The Garden of Betrayal

13

The alarm on my cell phone woke me at seven-thirty. I was sleeping on the couch in my den, where I’d bedded down a few hours before so as not to wake Claire. My head ached, and my stomach felt bloated-whiskey, beer, and cold pizza are a miserable combination. Scrabbling blindly on the floor by my head, I found the phone and pressed the central button, knowing it would give me another five minutes to snooze. A cricketlike chirping replied, announcing a low battery. I rolled onto my back, swearing. The phone had been in the charging cradle for hours before I left the office to meet Reggie, and the battery was practically new. I typed a semiliterate e-mail to Amy, asking her to pick up a replacement on her way to work. My phone was too important to me to risk having it give up unexpectedly.

I groaned as I sat upright. It had taken me until four to finish loading numbers into the depletion model. A dialogue box had popped up when I pressed the go button, estimating the run time at ten hours. I was impatient for it to get done quicker. A number of things in the raw data were disconcerting, and I was anxious to see the results.

There was a note on the coffee table in front of me. It was in Kate’s handwriting: You snore. Phil coming to dinner tonight. Can you make it? Please? I smiled, glad she seemed excited and that she wanted Claire and I to get to know him better. I picked up the note, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it toward the garbage can ten feet away, scoring an improbable basket. I hoped it was an omen-it had been a confusing couple of days, and I desperately needed some things to start falling into place.

• • •

The lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in New York is done up like a memorial chapel, with soaring stone columns, a backlit onyx ceiling, and an altarlike dais at the far end. I climbed a flight of steps to the reception desk and told a clerk I was there to see Rashid al-Shaabi. He checked my identification against his computer and summoned a liveried security guard to escort me to the fifty-first floor. A Middle Eastern-looking man I didn’t recognize was waiting when the elevator doors opened. He escorted me down a short hall, tapped on the only visible door, and then swiped a key card to unlock it. His jacket swung open as he extended his arm, and I caught a flash of a gun in a holster.

“Mr. al-Shaabi is supposed to be taking it easy,” he said to me in a Brooklyn-accented whisper. “Don’t let him overexert himself.”

The door swung open to a suite that was all blond wood and earth-tone carpets, with sweeping views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline. Rashid was sitting behind a desk in an alcove, talking on the phone in Arabic. He gestured for me to come in and then pointed to a silver butler’s tray laden with coffee and Middle Eastern pastries. The coffee and pastries were for me-I knew he was allowed only tiny quantities of diuretics or sweets. I draped my coat over a chair, poured coffee for myself, and settled in front of his desk to wait.

Rashid was wearing a crisp white shirt with rolled-up cuffs, blue suit pants, and worn green house slippers. He looked terrible. Barely five feet tall and maybe a hundred and ten pounds on his heaviest day, he hadn’t had any weight to lose when he’d taken his recent turn for the worse, but the wiry definition he’d had in his neck and forearms was gone, degenerated into a slack-toned frailty. When I’d last seen him, three or four weeks back, I’d been shocked by how aged he seemed.

“As-Salamu ‘Alaykum,” he said, hanging up the phone and struggling to his feet.

We went through the whole ritual, kissing each other on both cheeks. He shook me by the shoulders as he inquired about my health, barely jostling me. In the old days he’d made my teeth rattle.

“And Claire and Katherine?” he inquired.

“Both fine. Thank you for asking.”

“Bring them to see me,” he ordered. “There’s a Lebanese in the kitchen downstairs who makes proper qatayef. You know qatayef?”

I nodded. Crepes filled with cheese or nuts, ubiquitous at Ramadan.

“So, bring them,” he said, giving me another feeble shake. “They’ll eat. It would make me happy.”

Rashid had met Claire and Kate exactly once, when he’d turned up at my apartment unannounced ten days after Kyle had vanished, bearing a tin tray filled with grilled lamb kebabs and rice. We hadn’t had many visitors, save for family and police. Nobody knew what to do or say. He stayed an hour, weeping when I wept, and leaving only after I promised to call him if there was ever any help he could provide.

“I will,” I said, realizing I’d been remiss.

“That’s settled, then.” He let go of my shoulders and glanced at his watch. “Excuse me for a moment. I have to go and take some medicine.”

He didn’t look strong enough to go anywhere. The effort of standing had raised a sheen of sweat on his forehead, and his breathing was rapid and shallow.

“Can I get it for you?”

He straightened slightly, looking offended.

“It would make me happy,” I said, playing my trump card as a guest.

“In the bathroom,” he acquiesced grudgingly, pointing with a finger. “Off the bedroom. There’s a cup with the time written on it.”

I followed a rust-colored carpet around a corner and down a narrow corridor. Both the bedroom and bathroom doors were open. Twelve paper cups were arranged neatly on a plastic tray to the left of the sink, each containing four or more pills and marked with a time in black felt-tip pen. It seemed incredible that someone of Rashid’s size could even swallow that much medicine on a daily basis, let alone metabolize it. I searched for the cup labeled nine a.m., thinking ruefully that I’d best bring Claire and Kate soon.

Exiting with the medicine in hand, I noticed a mezuzah fastened to the frame of the bedroom door. It was a Jewish religious thing, an ornate, flattish metal container about the size of a pack of gum, with a verse from the Torah tucked inside. Every third doorway in my apartment building had one. I smiled, assuming a previous guest had left it behind and wondering if Rashid knew what it was.

“Tap water okay?” I called.

“Please. Not too cold.”

I poured a large glass of lukewarm water in the kitchenette and carried everything back to the alcove, where Rashid had reseated himself behind his desk. There were six pills in the cup I handed him. He put the first in his mouth, closed his eyes, took a sip of water, and then swallowed with effort, repeating the procedure mechanically until they were all gone. It took him a good two minutes, and he looked even more exhausted when he was done.

“You okay?”

He nodded silently, eyes still shut.

“I noticed the mezuzah on the bedroom doorway,” I said, hoping to cheer him up with a little banter. “Don’t tell me you’ve converted?”

He sighed heavily.

“When you’re as sick as I am, you’ll try anything.”

I felt uncomfortable until he opened his eyes and grinned, and I realized he was joking.

“Actually,” he said, “it was my grandmother’s. An old family secret. Don’t tell anyone.”

I smiled back, wondering if he was telling the truth. I knew his grandparents had migrated from Yemen to Saudi Arabia. Maybe a mixed marriage had been the reason. He took another sip of water, carefully set down his glass, and then looked up at me expectantly. Time for business.

“I have something fairly delicate to discuss with you, but before I do, I was wondering if I could ask you for a small favor,” I said.

“Of course.”

“Do you know a man named Mariano Gallegos? He was a member of the Venezuelan delegation to the United Nations a few years back, and he might or might not still be here in New York.”

He frowned slightly and rubbed his wispy beard.

“I don’t think so.”

“I need to speak with him. No big deal, I just want to ask him a couple of questions. Is there any chance you could arrange an introduction?”

He pulled a pad toward him and scribbled on it.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

“Thanks. I appreciate it.” I hesitated a moment, uncertain how to broach Theresa’s data. It had occurred to me that Rashid might get angry. In all our long acquaintance, he’d never done or said anything that wasn’t in OPEC’s best interest, and having Saudi secrets laid bare wasn’t necessarily in that category. Best just to heave it out, I decided, and let the chips fly.

“A friend of a friend looked me up the other day. The friend knew a person who’d done work for Aramco. The friend gave me a computer hard drive that contained an enormous amount of internal Aramco information. Reprocessed seismic data, production figures, mixture percentages, you name it. Well by well, for every field in the Kingdom.”

I paused, wanting to get a sense of his initial reaction before carrying on.

“Let me see if I have this straight,” he said, steepling his fingers and tipping his head slightly to one side. “You have a friend who has a friend who has a friend. And this person gave your friend’s friend a mass of highly confidential information, and then your friend’s friend came to you out of the blue and gave the information to you. And you think this information might be credible.”

“Stranger things have happened,” I said, coloring a little.

“Not often.”

“True,” I admitted. “Which is why I’m here.”

“You’d like me to vet this stolen data for you?” he asked, leaning forward slightly. “Based on confidential knowledge I may have obtained in my professional capacity as an employee of OPEC?”

It wasn’t exactly how I would have put it, but it pretty much summed things up.

“Yes.”

He tossed his hands skyward.

“Why would I do that?”

It was a question I’d anticipated. I extracted a sheaf of papers from my briefcase and handed them to him.

“What are these?” he demanded.

“Saltwater injection volumes and produced mixture percentages at Ghawar for the last five years. There’s a summary on the last page.”

He flipped to the end of the packet and glanced at the summary.

“So?”

“So, the mixture percentages are much lower than you’d expect, unless the wells were in serious decline.”

“Don’t embarrass yourself. Please. You’re not an engineer. There are any number of technical reasons for low yields. Even if the figures are correct, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

My head was throbbing slightly, and I wished I’d gotten more sleep. I had only one chance to pitch him. I didn’t want to screw it up.

“I know. But hear me out for a second. The Aramco data I saw-”

“The supposed Aramco data you saw,” he interrupted.

“Fine. The supposed Aramco data I saw contained a bunch of senior-management reports, including a few that had been explicitly written for OPEC. One was addressed to you by name.”

“And?”

“And the numbers in the reports don’t match the field data.”

“Meaning your information is internally inconsistent, and thus inherently suspect,” he said dismissively.

I didn’t answer, giving him time to think about it. Rashid was a long, long way from being stupid. One possibility was that my information was incorrect. The other was that Aramco had lied to him, and lied to their political masters. Which-if true-raised the question of why.

“I’m tired.” He sighed a few moments later, opening a drawer in the desk. He pulled out a handkerchief and used it to blot his forehead. “These pills are worse than my illness.”

“I’ll go,” I volunteered immediately, starting to my feet. “We can talk more after you’ve rested.”

“Stay.” He waved me back into my seat. “It’s nothing. I enjoy the company. You have a copy of this report that was addressed to me?”

I took it out of my briefcase and handed it to him. He flipped through a few pages and handed it back, his expression inscrutable.

“Let me explain something that may be difficult for you to understand,” he said, draping the handkerchief over his head like a kaffiyeh. “The truth is that nobody knows how much oil the Saudis have, or the real condition of their fields. Not me, not the Saudi oil ministry, and not the king. The Saudi government twists OPEC’s arm for the allocation they want, and then orders Aramco to produce that amount. Aramco does whatever they have to do to make it happen. If the minister or the king wants to know how much surplus capacity they have, or the exact quantity of their proved reserves, the head of Aramco reports whatever they want to hear and concludes by saying ‘Inshallah’ -God willing. And who can argue with that? If God wills the oil to come, it will come. If He doesn’t, it won’t.”

“With all due respect, Rashid, I don’t buy it. I’ve spent time with the Aramco people. There are a lot of smart engineers working there. I can’t believe they don’t know what’s going on.”

“Don’t confuse issues of intelligence with issues of culture,” he rasped irritably. “At the lower levels of the organization, I’m sure the smart engineers you refer to have made all the correct calculations. But it’s not acceptable to pass difficult news up the line at Aramco, particularly in the form of a forecast. Because many of the senior people in the Kingdom-including the king-genuinely believe that there’s a large measure of hubris in trying to predict the future. Inshallah. It will be what God wills.”

“Which would be fine if the Saudis weren’t sitting on most of the world’s excess oil reserves,” I said, watching the sweat bead on his forehead again. It was the kind of give-and-take he normally enjoyed, but I continued to worry that I was overtaxing him. “If the peak-oil people are right, and the Saudis are closer to running out of oil than anyone realizes, it means trouble for everyone.”

He smiled grimly, mopping his face with the handkerchief from his head and then tossing it on the desk.

“You want my opinion?”

“Please.”

“Inshallah.”

I half grinned, thinking he’d made another joke. As seconds ticked past without his elaborating, my grin faded.

“You’re not interested in trying to prevent a global energy crisis?”

“Unless it happens in the next few weeks, I doubt it’s going to have much impact on me.”

We stared at each other in silence, and I wondered if I was listening to the drugs.

“I’m kind of at a loss here, Rashid,” I said quietly. “You’ve always gone out of your way to be helpful to people, especially me. It’s hard to believe that you genuinely don’t care about preventing a catastrophe, regardless of whether you think you’re going to be here to see it.”

“There are a lot of things I care about,” he responded gravely. “Some I can affect, and some I can’t.”

“You don’t believe it would make any difference if the Western governments knew there was an oil crunch coming?”

“Frankly, no,” he said, sounding more amused than regretful. “America and her allies are so in love with democracy, but all that really means is never making hard choices. Everyone’s already aware that there’s only so much oil, but the Western economic powers won’t summon the political will to deal with the entirely predictable shortages until lines begin to form at your gas stations. And by then, as you and I both know, it will be years too late.”

“They’d take the steps if they had definitive warning. We’re talking about the end of the world as we know it. Genuine shortages mean famine and death and war. Those are issues that tend to focus the mind.”

“Famine and death and war for whom?” he riposted sharply. “Not America. America will suffer, but it won’t pay the full price. You’re the only great military power left. You’ll seize the Middle Eastern oil and gas fields and use what’s left of the energy to manage a crash transition. The genuinely bad consequences will be reserved for the Third World-the places where famine and death and war never seem to focus anyone’s mind.”

It was a terse, brutal, and entirely accurate summary of what Senator Simpson’s plan really meant. I wished Rashid had been present yesterday, when Simpson was trying to sell his idea as “energy security.” The world Rashid was describing wasn’t the one I wanted to leave my daughter.

“Is that the prevalent OPEC view?”

“More or less. The heads of the Arab Gulf States understand the danger of their ‘special relationship’ with America, but they’re afraid of Iran and of the extremists in their own populations. The lesson of Kuwait wasn’t lost on anyone. If it wasn’t for Bush forty-one and the U.S. Marines, the emir and his entire clan would be just another group of deposed aristocrats cooling their heels in Paris or London and waiting for their money to run out. The kings and the emirs and the sultans need America for security, so they can continue looting their national treasuries in peace, but they all know they’ve done a deal with the devil. When push comes to shove, America will annex what it needs to annex, and the most the Gulf royalty will be able to hope for is generous severance. The devil always demands his due.”

He was laboring for breath as he finished speaking.

“You’re not well,” I said, furious at myself for letting him become overexcited. No matter how important the issue, I’d been wrong to push him. “I’m sorry. Can I get you something?”

“Just more water,” he muttered, collapsing back into his chair.

I fetched him some and then waited silently until his eyes closed and he began breathing more easily. I was halfway to the door when I heard his voice behind me.

“Send me your information. I’ll look at it and let you know what I think.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling a rush of gratitude. “I appreciate it. I’ll get everything over to you later today.”

I had my hand on the knob when he spoke a second time.

“Would you like some advice?”

I turned to look at him. His eyes were open, and he was smiling at me.

“Please.”

“You should buy a nice piece of land somewhere remote and stock it with goats. Goats are easy to keep and very useful. The meat can be eaten, the hair can be woven into clothing, and the dung can be burned as fuel.”

He was laughing quietly as I left.