“I don’t mind that your job means you can’t go to our friends’ dinners or that you won’t be here when my brother arrives tomorrow. I just don’t like being told at the last minute, that’s all,” Sarah said, gripping the steering wheel a little too tightly. “I know your job means you can’t always tell me why, and I accept that it’s more important than my work, but…”
“Honey, I never said my job is more important. What you do for refugees is sometimes a matter of life and death, too,” MacIntyre said, regretting he had put it that way as soon as he said it. He patted his various pockets looking for his passport. “It’s just that in addition to secrecy, my job also involves a certain unpredictability, a spontaneity. And if I had remembered that your brother was coming to town tomorrow, I would have delayed a day; you know I love Danny.
“And if I knew for sure when I was coming back, I would tell you, but this trip is a little open-ended,” he said, retrieving the worn black diplomatic passport from the new Coach attaché case her mother had given him for Chrismica.
“It’s all right, Rusty, seriously,” she said, looking at him and not the traffic. “It’s just that I leave Sunday for Somaliland. So I am giving the cat to Max and Theo and you have to remember when you get back to go and get Mr. Hobbs from them. And then you need to feed him, and not starve him like you did last summer when I was in Sudan, poor thing.”
Mr. Hobbs was their cat and surrogate child, an arrangement that Sarah seemed to be perfectly happy with, most of the time. When he’d press Sarah for a decision to try to have their own human child, she would point out that both their travel schedules and his work hours meant that something would have to give. “It can’t just be my job to raise our child like it is just me taking care of Mr. Hobbs. It would have to be an equally shared responsibility.” He accepted that concept, but he did not see how he could walk away from his job to some thirty-hour-a-week position at a boring think tank like Brookings or RAND. There was too much going on. There were too few people who knew how to do it. And his mind would turn to mush writing think-tank monographs that no one would ever read.
Yeah, he wanted a child, their child. Sarah always ended these conversations with the same unconvincing assertion: “It’s not like we’re failures if we don’t have a kid. I am not like my mother, and I just don’t buy that I have to procreate to justify my space on the planet. Believe me, there are more than enough people doing that without us adding to it.” So he had bought toys for Sarah and the cat in airport shops around the world. They were not much appreciated by either.
Sarah wove her way through the triple-parked cars, taxis, and police on the departure level of Dulles, to the Virgin Atlantic door. She threw on the emergency blinkers and got out of the car to embrace him, while the Dulles policeman yelled, “Move the car, lady.”
“Be safe and be careful, wherever the hell you’re going,” Sarah said as the kiss ended and their breath formed two columns of hot air in the cold night.
“London has been perfectly safe since the Underground bombings in 2005, really…” he tried. She put her finger across his mouth to silence him, then slipped her hand inside his coat pocket. “You heard me, mister,” Sarah said. She smiled warmly at the Dulles cop and got back into the car.
Rusty waved, hoping that she would be looking at him in the rearview mirror. Then he started looking for his badge to get through security. What he found first, in his coat pocket, was a card deck and a note on a yellow Post-it: “You need to practice the Ambitious Card trick for the IAC Charity Show. Have a great trip, boss, Debbie.”
After bypassing the long security line, MacIntyre went to the Virgin Club to await his flight. He sat at the bar and opened up the deck of cards. Somehow, he realized, on trips he felt free of all the tension between him and Sarah. He was already feeling it, his muscles relaxing. As he shuffled the cards Debbie had sneaked into his coat, Rusty looked up at the plasma screen carrying CNN. Secretary of Defense Henry Conrad was giving a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Dallas. He asked the bartender to turn on the sound.
“… dating from Franklin Roosevelt’s meeting with the Saudi royal family aboard the cruiser the USS Quincy. Those who have forced the Sauds from power, for now, are al Qaeda murderers. They plan to spread their jihadist government throughout the region, threatening our allies in Egypt, Bahrain, and elsewhere. But I have a message for them. The United States of America will never permit them to harm our allies and will work for the restoration of the rule of law and order on the Saudi peninsula.”
In Dallas, the crowd roared. In Dulles, Rusty MacIntyre cut the cards, and ordered a Wild Turkey.
4
New York Journal reporter Kate Delmarco took a taxi to the world’s tallest hotel, a building shaped like a giant dhow’s sail on a man-made island a hundred yards off the coast of Dubai. She did not enter the hotel, but instead climbed into a golf cart that took her back over the short causeway to the shore, past the Wild Wadi Water Park, and then down to a dock where electrically powered little dhows departed for the canals of the nearby hotel and shopping complex. Alighting at the modern air-conditioned souk, she followed the signs through the mall to an Italian restaurant.
Although she was based in Dubai, her best source in the region was her friend Brian Douglas, the British diplomat stationed in the British embassy in Bahrain. She knew he was more than the regional energy affairs section chief, which was how he was listed in the embassy directory. But despite a few overnight sailing trips together on his 32-foot Bahrain Beauty, Douglas had never broken cover. He had never admitted to his other job. Last week he had called and suggested to her, somewhat cryptically, that she should meet “another Dubai friend” of his. So that was what she was about to do.
Waiting at the bar was Jassim Nakeel, a scion of one of the families that were building the new city of Dubai, soaring office towers, offshore islands of villas and condos, tourist theme parks. He did not wear traditional Arab clothing but looked instead like a transplant from Malibu or Laguna Beach.
“You thought because my name is Delmarco I would like an Italian restaurant?” she said as he led her to a table outside on the balcony. Kate Delmarco looked as though her family came from southern Italy, with slightly olive-tinted skin and long black hair. Although she would be forty-five later in the year, Delmarco was fit and exuded a Mediterranean allure. She had managed to finagle an open invitation to go riding at the Dubai royal stables anytime she wanted. It had become her Saturday-morning ritual.
“No, actually, I thought you’d like this place because it has a great view of the sound and light show the Burj al Arab hotel does every night,” Nakeel said as he seated Kate facing the giant sail-shaped hotel. “Besides, it has a great wine list.”
“Wine list! Is there anything about Dubai that is still Arab? Wine lists, theme parks, high-rise condos filled with Europeans, you in Armani…” Kate stopped as the seventy stories of the Burj turned purple, stars sparkled up one side of the tower and then down the other, and then the building faded to pink.
“Dubai is the center of the new Arab world, Kate, cutting-edge, business-smart, and cosmopolitan,” Nakeel said, taking the wine list. “For most Europeans, it’s more affordable than the South of France and a lot more fun. Besides, it’s cold there this time of year. The 1999 Barolo, please,” he told the waiter without consulting her. “After what happened in Riyadh, most global companies moved their regional offices to Dubai. It’s safe, secure, modern, and efficient. Besides, there are no taxes. They all love it here.”