Chapter 23: The Beginning of the End

Tuesday, August 25^th, 2015. My garage. Total.hilltop.digital.

It was about one a.m. when the door to the garage opened and K-T rolled in. I had called ahead, to let Anaïs know that I was fine and on my way.

“How are you doing?”

“I am drinking water and eating uh ... Maltezers. Very poor chocolate.”

“Yes, it’s English chocolate. Could be worse, though.”

“Hershey...” she shuddered.

“Exactly. I’ll be there in about twenty minutes. Can you hang on?”

“I can go nowhere else, Anglais. It is dark and I am only a woman.”

“That’s the spirit.”

She was all talk over the phone, but when I got out of the car she slung her arms around me and cried.

“I’m so glad you are here!”

“Me too.”

“I seaut you went to prison!”

“I was questioned for a while, almost to the point of tears, but then it turned out they didn’t have a leg to stand on. They were up in arms about it, but then it hit them like a bullet to the brain, so to speak. They didn’t want to drag it out. Anyway, this is all behind us. But while I have you here: can you look at that information for me?”

“Bien sûr, Anglais. What EES this place?”

“It’s just an old car workshop. I rented it so K-T could charge herself. Normally I never come here, but I left some water and candy behind in case I had to work on the car or something.”

“Your car, it is amazing. First time I thought it was normaluh, but zen I learn zat ze Tesla, it cannot do all zis yet.”

“Who did you talk to my car about? Ah, pfff ... Sorry, that’s probably not even a proper sentence. I’m dead tired.”

“I talk to nobody. I read a lot, on my iPad. What is up zer?”

She pointed to the cabin that was suspended over the workshop floor.

“I think that was the office, or maybe parts storage. Have you been there?”

“Yes. You could have taken me there! I think a ... matelas?”

“Mattress?”

“Yes, from Ikea. That would have been a lot cheaper than ze hotel room. And safer.”

“Safer, sure. But I’m not going to shag anyone on just a mattress in a grimy, empty office! What do you take me for? Imagine if I’d done that: bringing you here and asking you to come upstairs and do it in there. You’d run away screaming, and rightfully so.”

“Then we make it nice. I can clean it. You can maybe buy a real bed. I zink there is watur, no? For to wash?”

“Wow. You are something, you know that? Okay, can you take your mind out of the gutter for half an hour? I want to show you some pictures.”

In the office behind the entrance I had two old but serviceable plastic chairs, and a clean desk. We sat behind my laptop and reviewed the pictures I had taken inside the mosque. Not all of it, obviously.

“Where is this?”

“In a building I visited.”

She made the sound the French use for ‘DUHHH!’. It defies transcription. You’re either born with it or you’re not.

“Who are these men?”

“I have no idea. What does it say under their names?”

“You have paper, Anglais?”

“No. Open a Word document. Type it in.”

As you recall, I had found a whiteboard with thirty-four pictures stuck to it, all of male faces. Underneath were notes, written on grey Post-Its. I could not read the notes. Anaïs took her time zooming around the images I showed her.

“Okay, zis is what I see. On each piece of paper it starts with the name. Zayaan. Mohammed. Abdellatif. Qusay. These names, they are from many different Arabic countries. Like, zis name is popular in le Maroc. Zis name is typically Égyptien. Zis one, the black guy, his name is Soudanais.”

“Sudanese.”

“Yes. Then, next is a year. I zink zey are birth years, in ze Hijri calendar. Zis man looks about twenty, zis one about zirty. Next, occupation. Welder. Baker. Computer man. Pilot. But not always. Ze Saudi, zey have no occupation. Zey have a city next to zeir name. Okay? Zen, next line. The top row, zey all have cities in Western countries. These three: Londres. This one: Paris. Putain ... These two: Manche ... mange ... Mangester?”

“Manchester?”

“Maybe. Zis one: Copenhague. These four: New York. Zis one: Boston.”

“Okay. Write that down please.”

She typed as quickly as she spoke French. When she had recorded everything about the top row, we moved down to the middle row.

“Here it ees the same: name, birth year, occupation. But all with ze same name: Tabuk.”

“Where is that?”

“I don’t know. Place names in Arabic, they are not very original. Okay, I write it down for you.”

That took five minutes. I searched for Tabuk on my phone, but found too many matches, and that was assuming I spelled it right. I asked Anaïs to type it in Arabic, and we found only a few locations, one of them a speck on the map in the North-Western corner of Saudi. That was hundreds of miles away.

“Could it be a person, or something else?”

“I don’t know it more than you, Anglais. But it doesn’t sound like a name to me.”

“Okay: bottom row.”

“Let me see. It says here: martyrs.”

“What? Where?”

“Here.”

“Oh! I thought that was just ... someone trying to see if his white board marker still worked.”

“Yes, zat is very much what Arabic looks like, Anglais. So these are martyrs. It says the full name, country, a date from this year ... I don’t know Hijri calendar exactement, but I zink it is zis year. And an amount.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. Zis is ze symbol for Saudi riyal. Like ze Euro symbol, or ze dollar sign. How you not know zis, Anglais!?”

“I suck at languages, as it turns out. Hey, look at that. It looks like a cartoon dog with a cowboy hat, facing right. So what’s the money for?”

Her eyebrows did an annoyed little wiggle. Then she focused on the picture.

“I don’t know ... Maybe what they get paid?”

“They’re martyrs. Presumably they’re dead,” I said, studying the faces.

“Maybe ... money for their families?” suggested Anaïs.

“Hey, that might be it! How much is it?”

“In euro? A few hundred. But maybe it is per month. Then it is not so bad.”

“Okay ... Write down those names as well, please.”

One of them looked familiar, but then most of ‘em do. I’d been here a while now.

“Zis one ... Mohammed Fakhoury. Egypt. Shaban, vingt-quatrième. 1200 riyal. Then Farook Suleiman, le Maroc. Same date. 1500 riyal. Then Mohammed Masoon, Royaume-uni, same date. 3000 riyal. Then...”

“Wait, wait, wait ... Scroll back. Farook Suleiman! It’s him!”

That was the guy I pushed under a speeding train! And Masoon was the bugger I’d fed into the machinery of an escalator! And, and ... that other bugger, Fakhoury, wasn’t he the one who had blown himself up? I had never met him, but I had seen his picture. His before picture, I mean. I found them! I FOUND THE LINK!

“I want to decode that date. Shaban the 26^th in this year.”

“Okay. I can Google it ... This date in Hijra, Shaban the 24^th in 1436, that is...”

“JUNE ELEVENTH, 2015!”

The date of the attack. The date carved in Diana’s tomb stone.

“Oui. Jeudi. Is zat good?”

“Oh ... oh my...”

I found them. I found the bastards who carried out the attack and I had found the guy who was paying their families compensation. I’d found my target, at last! It was the imam!

“Anglais! Why are you crying?”

She was right. My eyes welled up and pretty soon after I was quietly crying. An immense weight was lifted off my shoulders. I would be able to keep my promise to Diana.

“I’m not ... I’m ... Oh, I’m so relieved...” I stammered. “Pfff ... I need some water. This is ... This is fantastic! Excuse me, I really need to pee!”

I had a wee, then drank a tepid bottle of water in one gulp, stuffed some celebratory Maltezers in my gob and went back to Anaïs in the office. She was still typing in the information I had asked her to translate, but I also saw her phone on the desk. It showed a British news item from The Independent, about the attack that had struck me and my family. She had clearly been doing some Googling. When I came back, she caught me looking at her phone’s display and gave me a pitying look.

“So now I know, Anglais. Why you are here.”

“Yes.”

“You are not a spy. A spy is a professional. He does not cry.”

“True, I suppose. I never said I was a spy.”

“Who did you lose that day?”

Oh dear, I almost started to sob again.

“A friend.”

She got up and hugged me.

“Tell me about it.”

I took the hug, but declined the invitation.

“No. I’m not ready for that. One day I will. When we’re both no longer here. Maybe over dinner, in your restaurant. But now I need to get you home, safe and sound. Well, home ... The palace.”

“The golden cage. Our golden cage.”

“Yes. Though my perch is a bit nicer than yours, I think.”

“I do not think I would want to trade with you, Anglais. I am only here to make gateaux and money. But I’m glad you found what you came for. What are you going to do now?”

“Share this information with my boss. The bottom list may be dead, but I think the people on the top list are in active cells in all those cities. They must be found.”

She clearly hadn’t thought of that.

“Then let’s go. And if you need me to translate more, bring me here. I will do what I can.”

“Thank you, sweetheart. Okay, let’s go.”

I must say the look on the receptionist’s face when I came in at around three in the morning was one I wouldn’t mind having a picture of. He was the same guy who had checked me in.

“Good evening, Mr ... Carstairs. How was your evening?”

“Eventful. I was taken out to the desert and questioned, and then they made me walk home. Fortunately a kind lorry driver brought me back here, so I’m none the worse for wear.”

“Ah, yes,” he whispered, even though we were alone in the lobby. “They sometimes do that, especially when they can’t find anything. Vengeance. Maybe it was good that it was night. During the day such a walk is ... dangerous.”

“Lethal, you mean. Now, I need some information. For a start I’d like to know who tipped them off?”

“Sir, I can assure you it wasn’t us. We waited in room 205 for you, but we saw your ... friend ... drive away. And you were arrested.”

“Yes. Did they ask for my name?”

“No, Sir. They only demanded a master key.”

“My credit card information?”

“No. Just a key card.”

“And if they come back for that information?”

“Sir, that room was not occupied. It is perfectly clean and there are no records of any recent guests. If they found someone there, he must have broken into the room.”

“I see. And the security footage? This hotel has dozens of cameras.”

“I’m afraid access to those recordings is restricted, Sir. Only the senior manager can release those. But if you were released, it is unlikely they will come back. And the recording will be overwritten in one week. The Mutaween are many things, but not fast or efficient.”

Well, there was nothing I could do about that, except threaten this man who had just disposed of the paper trail, at least. Didn’t see the point in that.

“May I have the senior manager’s name, please?”

He took a hotel note pad and wrote down a name and even a phone number.

“Certainly, Sir. He is presently in our Singapore property, but he may be reached via this number.”

“Thank you. Oh, one more thing: do you have any idea how they caught on?”

Again, a furtive look.

“They were drinking coffee in the lobby, Sir. The older man comes here on occasion, to try his luck. I hadn’t noticed them because I wasn’t at this desk, but they just watched the lifts and after a while came up to the front desk, identified themselves to one of our junior hosts and demanded your room number and a key. I think they waited a while to make sure you were ... uhm ... settled in, so to speak. I fear they may have noticed that you were together with a young lady, but trying to hide it. They are rather adept at noticing these things. Well, some of them.”

“How did they know the room number?”

“The system records the exact check-in time. They asked for the Westerner who checked in at ... let me see.”

“Never mind, I get it. Right. Thank you. Here, something for your trouble.”

He didn’t mind a nine hundred riyal tip. It was all I had on me in cash.

“I hope this worsens your amnesia, if needed.”

“Much appreciated, Sir! I’m sure it will. But don’t worry too much. You were released, after all.”

Yeah, well ... He didn’t know what I’d done to them...

The guard at the gate was quite surprised when I drove up to his barrier around three a.m. As expected, he didn’t wave me through but wanted to see my passport and my medallion, and he even shone a light in the back of the car. I wasn’t bothered, because I’d helped Anaïs hop the wall five minutes earlier. She said her roommates wouldn’t cause any problems.

Still August 25^th, 2015. Saudi Royal palace, guest annex.

I had about four hours sleep, which is not nearly enough but at least something. As soon as I woke up I reached out to both MI6 and the CIA, telling them I had come across valuable and time sensitive information. John Stein got back to me via Telegram only a few minutes later, with the words: ‘Come fish with us any time.” My buddy at the British consulate was in much less of a hurry.

I was very interested in the news, but had no way to access it. The English news sources I knew of were usually a day or so behind, and covered the entire region. Even if those bodies had already been found, it was unlikely the morning edition of anything would be opening with them, because such an event would be kept under wraps for as long as possible. And so there was nothing for me to do but order K-T to leave the palace during the exit rush and lie low, while I went about my routine.

We took it easy during the lesson, today. I had tea brought to my side of the curtain, and I could smell coffee coming from her side. The palace staff had learned to make Starbuck-like concoctions that were very much in demand by the residents. Until a year ago people would be sent out to get fancy coffee up to twenty times per day, but because it was a twenty minute round trip someone finally decided it would be much better to get some of those machines and train a few Pakistani to be baristas. You can hang all sorts of lessons on the principles behind Starbucks (why so many locations, what are the profit margins, why encourage people to hang around all day, what’s up with their music, and so on, and so on), which went down well with Alexandra. She had a very limited understanding of the world, but if I managed to find something she cared about, she was quite willing to learn more. To her, Starbucks was one of the coolest things imaginable.

“So, ready for the test tomorrow?”

I heard a sigh.

“I’ll, like, do my best? But it’s hard to, you know, like, focus?”

“And why is that?”

“Weeeeell, you know, its like, ‘why am I even doing this?’ My uncle won’t even, like, let me go to Dubai?”

“I’m sorry about that. I should not have made any promises on his behalf.”

“Oh, you like, didn’t actually promise? I kinda like knew he was all like that.”

“Thanks for understanding. I do appreciate you are making an effort and I actually do think you deserve a reward if you pass the test, but I have little to offer you.”

She was quiet for a second.

“So uhm ... Can I, like, ask you something?”

“Certainly.”

“I mean ... something personal? That you can’t, like, tell my uncle? Or the Khafama? Or, like, anybody?”

“Oh dear. Well, go for it. You have my word it won’t go beyond this room.”

A five second silence.

“Could you like, get me something? Buy me something?”

“Such as?”

“Like ... a toy?”

“A toy? What, you want a model train set?”

An annoyed sigh came from behind the curtain.

“I’ll draw it, okay?”

“Uh ... okay.”

A few seconds later she slipped a piece of paper under the curtain. We’d do that regularly, especially when it came to interpreting graphs. I looked at her drawing.

“You want a toothpick?!”

“NO! Okay, gimme.”

She took back the piece of paper. Now the toothpick was scratched out and replaced by a sort of cactus.

“What’s this, are we playing Pictionary now? Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?”

Her hand came from underneath the curtain, which was the first time I’d seen any part of her after the initial meeting in her room, and grabbed the sheet. It disappeared for five seconds and came back with a crude picture of a dick, such as you might find scrawled on the walls of any disrespectable toilet stall, but sans hairy balls or droplets of cum.

“What ... Are you having a laugh?”

“NO. This. From plastic.”

“Oooooooh! A dildo! Why didn’t you say so?”

I tore up the paper.

“It’s for a friend,” she said.

“Not to be blunt, but you are locked up like a galley slave. You have no friends. Look, it’s alright. I’m a grown man, I’ve seen them before and I can quite understand why you’d want one. Can I just ask: haven’t you got an electric tooth brush? That seems to do the trick in an emergency.”

“Yes, but ... Only from the outside. You know?”

“Oh, right. Yes. Yes, I do know. Shame my sister isn’t here. She can masturbate with just about anything.”

Oh God, why did that come out? I suppose I was a bit too relaxed, after having had a tiring but ultimately satisfying night that had brought one orgasm and two dead fanatics. It’s good to have some release once in a while, isn’t it?

“Yes?! Your SISTER?”

“Uhm ... When she gets drunk, she talks too much. I shouldn’t have said that. But yeah, she used to spend a lot of time on the road and she got incredibly creative.”

There’s a meme that goes: ‘Anything is a dildo if you’re brave enough,’ accompanied by a picture of something weird like a particularly malformed cactus or a chimney with studded brickwork or something. But Kate did have a certain expertise in finding things to amuse herself, and she didn’t mind sharing her knowledge. Especially with Kelly, I’m afraid.

“Like what?”

“I pushed those conversations out of my mind, I’m afraid. But I may be able to help you. If you pass the test, I’ll get you one. Are you particular about the size or the brand, or...”

“No. Just ... like, not too big? And with batteries I can recharge? I had one, once, and the batteries were very big, like for a torch? I couldn’t find more of those.”

“Oh yes. C and D. You’ll want AA batteries, those are easy to get.”

“Yes. So you’ll help me? That is SO cool!”

“I may need a few days to find one, given where we are. But I can always just order one by mail. Why don’t you ... oh, never mind.”

Her uncle opened her mail for her.

“And, like ... Not too realistic? So it’s easier to hide?”

“No, I get it. Well, in that case let’s call it quits for today. Unless you have any other questions?”

“No, I know what to do. Thank you, Mr. Carstairs.”

Oh, great. Now I had some shopping to do. But I wanted her to pass that test, or Omar might have me replaced. And I wasn’t done here. Not yet.

I had the rest of the day to myself, but that only meant a trip to the fishing supply store. Stein wasn’t in, but the agent pretending to be a salesman said I could wait there. Instead, I decided to go and have lunch. There was another prayer coming up, which meant I would be kicked out of any restaurant I found myself in. That’s why I decided to visit the Belgian coffee shop in the old, semi-abandoned mall across from the Hittin mosque. It was a fifteen minute drive, but that would be during the prayer. And so I saw the city come to a standstill, as it did several times a day. People could in theory pray anywhere, but given the heat most would look for a nearby mosque. As the call to prayer started, the streets emptied and parking lots filled up. A few minutes later cars would simply be abandoned in the road near the mosques, as the owners hurried inside. But I also saw groups of men, mostly TCNs doing some actual work, fold out their prayer mats, line up and pray to anything that happened to be between them and Mecca. It’s quite funny to see a group of devout people worshipping an abandoned shopping cart, or a sleeping dog.

Of course, women would not pray outside. Those that weren’t confined to their homes would use prayer rooms in malls, and some mosques had separate entrances for women. They would listen to the imam through a curtain or a speaker. The Mutaween prowled the streets and chased everyone to a mosque. As I was driving a palace staff car, identifiable by the license plate and a royal crest, some would shake their batons at me, at least until they saw my pale, Godless face. And even then.

The coffee shop had its shutters closed, but after knocking on them I only had to wait for a minute or so before I heard someone on the inside walk up to them and turn the key. They rose slowly, with an electric hum.

“Oh, hello?” said a rather rotund man wearing an apron, as he saw my shoes, legs and then the rest of me. “Come in! You’re new here, aren’t you?”

“No, I’ve been here once before. And I liked the coffee.”

The guy was a Westerner and my guess he was the Belgian owner of this place. He had obviously not been praying, but not closing your shop will get you in trouble with the Mutawa.

“Come in, then! I’m Maarten.”

“Reggie. Hi.”

“So, what can I get you? Hey, I just baked some Belgian cheesecake this morning. Interested?”

“Ah, the mattentaart? Lovely!”

“Oh, you speak Flemmish?”

No, I don’t. Well, I’m not supposed to.

“I uhm ... had it last time. It was very good.”

I took a seat at the window. We were on the first floor of the mall, overlooking the square and the mosque. People were filing out. It wasn’t very busy. I saw K-T, parked at the opposite side of the mosque, dutifully filming the entrance.

Maarten made fresh drip coffee and presented me with a piece of pie. These journals are slowly turning into recipe books, but I have another notebook for that so I’ll just tell you they’re about 500 calories per serving and leave it at that. This thing was going to be lunch.

The phone rang for a few take-out orders of coffee and cake, so my Belgian host was busy preparing brown paper bags, that were picked up by a young, dark-skinned guy who wore a bike helmet indoors. Apparently that was the entire lunch rush. Maarten poured himself coffee and joined me on the high chairs at the window.

“So, what do you do here?”

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Carstairs of Arabia

Ron Dudderie

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