Portrait of a Spy

the desert. He waved his arms one final time toward the sky to tell them he was still alive. Then he closed Nadia’s eyes and wept against her breast as her body turned slowly to stone.

Chapter 67
Paris-Langley-Riyadh

    M ORE THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS WOULD elapse before AAB Holdings finally revealed to the world that its chairwoman and chief executive, Nadia al-Bakari, was missing and presumed kidnapped. According to a company statement, she had been traveling by limousine at the time of her disappearance, en route from Dubai’s famed Burj Al Arab hotel to the airport. Two calls had been placed from the car, both from the phone of her longtime security chief. During the first, he had instructed the head of AAB’s travel department to move up the departure of the company’s aircraft by fifteen minutes, from 11:00 p.m. to 10:45. Seven minutes later, he had phoned again to say Miss al-Bakari was feeling ill and would return to the hotel to spend the night. It was her wish, he said, that the rest of the staff return to Paris as planned. Needless to say, Emirati authorities now regarded the second call as highly suspect, though they had yet to determine whether the security man was part of a conspiracy or merely another victim. The bodyguard was missing, as was the driver of the car.
    As expected, the news sent shockwaves through already jittery global financial markets. Share prices tumbled in Europe, where AAB’s portfolio was vast, and trading on Wall Street opened sharply lower. Hardest hit, though, was Dubai, Inc. Having spent untold billions portraying itself as an oasis of stability in a turbulent region, the emirate now appeared to be a place where even heavily guarded billionaires were not safe. The Ruler took to the airwaves to declare his city-state secure and open for business, but investors weren’t so sure. They pummeled Dubai-based firms and sovereign wealth funds with a merciless wave of selling that left the city of gold teetering once more on the brink of insolvency.
    When an additional twenty-four hours passed with no word on Nadia’s fate, the press was left with no option but to speculate wildly on what might have transpired. One theory held that she was murdered by a Russian criminal gang who had lost millions investing in AAB Holdings. Another posited that she had offended powerful interests in Dubai with her call for better treatment of the emirate’s migrant laborers. Still another suggested the kidnapping was but a ruse, that Nadia al-Bakari, one of the world’s richest women, had simply gone into hiding for reasons no one could imagine.
    Regrettably, it was this final theory that gained the most traction in certain quarters of the press, and before long, there was a rash of Nadia sightings at glamorous locations around the globe. The last had her living on a remote island in the Baltic Sea with the son of Sweden’s wealthiest man.
    That report appeared on the same day the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia finally announced that her body had been found in the Empty Quarter. The bodies of several men had been found with her, according to the Saudis, including that of her security chief. All had been killed by gunfire, as had Miss al-Bakari. As of yet, Saudi authorities had no suspects.
    In keeping with past utterances by the Saudi regime, the statement told only part of the story. It did not say, for example, that Saudi intelligence was already acutely aware of the circumstances surrounding Miss al-Bakari’s murder. Nor did it mention that a Saudi military patrol had recovered her body within a few hours of her death, along with the only survivor of the incident. Seriously wounded, this survivor was now the subject of intense, if secret, backchannel negotiations between the Central Intelligence Agency and friendly elements of the House of Saud. Thus far, the talks had produced no breakthroughs. In fact, as far as the government of Saudi Arabia was concerned, the man in question did not exist. They promised to mount a search for him, but held out little in the way of hope. The Empty Quarter, they said, did not treat intruders kindly. Inshallah , they would find his corpse, but only if the Bedouin did not get to him first.
    The miniature GPS tracking beacon lodged in Gabriel’s body told an entirely different story. It was the story of a man who, having been found alive in the Empty Quarter, had been flown by helicopter to Riyadh and deposited at the sprawling compound run by the Mabahith, the