FIFTY-THREE
RIYADH, S AUDI ARABIA
Ex-CIA operative Chip Reynolds hauled his bulky, fifty-eight-year-old, six-foot-two frame into the shower and let the hot water pound against his head and shoulders. Though he would have preferred to stay under it all day, that wasn’t what the Arabian American Oil Company, or Aramco for short, was paying him for.
After toweling off, Reynolds opened the door of his villa and found his breakfast and newspapers waiting. He carried the tray inside to his desk and poured a cup of coffee while he waited for his laptop to boot up. Knowing what a tight grip the Saudi monarchy kept on the media, he only glanced at the local papers. The valuable information came from his network of contacts scattered throughout the country. Though the deputy minister for state intelligence, Faruq al-Hafez, copied him on the daily threat assessment (the creation of which had been Reynolds’s idea in the first place), Chip knew that what he was getting was nothing more than a watered down version. Faruq had never liked him, and Chip knew why.
While still in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency, Reynolds had uncovered a plot by a Lithuanian mobster to bump off one of the lesser princes of the Saudi Royal Family. The spoiled, drugcrazed brat had run afoul of the Mafioso while vacationing in the Baltic, where his sadistic antics had resulted in the death of two young girls-one of whom was a relative of the aforementioned organized crime figure. The assassination plot was actually quite ingenious, but flawed in that it relied on local talent within the Saudi Kingdom to pull it off.
Reynolds’s superiors at Langley had instructed him to coordinate with Saudi intelligence, in particular its deputy minister. Despite Reynolds’s extensive background and expertise in the Middle East, including his fluency in Arabic, Faruq refused to work with him, insisting his people could handle the situation. The man had been wrong, almost dead wrong, and had it not been for Reynolds’s refusal to be sidelined, the prince surely would have been killed.
When Reynolds’s wife died seven years ago of cancer, he decided it was time to retire from the agency. He had given his country a good chunk of his life and wanted what was left of it back. He had watched for years while former colleagues jumped ship for the private sector and cashed in, and he wanted a piece of that action for himself. Saving the young prince’s life, no matter how much Reynolds privately believed that he and most of his debauched ilk within the Royal Family ought to take a dirt nap, had secured him a special preferred status within the house of Saud. The fact that he was ex-CIA, could speak their language, and knew his way around the block better than anybody they had seen in a long time didn’t hurt his standing either.
But while the al-Sauds might have liked what Reynolds brought to their side of the table, their deputy minister for state intelligence had been shown up by the American and never intended to let it happen again. Ergo, no real substantial intel ever flowed in Reynolds’s direction.
Reynolds had diplomatically discussed Faruq’s lack of cooperation with the Saudi Royal Family, and things had gotten better for a while, but they always seemed to recede to their current, frosty state of affairs. That said, Reynolds hadn’t become one of the CIA’s top operatives and wasn’t being paid such a big consulting fee for being lazy or stupid, and so he used his skills to bore as far as he could into all of his host country’s intelligence agencies. Within forty-five minutes every morning, he had a better handle on what was going on both inside and outside of their borders than they did. Truth be told, his picture was probably more accurate than if the Saudi intelligence agencies had been one hundred percent cooperative with him. Reynolds had always joked that he liked his intelligence like he liked his oysters-raw, with nothing added to enhance the flavor. The last thing he wanted was other people clouding his view of the landscape by trying to impress him with their take on things.
Contrary to the picture of peace, prosperity, and stability most of the outside world saw, the house of Saud was circling the drain. A host of socioeconomic problems that ran the gamut from record deficits, high unemployment, and ultra religious conservatism to resentment of the kingdom’s rapid westernization, passionate hate for American troops on Saudi Arabian soil, and the decline in oil revenues as the United States began to open up Iraq’s oil fields all came together to create one of the most dangerous political climates ever in the history of the al-Saud monarchy.
Evident to anyone who cared to take a close enough look was the fact that the Saudi monarchy’s grip on power over the last two decades had been in precipitous decline. The foolish family policy of ignoring domestic problems in the hopes that they would simply go away had been shown time and again to be an ineffective and potentially suicidal approach to governance.
When challenged, though, the house of Saud did what most petty despots did-they struck back, and struck back hard. Under the pretense of national security and Islamic law, severe crackdowns would be initiated whereby dissidents, leaders of opposition groups, and anyone appearing even remotely threatening to the monarchy were imprisoned, tortured, and in many cases put to death.
It was little wonder then that the rulers of Saudi Arabia found it difficult to accurately gauge public opinion. No half-intelligent subject of the kingdom would ever dare answer a scientific survey or telephone poll honestly, so the house of Saud was forced to rely on a loose network of informants throughout all strata of Saudi society. The problem with the kingdom’s informants, though, was that often they reported back only what they thought their handlers wanted to hear. This made for intelligence of varying degrees of quality and reliability, but when analyzed alongside the work product of the only somewhat efficient Saudi intelligence officers, most of whom, including their deputy minister, had their heads so far up their asses you couldn’t even see their shoulders, it was barely enough to keep the monarchy’s finger on the pulse of the kingdom and stay in control of the country.
As an American, Reynolds had little respect for the brutal way in which the Saudis ran their kingdom, but it was their country. The thing he despised about them the most was that they were the region’s most earnest spin doctors. For example, in an effort to appear more Muslim, King Fahd had given up his royal title of His Majesty for Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest places in the Islamic world. One member of the Royal Family had even come up with some cockamamie scheme to bottle and sell water from a recently discovered spring beneath the holy city of Mecca, which supposedly once slaked the thirst of the prophet Muhammad himself. Reynolds didn’t buy any of it. Though there were some fairly religious members of the Royal Family, they were definitely in the minority. The family’s attempt to appear faithful was an absolute sham. Anyone who had heard stories or had seen first hand the debaucheries of Saudi princes who partied like there was no tomorrow, with absolutely no respect for the tenets of Islam, knew where the ruling family really stood.
To some extent, it was hard to blame them when even their ailing king didn’t set much of an example. On his annual vacation to his coastal estate in Spain, Fahd’s entourage included 350 attendants, fifty black Mercedes, and a 234-foot yacht, in addition to which he had $2,000 in flowers and fifty cakes delivered daily. With every move it made, the monarchy was shooting itself in both feet, but Reynolds couldn’t have cared less. It wasn’t his country. As long as the hefty deposits kept being made to his bank account, he’d keep doing his job. His primary concern, the one he was being paid so many petrodollars to see to, was that Aramco’s oil continued to flow unimpeded-thereby replenishing the coffers of the house of Saud.