She’s well,” the talib said, smiling in spite of the situation.
    “How long now until the baby comes?”
    “Three months,” he said.
    “ Inshallah , it will be a boy.”
    “Actually, the doctors say we will have a girl.”
    “You don’t sound displeased.”
    “I’m not.”
    “Have you chosen a name?”
    “We’re going to call her Hanan.”
    In Arabic, it meant “mercy.” Perhaps there was hope after all.
    The talib began to recite verses of the Koran softly to himself. Nadia rolled onto her back and gazed up at the stars. They seemed close enough to touch. There was only the sound of the Koran and a distant hum of some sort. For a moment, she assumed it was another hallucination caused by the drugs—or perhaps, she thought, by the abnormality in her brain. Then she closed her eyes, silencing the voice of the talib , and listened intently. It was no hallucination, she concluded. It was an aircraft of some sort. And it was getting closer.
    A single narrow road links the Emirati oasis town of Liwa with the Shaybah oil facility on the other side of the border in Saudi Arabia. Nadia had passed through the checkpoint as the sleeping, veiled wife of one of her captors. Gabriel was made to suffer the same indignity, though, unlike Nadia, he was fully aware of what was happening.
    Beneath his veil, he wore the blue coveralls of a Dubai laborer. They had been given to him in a produce warehouse in al-Khaznah, a desert town in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, after he had been stripped of his own clothing and searched for beacons and listening devices. He had also been given a second beating, with Rafiq al-Kamal doing most of the heavy lifting. Gabriel supposed the Saudi had a right to be cross with him. After all, Gabriel had killed his old boss and then recruited the boss’s daughter as an agent. Al-Kamal’s involvement in Nadia’s abduction puzzled Gabriel. At whose behest, he wondered, was the Saudi here? The terrorists? Or the al-Saud?
    For now, it didn’t matter. What mattered was keeping Nadia alive. It would require one last lie. One last deception. He conceived the lie on the road to Shaybah while wearing the blue coveralls of