Blink of an Eye (42 page)
Those who followed the politics of the region knew that the destabilization in Saudi Arabia could easily spread to other Arab countries, as well as to other Muslim countries.
The U.S. military was already developing plans to take out a Saudi kingdom run by Khalid, but Clive held an extrapolation of such plans, and it didn't read as though removing a militant king would be easy. In fact, according to Seth, they would fail, at least in the first three months.
He glanced at the clock. Time was running out. According to information from within Saudi Arabia, Khalid would storm the palace in less than four hours.
“Come on, Seth,” he muttered. “What am I looking for?”
An image of Seth bent over the computer, typing away, ran across his mind. What made a mind brilliant?
“You're still out there, aren't you, Seth? This isn't over, is it?”
Clive looked back at the printout. The secretary was right about one thing: A militant government would depend on the cooperation of the sheik and the Shia. A thin thread of an idea tickled his mind. If Seth still had his gift, he would be able to tell Clive whether this mind-bending exercise would yield anything of value in the next few hours.
Forget Seth. Back to the printout.
Sheik Abu Ali al-Asamm stood at the entrance to his tent, looking over the valley filled with his men. If God wills it, he thought. For twenty years, thirty years, God had not; today he had changed his mind.
Riyadh sat on the horizon, dirtied by a haze of smoke from a hundred tire fires. The afternoon prayer call was just now warbling over the city.
Yes, pray, my fellow Muslims. Pray, as I pray.
The House of Saud had grown softer with each passing decade. Abdul Aziz would roll in his grave if he could see Abdullah today. They had abandoned the central teachings of the Prophet for favor with the West. So now those who were faithful were called fundamentalists and regarded with distaste and suspicion. Was religion a thing to change with cultural moods?
Evidently, most thought it was.
One of his most trusted servants, Al-Hakim, approached from behind. “We have received another message, Abu.”
The sheik didn't remove his gaze from the city. “From whom?”
“It's the Americans,” he said. “They are saying that should the coup succeed, they will not allow fifty years of progress to slip into the sea.”
Al-Asamm closed his eyes. Why the Americans insisted on putting their fingers into every jar, he would never understand.
“Go on.”
“They say they are drawing up plans for the removal of Khalid already.”
Al-Asamm smiled. They were a cunning lot; he would give them that. And it was true that his bloodline would not be fully established in the kingdom until Miriam bore a child. But they underestimated the value of both his mind and his word.
Everything
was negotiable in the American mind, including their own religion. Not so with the sheik, Abu Ali al-Asamm.
“Tell them I am more interested in the will of God than in the will of men. Then remind them that they are merely men.” The sheik paused. “On second thought, don't tell them that last part. It will only send them into a panic. Just tell them to mind their own business and stay on their own side of the ocean.”
Al-Hakim bowed and returned to the room where they kept the telex machine. Al-Asamm crossed his arms and walked to his mat. It was time to pray.
t
hey sat at the table, her hands in his, sharing precious minutes. As they talked, Seth periodically stood and crossed to the window before returning.
Their predicament was hardly comprehensible. Miriam was an Arab. A Muslim. She was a Saudi princess, daughter to the Sheik Abu Ali al-Asamm, and now she was married to a Saudi prince. Seth, on the other hand was . . . well, what was he? A brilliant man, surely destined to change the world by discovering light travel or a longer-lasting lightbulb. Seth was a Jew, at least in heritage. An American, not a Saudi.
And they were in love; this was a problem.
He told her briefly about his trip to Saudi Arabia, about how he'd awakened in Cheyenne Mountain after seeing her in his sleep, and about how he passed through Saudi immigration. But he seemed disconnected from these events. He'd had these powerful experiences so recently, but recounted them as if they were only distant dreams.
For Miriam they were not remote abstractions at all. Their implications burrowed through her head. Perhaps the problems of love were only illusions of the mind.
Miriam stood and walked toward the candles. When the light was on in Seth's mind, he could see so clearly, but when it was off, he became blind. Yet the truth was unchanging, waiting to be lit by a candle, wasn't it? And what was that truth?
Seth sat in silence behind her. She lifted her hand and slowly ran it over the flame. So small and yet so hot, so real.
“Do you think it's possible that so many millions of people could be wrong about love?” she asked. She felt her pulse quicken even in speaking the question.
He was quiet.
“That love is the only way?” she said. “The implications are almost too much to bear.”
“How so?” He looked at the candle.
“How can you kill your neighbor if you love him?”
Seth nodded. “I suppose you can't.”
“Why are we not taught this in our mosques? Why do your churches and synagogues and temples ignore this greatest truth?”
He thought about that for a long moment. “Because politics and power are greater.”
“They'd do better to think with their hearts.”
“That's one way to put it.”
“But you now believe?”
“In love?”
“In the God of love.”
“Yes. I do. He changed the future.” The candlelight flickered in his eyes. “But I'm not seeing the future now.”
“You are depending on your mind!”
“What do you mean?”
“When you see things in your mind, they're easy to believe. All your life you've depended on this brilliance of yours. But when these thingsâthese futures you seeâare no longer
in
your mind, you lose faith. The whole world puts the mind before the heart. It's killing us all.”
He stared at her. She could almost see wheels spinning behind his eyes.
“You saw the futures and you believed, enough to come to Saudi Arabia to save me. But now that you can't see, you lose faith.”
“Faith?”
“You've never had faith,” she said. “And now it may cost us our lives.”
He turned and stared at the boarded-up window, pondering this logic like a stunned child who'd just seen a card trick.
“Faith in whom?”
“In God.”
“
Which
God?”
Miriam stood and went to the window. She crossed her arms and looked out. A small plume of dust rose on the horizon, but it was too far away to tell its source.
“In the same God who demands that we love our neighbor,” she said.
“Just like that?”
She turned. “Just like that.”
o
mar held up his hand. “Stop.”
Assir brought the Mercedes to a halt. They'd crested a knoll on the dirt road. The desert rolled out before them, unbroken except for this trail that divided north from south. A small shack rested at the base of a cliff, three hundred meters ahead and a hundred meters off the road. According to the tracking device, the car was there, perhaps behind the hut.
“The common hut.” He pointed at the cliff. Assir eased the car forward and Omar picked up the radio. “They are in the common hut to our right. Do you see it?”
The radio crackled. “Yes.”
“Weapons ready. Form a perimeter around the front. Don't underestimate them.” He tossed the radio on the seat, pulled out his nine millimeter, and chambered a round.
The cars split the desert and approached the shack from multiple angles, raising ribbons of dust as they converged on the cliff. Assir followed a pair of fresh tire tracks and brought the car to a stop fifty meters from the shanty. Dust drifted by and then cleared. From here the hut looked abandoned.
The other Mercedes stopped, one by one, in a great semicircle around the shack, pinning it against the sheer rock.
“There's a car at the rear of the hut,” Assir said.
Omar nodded. The Mercedes purred. For a full minute he waited, not expecting anything. No one spoke over the radio; they would only follow his lead. He would prolong this menacing sight, this display of power, for Miriam to see from her pitiful hiding place. Ten black cars with tinted windshields, poised for the final kill, at his leisure.
Omar opened his door. The afternoon heat displaced the car's conditioned air, coaxing a sweat from his brow before he stood. He looked down the line of sedans over the roof of his own. One by one their doors opened and twenty men joined him, loitering behind the cover of their doors.
Omar faced the shack. “I will give you to the count of ten to come out unharmed,” he called. “Then we will open fire.” He lifted his pistol and fired a round into the corner brick.
“One!”
“Don't be stupid,” Miriam's voice called out.
The strength of her voice surprised him. This in front of his men. He clenched his jaw.
“If you kill me, your father will take your head off,” Miriam called out. “And if he fails, then I promise you my father will not! Put your silly toy away.”
A hawk called from over the cliff. He hadn't expected them to buy his threat, but neither had he expected her to dismiss him as a fool
.
“And if you think you can come in here and kill Seth before dragging me out, you'd better reconsider,” she called out. “Do you really believe that I would allow myself to be taken alive, only to be forced to look at your hideous face for the rest of my life?”
She defied him in front of his men to draw out his anger. He knew it and was powerless to stop the chill that ripped through his bones. He decided then, staring through the heat at the shack, that Miriam would live only long enough to bear him a child. A son was all he needed from her.
“I hear the sounds of an animal,” he said calmly. “I would like to speak to the man. To the American.”
“Take a hike, Omar,” a male voice called out. “She said she doesn't want to see you.
Capisce?”
Perhaps for the first time in his adult life, Omar was speechless. Stunned and unfathoming.
“Okay, I'm sorry,” Seth called out. “I take it back. But I'm afraid that Miriam has fallen hopelessly in love with me. We must allow love toâ”
“You are talking about my wife!” Omar screamed. “My
wife
!”
His voice echoed off the cliff.
“Yes, well, that is a problem. But we've been praying to God in here and we think we have a solution to this mess. We've decided that it will be okay to share it with you. That is, if you're man enough to come in and join us.”
Omar glanced at his watch. In two hours the sheik would storm the palace. It was time to be done with this foolishness.
“Your wife has demanded that I kill her if you come in after her,” the American called. “We'll be Romeo and Juliet. We'll both die in the embrace of true love. I'm fresh out of poison, but there's a shard of glass in here that we think will do the trick.”
Would he do such a thing? No.
And yet . . . the American had to know the situation was hopeless for him. And Miriam would probably prefer death over capture. The realization drove a small wedge of agitation into Omar's mind. He glanced down the line of cars. Seth stood to gain nothing by killing him. Twenty others here would storm the shack and take out their fury on him.
“I'm going in,” Omar said to Assir.
“Sirâ”
“He has nothing to gain by killing me. If anything happens, storm the place.”
“And Miriam?”
Omar hesitated. “Keep her alive.”
He stepped out from behind the car door. Assir barked an order to the others behind him.
“The gun, Omar,” Seth called. “Drop the gun.”
He tossed the gun to the sand and walked on. The door came open with a gentle tug. He stepped into the dim room.
“Close the door.”
The American stood in the corner, dressed in an abaaya, eyes flashing in the candlelight. He held a shard of glass against Miriam's throat.
“Close the door!” Seth said.
Miriam winced. She was dressed like a man. Omar pulled the door closed and faced them.
“Think I was kidding?” Seth asked. “Empty your pockets.”
Omar pulled out some coins. He tossed them onto the table. “You do realize that there is no way out of here. We are surrounded by twenty heavily armed men.”
Seth seemed not to have heard. “Pull up your pant legs.”
The American was after his knife. How did he know? Omar pulled out a ten-inch bowie knife from the sheath around his calf. He briefly considered rushing Seth then, but dismissed the idea with one look at the pressure of the glass against Miriam's skin. She could not be harmed. Not yet.