Hang on, Pollux, Belknap silently urged. I’m coming to get you.
But the course would not follow a straight line—for reasons Jared Rinehart understood better than anyone.
The shortest distance between two points, Jared had once ventured, is frequently a parabola followed by a ellipse followed by a hyperbola. He meant that in the world of espionage, indirection and obliquity were just as likely to provide a shortcut as blunderbuss directness, and he had been cautioning Belknap when he said so. Not that Belknap had any other choice at the moment.
The dun-colored building could have been a distribution center for industrial components. There was a halfhearted stretch of barbed wire around the property, which seemed mainly for show, a way of discouraging casual visitors. Belknap drove his SUV through the main drive and parked off to one side. Stealth wasn’t possible with a building like this one, and Belknap wasn’t going to attempt it. Such an approach would signal that he had something to hide, that he was in a position of weakness. They were the ones who had something to hide. Belknap would make more progress by being bold and fearless in his approach.
He stepped outside the SUV, instantly enrobed in kilnlike heat, and he hurried to the nearest door before he began to perspire. Not the garage-style hinged door leading to the tarmac drive, but the white enameled steel door to the left of it. The door pushed open, and, as his eyes adjusted from the dazzling white outside to the gloom within, he had the sense that he had stumbled across a small refugee camp.
The space was cavernous, poorly lit, with sleeping bags and thin mattresses scattered pell-mell. A row of open shower stalls was at one end of the space; water dripped from leaky faucets. There were food smells: cartons of cheap local stews. And everywhere there were people—girls, boys, many shockingly young. Some were clustered around pillars, some slumped, dozing, off on their own. They were a strikingly international crew. Some seemed to have arrived from Thailand, Burma, or the Philippines. Some were Arab. A few were from sub-Saharan Africa; others might have been village kids from India. A handful might have been from Eastern Europe.
What he saw did not surprise Belknap, but it nauseated him all the same. Young girls, younger boys, all driven by indigence into sexual slavery. Some must have been sold by their parents; others would have been fortunate even to have living parents.
Coming toward him slowly was a jowly, swarthy man in a white gauzy shirt and denim cutoffs, with a long, curved knife in one belt holster and a radio communicator in another. The man walked with a slight limp. He was nothing more than a watchman, a caretaker. For that was the ugliest part of it: Those who run such establishments did not need guards to keep these boys and girls in captivity; they required no locks, bars, shackles. And Belknap couldn’t have set them free if he wanted to. For these children, the true shackles were forged of poverty. Even if they were left to wander freely through Dubai, they would only be picked up by another such establishment. Physical beauty was their one saleable asset; the rest reflected the cold inexorable logic of the marketplace.
Belknap’s nostrils filled with a harsh chemical scent, overwhelming the human fetor; the drains in the concrete floors indicated that the place was hosed down regularly, and doubtless mopped with some industrial-grade disinfectant. Factory-farmed swine were kept in better conditions.
The man with the knife growled at him ineffectually, saying something in Arabic. When Belknap did not respond, he came closer and said in heavily accented English, “You are in the wrong place. You must go now.” It was clear that he considered the radio communicator on his belt—his ability to summon backup—his real weapon.
Belknap ignored the fat man and continued to look around. This was a Hades of sorts, an underworld that few of its inhabitants would ever leave, at least not with their souls intact. Of the dozens of people in the building, few were over twenty, he reckoned. A fair number were probably no older than twelve or thirteen. Every one a story of an everyday tragedy.
Amid the heat, he felt cold. His had been a lifetime of heroics, of derring-do with guns and spycraft, yet what did it amount to in the face of such horrors? In the face of the grinding poverty that drove children into a place like this, and made them feel grateful that they at least were able to fill their bellies? For there was no humiliation like want, no degradation like hunger.
“I say, you must go!” the jowly man repeated, his breath garlicky and stale.
There was a noise from a group of somber-looking teenage girls, and the man turned around and scowled at them. He brandished his knife and shouted a string of multilingual curse words. Some rule of local etiquette had been breached. Then he turned back to Belknap, the knife now in his hand.
“Tell me about the Italian girl,” Belknap demanded.
The fat man looked blank. The girls were livestock to him; he did not distinguish among them save by the grossest characteristics. “You go!” he bellowed, coming closer to Belknap.
The man reached for his radio handset and Belknap grabbed it from his chubby hand. Then, with a swift blow, he drove rigid fingers into the man’s soft throat. As the man sank to the ground, helplessly clawing at his rapidly swelling larynx, Belknap kicked him hard in the face with a heavy shoe. The fat man sprawled motionless on the floor, breathing in fast puffs but unconscious.
There were dozens of eyes on Belknap when he turned around, neither approving nor condemning, but simply interested to see what he would do next. There was something sheeplike about them, and he felt a surge of contempt.
He turned toward a girl who looked to be around Lucia Zingaretti’s age. “You know an Italian girl? A girl named Lucia?”
The girl dazedly shook her head. She neither moved away from him nor met his gaze. She just wanted to get through the day. For someone like her, mere survival was an achievement.
He tried again with another girl, and again; the responses were the same. These were people who had been taught that whatever they did would be futile; the lesson of helplessness was not easily unlearned.
Then Belknap made his way across the main floor until he noticed, through a slatlike window, a small cinderblock storage facility at the rear of the property. He barged through a back door and made his way across yards of sand and scrub until he reached the small cinderblock shelter. He noticed that the main door was designed to take a heavy security padlock, and that such a padlock had been used recently. The paint was scratched in spots, exposing glinting steel. No evidence of corrosion yet, which meant that the scratches were recent.
He pushed through the steel door and, pulling a penlight from his pocket, he investigated the gloom. The space was basically a shack, the sort of structure that was normally made of sheet metal, not heavy cement blocks. There was dust on the concrete floor, but there were also areas where the dust had been wiped away—further evidence of recent activity.
It took him nearly five minutes before he saw it.
A small inscription, easy to miss, about a foot above the floor on the rear wall. He knelt down and peered, holding his penlight very close to it.
Two words, in small painted letters: POLLUX ADERAT.
It was Latin for “Pollux was here.” Belknap could hardly breathe. He recognized the neat, almost crabbed handwriting—unmistakably Jared’s—and he recognized something else as well.
The words had been written in blood.
Jared Rinehart had been there—but when? And, most crucially, where was he now? Belknap raced back into the main building and started demanding of everyone he came across whether they had seen a man in the past few days, a tall American. All he aroused was mute indifference.
As he made his way back to his SUV, hair now sweat-pasted on his forehead, he heard a boy’s voice. “Mister, mister,” the child was calling out.
He turned around to see a kohl-eyed Arab, who was maybe in his early teens, maybe not yet. The urchin’s voice had not yet broken. A specialty taste.
Belknap gazed at him, mute, expectant.
“You ask about your friend?” the boy asked.
“Yes?”
The boy was silent for a moment, staring up at the American as if to scrutinize his character, his soul, the possible danger he presented and the possible help he could offer. “A trade?”
“Go on.”
“You take me back to my home village in Oman.”
“And?”
“I know where they took your friend.”
That was the boy’s trade, then: information for transport. Yet could he be trusted? If he were desperate to be returned to his Omani village, a crafty boy could concoct a story on the spur of the moment.
“Where?”
The boy shook his head, his fine black hair gleaming in the sun. The makeup they had applied around his eyes was doubtless a regional specialty. But his delicate face was resolute, his large eyes were solemn. The terms of the exchange had to be honored first.
“Talk to me,” Belknap said. “Give me a reason to believe you.”
The boy—perhaps four foot six in height—tapped on the hood of the SUV. “You have air conditioning?”
Belknap gave him a hard stare. Then he got into the driver’s seat and opened the door opposite; the Arab boy climbed in. He started up the engine, and within moments cool air bathed them both.
The boy smiled, a dazzling white smile, as he pressed his face to the nearest AC vent. “Habib Almani—do you know this princeling?”
“Princeling?”
“He calls himself ‘princeling.’ An Omani gentleman. Very rich. Big man.” The boy gestured with his hands to describe someone of considerable girth. “Owns much property in Dubai. Owns stores. Owns trucking firm. Owns dhow business.” He pointed toward the dun-colored building. “Owns this, too. Nobody knows.”
“But you know.”
“My father owe him money. Almani is also a Beit, a clan chieftain.”
“So your father gave you to him.”
The boy shook his head vehemently. “My father never do that! He refused! So Habib Almani’s men take his two children. Zip, zip, in the darkness, he steals us away. What can my father do? He does not know where we are.”
“And my American friend?”
“I see him brought here blindfolded, in Habib Almani van. They use his trucking service. They use his building for the rent boys and girls. Habib Almani does all this for them. Then they take the tall American away. The princeling knows, because he is the one in charge!”
“How do you figure that?”
“My name is Baz. Baz means falcon. Falcons see much.” He gave Belknap an intent look. “You are an American, so this is hard for you to understand. But poor is not the same as stupid.”
“Point taken.”
The drive that the boy described would involve traveling through the desert, and on some poorly trafficked terrain. If Baz were lying to him…but the boy seemed to understand the risks as well as the rewards. Too, there were details in his story that made a sickening kind of sense.
“Take me with you,” the boy implored, “and I’ll take you to him.”
At the Portland headquarters of the SoftSystems Corporation—a sprawling campus of redbrick and energy-efficient glass that the New York Times architecture critic had called “Portland postmodern”—there was never any cause to complain about the coffee. William Culp, its founder and CEO, liked to crack that a programmer was a machine for turning coffee into code. In the great Silicon Valley tradition, sophisticated coffee machines were available throughout the offices, and the brew was an upscale blend of specialty beans. Still, William Culp’s own brew was, well, first among equals. Kona or Tanzanian Peaberry was all very well, but he’d developed a fondness for Kopi Luwak beans. They cost six hundred dollars a pound, and only five hundred pounds were harvested every year, all from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Most of it was snapped up by Japanese gourmets. But Culp made sure he had a regular supply.
What was special about Kopi Luwak? Culp relished the explanation. The beans had actually been eaten by a tree-dwelling marsupial that always went for the ripest coffee cherries, and then excreted them whole, still layered in their mucilage but subtly altered by the animal’s digestive enzymes. The locals gathered the marsupial’s droppings and carefully washed them to retrieve the beans, as if panning for gold. The result was the most complex java in the world—heavy-bodied, rich, musty, with caramel flavors and a hint of something he could only describe as “jungly.”
He was enjoying a freshly brewed cup right now.
Bob Donnelly, his chief operating officer, a man with the broad shoulders of the college fullback he had once been, regarded him with amusement. He wore an open-collared pale blue shirt with the shirtsleeves rolled up. SoftSystems generally adhered to a dress-down ethic—if you saw anyone wearing a tie, it was invariably a visitor—and preserved the conventions of Silicon Valley informality. “Another cup of your crappuccino?” he asked wryly. They were sitting together in a small conference room adjacent to Culp’s private office.
“You’ll never know what you’re missing.” Culp smiled. “Which is fine with me.”
Donnelly wasn’t one of the “OGs,” as they liked to call themselves—he wasn’t one of the six boys from Marin County who, decades back, had monkeyed around with old Atari consoles in their garages and had come up with the prototype of the computer mouse. What was patentable wasn’t the mouse itself—the “hardware peripheral”—but the software that made it work, that integrated it with a visual interface. In the years that followed, nearly every software package on the shelf licensed intellectual property that Culp and company had patented. SoftSystems got big. Culp had given his parents a chunk of stock, and they sold it for a hefty sum once the price broke a hundred. Culp privately scorned their fearful attitude toward financial risk. The stock would triple in just another five years, making Culp a billionaire before his thirty-fifth birthday.
But over the years, most of the other fellows from the old days peeled off to do their own thing. Some started their own companies; others spent their days with costly toys—speedy yachts and jets. Culp stayed the course. He replaced the garage boys with MBA types, and, apart from a nasty and narrowly dodged antitrust trial, SoftSystems had gone from strength to strength ever since.
“So what do you say we acquire Prismatic?” Donnelly asked.
“You think we can make it profitable?”
Donnelly ran a hand through his short reddish hair, as thick as boar bristles, and shook his head. “Strictly as a B&B.” A B&B was their shorthand for “buy and bury.” When SoftSystems analysts stumbled on a company with a technology that might pose a competitive threat, it would sometimes acquire the company, and thus its patents, simply to take them off the market. Retooling SoftSystems programs with the superior algorithm could be a costly proposition. “Good enough” was, often, all that the market really required.
“You work up the financials?” Culp took another sip of the rich brew. He looked like an aging schoolboy, with wire-rim glasses that had scarcely changed since college, a thatch of sandy brown hair that still hadn’t receded a millimeter. Close up, you could see the lines around his eyes, the way it took a while for his forehead to uncrinkle when he had raised his eyebrows. The truth was that he had never really been boyish when he was a boy. There had been something middle-aged about him even when he was an adolescent, so it was maybe only fitting that there was something adolescent about him now that he was middle-aged. It amused him sometimes when people pretending to be his intimates referred to him as “Bill” the people who really knew him knew that he had always been “William.” Not Bill, not Will, not Billy, not Willy. William. Two syllables separated by a hint of a third.
“Got ’em here,” said Donnelly. He had boiled them down to a single page. Culp liked his executive summaries to be truly summary.
“I like what I’m seeing,” Culp said. “An equity swap—think they’ll go for that?”
“We can do it either way. We’ll make a richer offer in equity, but if they want cash, no problemo. And I know their angel investors—Billy Hoffman, Lou Parini, guys like that. They’ll insist on a quick payday. Force the managers’ hand if they have to.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Millie Lodge, one of Culp’s personal assistants. “Urgent call.”
“I’ll take it here,” Culp said absently.
Millie silently shook her head—a small gesture, but one that caused Culp’s stomach to clutch.
He took his coffee with him to his office, and picked up the phone: “Culp here,” he said, suddenly hoarse.
The voice that greeted him was sickeningly familiar. A creepy, electronically altered sound. It was whispery and raspy and harsh and heartless and eerily insistent. The way it would sound if an insect could speak, he sometimes thought.
“Time to tithe,” the voice said.
Culp broke out in a cold sweat. From experience, he knew that the call would have been placed via Web-based telephony and was impossible to trace. It could have emanated from the floor below him or from some hovel in Siberia; there was simply no way to know.
“More money for those goddamn savages?” Culp asked between gritted teeth.
“We’re looking at a document composed on October seventeen, another series of e-mail exchanges from that afternoon, another internal document from October twenty-one, and a confidential communication sent to Rexell Computing, Ltd. Shall we forward copies to the S.E.C.? In addition, we have documentation relating to the formation of an offshore business entity called WLD Enterprises, and—”
“Stop,” Culp croaked. “You had me at hello.” Any hint of rebellion or defiance had been crushed. Each one of those documents by itself could spur the S.E.C. and the Justice Department into a fresh investigation of antitrust activities, and a legal morass that could cost billions to deal with and dent the company’s market capitalization for a long time. There was even the looming danger that the company would be broken up, spun off into parts—which would be the greatest disaster, because the parts were decidedly less valuable than the whole. Nobody needed to belabor the consequences. They were crystal-clear.
That was why he had already been forced to give away vast sums, through the William and Jennifer Culp Charitable Trust, toward the treatment of tropical diseases. If the whole goddamn continent of Africa just sank beneath the waves one day, Culp wouldn’t give a good goddamn. But he was running an empire here: He had responsibilities to it. And his enemies were formidable and intelligent and unsympathetic. Culp had spent a shitload of cash trying to track them down, and with nothing to show for it save a few denial-of-service attacks on the corporate Web sites.
People thought he was the master of his domain. Nonsense. He was a goddamn victim. What did he really control, after all? He glanced through the glass at his COO. Donnelly had a whitehead on the side of his nose, a small pustule, and Culp felt a sudden urge to pop it, or poke it with a needle. A twisted grin appeared on his face. Imagine what would happen if I did that. He caught Millie Lodge’s eyes; Millie Lodge who knew so many of his secrets and was every inch a loyalist, he had no doubt. But that goddamn reeking perfume she always wore. He’d meant to say something to her about it, but somehow it never seemed appropriate—he could never figure out a sufficiently offhand way to bring it up, without devastating her, and now, all these years later, it would be just too goddamn awkward to broach the subject. So there! William Culp, a prisoner of her Jean Tatou cologne or whatever the hell it was.
But maybe—maybe Millie herself was somehow behind the shakedown! He looked at her again, tried to size her up as a potential conspirator. It didn’t make sense, somehow; she just wasn’t that crafty. He continued to steam, silently. Here I sit, William Culp, No. 3 on the Forbes Four Hundred, and these bastards have my goddamn sack in their fist! Where’s the justice in that?
“The European Commission would look askance at your proposed acquisition of Logiciel Lilles,” the voice from hell prompted, “if it was made aware of your draft marketing scheme for—”
“Just tell me what you want from me, for the love of God,” Culp said with bitter resignation. It was the snarling of a defeated animal. “Just tell me!” He took another sip of his cooling brew and made a face. The flavor was actively unpleasant. Who was he kidding, anyway? It tasted like shit.
Oman
The horizon line was serrated with crags and swales and the occasional stunted acacia tree. Half-shrouded in the distance, to the north, was the irregular crest of the distant Hajar Mountains. The one-lane road was often powdered over with the reddish sand, so that it blended into the surrounding desert. Finally, the road lurched through a rocky pass and into a green arroyo. There were date palms along the ravine, desert oleander, and scrubby grasses.
For intervals, he allowed himself to be dazed by the beauty of the landscape, his mind emptying out into the barren majesty of his surroundings. Then thoughts of Jared Rinehart began to intrude.
He was failing a man—he could not shake the feeling—who had never failed him. A man who had not only saved his life on more than one occasion, but who had stepped in on occasion to keep him from harm’s way. He remembered the time when Jared had warned him that a woman he had been getting close to—a Bulgarian émigrée who worked at Walter Reed—was a suspected mole, the subject of a clandestine FBI probe. The dossier Rinehart showed him had been devastating to Belknap. Yet how much more devastating would it have been if Belknap hadn’t learned the truth? The FBI generally guarded its domestic investigations from the other agencies; Belknap’s own career could have been destroyed, and perhaps, given his carelessness, it should have been. But Rinehart would not hear of it. Through every kind of travail, he always kept an eye out for Belknap, as much a guardian angel as a friend, Belknap sometimes thought. When a close friend of Belknap’s—a friend from childhood—died in a car accident, Rinehart had traveled all the way to Vermont to attend the funeral, simply to keep Belknap company, and make it clear he was not alone, that when he grieved Rinehart grieved as well. When a girlfriend of Belknap’s was killed during an operation in Belfast, Rinehart had insisted that he be the one to break the terrible news to him. He remembered how he struggled not to fall apart, how he struggled not to weep, until he looked up and saw that Rinehart’s own eyes were moist.
Thank God I still have you, Belknap had told him. Because you’re all I’ve got.
And now? What did Belknap have?
He was failing the one true friend he had. Failing, yes, the one man who had never failed him.
The SUV juddered as he drove over a crested ridge of fissured road, and his gaze drifted away from the crenulated mountains in the distance, the shades of ochre and yellow in the earth and stones. He had filled the tank two hours earlier, and now he gave the gas gauge an occasional glance. Up ahead, a cluster of mud-brick houses was sheltered by a cliff. A few birds circled overhead.
“Falcons!” Baz said, pointing.
“Like you, Baz,” Belknap said, to show that he understood. The boy had been chatty at the onset of the journey, and then subdued, and Belknap wanted to be sure that he would hold together if there were troubles ahead. As soon as they were out of Dubai, he had peered at himself in the mirror on the reverse side of the sunshade, and started rubbing at the kohl around his eyelids. Belknap gave him his handkerchief for the job. Now that it was almost gone, it was easier to see who the boy had been before being dragooned into the services of Habib Almani. Baz told him that his father wanted him to be an imam, that his grandfather had taught him to memorize scripture from a young age. The grandfather, once a trader from the coast, was also the one who had taught him English. Baz was fascinated by the radio in the dashboard, and during the first half hour of the trip he had avidly, marvelingly, switched between stations.
At the base of an escarpment, across from the wasp-nest village of mud houses on a wadi, was a large tentlike structure. The fabric—a cream-colored silk, it seemed—rustled in the faint breeze.
“This the place?”
“Yes,” Baz confirmed. There was tension in his voice.
The Omani princeling would be inside, holding court. Outside was a loose line of six or seven men in turbans and dishdashas, some sun-wizened, all lean, nearly to the point of emaciation. Baz had said that Almani would be on one of his regular visits to his region of tribal origin, and plainly he was—doling out gifts to the local chiefs and village elders. That was how the essentially feudal social order worked in places like Oman.
Belknap pushed his way into the tent and found himself walking on silk carpets. An attendant looked dismayed and heckled him in Arabic, gesturing excitedly. Belknap realized that the man was upset because he had not removed his shoes. The least of your problems, he thought.
Baz told him that the princeling was a man of considerable girth, but that was an understatement. He was corpulent. He was perhaps five-eight and must have weighed three hundred pounds. All of which made it easy to recognize him. He sat on a woven-cane seat, as if it were a throne. On a rug beside him was a heap of gaudy trinkets, obviously for bestowing upon the visiting elders. One of them, clad in dusty muslin, was walking away on bare feet as he clutched some bauble of gold foil.
“You’re Habib Almani,” Belknap said.
“My dear sir,” the man replied with an elegant sweep of a hand, his eyes widening. On his fingers were jewel-encrusted rings that glinted and flashed. A diamond-studded khandjar, a small L-shaped ceremonial scabbard, drooped from a sash around his waist. He spoke in the plummiest of British accents; Belknap could have been at the Athenaeum Club. “We come across so few Americans here. You must excuse the humble and temporary nature of my establishment. This is not exactly Muscat! And to what do we owe the pleasure of your company?” His small hard eyes belied his elaborate courtesies.
“I’m here for information.”
“You come to this humble Omani princeling for information? Driving directions, perhaps? How to get to the nearest…discotheque?” He started to guffaw, the very image of debauchery, and stole a leering side glance at a girl, perhaps thirteen, who silently huddled in the corner. “You’d enjoy a night at a discotheque, wouldn’t you, my little rosebud,” he cooed to her. Then he turned to Belknap again. “I’m sure you know about Arab hospitality. Everywhere we are renowned for it. I must ply you with goodies, and take pleasure in doing so. But, well, you see, I am curious.”
“I’m with the U.S. Department of State. A researcher, shall we say.”
A small twitch was visible on the man’s porridgy face. “A spy. Lovely. The Great Game. Just like in the old days of the Ottomans.” The self-described princeling took another sip from a silver teacup. Belknap was close enough to smell liquor—Scotch, in fact. Probably the expensive stuff. The princeling was plainly the worse for drink. He did not slur his words; he enunciated them with the emphatic precision of someone determined not to, which was no less of a giveaway.
“An Italian girl came into your possession recently,” Belknap said.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“She was employed by an escort service you own.”
“By the beard of the Prophet, you shock me to the core, you cut me to the quick, you rock me to the foundations, you shiver my timbers and—”
“Don’t try my patience,” Belknap said in a low, menacing voice.
“Oh, hell, if you’re looking for an Italian putta, you’ve really gone out of your way. I can offer you other satisfactions. I can and I will. What’s your speed? Name your poison? You want—yes, my little rosebud?” He gestured toward the cowering girl. “You can have her. Not for keeps. But you can take her for a test drive, shall we say—a test drive to paradise!”
“You disgust me,” Belknap said.
“A thousand apologies. I understand. You steer the other course. You drive on the other side. No need to explain. You see, I went to Eton, where buggery was practically a school sport, like the Wall Game. You know about the Wall Game? Only played at Eton. You must go to the St. Andrew’s Day game one year, watch the Collegers and the Oppidans have it out. Rather like football. Rather. But rather different, too. I believe the last time a goal was scored on a St. Andrew’s Day match was in 1909, if you can believe it.”
“Believe this, you bastard,” Belknap growled in a voice only loud enough for Almani to hear. “I’ll rip your arm out of its socket if you don’t come clean.”
“Ah, a taste for rough trade!” The voice was jeering beneath its obliging tone. “We can accommodate that as well. Whatever lights your torch! Whatever charges your battery! Now, if you’ll just turn around and head to Dubai, I’ll be able to provide you exactly—”
“With one phone call I can scramble a couple of helicopters that will take you and your goddamn entourage to a very dark place from which you may never emerge. With one phone call I can—”
“Oh, poo!” The bejeweled Omani downed the contents of his goblet and exhaled boozily. “You know something? You’re the sort of person Dr. Spooner would have called a shining wit.”
“I warned you.”
“The wop wench—what about her? It was a favor, that was all. Not my cuppa, I’ll tell you that for nothing. Someone wanted to get her out of the way.”
“Someone connected with the Khalil Ansari group.”
Suddenly the princeling looked uncomfortable. With a sloppy sweep of his arm and a few words of guttural Omani Arabic, he ordered the others away, including two glowering burly men who had stood to either side of him and whose khandjars looked more than merely ornamental. Only the silent, cowering girl remained.
“Loose lips sink ships!” Almani scowled.
“Who?” Belknap pressed. “Tell me who.”
“Khalil Ansari’s dead,” the man said sullenly. Wariness had entered his voice; a man like him did not dismiss his guards cavalierly. He must have placed great weight on the risk of untoward revelation.
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Not that it’ll make a goddamn bit of difference now, will it?” the drunken Omani went on. “He wasn’t really in control of the business anyway, not toward the end. New management. New maestro.” He pretended to be an orchestra conductor. “Tum-tee-tum, tum-tumity-tumity-tum,” he burbled, a snatch of some tune Belknap didn’t recognize. “Anyway, it wasn’t like I had any choice. You CIA types never understand that. You’re always picking on us pawns and leaving the kings, queens, bishops, and rooks to their own devices!” Abruptly, he had turned maudlin and self-pitying. “What did I ever do to you?”
Belknap took a menacing step closer. Almani, he inferred, had been on the CIA payroll at one time or another. It affected the way he dealt with the American: made him desperate to buy him off, lest evidence of his past associates compromise his standing with his current associates. In the Gulf, it was not an uncommon situation among middlemen like this glorified princeling.
“It wasn’t just the Italian girl,” Belknap said. “Tell me about the tall American. Tell me about Jared Rinehart.”
Habib Almani’s eyes widened, his cheeks puffed out as if he was about to be sick. Finally he blurted, “I had no bloody choice, did I? There are some people and some powers to whom you just can’t say, ‘Sod off!’ I had no bloody choice.”
Belknap grabbed hold of the man’s pudgy soft hand and began to squeeze hard, then harder. Pain was visible in the princeling’s contorted face.
“Where is he?” Belknap asked. Then he put his face inches from the Omani’s and bellowed the question: “Where is he?”
“You’re too late, aren’t you?” Almani sneered. “He’s not here. Not in the Emirates at all. Not any longer. He had been in Dubai, yes. They wanted to put him in my safekeeping and all that. But next thing you know, they put the long fellow on a private bird, you see. Your friend has flown away.”
“Where, goddammit?”
“Somewhere in Europe, I’d guess. But you know how it is with private jets. They file flight plans—but then they don’t always stick to them, do they?”
“I said where?” Belknap lashed out with an open hand and struck the Omani across the face.
The man reeled drunkenly, and then settled into a half-crouch, breathing hard. He was obviously debating whether to summon his guards, and then, just as obviously, thought better of it. Almani was debauched and vainglorious; he was not rash. His temper quickly cooled to a wounded dignity.
“I told you,” Almani said, “I don’t know, you son of a dog and a camel. It’s not the sort of thing you ask, now is it?”
“Bullshit.” Belknap placed both his hands around Almani’s fat, pulpy throat. “You don’t seem to know who you’re dealing with. You want to know what I’ll do if you don’t talk? You want a taste? Do you?”
The Omani’s face colored deeply. “You’re out of your league,” he coughed. “You’ve had your twenty questions. But if you think I would cross—”
Belknap punched him hard. Knuckles met cheekbones through an inch of adipose.
“You’re insane if you think I would tangle with Genesis,” Almani said in a low voice, hushed with intensity. A spark of lucidity glinted through his drunkenness and affectation, like a voice at the bottom of a well. “You’re insane if you’re thinking of tangling with Genesis.”
Genesis? Belknap threw out an arm and slammed his elbow into the Omani’s jaw.
Blood appeared in a small rivulet from the corner of the man’s mouth, dripping from his thick lips, as if someone had tried to draw a lopsided frown on his face. “You are wasting your energies,” the man gasped. Not his words but the finality on his face made Belknap stop. The finality, and the fear.
“Genesis?”
Breathing heavily, Almani managed a twisted smile despite the pain, the blows. “He’s everywhere, don’t you know?”
“He?”
“He. She. It. They. The hell of it is, nobody knows for sure, except for a few unfortunates who have reason to wish to Allah that they didn’t. I say ‘he’ for convenience. He has his fingers everywhere. His confederates always among us. Perhaps even you.”
“Oh, you think?” Belknap grunted.
“No, not really. You’re too bloody obvious in your moves. You’re a two-plus-two-equals-four guy. Not a connoisseur of complexity. No match for Genesis. But then who is?”
“I don’t understand you. You live in holy terror of a person you’ve never seen?”
“As have men throughout the millennia. But seldom for such good reason. The princeling will take pity on you. The princeling will tell you the facts of life, you silly ignorant naïf. Call it Arab hospitality. Or don’t. But never say I didn’t warn you. There are those who say that Genesis is a woman, the daughter of a German industrialist who fell in with the radicals of the nineteen-seventies—Baader-Meinhof, the June Two Movement—and then out the other side. Some say Genesis has a public profile as an orchestra conductor, a maestro, who travels around the world from one engagement to another, while stealthily maintaining discipline among those who have no idea of his true identity. Some say he’s a giant of a man, others, that he’s a midget, literally. I’ve heard that she’s a ravishing beauty, and I’ve also heard she’s a wizened crone. I’ve heard it said that Genesis was born in Corsica, Malta, Mauritius, and various points east, west, north, and south. Some say he’s descended from a family of samurai, and spends more of his time in a Zen monastery. Some say his father was a poor ranch hand in South Africa, and that he was adopted by a rich Boer family with mining interests, which he then inherited. Some say he’s Chinese, a onetime intimate of Deng. Some say he is a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, but nobody knows which. Yet others—”
“Stop it, you’re gibbering.”
“My point is merely that there are many stories and no validated truths. He rules over a shadowland that encompasses the globe, yet he—or she, or it—remains forever out of sight, like the dark side of the moon.”
“What the hell…?”
“You’re hopelessly over your head. I suppose we both are. But at least I know it.”
“I’d just as soon kill you as spit on you, you do know that, don’t you?” Belknap snarled.
“Sure, you could kill me. But Genesis could do worse. Inconceivably worse. Oh, the stories I’ve heard. The legend of Genesis is not inconsiderable.”
“Campfire tales!” Belknap scoffed. “Rumors based on superstition—is that what you’re talking about?”
“Stories that are passed along on the lower frequencies. Rumors, if you like—but rumors I have good reason to credit. Campfire tales, you say? Genesis knows a thing or two about fire. Let me tell you about another princeling—a member of the Saudi royal family in fact. It was said that an agent of Genesis passed along a request to him. A request from Genesis. The foolish man had the temerity to refuse. He thought he could defy Genesis.” Habib Almani swallowed hard. His forehead gleamed in the sunlight filtered through the layers of silk and muslin. His soft round hands clutched each other. “He disappeared for a week. Then they found his body in a Dumpster in Riyadh.”
“Dead.”
“Worse,” Almani said. “Alive. He remains alive in a Riyadh hospital to this day, I’m told. And in precisely the same condition as when he was discovered.” The Omani leaned forward with a look of horrified intensity. “You see, when they found him, he was paralyzed from the neck down—the cervical spinal cord had been carefully severed. His tongue had been surgically cut out. And then a state of permanent blepharospasm was induced, apparently through the injection of a neurotoxin. Do you follow? His very eyelids were paralyzed, permanently clenched shut. So he cannot even communicate by blinking!”
“The man was otherwise intact?”
“Which is the really horrifying thing. He lives on, perfectly conscious, utterly immobile, locked into his midnight existence, his own body the ultimate crypt…as a warning to the rest of us.”
“Jesus Christ,” Belknap breathed.
“Allahu Akbar,” the Omani echoed.
Belknap narrowed his eyes. “If you’ve never seen him, how do you know I’m not Genesis?”
A measuring gaze. “Could you do such a thing?”
The look on Belknap’s face was answer enough.
“And then there was a famously handsome Kuwaiti. Heir to a petrol fortune. A great ladies’ man. So beautiful, it was said, that when he entered a room people would fall silent. Then one day he defied the will of Genesis. When they found him—still alive—his entire face had been flayed. Do you understand? The very skin from his face was—”
“Enough!” the American barked, cutting him off. “Goddammit, I’ve heard enough. Are you telling me that Pollux is in the clutches of this Genesis?”
Habib Almani shrugged elaborately. “Are we not all in his clutches?” Then he lowered his face and cradled it in his hands, retreating into a fugue of fear. A place beyond reach.
“Goddammit, you’ll answer my questions or I’ll slice your throat open, rip your balls off, and shove them down your gullet. Nothing fancy, but I find it usually does the trick.” He took a folding blade from his pocket and held it at the man’s throat.
Almani just stared off, spent. “I have no more answers,” he said miserably. “About Pollux, about Genesis? I have told you all I know.”
Belknap searched the man’s face. He was, Belknap could tell, speaking the truth. The operative would learn no more from him.
The boy was waiting for him in front of the SUV when Belknap emerged, looking solemn. Dust from the desert breeze was already beginning to dull Baz’s lustrous black hair.
“Get in,” Belknap grunted.
“There is one more thing you must do,” the boy told him.
Belknap just looked at him, suddenly conscious again of the baking heat, rising in waves from the earth itself.
“In the tent, you saw a girl, thirteen years old, kept by the princeling?”
Belknap nodded. “An Arab girl.”
“You must go back and get her,” Baz instructed. He clasped himself with his slender arms, a pose of resolve. “You must take her with us.” He took a deep breath and looked up at the American. For the first time, his eyes were moist. “She’s my sister.”