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These are chapters 1 and 2 of four postings in eight chapters, to complete posting by the end of March 2020.
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Chapter One: Welcome to the Gulf, Chris Carter
The combination of knock-out pills, which didn't completely work, and liquor, on the run from Frankfurt to the Arabian Peninsula would have had me staggering off the plane onto the tarmac even if the oppressive desert heat hadn't done the trick. I had to lift my arm to cover my eyes against the glare off the steel and glass monolith of a terminal building that rose like a displaced iceberg in front of me. Westerners like me were being piled into one of two airport buses at the bottom of the jet stairs. The buses had already taken all of the Arabic men to the terminal—those having been permitted off the plane first—and then had returned for the rest of us. These Arabs, dressed in the white robes the country book the Agency had doled out to me shortly before I left Washington called thawbs or dishdashas, evidently were local potentates. The handbook told me not to bother to try to distinguish a thawb from a dishdasha.
I wasn't in much condition to tell much of anything from the other—although it was obvious that, no matter what order we deplaned in, the men in the robes were going to get to the terminal before the rest of us.
The heat of the Gulf emirate, showing in waves of heavy air coming off the sand beyond the runways, that we'd landed in was still building when we finally reached the terminal and were hit with a blast of cold air conditioning inside what I'd already named The Iceberg. Then, as we slowly cleared immigration control—me clearing last, because third-world satrapies just loved to hassle Americans with diplomatic passports—everyone seemed to disappear. When I stumbled out into the main terminal, it was like I was the only one in a gigantic air hanger that just soared up and up. It took a while to focus in on the direction I was to go to get to baggage claim. The terminal seemed empty—so deserted that the sound of my shoes clipping along as I walked across the terminal floor echoed off the glass walls and steel frame of the terminal. All of the signage was in Arabic. That alone didn't defeat me, as I spoke and read Arabic fairly fluently. But none of it seemed to relate to airport functions. Pithy blurbs from the Koran are all very nice—in fact I found them inspiring and helping to steel my resolve in what I had agreed to do—but they don't tell me where to find my suitcase.
Stumbling onto the baggage claim area at last, I could see my bags circling the metal carousel as I approached and disappear through strips of black rubber back into the bowels of the building before I could reach them. Of course, it took them an age to come out the other side again—and of course my bags were the last to be picked up and I was the last to clear customs. Material was sticking out of the seams of the suitcase; despite having diplomatic immunity, my bag had been searched and there would be no apology forthcoming for that. I was a bit surprised to discover that they were every bit as "in your face" with American diplomats here as they were in Israel.
In one last moment of frustration and confusion, the customs agents linked arms to deny me access to the exit everyone else had used and to direct me over to a door at the side. They were smiling now, their job of putting the American in his place finished. Who would have known that at this late stage of the process, there would be a diplomatic lounge and separate entrance to depart the terminal—to a covered waiting area for limousines rather than right out onto the "teeming masses" street. In the lounge, tapping her toes impatiently, a look of irritated impatience on her face, was the last person in the world I wanted to either see or to be made to feel delinquent by.
I had met Penny Haskell in Langley a couple of times during my abbreviated training for this post, where I was to engage in covert tech support while pretending to be a State Department logistics officer and where even that had an element of pretense. Haskell was the chief of station in this emirate—the top American spy in the country. Each time we had briefly met and spoken at CIA Headquarters across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., Haskell had been abrupt and cold. She always seemingly needed to be somewhere else in the next ten minutes and was dealing with me only on sufferance—although it had always been a case of me sitting and cooling my heels, waiting for an appointment with her that I hadn't been the one to schedule.
Today was no different—other than that she'd been waiting for me, and she wasn't at all pleased by that fact. At my obvious confusion that I had been met at the nearly deserted airport in this postage-stamp sized emirate on the Persian Gulf by the COS herself rather than by some embassy foreign national flunky, she told me, in clipped tones, that the COS always met her incoming staff members. But she went on to say that my plane had been late and I'd come out of customs late—and she managed to say it in a way that suggested I personally was responsible for the delays—and that she was expected at an event. There wasn't time to take me to my hotel or the embassy; I'd have to go to the event with her.
Wonderful, I thought. Just what I wanted to do, having traveled a quarter of the distance around the globe without sleep—although I could fall down in a stupor now—with the makings of a hangover and nearly drooping with heat exhaustion.
"Where?" I started to say.
"We're going to the horse races," Haskell said.
God, yes, I thought. Just the thing for the condition I'm in—outside at the rails in the heat of the desert day with horses kicking dust into my face. Lovely.
The horse races turned out to be at a fancy track across the city, the emirate's capital being a compact collection of impossibly tall and wildly shaped skyscrapers set on obviously manmade islands poking out into a harbor on the shores of the Gulf. Haskell told me that, from the air, the whole complex fanned out in the shape of a palm tree. I believed her. She also told me that the city was only for the wealthy rulers—that the lower classes lived in slums hidden on the other side of manmade hills surrounding the central city and only came into the modern city to serve the upper class. I believed that too. I was so tired and hung over I was willing to believe anything she said.
I balked a bit when she told me that the horse race we were going to would feature this year's winners of the Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes, racing each other—the horses having been shipped here just for a race that would last less than eight minutes. But it turns out she was right about that too. Mercifully, though, the track was too fancy for us to be standing at the rails. We were in some sort of large, air-conditioned skybox overlooking the track. I would have thought that there would be quite a crowd out to see such a race, but it was only being run for those of us in the skybox.
It was here where I saw him and he perked up and gave me a speculative full-body inspection with his hooded eyes when Penny Haskell introduced me to his father, Prince Sayeed el-Basir, the holder of every vestige of functional power in this small emirate. Haskell emphasized in the terse introduction that I had been an intercollegiate tennis champion. That's when Amir el-Basir moved out of his father's shadow and asked her to repeat that.
