Portrait of a Spy

operation was his now. Gabriel was just another private contractor, a man in a gray box with a green badge around his neck.

Chapter 41
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    T HE B OEING B USINESS J ET OWNED and operated by AAB Holdings entered the airspace of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia at precisely 5:18 p.m. As was customary, its British pilot immediately informed the passengers and crew of this development so that any females on board could begin exchanging their Western clothing for appropriate Islamic dress.
    Ten of the women on board the plane did so at once. The eleventh, Nadia al-Bakari, remained in her usual seat, working through a thick stack of paperwork, until the first lights of Riyadh appeared like bits of amber scattered across the desert floor. A century earlier, the Saudi capital had been little more than a mud-walled desert outpost, all but unknown to the Western world, a speck on the map somewhere between the slopes of the Sarawat Mountains and the shores of the Persian Gulf. Oil had transformed Riyadh into a modern metropolis of palaces, skyscrapers, and shopping malls. Yet in many respects the trappings of petrowealth were a mirage. For all the billions the al-Saud had spent trying to modernize their sleepy desert empire, they had squandered billions more on their yachts, their whores, and their vacation homes in Marbella. Worse still, they had done little to prepare the country for the day the last well ran dry. Ten million foreign workers toiled in the oil fields and the palaces, yet hundreds of thousands of young Saudi men could find no work. Oil aside, the country’s biggest exports were dates and Korans. And bearded fanatics, thought Nadia grimly, as she watched the lights of Riyadh grow brighter. When it came to producing Islamic extremists, Saudi Arabia was a market leader.
    Nadia lifted her gaze from the window and glanced around the interior of the aircraft. The forward seating compartment was arranged in the manner of a majlis , with comfortable chairs along the fuselage and rich Oriental rugs spread across the floor. The seats were occupied by AAB’s all-male senior staff—Daoud Hamza, the legal team of Abdul & Abdul, and, of course, Rafiq al-Kamal. He was staring at Nadia with a look of transparent disapproval, as if silently trying to remind her it was time to change her clothing. They were about to touch down in the land of invisible women, which meant Rafiq would become more than just Nadia’s bodyguard. He would also serve as her male chaperone and by law would be obligated to accompany her everywhere she went in public. In a few minutes’ time, Nadia al-Bakari, one of the world’s richest women, would have the rights of a camel. Fewer, she thought resentfully, for even a camel was permitted to show its face in public.
    Without a word, she rose to her feet and made her way toward the back of the aircraft to her elegantly appointed private quarters. Opening the closet, she saw her Saudi uniform hanging limply from the rod: a simple white thobe , an embroidered black abaya cloak, and a black niqab facial veil. Just once, she thought, she would like to walk the streets of her country in loose-fitting white clothing rather than inside a constricting black cocoon. It wasn’t possible, of course; even wealth on the scale of the al-Bakaris offered no protection against the fanatical mutaween religious police. Besides, this was hardly the moment to test Saudi Arabia’s social and religious norms. She had come to her homeland to meet privately with Sheikh Marwan Bin Tayyib, the dean of the department of theology at the University of Mecca. Surely the esteemed religious scholar would find it odd if, on the eve of that meeting, Nadia was arrested by the bearded ones for failing to wear proper Islamic attire.
    Reluctantly, she shed her pale Oscar de la Renta pantsuit and with clerical slowness robed herself in black. With the niqab now hiding the face God had given her, she stood before the mirror and examined her appearance. Only her eyes were visible, along with a tempting trace of flesh around her ankles. All other visual proof of her existence had been erased. In fact, her return to the forward passenger cabin provoked scarcely a glance from her male colleagues. Only Daoud Hamza, a Lebanese by birth, bothered to acknowledge her presence. The others, all Saudis, kept their eyes conspicuously averted. The illness had returned, she thought, the illness that was Saudi Arabia. It didn’t matter