The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (23 page)

“How did you know?” the sheikh said. “How did you know I would like something like this?”

Because you are a wealthy, cloistered man who likes to play-act at
jihad, I thought.

“A true warrior requires such a thing,” I said.

Gently, he replaced the dagger in its black velvet nest and returned his eyes to me, now with genuine interest. “So, tell me about yourself,” he said.

I did not go back to the couch. I sat right there at his feet and told him about my life, my recruitment by the Muslim Brotherhood, my involvement with the PLO. It turned out that Shiekh Fahim knew my cousin, an imam who would go on to become the highest
mufti
, or Sha
ria scholar, in Lebanon. I had learned to drop his name whenever I could; it always opened doors for me.

I quoted the
sura,
as I always did to remind the rich that Allah commands
jihad
and that Muslims without guns could fight with their gold. “The Shia are taking over Lebanon with the help of the Syrians,” I went on. “The infidel Americans are helping the Maronite Christians and Phalangists. We have a lot of warriors, but we cannot fight on an empty stomach.”

Aamer looked on, seeming proud that he had impressed his uncle and benefactor with his devout friend. Sheikh Fahim seemed riveted. I went to close the sale: “We cannot move forward unless we are blessed by Allah and his chosen people. We are already thankful that you took your valuable time to allow us to sit in your presence today. If you find it in your heart, we would be most grateful to also receive your blessing.”

Sheikh Fahim turned to gaze out into the garden, and I watched his face as he considered my story. When he returned his eyes to me, it was as though someone had turned a dial: warm to shrewd.

“Many people ask for our blessing,” he said. “If I help you, how do I know this money is not going to the wrong place?”

“Our brothers in leadership will confirm to you that they have received it.”

His eyes tightened further. “I do not want to receive any phone calls. I do not want any traceable connection.”

“Then I will give you information you can use to verify that the money went to the proper account.”

The sheikh paused for a long beat, and I worried that my pitch to the richest man I had ever approached had failed.

Then he spoke again: “Today, you will have seventy thousand dollars. It will be deposited as soon as I verify who you are.”

My heart raced. In 1978, seventy thousand dollars was as a quarter million today. Not only was the money huge, but this was a coup of another sort. For months, I had been fishing the bank accounts of Bedouin sheikhs, but now I had hooked a whale.

Aamer and I parted ways with the sheikh and went out the way we
came. At the security station near the front doors, a guard stopped me and held out an envelope. It was made of expensive-looking cream-colored stock, and I took it from him, slightly confused. Had the sheikh changed his mind about the bank deposit, the verification, and issued a check right away?

Lifting the flap, I shook out a single sheet of paper and saw that it bore only two lines of handwriting: a London telephone number and, in a flourish of black ink, a signature:
Fatima.

7

Only to appear to be a man in control, I waited a week before I picked up the phone. But the truth was, I counted the hours like a man in prison. My pulse galloped as I dialed Fatima’s London number. She answered the call herself, and her low, tawny voice reached into my chest across two continents and three seas.

Still, I played it cool. “I keep an apartment in the Emirates and I just returned. I received your note. Very lovely. I am just getting back with you.”

Fatima spoke playfully but did not waste time. “I know why you wanted to meet with my father.”

Did she really know I had visited her home in the cause of
jihad?
Perhaps she had tortured Aamer until he told her.

On the phone, I brushed past her intimation. “It was a great honor to meet him and also to meet you.”

“You know, as a proper Saudi girl, I am not supposed to talk with strange men—especially men like you.” Across the distance, I could hear the smile in her voice, see the sparkle in her dark eyes. “But I like you very much. And I like what you do.”

Her directness startled me. No woman of Saudi royalty should speak with me—a commoner, a foreigner—alone on the telephone and so
brazenly. Suddenly, I remembered with exact clarity her mesmerizing scent, the rose petal texture of her hand.

“Women like me don’t meet men like you,” Fatima said. “A lifetime could pass first. Men like you have tasted liquor and known women. I have known since I was a little girl that I will marry my fat, ugly cousin. I also know he will not know how to please me. But you have practiced. I could see it in your eyes.”

Now every pulse point in my body pounded. Her voice was like golden nectar in my ear. I imagined the face behind her veil. Remembering the few strands of raven hair that had peeked from her
abbayah
, I envisioned a thick mane tumbling down her back.

“Come to London,” she said with sudden urgency. “Or Paris. This weekend. I will meet you wherever you like.”

London? Paris? Reality hit like cold water in my face: a trip like that would cost money I did not have. “I cannot come this weekend,” I said. “My budget does not permit.”

The teasing sparkle returned to her voice. “Evidently, my father is not paying you enough.”

Maybe she does know the truth.

“I do not touch that money. That is for advancing the cause of Islam.” My answer was true, and would also serve me well if Fatima was playing the spy.

“In any case, you don’t have to worry about finances,” she said lightly. “My father pays for everything I do and I don’t keep an itemized record of my expenses.”

A long pause filled the line. And then, like a single raindrop breaking the still surface of a pond, it was broken.

“Come to me,” she said.

8

That was on a Wednesday. But it felt as if I waited two years instead of two days for Friday to come. I worked some contacts in the United Arab Emirates, a project involving fake American visas. But even that was torture. I spent most of my time mooning around my apartment and listening to love songs by Ummu Gulsum, the legendary Egyptian singer.

Finally, Friday came. At the British Airways counter in Dubai, I picked up the first-class ticket Fatima had booked for me, boarded the plane, then sipped champagne all the way to Heathrow. A driver met me there in a limousine flying a gold-tasseled Saudi flag, and he whisked me to a grand London hotel overlooking Hyde Park. A smoothly mannered concierge welcomed me personally and ushered me into a café decorated in leather, mahogany, velvet, and crystal.

The concierge seated me at a table, and a waiter appeared with a tall, dewy glass of freshly squeezed lemonade, thin slices of the yellow fruit wedged among the ice. My seat faced a terrace banked in vines and flowers and overlooking the park. I felt like royalty. I had never been treated this way. I did not know how to react. I was thinking that I could quickly get used to it when an earthy scent stole my breath. I whirled to find Fatima standing behind me.

She wore a silk blouse in pale pink and a matching skirt, long and slim, down to high-heeled boots of expensive black leather. A scarf of pink chiffon wrapped her head, but her face was not covered. And it was the face I had imagined hidden behind her veil: Delicate feminine features. High cheekbones, skin golden. Full lips touched in an innocent pink. And those wide, dark eyes, inviting pools in a secret grotto.

There is something beyond a racing heartbeat, when the center of your soul flies outside your body and enters the soul of another. I stood and faced Fatima, grabbed her hand, and kissed it. The kiss was not polite.

A full minute passed before we were able to collect ourselves. Then Fatima glanced around the café and saw that a couple of other parties
had come in to dine. “Would you like to go out to the terrace?” she said.

Outside, we settled on a bench facing Hyde Park. A number of diners turned to look at her. That’s how striking she was.

“Would you like to have lunch?” she said, looking into my eyes.

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

“Neither am I.”

I reached for her hand again and now found it cool and trembling. For a long time, we didn’t talk. We just looked. But inside me, a war raged.
Am I doing the right thing?

If the sheikh found out, even about this rendezvous that had so far been chaste, it could be deadly for both of us. Many was the outraged Muslim father who had sliced his daughter’s throat for merely sitting with an unmarried man. They did it to preserve their honor, the family’s good name.

“What am I doing here?” I finally said aloud.

“I don’t know,” Fatima said. Then, as if she had read my thoughts, she looked around the terrace. “There are a lot of people watching here. Let’s go upstairs and talk.”

An elevator swept us up to a luxurious suite that must have covered an entire hotel floor. The sheikh had apparently rented it for years, or perhaps bought it, because it was decorated in the style of his villa, all silk and leather, mahogany and gold. On one wall of the wide sunken living room, a fire roared in a massive marble fireplace.

Fatima disappeared, and a moment later I heard the voice of Ummu Gulsum floating through the room. Fatima returned.

“I listened to this while I waited for you.”

“So did I,” I said, amazed.

She stepped close to me, so close I could feel the heat from her body. I looked down at her, reached forward, and brushed away her pink
hijab
. It fell away like air, releasing a burst of myrrh, the scent of her hair.

She reached up, and like a cool fire her hand touched the back of my neck. She laid her head on my shoulder.

“I was dreaming you would dance with me,” Fatima said.

Circling her with my left arm, I pressed my hand against the small of her back and pulled her to me. Her breath caught. I took her left hand
in my right, and as we swayed to the voice of Ummu, time stopped and every question in life seemed answered.

We danced until sunlight faded from the windows and only the glimmering fire lit the room. When I kissed her, I drank as deeply as if I had never kissed a woman. And there before the fire, we settled on silk cushions striped in burgundy, green, and gold, where we danced until morning, the flames reflecting off Fatima’s golden skin.

9

Relationships like the one with Sheikh Fahim opened more doors for me, though they would likely have turned into guillotines if Sheikh Fahim had known I had fallen passionately in love—and into bed—with his daughter. Fatima and I spent nearly two years before fireplaces up and down Europe. She kept the suite in London and an apartment in Paris, but wherever I was working, she flew to meet me. Our affair was a mad, secret string of hidden café rendezvouses, extravagant gifts, and ardent nights ending in shared sunrises.

Fatima had been promised to her cousin, Fayed, who worked as some kind of bureaucrat in the Saudi royal government. But she kept delaying the marriage, playing her indulgent father like a marionette with strings of excuses.

Sheikh Fahim and his wealthy friends, meanwhile, loved me and my European connections. They loved me because I appeared “neutral,” a Lebanese who could speak French, English, and Arabic and who could blend in with other cultures. I was a chameleon. Best of all, they knew I could obtain for them—pleasures. You see, many of Saudi’s powerful were drenched in lust. Radical Islam is like a moral straitjacket: do not look, do not touch, do not even
wish
for the things of the flesh. So, while the oil sheikhs pretended to be strong Islamists up front, they enjoyed the world in secret.

In the sheikhs’ eyes, all this was justifiable, according to the
hadith
,
which teaches Muslims to “seed” the women of infidels. For the Muslim Brotherhood and the PLO, it was a profitable arrangement: the happier the sheikhs, the more money I commanded for the armaments of war. At one point, I had over a dozen regular benefactors who pooled their money to purchase fifty thousand, sixty thousand, even seventy thousand dollars in travelers checks in my name. Once, I received over two hundred thousand dollars at one time. As always, I handed it over to my contact, Samir, a Palestinian accountant who deposited the funds in the PLO’s accounts.

Saudi money was the lifeblood of our movement, along with regular contributions from sheikhs in Kuwait and the Emirates. But to the sheikhs themselves, such donations were less than pocket change. I once saw a Saudi sheikh give a Rolls-Royce to a young British woman who had only helped him when he had a flat tire on the way to the airport.

Gave
it to her. On the spot. The whole car.

In early 1979, I was in London and called Fatima at the hotel. She did not answer. And she did not answer the next day or the next. This was unlike her. We had been in constant contact, even when we were in different cities. But since our affair was secret, there was no one I could ask. On the fourth day, I went down to the maibox at my flat and found a letter. The return address was Saudi Arabia.

I opened it and when I saw what was at the top of the letterhead, the breath left my body: it was the Saudi royal seal.

Was this a joke? I would have thought so except for the stationery. It looked genuine. I had seen some like it in Sheikh Fahim’s business suite, among his papers. I slammed shut the mailbox, bounded up the stairs to my flat, and called Aamer.

“Is the letter right?” he said, shocked. “Have you been with Fatima?”

“Absolutely not!” I said, still clutching the letter. “I do not know what they could be talking about, what this means. Maybe it is a plot against me.”

“Is the letter signed?”