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RIYADH, S AUDI ARABIA

Ex-CIA operative Chip Reynolds hauled his bulky, fifty-eight-year-old, six-foot-two frame into the shower and let the hot water pound against his head and shoulders. Though he would have preferred to stay under it all day, that wasn’t what the Arabian American Oil Company, or Aramco for short, was paying him for.

After toweling off, Reynolds opened the door of his villa and found his breakfast and newspapers waiting. He carried the tray inside to his desk and poured a cup of coffee while he waited for his laptop to boot up. Knowing what a tight grip the Saudi monarchy kept on the media, he only glanced at the local papers. The valuable information came from his network of contacts scattered throughout the country. Though the deputy minister for state intelligence, Faruq al-Hafez, copied him on the daily threat assessment (the creation of which had been Reynolds’s idea in the first place), Chip knew that what he was getting was nothing more than a watered down version. Faruq had never liked him, and Chip knew why.

While still in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency, Reynolds had uncovered a plot by a Lithuanian mobster to bump off one of the lesser princes of the Saudi Royal Family. The spoiled, drugcrazed brat had run afoul of the Mafioso while vacationing in the Baltic, where his sadistic antics had resulted in the death of two young girls-one of whom was a relative of the aforementioned organized crime figure. The assassination plot was actually quite ingenious, but flawed in that it relied on local talent within the Saudi Kingdom to pull it off.

Reynolds’s superiors at Langley had instructed him to coordinate with Saudi intelligence, in particular its deputy minister. Despite Reynolds’s extensive background and expertise in the Middle East, including his fluency in Arabic, Faruq refused to work with him, insisting his people could handle the situation. The man had been wrong, almost dead wrong, and had it not been for Reynolds’s refusal to be sidelined, the prince surely would have been killed.

When Reynolds’s wife died seven years ago of cancer, he decided it was time to retire from the agency. He had given his country a good chunk of his life and wanted what was left of it back. He had watched for years while former colleagues jumped ship for the private sector and cashed in, and he wanted a piece of that action for himself. Saving the young prince’s life, no matter how much Reynolds privately believed that he and most of his debauched ilk within the Royal Family ought to take a dirt nap, had secured him a special preferred status within the house of Saud. The fact that he was ex-CIA, could speak their language, and knew his way around the block better than anybody they had seen in a long time didn’t hurt his standing either.

But while the al-Sauds might have liked what Reynolds brought to their side of the table, their deputy minister for state intelligence had been shown up by the American and never intended to let it happen again. Ergo, no real substantial intel ever flowed in Reynolds’s direction.

Reynolds had diplomatically discussed Faruq’s lack of cooperation with the Saudi Royal Family, and things had gotten better for a while, but they always seemed to recede to their current, frosty state of affairs. That said, Reynolds hadn’t become one of the CIA’s top operatives and wasn’t being paid such a big consulting fee for being lazy or stupid, and so he used his skills to bore as far as he could into all of his host country’s intelligence agencies. Within forty-five minutes every morning, he had a better handle on what was going on both inside and outside of their borders than they did. Truth be told, his picture was probably more accurate than if the Saudi intelligence agencies had been one hundred percent cooperative with him. Reynolds had always joked that he liked his intelligence like he liked his oysters-raw, with nothing added to enhance the flavor. The last thing he wanted was other people clouding his view of the landscape by trying to impress him with their take on things.

Contrary to the picture of peace, prosperity, and stability most of the outside world saw, the house of Saud was circling the drain. A host of socioeconomic problems that ran the gamut from record deficits, high unemployment, and ultra religious conservatism to resentment of the kingdom’s rapid westernization, passionate hate for American troops on Saudi Arabian soil, and the decline in oil revenues as the United States began to open up Iraq’s oil fields all came together to create one of the most dangerous political climates ever in the history of the al-Saud monarchy.

Evident to anyone who cared to take a close enough look was the fact that the Saudi monarchy’s grip on power over the last two decades had been in precipitous decline. The foolish family policy of ignoring domestic problems in the hopes that they would simply go away had been shown time and again to be an ineffective and potentially suicidal approach to governance.

When challenged, though, the house of Saud did what most petty despots did-they struck back, and struck back hard. Under the pretense of national security and Islamic law, severe crackdowns would be initiated whereby dissidents, leaders of opposition groups, and anyone appearing even remotely threatening to the monarchy were imprisoned, tortured, and in many cases put to death.

It was little wonder then that the rulers of Saudi Arabia found it difficult to accurately gauge public opinion. No half-intelligent subject of the kingdom would ever dare answer a scientific survey or telephone poll honestly, so the house of Saud was forced to rely on a loose network of informants throughout all strata of Saudi society. The problem with the kingdom’s informants, though, was that often they reported back only what they thought their handlers wanted to hear. This made for intelligence of varying degrees of quality and reliability, but when analyzed alongside the work product of the only somewhat efficient Saudi intelligence officers, most of whom, including their deputy minister, had their heads so far up their asses you couldn’t even see their shoulders, it was barely enough to keep the monarchy’s finger on the pulse of the kingdom and stay in control of the country.

As an American, Reynolds had little respect for the brutal way in which the Saudis ran their kingdom, but it was their country. The thing he despised about them the most was that they were the region’s most earnest spin doctors. For example, in an effort to appear more Muslim, King Fahd had given up his royal title of His Majesty for Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest places in the Islamic world. One member of the Royal Family had even come up with some cockamamie scheme to bottle and sell water from a recently discovered spring beneath the holy city of Mecca, which supposedly once slaked the thirst of the prophet Muhammad himself. Reynolds didn’t buy any of it. Though there were some fairly religious members of the Royal Family, they were definitely in the minority. The family’s attempt to appear faithful was an absolute sham. Anyone who had heard stories or had seen first hand the debaucheries of Saudi princes who partied like there was no tomorrow, with absolutely no respect for the tenets of Islam, knew where the ruling family really stood.

To some extent, it was hard to blame them when even their ailing king didn’t set much of an example. On his annual vacation to his coastal estate in Spain, Fahd’s entourage included 350 attendants, fifty black Mercedes, and a 234-foot yacht, in addition to which he had $2,000 in flowers and fifty cakes delivered daily. With every move it made, the monarchy was shooting itself in both feet, but Reynolds couldn’t have cared less. It wasn’t his country. As long as the hefty deposits kept being made to his bank account, he’d keep doing his job. His primary concern, the one he was being paid so many petrodollars to see to, was that Aramco’s oil continued to flow unimpeded-thereby replenishing the coffers of the house of Saud.

Unscrewing the bottom of the souvenir.50-caliber sniper round sitting on his desk, Reynolds removed a forty-gig, portable USB flash memory drive from its hiding place and attached it to the back of his computer. Not only was the portable drive extremely fast when it came to transferring data, it also had the added benefit of leaving no trace on its host. With this special toy (a gift from one of his friends at Langley) he was able to safely encrypt and store any information he didn’t want lying around on his laptop’s hard drive. One could never be too careful in the kingdom.

For their part, the Saudis were notorious for filtering Internet content. Their Internet Services Unit (ISU) operated all the high-speed data links that connected the country to the international Internet, and all web traffic in Saudi Arabia was forwarded through a central array of proxy servers at the ISU, which decided what users could and could not have access to. Citing the Koran, the Saudis claimed to be preserving their Islamic values by blocking access to any materials that contradicted their beliefs or might influence their culture. All this while they smoked, drank, did drugs, and whored around in foreign countries. The hypocrisy of it all would have been amusing if the net effect wasn’t so lamentable for the average Saudi citizen.

Even though the Saudis had the technology to block access to certain Web sites, Reynolds knew they didn’t have what it took to crack encrypted e-mails. Despite all the billions in sophisticated military hardware Uncle Sam had sold his Bedouin buddies over the years, encryption was the one area, thank God, the U.S. had refused to do business with the Saudis in. In fact, America hadn’t been too keen on Internet filtering, and along with the help of the NSA, the CIA had created a back door for its operatives in Saudi Arabia who needed a secure way to access the Net. They had placed a digital trapdoor in the last place the Saudis would ever look for it. As Reynolds logged onto the ISU’s homepage, he smiled at the irony of choosing the eunuchs’ locker room as the perfect place to hide the spermicide.

He surfed through the proxy servers over to his Saudi-sanctioned e-mail account and read a string of briefings from his roving security teams who checked in on Aramco’s wells, refineries, pumping stations, and various other operations throughout the kingdom. Satisfied that his own house was in order, he decided to see how the house of Saud was faring and opened the e-mail containing the watered-down daily threat assessment. As usual, it was only mildly interesting and not very informative. Reynolds poured himself another cup of coffee and began to whistle We’re off to see the wizard, as he carefully wove his way through the firewalls and layers of security that protected the Saudi Intelligence Services’ data. It was time to peek behind the palm frond curtain.

One of the Saudi ruling family’s biggest fears, and the reason Reynolds held the position he did, was that its state oil company, Aramco, was incredibly vulnerable to attack. With so much infrastructure above ground and unprotected, American forecasters had prognosticated that it would only take a small, well-organized band of saboteurs to completely decimate Saudi Arabia’s oil production capabilities, push the al-Sauds from power, and create a worldwide domino effect that could send oil prices soaring over $100, or maybe even $150 a barrel. Geopolitical, social, and economic upheaval would immediately follow. Stock markets would collapse, and civilization would be thrust into a modern version of the dark ages from which it might not ever recover.

It was no wonder Reynolds had nightmares. Saudi Arabia had over eighty active oil and gas fields and more than a thousand wells. There was no way he and his men could be everywhere at once. There had been small, amateur efforts at sabotage in the past, more nuisances than anything else, but it was the “what if” big one that everyone was worried about.

The only way to prevent a major attack was to keep an eye on those most likely to commit one, and that’s exactly what the Saudi Intelligence Services’ agents were supposed to be doing. The problem, in Reynolds’s opinion, was that most of them, including Faruq, weren’t even worthy of the envelopes used to mail their paychecks.

Reynolds downloaded the real daily threat assessment and then cherry-picked e-mails and memos that had flowed between the kingdom’s various intelligence branches over the last twenty-four hours. As he read, something unusual caught his eye.

Over the last two years, Reynolds had compiled his own terrorist watch list. Almost all of the list’s distinguished honorees were radical Muslim fundamentalists from the militant Wahhabi sect, and all were young men the Saudi Intelligence Services currently had under surveillance. The report he was seeing now, though, gave him a strange sense of déjà vu. He had read this same report somewhere before. But how was that possible? He had to be imagining it. Tailing subjects and writing up daily reports were two of the few things the Saudis actually did correctly.

Accessing his removable drive, Reynolds opened the folder he had created for the surveillance subject in question-a young Saudi militant named Khalid Sheik Alomari-and pulled up his previous surveillance reports. It took the security consultant over twenty minutes, but he eventually found what he was looking for. Six months ago, the Saudi agent tailing Alomari had filed the exact same report, verbatim.

It had to be some kind of mistake. Reynolds decided to check the most recent reports on some of the other young Saudis who were known to be close associates of Alomari’s and who attended the same militant mosque on the outskirts of Riyadh. Anything having to do with Khalid Alomari gave Reynolds a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, and it wasn’t without cause. The fact that Alomari had been suspected, but never convicted, of several ingenious terrorist attacks within the kingdom, as well as hailing from Abha, the same remote mountain city in the southern province of Asir as four of the fifteen 9/11 hijackers, had cemented his position at the top of Reynolds’s list of Wahhabi wiseguys worth watching.

Four more cups of coffee and two and a half hours later, Reynolds had pieced together a very puzzling picture. Saudi intelligence agents had been substituting old surveillance reports not only for Khalid Alomari, but also for four of his associates. Reynolds didn’t like it.