It was 1:14 p.m. Shortly after three, Hanifa rang the consulate’s main number and asked if Omar was there. The man who answered said Omar had never arrived for his appointment. And when Hanifa called back an hour later, a different man said Omar had already left. At four fifteen she saw several men walk out of the building with large pieces of luggage. His Royal Highness Prince Khalid bin Mohammed was not one of them.
When Hanifa finally returned to the InterContinental, the room had been ransacked and Omar’s laptop was missing. She rang ZDF headquarters and filed an urgent report about a journalist from Der Spiegel who had disappeared after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Within forty-eight hours, much of the world was asking the same question: Where was Omar Nawwaf?
Ten days later, after finally being allowed to enter the consulate, the Turkish police declared that Omar had been murdered while he was inside and that his body had been gruesomely dismembered and disposed of. Almost overnight, KBM, the great Arab reformer, beloved by the financial and intellectual elites of the West, became an untouchable.
Hanifa remained in Istanbul until late October, monitoring the Turkish investigation. When she finally returned to Berlin she found that her apartment, like her room at the InterContinental, had been torn to pieces. All of Omar’s papers had been stolen, including the notes he had taken during his last reporting trip to the Middle East. Heartbroken, Hanifa consoled herself with the knowledge she was carrying Omar’s child. But in early November she suffered a miscarriage.
Her first assignment after returning to work took her, of all places, to Geneva. Posing as the wife of a security-conscious Jordanian diplomat, she visited the International School, where she observed the afternoon exodus of the student body. One child, a girl of twelve, departed the school in an armored Mercedes limousine. The headmaster intimated the girl was the daughter of a wealthy Egyptian construction magnate. Hanifa, however, knew the truth. She was Reema bint Khalid Abdulaziz Al Saud, the child of the devil.
“And you never tried to warn the devil his child was in danger?”
“After what he’d done to Omar?” She shook her head. “Besides, I didn’t think I needed to.”
“Why not?”
“Khalid had Omar’s computer and his notes.”
Unless, thought Gabriel, it wasn’t the Saudis who had taken them. “And when you heard Khalid had abdicated?”
She wept with joy and posted a taunting message on her Twitter feed. A few days later she returned to Geneva to watch the afternoon departure of students from the International School. The child of the devil was nowhere to be seen.
“And yet you remained silent.”
Her dark eyes flashed. “If Khalid had killed your—”
“He’d be dead already.” After a silence, Gabriel said, “But Khalid isn’t solely to blame for Omar’s death.”
“Don’t you dare try to absolve him.”
“It’s true he authorized it, but it wasn’t his idea. In fact, he wanted to meet with Omar to hear what he had to say.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“He was told Omar intended to kill him.”
She was incredulous. “Omar never hurt anyone in his life. Who would say such a thing?”
“Abdullah,” said Gabriel. “The next king of Saudi Arabia.”
Hanifa’s eyes widened. “Abdullah engineered Omar’s murder so Khalid wouldn’t learn of the plot against him—is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes.”
“It all fits together very nicely, doesn’t it?”
“Your version of the story matches Khalid’s perfectly. There’s one part, though, that makes no sense at all.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s no way a pair of veteran Middle East reporters like you and Omar didn’t make a copy of the story.”
“Actually, Mr. Allon, I never said we didn’t.”
They had made several, in fact. Hanifa had e-mailed encrypted copies of the story to her work account at ZDF and to a personal Gmail account. Fearful of the hackers at the Royal Data Center, she had also loaded the file onto three flash drives. One was carefully hidden in her apartment, and another was locked in her desk at ZDF’s Berlin bureau, which was protected by round-the-clock security.
“And the third?” asked Gabriel.
Hanifa produced a flash drive from a zippered compartment of her handbag and laid it on the table. Gabriel opened his laptop and inserted the device into one of the USB ports. An unnamed folder appeared on the screen. When he clicked it, a dialogue box requested a user name.
“Yarmouk,” said Hanifa. “It’s the refugee camp—”
“I know what it is.” Gabriel entered the seven characters, and a single icon appeared.
“Omar,” said Hanifa as tears washed over her cheeks. “The password is Omar.”
46
Gulf of Aqaba
It was a few minutes after four in the afternoon when El Al Flight 2372 from Berlin landed at Ben Gurion Airport. Gabriel, Mikhail, and Sarah squeezed into the backseat of an Office SUV waiting on the tarmac. Yossi Gavish, the bookish head of Research, was in the passenger seat. As the SUV lurched forward, he handed Gabriel a file. It was a forensic analysis of Crown Prince Abdullah’s checkered business career, based in part on the material supplied by Khalid during his visit to Gabriel’s home.
“We’ve got it cold, boss. All the money came from you-know-who.”
The SUV stopped next to a private Airbus H175 VIP helicopter that stood, rotors drooping, at the northern end of the airport. Khalid’s pilot was behind the controls. Yossi handed a Jericho .45 pistol to Mikhail and a Beretta 9mm to Gabriel.
“The IAF will shadow you as far as they can. Once you get into Egyptian airspace, you’re on your own.”
Gabriel left his Office BlackBerry and laptop in the SUV and followed Mikhail and Sarah into the Airbus’s luxuriously appointed cabin. They flew southward along the coast, over the towns of Ashdod and Ashkelon, then turned inland to avoid the airspace of the Gaza Strip. Fires burned in fields of grain on the Israeli side of the armistice line.
“Hamas starts them with incendiary kites and balloons,” Mikhail explained to Sarah.
“It’s not such an easy life.”
He pointed toward the chaotic skyline of Gaza City. “But it’s better than theirs.”
Gabriel read Yossi’s file twice as the Negev passed beneath them. The sky outside his window darkened slowly, and by the time they reached the southern end of the Gulf of Aqaba the sea was black. Tranquillity lay at anchor off Tiran Island, aglow with its distinctive neon-blue running lights. A shore craft hovered protectively off the massive superyacht’s port side, another off its starboard.
The Airbus alighted on Tranquillity’s forward helipad—there were two—and the pilot shut down the engine. Mikhail exited the cabin and was confronted by a pair of Saudi security men in nylon jackets bearing Tranquillity’s insignia. One of the men held out a hand, palm up.
“I have a better idea,” said Mikhail. “Why don’t you shove—”
“It’s all right,” Khalid called down from somewhere in the upper reaches of the ship. “Send them up right away.”