The Protocols of Carstairs
Copyright© 2021 by Ron Dudderie
Chapter 5: Keller we have a problem
As the motorcade left the palace grounds, my phone rang. It was K-T, who had no doubt seen me moving away from her. I was about to cancel the call, when Omar snatched my phone out of my hands!
“HEY!”
The burly guard leaned over to me and communicated non-verbally I should sit back and shut the fuck up. Yes, he said all that. With his eyes, and a snarl. Talented guy. I leaned back. A motorcycle cop who had cleared the previous intersection now sped past us, with nary a sweat stain on his khaki uniform blouse, on his way to halt traffic on an intersection ahead of us.
“Yes?” said Omar. I could hear K-T on the other side and hoped she’d be able to tell the difference between his voice and mine.
“Mr. Carstairs can’t come to the phone right now. Who is this?”
He listened for a second and frowned. Then he looked at me.
“A lady wants to know if you have bought Pee Pee Ai.”
“What?!” I said, completely baffled. Was this not my car? I was sure I’d seen her name on the display. Obviously I don’t have her stored under K-T, but as ‘Unknown.’, so with a period at the end.
“He doesn’t know what that is. Huh. Oh. I see. Hang on.”
“She says you may be entitled to claim thousands of pounds. Who is this lady? Why is a lady calling you?”
“I have NO idea. Must be a wrong number.”
He checked the screen.
“It says ‘Unknown’. Huh. Listen, Miss? He is busy. Try later. Salaam Aleikum.”
He gave me back my phone. I leaned back. Why was my car smart enough to pretend to be a call centre agent right now but completely unable to understand the fairly basic instruction to come and pick me up twenty minutes ago?
As soon as Omar had caught me trying to escape, I had been frogmarched to my room and ordered to pack. Asim had gone to assist Alexandra, who wasn’t known for her ability to pack either light or quickly. We met up in the lobby, me with a carry-on for my laptop and one heavy suitcase and Alexandra with four wheeled suitcases. Three limousines, two palace guard patrol vehicles and four motorbike outriders were ready to bring us to the airport. Palace staff, dressed in red jackets, handled our luggage. Asim knew I was in trouble, but was smart enough not to ask any questions about it right now.
Obviously Omar had wanted to know where I was going. My answer was not my finest work of fiction, but it seemed to be enough: I just said I didn’t feel like going on a twelve hour flight. I also objected to being dragged away from my room so quickly after my ordeal in prison, especially without having been given a proper reason.
Omar found this unreasonable and told me so in no uncertain terms, reminding me once again I was his employee and I should do as I was told. I gave in very easily once I was certain he had accepted it as a believable reason for a man to flee his workplace.
Just before we reached the airport, I spotted two of the cars Caroline’s impromptu security force was using, idling at the exit of a service station courtyard. They merged into traffic as we passed and one tried to get alongside us, but the officers escorting us weren’t having that and shooed them away. One bike patrolman even made a kicking motion. Omar noticed it.
“What is that about?” he asked the driver.
“Probably new arrivals, Your Royal Highness. White noses.”
“Oh. Idiots.”
New arrivals is a term for expats who have recently arrived and are still settling in. They live in temporary housing until they can find a place of their own, they haven’t arranged a Saudi driver’s license or other paperwork yet and they are caught unawares when it’s prayer time and the shops suddenly evacuate. It takes a while to get into the rhythm. Americans especially, who are used to very prompt service, sometimes get upset when they put in a food order and are told the chef won’t even get started on it until the next prayer has ended.
“But that don’t start for another twenty minutes!” I’ve heard one exclaim. “I don’t plan on being here by then!”
Imagine scarfing down your evening meal in a sit-down restaurant in under twenty minutes. Less, in fact, as you also expect it can be prepared within that timeframe. No other Islamic countries have these mass evacuations during prayer, by the way. At most the cash registers close for a few minutes, but generally commerce proceeds and non-Muslim patrons can be served by non-Muslim staff.
The black cars had no choice but to drop back again. Our escort cleared two more intersections as we sped through and then led us to a small terminal on the east side of King Khalid airport, where Saudia Private Aviation launches and receives business jets and where all the airplanes of the Royal Family are serviced. Not even Saudi princes are interested in pissing away money on anything larger than a medium size jet, so the Saudi Air Force keeps a few Airbuses and Boeings around, for when a Gulfstream, a Jetstream or a Cessna Citation just won’t cut it. A barrier opened for our convoy and our driver parked next to an Airbus A330. Air-stairs were rolling into position as we all got out. The Airbus 330 is not nearly the behemoth the A380 is, but it would probably still hurt if you caught one in the eye. Sixty meters long, seventeen metres high and room for 253 passengers in its normal configuration. However, this wasn’t a normal configuration. Asim turned into a tour guide, as he often does when he wants to impress me, and waited with me on the tarmac while the important people boarded first. At least I was one of the first servants allowed on board, but all in all there were only about thirty of us. Ten of those were civil servants from a trade delegation. Princess Alexandra, who had been in the car behind ours, was kept away from them as if she had the plague. I saw her being shoved up the stairs by a very protective Omar, but for now I was kept waiting. Fortunately we were in the shade of the Airbus, which helped a little. I suffered more than most. The Saudi men, dressed in white, seemed entirely unaffected. Airport staff, loaders and what have you, wore uniforms and even helmets but seemed not to care too much about the heat. I did.
As Asim was babbling about the gold taps, handmade carpets and rosewood panelling I was about to behold, I noticed the black cars gathering around a Gulfstream G650, parked some three hundred metres away. That’s a beast, as far as private jets go. Our aviation rental company didn’t even have anything larger available. By our I mean Keller & Fox. We ... they rent their planes. As a general rule, if it flies, floats or fucks you should rent, not buy. That’s what Peter Fox says, mainly to annoy any women in hearing distance when he’s in one of his moods. But he’s not wrong.
Even though I couldn’t really make out any faces at this distance, the unmistakable but striking figure of Caroline alighted from a limousine. She just stood there for minute, staring in our direction. Only when her arms moved down did I realise she had been using binoculars. I saw that her team was loading suitcases and crates into the modest cargo space. Another car pulled up and I recognized my father’s hair, and the doctor. My phone buzzed and as Asim’s back was turned for a second I glanced at the screen. I didn’t recognize the number, or rather my phone didn’t, but it could only have been a message from her.
“Looks like you’re not coming home yet. Best of luck.”
I wanted to wave, but then we had to board.
The Airbus was divided into two sections: the back had forty seats, two on each side. They were all of the business class variety, by which I mean they reclined and had small partitions so that the occupant could have a bit of a snooze and the illusion of privacy. This is where senior servants such as myself and the members of the trade delegation sat. Lower ranked servants didn’t get to go on this trip, because hotel staff would fill their roles.
The front of the plane was separated by a partition wall with a door to the left. Behind that door a corridor lead to a conference room, some luxury cabins and the cockpit. Several sliding doors opened to that corridor. Asim couldn’t wait to show me what was behind them, but we were asked to take a seat. Omar and the princess were at the front, but Asim preferred to hang out with me. He introduced me to everybody, which is to say I shook hands with seven bearded men in traditional clothes who were virtually indistinguishable.
I have mentioned before that you can fault Arabs for many things, but generally not lack of manners. They all smiled, they all asked polite questions about my experiences in their country and they all presented their business cards. I would have described them as a group of highwaymen before, but at this point I was actually relieved I’d be spending some time with these very civilised civil servants as my fellow passengers and not, as has been the case before, a German backpacker with dreadlocks down to his arse who takes his shoes off even while the rest of us are boarding, a Russian man who was so drunk he had to be restrained from singing, a nervous Canadian woman with a ‘comfort duck’ on her lap (I swear I didn’t make that up) and various other weirdos you encounter on regular flights. After four introductions we were asked to take our seats and I saw Caroline’s jet taking off ahead of us. Home hadn’t felt so far away since I had come to this place. But clearly I wasn’t done yet.
As soon as we were airborne and the plane had levelled off, Asim went on with the introductions. I was glad he had kept track of who I’d met already, because I certainly couldn’t. If I may digress for one brief moment with an anecdote about life in The Netherlands (I promise I won’t make a habit out of it), let me tell you one thing foreigners find both amazing and unpleasant about us: the way we celebrate birthdays. We suck at it. The idea is that you are invited over for coffee, either around noon or after dinner (but NEVER around mealtimes), and then you will be offered a seat around the coffee table in the house. There usually aren’t enough, so extra seats are brought from all over the house and everyone sits in a circle. Hence the word ‘kringetjesverjaardag’. This means many people end up having to balance both a cup of coffee and a piece of cake on a plate in their hands, as they are too far away from the actual table. The cake is, I’m ashamed to say, never very good. We don’t do patisserie very well. (A popular chain store called HEMA is ‘famed’ for its cake selection. One time they were caught using cellulose as a filling agent in a children’s cake. Cellulose. That’s WOOD to you and me. Paper, at best.)
If it’s evening you will also be offered beer or wine, and the host will present a plate with cheese cubes and liverwurst slices. This agony can easily last three hours and when I was young it was also still very normal to smoke in the house, or to allow guests to do so even if you didn’t. In fact, my parents would put out glasses filled with cigarettes. Kate soon put a stop to that, let me tell you. By the time she was four she was calling people up to let them know they’d better stay home if they intended to smoke on her birthday. (I gave her the numbers.) We never saw uncle Ruud after that, which was a relief to us all as the man had a voice like a fog horn but made less sense.
Anyway, the worst part of these birthdays is arriving late, because now you have to make your way along the ENTIRE circle, which given the size of Dutch houses is very similar to having to make your way to the middle seats in a theatre when the rest of the row has already been filled. You then have to shake hands and go ‘fielsiteerd’. Fielsiteerd, fielsiteerd, fielsiteerd, fielsiteerd. Don’t leave anyone out. Meanwhile, the host will go to the attic to hunt down a seat and you can spend the rest of the evening on a swivelling office chair. I would advise you to never, ever accept a Dutch birthday invitation. Even if it’s a lovely day in summer and the host has a garden, they STILL set up this fucking circle.
Where was I? Oh yes, the point of this anecdote was that this round of introductions felt like a Dutch birthday. When I was finally done exchanging pleasantries with the last guy and had pocketed his business card, I turned around and found another Saudi man waiting for me. He’d boarded seconds before the door closed and immediately disappeared behind the partition wall. He was flanked by Asim and Omar and looked like all the others: tea towel, white dishdasha, facial hair. Except this guy wore a brown cloak with gold trim.
“Carstairs!” said Omar. “Come here and meet His Royal Highness Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman bin Faisal bin Turki bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Saud, the son of His Royal Highness King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and deputy crown prince.”
I smiled, approached the man and offered my hand. He shook it politely, but his eyebrows shot up. And not just because I was supposed to have kissed his hand, as protocol dictates.
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