Abel had been a sickly child, in and out of hospitals. When he was out, he spent much of his time in bed with barely the strength to read. While the other kids advanced physically, he advanced intellectually. He graduated from university early, at the age of twenty and with dual degrees in math and economics, and was recruited by the Stasi. The employment opportunities in East Germany in the early eighties were not good. That fact combined with the idea of doing some bullying after being picked on for much of his youth appealed to him in a perversely satisfying way.
For the first three years with the Stasi he pushed to get transferred from the analytical side to the operations side, but his delicate appearance always prevented him from reaching his goal. Abel stood five feet ten inches tall, but back then he weighed just 145 pounds. Slowly, he put on weight and spent every moment of his free time working out in hopes that he could pass the physical requirements needed to get out from behind his desk.
He was rewarded in his fourth year by a transfer to operations and began taking part in the systematic kidnappings of Westerners who traveled to East Germany. Abel would help identify targets and sometimes even lure them into traps. His baby face and slight stature meant he could pass for a young teenage boy. Homosexual businessmen who traveled to the east were easy targets for blackmail. Abel would loiter on the appropriate corner, or park, or bar and wait for a man to come along and make a lewd request. He'd give the proper hand signal and the other members would swoop in, throw the man into the back of a van, then dump him in an interrogation room. The man would then be told he could choose between jail and public humiliation, or he could buy his freedom. Abel recalled, all these years later, that all of them but one chose to buy their freedom. That stubborn son of a bitch was eventually taken to an extremely harsh location where after a month of beatings he was strangled to death by a very sadistic and homophobic Stasi officer.
Each kidnapping would usually yield several thousand marks. The Stasi had contacts in almost all of the western banks and they would do their homework before they named the price of freedom. His ultimate catch was a West German noble who brought in $500,000. The man was in their custody for less than twenty-four hours. Abel estimated that his unit alone had brought in over five million dollars in a two-and-a-half-year period.
After that he was promoted to counterintelligence, which gave him reason to travel to West Germany more frequently. He was just getting involved in some serious spy craft when everything fell apart. He'd been warning his superiors for months that the signs were there, but they were too busy shuttling back and forth to Moscow kissing the asses of their KGB bosses. The last thing they wanted to do was tell the autocrats at the KGB that they were losing control of the Soviet Union's westernmost European satellite. Such news was likely to get them marched out back and shot in the head.
Abel had studied the economics of East versus West. He knew the numbers manufactured by the governments in East Germany and Russia to be false. As a general rule, he divided them in half in order to recalibrate for exaggeration and deception. The West, however, was a different matter. The evil capitalists had these things called corporations, and these corporations had a fiduciary responsibility to be honest with their shareholders. An amazing amount of data was public information. Every time Abel ran the numbers he came away with the same conclusion. They were getting their asses handed to them by the West, and they were about to collapse under the weight of their lies and economic inefficiencies. The empirical economic signs were right there for anyone who opened their eyes. The data on its own should have been enough, but Abel saw something else that was equally alarming.
The communist dictators stayed in power by using two tools. The first was intimidation. Through a network of secret police, phone taps, and informants the populace lived under constant fear that if they said anything critical of the government they would be snatched from their beds in the middle of the night and disappear forever. The other tool was not physical in the painful sense, but rather mind-numbing. It was the state-controlled media. The dull thrum of propaganda that George Orwell himself had predicted so eerily in his monumental novel 1984 was churned out day after day on state-run TV and radio and in the newspapers. Abel saw the rise of the information technology age for what it was and knew the German Democratic Republic was about to lose its monopoly on the news and thus on people's thoughts. A full year before the wall came down, unification had become a moot point for the young spy.
More than a decade and a half later, Abel got that same feeling when he visited Saudi Arabia. Change was afoot, and there was no stopping it. It wasn't whether it would happen or not, it was a matter of when. The hugely uneven distribution of wealth itself was forcing the country toward a boiling point. Add to that the supercharged religious component and Abel was willing to bet his life that Saudi Arabia was headed for serious upheaval.
The worldwide economic implications of such an event were staggering. Change for most people was stressful, but for Abel, it presented opportunity. He'd already made millions, but at forty-seven he had grander plans still, and large multinational corporations, international banks, investment houses, commodities firms, and even a few governments were listening to him this time. They were all paying him adequately for his services, but that wasn't enough for a man like Abel. Like a true German he believed one must always strive for efficiency and perfection in order to obtain complete self-realization. He'd built into all of his consulting contracts large bonuses that were contingent on his global predictions coming to pass. Some of those contracts were due to expire in the coming year, and Abel didn't like the idea of being right, but late. The revolution was going to take place. It was inevitable. He might as well profit from it.
Abel stopped in front of Abdullah Telecommunications and stared up at the benign, monolithic six-story building. As someone who grew up in Leipzig, a city famous for its Renaissance architecture, Abel couldn't have been more unimpressed. As much as the former spy tried to embrace the Saudi culture, its architecture was one thing that as far as he was concerned had no redeeming value whatsoever.
After checking with the man behind the large block of stone that fronted for a reception desk, Abel was told politely to wait. No more than thirty seconds later a very anxious man exited an elevator and walked stiffly and quickly across the lobby. The man extended his hand, and in English presented himself as one of Abdullah Telecommunications' senior vice presidents.
Knowing how Arab businesses worked, Abel was unimpressed with the title. A company like this was likely to have dozens if not hundreds of senior vice presidents-almost all of them related somehow to the main man, Saeed Ahmed Abdullah. They all collected sizable checks, maintained generous offices, and with the exception of a handful of Abdullah's most talented relatives, stayed out of the way of the Western consultants who ran the company's day-to-day operations. Abel and his escort took the elevator to the top floor, where Abel was walked through three separate sets of gold-plated doors. He was reverently deposited in a room that oozed Arab masculinity.
The mahogany-paneled walls were covered with the heads of exotic animals. In the center of the room, no more than ten feet away, a spotted leopard was staring him down with his glass eyes. The beast was mounted in a permanent state of agitation, which was conveyed through a snarl that fully exposed the deceased animal's jagged teeth. A large oil painting of a desert landscape hung above the granite mantelpiece of a fireplace that Abel assumed was never used. The entire room was intended to convey virility and strength. That was obvious. How far Abel should read into all of this he was not sure. Some of these Arab men used such decorations as a way to make their position in the pecking order crystal clear, while others did nothing more than pay an overpriced French interior decorator to do what he'd done for some other member of the royal family. They were not big on original thought or content.