Portrait of a Spy

dealing it across the desk to Gabriel, whose face remained expressionless. They said nothing more to each other. They didn’t need to. Their affliction was shared. They had an agent in hostile territory, and neither one of them would have a moment’s peace until she was back on her plane again, heading out of Saudi airspace.
    At noon Washington time, Carter returned to his office on the seventh floor while Gabriel headed to the house on N Street for some much-needed sleep. He woke at midnight and by one a.m. was back in Rashidistan, with his green badge around his neck and Adrian Carter sitting tensely at his side. The next cable from Riyadh arrived fifteen minutes later. It said NAB had departed her walled compound in al-Shumaysi and was now en route to her offices on al-Olaya Street. There she remained until one in the afternoon, when she was driven to the Four Seasons Hotel for a luncheon with Saudi investors, all of whom happened to be men. Upon departure from the hotel, her car turned right onto King Fahd Street—curious, since her office was in the opposite direction. She was last seen ten minutes later, heading north on Highway 65. The CIA team made no attempt to follow. NAB was now entirely on her own.

Chapter 42
Nejd, Saudi Arabia

    T HE WIND BLEW ITSELF OUT at midday, and by late afternoon, peace had once more been imposed upon the Nejd. It would be a temporary peace, as most were in the harsh plateau, for in the distant west, black storm clouds were creeping over the passes of the Sarawat Mountains like a Hejazi raiding party. It had been two weeks since the first rains, and the desert floor was aglow with the first hesitant growth of grass and wildflowers. Within a few weeks, the land would be as green as a Berkshire meadow. Then the blast furnace would reignite and from the sky not a drop of rain would fall—not until the next winter when, Allah willing, the storms would once again come rolling down the slopes of the Sarawat.
    To the people of the Nejd, the rain was one of the few welcome things to come from the west. They regarded nearly everything else, including their so-called countrymen from the Hejaz, with contempt and scorn. It was their faith that made them hostile to outside influences, a faith that had been given to them three centuries earlier by an austere reformist preacher named Muhammad Abdul Wahhab. In 1744, he formed an alliance with a Nejdi tribe called the al-Saud, thus creating the union of political and religious power that would eventually lead to the creation of the modern state of Saudi Arabia. It had been an uneasy alliance, and from time to time, the al-Saud had felt compelled to put the bearded zealots of the Nejd in their place, sometimes with the help of infidels. In 1930, the al-Saud had used British machine guns to massacre the holy warriors of the Ikhwan in the town of Sabillah. And after 9/11, the al-Saud had joined forces with the hated Americans to beat back the modern-day version of the Ikhwan known as al-Qaeda. Yet through it all, the marriage between the followers of Wahhab and the House of Saud had endured. They were dependent on one another for their very survival. In the unforgiving landscape of the Nejd, one could not ask for much more.
    Despite the extremes of climate, the newly laid surface of Highway 65 was smooth and black, like the rivers of crude that flowed beneath it. Running in a northwesterly direction, it followed the path of the ancient caravan route linking Riyadh with the oasis town of Hail. A few miles south of Hail, near the town of Buraydah, Nadia instructed her driver to turn onto a smaller two-lane road running westward into the desert. Rafiq al-Kamal was by now visibly uneasy. Nadia had told him nothing of her plans to travel to the Nejd until the moment of their departure from the Four Seasons, and even then her explanations had been opaque. She said she was having dinner at the family camp of Sheikh Marwan Bin Tayyib, an important member of the ulema . After the dinner—which would be strictly segregated by gender, of course—she would meet privately with the sheikh to discuss matters related to zakat . It would not be necessary for her to take along a chaperone to the meeting since the cleric was a good and learned man known for his extreme piety. Nor were there any concerns about safety. Al-Kamal had accepted her edicts, but clearly they did not please him.
    It was now a few minutes past five, and the light was slowly seeping from