Ahmed sensed there was guilt in Abdullah about this past. His tone was the one he had used when explaining to their father that he had dented the car. Ahmed tried to shift the conversation from his brother’s role to his own current interest, the Iranians. “And you met Qods people in bin Laden’s camps?”
“No, no. They were never visible. If you were good at something special and they trusted you, Khalid would send you to Iran for advanced training with Qods or with Mugniyah’s Hezbollah people. Dr. Zawahiri had an office in Tehran and went there a lot, from the days when he ran Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Many of the brothers came to the Afghan camps by flying to Tehran, where the Qods people got them through immigration and sent them on their way by bus to the border,” Abdullah recalled. “But the fact that Qods was helping al Qaeda with money and training was never to be spoken about, because even the President of Iran did not know. And, of course, the Americans did not.”
Ahmed shook his head in amazement. The Revolutionary Guards’ Qods Force really was a service within a service, reporting only to the big ayatollah, the Iranian supreme leader. “What happened, Abdullah, between you and al Qaeda? Why did you break with them and start your own movement inside our country?”
Abdullah shrugged, as if to say that the answer to that question was well known, or should be obvious. “After 9/11, I broke off from bin Laden. I thought they had gone too far, killing innocent people. Then, after the Americans invaded Iraq, I went to Iraq and worked with that crazy man Zarqawi for a short time. Why? For the same reason our uncle fought in Afghanistan. For the same reason I opposed the al Sauds. To get the foreign troops out. I participated, I learned, and then I led so that we could be our own nation, a great nation, not an American military base, not one family’s money machine.”
Ahmed was so proud of his brother, who had seen the excesses and mistakes of the others and forged his own movement to free his homeland. There was also something of a parallel with al Qaeda in what Abdullah had done, because Abdullah had done the hard work of operations and let theoreticians like Zubair bin Tayer be the public face of the movement. “And you succeeded,” Ahmed added.
“Yes, but right now we are weak. The Sauds took our money.” Abdullah returned to one of his current themes, financing. “The Americans have frozen most of it, probably so they can claim it for themselves. But with what they have, the Sauds are buying trouble for us. They want to come back and rule again, and kill me and all the council. I don’t know how much time I have before they do that. Every day I get reports.” Ahmed looked up and their eyes met. Abdullah pointed with his head toward one of the bodyguards.
Abdullah continued, “I accept many things in the Shura that I do not personally agree with, things I do not think will be good for the future of our people. I accept them for now because we are weak and cannot have internal divisions that our enemies, what you call your scorpions, will exploit.”
Ahmed thought for a moment and then replied, humbly, “I know the only right I have to speak on these issues is that our father’s blood flows in both of us. I have not earned a say, as you have.
“But I do love this land and I do love you and I do not want to see your efforts go to waste. If you do not stop your enemies on the council now, they will shape Islamyah in a mold that will harden fast. Then they will come after you, because you are not part of what they want to build. And what they want to build will weaken Islamyah and attract my scorpions in droves, especially if they try to get the nuclears.” Ahmed reached across the table and squeezed his brother’s forearm. “If you think you are going to get killed, die for something you believe in, not for what they believe in.”
Abdullah put his right hand gently on top of the vise grip that Ahmed had placed on his left forearm. “So is that your prescription, Doctor, that I should get killed?”
“No, my care is seldom that lethal to my patients.” Ahmed smiled. “My prescription is early prevention. The new army would follow you, and you already run all of the police. Use that power while you have it. Use it for the good of our people. They have not yet been fully liberated. If the people are with you, really with you, they will keep the scorpions away.”
“Inshallah,” Abdullah said as he embraced his brother. The two men walked back into the Golden Tulip, holding hands. The bodyguards went with them, in front and behind. On the table in the patio, they left the remnants of the mezza and the hammour. Abdullah had placed the blue UN report inside his robe.
“Come upstairs with me and meet my team that has been spending all day looking at the Aramco books. Tell them some of your theories.” Abdullah guided them toward the elevator. Off the main dining area of the rooftop restaurant was a private room with a floor covered in carpets and pillows. An incense burner in the corner let off a sweet smell. When Abdullah entered the room, the men who had been sitting in a circle on the floor smoking water pipes all rose to their feet.
Abdullah walked the circle formed by his men, shaking hands and kissing cheeks, introducing them one by one to his brother, the doctor-spy. “So you have examined the security of our oil company and you have examined its books,” he said, seating himself on the floor amid a pile of pillows. “What have you found? Did the Sauds suck all the oil out and take it with them to California?” A servant brought Abdullah a fresh water pipe and helped him light it.
“No, Sheik, even the Sauds could not steal it all,” Muhammad bin Hassan replied, evoking the laughter of the men. He had been a partner in a major accounting and consulting firm in London, and had returned after the revolution at the request of the man with whom he had played football as a boy in Riyadh, Abdullah bin Rashid. “Our declared reserves are 290 billion barrels. Another 150,000 to 200,000 lie in the fallow fields.”
“I’m sure that’s a lot, ’Hammad, but what does that mean? How does it compare with everyone else?” Abdullah asked as he exhaled the apple-flavored tobacco smoke.
“It means we have over one-third of the world’s remaining oil, another third is elsewhere in the Gulf, and the final third is spread around Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria. But ours is the cheapest to produce. It just comes bubbling up from right below the sand. Russia and America have to spend huge amounts to find it in their countries and raise it from under the ice or on the bottom of the sea. It is their demand and their cost of extraction that has driven the price to ninety euros a barrel. Our oil is also cheap to refine, whereas so much of the rest of the world’s needs costly refinement.
“The current rates of consumption are also in our favor. China and America each import over ten billion barrels a year and climbing. Here is the key: almost every other oil producer has pumped all the cheaply extracted oil and can see the day when they will have pumped it all. At our current rate of production, we have over another hundred years of oil. When everyone else has run out, we will still have plenty for ourselves and plenty to sell.”
There were smiles around the room, except for Ahmed, who looked to his brother for permission to speak. “Ahmed, what do you think of this good news?” Abdullah asked.
“With respect to Muhammad, I am not sure that it is actually good news,” he said tentatively. The smiles froze.
“Let’s not talk of today and tomorrow,” he went on. “Let’s imagine us back in our grandfather’s time. Let’s say he was a camel dealer, which he actually was, Abdullah’s and my grandfather. If there had been a pestilence among the camels elsewhere and they had all died, and he still had his camels in good health, would he not fear that the other tribes would come to steal them?” There were nods around the circle.