Chapter 12: The Stein Way

As meetings go, I’ve had worse. I had no particular reason to doubt John Stein, but you never know what Americans are really up to. The Saudi government is only one of many undemocratic regimes they support to the hilt. They’re also not particularly interested in bringing people to justice. Generally all they need is a set of coordinates, a license plate number or the exact time their target will be driving past a hospital or day care centre. I was fairly sure a couple of terrorist attacks in London weren’t important to them, especially if investigating them meant endangering their precious oil supply. But they seemed to have my number and in this one meeting with John Stein, which went on for half an hour after they’d actually gotten me a biscuit (I can never really tell if Americans have missed my sarcasm or are out-sarcasming me. They got me a Ding Dong. I mean, is that a coincidence?), I felt more supported in my endeavour than during my entire time with MI6. Stein had a couple of good ideas for me to get close to Omar, which he’d discuss with his people. Meanwhile, MI6 had given me a false passport, an impractical car and a handler slash car manufacturer who, as far as I could tell, was at work in a bunker underneath the desert some five hundred miles away. And that was about it.

I suppose if I am to make any headway in this story, I had better start leaving stuff out. I keep these journals mostly for practical reasons, as my memory just isn’t that great, but also to relax. It’s twenty minutes out of every day, spent bashing a stream of consciousness brain dump into a keyboard. Not to brag, but I do type phenomenally fast. Annabelle, my erstwhile secretary, ordered a special, quiet keyboard for me, because my trusty IBM Model M gave her the feeling she was at work in the trenches of Verdun, surrounded by machine gun fire. I was reluctant to let go of it, but even more reluctant to lose this promising woman as my secretary. Within a few weeks I knew I had made the right choice by keeping Annabelle, rather than the keyboard.

I was going to write extensively about the time, just a few hours after my meeting with John Stein, I nearly shot a housekeeper in her face. But I have a bit of a backlog as it is, so you’ll have to make do with this very brief version: I was in the kitchen, listening to music with headphones on while I was preparing potato salad. I was making it just for me, because I had no idea if and when Asim would be coming home and my texts went unanswered. Not having had much time to myself, I made some comfort food. Egyptian potatoes are quite good, as it turns out. I wouldn’t have thought so, but Egypt is very much the breadbasket, if not the actual vegetable garden of the Middle East.
During a break in the music, I heard the sound of furniture moving in a room on the second floor. When I looked outside, Asim’s car was nowhere to be seen. I checked the garage and that’s when an app on my phone told me the sensor for my room had gone off. I contacted K-T, who for the moment was parked at the back of the building, on the other side of the wall. She drove up to the gate and I got my pistol and my gloves from her secured glove box, plus a pair of yellow glasses MI6 recommends for this type of thing. They enhance contrast and depth perception, and they stop debris from firing a gun from ending up in your eye. Never knew that was a problem, but there you go. So I go back into the house and, feeling very much like a little boy acting out his favourite movie, searched the place. I’m not sure why I was so relaxed, but I think it helped I had practised this at the Armstrong compound. Looking back I think I merely expected to find some poor chancer, a recently fired Paki or a young Saudi looking for booze, not a SWAT team or an armed robber. It really is a very, very safe country. Unless we’re counting marital rape as a crime, obviously. But they don’t.

The ground floor was empty, but I heard another noise from upstairs. Long story short: I ended up scaring the shit out of a maid, sent by the palace to clean this place. Two of them, actually, but the second one only appeared when the first one was crying and screaming her bloody head off while I tried to calm her down. I had no idea the palace actually sent cleaners here, although I might have guessed that it wasn’t Asim who had kept the place clean and tidy. He had, in his own way, told me about this when he had texted me ‘Clean house tomorrow!’ but I just thought it was an order and when I looked for something to do I couldn’t really find anything that seemed urgent.

Offers of cups of tea and some British charm helped to calm them down, but I still had to talk these two women, one from Malaysia and the other from Sudan, out of calling their supervisor to report me. One hundred US dollars each, or the equivalent in Saudi riyal, did the trick. Then I made them tea and scones, which I can do in twenty-five minutes because the dough doesn’t need to rest, as they went about their business mopping floors and cleaning bathrooms. They were both from countries that are a tiny bit more relaxed about men and women talking to each other, although they were both still very devout muslims and immediately put their hijabs backs on, even while screaming.

I can’t say we had a very pleasant conversation over tea and scones, mainly due to an unsurmountable cultural divide, but sometimes propriety forces you down a certain road and if I accidentally put a gun against your temple and pull you out of a walk-in closet, I’m going to bake you something, dammit!

When the tea and the scones were gone, they cleaned the windows on the outside and were picked up by a van from the palace. I never learned their names. Asim came home around eight o’clock, seemed happy enough with some potato salad and a cold beer for dinner and laughed his fucking head off when I told him what had happened, substituting a carving knife for the gun. Then we played Gran Turismo Sport and went to bed. I spent an hour on my journal before I turned off the light.

Asim was very keen to show me his country, but didn’t seem to care all that much about me bringing him breakfast. If I didn’t provide a meal, he’d either call the palace kitchen to have something delivered, skip it altogether, drop in on a friend who then ordered his wife or servants to whip something up or visit one of the many cafés in the area. He would frequently meet up with his mates, none of whom seemed to have a job. They drove bizarrely expensive cars and were obsessed with trinkets such as iPads and expensive watches. I wasn’t needed or wanted for that part of his life and that was fine with me. Apparently my role was that of a spectator. Whatever.

This was fine with me. I don’t actually want to be a butler and clean up after someone. But I was here with a mission, and not much of an idea how to go about it. Some time to mull it over was welcome. Actually, I was in dire need of some rest as it was. My life is anything but sedate, sadly.

Asim took me on a few trips in the white Land Rover. We loaded up a carpet, some folding chairs, a parasol and a cooler full of snacks and drinks, and drove out of the city. You’d think there would be nothing of interest, but you’d be wrong. Saudi Arabia is beautiful, in its own way. You have to be the sort of person who can appreciate a desert, but as it happens I am. I found Nevada a marvellous place and could have toured around for weeks, but Samantha and Kelly grew bored of it before I did and so we started looking for some trees. Even so, Red Rock Canyon and Snow Canyon (Utah, I know) are places I hope to visit again some day. And I’ve rarely seen a more beautiful night sky than in Kodachrome state park, or a nicer sunset. And so Asim found an appreciative visitor in me as we toured around Riyadh and drove up narrow mountain roads to enjoy the view or explored wadis that lead to small villages dotted with date palms, where small children in colourful clothes came running to greet us and to bum a few cans of ‘Bipsi’ (Pepsi) off Asim. Baby goats followed them around and Asim chatted with everyone, including the old men who would invariably appear to check us out. Most people spoke English to some extent, even if only a few words or phrases. We were often offered coffee, or invited to visit their local mosque.

I wasn’t at all interested in that, but it usually involved little more than taking a five minute tour with my shoes off while Asim translated what the local cleric told him about who had made the prayer rug and the lamp and the whatnots. That wasn’t so bad. They would always ask if I was a muslim, and if not if I’d be interested in signing up then and there, but telling them I was a Catholic usually did the trick. (Saying ‘yes’ to get out of the tour was strongly discouraged by Asim.) They’d suddenly treat me as if I were mentally handicapped, but they’d leave it at that.

Actually, I should mention that they would always ask me if I was Jewish before the invitation to tour the mosque was extended. Saudis somehow believe Jews want nothing more than to come visit their country posing as tourists and can be tricked into divulging their religion by one off-hand question. I don’t speak from any kind of experience, but I’m pretty sure the Mossad has infiltrated the place like lichen by now.

Once or twice Asim rolled into town at prayer time and then there was no getting out of it for him, but I was welcome to wait in the shade or walk along the open water canal network (the qanat, sometimes called falaj) that ran to different parts of the villages. Not that there were many networks like that: more often they’d use buried water pipes. Less photogenic, but more hygienic.

These people weren’t poor by any measure. Sure, far away from the larger cities, the secondary roads were all graded or just dirt roads. Only very dangerous sections, or ones prone to flooding, would be asphalted. These graded roads also ran through villages. Still, most houses were connected to the grid and many had several parking spaces and air conditioning units on the roof. Clinics or schools were never more than half an hour away. The local shops weren’t much use: they mostly sold non-perishables, especially cookies and candy, with one small cooler for dairy and some weathered lettuce. People would drive to Riyadh or the nearest Lulu centre once a week or so for oil, flour and rice. Fresh produce mostly came from their own gardens. If they wanted meat, they’d slaughter a goat or some chickens. They didn’t make much money, but they also didn’t pay any taxes and all public services were free. Selling the odd goat or bag of dates, or maybe having a few camels around to sell the milk, was apparently enough to make ends meet. You could always sell a few daughters, get a dowry. That’s why there weren’t many young men in these villages: they’d go to the city to get a job as a civil servant or in sales. Someone’s paying for that dowry and a Toyota pickup truck, right? And you’ll want a pickup truck, because how else are you gonna move your camel? Just load her up, make her sit down like a brooding chicken and throw some straps over her. I’ve seen dozens, if not hundreds of camels staring back at me in traffic, tied up like that. They didn’t seem to mind much.

Obviously there were no women anywhere in sight, except girls so young they didn’t yet wear head scarves or hijabs. They all had black curls and weren’t in the least afraid of us. I felt sorry for them, knowing that in a few years time they’d be made to dress in black and would be locked behind walls, treated and traded as chattel. They’d probably get a decent education, but wouldn’t be expected to do anything with it.

Every now and then I’d turn a corner and I’d see a black ghost hurrying indoors. Soon after, shutters would close, as if I’d stand on my tiptoes and look in, hoping to catch a bare ankle or a lock of hair. Saudi Arabia is a nation of prisons, I’m sad to say. But it should be noted women do as much as men, if not actually more, to reinforce these values. (‘Ooh look at her, flashin’ her ankles! She’s no better than she ought to be! Do you know, she once said ‘hello’ to my seventh cousin, Mohammed? Oh yes! With a lock of hair peepin’ out of her hijab ‘an all! Poor boy nearly came in his pants. She’s a dirty slapper and no mistake!’)

Still, those trips were mostly rather nice. We’d drive for hours and negotiate about the music. I couldn’t stand the Arabic hits everyone here played incessantly. Not in public, obviously, but certainly at home and in their car. Asim tried to tell me about famous artists and he’d make me listen to ‘the classics’, but it all sounded the same to me. After half an hour I’d get very cranky. As butlers aren’t supposed to be cranky, all I could do was go quiet and retreat into myself. Asim noticed and after a while we made a deal: whoever drove decided which music was played. Except he couldn’t play rap music and I couldn’t play jazz. We found a happy medium in eighties pop and Country & Western music, which we both thought was hilarious but went well with the landscape.

After the first trip, when we only had a few songs to listen to from a home copied Dire Straits CD I found in the glove box, Asim loaded up his iPod with a few dozen albums. I’m convinced our duet of ‘Behind The Clouds’ is better than Brad Paisley’s version, and Asim sings ‘All My Exes Live In Texas’ with a phenomenally good accent. I ended up doing a lot of driving, which I normally don’t like to do but is okay if you get to go fifty miles an hour on a graded road in a dry river bed.

We mostly went North of Riyadh, to Ar Rass, Al Jihfah, the sand dunes of Zurud and the ruins of the Hatem Al Ta’ai Palace. Those ruins are not even remotely interesting or impressive, but they sit in a mountainous region that’s great fun to drive around in. Asim wanted to show me more, but Saudi Arabia is vast and it would take days to drive from one landmark to another. There aren’t that many and with some of them you can actually be standing on top of ‘em and not know about it. We once took a two hour detour to see the remains of a mosque built in 1517. It turned out to be a wall with at most some 50 stones left in it, in a clearing filled with trash. I was underwhelmed.

When Asim, feeling somewhat embarrassed, then proposed a visit by air to Farasan Island I can’t say I wasn’t interested, but I had to gently dissuade him from this idea. I wasn’t here to go on vacation. Asim assumed I’d had enough of these trips and turned his attention back on his friends.

One day, about a week after Anaïs had spent the afternoon with me, a van arrived from the palace. I expected some cleaners or maintenance workers to emerge, ordered by Asim or just following their own schedules. Two days earlier, just as Asim and I were ready to leave for another road trip, a Pakistani fellow and his Saudi handler had shown up to spray roach-repellent around the house. The Saudi stayed the hell away from the Pakistani, who put on a well-worn face mask and began to spray a fine mist of very nasty poison on the tiles around the house, as well as into any drains he came across. I suspected they weren’t quite following the manufacturers’ instructions on safety. Why would they? Have you any idea how many Pakistani there are? Over 200 million! And over half of them would kill for a job spraying poison in a forty degree heat without any kind of protection. Asim had a hell of a time getting me to cheer up after I’d seen that guy doing his job.

This van didn’t contain any cleaners or poisoners. Just a guy in a cotton shirt with the royal emblem, carrying a small, white cardboard box he had taken out of a styrofoam cooler.

“Mister Carstairs?” he asked, as I came to the gate.

“That’s me.”

“For you, Sir. Bye.”

And he was gone. I went back inside and opened the box, which I expected to contain sandwiches. Asim wasn’t around, but he would order food without telling me. The drivers that were sent to our house had a key to a store room, or would just put their stuff out on the pool furniture. It was usually hot food, so there was zero chance of it getting cold.

Today, however, it was pastry. Two small, round Bakewell tarts, with pink glaze and a maraschino cherry on top, with a single large éclair wedged between them. I hadn’t ordered anything.

As I picked up the éclair to transfer it to a Tupperware box, it somehow ‘popped’: white cream sprayed from one end, all over the Bakewell tarts! The toaster and the tea kettle got a few strands of goo over them as well.

“Godgloeiende!” I cursed, after which I quietly chided myself for cursing in Dutch. That’s some trick, preparing a spring-loaded éclair! Choux pastry, used for profiteroles, beignets and such, has no raising agent. Instead, it relies on a high moisture content to generate steam, which forms pockets inside the pastry. This makes it hollow. You can then use a piping tube to fill it with whatever you like. Obviously this is not a guaranteed method: you can only be sure the inside is hollow if you cut the pastry in half, thereby ruining it. Imagine that happening at a state dinner!

As it was no longer presentable I cut it open, but all I found inside the choux pastry was an empty bubble on one side, and a chamber full of cream on the other. I poured a glass of cold milk and sat down to eat it, because hey, pastry! It was amazing. Clearly Anaïs had a few leftovers and sent some to me. What a lovely gesture, sending confectionery to a man who is eternally on the brink of obesity. I was going to have a hell of a job stopping myself from eating the tarts right now!

Then I got a text message.

‘Did you enjoy, Anglais?’ followed by a smiley face. I guess she knew they had been delivered.

I texted back:

‘Hi! Yes, thanks. The éclair sprayed cream all over the tarts, but that just means more for me. Thank you very much.’

A few minutes later:

‘Vraiment!? Ooh la la! What this remind you of, Anglais?’ and another smiley face. I had no idea. For all I know they cover the Pompidou centre with silly string every other week.

‘It’s fine, I’m sure it will all be fantastic. And I love Bakewell tarts. Thanks again!’

Yet another message, while I was making a shopping list.

‘You have any more free time, Anglais?’

‘Not right now. My employer is in the country. I never know what he is up to.’

‘But you have free time, yes?’

I sent a reply six hours later, because I had an appointment with John Stein and getting there was going to take a bit of work.

“Welcome, son. What do we call you, anyway? King? Carstairs? Vandecandyman?”

“Wow, that’s perfect. Were your parents Dutch?”

“Don’t piss him off,” said John Stein to the drill-sergeant who had greeted me like this. Not that he was an actual drill-sergeant, at least not to my knowledge. I was and remain to this day blissfully unaware of the meaning of any and all insignia. I just recognized the type. The British equivalent is usually a bit shorter, invariably has a lower class accent and more tattoos.

“‘Scuse me? Don’t piss HIM off?”

Stein rested his feet on a metal chair. I recognized it as an Emeco 1006, for which Peter Fox had recently paid sixteen hundred pounds. It was originally designed for the US Navy, who needed something extremely durable and light, preferably capable of withstanding torpedo blasts. The result has become an iconic chair.

“No. We got his profile here. He reacts extremely poorly to being provoked. Doesn’t stand down. Ever. It’s like his thing.”

“Oh, really? Sounds like a fucking excellent quality for a field operative,” scowled the soldier in charge of embassy security. We were in a building on the outskirts of town. It looked a lot like a warehouse. I’d gotten here in the back of a van, after a visit to the embassy for a little chat. And I got to the embassy in a car that picked me up from an underground parking lot. A lot of cloak and dagger stuff, at least for a humble IT manager. Stein sighed and got up.

“It’s actually one of a very long list of qualities that makes you wonder what the fuck the Brits were thinking when they deployed him. You know he hosted the Goddamned Oscars?!”

“Actually, I didn’t host. I just presented best supporting actor.”

“WELL WHOOP-DEE-DOO, Planet Hollywood! And what the fuck am I supposed to do with you?”

“Teaching me Arabic would be nice. Nobody seems to have managed so far,” I suggested.

“You ... don’t speak A-rab?”

“Barely. Two weeks worth. Salaam. Whoops, that was it.”

Air escaped from the corner of the soldier’s lips. He lost his demeanour.

“John? The fuck?”

“Look, let’s go over the basics with him. See what needs improving. I want him to be able to lift and drop, I wanna know if he can use a piece, I want him up on...”

“Whoa whoa whoa whoa,” I said. “Lifting and dropping? I lift forks and drop pearls of wisdom. I don’t even exercise when it’s fifteen degrees, never mind forty-six.”

John put his hand on my shoulder.

“Yeah, no kidding. Relax, we know you got issues with PE. Lifting and dropping ain’t what you think it is. Let’s see how you do on the firing range, okay?”

Mediocre. That’s how I did. About as well as you’d expect from a man who has spent no more than about four hours on a firing range, and spent the first two hours giggling. My accuracy was 63 percent, which tends to get you sent home with most of the three letter agencies. But in my case they felt it was good enough. So did I.

The next part I liked better. A LOT better. I met Jonathan, a quiet, greyish man with a clipboard, who asked me to answer some questions about allergies and write down the answers. I then found out I had lost my watch, my wallet, my keys, my sweeteners, my pen, my handkerchief and my reading glasses. On the other hand: I had acquired a playing card, a condom, a ring on my finger, a tie clip and a packet of Marlboro!

Lifting and dropping basically means pickpocketing, including the skills to place something on someone’s person. It’s an extraordinarily important skill and the Americans have developed a very impressive training program for it. I took to it like a duck to water and spent three hours patting down and bumping quasi-accidentally into the trainer and then some very patient if bored looking soldiers and into John Stein. This was the most fun I remember having with my clothes on. Don’t get me wrong: you can’t learn pickpocketing in an afternoon and I still can’t remove watches. But you can learn how it’s done and how to prevent it. It just turned out to be my thing, because it relies in no small part on dazzling someone with bullshit while you focus on your moves.

Can I just say that even though I enjoy making fun of Americans, especially after I’ve been reading the news and they’ve said or done something that makes me choke on my tongue with anger, I do enjoy socialising with them. They’re very much unpolished compared to the Brits, but at the same time a lot more genuine. I had been feeling very much alone and unsupported so far, even though Asim was a decent enough chap. But even the American military, the MILITARY I’ll remind you, can give you that ‘hey, we’re a team now and we got your back’ feeling if they want to. I know it’s all fake and before you know it you’ll find yourself on the roof of an embassy, looking at the undercarriage of the last chopper out of Saigon, or being waterboarded for simply implying on Twitter that it might be helpful for World Peace or at the very least World Wellbeing if their President were to stick his dick in a blender, but to me this was a real pick-me-up! Besides, I was pretty sure the Brits would also drop me like a dripping nappy if they felt I had outlived my usefulness.

They had selected lots more for me to learn, but after the introduction to ‘non-intrusive object insertion and removal 101’, our time was at an end. I still had a very cumbersome ride home, and Asim was texting me about dinner. At least according to the lady at the embassy who was keeping an eye on my phone. Well, I say my phone: a cheap burner that received forwarded texts from my own phone, which was in turn safely tucked away in K-T’s trunk and driving around Riyadh with a hologram at the wheel. The Brits did teach me SOME tricks, you know.

I was home just a few minutes before Asim. He found me unpacking plastic bags from Lulu.

“Dinner will be in half an hour, Your Royal Highness.”

Asim was engaged in a single player game and didn’t seem to care if I was in the room or not. The sun was down and I was contemplating going for a swim. The pool wasn’t very long, but I’d have it to myself and some exercise was long overdue now that Kate wasn’t around to make me.

Kate. As soon as I thought about her, I winced. The voices in my head, a chorus of wailing doomsayers, started up again. It had been a while since I heard from them. How is Kate? Is she okay? How long has it been since you spoke to her? How is Melody, and Edwin? How are they coping? They’re probably dead. Or kidnapped. Or killed by some sort of virus. You left them alone. How could you do that? Whoooooooooooooooo!

I sighed and put away my swim shorts. Time to break a cardinal rule of intelligence work: check up on the home front.

Kate and I had prepared a way to communicate via the internet. Not that this is particularly difficult to arrange, mind you. We’d just found a clever way to do it, inspired by General Petraeus. And he got it from Al-Qaeda, so you know it worked; they’re quite good at that sort of thing, you can’t deny that. Anyway, Petraeus used a Gmail account to communicate with his mistress. They both had the login details and would leave draft messages that were never actually sent anywhere. Clever, right? Well, Kate and I had gone one step further: we started a free Wordpress blog about gluten-free food, lazily slapped three stolen blog posts and a picture of a Spelt bread on it and then set the thing to ‘under construction’. We also used drafts to write each other letters, but even if a draft was accidentally published, the site would be under construction and it wouldn’t show up. I hadn’t logged in yet, but I made my laptop connect to a private VPN (Witopia, they’re very good) and signed in to glutenfree.wordpress.com. (We have since abandoned it and some lady who actually has celiac disease now has it. Leave her alone, mmmkay?)

There was nothing from Kate. Only the filler posts were there, plus some housekeeping messages about plugins and themes that needed updating. I was a bit disappointed, but I figured I’d leave her a message. I was halfway through when I remembered I could have written in Dutch, but somehow that hadn’t occurred to me. This is worrisome.

“Dear Kate. I am well! Everything is completely different than I expected, but I’m comfortable and safe. Not making any headway yet, but I found people who are offering to help. I was given a car. It’s electric, which is very inconvenient. Also, it has your voice. As in: exactly your voice! As I understand it, Caroline is behind it. Do you recall a voice-over session with the line: ‘I am unable to parse this request’? Because that’s about all the damned thing says. It’s unnerving, but it has proven useful from time to time and even though hearing you upset me at first, I’m now getting used to it. I would like to write lots more, but we agreed to keep it vague. Also, I’d be typing for days once I really get started. I love you, I miss you and I wonder if I’ve done something too drastic by coming here, but I am safe and by and large managing very well. Kiss Mel and Eddie from me. And if at all possible, let me know how Caroline is managing. Love, Tinus.”

Tinus is a variation on Martin and if you ever, EVER call me that I will rip off your ears and feed them to you. Only Kate gets to call me that.

I logged off and started to prepare for bed, which includes setting up a few devices and a lot more personal grooming than I was used to, courtesy of that bloody beard. But while I was shaving and preening, I suddenly realised I had used Kate’s real name. That wasn’t very smart, so just before I turned in for the night I logged on again, to fix it. You’re way ahead of me, aren’t you?

“Wow, your post was two minutes old when I logged in! I just felt this weird urge to check our site all of a sudden. I have more to say than you, but I wrote parts of it earlier. Just told Melody you’re fine. She was already asleep, but she really needed to hear that. I didn’t know about any car, but now that you mention it I did have a VO job recently. I never take them but it came in via an agency where I once registered myself just to see how they handled signups. Caroline heard about it, insisted I do it. But they never mentioned a car. I was reading lines like ‘Burning fridges, televisions and washing machines are not as unusual as one might think.’ Complete nonsense. They said it was for a video game. Did about two hundred lines like that. Only took me an hour or so. Never said that line you mentioned. Think the client was called Lyrebird.

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Carstairs of Arabia

Ron Dudderie

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