“Worse than beasts,” Ruhi said. “They are cornered beasts. They will do anything to try to save themselves. I know that now.”
Ruhi withdrew his hand and turned away, filled with disgust. It wasn’t directed at Malik’s curiosity, and it wasn’t a performance. It was real. He acted on the anger and fear and even the frailty that he had known during his torture — and the resentment that he harbored for all of that. And it had worked. He could tell that his uncle sensed the genuineness of his hurt and fury.
Ruhi wondered whether it was the right time to ask if Ahmed had slipped back across the border to come home, or was still in some Islamist redoubt in Yemen. No, he told himself. You don’t want to push too hard too fast, even with Uncle Malik.
A feast was prepared that night in Ruhi’s honor. A sheep was ceremoniously slaughtered and butchered and roasted in a great stone pit in the wide courtyard of Malik’s huge home. Oranges and limes and lemons, papayas, dates, and pomegranates — tropical fruits of all kinds — adorned a sideboard, along with breads and rolls, vegetables, and scented olive oils. It astonished Ruhi to see such wealth, such unbridled abundance, after leaving the U.S. in such a decimated, desperate state.
Many toasts were made in Ruhi’s honor, all with nonalcoholic beverages, of course. His siblings and extended family avoided asking about his detention. Perhaps Malik had told them to be respectful, that his nephew was a wounded man. Not a word came up about Ahmed in any of the necessarily fleeting conversations that Ruhi had in the course of so many greetings. He was surprised and pleased that he could remember all the names of his relatives. Family was sacred in Saudi Arabia, and no matter what America had to offer an immigrant such as himself, close family ties were not as common there, even among the native born.
The celebration was such a whirlwind — and filled with such singular good cheer — that by the time Ruhi settled in a guest room, he had forgotten about Ahmed. He lay in a large bed, dozing off, when the bedroom door to the courtyard creaked open. He bolted upright and saw a torch burning behind a gowned and hooded man.
“Ahmed?” Ruhi whispered.
The shape moved closer. “Why would you think it was me?”
Agent Candace Anders sat alongside a senior Saudi intelligence official. They were only a few miles from Ruhi, glimpsing him from a camera drone the size of a hummingbird.
“That’s him. That’s Ahmed Mancur,” said the official, who’d told Candace that his own name was Omar, never offering a family name. “And that’s your man, the one inside?”
“Yes, that’s Ruhi, his cousin. Look,” Candace said quickly, “we want to work with you. That’s why we tipped you off that Ahmed Mancur might come home. But it’s critical that you not grab him now.”
“That is asking a lot. We have been searching for him for a long time.”
“If you can wait a little longer, your country’s biggest customer would appreciate it.” Candace smiled as she spoke. “And one of your biggest benefactors,” she added, a not-so-subtle nod to U.S. military largesse to the emirate.
“You think Ahmed Mancur will lead you to your prey?” Omar asked.
“We don’t know, honestly. But we want to find out.”
They watched Ahmed slip inside the house and close the door.
The drone pilot, sitting only feet away, brought the tiny device up to an altitude of two hundred feet.
“You have no ‘ears’ inside?” Candace asked.
“Not in that place,” Omar acknowledged. “Malik has it swept at least once a week. He has differences with his son, but he doesn’t want him taken by us. But we have never been in such a position to take him down, either.” He was smiling now.
“So, what are you saying?” Candace asked bluntly. “That you’re going to take Ahmed now?” she asked.
“No, we will play ball, as you say.”
“How equipped are you to follow him in Yemen?” she asked.
“It depends. You?”
“We got Awlaki.”
“It took forever. So your answer is no, you’re not well equipped.”
“We don’t know yet, honestly. But we have huge resources invested in this case.”
“You say ‘honestly’ a lot. Should I assume you’re lying otherwise?”
She shook her head. Felt foolish.
They were back to waiting, as they had been before Ahmed showed up. Omar returned to briefing her about two Saudi Islamists, Abdullah and Ibrahim al-Asiri:
“Ibrahim was the explosives expert, supposedly. His brother, Abdullah, stuffed one of Ibrahim’s bombs up his anus. Please excuse my scatological reference, but it is essential to understanding how grim it is getting down by the Yemeni border.”
“That’s fine,” she said and shrugged. She almost added “honestly,” but choked it down.
“Abdullah was posing as an Islamist defector when he met with my boss, the chief of our counterinsurgency agency. He is a prince, you should know. Abdullah made it into the prince’s study in his home not far from the border. He even hugged him. Then Abdullah’s phone rang and set off the bomb.”
Candace winced.
“I am so sorry. I should stop.”
“No, you should not. I’ve seen worse.” Unfortunately, that was true — in Kabul. Moreover, Candace could not let herself be seen as a weak woman. Not in Saudi culture.
“The prince survived in good shape because the force of the bomb went straight up, taking Abdullah’s head off. It blasted clear through the roof.”
“Somebody was looking out for the prince,” Candace said, fully aware that she was setting herself up for a display of piety.
“Yes, may the blessings and peace of Mohammed be upon him.” Omar paused for several seconds before going on. “So the border keeps us busy with bombs and spies, defectors, men of no faith and men of great faith, and they are all at war with one another.”
“And that’s where we’re going, it looks like?” Candace asked.
“Yes, I am certain of it now.”
“It’s your own Casablanca.”
“That is true, but there is no Rick’s Café Américain for us.”
“Drinking and gambling? There wasn’t supposed to be then, either,” Candace said.
“I know, but times have changed.”
Have they ever.
Candace shrugged and nodded, acknowledging his point. She could not have been happier to hear that they’d be heading for the Yemeni border. It was extremely difficult, diplomatically speaking, for U.S. intelligence agents to operate in Saudi Arabia without alerting their counterparts in the emirate. That was a problem because they didn’t always know the loyalties of individual Saudi agents. Yemen, however, had been most cooperative with the United States, even covering up U.S. drone attacks on its own people. In other words, Yemen wasn’t Pakistan, which had become openly outraged over American assassinations on its soil, after bin Laden and Abbottabad.
But large regions of Yemen had been reduced to anarchy, which provided the most compelling reason of all for heading to the southern Saudi border: The lawlessness made Yemen a possible center for the cyberattackers. Their tools were sophisticated; nobody, including Lana Elkins, had been able to hack below the “cover” of the online magazine, Inspire, to what Candace and other intelligence agents thought might be the command center for Al Qaeda in Yemen. Whoever was doing the website’s dirty work clearly had extensive cybertools, knew how to use them, and were all but taunting Western intelligence by affiliating themselves with an Islamist site brazenly urging the faithful to make bombs.
Yemen also had many anarchic tribal regions, much as Waziristan did, but Yemen shared a highly penetrable border with the technologically advanced Saudis. The emirate’s most radical Islamists had a well-earned reputation for traveling the world to spill the blood of infidels, which they had demonstrated most brutally on 9/11. That the faithful might simply hop their country’s southern border — to carry out cyberbutchery — appeared painfully plausible.