Florence of Arabia

"Never mind, 'darling.' Now, Florence, certain allegations are being made. I shall pay you the courtesy of repeating them to you directly." "Yes, my lord."

"And never mind 'my lord.' Don't think you two fool me with these flatteries. You may spin your spiderwebs, but I am no insect. Now. I'm going to ask you straightforwardly. Are you making love with my wife?"

"Gaz." Laila said, "really, this is too mortifying."

"Let her answer."

In the car on the way. Florence had rehearsed answers to "Are you with the CIA?" This question she had not anticipated "Well, no. Since you ask." "There's talk. Talk about the two of you." "Talk from who? Who has told you this nonsense?" Laila said. "It is enough that it is being said."

"A fine standard!" I.aila said.

"Never mind standards. A rumor is circulating that my wile—the sheika—is having a thing with another woman! It's demeaning. An affront to the manhood."

"Darling. I shouldn't think your manhood is in any question whatsoever, given the workout it's been getting."

"Woman, you vex me!"

Florence said, "May I show Your Majesty a news article that appeared yesterday in Al Matar? It concerns this mutter—matter—of your dignity." She produced a folder from her briefcase and presented it to him. I le took it grumpily and read. The headline said:

EMIR IS GUIDING FORCE BEHIND TV MATAR

According to those in the know in Amo-Amas. it is the emir Gazzir Bin Haz himself, and not the sheika Laila, who has guided TV Matar from its inception.

"It is from his vision that the programs stem," says this person. "Gazzir brilliantly understands the power of the medium, and is using it to transform the Arab world and to bring it into harmony with modernity, while preserving what is fundamental in our rich religion and culture. To be sure, this will earn him enemies, but worthy ones, and no leader can be called great who does not have great enemies. In this sense, Gazzir can be called 'the New Nasser' or, what with the current crusades being mounted against Islam by the United States and England, 'the New Saladin.'"

The story had been written by Rick, translated into Arabic by George, and placed in Al Matar by Bobby. "Hmm," the emir said.

"Keep reading." Florence said. "There's a paragraph about Laila."

Though Sheika Laila is the nominal head of TV Matar, she gives full credit to her husband for conceiving and implementing the revolutionary broadcasts.

"The emir." she said in a telephone interview, "is a visionary. For him there is no present, only the nature. As head of state, he is immersed in the thousand and one details of governing his country. It's true that I had some minor experience in broadcasting, so it was only natural that he would ask me to help him. But from beginning to end, TV Matar is the emir's achievement."

"You said this?" the emir asked. "It's there in black and white."

'What are you two she-devils up to? I demand to know."

"Helping you become the New Saladin." said Laila. "But if you'd rather just go down in history as another rich Gulf emir, say the word. It's up to you."

The emir looked at Florence. "Is this true?"

"If greatness is being thrust upon you. sire, why fight it?"

The emir stroked his goatee. "I had a telephone call from Kamar ak-Zaman this morning. He's secretary of the Arab League."

"Oh?" Laila said.

"They want me lo address the conference. In Bahrain. Next week."

"Thais marvelous, darling! They've never asked you before."

"Sire." Florence said, "this is truly wonderful news. And yet I fear that your absence from the country at such a time might prove ... irresistible to certain elements."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, sire, that your brother Maliq might seize the opportunity of your absence to move against you."

The emir stared at Florence for a second and then laughed. "Maliq? Depose me? Please."

"Consider." Florence said. "Your brother goes from being a race-car driver to a raving ayatollah in less lime that it takes to accelerate from zero to sixty miles an hour. Suddenly, all your moolahs are preaching that you are corrupt—I'm not saying they're right, mind you. Then the French ambassador tells you that your wife and I are having a lesbian affair."

The emir recoiled. "How did you know that?"

"Simple deduction. Your Majesty. You met with him and summoned me and confronted us with this canard. Which it is. Meanwhile, the Wasabis have put their military on alert and are flying fighter jets along the border. A car bomb goes off in downtown Amo. And now you're being lured—invited—out of the country. Call me paranoid, but it has all the elements of a coup in the offing. By the way. you might ask M. Valmar, the next time he comes in to relay rumors about your wife and me, whether any of his staff at the embassy here are explosives experts."

"What are you saying? The French set off the bomb?"

"Your brother and the French do get along very well."

The emir turned lo his wife.

"It's all rather more interesting than presiding over the Switzerland of the Gulf, if you ask me," Laila said. "Florence may well be right. You don't have logo address the conference. You can be the New Saladin right here at home and go on getting richer off the advertising revenue. Saladin never had numbers like these. And there's this: Do you realize how long it has been since an Arab country put something on the table other than self-pity, denial, finger-pointing and suicide bombers? For the first time in centuries, an Arab country is generating income not from oil but from an idea. In this case, that women might just have something to contribute to civilization other than their vaginas. Don't you see what's happening? You could be the Arab leader to lake the Middle Bast out of the Middle Ages! And you greet this opportunity that has landed in your lap like a plump fig by wringing your hands and accusing us of being a pair of Sapphos?"

"Clap, clap." said the emir. "What a pretty speech." He turned back to Florence. "You think King Tallulah is involved in this so-called plot against me? He is flying his fighter jets along mv border. Back and forth, day and night. The desert roars with the sound of his engines. All because of your television station."

"1 don't know, sire. But historically Wasabia has yearned for a coastline."

"Would the Americans permit such a thing?"

"I can't speak for the US. government. It's true that there are more American and British warships off your coast than there are fish But after the way things have been going, it's possible that they might not be so anxious to intervene militarilv."

The emir considered. "Why then would the French ambassador come in and tell me that the Americans want to overthrow me?"

"I must say" Laila said, "M. Valmar had all sorts of things on his mind today, didn't he? He told you that?"

"He told me that Florence is a CIA spy who was sent here to undermine my regime."

"By making you rich and the New Saladin—the moral leader of the Arab world? That's some undermining."

"Are you a spy, Florence?" the emir asked.

"Don't you think you've accused Florence of enough for one day?" Laila interjected.

"No," Florence said. "I'm not a spy."

The emir didn't look especially convinced, though at this point, his head was spinning. "But why would Valmar have told me that he was concerned about the possibility of conflict between Matar and Wasabia?" he said.

"Who knows, darling? Maybe he wants you to buy some French fighter jets. Did that subject happen to come up?"

"He mentioned ... something."

"So."

"Whatever the case, from now on, I don't want the two of you going about in public together. It would only cause talk." "Ridiculous," Laila said.

"I'm the emir. I have to think about the dignity of Matar. Now you both may leave us. We have a headache."

"DIGNITY OF MATAR,'" Laila said to Florence outside the office. "The three most preposterous words in the English language. I'm sorry, darling. Looks like we won't be having any more mad, passionate sex. But if the dignity of Matar is at stake, what can one do? Honestly."

Florence was thinking about the concept of sexual abstinence. "Let me try something out on you," she said. "In case we want to take this to the next level."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The text message on Florence's secure BlackBerry said. "Blenheim Beach 2250 hours."

Blenheim Beach was an hour's drive south of Amo-Amas. A travel magazine had once named it one of the ten most beautiful beaches in the world. It had not gone on to become one of the world's most popular beaches, owing to the fact that it was the spawning ground for the banded sea krail, one of the world's prettiest and most deadly snakes. Before being renamed for Winston Churchill's illustrious ancestor, the area had been known as Noosh al Zhikh-ir, or Eve's Lagoon. Local legend said it was the site of the Garden of Eden.

Florence sat in her parked car looking out on the empty beach and the moonless night. She felt very exposed here. She'd taken pains to make sure she had not been followed. She was tired, her nerves jazzed from caffeine and adrenaline. The inside of her head felt like a ball of crumpled aluminum foil. She wanted to be home in Foggy Bottom, in a hot bubble bath, not on a stretch of sand wriggly with venomous snakes.

At a quarter to eleven, she got out of the car and walked to the water's edge, keeping an eye out for slithering things. Presently, she heard the sound of an outboard motor. She signaled with her flashlight. The signal was returned. She could not make it out until it was almost ashore: a swift inflatable boat, three men with blackened faces holding automatic weapons. A figure with an unblackened face jumped olf the bow of the boat and approached. "Bit dramatic, isn't it?" she said.

"All the flights were booked." Bobby said. He turned to the men in the boat. "Thank you. gentlemen. My compliments to the captain."

'The boat backed into the surf, turned and buzzed off into the darkness.

"Man, the size of these submarines today. Had a whole room to myself. In the old days, they'd have you sleepin' inside a torpedo tube. How you been. I've missed you."

Something about him seemed different. It wasn't until they were inside the car with the interior light on that she realized just how different he was. His short blond hair was now black, long and tied at the back in a pony tail. He also had a mustache. He grinned at her. "Say hello to Willie G Underwood." The southern accent was gone, replaced with a western twang. "Reno. Nevada. Damn pleased to meet you. My card."

JACKPOTS INTERNATIONAL GAMING CONSULTANTS

"Our Dice Arc Always Hot."

"And what fresh hell is this?" Florence said.

"Slot-machine repairman! We don't call ourselves that. We prefer the term 'reward adjustment specialist.' We service the big machines, your Trump 7600 or the Bugsy 1200—the monster slots that pay half or a million bucks. The ones with whistles and sirens—Weeoouoo! We have a winnerrrrrrr' Why risk making some Dutch cigar salesman a millionaire, right? You with me?"

"Why, indeed."

"You mad at me or somethin'?" He lapsed back into his Alabama accent. "I've been getting a lot of questions about you. Even Laila. Someone lingered you."

"Figured. That's why I'm here to fix slot machines. You got to blend in this business. It's all about blending." "Where are you staving?" "I'm booked into the Aladdin, on Infidel Land."

"You'll certainly blend there."

"I’ll really want to blend, maybe 1 should order up a couple Russian hookers. I'm startin' to like this assignment. You look beat. Flo."

"'The reason I look 'beat' is that I've been getting visits in the middle of the night from police looking for you."

"Sorry ‘bout that. But they're about to have bigger things to worry about than a little shootout in a garage."

"What are you planning to do?"

"Gonna refocus the energy around here. I see our friend Maliq has become quite the religious leader."

"Yes, and he's been doing a lot of preaching lately. Whipping up the moolahs."

"That happens when a man gets religion, puts aside his sinful past." Bobby mused. "Most of the founders of your major world religions were playboys of some kind before they found God. Then one day they hear this voice, and there's a flash of blindin' light, and the next thing you know, the hallelujah chorus is singin' and they've got a billion followers. When you think about it, Jesus was really the only one who founded a religion without first going through a young-'n'-crazy phase. He can't have had that much fun bein' a carpenter.

"I got a message for you from Uncle Sam. He's worried about you. He wants you out of here. I think he's right. Stuff's happenin' here, with more stuff about to happen."

"I'm not about to leave. This is my operation."

"I'm only the messenger. Ma'am."

"What's going on? What did you find out in Paris?"

"Since right around the lime of Maliq's miraculous escape in the car, seventy-eight bank accounts at the Banque de Cannes got opened up. The names on the accounts match the seventy-eight leadin' moolahs and were funded to a hundred thousand dollars each. Between what these guys are getting’ from the French, on top of the baksheesh their own government here pays 'em, I'm con-templalin' taking up the religious life myself."

"So it's true—they're mounting a coup against Gazzy?"

"That would be my guess," Bobby said. "They've been cultivatin' Maliq for some time now, givin’ him fast cars and pourin' enough Chateau Lafite in him to drown a cat. With Maliq in, they'd have what they've always wanted—shore-front. Naval bases, tanker terminals. Hell, by the time they're finished in Amo, it'll look like the Riviera. They'll probably even have film festivals. They'll say to King Tallulah and the Wasabis, 'Okay, we got rid of Emir Gazzir for you and installed the idiot brother. Naturellement, we'll be wantin' a discount on crude. But don't worry, you can make up for it chargin' the Americans double what they've been payin'.'" Bobby shook his head. "I really should ‘ve figured this out a lot sooner. If I had, I sure as heck wouldn'ta used Air France for my fake flight-out of here. That was truly stupid of me. That's why they knew it was me killed that guy in the garage. They blew me to the Mataris. On the other hand, that's what led me to them. So in a way, we're even. But not for long, 'cause I'm about to open a can of industrial-strength whup-ass on our French friends."

"What are you going to do?"

"Flo—Florence, you really don't need to know that."

"You're still working for me." Florence said. "Aren't you?"

"I'm not sure this entire situation has a whole lot of coherence to it at this point. But listen, I think Uncle Sam's got a point about you gettin' out of here. TV Matar was a great idea, but instead of liberatin' women, it appears to be plungin' the region into considerable distress."

"It'll be a nightmare here, especially for women, if Maliq takes over and the Wasabis are calling the shots. You know what they'll do."

Bobby looked out the window. "Yeah." he said, "if I was a Matari, I'd definitely be inclined to invest in companies that manufacture abaayas and veils. Things could get quite ugly around here."

"The French ambassador told Gazzy there's a rumor going around that Laila and I are lesbians."

Bobby sighed. "Man, they are good. Gotta hand it to them. If word goes 'round here that you and the emir's wife are havin' a roll in the hammock, I'd better call that water taxi that just dropped me off and tell 'em to pick you up."

"I'm not leaving, and that's that."

"You're the boss." They rode in silence. "Uh..." Bobby said. "What?"

"This rumor—that's all it is, just a rumor?"

"I—where do you—how can you ask me such a thing?"

"I'm only askin'. As the person in charge of security here. 1 might as well have all the information." "Well, now you do." "All right, then."

"Just because I haven't made a pass al you—"

"Flo"—Bobby sighed—"that has nothin' to do with it"

"Would you mind not calling me that?"

"All right. Ma'am."

"Don't call me that, either. Why do I have to sound like a cleaning woman or an old lady?"

"All right. Florence of Arabia. Is that what you want me to call you?"

"Don't call me anything." Florence looked over at Bobby. He was smiling. "What's so funny? I don't see anything funny."

"I was just thinkin'." Bobby said, "what great strides we're makin' toward peace 'n' Stability in the Middle East."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Florence decided for the time being not to tell George and Rick that Bobby was back in town. In the event of an interrogation, the less they knew, the belter.

"May 1 say something. Firenze?" "Yes, George." "You look awful." "Thank you."

"Maybe I don't look so hot myself. May I say something else?" "Yes, George."

"I'm getting the distinct feeling that you're not telling me something. Renard also feels this way."

"There's just, you know, lots going on." "Do you mind I’ll ask you something?" "What. George?"

"It's really none of my business. Don't ask, don't tell, I say, but are you and the sheika ... There's this rumour going around."

"No, George. I am not having a fling with the sheika." "Not that I'd mind—"

"That's hardly the point. Really. I wouldn't expect my own staff to be gossiping about this. It's disinformation put out by the French, among others."

"Ah. Rather clever of them. They tend to look down on those of the Sapphic persuasion around these parts."

Renard walked in. "Hey, Florence, you know anything about this rumor going around about you and the emir's wife?"

"We were just discussing it."

"Oh." Rick nodded tentatively.

"It's not true." Florence said.

"Hey, you know, whatever."

Florence sighed inwardly. Did she now have to explain to Rick that because she hadn't made a pass at him. that didn't mean she and the emir's wife were— how had Bobby put it—having a roll in the hammock'.''

"Never mind." she said. "Why don't you put it out on the six o'clock broadcast that I'm not having an affair with the wife of the ruler."

"We ought." George said, "to give some thought to this. You don't want something like that going around. They may be liberal in Matar, but they're still .Arabs."

"I'm wide open to any ideas you have."

"I have an idea." Rick said. "I think you and I should be seen in public pawing each other."

Florence stared at Rick. "Thanks for the input."

"I'm serious. If you want to show them you're hetero, what better way?" I le grinned. "We could sit at the Cafe Clementine and smooch."

George said. "They're not crazy for public displays of affection, hetero or homo."

"If it's a choice between having people think she's doing it with the emir's wife or with me ..." Rick shrugged.

Florence's secure phone went off. It was Bobby, or Willie G. Underwood, or whatever he was calling himself these days. She heard the sound of slot machines in the background.

"You alone?" he said.

"I'm sitting here with George and Rick. What's up?"

"There's a situation developin' in Kaffa. No one knows about it, so don't tell anyone about it. We just received word that Princess Hamzin, King Tallulah's second wife, busted into the king's council meeting yesterday. That's bad enough. The last time somethin’ like that happened in that country, dinosaurs were still walkin" the earth. As if that wasn't bad enough, she was wearing no veil, and pants. Pants. And if that wasn't bad enough, she started lecturin' the king and his council about improvin' the lot of women in the royal kingdom. Appears the princess is a real fan of TV Matar. The king was reportedly taken to the hospital with chest pains."

"It's begun, then," Florence said. "The revolt of the Arab women. This is real news. Bobby."

"I'd say that depends on your definition of 'great.' 'Fhe Wasabis are mad-der'n adders. Our birds are picking up all sorts of chatter. And it's pretty clear who they blame for this. This is your revolution, Flo. My guess is someone's gonna walk into your office any minute now and take you to see the emir. That's why I'm calling—to put you in the picture."

"We need to gel this out, put it on the news."

"Whoa, whoa. Negative. Who are you, Bob Woodward? This is all off the record. No one outside the palace knows about this. They don't want anyone to know about it. for obvious reasons. You go puttin' this on TV, all hell's gonna break loose."

"Then why did you tell me?"

"So you can keep your head down. I sure didn't tell you so's you could go wavin' red flags in their faces."

"Bobby, this is why we came here in the first place."

"Yo. Flo of Arabia, listen up for a second. We did not—let me say it again— not come here to start a war between Wasabia and Matar. Are we on the same page here? I'll bet you a million dollars—which I can access, now that I know how to fix a damn slot machine—that our Uncle Sam would agree with me on this."

"May I remind you that this isn't your operation? You're along here to provide security and intelligence. And all you've managed to do thus far is shoot up a garage and alert the French secret services to our presence here. Are we on the same page now?"

"If you don't want to listen to me, why don't you call Uncle Sam and ask him his opinion of the situation? Inasmuch as he's payin' our salaries."

"I'll do just that. But what about the princess?"

"I'd say it's not lookin' great for the princess." "What do we know?" "Is this off the record?"

"Who are you. Deep Throat? What do we know?"

"Sounds bad. We picked up some references in the chatter to lapidation."

"Lapidalion? Stoning?"

"This wasn't exactly the brightest thing she could ‘ve done. Embarrass her husband, the king, in front of all his ministers? Hell, I wouldn't do that back in Alabama."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saving that Princess Hamzin is in for a real rough ride." "We can't just abandon her, Bobby." "What do you mean? She's not working for us." "But this is our fight. This is our revolution. We started it." "Wait a minute. We didn't tell her lo storm into her husband's meeting and give everyone the finger."

"Have you ever seen a lapidation?"

"Well, no, but what's that got to do with it?"

"I have. A video clip, anyway. She couldn't have been older than nineteen. Adultery. They use small stones so it takes longer. It was awful, Bobby."

"I don't doubt it for a second, but look, Flo, we got to keep our eye on the big picture here. You go public with somethin' like this, and they're gonna know exactly how you came by the information, and this whole thing is gonna come down on your head. And they won't be throwin' small stones, either. Giant big fuckin' rocks the size of—"

"Bobby, this is the moment. This is Aqaba. We can't back down now. We can't just leave her lo die."

"Dammit, girl, what did you think was going to happen? That broadcastin' all this feminist crap into a kingdom that's still back in the fourteenth century was gonna result in some conference or somethin'? That there'd be panel discussions with everyone wearing name tags? And that they'd say, 'Oh, why, you're quite right, wise American lady, you're absolutely right, we shouldn't be persecutin' our women like this. How medieval of us! Okay, ladies, throw away your veils, this way to the drivers-license window. And just to demonstrate how liberal we're gonna be—we're not even gonna chop off your little heads anymore!' Is that how you thought this was going to play out? This is the Middle Last! The cradle of destabilization, mother of all tar babies, the planet's longest-runnin' argument! Don't you understand that since the dawn of time, startin' with the Garden of Eden, nothing has ever gone right here? And nothing ever will go right here."

"Then what are we doing here?"

"From the looks of it, fuckin' things up even worse. But at least we're consistent. That ought to be our motto: 'U.S. foreign Policy in the Middle Mast: Making Matters Worse." Flo? You there? Talk to me. Florence. Flo! Dammit, girl..."

Florence called Laila. "I have to see you. It's urgent."

"It's not the best time." Laila said. "Gazzy s in a foul temper. He's had all sorts of calls. Something's going on, and he won't tell me."

"I think I know what it is, but I don't want to explain over the phone."

"I don't think it's wise to annoy him right now by being seen together. I know it's all absurd, but we oughtn't feed this ridiculous rumor."

"It's important." Florence said. "I wouldn't otherwise, Chartwell Mall, by the Starbucks. I'll be outside by the ficus tree."

"Is this wise, darling, to be hitting the mall at a time like this?"

FLORENCE WATCHED THROUGH the mesh opening in her lace veil. The woman approaching her was dressed from head to toe in a white abaaya. She approached and stood there, looking about uncertainly. "It's me." Florence said.

"God be praised" Laila said. "Look at us both. 1 feel like a guest on Cher Azade."

They sat by the ficus tree as the bourgeoisie, haute, middle and low of Matar ambulated past in the Muzak hush of the mall.

"I managed to elude my bodyguards by slipping out the back of the dressing room at Ralph Lauren. They are inept. God forbid someone should actually try to assassinate me. Well, what's all this enormous urgency about?"

Florence told Laila about Princess Hamzin. Laila absorbed the news in silence.

"I met her once. She's the prettiest of Tallulah's wives, not that that will help her. God, what could she have been thinking?" Laila sighed. Her head turned toward the Starbucks.

"Hundreds of years ago—perhaps a thousand—this area right here was a souk. Teeming with merchants and ships and caravans. Some of the first coffee ever drunk In Europeans passed through here. Now we have Starbucks. Thus do we progress. Well. Firenze. I must say, you seem to be very well informed about all sorts of things. What else do you have to tell me outside Starbucks? Have you gotten me mixed up in some sort of CIA operation after all?"

"I don't really know who I'm working for." Florence said.

"That smacks of evasion."

"I know how it must sound. But the truth is, I don't. There's this man who calls himself Uncle Sam—"

"I really don't want to hear this." Laila said angrily. "If I'm going to end up in a prison cell, I'd rather not have anything they want. You might have told me, Florence."

"That's what everyone tells me these days." For once. Florence was glad to be wearing a veil. She felt tears welling up. "I'm sorry. I'd been looking for the right moment to tell you."

"It's not that I hadn't wondered." Laila said in a slightly softer tone. "It did occur. I mean. I'm not a fool. But it was all going so well that I concluded it couldn't possibly be a CIA operation. They always turn out so badly. And now ... So. your Mr. Bobby, then—it was him in the garage."

"Yes. It was self-defense."

"It always is. What was he doing there in the first place?" "Checking out Maliq's car. He found out it was rigged. The black smoke, the miracle, it was a fake to provide an excuse for his religious conversion." "So... we're to have a coup, then?"

"I can arrange to get you and your son out of the country." Florence said. Laila stood. "Thank you. but I think you've been enough help as it is."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Florence returned to her office, thoroughly depressed, to the news from her secretary that "your uncle" had called.

"He didn't say which uncle. He seemed to think you'd know."

Florence did know; and she knew furthermore that it was not a call she wanted. She dialled, Uncle Sam picked up halfway through the first ring, never a good start. She could hear the hissing of steam from his ears.

"What in the name of all that is holy do you think you're doing over there?" he spluttered.

"I see Bobby has given you a fill."

"A fill? Is that what you call it? Jumping Jehoshaphat, you can't go revealing this information on television! Do you have any idea how sensitive it is?"

Florence felt a certain weariness. It occurred to her that she had spent most of her time in the government arguing. "I told Laila I'm with the government," she said.

"What? You did... what?"

"As long as vou're mad at me. you might as well be really mad." "Why would you do such a thing?" "I was tired of deceiving her. I think she knew anyway." "Florence," he said, his tone quite changed. "I'm pulling you out of there, effective immediately. You've done a dandy job. But you're tired. You need some stateside time. Better still, a couple of days in Paris or London, shopping—on your uncle's dime. How does that sound?"

"You sent me here to start a revolution. Now you want me to go shopping?"

"Oh. for heaven's sake, lighten up. young lady. I'm not trying to make some big chauvinistic point. If you'd rather go to a museum, go to a museum. I'm all in favor of culture."

"That's very progressive of you."

"Florence, if you put this story about the princess on the air, it will— Oh, how do I explain?" "In English?"

"English. Very well, I'll give you a perfect English parallel. In World War Two, Churchill found out the Germans were going to bomb Coventry. But il he warned the people in Coventry, the Germans would find out the British had broken their code. So he let the Germans bomb Coventry. And people died. But he won the war."

"In other words, one has to be ruthless."

"Exactly. Exactly."

"Thank you, Uncle Sam. You've clarified the situation for me."

"I knew you'd understand. I'll send the plane for you. Gosh, you must be just knackered. And what a job you've done. What a job. Think of a week in a suite at Le Bristol on the rue du Faubourg St. Honore. My favorite hotel. Sleep late, massage, the museums ..."

"It sounds wonderful."

"I'll be there when the plane lands. I'll be the one holding a sign at baggage claim!"

"Bye, Uncle Sam."

FLORENCE CALLED IN Fatima Sham and handed her the script for the broadcast. Fatima read it. Her eves shot up from the script.

"I haven't seen anything yet on this. Is it exclusive?"

"Oh, yeah."

"Our source?"

"Reliable."

"Ah," Fatima said. "I see."

"This could be your big break, Fatima."

"Yes. It might even lead to a job in legitimate journalism. Florence, this seems a good lime to ask." "Shoot."

"Are we some sort of CIA operation?"

"I'm not really sure myself." Florence sighed. "That must sound terribly evasive."

"Well"—Fatima smiled—"it does, yes."

"We probably are, one way or the other. But it is also true that this girl in Kalfa is going to be killed if we don't do anything about it. And now you know everything I do."

"Oh dear," Fatima said. "And I thought we were doing such a jolly good job."

"I thought so, too. I should tell you something else. Reporting this story won't make you any friends in Wasabia. And the situation here could change. We've stirred up the adder bed. I'll understand if you'd rather not go on the air with this. I could do it myself, but that would give the other side ammunition to use against us."

Fatima looked at the script. "We can't just let them stone her to death. I'd better hit the phones, see what I can dig up." At the door, she stopped and said, "Whatever happens, good for you, Florence."

FLORENCE CALLED GEORGE and Rick into her office and shut the door, then raised Bobby on the phone and put him on the speaker.

"Bobby, I want you to get George and Rick out of the country right away."

"Why?" After a pause, he said. "I thought you told Uncle Sam you weren't... What's goin' on, Florence?"

"Bobby, please, just for ten minutes, pretend that you work for me? I want them both out of here tonight. Can you arrange for that water-taxi service of yours?"

"Aw. hell, girl, 1 can't just order up a nuclear submarine like it's Chinese takeout."

"Submarine?" George said, paling. "Stop right there. I don't do submarines. I'm claustrophobic."

"It's a big submarine, George," Florence said.

"It would have to be as big as the Queen Mary 2 and Stav on top of the water."

"George," Florence said sternly, "twelve hours from now, the most beautiful sight in the world to you might just be the conning tower of a U.S. fucking submarine. Bobby?"

"What?"

"Get them out of here. Sub. camel, hot-air balloon. I don't care. This is a high-priority exfiltration. All right? Can I count on you? Hello. Bobby?"

"I'm here, goddammit." After a few moments, his voice came back over the speaker. "You boys there?"

"We're here," Rick said, speaking for the stricken-looking George, who had clearly begun running the horror movie in his mind, starring himself, descending the ladder deeper, deeper...

"Okay, listen up. You know the Cafe Winston, on the Esplanade by the open-air fish restaurant? It's three-fifteen now. Be there in one hour. No later, understand? Do not go to your apartments. Do not take anything from the office with you. Just walk out the front door. Leave separately, ten minutes apart. Each of you carry a newspaper or magazine under your arm. It'll make you look casual. Walk, don't run. Don't look over your shoulder. If you see someone followin' you, it's probably one of my people. Everything will be fine. When you get to the cafe, order a coffee and sit tight. Pay for the coffee when it's put down. Leave a normal tip. You'll see two white Mercedes Amo taxis pull up, a few minutes apart. Each will have a strip of yellow tape on the radio antenna. George, you take the first cab. Renard, the second. Take your newspaper with you. Have you got that? You want me to repeat it?"

"No, we've got it," Rick said.

"George, you there?" Bobby said.

"What?"

"It's gonna be all right. You're gonna be all right. Do you have some Valium or somethin' on you? Never mind, I'll have some in the cab. You'll be all right. Hey, there's lots of, uh, people like you on subs."

"Claustrophobes?"

"No, you know, uh— Never mind, you'll be fine." "Bobby?" Florence said. "What?" be snapped. "Thank vou." Bobby clicked off.

"I le's not really thrilled with me at the moment." "For God's sakes. what's going on?" George said.

"You're both going on R and R. You've both done a spectacular job. I'm proud of you." She felt herself choking up but managed to swallow it. "Firenze." George said, "what is going on?"

"It's about to get messy. I'd rather not have to worry about you two."

"Hey hold on, I can handle it." Rick said. "You're talking to the man who put on a golf tournament in North Korea with O.J. Simpson."

"Rick, we're beyond spin. Look, we're about to lose the backing of whoever the hell it was who sent us over here. That makes our situation here, as they say at the old State Department, nonviable. This is when you evacuate non-essential personnel."

" 'Non-essential'?" Rick said. "Is that what I am?"

"You're the most brilliant—and twisted—mind in the business. And you're leaving in fifty-five minutes."

"Why can't we all leave?" George said.

Florence looked at her two boys. "I'm coming, too. I'll meet you on the beach, but l have to take care of some things."

They left. On the way out, she heard George telling Rick. "I'm not going on a submarine. There's not enough Valium in the world."

When they were gone, Florence burst into tears, but, efficient girl that she was. she briskly got it over with and plunged back to work.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Good evening. I'm Falima Sham for TV Matar, and this is the six o'clock report. Princess Hamzin, second wife of King Tallulah of Wasabia, has been sentenced to death by stoning. Her crime: petitioning her husband and his ministers for basic women's rights. 1 spoke this afternoon by telephone with Prince Jerbil al Jakar, minister of Wasabi external affairs."

A still photograph of the minister appeared on-screen, accompanied by a recording of the telephone conversation.

"This is a monstrous lie! There is no truth at all to it. It is lies. All lies! Who has told you this terrible lie? Some villain."

"Will you make the princess available for an interview with us?"

"The royal household does not give interviews. No, this is a gross provocation. This is an attempt to interfere in our sovereign affairs. This will not succeed. No. no."

"Can you produce proof that the princess is alive?"

"Of course she is alive! Everyone is alive! Everyone is happy. Good night to you, madame."

There followed the sound of a phone being slammed down.

"That was Prince Jerbil al Jakar, minister of Wasabi external affairs," Fatima continued. "The Wasabi practice when stoning women to death is to match the size of the stones to the severity of the offense. In cases of adultery, small stones are used to prolong the execution. It is not known what size stones might be used on a royal wife for the crime of petitioning to improve the situation of women. I spoke with Grand Mufti Adman Ilkir, one of Wasabia's leading religious authorities."

The tape rolled. "Grand Mufti Ifkir. thank you for speaking with TV Matar." "Yes, I am here. God be praised."

"This sounds like a very serious offense Princess Hamzin has committed." "Oh, most serious, most serious. There can be no punishment severe enough."

"What about stoning? That's pretty severe."

"Only if you use very small stones."

"Why not just cut off her head?"

"No, no, no. That is too quick. Too quick."

"So what size stones would you recommend?"

"The smallest, like this. These are the best. Like the ones we throw at Satan in Mecca during the hajj."

"Those are small. Wouldn't it take a very long time to kill a woman with stones that small?"

"Yes. That is the point. It's a mercy. It gives her time to repent of her crime."

"Thank you for taking the time to speak with us."

"You are welcome."

Florence said through the intercom into Fatima's earpiece. "That'll get their attention. Good interviews."

"Florence" said a control-room assistant. "The sheika Laila. Line two." "Christ, Florence," Laila said, "what are you doing?" "What 1 came here to do."

"Does that include destabilizing the entire region? Giving Wasabia an excuse to invade us? And you, you'll be long gone, won't you? Last seen climbing aboard an American helicopter." She hung up before Florence could answer.

FLORENCE STAYED AT her post in the control room through the night and into the next morning, monitoring developments. There's no better place, really, to monitor developments. All the world came to her on dozens of screens. On the one in front of her was a grim-looking man identified in the Chyron as PRINCE BAWAD, WASABI FOREIGN MINISTER. Florence watched the husband of the late princess Nazrah, whose midnight dash to freedom had set off this chain of events. He looked distinctly unamused as he made his way past a scrum of bawling reporters outside the United Nations. "There is not one word of truth in this libel." He scowled, before disappearing into a limousine, surrounded by nervous security men.

On another monitor, Florence watched a crowd of women outside the Wasabi embassy in Washington, holding signs saying WASABI PICS and RELEASE PRINCESS HAMZIN.

Well Nazrah, Florence thought, look what a great fuss you've created.

Another monitor showed a press briefing in progress at the State Department in Washington.

"I have nothing for you on this at this point in time," the spokesman said, more lugubriously than usual, to a forest of raised hands in front of him.

"Has the secretary spoken with the Wasabis about this?"

"Not to my— As I said, I have nothing for you on this."

"What is the princess's current status?"

"You're free to ask their foreign ministry."

A French reporter asked, "What can you inform us about the relationship between the U.S. government and TV Matar, which has broadcast this provocative story?"

‘I’m not aware of any connection."

"But the funding, it comes from the CIA, no?"

"1 wouldn't have any comment on that."

Florence found herself thinking about George and Rick. She imagined them all on the rubber boat, on their way out to the waiting submarine, guarded by Navv SEALs with black faces. George would be complaining. She smiled, thinking of Bobby telling him about all the hunky sailors he'd meet.

She decided to check in. She dialed Uncle Sam on the secure cell. It rang several times, and a recorded voice told her she had reached a nonworking number. They were destroying the connective tissue. She was alone now.

Toward four in the morning, she got exhausted and needed to rest for at least an hour or so. There was an escape hatch in the ceiling of the bathroom off the control room. Bobby's people had installed it. She opened it and climbed up onto the roof of TV Matar, which had a view of the city and the Gulf. She lay down and looked up at the night sky over Matar. She knew that on any given night in the Middle East, many people were sleeping on their roofs—to escape the heat, or the secret police. In a part of the world where they come for you in the middle of the night, it is a sensible sleeping arrangement. The only problem is that sometimes, along with the stars falling, come bullets raining down. Arabs love to fire joy shots into the air to celebrate life's victories: a wedding, the birth of a son, the news that a new martyr has ascended to heaven.

Florence drifted in and out of restless sleep until dawn, then climbed back down to the control room to the news that the Wasabis had produced evidence that the Princess Hamzin was alive and well.

Triumphant evidence. The princess was not only alive and well but slumping for jewelry, in Paris, no less. French television was showing footage of her. taken through the front window of Hermes. The images showed Princess Hamzin handing over an American Express card for a $150,000 diamond bracelet. The news announcer came on with a smirk and said, "Evidently, the princess prefers to wear stones."

Florence scanned the other monitors. They were all showing the same footage. It was followed by Prince Bawad, a picture of smugness.

"The world can plainly sec," he said, stroking his goatee, "what an oppressed life our royal princesses lead."

For the next hour. Florence watchcd a succession of talking heads on dozens of television shows. One. an anthropology professor at the University of Chicago, said that the U.S. had no business trying to impose feminist values abroad, for the reason that many, perhaps even the majority of Arab or Indian or African women, "don't want to be liberated." "How would we feel," he asked thoughtfully, "if one of those countries tried to impose its values on us?"

Florence was pondering whether the majority of, say, Arab women were content with the status quo when her cell phone rang. It was Laila.

"I shouldn't have said what I said."

"You don't have any apologies to make to me," Florence said. "I take it you've seen the images? From Paris?"

"Yes." "Well?"

"There are two possible explanations." Florence said. "The first is that the information was wrong. The second is that we saved her life."

"I must say, it wasn't quite my idea of Arab suffrage, forking over an American Express card for a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar bracelet at Hermes."

"You saw the expression on her face. She looked doped." "Is that what you're going to say on television?"

"I don't know." Florence wished Renard, master of spin and counterspin, were here. "I've been outmaneuvered."

"Would you care to know where the New Saladin stands? I think he's about to institute lapidation in Matar—for TV Matar executives. Will we be issuing an apology?"

"To those bastards? Over my dead body."

"I wouldn't say that in the Middle Fast, if I were you. Better issue something. I'll try and fend off the New Saladin, but you'd better get cracking."

Florence stared at the bank of glowing TV screens in front of her and summoned Fatima.

"Fatima," she said, "the day will come when you practice legitimate journalism. But that day will not be this day."

"GOOD AFTERNOON FROM the TV Matar newsroom in Amo-Amas, I'm Fatima Sham.

"A source close to the Wasabi royal family has confirmed to TV Matar that the princess Hamzin was in fact sentenced to death by stoning for the crime of disrespect. He further confirms that because of negative world reaction to this news, along with mounting international outrage, the royal household is attempting a cover-up. Last night, according to the source, the princess was drugged and put aboard a Royal Wasabi Air Force plane and flown lo Paris, where a staged shopping expedition was mounted to make it appear that she is thousands of miles away, buying expensive jewelry, and not facing a horrible death. We bring you this exclusive interview with the Kaffa palace insider.

Because he fears for his life, we agreed not to show his face and to identify him only as 'Abdul.'

"Can you tell us what happened?"

"They were going to stone my lady to death. With little small stones. Oh, terrible. Then came the report on the television—praise God! The king Tallulah's minister became fearful and said, 'Oh, this will make a terrible, terrible impression on the royal image! We must wait and kill her when no one is paying attention.' So they came with big needles filled with drugs and stuck her, Like this." Abdul jabbed his arm. "And took her to a plane to Paris."

"How do you know all this?"

"I was there! I saw. With my own two eyes, praise God that I am allowed to keep them. There was a French person." "What French person?"

"Oh, very French. An old French person with gray hair. He has been in the palace here many times. The royals listen to him all the time. They think everything French is good. He tells them what to do, and they do it. He tells them, 'Bring her to Paris, we will make it look like a shopping trip.'"

"So you're saving the television images of the princess shopping, they were all fixed to make it look like she's in no danger?"

"Yes, but she is in great danger! Still! When no one is paying attention, they will kill her. My poor lady!"

"Abdul, thank you for telling us this. You are very courageous to come forward. One final question: You say the French have a lot of influence with the Wasabi royals?"

"Yes. Many times I have listened to the princes and the king on the telephone, many times with the French saying, 'You must help us get back the coastline that the English villain Churchill took from us. We will give you oil and navy bases.' Many times I have heard these conversations. Many, many times."

"Thank you. God keep you safe. When we return, we'll have a report from our correspondent in Paris."

Florence sat back in her chair in the control room. Too bad Renard hadn't been here to watch it with her. She felt certain he would have been proud of her. She was particularly pleased with the French element.

Laila rang. "Wow. How on earth did you find Abdul? What a coup." "He works in the cafeteria here," Florence said.

"Aha." There was a pause. "Well, that will win us an Emmy for hard investigative news. I think I won't share that part with the New Saladin. Oh, it's coming back on. I don't want to miss a word. I'll call you at the commercial."

"Welcome back to TV Matar News, I'm Fatima Sham. We now bring you this exclusive report from Rita Ferreira, our Paris bureau correspondent."

"Yes, Fatima, I'm standing outside the gales of the Onzieme Bureau, a little-known branch of the French intelligence service. We tried to speak to officials here about a report that they have been tunneling money secretly to Matar's mullahs, in an attempt to start a coup in the tranquil Gulf nation and replace its benevolent and popular ruler, the emir Gazzir Bin Haz, with a fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship."

The screen showed the reporter trying to thrust a microphone through the window of a dark sedan driving out the gate.

"TV Matar, hello! Bonjour! Is it true that you are trying to start a revolution in Matar?"

The car kept going. The screen showed two gendarmes approaching, waving the camera away. "Allez! Allez!"

"We are with TV Matar, here to ask questions." "No. You must go. Go. Go now."

"But we want to speak with someone from the Onzieme Bureau, to ask about their plans to destabilize our country." "You must ask to the foreign Bureau. Allez!"

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“I think,'' Laila said over the phone, "that you'd better get over here to the palace. The French ambassador has requested an audience. The New Saladin's spine could use some stiffening. It's the only part of him that isn't normally stiff. I'll send a car."

Florence was driven through the tranquil, baking streets of Amo-Amas to the palace. She walked on lapis-lazuli-flecked tiles past cool alabaster fountains and shaded terraces and mosaic corridors, past bodyguards in ceremonial dress, and into the emir's audience room, where the Lion of Matar awaited. The Lion was frowning.

"Well, Miss Intrigue," he said, "you've made me very popular. Everyone wants a meeting with me suddenly. The French ambassador, the Wasabi ambassador. Your American ambassador. Even the Russian ambassador. What can he want. I wonder? I should just invite them all at once. It's been a long time since we've held a grand diplomatic audience. I don't know whether to thank you or have you deported. I could just have you escorted to the Wasabi border and tossed across. I'm sure King Tallulah would be delighted to have you as his guest"

"I regret having caused I lis Majesty" such consternation." "Oh, pish. Now, what's this about the French buying my mullahs? Is this true?"

"Yes."

"And how do you know this arresting fact?"

"I'm in the news-gathering business."

"Are you with the CIA? I want an honest answer now."

"Not that I am aware, my lord."

The emir stared. "What do you mean, not that you're aware? What kind of answer is that?"

"A vague, honest answer. There was a man. but he's vanished. So now it would seem that I'm an employee of TV Matar. Which is to say, I work for you."

"Stop throwing sand in my eyes. This man, who is he?"

"I was never sure. He represented himself as being with the United States government. He was possessed of great resources, certainly. Enough to make all this possible. The initial funding, the gift of Your Majesty's helicopter..."

"I want an answer!"

"Darling." Laila said, "calm yourself. You'll give yourself a rash. Florence is trying to explain. Though I must admit I'm confused, too, at this point. But TV Matar is fully independent. You own it, darling. Morever, you're doing very, very well by it. You're now the largest broadcaster in the Arab world."

"Yes yes yes, but was this funded by American intelligence?"

"Darling," Laila said, "if it had been, do you really think it would have worked this well?"

"Good point," Florence murmured.

"I don't know that it's turned out 'well,'" the emir said. "And don't try to deceive me with your honey tongues. I want to know—right now, this instant—was this an American operation?"

"Yes," Florence said. "I regret deceiving you. But I do not regret what we've done."

The emir looked from Florence to his wife. "Did you know about this?"

"No," Florence interjected. "I deceived Laila, too. I deceived you both."

The emir sat back in his divan seat and tapped his purplish lips with a fingertip. "Then I have no choice. There will have to be an arrest. And a trial, and then... Look at the position you've put me in. I hardly have a choice."

"Darling." Laila said, "let's think this through before we do anything hasty. Florence has admitted to working for some esoteric division of the U.S. government. But TV Matar is entirely controlled by us. And it's made Matar. and you, a voice on the world stage. We're a long way from fig oil and the Churchill tax.

"And now Florence and her curious mice seem to have exposed a French plot to replace you on the throne with your odious little brother. So she's made you independently rich and important, and is trying to keep you on that throne. And you want to arrest her. You do what you think is right, but if you insist on this idiotic course of action, all you'll be saying to the whole world is "Gosh, wasn't I a booby! This American woman managed to pull the wool completely over my eyes!' So much for the New Saladin. But it's up to you, darling."

The emir rubbed his forehead.

Laila glanced over at Florence. "'Are you still a U.S. agent?" she asked. Florence imagined she was giving a press briefing at the State Department. I have nothing for you on that at this lime. "Florence?"

"No. No, I don't think I am at this point."

Laila turned to the emir. "There. So why the fuss?"

The emir regarded the two women standing in front of him warily. "If I find," he said, "that you two were in collusion, there will be consequences. Severe consequences."

"Shouldn't we give some thought to what you're going to tell Monsieur Valmar?"

In due course, the French ambassador was announced. Laila and Florence withdrew through a separate door before he was ushered in.

"You might have given me some warning that you were about to admit to being an American spy," Laila said crossly.

"Not a spy, Laila. I was never that."

"Whatever. The situation seems stabilized for the time being. But an revoir. Switzerland of the Gulf."

"Yes." Florence said. "It's starting to feel more like the Middle Last."

FLORENCE RETURNED TO TV MATAR. Her cell phone rang. She picked up, frowned; recognizing the voice. "What do you want?" she said.

"That's not a very friendly hello." Uncle Sam said. "I've been trying frantically to get you."

"Really? How odd. I called you several limes and got a nonworking number. I had the distinct feeling that I'd been thrown overboard." "These phones. They drive me cuckoo." "Oh, please. What do you want? I'm very busy." "We need to talk, Florence." "Talk."

"In person. I'm sending the plane. Again. I can have it there in two hours. This isn't a request, young lady."

"I don't work for you anymore." She heard a sigh. "I'll send you a formal letter of resignation, if you prefer. I told them all about you."

"Told who about me?"

"The emir. Laila. It felt wonderful."

"Oh, goodness, Florence. Why would you do such a thing?"

"I got tired of lying. Sorry."

"You've got clientitis. Look, it happens. Practically every ambassador we send overseas, they end up lobbying for the country instead of the U.S. Fortunately, there's a cure."

"Oh? What?"

"You get on a plane and come home. And by the second day, you wake up and it all seems like a dream."

"I'll come home when I'm finished here."

"You are finished there. What do I have to do—send in Delta Force to get you? Don't think I won't. Florence, don't make me come down there." "Goodbye, Sam. Thank you for everything." "Is it the sheika?" "What do you mean?"

"These rumors—arc they true? Are you, how to put it, having a thing with the sheika?"

"This is absurd."

"We're picking up a lot of chatter about this, Florence. It's very dangerous for you. You know how Arabs can be. The whole manhood thing." "Unlike us, say?"

"You know perfectly well what I'm saving. We have to get you out of there. I mean now."

"Rely not on women. Trust not to their hearts. Whose joys and whose sorrows Are hung to their parts."

"What are you talking about?"

"It's a verse from The Arabian Nights. Look, I made a promise to stay, to see this through."

"Promise? Promise to whom?" "To my lesbian girlfriend. Laila." "Florence—" "Goodbye, Sam."

Florence fell a sense of weightlessness after ending the call. She stared at the cell phone, the one Bobby had given her, her link to her now former employers, still warm from Uncle Sam's spluttering. It rang again. She was about to press TALK, but then paused. She knew that cell phones were a popular means of assassination in the Middle East. The Israelis had pioneered it. A few grams of C4 plastic explosive packed into the earpiece.

Would they do that... to her? Florence put the phone down and backed away from it while it continued to chirrup.

"Ah!" She started.

"Sorry, Florence." She had backed into her assistant. "Are you all right?" 'Yes. fine."

"We can't find Fatima."

FATIMA SHAM, THE ANNOUNCER, hadn't shown up for work. They'd called her apartment, her cell phone, her boyfriend, her mother. She'd disappeared.

Florence called Laila.

"I'll call Colonel Boutros," Laila said. "When was she last seen?" "Last night, when she left the studio."

"All right, I'll get on it. Meanwhile, Gazzy's pumped up like the Michelin Man. He gave the French ambassador what-for over funding the moolahs. Valmar looked very pale leaving. Gazzy hasn't fell this empowered since he exiled his mother. I hope we're not creating a Frankenstein."

While the authorities searched for Fatima. Florence tried to concentrate on directing TV Matar's coverage of events. There was a lot to cover.

Maliq had reentered the fray. He had called for his followers to assemble at the racetrack for "prayer." The emir had denied him a permit for the assembly. The mullahs were now denouncing him for "selling out Islam to the infidels." Gazzv had responded by throwing a few of them in jail and impounding their Mercedeses. He issued a statement pointing out that by law, public assembly in Matar must be granted by the emir. It went back to the third emir (1627-41), who scholars now think suffered from agoraphobia, a rare condition in deserts, but nonetheless.

The French were suavely denying, with dismissive waxes of the hand, fun-neling money secretly to Matar's moolahs. They were also denying the very existence of an Onzieme Bureau. Meanwhile, the Onzieme's agents were busy planting stories throughout the Arab media suggesting that the Bin I laz family was now a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States government.

Princess Hamzin. looking hollow-eyed, had moved with her burly male entourage from Paris to London, where she was widely photographed at Harrods and other deluxe emporia. American Express was reaping a windfall from the shopping spree. The Wasabis were still furiously demanding an apology from TV Matar for its "odious mischief-making."

In other news coming out of the Middle Last: Palestinian schools were now offering online correspondence courses in suicide bombing; in Israel. American archaeologists had discovered a first-century scroll underneath the Old City that purported to be a certificate of marriage between a Nazarene carpenter named Yeshua and a former prostitute named Mariah, from the town of Magdala. This caused a great sensation for months, until carbon-dating and an investigation traced the document to the publicity department of a New York City publishing house.

THREE DAYS AFTER Fatima's disappearance, a package was delivered to the front desk of TV Matar. After it was determined not to contain a bomb, the package turned out to contain a videotape. It showed Fatima buried in sand up to her neck, being stoned to death with small rocks. The tape was twenty minutes long. Everyone who watched it wept.

Florence brought the tape to Laila. She could not bring herself to view it again, so she left the room while I.aila viewed it.

She waited outside on the terrace, looking out over the Gulf in the moonlight, her skin misted by salty droplets from the fountain that spouted out the royal crest. Laila emerged, pale and shaken. Neither woman spoke. The two of them stood by the balustrade overlooking the gardens, listening to the waves lap the shore and the onshore breeze rustle the fronds of the date palms.

CHAPTER TWENTY

It's a miserable business." said the emir. "I'm not saying it isn't, but we have no proof."

"Proof." Florence said angrily. "Who else could it have been?"

"What are you Irving to do? Start a war? It's horrid and regretful, and I will get to the bottom of this matter. But you will, under no circumstances, broadcast this videotape. That would only play into the hands of whoever did this."

"Emir." Florence said, "this woman was a citizen of your country. She lived under your protection. Are your people now fair game, to be hunted like gazelle at the pleasure of poaching Wasabi raiders?"

"Of course not. And I'm not sure 1 like your tone, madame."

"Forgive me. I forgot that I was addressing the New Saladin."

"Your situation here is complicated enough without adding insolence, Laila, perhaps it would be best if you showed our guest out."

"Gazzir." Laila said, "you can't just let this pass. It may have been an act of retaliation, but it was also a test of your resolve."

"What would you have me do?"

"At least show the world what they did to this woman." "But we don't know who did it."

"Then just show it," Florence said, "and let the world draw its own conclusion."

"It is a war you want. Madame CIA." the emir said. "I'm not going to give you one. You came here to make mayhem, and now you have it. You don't have the stomach for it? You should have stayed home. You're lucky it wasn't you on that tape."

"What a thing to say, Gazzir," Laila said.

"No." Florence said. "He's right. It should have been me."

"I'm not going to start a jihad just to satisfy your cravings for martyrdom. Now, I have a very full schedule. You may both retire."

Laila walked with Florence to the car. She whispered in Florence's ear, out of hearing of her bodyguard, "Coffee tomorrow, ten o'clock."

Florence’s new Government "bodyguard" did not follow her into the control-room bathroom. The next morning at nine o'clock, Florence look the abaaya that she kept in a drawer in her office. She went into the bathroom and up the escape hatch, out onto the roof, down a fire escape and walked the three blocks to the single-car garage that housed what Bobby called the "safe car." Theoretically.

She held her breath, starling the ignition. The car didn't explode. Twenty minutes later, she was at the mall outside Starbucks, where, under the ficus, a familiar figure in white awaited, holding two grande non-fat lattes.

"It's impossible to drink through this damned mouth mesh." Laila said.

"Use your straw."

"Yesterday after we left him, he took a telephone call from— Oh God, now I'm the spy. You're not still working for them, are you, Florence? You have to tell me." "No. It's just us now."

"All right. He got a call from King Tallulah. I listened in on the whole thing."

"How?"

"I had the system fixed so that I can. I'm not an idle snoop, but when you have a young son to look out for, as they say, knowledge is power." "What did the emir and the king discuss?"

"The Pan-Arab summit in Bahrain. Tallulah said how much he was looking forward to seeing him there, ever so excited about it. What a great honor for Matar. Et cetera. I wanted to scream."

"Did they discuss Fatima?"

"It was dealt with in the way they have. 'Such an unfortunate business.' 'Yes, indeed unfortunate.' You see, the score had been evened. So there was no point in pressing it. No honor to be gained. Let the feasting commence. I had a vision of them under a tent together, chins glistening with sheep fat and buttered rice. It was awful. Firenze. I loved him once. Even with his harem. But after listening yesterday ... no. I cannot give my love to such a man."

They sat in silence. Florence said, "They're trying to get him out of the country. The Pan-Arab meeting. That's when it will happen. That's when they'll make their move."

"Yes."

"Would he listen to you?"

"At this point? He might think it's a cabal you and I cooked up lo cheat him of assuming the mantle of the New Saladin." "So, Laila, how shall we proceed?" "I need to get my son out before anything else." "Do you want help?"

"Best not. But I'll need a day or two. My sister is in England. I've kept bank accounts. Against a rainy day. It doesn't rain much in the desert, but when it does, the floods can kill."

"Forty-eight hours, then."

"Firenze. I know you said you'd see it through with me. That was all very gallant of you, but... What I'm trying to say, darling, and not being very articulate with, is that it might be better if you left Matar now."

"Not yet, I have to do this first. Then I'll leave with vou. Anyway"— Florence smiled—"I can't watch it all on a television screen at the Frankfurt airport. I've gotten loo used to being in the control room."

"Oh dear," Laila said. "What will become of us?"

"That's what Nazrah said that night in the Fairfax Hospital."

They stood and walked toward the elevators.

"I'd kiss you goodbye," Laila said, "but we mustn't scandalize all the nice bargain hunters at the mall."

Three days later TV Matar's viewers were surprised by the new face that greeted them from the six o'clock anchor desk. It was that of an attractive woman in her late thirties, with dark hair. She might have passed for an Arab, but her name was Italian-sounding.

"The person who regularly gives the news on this program." Florence began, "is Falima Sham. Fatima disappeared following a broadcast in which she reported that the Wasabi royal family had sentenced one of its own princesses to be stoned to death for the crime of petitioning the king to stop the persecution of women.

"An extensive search by the authorities was undertaken to find Ms. Sham. The investigation produced no result.

"Then, four days ago, a videotape was anonymously delivered to TV Matar. You are about to see that videotape. Be warned: It depicts Ms. Sham being killed. If you have no stomach or desire to witness a young woman being slowly stoned to death, then you should not watch this. If there are children present, you should send them from the room.

"It is being shown on my initiative, and mine only, for one reason: to honor a brave woman who dared to speak out against a terrible injustice, and who for that was herself savagely murdered. The term 'martyr' has been debased and corrupted. You are about to witness an actual martyrdom."

Florence had instructed the staff to switch off the telephones and to bar all the doors to the control room. She also specified that the power source be switched to the emergency generators, so the broadcast would continue if the outside power was shut oil".

The tape ran for its full twenty minutes. Though they had seen it before, the staff again wept. Florence had to struggle to keep her own composure. She had dispensed with makeup so her eyes would not become a caricature of muddy mascara.

It took a few moments after the tape ended before she was able to continue. "It is not known precisely who did this deed. However, this method of execution is regularly employed in Wasabia.

"Fatima Sham was twenty-six years old. She is survived by her family, by her friends, by her colleagues and by millions of sisters throughout the Arab world. Etemen dan mouwt 'ha yekoon aindee manaa"

In minutes there was a pounding on the steel doors to the control room. The staff's blood was up. They armed themselves with lire extinguishers, axes, steel pipes, electrical tubing. Watching them, Florence felt mixed sensations of pride and futility.

"No," she commanded, "put those down." She unclipped her microphone, checked herself in the mirror and walked to the door. She gestured to a technician who had positioned himself to bash the invaders with a wastebasket. He opened the door. A half-dozen men burst in with drawn weapons.

Florence addressed them sternly. "Put your weapons down. We have none."

The security agents froze, startled by this unexpected temerity. Then one of them, apparently the leader, approached and cuffed Florence hard across the face. The blow caught her off balance. She fell. The staffer with the wastebasket moved toward the attacker and got the butt of a pistol in his face, breaking his nose and misting the air with blood. Florence, dazed, felt the cold snap of metal around her wrists. She was pulled to her feet and dragged out of the control room.

They hustled her into the back of a car and threw a blanket over her head. Whether this was to humiliate her or to keep her from seeing where they were taking her. Florence could only speculate.

She knew the location of police headquarters and, from the cars movements, tried to calculate whether this was the destination. After a quarter hour of turns that she could not follow, she had no idea where they were taking her. The leader sitting in the front seat did not respond to her questions.

It was only ten miles to the Wasabi border, and it was this directional scenario that was the least pleasing. But there was another possibility: that she might be on her way to the same fate that had befallen Fatima. Florence imagined the car stopping, the blanket being pulled from her head, the neck-deep hole dug in the sand, the basket full of small stones, a video camera mounted on a tripod. They'd want a record of this one, too.

Her face flushed hot, and she felt like she was going to throw up. But then the image of herself covered in her own mess, as she was executed, overrode her nausea. If this was to be her fate, Florence was resolved to meet it with such dignity as she could, head high, and serene, with maybe even a shouted "Fuck you!" at her killers. Well, perhaps something more elegant than "Fuck you!" She mused on her final words.

A half hour passed. Finally, the car slowed, made a series of turns and stopped. She heard voices. She was pulled from the backseat and, with each arm firmly grasped, was marched across a stone floor. She remembered from her State Department hostage training to notice every detail, but with the blanket over her head, it wasn't easy. She thought. There's the floor. I might as well notice that. But in the end, it was only a floor.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

She was taken to a windowless room of ambiguous architectural purpose. It could serve as a cool cellar for fresh foodstuffs, Kaffir limes and Damascus melons. Such subterranean spaces had other, less pleasant uses. The thickness of the door that shut behind her. the sparseness of the furnishings before her—a wooden chair and table, an overhead lightbulb. a bedspring cot and plastic tub—bespoke austerity. The one item out of place was a video camera mounted on a tripod.

By her wrist watch, its face scuffed by the handcuffs, it was going on three in the morning when the door opened. The man confronting her wore Western dress that might have been a military uniform minus insignias.

"You are being deported," he said. He put some papers on the table before her. "Where you are deported to, it depends."

She read the papers. It was a confession in the form of a script. Presumably, she was to read it for the video camera.

In it, she admitted loan "unnatural and immoral relationship"—not with the sheika but with her TV Matar colleague Fatima Sham. Florence had become enough of a journalist to know a good lead paragraph. She read on. She was further admitting to trying to blackmail the Wasabi Royal House of Hamooj. Her "shameful plot" was to demand $20 million from them. When they refused— "as, God be praised, they should have"—Florence's lover Fatima Sham put on television the "wicked and untrue" story about Princess Hamzin. Someone put a lot of thought into this, Florence mused as she read. It went on to say that Florence and her "accomplices" then avenged themselves on the "honorable Wasabis" by killing Falima in the gruesome manner depicted and sending a copy of the tape to Kaffa, saying they would put it on TV Matar and blame them for it if a ransom of $40 million weren't paid. Again, the "upright" Wasabis held fast. But then "the police"—the script did not specify whose police—caught her. She could no longer live with the shameful things she had done, so she was recording this "true confession." It concluded with an apology to the emir of Matar and the king of Wasabia for perpetrating such vile doings while a guest on "holy" soil.

"Well." she said finally, looking up at her dour jailer. "I seem to have been very busy."

He pressed the record button on the video camera. "Begin," he said.

Florence looked into the camera. "My name is Florence Farfaletti," she said. "I'm an American citizen. It appears that I am being held in some basement somewhere. It's a bit damp, but otherwise tolerable. Have a nice day."

The man pressed the stop button. "You won't like it in Kaffa." He came toward her. Florence recoiled, thinking he was going to strike her, but instead, he unlocked her handcuffs.

"You run a television station." he said. He pointed to the video camera. "So, here is television camera. In two hours I come back. Make the film."

She used the next hour to explore every inch of the room. She tried to pry a piece of wire from the cot, with the idea of fashioning a tool to pick the door lock, but gave up after five minutes. There were problems with this approach, the first being that she did not know how to pick a lock. They'd taught her the rudiments of the skill during her weekend of hostage training in Virginia, but she had never really gotten the hang of it. She thought of buying herself sometime by sabotaging the video camera, but that seemed like feckless temporizing. Perhaps if she kept talking but never quite confessed until the tape ran out—a video Scheherazade, with the tape counter stopped at 1001.

She wondered what was going on back in Washington. What was Uncle Sam doing? Pulling strings or erasing computer files? Or sitting down to a martini and medium-rare porterhouse with onion rings at the Palm?

She missed Bobby. She missed George. She missed Rick. George and Rick wouldn't be much good, but they'd cheer her up. She shut her eyes, headachy with fright and fatigue, and dreamed of the conning tower of a U.S. nuclear submarine breaking the glass-still surface beyond the snaky beach. Where was Laila? The hours passed.

A FEW MINUTES before seven A.M. by the sculled watch, she heard the sound of the door being unlocked. Her heart was pounding. The door opened, admitting the jailer and another man, a torturer by his looks. The jailer went to the video camera and examined the counter. It was still set at 003. His face creased with displeasure. He nodded to the torturer, who look out a nine-millimeter pistol and pressed the muzzle against Florence's forehead. It was as cold as a doctor's stethoscope. She swallowed and closed her eyes.

"You make confess?"

"No."

"Kill her," the jailer said.

Florence shut her eyes. She smelled gun oil. She wondered what they would do with her body. Feed it to the sharks beyond the reef? The crabs would finish it off. She saw her own bones, bright white, phosphorescently aglow against the blue of the water, resting placidly at the bottom. Get it over with.

The hammer snapped forward against the action. Florence emitted a little shriek and opened her eyes. The men were smiling cruelly, but there was the unmistakable element of defeat in their eyes. They left. She stood and kicked the plastic bucket across the room. It ricocheted off the wall. Then, from terror and exhaustion, she passed out.

In the dream, she was thirsty, very, very thirsty. She was biting down on her lips to draw blood to drink. She was in the desert. It was a furnace. In the attack on Aqaba. it was so hot that Lawrence's hands blistered on the metal of his rifle. There was a submarine. A submarine in the middle of the desert? Don't ask. Go aboard—listen—they're calling you.

“What day is it?" she said to Laila. "Thursday."

Florence had been in the subterranean room for five days before the door flew open and in rushed Colonel Boutros of the Royal Matar Constabulary, along with two of his men.

"God be praised, you are safe, madame. Are you grievously injured? What did they do to you? Did you see their faces? Can you give a description?"

When they brought her out, she saw that she had been in the basement of some abandoned factory-like building on the edge of Amo-Amas. She asked Colonel Boutros at least a hundred questions on the drive to the constabulary headquarters. His answers seemed guarded. And when they arrived at the HQ. there was a crowd of reporters with cameras wailing. Colonel Boutros preened, posing with Florence. "God be praised, we have found her!"

A television reporter thrust a microphone at her and said. "Flor-ents. will you now announce an end to the sexual jihad by Matari women?"

"To the what?"

"You did not know?"

"I have been locked in a cellar for live days."

"'The women of Matar made jihad on your behalf. Against the men of Matar."

"How did I hey do this?"

"After you were taken, the sheika Laila went on the television and called upon the women of Matar not to make relations with their husbands until you were returned. There are many men in Matar grateful for your return."

Florence was digesting this when she heard sirens. A forty-foot-long while limousine bearing the royal crest and accompanied by a motorcycle escort arrived. Fetish, the emir's man, was inside, all greasy smiles. "Praise truly be to Allah that you are returned lo us safe!" Then it was off to the palace.

After being given a room to clean up in and fresh clothing, Florence was admitted to the emir's ceremonial chamber. As she walked in. there was a flash of light that caused her to flinch. An official photographer. The emir stood— that was unusual—and walked over to her. He embraced her and kissed her tenderly on the forehead as the camera flashes continued, bathing them in flickery strobe light. Laila looked on.

"Dear sister!" he said, "what a time you have had, and how worried we were!" He continued to pose for a few more pictures. Then Fetish waxed and the photographer was gone and it was just the emir, Florence and the sheika. There was tension. Florence noted, between husband and wife.

"How are you feeling, dear Florence?" he said. "I am appalled, appalled that this could have happened. And yet"—he lowered his voice to a gentle lecturing lone—"you were very naughty to do what you did. This is not the American Super Bowl, where you can put just anything on television. You have no idea, no concept, of what trouble you caused me with my neighbors. They moved tanks—tanks!—to my border. Your own government was most anxious. Most anxious. They were no doubt thinking. O God, not another Kuwait. There were many conversations between Washington and Kaffa and Amo-Amas. I don't want to look at my phone bill. Well, it's all fixed. For now. Sit, sit, for heaven's sake. Do you want some tea? Something more than tea? Whiskey? I could use one myself. Thank God for the diligence of Colonel Boutros."

Florence looked at Laila, who gave her a glance, as if to say, Just play along.

"Yes," the emir said, straightening slightly. (Always sit up straight while lying through your teeth.) "It was his men who found you. And just in time. God knows what evil things they had planned for you."

Florence said. "Thank God for Colonel Boutros."

"Were you able to see their faces?" the emir asked solicitously. "We will hunt them down. They will know no peace. Or perhaps they have already fled across the border."

"My captors—they were ... Wasabi?"

"Of course. No Matari would do something so barbaric."

This brought a grunt from Laila. The emir stiffened. He said, "Laila was very concerned for you. As were we all. She went on television and told the women of Matar to withhold... normal marital relations until you were found."

"It worked for Aristophanes" Laila said tartly.

The emir grinned. "It certainly gave us inspiration to find you. All of Matar—especially the males—rejoices in your return. Which must, alas, be brief under the circumstances. I think it would be best if you departed Matar.

I shall be sorry to see you go, Florence. How you have enlivened our drab little kingdom by the sea. But before you go, one or two matters."

"I would have thought at least three or four, sire."

"Eh? Ah, your terrible ordeal has not dulled the wit. Excellent, excellent. Now, if you would make a little statement." "That's what my captors wanted me to do."

"Oh, nothing like that." the emir said rather too quickly. "Just something to make peace between me and the women. You see," he said with a tight glance at Laila, who was viewing him with distinct coolness, "the impression was given that our government was insufficiently concerned by this terrible abduction. Of course, nothing could be further from reality. You will correct this impression before you leave?"

Florence eyed the emir coolly. "As Your Grace commands."

"You are very simpatico, Florence. It's the Italian in you. I have always adored the Italians, though they were very naughty under Mussolini. So you will make peace between me and the women. Good, good. Well then, I must take my leave of you. How can I repay what you have done here? You must come back and visit. Oh, I almost forgot, a present."

The emir clapped his hands. Fetish appeared holding a black box. The emir opened it. It was a medal, lushly done in enamel and gold in the shape of a lion's head, above two drawn swords, the emblem of royal Matar.

"The Order of the Royal Lion of Matar. First Class." the emir said proudly, putting it around her head. "This is the first occasion ever it has been given to a woman."

Florence looked at Laila, who was rolling her eyes. Florence bowed slightly. "It is a great honor, sire." "Hurry back, my dear. Hurry back. Darling, will you see Florence off?"

Florence and Laila spoke softly on the way to the car. "Sexual jihad?" Florence said.

"Don't knock it. It worked. No Matari male has been laid in five days. Other than my husband. Powerful incentive, that. Still, if it hadn't been for your Mr. Thibodeaux, you might still be in that room. He went into very high gear after you were taken." "Bobby? Is he—"

"Outside, he's got himself a new identity. It's rather daring. Do be sure to compliment him on it."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Florence heard the crowd before she and Laila walked out the front door of the palace. "What's this?" she said to Laila. "Your fans, darling."

There were thousands of them, mostly women. When they saw Florence. I hey began to ululate in the way of Arab women, though it had been rather a very long time since this tradition had been observed in progressive Matar. They began to chant, "Flor-ens! Flor-ens!"

To the object of this homage, standing on the marble steps, it sounded like the name of some household air freshener. They surged forward, swarming around her, touching her, grasping. She was presented with flowers. Palace security tried to push them back without success.

Laila had seen to it that cameras were there to record it all, as well as a TV Matar truck to feed the footage to a satellite 250 miles up and back into millions of televisions. Lately; Laila had been thinking like the producer of a reality TV show, a fact that appalled her somewhat.

"Flor-ens! Flor-ens!"

Laila shouted into Florence's ear, "I think you'd belter address them, darling, or they'll never let you out of here." "But—"

"Remember to thank Gazzy, or you will never get out of here."

Florence blushed and swallowed, her mouth dry as dust. She felt more exhausted than triumphant, but she raised her hands to quiet the crowd, and into her mind flashed, unavoidably, the image of Peter O’Toole scampering whitely across the top of the dynamited Turkish train. Try as she might to shake it from her head, she couldn't. The movie wouldn't stop playing. The next image was of the wounded Turk firing the pistol shot into O’Toole's shoulder. Now she looked down at the surging crowd with fear. Though most of the women wore Western dress, there were a few dozen wearing abaayas. Maybe the University of Chicago anthropologist was right: Perhaps some Arab women didn't want to be rescued from oppression. Florence weighed this terrible possibility along with how simple it would be to kill her right now. How easily a gun could be concealed beneath the veil.

The fear emboldened her. She gestured forcefully for the crowd to quiet. It did. She opened her mouth to address it and—was dumbstruck for words. It was then that she realized tears were streaming down her cheeks.

"Darling," Laila said, "do pull yourself together."

Then Florence heard a voice, a male voice, southern-accented. It said. "Goddammit, girl, you gonna say somelhin' to the folks or just stand there blubberin' like you won the Miss America contest?"

The voice seemed to be coming from a woman dressed in an orange abaaya. Florence looked over at Laila, who was smiling.

Florence's impulse was to leap into the arms of the orange apparition, but this was, she decided, not an appropriate crowning gesture at a moment of feminist triumph—leaping into the arms of a CIA Muslim drag queen.

"Well?" it said. "Come on. Don't got all day"

Florence raised her arms higher, and the crowd quieted

"God be praised, sisters, I am glad to be back with you. I am sure that your husbands are glad, too!" They liked that, the crowd. "I am grateful to you, and to the sheika Laila."

Laila waved and said sideways, "Don't forget Gazzy."

"And of course to the emir," Florence said, "the Lion of Matar, the New Saladin ..." Florence tried not to burst out laughing. "Champion ... and protector of Arab women ... throughout the world!"

"Aren't you laying it on a bit thick, darling?"

Florence's expression was not lost on the Lion of Matar, watching on television in his office. Bitch, he thought. But the crowd was roaring, and that, in the end, was what muttered. At least the bitch would be on an airplane in a few hours, gone for good.

The crowd was chanting, "Flo-rens! Flo-rens!" The Lion of Matar took the television remote control in his plump, bejeweled hand and pressed the off button.

“I’ve never kissed a woman." Florence said to Bobby.

Laila had arranged for them to be driven separately to Florence's apartment overlooking Marlborough Square. They'd have a few hours together before the flight out.

"I never slept with a lesbian." Bobby said. "Wanted to, just never quite got around to it."

They made love again. Afterward. Bobby stood by the balcony looking out over the square. It was early evening. The lights of the town were coming on. " 'Bout time to go, Flo."

Florence smiled. She was wrapped in bed linens and very happy. It had been a long time since she had made love. "Do you have to call me that? Call me Flor-ens."

Bobby looked back at her over his shoulder. "Knew that was gonna go to your head sooner or later."

She couldn't take her eyes off him. He reminded her of Steve McQueen, blond and coiled and dangerous. His pistol was on the bedside table.

"Tell me how you found me," she murmured.

"Already told you."

"Tell me again. I like being rescued."

"I've got... Aw. I can't tell you this stuff, Flo. Come on, time to get dressed now."

"More love first."

"We'll do it on the plane."

"Is it a nice plane? Is there a bed? I want to make love all the way home. How did you find me? I'm not leaving till you tell me."

"Could make you leave."

"I'll chain myself to this bed."

"Thought you'da had enough of chains by now."

"Tell."

Bobby looked at her, love-warm in bed, the sheet draped over her as if on a marble statue, he sighed, a gesture first experienced by humans a hundred thousand years ago when the first man gave in to the first woman.

"Fetish," he said.

"Anything, darling."

"No. Fetish—the emir's guy. I got to him." "Got to him how?"

"He works for the French. I found that out and told him if he didn't tell me where they were holdin' you. I'd tell the emir. He coughed it up real quick. I got word to Boutros. He and I... That's how."

"How did you find out Fetish works for the French?"

"Can we talk about him on the plane? The French girl in Um-beseir, Annabelle, real dish, joined the harem just about the time of Maliq's religious conversion? She works for the French. I got to her."

"Got her or got to her?"

"Whatever."

Florence threw a pillow at him. "I'm sorry you had to go through such hell finding me."

The explosion knocked Bobby backward onto the bed. His instincts took over instantly, and he covered Florence's body with his. Half the ceiling came down on them.

Florence's face was pressed against his chest. She could feel his heart pounding.

"Get dressed now," he said. He slipped on his trousers, took his pistol and approached the balcony, crouching. The flames from the street below reflected on his bare skin.

"Looks like your revolution's started. Flo."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Florence crawled to the balcony and peered over the rail with Bobby "Car bomb." Bobby said. "Big mother."

"Laila." Florence said. She dialed on Bobby's cell. The building shook From another explosion, smaller, more distant. That was Followed by a half-dozen more around the city. Boom. boom. boom, boom—nearly identical intervals.

"It's coordinated." Bobby said.

Laila picked up. "Florence? Something's happening. Thank God I got Hamdul out."

"Are you all right?"

"Just scratched up. The windows blew out. We're on fire. Needless to say, no one is trying to put it out. They're too busy running around shrieking uselessly. Where are you? Your place?"

"Yes. There are explosions all over the city. Bobby says it's coordinated."

"Get out of there, fast. There's shooting on the grounds. Wait. Hold on, I hear something."

Florence heard rotor blades.

"It's the helicopter," Laila said. "The one you gave him. Nice of him to tell me we're leaving."

"You better go." Florence said. The sound of the rotor blades became louder over the phone.

"Florence!" Laila sounded stunned. "I'm here."

"They're leaving—they've lifted off! I can see him. He's sitting next to the pilot!" The rotor blades grew louder. "That pig! That fat, adulterous, odious, cowardly—"

There was an explosion.

"Laila? Laila? Laila?"

"What's going on?" Bobby said.

"Laila!"

Bobby took the phone from Florence and listened. He disconnected. "Time to go." He handed her the orange abaaya that had been his disguise at the rally. "Put this on."

She looked at the garment.

"Flo, it's not a fashion statement."

She put it on slowly. It smelled of him. Bobby yanked the sheet off the bed, took out his spring knife and cut a slit in it and threw it over his head. "Trick or treat." he said. "Come on."

They took the stairs instead of the elevator. It was eight floors down to the lobby. He opened the door cautiously and looked into the lobby. Florence leaned back into the concrete wall, trying to get her heart to stop pounding so hard. She heard a noise.

Four men banged through the lobby door. They wore Western clothing. They spoke. Florence caught the accent.

They spoke loudly, in unafraid tones, and carried drawn pistols. They made for the elevator. Bobby slowly closed the door and held the bar handle of the fire door, manually locking it.

"Wasabi," Florence whispered to Bobby. He looked questioningly at her. "he said hlonek' instead of 'shlonek.' Trust me—they're Wasabi. Probablv mukfelleen."

They went down to the basement and found a rear stairwell. There was a small wire-mesh window in it. With his hand already on the handle, Bobby looked through the window, then quickly darted to the side and threw the bolt home, locking the door just as someone tried to open it from the other side.

They retreated back up to the second floor and emerged into the corridor.

There was a door at the far end that opened onto a small balcony above an alley. They stood on the balcony and looked down. There was a large Dumpster filled with garbage bags.

"Can you do this?" Bobby said. Florence nodded. It was a twenty-foot drop into the Dumpster.

They landed to a commotion of squeaks. Florence felt things squirming under her. Rats. She stilled a cry. Bobby beat at them with his lists. He pulled garbage bags over the two of them until they were concealed. Florence lay there, rodents stirring under her. The garbage had been there for days, putrefying in 110-degree heal. Bobby reached over and held her hand. He whispered. "Best way to get to know a country."

The balcony door above them banged open. They heard two voices. Florence held her breath. The door closed. It was quiet again, they lay there for ten minutes. Bobby whispered. "You want dessert, or shall I get the check?"

Thev hauled themselves out of the Dumpster and made their way toward the waterfront, trying to stay in the shadows. The city was alive with the noise of explosions and small-arms fire. Bobby and Florence came to a grassy public square and ducked into a clump of trees at the corner.

"If we get stopped." Bobby said, "act hysterical, like you're scared shitless."

"Not a problem. Where are we going?"

Bobby thought. "Airport's out. The harbor."

"Is your water taxi operating?"

"You bet. In an hour, we'll be in our own submarine, drinking French champagne and screwin' our brains out."

She didn't believe him, and then it hit her—he'd come back for her on his own. He was operating solo.

"We'll head for the water." he said. "Where there's water, there's boats; where there's boats, there's gettin' the hell out."

"You came back on your own, didn't you?"

"We're gonna be fine. I've been through more Middle Fast coups than you’ve had hot breakfasts."

They came to a corner. Bobby looked around it and jerked his head back. The street was blocked by an armored personnel carrier with a mounted machine gun. The markings on it were Matari.

They moved along Soames Street, parallel to the waterfront. Bobby again peered around a corner and motioned her back. All the streets leading to the harbor were blocked.

"They don't appear to be encouragin' visits to the waterfront tonight." he said. "Time to find out what's goin' on."

They continued along Soames until they came to an appliance store with television sets and microwave ovens in the window.

"Keep an eye out." Bobby produced a tool and fiddled with the lock. It clicked open. He pushed the door open gently, listening for an alarm to go off. They entered.

Against a wall were fifty or so televisions. Bobby went behind the counter and began flipping switches. All fifty sets flicked on, bathing them in blue screen glow.

"Be a good place to watch the Super Bowl." Bobby said. He began flicking several remote controls at once, causing blizzards of pixels.

"Channel Forty-five." she said. The TV Matar channel.

He flicked. Normally, at this hour, TV Matar would be showing Mukfellahs, the situation comedy about the inept crew of religious police. Instead, there was a grim-faced announcer, a man, sitting behind the news desk. They knew instantly what it meant. The announcer was dressed in the clerical garb of a Matari moolah, and he was speaking Matari, not English. The first words Florence could make out were "criminal." then "infidel," then "provisional," followed by "Imam Maliq" followed by "God be praised." None of these buzzwords was reassuring. Again she was struck by how incongruently malevolent "Allah the merciful, the compassionate" could be made to sound coming from human lips. Then she heard her own name mentioned, and hot as she was under the abaaya, Florence felt a chill. She learned from the television that she was at large somewhere in the city, that all decent citizens should be vigilant, for she was dangerous, an enemy, an agent of Satan.

Bobby was standing by the door with his pistol drawn, in the event the alarm was silent and an enraged Mr. Mohammed Dera'a, whose name appeared on the sign above, was on his way to reassert proprietorship of his goods.

The moolah continued his announcements. The holy soil of Matar was— praise God—under new rule. The decades of corruption and decadence so vile in the eyes of God the merciful, the compassionate, the wise, were over. A new dawn was proclaimed (though technically, it was only eight P.M.). A revolutionary Islamic republic was proclaimed. Praise God. Citizens should remain indoors until the last vestiges of the former regime could be "cleansed"— another sunny word made sinister.

Up on the screen came Gazzy's face. He was in sunglasses, grinning and waving at the photographer. The picture had been taken in what newspaper captions like to call "happier times."

"The imam makes the following announcement. The emir Gazzir Bin Haz. blasphemer, betrayer and tool of imperialist infidels, is dead. Allahu akbar. He was fleeing the royal palace like a coward when his American-provided helicopter stuck a tree and crashed. The former sheika ..."

Florence held her breath.

"... is in custody. Already she is repenting of her crimes against God the mighty and the people of Matar. Long life and blessings upon our glorious beloved imam Maliq, beloved of God, sent by God, savior of Matar’s holy soil."

Florence began dialing.

"What you doing?"

"It's the Middle Fast. I'm trading."

Bobby sighed. "Baby, you're not bein' part of the solution."

She dialed the main palace number. A voice answered, authoritative.

"This is Florence. Do you understand who I am?"

"Yes."

"I wish to speak with the imam Maliq." "Impossible."

"I have something he wants very badly."

"Speak."

"I will convey that to the imam," she said sharply. "Put him on the telephone. Do it now, or you will feel his anger upon your back." In moments of drama. Arabic tended toward the archaic.

Bobby mouthed the words: "They're tracing the call."

Florence paced back and forth in front of the TV screens.

"Flo." Bobby hissed. "What the fuck you doin'?"

"I'm responsible."

"Aw, jeez, dammit, girl!" He banged his hand against the glass door. "You're always responsible! You want to be a martyr? Why don't you just strap on some explosives and go blow up a damn bus!"

"Fuck you."

"This is the imam Maliq." said a startled voice, "and fuck you, madame!"

"Not you. It's Florence calling."

"What do you want?"

"To trade. Me for the sheika."

"Why should I trade? You will be dead or captured before dawn."

"Just put her on a plane. The moment it lands and I see her on TV, getting off. I'll turn myself in. I'll confess to whatever you want."

Maliq laughed. "You will confess in any event."

"Look. Maliq, you're bringing the veil back to Matar, Yes?"

"Certainly, but what does this have to do with it?"

"There are two and a half million women in Matar. How long will it take you to look underneath every veil to find me?"

"There is no rush. My days of racing are over. Cod be praised."

"Come on, Maliq, do you really want to wait that long before chopping off my head?"

"Imam Maliq, if you please." he said almost flirtatiously. "Cut off your head? No, no, I have something else in mind. All in good time. And now I must go. It seems I have a country to run."

The television sets were showing file footage of Maliq addressing a crowd. He looked rather stylish for an Islamic religious leader, but then his clerical garb had been designed in Paris.

There was a long glass counter of cell phones and GameBoys and other electronic items. It was locked. Florence found a metal bar by the cash register for threatening robbers. She picked it up and began smashing through the glass.

Bobby watched. "Flo, what are you doin'?" "Launching the counterrevolution."

She gathered all the cell phones into a plastic shopping bag. She pointed to another locked glass display case full of video equipment "Break that, would you, please?"

Bobby went to the display and smashed it with a single blow of his pistol butt. Florence pulled out several video cameras and put them in the now bulging bag.

"That one. too." She pointed.

Bobby obediently broke another case. "Mr. Dera'a isn't gonna be real happy."

Florence gathered up some battery-operated televisions. Having completed her looting, she grabbed her orange abaaya. She kissed Bobby on the cheek. "Goodbye, baby," she said.

"What are you talkin' about?"

"Bobby. A man, a Westerner, blond, wanted for killing one of the new ruler's men in a garage? How long do you think you'd last in the new Matar?"

"I got my veil."

She smiled and stroked his cheek. "You'd do me more harm than good."

She put on her orange abaaya and picked up the bulging shopping bags. She looked like any Muslim woman who'd spent the afternoon at the mall.

Florence put her head out the door, looked both ways, cast a backward glance at Bobby and left.

He gave her a head start, then put on his own abaaya and followed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The coup in Matar, or, as the State Department was calling it, "the developing situation in Matar," had taken the United States government completely by surprise. The White House gamely asserted that it had been aware "for some time now" that a violent takeover had been in the offing, and they had been working "behind the scenes and around the clock" to avert crisis. This, however, was a souffle that refused to rise.

On Capitol Hill, the cries of "Who lost Matar?" grew louder and louder. Senators pounded their podia, demanding answers. The president declared that he, too, wanted answers. The CIA said that although it would have no official comment, it, too. perhaps even more than the president and the senators, wanted answers. The secretary of state said that there might in fact be no answers, but if there were, he certainly would be interested in hearing them. The secretary general of the United Nations said that he was reasonably certain answers existed, but first the right questions must be asked, and then they would have to be translated, and this would take time.

There were those who urged caution, and those who urged that now was a time not for caution but for boldness. Then there were those who urged a middle course of cautious boldness. 'There were extremists on both sides: the neo-isolationists, whose banner declared. "Just sell us the damned oil." and the neo-interventionists, who said, "Together, we can make a better world, but we'll probably have to kill a lot of you in the process."

Privately, the American president was said to be torn—between dispatching an aircraft carrier (perhaps the most dramatic gesture available to a president, short of actually landing on one); and dispatching a nuclear submarine. A distinguished naval historian pointed out on public television that submarines are every bit as lethal as aircraft carriers, but, being underwater, are harder to see and therefore "less visually impactful." It was, as another historian said on public television, "a time of great ambiguity." And yet about even that much, reasonable people differed. One fact, however, asserted itself stubbornly, insistently, over and over, until it could not be ignored or swept or channel-surfed away: that nearly one third of America's imported oil. without which there would be much shivering in January, now flowed through a country ruled by— as one more historian put it on public television—"a race-car driver turned ayatollah, installed by France." On this point, there was little ambiguity. The question was, what to do about it? France had played her cards with elan and panache, savoir faire and a heaping helping of je ne sais quoi.

Within days, snippets of film taken in the late Gazzir Bin Haz's "summer" residence at Um-beseir had made their way onto the Internet and television, Canal Quatre in Paris aired a documentary about the emir's harem that would have made Casanova, the authors of the Kama Sutra and. quite possibly, the Marquis de Sade blush. The film had been (apparently, since no one would take credit for it) shot by some hidden camera. (Annabelle had been a busy girl, indeed.) In one particularly riveting sequence, the emir of Matar was seen spooning beluga caviar onto the breasts of a pair of (admittedly delectable) Russian ladies named Tatiana and Svetlana, and then gobbling it up, pausing only to take puffs from a hookah that seemed to contain more than mere tobacco, and gulps from a bottle quite clearly labeled "Southern Comfort" while periodically shrieking, "God be praised1." True, every man worships God in his own way, but such vignettes made it somewhat difficult for the exiled noblesse of Matar, now dug into their bunkers in Cannes, Gstaad and Portofino, to assert convincingly—between swigs of Chivas and Cristal—that the late emir had been guided by a decent respect for the opinion of mankind.

Expensive media consultants were duly engaged by the exiled Bin Hazzim to make the ease that life in Matar under the emir, decadent and even downright naughty as he may have been, had been more benign than the Matar that the neo-conservative Maliq had in mind. Religious converts often try to make up for lost piousness with heightened fervor. Maliq's motto was a perverse paraphrase of Saint Augustine: Oh God. make me bad—right now: Within days of taking over, he had revoked driving privileges for women; reinstituted the veil; made it illegal for women to leave the house except with a male blood relation: and decreed female laughter punishable by twenty lashes, on the theological grounds that if a woman laughed, she was probably happy about something, and that would not do.

The citizens of Matar did not embrace this new pietism with open arms, but then Maliq had never said he cared what they thought one way or the other. A large construction crane was driven into Robespierre (formerly Churchill) Square, and several counterrevolutionary Matari citizens were duly suspended from it by the neck. Several women, frisky enough to venture out in broad daylight without their heads covered—and, if you please, without male chaperones—were swiftly made an example of. It was quite obvious, declared the mukfellah official who announced their sentences, that they had been on their way to fornicate with loathsome blackamoor cooks. There was no actual evidence of this, but the advantage of a religious judiciary is that you don't need evidence. The unfortunate women insisted that they were just going out to pick up milk and the dry cleaning, but you can't be too careful.

Much as he enjoyed a flogging or beheading, or even the occasional stoning, Maliq could take or leave them. He would much rather watch NASCAR and formula One racing on television (though he now had to be a bit discreet about this). It was his Wasabi patrons who were behind all the chopping and lashing. They insisted. And since it was they who had put him on his throne, Maliq had no choice but to play along.

TV Matar and his late half brother Gazzir—whose helicopter had been brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade, not a tree—had caused the House of Hamooj nothing but ridicule and humiliation. Now it was payback time: time, moreover, to set an example for all the Wasabi women back at home who had gotten all sorts of dangerous ideas from all those months of watching TV Matar.

How different was its programming now! Recipes, tips on how to please the husband, how to keep from being trampled during the hajj, comedies about greedy Israelis and fat infidel Americans. Thursday nights at eight. Everyone Loves Imam!, with Maliq reading aloud from the Book of Hamooj and giving his own unique textural interpretations. True, ratings were a sliver of what they once had been. But then you need to give new shows time to build.

France. Wasabia's co-partner in the Maliq installation, was not altogether thrilled by this grim slate of affairs. But as the Ministere de Petrole (Ministry of Oil) was about to sign an entente economique (sweetheart deal) with Wasabia for a 20 percent discount. France was not disposed to make too loud a bruit (noise) about it.

Confronted in the men's room at the IN Security Council by the U.S. permanent representative, the French permanent representative shook his head and rolled his eyes and said. "Yes, yes, yes, but what can one do with these people— they are impossible." leaving the American representative with an even more deeply beetled brow and requiring further instruction from Washington.

France was also about to sign a mutual security pad with Matar, providing her with a deep-water naval base in the Gulf. The new government in Paris was manifesting neo-Gaullist (some said neo-Napoleonic) designs in the Proche-Orient, where the tricolor had once flapped proudly in the breezes. All the insults of 1922 were finally being avenged. Another distinguished historian— there seemed to be no end of them—said on public television that France was no longer content to sit back and watch the United States screw things up in the region. Did not France have her own proud history of screwing things up? Took at Algeria, Vietnam, Syria, Haiti—Quebec—all still reeling from their days of French rule. Clearly. France was ready and eager to show the world that she, too. could wreak disastrous, unforeseen consequences abroad, far more efficiently and almost certainly with more flair than America.

There was, meanwhile, yet another wave of anti-French sentiment in the United States. French maitre d's were assaulted by gangs of thugs, champagne was poured into gutters, baguettes were angrily torn in two and hurled across restaurants. Peugeots were splattered with vegetables and their windshield wipers bent. The French embassy in Washington, once the scene of glittering soirees, was attacked by a mob of evangelical Christians hurling (innocent) frogs. One member of Congress introduced a bill calling for exhuming and repatriating the remains of American soldiers buried in Normandy. "Digging Up Private Ryan."

The cries of "Who lost Matar?" grew more clamorous, despite polls showing that for two thirds of the American people, the more relevant question was "Where exactly is Matar?" However, when informed by the pollsters that "perfidious Frogs" and "filthy Wasabis" had taken over the country in order to "make America look bad" and "drive up the price of oil," Americans by a distinct majority responded that their government must do "something" about it, as long as it wouldn't cost too much and could be done from thirty-five thousand feet. There was little appetite at this point for another Pentagon "boots on the ground" intervention in the region.

Such, at any rate, was the situation two weeks after Florence left Mr. Dera'a's appliance store carrying her shopping bags of electronics.

Renard and George were back in Washington following their watery exfiltration off Blenheim Beach. The submarine had been smaller than advertised, and its medical officer had had to sedate the claustrophic George with a hypodermic before they could get him down the hatch. The submarine transferred them to an aircraft carrier. They were flown off the carrier—along with crew mail and the corpse of a despondent, homesick sailor who had committed suicide by drinking the hydraulic fluid of an F-14—to Bahrain, and from there by commercial aviation to Rome, and from there on to Washington, where they arrived to find that all traces of their mission had been deleted, as if by a single stroke on some master keyboard.

The Alexandria safe house that had been their staging area was now occupied by a middle-aged couple who insisted that they had bought the house on the Internet six months before, and who didn't seem disposed to argue the point with the two forlorn-looking men on their doorstep. George and Rick felt like sailors who come across a ship in the middle of the ocean, eerily empty of human presence but for cups of still-warm coffee and cigarettes burning in the ashtray.

George telephoned his old desk at the State Department and got through to Duckett’s deputy, who said he was under the impression that George had been transferred to Guatemala City. They didn't seem to care whether George came back to the Near East desk. George found himself in a bureaucratic Sargasso Sea.

When he and Rick went separately to get money from their ATMs. They each found in his checking account the inexplicable but not unwelcome sum of $I million. It could have had only one source: the now vanished Uncle Sam. This was, evidently, their severance pay. The sudden largesse left them confused, all the more so when, a few days later, the sum disappeared from their accounts only to reappear the next day, doubled. They debated the meaning of this now-you-see-it-now-you-don't deposit and concluded that it was a message: Keep quiet, or all this money will go away for good. Behave, and it might double.

The discovery that they were millionaires twice over left them temporarily elated, then profoundly depressed, for by now the cataclysmic events in Matar had played on their television screens, and their thoughts were not on how to spend this munificence but on what had happened to Florence.

They were sitting glumly in Rick's apartment off Dupont Circle one evening, eating Chinese takeout and drinking Alsatian beer and watching a television news program in which several Middle Eastern experts, each beamed in from a different city, were screaming at one another about the need to remain calm, when the host interrupted his guests to say that the network's Manama bureau had received a videotape, apparently taken inside Matar. Inasmuch as the country had been sealed off from outside media by order of the emir Maliq, the announcer was excited by what was about to be shown.

Rick and George put down their Kung Pao chicken and intently watched Rick's spiffv new fifty-five-inch plasma-screen home-entertainment system. Rick thought they might as well spend some of the money, to the dismay of a censorious George, who had not yet decided on the moral propriety of spending the mysterious deposits. Their maxillofacial muscles gaped as a grainy simulacrum of Florence came on-screen, accompanied by scratchy but quite audible sound.

"I speak from inside occupied Matar. An iron veil has descended upon the country. The sheika Laila, widow of the late emir, is being held prisoner by the usurper Maliq and his Wasabi and French puppetmasters. Women are being tortured and executed. But their spirit is unbroken. They cry out to the civilized nations of the world. Do not allow the forces of corrupted Islam, which make a mockery of a great religion and of its founder, the prophet Mohammed. They cry out to you: freedom! freedom! freedom!"

The announcer said that not much was known about the person on the videotape, other than that she had apparently once worked in some capacity at TV Matar, the formerly pro-women's-rights satellite network. It was thought that she might be an American citizen, a fact that, he pointed out. "could complicate the situation as far as the United States government is concerned."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The scaffold had been erected in the center of the mall over a fountain so that the spectators could see.

Florence maneuvered her way as close as she could to the platform without drawing attention. She had contrived a shoulder harness for the video camera, which was tucked under her left arm. A small hole cut in the abaaya provided an aperture for the lens. There are advantages to a system that forces its citizens to cover themselves from head to toe.

At each corner of the platform stood a mukfellah. Mukfelleen had been trucked into Matar from Wasabia in great numbers, to enforce the religious codes. They were like secret police anywhere: they liked a bit of bowing and scraping. When Florence—accompanied by the required male escort—passed one in the street, if the mukfellah was looking especially sour, she would bow and say. "God be praised, brother, for your presence here!" Her male escort, his Western features obscured by gutra and large sunglasses, would lug at her and say, "Come along, sister, do not disturb these well beloved of Allah al their blessed labors." To reinforce the illusion that she was just another Matari wife. Florence carried a wicker basket full of fruit and other fresh items from the market. Underneath the produce was a nine-millimeter pistol, and the more she saw of the mukfelleen and their blessed labors, she more she yearned to use it on them. Whatever misgivings she may have had about Bobby killing Maliq's man back in the garage were gone now. Her weeks in occupied Matar had taught her how to hate.

The crowd stirred. The captain of the detail pushed his way through to the scaffold, four mukfelleen stood at the corners of the platform. They called for silence and respect.

The captain climbed the steps of the platform and read the sentence. The woman, one Ardeesha, had been caught not only driving a car but trying to escape Matar. The imam Maliq. blessings be upon him and his holy work, had compassionately commuted the sentence from death to one hundred lashes. Allah is merciful.

Ardeesha was brought out, trembling and whimpering and begging for mercy. She was tied down. The muk brought the four-foot-long rattan cane down again and again on the writhing black shape on the platform. She screamed throughout the first thirty blows and then fell silent. The women closest to the platform began to cry and beg for mercy. The whole business took about ten minutes.

When it was over, the mukfclleen captain who had read the sentence praised the imam's compassion, and the order was given for the crowd to disperse. Most of the audience's male escorts had been smoking or having coffee at Starbucks. They gathered up their charges and left. Some decided to remain and do some shopping. The mall's shopkeepers look advantage of the Punishment Day crowds and announced sales. Florence's male escort collected her. and together they left. As they walked past the mukfelleen guard al the mall's entrance, her escort did not compliment him on his blessed labors.

They got into their car and drove off in silence. Florence pressed the PLAY button and watched to make sure she had gotten it on tape. Bobby listened to the sound of the cane blows coining from the camera's speaker and said quietly, "Turn it off."

Amo-Amas teemed with Wasabi Friendship Troops. Maliq had also requested French soldiers, but Paris, already having enough to explain at the United Nations, demurred: France did, however, dispatch hundreds of advisers to help with infrastructure. Thousands of Mataris had fled (mostly for the South of France), producing the usual brain drain.

Bobby and Florence drove north, off the main roads. Traffic slowed to a crawl. Bobby leaned his head out the window and saw police vehicles ten cars ahead. Roadblocks and identity checks had become the norm. Florence removed the tape from the video camera hidden underneath her abaaya and substituted a tape containing images of children playing on the beach. Were the camera confiscated, the images would be innocent.

The basket of fruit was between them. They edged forward toward the police.

"God be praised." Bobby said to the policeman, who leaned in and demanded his and his wife's papers. Bobby's Arabic was without accent and he had darkened his skin with cosmetics. He looked as Matari as the next man.

'The soldier did not return the greeting. He examined their papers, flipping through the pages of the Matari passports. "Where are you going?"

"Home, with your permission."

The policeman lingered over Florence's passport. "Wife?"

"I've got three. But this is the good-looking one. so I took her to see the punishment at the mall. So she won't get ideas. A good example our imam sets."

The policeman looked closer at Florence, who sat staring straight ahead. "What's in the basket?"

"Figs from the Mashulf Valley." Bobby held the basket to the policeman. "Have one. as a token of our thanks for protecting us from our enemies. They're delicious."

The policeman reached for the basket's handle.

"Brother, please." Bobby grinned. "They're for the children's supper." He moved his left foot, with its ankle holster, within reach.

The policeman hesitated, he picked the plumpest figs off the top and gave the basket back and waved the car forward. "Go," he said.

"And Allah be with you." Bobby said. He edged forward and muttered. "Asshole."

There were no more roadblocks, and half an hour later, they reached their drab concrete house in the Sherala district, one of Amo-Amas's poorer neighborhoods, a place of broken glass and spiked walls, starving dogs and Filipino "guest" workers who had been granted permission by their Matari employers to live outside the home. There was an enclosure for the car.

Inside. Florence made duplicates of the videotape. She took off the hated abaaya. Bobby aimed the camera at her.

"This footage that you are about to witness was taken inside occupied Matar on March twenty-seventh at the Chartwell Mall, which the usurper Maliq has turned into a place of public execution ..."

When they were finished, Bobby put a copy of the tape inside a packet of cigarettes and drove to the airport. On the way, he called Fouad, a ground-crew chief with Air Matar whom Bobbv had recruited years ago. Seven hours later, the tape was in Nicosia, Cyprus, and in the hands of an Armenian named Hampigian, with whom Bobby had also been doing business for years. In another eight hours, it had arrived at the CNN bureau in Rome. Within an hour, following a conference with headquarters in Atlanta that included the chairman of the board, the tape was broadcast.

Among the millions who watched were Renard and George. They had set up a makeshift command center in Rick's office, using more of Uncle Sam's severance pay. The tape made for very difficult viewing. Even the cynical Renard was unable to speak after it was over. George had to get up and leave the room after five minutes. But then few people in the West had watched a woman being slowly beaten to death.

The network was flooded with phone calls, mostly from people appalled that it would show such a gruesome thing—the worst, some said, since the pictures of Americans torturing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison. But there was intense interest in the American woman who had taken the footage, obviously at great personal risk. She was now an object of official curiosity—in Washington. Paris, Kaffa and Amo-Amas; indeed, all over the world. Naturally, the media couldn't resist. They dubbed her "Florence of Arabia."

IMAN MALIQ BELOVED OF ALLAH, emir of the Royal Kingdom of Matar, high prince of the House of Bin Haz, sharif of the Um-Katush, was less than pleased to hear that Delame-Noir of the Onzieme Bureau was in Matar and requesting an "audience." It did please Maliq that he had put it that way. "audience" being more august than "meeting."

Still, he felt that Delame-Noir was condescending to him. He didn't like Delame-Noir to begin with, and now that he had achieved the throne, if there was any condescending to do, by Allah, he would do it. He was in no mood for one of Delame-Noir's interminable pedantic lectures about the historicity of Hegelian dichotomies. Nor did Maliq desire to be reminded that it was Delame-Noir who had put him on the throne with the scheme of transforming him from a cheating race-car driver into a religious leader.

King Tallulah and Prince Bawad had been imperious beyond belief, reminding Maliq in every phone call, every e-mail, every meeting that it was their troops, their mukfelleen. their money and, God be praised, their oil that had put him on the throne. Between Paris and Kaffa. Maliq was tired of being grateful. Dammit, they should be grateful to him! Had he not selflesslv put himself forward, giving up a brilliant career as a race-car driver, to restore Matar to its glory? (Assuming

Matar had ever actually been glorious.) Had he not risked all? What if the coup had failed? Where would he be now? In Gazzy's dungeon, supplementing his diet with beetles. No. he'd had quite enough of their telling him, Now, here's what else you can do for us today.

"We will not see the Frenchman." Maliq petulantly announced to Fetish, the aide de camp he had inherited from his brother and who had come highly recommended by Delame-Noir. A certain air of pronouncement-making had crept into Maliq's speech of late; this often happens, alas, when one becomes dictator.

"But Holiness—"

"I have spoken, Fetish."

Since Fetish was also on the payroll of Delame-Noir's Onzieme Bureau, he pressed as gingerly as he could. "Great Imam—would it not be wise to grant the Frenchman a few minutes? He has traveled a great distance."

"Bah! You make it sound like he crossed the Nefud Desert on camel. He came in his own private jet. It's got a bed in it, a kitchen and a two-star Michelin chef. We ourselves have flown in it. It is—damn thy impertinence. Fetish. It is not for us to explain ourselves!"

"I am but dung beside Thy Augustness, lord, beloved of Allah

, protector of the one true faith. However, in my despised humility. I ask, should not my lord receive the Frenchman just for a brief time?"

Maliq made a growling noise but knew Fetish was right. "Ten minutes.

Make sure you come in after exactly ten minutes and say, 'Imam, you are urgently needed by ...' Well, by someone important."

"How truly wise and benevolent is my master. Allah truly—"

"Oh, just get him, Fetish."

Maliq paced in his office, lingering his worry beads. Delame-Noir was shown in.

"Altesse!" Delame-Noir bowed ever so slightly. He looked Maliq up and down, rather—Maliq thought—like a malevolent tailor. "In your person, the magnificence of the Bin Hazzim and the purity of the true faith have found their most sublime embodiment. How lucky is Matar to have so wise, so puissant, a ruler. This does not happen every day. Indeed, not since your second cousin's great-great-great-uncle Ali Hashim bin—"

'Yes, yes," Malic] said. "Matar is once again a holy place. God be praised. So. Here you are."

"I have come to pay you homage, man emir. To see the new crown jewel of the Matari in his setting."

"Ah? Well. Good. Here I am. So. Very busy time."

"Oh, yes." Delame-Noir grinned Gallicly. "It is truly work, establishing oneself as the unquestioned authority. But you have, yes, yes, you have. And now maybe it's time to give the signal that, okay, we take our religion seriously, we are very observant, very strict, but we're not going to beat to death all the naughty women in the mall outside the Starbucks? Surely?"

Maliq sighed. "We didn't know this Florence woman was going to take a video of it."

"All the same, it's not such a good image for the new Matar, mon imam. They are playing it on the Internet now. It's very— Speaking personally; I find it very difficult to watch. It's like a Mel Gibson movie."

"The Internet is an instrument of Satan."

"The theology I must leave to the theologians." Delame-Noir said. "My concern, it's for you. Because this is not good publicity. Look, myself, I don't really care. We chopped off a lot of heads during our revolution. For a while it's fun, and an amusement for the riffraff, but if it goes on too long, it's not good for business."

"What are they going to do, not buy the oil?"

"No, no. Oil they would buy from anyone. From Satan. But why give yourself such a bad image in the world'.''"

"It's not my image you're worried about. It's yours."

"From you. wise imam, there is no keeping secrets. But okay, yes, this is making everyone look not so good. Not that France cares what the world thinks, still..."

Maliq threw up his hands. "It's the Wasabis who insist! Tallulah himself— he calls me every day to say he's sending more mukfelleel to help me 'purify the country.' I tell him. Thank you, you are too generous, but we don't need any more religious police.' And the next thing I know. Fetish informs me that another five hundred have arrived—by bus! What am I supposed to do?"

Delame-Noir nodded sympathetically. "It's not easy being imam."

"If it weren't for me, the muks would be holding twice as main executions and beatings."

"Clearly. I have misread the situation. How can I apologize to you? How can I help?"

"Just tell me." Maliq grunted, "what am I supposed to do."

"Perhaps there is a solution. Look, why don't you say to Tallulah. 'My dear king, we have had the iron fist, now it's time for the handshake, eh? We have made the people tremble. They are making pee-pee in their thobes, They are so full of respect for you. Now we have a very obedient people. And now it's time for the making pleasant.' Eh?"

"They're Wasabis." Maliq said. "They don't make pleasant"

"At least get this publicity off your soil."

"How?"

"Here is a statistic that I happen to possess. It's very secret, so please don't tell who told you. Do you know part of the reason Wasabia is sending you all these mukfelleen? Because they don't have enough to do there, because the population is so scared of them, they don't do anything wrong. They don't even go outside the house anymore. And this has translated into an unemployment situation among the mukfelleen. Tallulah is very worried about this, so he see it as a golden opportunity to get them out of his country and fully occupied. This is what is going on with the mukfelleen. And it's not good to have out-of-work executioners, eh? They get ideas.

"So, why don't you say to Tallulah, "Okay, in return lor your assistance with the change in regime. I am going to send you all our naughty women of Matar to help with your mukfeleen unemployment situation.' If they want to chop off the women's heads and make the bastinado, then at least it's happening in Wasabia, where they expect this barbarism, not here in the former Switzerland of the Gulf, eh?"

"But what about this Florence woman? I can't have her running around loose. It undermines our authority."

"No, no." Delame-Noir smiled. "This we cannot permit. Perhaps for this, too. I have a suggestion."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Florence could tell from the look on Bobby's face that it was not good news. He ripped off his gutra with disgust and tossed Al Matar on the table. Florence saw the front-page headline above the fold:

FORMER SHEIKA CONFESSES TO IMMORAL RELATIONSHIP WITH AMERICAN FLORENCE SPY-PROPAGANDIST

Bobby said. "They probably didn't bother to torture her. Just made it all up."

Florence read the last paragraph aloud:" "The decision about how to punish her foul sins rests with the highest authorities. Acknowledging the enormity of her crimes, the former sheika has herself stated that strict implementation of shari'a, as interpreted by our blessed imam Maliq—a thousand blossoms fall upon his immaculate person—is commensurate with her crimes, too unspeakable to detail here.'

"Aw, shit." Florence finished.

"Us a trap. This is the bait."

Florence started to gather up her things. Bobby watched her. "Does this mean that we're takin' the bait?" "I can do this alone."

"God-dammit

, Flo."

By the time they left their shabby dwelling, they resembled a thousand married couples—she determined, he furious.

They drove to a car park in the Mirdam district, one of Amo-Amas's most crowded, a place of market stalls and outdoor eateries abutting the playing fields where soccer games and camel and horse races were held. It bustled still. Even the grim asceticism that had settled on Matar had not entirely stilled the ambient noise of buying and selling.

Bobby's ego had now recovered at least to the point where he was speaking to Florence. "If he picks up right away." he said, "make it real quick. If he offers to put Laila on the phone and tells you to hold, hang up. You can always call back on another cell. But if they're expectin' the call, and they sure as hell will be, we've only got a couple minutes before the place’ll be swannin' with muks. I don't know how much technical assistance they're gettin' from the Frogs, but let's assume they are, so whatever you've got to say, say it fast.

"The call will be taped. And they will take anythin' you say and splice it so it'll sound like you're admittin' to everything from lesbian orgies to pissin' on the Kaaba stone in Mecca."

They parked the car and got out and blended—Bobbv's favorite pastime— into the late-morning crowd. It was as good a place as any to make a call that would be immediately traced: thousands of people, half of them veiled, traffic, two-way streets, dozens of ways in and out.

Florence took out one of the cell phones that she had stolen on the night of Matar's "liberation." as it was now officially called. Bobby pressed a wad of sticky wax on the back of it and returned it to Florence. The wax made it feel lumpy and strange in her hand. She dialed the emir's private line.

He picked up after two rings. She identified herself. Maliq came on within moments. They'd obviously been expecting the call. Bobby chewed gum and looked at his watch with the air of a nervous coach.

"Well, Maliq." Florence said, "are you ready to take your seat at the table of civilized nations'.''"

"What are you talking about. Florence?"

"I’m doing what you wanted me to—answering that notice you put in the paper today."

"Ah, Still want to trade, then? I shall require a down payment."

"What did you have in mind? A hand? Tongue? The whole head?"

"Since you like to make tapes, you'll make a tape of your confession. On it should be included all your admissions, all your crimes—the U.S. government's role in plotting against Matar, against Islam, against me personally, your unnatural relationship with the sheika. Everything."

"The thousand and one crimes? I'll need a very long tape. And after you have it?"

"She will be flown to Cyprus. And you will surrender yourself." "What guarantee do you have that I would surrender after the sheika is set free?"

"You want her to live a long and full life, yes? With her son?" "All right. Hold on a moment, would you, Maliq?"

She left the connection open. Bobby look the phone from her. He stepped off the curb and bent, as if to tie his shoe, and affixed the phone to the underside of a car that was stopped for a red light

They moved off and again blended into the crowds. Moments later, there were sirens and a helicopter overhead, then several black sedans full of mukfelleen sped past them in the direction of the innocent vehicle.

“I HAVE COMMITTED offenses against the state and ... I have..." Florence stared into the lens of the camera Bobby held. "My name is Florence. I am American. I have had a ... relationship .. ."

"Would it help if I set it up on a tripod and let you do this alone?" Bobby said.

Florence sighed. "No, let's try it again. What take are we on?" "Eighteen or nineteen. Lost count Okay, rollin'.. ."

"My name is Florence. I am American. I am an enemy of the regime of Imam Maliq." She looked at Bobby. "How was that?" "I think they're going to want more than that." "This film—you're sure it works?" "Like a charm. Used it dozens of times."

"Okay, then." She brushed a strand of hair away. "Do I look all right?"

Bobby rolled his eyes. "Fabulous. Rollin'."

"My name is Florence, and 1 have commit led many offenses against the country of Matar and its glorious leader, the imam Maliq bin-Kash al-Haz ..."

". . . FOR THESE TERRIBLE offenses, I deserve whatever punishment Imam Maliq. in his great wisdom, counseled by the holy mullahs of Matar, in accordance with shari'a. should decide upon. May my sins be cleansed, and may Allah forgive me for my transgressions. Long life to Imam Maliq. Long life to the new Islamic Republic of Matar."

Fetish switched off lhe VCR.

"Hum." Maliq grunted, pleased.

"Congratulations, Imam." Fetish said. "A great success." "Yes. "It was, rather. You don't think she was acting too much?" "No. sire. She looked most fearful and penitent. Very convincing." "She's not bad-looking."

"Truly, a waste of beauty. Magnificence. Shall I have the tape copied and distributed'.''"

"Oh. yes. Make many copies."

"And shall I make the arrangements?"

"Which?"

"With respect to the sheika. Great One. The plane—to Cyprus?" "Of course not."

"Ah? The imam would pray first, then have me make the arrangements?"

"You may make the arrangements. Fetish, when I tell you to make them. Is this difficult to comprehend? Is thy hearing afflicted?"

"No. Holy One. It is all quite straightforward. Forgive thy humble servant's obtuseness."

"Your what?"

"Stupidity, Imam."

"Ah. You may leave us."

Fetish went off to a quiet corner of the palace apartments to relay by cell phone to his other employer. M. Delame-Noir, the developments and lack thereof.

FROM ANOTHER CROWDED part of the city. Florence placed another call to Maliq. Bobby, now even more impatient, kept time with his watch.

"You have your down payment." she said when Maliq came to the phone.

"Yes. Do you have a television in whatever stink hole you're in? It's going to be playing tonight. But if you miss it tonight, you can watch it tomorrow night. Or the night after that."

"Will I also see on television the sheika disembarking from a plane in Cyprus?"

"Well, you see, there's a problem."

"What problem.' Maliq?"

"She's not well to travel. She has had quite the time of it, you see. Why don't you visit her? We’ll put you in an adjoining room. You can make love through the bars."

"So, Maliq, still the cheater?"

"No, Florence, still the winner."

Florence pressed END and dropped the phone in the gutter, where it broke apart as it tumbled into the sewer drain. She and Bobby joined the throng and walked off. Above, they could hear a helicopter approaching.

"IMAM, THERE IS a problem with the tape." Fetish said. "What 'problem'?"

"There is nothing on it."

"What are you saying?"

"I sent it directly to Jahar, the head of the television station, for duplicating and broadcasting. But he says that when they went to duplicate it, it was— empty. There was nothing on it."

"This is impossible. Fetish. You and I watched it together."

"I cannot explain. Imam."

Maliq picked up his phone. Jahar came on the line and tremblingly reported that, regretfully, alas, there was nothing on the tape. Maliq called him an imbecile and a fool and. what was more, a traitor. Jahar, sweating profusely, said that the tape was being examined most rigorously by TV Matar's top technicians, and if anything could be found on it—other than nullity and blankness—he would immediately advise His Most Holy Worship. Maliq slammed the phone down with such force that it cracked. "Filthy deceiving bitch!"

"Holiness," Fetish said, "she is not worthy of thy wrath."

"Trickery! Foul women's deceit!"

"Calm thyself. Holy One, lest thy heart burst."

"Fetch the sheika! Bring her here, the slut! Immediately!"

"Master—"

"Fetish." Maliq seethed, "do you know what an oubliette is?"

Fetish did not, but he was certain it was no pleasant thing.

"It is a hole, Fetish, a very deep hole, found in French chateaux and prisons, for the hurling into of troublesome people. And there they are forgotten— oubliés. I'm having one installed beneath the palace. Would you like to be the first to try it out?"

Nothing so concentrates the mind as the prospect of being hurled into a pit. Fetish scurried off like a crab to call Delame-Noir.

Delame-Noir was a man of refinement, but on hearing Fetish's report, he uttered a low "Merde." Upon regaining his composure, he instructed Fetish to delay, whereupon Fetish began babbling about oubliettes. It had been some time since Delame-Noir had heard the word, but now that he was reminded of it, he was inclined to dig one himself, deep enough to accommodate the entire Matari royal family; or the whole country, for that mutter.

"1'1'S BECOME EASIER now that film is digital," Bobby was saying. "There's an algorithm embedded in the chip that activates the erase function when you hit PLAY. So you can only play the tape once, and it won't duplicate. Can come in kinda handy. I've used it a lot."

Florence hadn't said much since dropping the phone into the sewer.

"Look, Flo," he said, "you tried. You did everythin' you could. He was never going to let her go. Even if he wanted to, the Wasabis wouldn't let him. The only thing they want more than Laila's head on a stick is yours."

"Algorithm." she said absent-mindedly. "It's an Arabic word. It comes from 'Al-khawarizmi.' Mathematician, twelve centuries ago, in the days when they were great. They're going to kill her. Bobby."

'Maybe the French'll intervene. This PR can't be doin' them any good. They may be assholes, but they don't like lookin' like assholes."

"No. they'll kill her."

"Maybe it's time to go home, Flo. We're not makin' things any better here at this point."

She looked at him. "Are you scared?"

"To be scared, you gotta not want to die. I haven't really cared about that, since there wasn't really anyone I'd miss that much. Up to now. If you see my problem."

"You don't sound very happy about being in love." "I've got mixed feelings about it, frankly. There are better places than the Middle East to lose your edge."

"THE FRENCHMAN is here, Holy One."

"What? Who does he think he is, just showing up? And where is the sheika? I told you to bring her here."

"Yes, she's coming. They had to ... wash her. She was not presentable, sire. Being in the cell without amenities ..."

"I didn't ask you to give her a bath. Fetish."

"My stupidity is a boundless as the Nafta Desert, oh lord. Forgive me." Maliq made a growling noise.

"In the meantime, will you not admit the Frenchman, sire?" "What does he want?"

"1 don't know. Imam." The introduction of the oubliette had altered Fetish's posture: his spine was now bent in permanent bowing. "Five minutes. Do you understand, Fetish?" "Thou art truly benevolent."

Delame-Noir was ushered in. "The imam is indulgent to see me on such short notice."

"We are very busy-, monsieur. What is it you wish to see us about?"

"We have made an intercept of the Americans’ communications, sire. I thought you would want to have it from my lips, personally, rather than over the telephone."

“Yes?"

"It is very sensitive." 'Yes. yes, yes. So?"

Delame-Noir lowered his voice. "I gather my lord yesterday had a telephone conversation with Prince Bawad, the Wasabi foreign minister'.''"

"How do you know that? What if I did? I'm the ruler of Matar."

In fact, the French had a tap on Maliq's phone, thanks to Fetish. But best to pretend that it was the dreadful Americans.

"I am not criticizing. Imam. But it would appear that the Americans were listening in on this conversation. They are very technically, well— They are clever at this, at least. The vicissitudes of modernity. Always someone is listening. As for me. I understand, it is none of my business. But now, because of what we have learned, it becomes in a way my business. You grasp the essence of mv discomfort?"

"Concerning what?"

"We have the recording of the conversation, thanks to the American eavesdroppers. I gather Prince Bawad was very—how to say it?—authoritarian with you?"

"I can hold my own with Prince Bawad." Maliq said stiffly.

"Of course you can. To me, it seems very rude the way he treated you. Very imperious, very bossy, Calling you—forgive me. Great Imam, for I am only quoting, eh?—the son of a kitchen slave, a cheater at automobile racing, and saying that if you don't do exactly as the Wasabis say—what were his words, exactly?—'we will remove you from the throne like a rotten fig." A strange figure of speech. I agree. He is not so adept at the diplomacy, the prince, for a diplomat"

"Bawad is a toad. From now on. I deal only with Tallulah."

Delame-Noir shrugged as only a Frenchman can. "Yes. but Bawad is King Tallulah's nephew, and they are very close. I don't think that the prince would have said these things to you if his uncle the king did not approve."

"What of it?" Maliq said impatiently.

"Mon imam, the point is that the Americans are in possession of a tape recording of this conversation. And my conclusion is that if you execute the sheika Laila. the Americans may use this as a pretext to become involved directly. Florence has stirred up much publicity in the United States. In the world."

"And what are the Americans going to do? Not buy oil? Bah."

"Perhaps they will leak the tape of Bawad ordering you to kill her. And how is that going to look if it's played? Making it seem as though you are just a puppet of the Wasabis. Who wants this? The Wasabis, perhaps they don't care. But we, France, as your allies and true friends, this we do not want." Delame-Noir smiled. "We want a strung imam in Matar. An independent imam! Not one who must ask permission from the House of Hamooj every time he wants to go to the bathroom. Of course, it goes without saying that you may always depend on France."

Maliq threw up his hands. "What am I supposed to do? They want this sheika dead. And they want the Florence creature even more, and they blame me—me!—for not catching her. Florence tricked us, you realize. I asked her to make a tape, just as you told me, and she tricked us, the slut-bitch. It plays once and—poof, nothing, gone like a djinni."

"This was my own stupidity. Great Lord." Delame-Noir said soothingly. "You played your part with brilliance and subtlety, and we—no. I alone myself—let you down by not anticipating that they would resort to this CIA trick. I curse myself. I will not sleep tonight for—"

"You're overdoing. Dominique."

"Yes, I suppose I am."

"What am I supposed to do now? You say the Americans will use this tape of the conversation between me and Bawad?" "I fear they might, yes."

"Why don't I call in the American ambassador and tell him his country belter start building windmills to keep them warm this w inter?"

"But my lord, is it wise to inform the Americans that you know about this? We have them exactly where we want them."

"We do?"

"But yes. Instead of making threats to the Americans, you say to them. 'Look, my hamburger-eating friends, we know the sheika works for the CIA.'"

"She does?"

"No. but you tell the Americans that you think she does, and this will make them very nervous. You tell them that she has confessed to even thing. You say, "And now the Wasabis, they are being very severe. They want me to chop off her head. You would think they are French! Ha! But I have decided that I'm not going to chop off her head. I'm going to give her to you—with the head intact. Do you know why, my American friends? Precisely to show the Wasabis that I am my own imam, my own person, that I don't take orders from anybody. And now here is what you Americans are going to do for me in exchange, first, I want to start hearing you say nice things about me in the United Nations. Second. I want you to stop saying all these terrible things about how France was very naughty to help me become emir. And third, I want you to send your people—your Delia Force commandos, who are very good—into Amo-Amas and remove this Florence woman of yours. Dead or alive, it's no matter for me, but it's time for her to go. I am not looking to make the next Joan of Arc. But if you don't come and get her, I will deal with it very soon. And finally; if you don't help me with these things, you Americans are going to have a very cold winter, yes?'"

"Hmm." Maliq said. "Do you think they'll go along with it?"

"My dear imam, you must understand—the Americans are idealistic to the point where they must lower their thermostat two degrees. Then they become very practical."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Florence and Bobby were in the middle of shooting another "Osama"—the name they had given Florence's videotapes—when they heard an electronic chirping. It startled them, since the phone had been turned off, and cell phones as a rule do not ring when they are in the off mode. And now this one was ringing.

Florence moved toward it. Bobby said. "Couple of grams of C4 can make for a pretty bad headache."

He took the phone from her and walked to a far corner of room. Florence watched him. He took a breath, held the phone at arm's length and pressed the TALK button. He exhaled and held the receiver a foot from his ear.

"Salaam." He listened, his eyes darting sideways nervously. "I'll give her the message." he said with an edge in his voice, "if I see her."

Florence mouthed: Who?

Bobby mouthed back: Uncle Sam.

She held out her hand. Bobby cupped his over the receiver and whispered. "Keep it short." He gave her the phone and began gathering up their things. She recognized by now the rhythms of another hasty departure.

"Well, well." Florence said into the phone.

"Young lady. do you have any idea what sort of problems you're creating back here?"

"Didn't you tell me at our first meeting, 'If you can't solve a problem, make it larger'?"

"I didn't tell you to make it this large. We’ll talk about it when you get home. The last thing we need is for you to be captured." "First get Laila out."

Uncle Sam sighed. "What did you have in mind? An amphibious assault on the palace, or Black Hawk Down: The Sequel? Have you been outside lately? There are more Wasabi troops in Matar than there are citizens."

"It's not a request."

There was a pause. "I'll do what I can."

"Not good enough."

"It will just have to be."

Bobby motioned to Florence: Finish up.

"Oh-one-four-five hours," Uncle Sam said. "That's one-forty-five A.M. I'll have the water taxi on station, the usual place. Is Omar Sharif there? Put him on."

Florence numbly handed the phone to Bobby, He listened, grunted a few "yeah"s and hung up.

"Somethin' wrong here," Bobby said. "Come on, time to go."

"Did you tell him about us?"

"What about us?"

"That we're sleeping together?"

"I... might have. Come on, that doesn't matter right now." "Why would you have told him that?" "Because he asked."

"When did you tell him we were sleeping together?" "After we started sleepin' together. Flo, we gotta go." "Why would you tell him?"

" 'Cause he asked me if you were a dyke. The rumors, he didn't know what to believe. He was tryin' to get you to leave the country, and you wouldn't, so he-"

"Assumed I was a lesbian. So is that why you slept with me? Is this part of your mission? Sexual preference observation officer?" "Of course not. Goddammit, Flo."

"Don't you goddammit. If anyone gets to goddammit, it's me." "Flo, we gotta go. I got a bad feeling about that call." "I thought we were being exfiltrated by submarine." "Maybe. Will you just get your stuff, girl?"

In a huff. Florence gathered her things, consisting at this point of her pistol, cell phones and hated, smelly abaaya.

They got in the car. Instead of driving off. Bobby circled around to the front and parked two blocks away, facing the front of their little house.

"What are we doing?"

Eliminatin' possibilities." Bobby was slumped low in the driver's seat, watching the house through small binoculars. His right hand rested on the bull of the pistol lucked into his waistband, beneath the folds of his thobe.

A quarter hour later, a sedan approached the house from the far side, slowed and stopped. Four men got out. They wore the distinctive black and blue thobes of mukfelleen. They carried pistols instead of standard-issue whips. Bobby peered intently through his binoculars.

"Well, sum-bitch. Goddammit."

" Mukfeleen?'

He handed Florence the glasses. "See that heavyset guy in front with the mustache? His name is Anbar Tal. He's a captain in the Royal Matar Air force Security Service. I recruited him."

"He's... CIA?"

"Last I checked."

"Why is he approaching our house with all those men and pistols?"

Bobby peered through his binoculars. "The body language somehow isn't convevin' to me We're here to help"

He slipped the car into reverse and slowly began to back away.

Florence looked in the rearview mirror and saw the men in black and blue thobes approaching their car from behind. Bobby instinctively floored the accelerator.

There were two loud thumps from behind, and then the men in thobes were on the trunk of the car, and not happy about it. In the next instant, they were on the hood, and even less happy. Then they were on the ground in front of the car, limp and beyond caring one way or the other.

The car was now speeding backward at thirty miles per hour. Ahead, in the receding distance. Florence saw the five muks. led by Anbar Tal, running toward them, aiming their pistols. It took a second for Florence's overworked brain to process that this stance was preliminary to worse developments. She processed this critical insight a quarter second before the first bullet smashed through the windshield, leaving her abaaya coated in safety-glass crumbs. Crouching in her seat, she heard more vitreous explosions, accompanied by obscene mutterings from the driver's seat. Then there were even louder explosions, which after a moment she realized came from nearby. Bobby was driving backward and firing out the window with his left hand.

"Could use some help," he said.

Florence had fired a gun only once, many years ago. during her brief State Department training course. Though she had gripped a pistol many times in the previous weeks, it now felt strange and unwelcome in her hand as she flipped the safety off and aimed out the window. She shut her eyes and fired.

There was a loud metal thunk. followed by an explosive hissing and a vertical jet of steam. She had shot through the hood of their car and punctured the radiator.

Bobby swung the wheel hard over and yanked the hand brake, turning the car 180 degrees, then shifted into drive and floored it. The problem was that an internal combustion engine, however expertly engineered by the finest automotive minds in Germany, is not designed to run, either efficiently or for long, once penetrated by nine-millimeter rounds. Steam hissed from the hood like water spewing from the spout-hole of an angry whale.

"You all right? Flo? You hurt?"

"I'm okay. Oh, shit, Bobby, I shot the car."

"Listen up. I'm gonna turn that corner. I'm going to stop. I want you to get out. Okay? Now, listen to me: There's a man who works at the live-chicken souk. He's got a booth, the name on it is ZamZam Best Chickens. Got that? His name is Azool bin-Halaam. He's worked for me. He's independent. No one knows about him, not CIA, not Uncle Sam, not the Frogs, no one. He can get you on the ferry to— Shit, come on, you, sum-bitchbastard!" Bobby was pounding the dashboard in the obscure hope that the engineers had installed a sensor there that, when pounded violently, would instruct the car's computer to ignore the fact that a nine-millimeter bullet had been fired through the engine's cooling system. Alas, the engineers had overlooked this feature. "I'm not going to leave you here," Florence said.

"Shut up and listen. You tell Azool you're a friend of Cyrus from Cyprus. Got that? Cyrus from Cyprus. He'll get you out of the country on the ferry to Pangibat. Got that? ZamZam. Azool. Cyrus from Cyprus. Have you got that?"

They'd turned the corner. Bobby pulled the cranking car over and stopped. The street was blessedly teeming with pedestrians, some of whom paused to stare at the strange sight, a hissing Mercedes.

"Go, Flo. Please. Don't make me beg. girl, I'm too old."

She opened the door to get out, then closed it. She took her pistol and turned around and aimed through the rear window. "Just drive."

"Goddammit, woman."

"Just drive."

Spewing cusswords, Bobby stepped on the accelerator. A violent, bronchitic hissss issued from the hole in the hood as the last of the coolant evaporated. The car moved forward without conviction.

Looking back, Florence saw a dark sedan round the corner fast. Pedestrians bolted out of the way.

She braced the gun in both hands and kept her eyes open. The first shot shattered the glass of their own rear window, providing a clear field of fire. She aimed again and methodically emptied the magazine of eight rounds into the windshield of the pursuing vehicle. The car veered from side to side and then went off the road and onto the sidewalk and into the plate-glass window of a pastry shop.

"Better." Bobby muttered.

Florence ejected the spent clip and rummaged in her satchel for a fresh one.

Bobby turned off down a narrow street. The hissing had stopped. The temperature-gauge needle was hard over into the red, indicating meltdown. This and a loud knocking sound augured the necessity, sooner rather than later, of alternative transportation.

Bobby braked. They opened the doors and got out. A car similar to the one Florence had dispatched turned the corner. It accelerated toward them. Florence saw pistols aimed at them from the windows on both sides.

Bobby opened fire. A hole appeared in the windshield in front of the car's driver, another in front of the passenger. The car veered sharply lo the right, into a lamppost, in the process shearing off an arm that had been aiming a pistol.

Florence gasped. Bobby came around and pulled her lo her feet. They ran down alleys until Bobby, breathing hard, finally announced, "Okay, walk, just walk."

They walked, another Matari couple taking a leisurely stroll after shooting dead a half-dozen men.

The streets around them screamed with sirens. From above, they could hear the urgent whoosh and roar of rotor blades.

Bobby whispered to her. "Y'ever fainted?"

"No."

"Start."

"What?"

"Just faint, would you?"

Florence collapsed to the pavement as best she could without breaking a kneecap. Why. she had no idea. She closed her eyes.

She heard a male voice speaking Arabic, asking what was wrong.

"She is pregnant," Bobby said with perfect lack of sympathy or tenderness and exactly the right tone of annoyance.

"She shouldn't be outside in that condition." the man said.

"Don't I know it? Twelve times I told her, and a thirteenth, but she insists. She thinks exercise will give her a male child."

"God will that it be. Is she all right?"

"I think her time has come. We must have an ambulance."

Florence thought. Clever boy.

"I will call you one."

"Allah favors the compassionate. Thank vou. brother."

While the man spoke into his cell phone, Bobby leaned down and whispered, "Now, why didn't 1 think of that?"

Matar had good infrastructure and civil services. The ambulance arrived within minutes. Florence had maneuvered her satchel underneath her abaaya so that her outline was appropriately gravid. The two attendants loaded her onto a gurney and into the ambulance. Bobby jumped in after her.

"Which hospital?" he asked an attendant.

'Churchill—I mean king Bisma. Thev changed the name."

"You better hurry unless you want to deliver the child right here." As the attendant went about rolling up the folds of Florence's abaaya in order to fasten the blood-pressure cuff, Bobby brought the pistol butt down on the back of his head. Then he reached through the doorway and pressed the muzzle of the pistol to the driver's neck and pulled back the hammer for that extra note of emphasis and said, "If you want to live, drive to the airport. If you'd rather die. I will drive."

The man emitted a squeak and began to beg for his life. "Relax. Do as I say, and everything will be well."

The man continued to babble and wail, he had seven children. He was the sole support. He had missed prayers that morning. If he died now, he would not see paradise.

Florence stripped the unconscious ambulance attendant of his uniform vest, then bound his hands and mouth with adhesive tape, which ambulances have in copious supply.

Bobby told the driver. "Slow down and turn off the siren."

The driver obeyed, still blubbering. Bobby handed him the radio handset.

"Tell the dispatcher to put you through to Matar Air Medical Service at the airport. Tell him only that." He pressed the muzzle into the man's neck. "I speak Arabic."

The driver did as asked. A voice came on. Bobby took the handset from the driver.

"This is Dr. Mansour bin-Halibib, personal physician to Fetish al-Zir, assistant to the imam Maliq, blessings be upon his name. To whom do I speak?"

The voice came back crisp and subordinate. "Saif al-Utabi, Excellency, at your service."

"Very well. We require an immediate medical evacuation. One of the imam's wives has sustained a brain injury. We are en route to you. Weil need your fastest aircraft, with fuel for Cairo."

"But I've received no authorization. Excellency—"

"I am authorizing it"

"But Excellency—"

"If the imam's wife dies in this ambulance, I will tell him that it was because I was distracted by unnecessary questions!"

One advantage of totalitarianism: The lower down the food chain, the higher they jump.

"We will make reach' for you." Saif al-Utabi said.

"We will be there in fifteen minutes. Inform the security personnel at the gate to admit us without delay." "Yes, Excellency."

The ambulance driver looked at Bobbv, goggle-eyed with fear.

The road to the airport went through mostly empty desert. Bobby put on the unconscious attendant's uniform vest. He instructed the driver to pull off on the far side of a billboard advertising the pleasures of Infidel Land: Mukfellecn censors had painted over the offending text. Florence held the gun on the driver while Bobby dragged the other man out of the ambulance and laid him behind the base of the billboard.

Back inside, he gave the driver instructions, com eying, as gently as possible under the circumstances, that if he did not follow them precisely, he would be meeting Allah sooner than expected, prepared or not.

Florence listened and said to Bobby in French, a language she guessed the driver did not comprehend, "They do have an air force. They'll shoot us down."

"I'm wide open to suggestions."

"What about the embassy? They have to take us in there."

Bobby snorted. "Oh yeah, they'd be just tickled to have us. Even if the marines didn't shoot us down, even if we did make it through the gates, then what? Spend the rest of our lives living in the basement being frowned at by embassy pukes? No. thanks. Right now a jet with medical markings sounds pretty good to me." Florence had to agree.

They were approaching the airport. Florence rigged herself up with every medical device in the ambulance—respirator tube, blood-pressure cuff, IV tubes. CoolPak pressure bandages—and lay back on the gurney in a passing imitation of an imam's wife with a serious head injury. Bobby took his seat in the front, reminding the whimpering driver that he had a pistol in his vest pocket. Bobby reached forward and flicked on the siren and lights, lighting up the desert around them in red, white and blue strobes.

There was a roadblock at the airport entrance. "Stay calm, say nothing. I will do the speaking," Bobby said. They slowed to a stop. Soldiers with machine guns blocked the way. One motioned to the driver to roll down the window. "Where are you going?" "Air Medical Service," Bobby said. "What's the problem, sir?" "That's for me to ask, not you. There's an alert." "But sir, it's urgent, as you can see."

The two rear doors of the ambulance opened, and two soldiers looked in. Florence lay still on the gurney, clenching the grip of the pistol under her abaaya."Who is she?" the soldier said through the driver's window.

"The imam's wile," Bobby said. "His favorite wife. She's being evacuated to Cairo." He added gravely "It's critical."The soldier straightened. "We've had no notice of this."

Bobby said angrily, "Why do you tell me this? This injury was not planned in advance! Allah is merciful—don't expect the imam to be."

The soldier hesitated. Then, with a slight, contemptuous sideways gesture of his head, he indicated his permission to proceed. The ambulance's rear doors shut with a bang. The soldier in front stood aside. The ambulance moved forward."I think my blood pressure spiked," Florence murmured.

The driver appeared to be hyperventilating. Bobby patted him on the back and spoke to him in a friendly tone. "You did well, my friend, well. A few more minutes, and it will all be over, and you'll have a great story to tell your wife and chil—"

The driver's eyes rolled up under his eyelids. He pitched forward onto the steering wheel. The ambulance veered into the path of a service vehicle.

Bobby lunged for the wheel and swung it back, avoiding the oncoming truck by inches. Florence was thrown off the gurney in a tangle of medical appurtenances. "What the hell?" she said.

Bobby was trying simultaneously to steer the careening ambulance, reach the brake with his left foot and drag the unconscious driver out of his seat, a complicated endeavor under the best of circumstances. Florence struggled to free herself of tubes and crawl to the front. A crunching sound announced the fact that they had driven through a wooden barrier and were now going the wrong way on a one-way service road, which declared to even the casual observer that all was not well at the wheel.

With a grunt, Bobby succeeded in hefting the unconscious driver out of the seat and onto the floor, and then jimmied himself into the seat, reasserting control of the ambulance, which was now driving straight at a fuel truck. The ambulance had the advantage of a siren and flashing lights, forcing the oncoming vehicles off the road with angry blaring. But now other sirens asserted themselves. And as Florence groped her way over the unconscious driver to the passenger seat, she heard the squawk of voices over the radio—urgent, angry voices, addressing themselves to the driver of the ambulance and demanding that he halt.

"Hang on." Bobby spun the wheel and slammed on the brakes. The ambulance turned but, top-heavy, went onto two wheels. It tottered for what seemed a very long time, then fell back miraculously onto all four wheels.

Now, at least, they were facing the right way, although they had by this point created a spectacle of themselves, and with that came increased interest on the part of a dozen vehicles in the distance. Some had mounted heavy-caliber guns.

Bobby assessed the deteriorating situation in the clinical language of the professional: "We're fucked."

He turned up a ramp that announced DEPARTING FLIGHTS. The security vehicles were still hundreds of yards off but closing fast. It was evening, and the airport was crowded. Then' were dozens of vehicles in front and hundreds of travelers getting out and entering the terminal.

"When I pull up to the curb," Bobby said, "jump out. Blend like hell. You can make it. Remember, ZamZam Best Chickens. Azool. Cyrus—"

"—from Cyprus. Yes. Bobby, I know."

"Okay, then." He drove to the far end of the terminal, then pulled over to the curb. He'd turned off the siren and the lights. "Go, Frenzy." "I'm stuck." "What?"

"My foot, it's wedged." Bobby leaned toward her.

"No, you ean't reach it from that side." she said. "Go around. Quickly."

Bobby opened his door and bolted around the front. As he did. Florence jumped into the driver's seat, put the ambulance in drive and took off with a screech of tires. She caught a glimpse of him in the side mirror, standing on the curb. Then the police and military cars screamed past him in hot pursuit of her.

Ambulances are built for speed. She drove fast, drawing the pursuers away from Bobby. But police and military vehicles are also built for speed, and they soon closed behind her. They had apparently satisfied themselves that there was no imam's wife inside, for they were now shooting. The low overhang of the ambulance protected the tires, and her body was shielded by the metal bulkhead behind the driver's seat. But a volley of bullets ripped through the doorway and smashed through the windshield, turning it into a spider web.

Florence analyzed her situation as she drove. In minutes, she knew, she would be captured or dead. They'd drag her out and—what then? Interrogation. Torture. Execution. The Wasabis would want their licks. They would want her most of all.

She heard a noise and saw the helicopter. It was flying low. keeping pace with her. She saw the man with the rifle aiming at her. She looked at the speedometer. A hundred and ten. She was approaching a highway overpass. It could all be over in seconds, neat and clean. So much easier all around. Not a particularly glorious way to go out, smashing into the concrete strut of a highway overpass, but SO much cleaner. No one screaming at her, no one hooking her up to a car battery, no beheading or being stoned.

She nudged the vehicle into the left lane and kept her foot down on the accelerator. She felt, suddenly, quite calm, almost thrilled to be in such complete control of her fate. She thought of Nazrah, who had set all these events in motion with her own car crash. Florence put her head down and aimed at the support And then she heard the groan.

It was the driver. She had forgotten all about him. He was looking up at her in pure terror, babbling. He presented a pathetic spectacle, lying on the floor there, but then she remembered his seven children. If only he hadn't mentioned that. It only he'd been a little braver. If only he'd kept that to himself and ... the overpass was seconds away.

She veered away from the concrete strut and sped under the overpass.

The helicopter was flying alongside her, low off the ground. She saw a man leaning out the side door. He was aiming a rifle al her.

He fired three efficient shots into her engine block. The windshield splattered with oil. The vehicle began to slow.

She caught a brief glimpse of the man as he lowered his rifle. She noted the blond hair and the tell-tale rolled sleeves of a French para. Yes, she thought as her vehicle slowed and was surrounded, they always were very good at le sniping, the French.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Rick Renard was in his Washington office Irving to persuade a portly former U.S. senator, twice thwarted in his attempt to be elected president, to become spokesman for a chain of weight-reduction centers.

The senator was pretending that this was beneath his dignity, which it was, but he had another reason: He wanted more money. Renard, meanwhile, was pretending that helping obese Americans lose weight was a magnificently selfless humanitarian act, and if a distinguished man who had devoted his entire life to public service made a few dollars in the process, what reasonable person could object?

In the midst of this perfunctory Kabuki dance. Renards assistant entered apologetically and handed Rick a note saying that George was on the line demanding to speak to him. No, it could not wait, and yes. it was urgent, very, very urgent.

"The White House." Rick said to the senator as he reached for the phone. "Do you mind?"

The senator understood perfectly well that it wasn't the White House, but he was flattered that Rick should elevate the lie to such a high degree. In Washington, you know how tall you stand by how low the other person is willing to stoop.

"No, of course not."

"Yes, Karl?" Rick said into the phone.

"It's Firenze," George said. "I think they've got her."

"Shit." Renard said. "Fuck."

The senator stared.

"I'll find out what I can." George said. "I'll meet you at your office as soon as I can get out of here. Duckett has me auditing eight-year-old visa applications, the swine."

Rick hung up.

"Is everything all right—at the White House?" the senator asked heavily.

"Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know how they are." Rick smiled. "Every time their numbers drop a point, it's panic city."

Rick got rid of the senator and told his assistant lo cancel everything, then switched on all the TV sets and surfed those and the Internet until George arrived with what news he'd been able to gather. It wasn't easy, since Duckett had petulantly downgraded his security clearance. But George had friends.

The U.S. embassy in Amo-Amas had cabled a report about some kind of disturbance in the Dismalia Quarter: shootings, car crashes, an incident at the airport, Embassy communication monitors had picked up Matari police-radio chatter about el imra'a amrikiya (the American woman). They had also picked up French radio transmissions to and from a military helicopter, asking for and receiving permission to fire upon a fleeing vehicle. Half an hour later, a convoy of vehicles had driven at high speed through the gates of the Prince Wazba Air Base. Following Maliq's takeover, the base had been turned into a detention facility for Mataris who were bold enough to express the opinion that Maliq's coup was less than the greatest event in Matar since the coming of Islam. The vast majority of these complainants were—no surprise—female Mataris.

"Duckett disappeared into his office looking like a Komodo dragon had just crawled up his ass." George said, pacing back and forth. "He wouldn't give me the time of day. They've got her. I know it."

"I tried calling some of the old gang at TV Matar," Renard said glumly. "No one's left. All I got were hang-ups. One person actually called me an infidel. I want my old Matar back."

Renard's assistant came in. "Someone named Bobby for you?" Rick and George practically knocked each other over, reaching for the phone.

"Bobby? Is she all right?" Rick said.

"No. They got her. Okay, just listen. I'm not gonna stay on long, on account of that double-dealin' lowlife Uncle Sam probably listenin' in. You there, Sam? You listenin'? You tell us you're arrangin' for a water-taxi exfil, and ten minutes later, Anbar Tal—my recruit—shows up to kill us. Well, listen to this: I'm gonna come back there. If I have to swim, I am comin' back there, and by the lime I'm through with you. you'll be breathin' through your asshole and crappin' through your ears. You got that?"

Renard cupped the phone and whispered to George, "I think he's upset."

"All right," Bobby said, "is it on the news over there?"

"No. not yet."

"George there? Put him on. George, what's State doin'?"

"What they do best. Nothing. Just a few cables out of Amo. Duckett won't tell me anything. Bobby, what are they going to do to her?"

"1 don't know, man. Put Renard back on. Rick, you remember that cell phone I gave you? The one I told you to keep in D.C.? Do you still have it?"

"Yeah, I think—yeah."

"All right. Use that to call me. I'll be in touch. You get started at your end." "Started—on what?" "You're a PR man, aren't you?" "Well, yeah—"

"Start spinnin", man. Spin till you drop. Yo, George?" "I'm here."

"Don't let those embassy pukes walk away from this." "I'm on it."

"All right," Bobby said, "let's get her out of there. Shock and awe, boys. Shock and awe."

The line went dead.

"What did he mean by that last part?" Renard said. "Oh. it's just knuckle-dragger talk. But for once I agree."

IT WAS A SMALL CELL, fairly clean; by ceil standards, the very lap of luxury. There was a cotlike bed with a bit of foam for a pillow, a plastic pail for necessities—with a lid, very deluxe—a bottle of water, and a copy of the Holy Koran.

They'd hooded Florence after dragging her out of the ambulance. Before the hood went over her head, she'd had a last look at the French sniper who had put the bullets in her engine. He looked almost apologetic, giving her a little shrug as if to say, Bui what can one do? Orders are orders, Helas, cherie.

After the handcuffing and hooding were done, without apologies or shrugs, Florence was put in the back of a vehicle and driven off. Even with her instinctive inertial guidance navigation, she had no way of knowing where they were taking her. After an hour, perhaps more, the hood was removed, and she found herself blinking in a brightly lit room, somewhere—pray Allah—still in Matar, and not across the border in Wasabia. Not that there was much sunlight left between the two countries.

She was reading the Koran when she heard the key turning in the heavy door. In Washington she had met a man who had spent live and a half years being tortured and confined in North Vietnam, most of it in solitary, unspeakable conditions. He told her that even thirty years later, whenever he heard the sound of keys or a door being opened, his pulse quickened and his chest seized up.

The man who entered the cell wasn't wearing the black and blue uniform of the mukfelleen. One takes such comforts as one can.

Florence was hooded, manacled leg-and-hand and marched out. She guessed that the chains were for psychological effect, the likelihood of a woman overcoming her captors and breaking free being low. Florence clanked along the stone floor barefoot, trying to fall into a semblance of dignified rhythm. She was also trying not to trip and fall. Her situation was undignified enough as it was.

She was prodded forward with the end of what fell like a club into a cooler space. The thought came to her, not entirely unwelcome, that in a second the hood might be pulled off to reveal the executioner with his seyef. If you were going to have your throat cut, better that it be cleanly done and with some semblance of a ceremonial beheading, instead of with a rusty folding knife of the kind used on a sekeen sheep.

She found herself in an air-conditioned room reassuringly devoid of bloodstains or instruments of death or torture, facing a plain table at which sat three men. the center of whom she recognized right away as Maliq, emir, sheikh and imam of the Islamic Republic of Matar, blessings be upon him.

It took her several seconds to place the man sitting on Maliq's right, from the distinctive teal and maroon gutra. she knew him for a Wasabi, and by the scarlet trim of his otherwise plain thobe, for a member of the Hami Babb, the tribe that, since the time of Sheik Abdulabdullah "The Wise" Walla al-Hamooj, founder of the Wasabi dynasty, had been entrusted with the duties of royal bodyguard. This was Salim bin-Judar, first deputy for the Ministry of Public Health. the euphemism that the Wasabi central government had decided upon for its secret police. This man she knew by reputation very well, and despite the honor of being in his presence, it caused her a distinct dryness of mouth.

The identity of the man to Maliq's left was all too easily discerned. The black and blue thobe proclaimed him mukfellah. Mis stare of pure hatred was the most intense Florence had ever seen from a human being—anthracite coals of smoldering fury—trained on a shackled American woman, an infidel who deserved to be consigned to hell to be gnawed for all eternity In Satan's foul jaws and stinking breath. Have a nice day.

"Salaam, Maliq" Florence said.

The mukfellah leaped from his seat and roared at her to show respect to the imam. But Maliq silenced him with a raised hand.

"Salaam. Flor-ents." He smiled and pointed to her manacles. "So, bracelets? The latest in fashion?"

"Yes, they're all the rage. But fashions change quickly, especially in Paris."

"Enough of the little talk. These men here are very important And they are very angry with you. Yes, I would say, very angry. They want to deal with you directly. Shall I give you to them?"

"You'd belter do what you're told, or your masters will be unhappy."

"I rule in Matar. Be certain of that, madame. Your CIA lover. Mr. Theebo. Tibu—"

"Thibodeaux. Surely your French is up to that." "We have him. You don't believe me?"

"Have you ever told me the truth?"

"Then perhaps you would like to see the body. It's very unpleasant, lie died in a most undignified way. Do you know how? Blew himself up with a hand grenade. Such a pity. We would have treated him with justice. Perhaps even given him back to your government, as a goodwill gesture. We are not the third world here, you know."

Though Maliq spoke confidently, Florence couldn't bring herself to believe him. Bobby was a grenade thrower, not a hugger. Still, her stomach knotted.

Maliq said gaily, as if this butterfly thought had spontaneously perched on his forehead. "Maybe you'd like to have the body in your cell? How cozy it would be for you." Switching to Arabic, Maliq said to the mukfellah, "When she's taken back to her cell, have the American's body put in with her. Then have the door welded shut. Seal them in. Let them rot together."

The man nodded, and for the first time during the interview, his face lightened into something like a smile. So he had a soft spot after all.

"No translation required, eh, Flor-ents? Come, come, what a look! You're a student of our history. In the days of my ancestor Jamir al-Kef, emir some hundred years ago, you recall what was the custom with women who had been very naughty? They were tied up, and a small hole was made in the stomach and the intestine pulled out a fool or two, then left in the desert for the dogs. You see what progress we have made in the new Matar! How liberal we have become!"

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Just after two AM. the door to Renard's office, where he and George were furiously brainstorming, opened and admitted two unsmiling, burly men who looked remarkably like the sort the U.S. government dispatches when it desires to make an emphatic point. Once these two had secured the room with their scowls, they were joined by a third man whom Rick and George immediately recognized as their long-lost relative Uncle Sam.

"Hello, boys." Uncle Sam motioned to his men to wait outside. "No sense beating around the proverbial bush. We intercepted a call to this office from Bobby Thibodeaux last night."

"Oh, for the days when gentlemen didn't listen in on each other's telephone calls." George said.

Uncle Sam poured the dregs of the coffeepot into a cup, dusted it with powdered creamer, sipped it and winced. "Lord save us! You might have bought a decent coffeemaker with some of that two million dollars. Let me say what I have to say before this reaches my bloodstream and kills me.

"for starters, what Bobby Thibodeaux told you is simply, totally, completely cuckoo. He seems to be under the delusion that I dispatched a CIA assassination team to kill him and Florence. I don't know where he got that one. Well, actually. I do."

George and Renard listened in sullen silence.

"Why am I getting the distinct feeling that you don't believe me? Pardon me—but is this the United States of America, land of presumed innocence? All right, hear me out, fellows. I tried several times—several times, as you are well aware—to pull those two out of there. As you further know. Florence refused to leave without the sheika. Now, I don't know what was going on between those two, but never mind. My sole interest was in getting her out before a disaster of this—this—this mind-boggling proportion happened. And here we are.

"As I recall, the mission was to try to empower Arab women and bring about some kind of stability in the Middle Fast. There were those who said. 'Are you out of your mind?' Others said, 'We've tried everything else, why not give it a shot? What harm can it do?' Ha! And how did it all turn out? With a coup d'etat—and how appropriate to use the French term for it—against the only stable country in the region. Not only did it not work, but it brought about the further enslavement of two point five million Arab women, along with the empowerment of a psychopathic race-car driver, to say nothing of a whopping increase in Wasabi oil prices that may well determine the outcome of the next U.S. presidential election. And did I mention France getting naval bases in the Gulf? Damn fine job. boys. Have a cigar. Your government is proud of you.

"Meanwhile, your erstwhile colleague Mr. Thibodeaux, who, by the way. I never wanted to be part of this mission—but never mind, what say do I have in the mutter?—has baked it into his fevered brain that I'm out to get him. I understand it's hot in Matar, and that heat can do strange things to a man, but goodness gracious, to treat this level of paranoia, you're better off with tranquilizers and a dart gun!"

George said. "Not to interrupt your splendidly indignant rant, but why don't you just tell us what happened? Or skip that part and tell us where Florence is. And whether she's even alive."

"I was getting to that, George. She's alive. This much we know. I am doing everything in my power—that is. what power I have left after this catastrophe— to get her out of there. But it's going to require one heck of a diplomatic balancing act, let me tell you. .And if you two go barging in like a couple of bull elephants on steroids, acting on input from a delusional ex-spook—"

"Ex?"

"Completely ex. CIA fired him. And not for calling in that cruise missile strike on the Indonesian ambassador in Dar. Would you like to know why he was given the boot? For screwing the wife of the U.S. ambassador to Jordan."

"She was a notorious nympho." George said. "The woman was insatiable. She'd have sex with the elevator operator if the ride was more than three floors."

"Nevertheless, the ambassador didn't much appreciate it. And he was the president's chief fund-raiser."

"Enough!" Rick interjected. "Who cares who was screwing who!" "Whom," George said.

"Whatever. What are you doing to get Florence out of there?"

"Look, fellows, the less you know about that, the better."

"Oh, no," George said. "No, no, no, no, no, What do we look like, two mushrooms that you're going to pile manure on and keep in the dark?"

"George. I'm saying this for your own protection."

"You sound like you're putting on a condom." said Renard. "Never mind all that hooey. I want to hear, right now, right here, how you're going to get her out. or I promise you'll find yourself in such a public relations shit-storm that you'll be picking it out of your eyes for years."

"All right." Uncle Sam sighed as though about to divulge the formula for Coca-Cola. "We're working on it through the French."

"The French?" Rick and George said simultaneously. Rick added. "The French?"

"Believe it or not. they're almost as appalled by this new regime as we are." "But they helped install it."

"The last thing Paris wants is to have its client chopping off the head of a feminist American hero. That's not going to help them sell Airbuses or Brie in the U.S.A. But you've got to let me handle it. Are we on the same sheet of paper here'.'"

"I still don't understand." George said. "Bobby told us you'd arranged for the water taxi, and suddenly, the CIA shows up shooting. The embassy cables from Amo confirmed there was a shoot-out and a chase and a capture. So— what happened?"

"I just can't go into that."

"Oh, do."

Uncle Sam gave another heavy sigh. "My call to Bobby and Florence was intercepted. We found that out after die fact." "Intercepted by?"

"The French. They're the ones who sent the hit team, not me, for heaven's sake."

"The French sent the CIA to kill two Americans'.'' This makes no sense."

"The man Bobby was referring to is Anbar Tal. He works for the Matar Air Force. And yes, he also works for CIA. Bobby himself recruited him. It also happens that he works for the Onzieme Bureau. That's the part Bobby didn't know. He's a double agent. Triple, technically."

"So you're trying to get the French to help free Florence, and they're the ones who sent this multitasking thug to kill her? It still makes no sense."

"It's the Middle East. Rick." Uncle Sam shrugged. "I don't really understand it myself."

George said. "We're not going to sit on our hands while you sip aperitifs with the head of the Onzieme Bureau. And frankly, I think you're more full of shit than a Strasbourg goose."

Uncle Sam said quietly, coolly. "You don’t really have much choice in the matter, do you now. George?"

"Is Untcle threatening?"

"Uncle may not have as much grease as he did before his niece and nephews fucked things up seven ways from Sunday, but he is not without resources." Untie Sam stood. "You fellows are in receipt of two million dollars each. In your personal bank accounts. Can you produce 1099 forms for those funds? I guess not. Did you happen to note the origin of the wire transfers?"

"Third Bank of Bangor."

"Very good. And Third Bank of Bangor, as any wet-behind-the-ears FBI rookie investigator will tell you, is a shell for Banc Mercantil de Grand Comore—in Moroni, that would be the capital city of the Comoro Islands, not to be confused with the angel Moroni. And who owns the Banc Mercantil? Sheik Adman Ifkir, Third cousin, on the Yemeni mother's side of... guesses, anyone?"

"Osama bin Laden." George sighed. "What?" Rick said.

"Gold star for George." Uncle Sam applauded noiselessly. "So it would appear that you two are in receipt of funds from a bank controlled In Al Qaeda. Won't that be fun explaining at your arraignment for treason? But I'm sure there are lots of lawyers here in town who would be happy to represent you for, say, six hundred dollars an hour. Let's see, two million dollars divided by six hundred—that might see you through the first year of legal bills. But heavens, what am I thinking? The government will have confiscated the money. Dear, dear, dear."

"You're a real prick, aren't you, Sam?" Rick said.

"You should see the people I report to." Uncle Sam said as he went through the door. "Definitely, a new coffee-maker."

BACK IN HER CELL, Florence had passed the fretful hours waiting for the sound of the door being unlocked and the remains of her lover to be tossed in. followed by the sound of the door being welded shut. Immuration. she'd had time to reflect, was the punishment meted out in Rome to vestal virgins whose chastity had been compromised. Though she could not remember whether they had been entombed alive with the corpses of their paramours.

But as the hours passed, nothing happened. She began to hope that it had all been some kind of bluff to keep her off balance—either that or just for kicks. At some point in the afternoon, her hands had started trembling uncontrollably.

As she was thus reflecting, the lights in Florence's cell went out, plunging her into complete darkness. A few minutes passed, during which she could hear her own breathing distinctly. She struggled against the temptation to cry out for a guard. An electrical failure? Prelude to a rescue? She was pondering this last possibility when she heard the lock mechanism on the door. She felt the outward suck of air as the door opened, and in the next instant, she was knocked backward by the force of a human body, inert and rank with the after-smell of explosive, being hurled into the cell.