“You’ve done nothing of the sort. You were complicit in kidnapping the boy and trying to shuffle him off to an orphanage over a thousand miles away from his homeland.”
“It’s a complicated situation, Sava.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“In a complicated part of the world. Bahrain is a tinderbox. We’re doing our best.”
“I’m sure you are.”
Mark wasn’t being sarcastic.
He knew that the CIA was capable of doing some pretty awful things — but never just for the hell of it. If they’d helped the Shias in Bahrain steal Muhammad, it was almost certainly because someone at Langley had thought — wrongly or rightly — that a greater good was being served by doing so.
Rosten said, “Listen, I can’t go into specifics, but I can say this — we’ve backed the royal family in Bahrain for years. They’ve been good to us, and we’ve been good to them. But the Shias outnumber the Sunnis on this island two-to-one and have shit for power. That can’t last forever. They’re going to fight it out at some point.”
Rosten was probably right about that, Mark thought. The Sunni-Shia split, akin to Christianity’s Catholic-Protestant division, was at the heart of why Iraq, and then Syria, had devolved into civil war. Why not Bahrain?
The thing that got Mark was that the original cause of the schism — a disagreement over who would succeed the prophet Muhammad — was a dead issue. Dead, in the sense that everyone involved — all the Sunni caliphs and Shia Imams who claimed they had a right to rule — had died long ago. Granted, the Shias didn’t see it that way, but no one had seen their last claimant for over a thousand years, so Mark was counting him as dead.
Now the two groups were mainly just fighting for power in the region.
“Listen,” said Rosten. “This is the story I need you to selclass="underline" The Shias kidnapped Muhammad. We found out about it and were going to retrieve him ourselves, but then the Saudis beat us to it. At which point you interfered, not knowing that the Saudis were trying to help the kid.”
“Were they?”
Ignoring the question, Rosten said, “You’re working for us now, just trying to reunite Muhammad with his family.”
“I assume, given that the Shias thought it worth their time to kidnap him, that Muhammad is one of the royals?”
“Well, aren’t you clever.”
“So you and I form an alliance, Muhammad gets to go back to his family, the Bahraini royals are happy, the Saudis are happy. But the Bahraini Shias — and probably the Iranians — are pissed because the plug gets pulled on whatever damn cockeyed deal you tried to cut with them.”
Mark knew that any dispute between Sunnis and Shias was never just a local issue. It was inevitable that Iran, a Shia country, would be backing the local Shias, and that Saudi Arabia, a Sunni one, would stand behind the local Sunnis.
“Close enough. Minus the part about anyone being happy. We’re all just reacting to a bad situation.”
“Must be a really bad situation.”
“The Shias are going to rule this island eventually, Sava. The Saudis will try to stop it, they’ll send troops, but they’ll be fighting a rearguard action. We were just trying to manage a crisis and stay ahead of the curve. Support the local Shias, but fend off Iran — just like we’re doing in Iraq. I would think that would make a lot of sense to a guy who’s been in the business as long as you have.”
“Helping the Shias kidnap a two-year-old doesn’t make any sense to me, but I don’t have a problem selling your bullshit story to the Bahrainis if it means the kid gets to go back to his family. So who do I meet, and when?”
“I have to line it up — I had to know you were on board before I pulled the trigger. Wait for my call, it won’t be long.”
28
Thank God for places like the Connaught Hotel, thought Rad Saveljic as a waiter brought him a late breakfast of French fries and coffee with cream.
After having dinner here last week with his boss and a few BP execs, Rad had taken to coming to the Connaught every day for breakfast. And he always got the French fries. He was especially appreciative of them this morning. Ever since last night’s debacle with the spicy vindaloo and the fresh salad, his stomach had been cramping. The fries were just the sort of normal food his digestive system needed to get back on track.
Rad took a sip of his coffee and winced as his stomach tightened. He wished he could just stay here for the day. Conduct business from the lobby. Instead, in an hour, he was supposed to meet both his boss and the owner of a local construction firm at the future site of a new BP office building.
It was peaceful here, behind the high walls that surrounded the Connaught. Hidden away in this elegant refuge, he could watch BBC at the bar, enjoy a quiet dinner while reading the International Herald Tribune, or surf the web without being jostled by the sweaty crowds on the street.
He used his phone to check his Facebook account. Back in the States, he’d never been much of a fan of Facebook, but now he loved even the stupid inspirational photos people posted, because they reminded him of home. He pushed the Like button on a friend who’d posted a picture from a New York Giants’ game where the Giants were up 21–10 against the Eagles, then clicked on a newspaper article in his feed; the mayor of Elizabeth, New Jersey, had been indicted for corruption. No shocker there, thought Rad, laughing to himself as he forced himself to eat a French fry.
Thinking about New Jersey put Rad in a good mood, and made him temporarily forget about the rumbling in his stomach. Maybe India wasn’t that bad, he thought.
The day before, they’d driven around the India Gate — which he gathered was Delhi’s version of the Arc de Triomphe. They’d eaten lunch at a place where the lattice windows had been sculpted out of marble. Pretty good stuff.
Rad was beginning to think that maybe Delhi was like New Jersey, in that, sure, it was crowded and corrupt, but not without its charms if you knew where to look.
The pollution was unbearable, though. Which, he thought, given that he was comparing it to New Jersey, really said something.
Rad looked up from his phone and out toward the front of the hotel, expecting to see some evidence of that gross pollution just beyond the hotel’s tall, wrought-iron entrance gates. Instead what he saw was a man looking right at him; a man of modest stature, whose skin was a shade lighter than that of the average Indian; a man Rad was almost certain he’d seen earlier that morning, as he was leaving his apartment.
His apartment was a half mile away. And Delhi had a population of over sixteen million.
Strange coincidence, he thought.
29
Rosten called Mark back. Muhammad had been living with extended family in the house of his great-uncle prior to the kidnapping, he said. This great-uncle was eager to meet Mark and arrange for the return of the boy.
Mark popped the last of his second Cinnabon into his mouth and washed it down with the dregs of his coffee. “OK,” he said, feeling a little sluggish. “Where do I go?”
Rosten told him everything he needed to know.
After he got off the phone, Mark wanted to shoot Daria an e-mail, to let her know where he was and what he’d learned about the boy, but he decided against it. Communicating via draft messages through their anonymous e-mail account was a good way to minimize the risk of being tracked or surveilled, but it wasn’t an infallible method; to try to do so now would be to indulge in a personal pleasure at the risk of potentially compromising the op.
“Riffa,” said Mark to the young, dark-skinned cab driver who’d pulled up in front of the Cinnabon store. “The Sheikh Isa Mosque.”
There were many wealthy enclaves in Bahrain. Well-tended English gardens could be found in many villages on the west coast, and the Americans had all but taken over the eastern Manama district of Juffair — but Riffa, located ten miles south of Manama, near the center of the island, was home to the wealthiest of the wealthy because that was where the royal family lived.
The cab driver gave Mark a long funny look. Mark wished he’d shaved on the plane; he figured he probably smelled too. The dress shirt he was wearing still had food stains on it from the day before, when he’d helped with Daria’s stew.
Mark pulled open the rear door to the cab and slid inside. When the cabbie didn’t start driving, Mark said in English, “Sorry, my Arabic stinks. Riffa? Mosque?”
“I’m Pakistani. I don’t speak Arabic.”
“Good.”
“Many police are around Riffa.”
“OK.”
“The police are at checkpoints.”
“Is that going to be a problem?”
The cabbie looked Mark over again. His expression made it clear that he didn’t like what he saw. “Why do you want to go to this mosque?”
Mark pulled a wad of Bahraini dinars out of his front pocket — he’d exchanged five thousand dollars at the airport — and offered forty dinars, about a hundred dollars, to the cabbie.
“Perhaps we can say we are just driving through,” the cabbie allowed.
Once they were out of downtown Manama and speeding south toward Riffa, the hatred many Shias harbored for the royal family was plain to see. Newly built apartment buildings and run-down shops were scarred with graffiti at ground level. Most of the graffiti was in Arabic, but some of it was in English: DOWN WITH THE KING, TERRORISM IS A BRITISH INDUSTRY, US GET OUT! Bahraini security forces had tried to cross out the slogans with spray paint of their own, resulting in a nightmarish mess that conveyed little but mutual anger.
That anger was also evident in all the brick-paver sidewalks that had been ripped up — to be thrown at the police, the cabbie explained. Streets were charred with black marks where fires had been burning, further evidence of nightly conflicts, and blackened tires had been pushed to the sides of the road. Men in thawbs, the white robes that were common to the region, stood on rooftops, surrounded by rusted satellite dishes as they stared down with hostile expressions at the passing traffic. The remains of battered effigies, presumably representing the king, hung from a few lamp posts.
Mark began to feel the desert in a way he hadn’t in Manama. The sun was intense and the land flat. Many of the cinderblock and stucco buildings were the color of sand. On the side roads leading off the main highway, he could see patches of barren desert.
Just past a tall clock tower on the outskirts of Riffa, red signs appeared that said REDUCE SPEED NOW and CHECKPOINT, STOP FOR INSPECTION in both Arabic and English. Beyond the signs, thick concrete barriers painted yellow with black arrows directed traffic into a single lane.
A Bahraini soldier greeted them. The cabbie produced his license and said he was just using the highway to take Mark to the oilfields south of Riffa.
The soldier looked Mark over for a moment, inspected his British passport, then waved them through.
On the other side of the checkpoint, a different world greeted them.
Blocky art-deco street lamps lined the right-hand side of the road, many of which were adorned with an image of the king near their base. Palm trees abounded, and unlike those Mark had seen outside Riffa — where many appeared to be struggling for lack of water — these were all healthy and green, as were the clusters of purple-flowered hedge bushes beneath them. The vibrant green of the neatly mowed grass between the hedges stood in striking contrast to the dusty sidewalks and sandy rubble-strewn lots he’d seen outside of Riffa.
High walls rose beyond the palm trees, on the other side of which the tops of stately villas were visible.
No way was this going to last forever, was all Mark could think. The royals might be able to hold off the hordes for a few more years, or maybe even a few more centuries, but eventually the barricades would fall. At which point, new wealthy and poor classes would emerge. And they’d be similar to the old classes, but at least they wouldn’t be defined by religious affiliation.
The ivory-colored Sheikh Isa Mosque soon appeared on the left. Minarets topped by Islamic crescents rose high into the sky. It was big enough to accommodate thousands, but Mark had a feeling it rarely did. It was too uncluttered, too clean. His cabbie pulled into the parking lot.
“OK?”
“OK,” said Mark. He slipped the guy another five dinars and stepped out of the cab.