Alex Berenson: The Secret Soldier

“Give me the number. And the number of the phone that received the call.”

Wells did.

“I’ll let you know soon as I hear.”

The Jeep slowed as they approached a roadblock at the entrance to Highway 5, the road connecting Jeddah and Mecca. The cops running the roadblock weren’t cops. Half of them carried M-16s and wore Special Forces uniforms. The others were muk in black shirts and pants. They waved Gaffan over, put a floodlight on the Jeep. Wells kept his arms low by his sides. He’d noticed flecks of blood on the cuffs of his gown. On a close search, they’d be obvious.

Gaffan handed their identity cards to a Special Forces officer. He looked them over, then called the muk to check them out. Wells wondered whether Mansour had already learned the names on their cards.

“You should be home,” the muk barked. “Where are you going?”

“Mecca.”

“Mecca? Why tonight?”

“We have a job tomorrow. Cleaning a house. We didn’t want to get caught in the traffic in the morning.”

The muk shined a flashlight over the Jeep. “I don’t see any supplies for cleaning.”

“They’re all at the house.”

“Where are you staying?”

“The owner lets us sleep on his roof.”

“Where?”

“It’s on Abdul-Aziz Road. Two kilometers from the Grand Mosque.”

The muk handed back their identity cards. “Drive fast, then. You only have thirty minutes, and if you get stopped at the western roadblock, they may make you sleep in the car and wait until the morning. Or they may arrest you.” He handed back their identity cards, waved them on.

“Thank you, officer.”

“Next—”

Gaffan sped off. “Abdul-Aziz Road,” Wells said.

“Figured it was a safe bet.”

THE DESERT TOOK OVER, the land as dark and flat as an ocean. If not for the glow of Jeddah behind them, Wells would hardly have believed he was traveling between two multimillion-person cities less than fifty miles apart.

His sat phone rang. “Our friends say the number traces to western Mecca,” Shafer said.

“You have a street? An address?”

“They’re still working that. They may need you to call it again.”

“I thought—”

“It’s not Verizon. They can’t just ask nicely and get the location. And these disposables are tricky. Believe me when I tell you they’re pulling out the stops. They’re basically giving the Saudi telecom system an enema as we speak.”

Five minutes later, Shafer called back. “They’re ready. They say if you can get that phone up, they can get to the specific tower.”

“How long do they need?”

“Thirty seconds. A minute would be better. But do it soon. They say that the way they’re spooning data, they could take down the whole system.”

“‘Spooning.’”

“It’s a technical term.”

Wells reached for Hassan’s cell. Thirty seconds. If he screwed up, he’d not only blow his chance at finding the house, he might provoke the kidnappers into killing Kurland. Could he sound enough like a native Saudi to fool them? He murmured phrases to himself, smoothing his accent. They were halfway between Jeddah and Mecca now, rolling east at ninety miles an hour. As he watched, the cell’s reception shrank to a single bar.

“Pull over.”

“What about the curfew?”

“Just do it.”

Gaffan slowed down, edged to the side of the highway. Wells called the 966 number, keeping his hand over the microphone. After three rings, a man picked up.

“I got your voicemail,” Wells said quietly. “But we may have a problem—”

“Hassan. I can’t hear you—”

Wells took his fingers off the microphone. “Better?”

“A little.”

“Usman says a helicopter’s circling.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know. Hold on—” Wells covered the microphone. “Usman—” He imagined himself on the first floor of the house, running to the roof. He waited, watched the call timer move past forty-five seconds, fifty. “I’ll call you back.” He hung up. He’d stretched a handful of sentences into a fifty-eight-second conversation. In a few minutes he’d send a calming text to the man on the other end. False alarm. Everything’s fine. See you tomorrow.

“Let’s go.”

THEY FLEW UNDER THE signs for the bypass highway that non-Muslims were required to take around Mecca. Wells wondered what would happen if they were arrested inside the city’s borders. Gaffan wasn’t Muslim at all, and a Wahhabi judge might find Wells’s commitment to the faith lacking. So they had the muk and the kidnappers against them, and now the religious police, too.

The highway was nearly empty now, three lanes of freshly paved asphalt. Gaffan pinned the Jeep’s speedometer at an even one hundred sixty kilometers — one hundred miles — an hour. The land around them was still featureless, but ahead a halo of city lights rose behind a low mountain range. Then the road turned, and through a gap in the hills Wells saw a massive skyscraper towering over the city and the hills around it.

“What is that?” Gaffan said.

Incredibly, the Saudi government had built a massive office and hotel complex beside the Grand Mosque. The development was centered on a two-thousand-foot skyscraper, the second-largest in the world, topped by a gigantic clock modeled on London’s Big Ben. Each of the clock’s four faces was one hundred fifty feet high — the size of a midsized office building — and had at its center the Saudi palm-and-crossed-swords logo. On its face, the complex was an awful idea, a giant commercial center on top of a sacred religious site. And architecture critics agreed that the buildings were ugly and ponderous, much too big for the site, their bulk worsened by their lack of glass. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s largest skyscraper, was a more-than-two-thousand-five-hundred-foot needle into the sky, a soaring monument to modern design and engineering. The Mecca tower was an overgrown Lego block.

But the Saudis weren’t fools. And despite their wealth, they weren’t inclined to build skyscrapers. The tallest buildings in Riyadh were less than half the size of this building. The princes had placed the complex where they did to remind the world that the glory of Islam and the glory of the House of Saud could not be separated. They’d knocked down a historic Ottoman Empire fortress to build it, ignoring the protests of the Turkish government, delivering the message that Mecca would never again belong to the Turks. From its heights, the skyscraper flashed the call to prayer five times a day, its green and white lights glowing over Mecca and the desert. It was a gift from the princes to proclaim the might and majesty of Islam. The symbolism was as simple and overwhelming as the Saudi flag.

Wells was starting to explain all this to Gaffan when his sat phone rang. “I have something for you.”

“Please tell me it’s an address.”

“Not quite. But we have it down to two blocks in a neighborhood called Hindawiyyah. Good news is there aren’t any apartment buildings. It’s all residential. Medium to big houses. A good place to hide someone.”

“What’s the street?”

“It’s called Shahab. The expressway turns into a road called Umm al Qura”—Mother of Villages, Mecca’s historic title—“which goes right to the mosque. Shahab’s off Umm al Qura, about twelve hundred meters after the expressway ends. Right-hand side. The hot zone is four hundred meters down, give or take.”

“‘Give or take.’”

“There’s a radius around the cell towers. Our friends played some games with the signal to triangulate, but they could only get to within about a hundred meters. A circle with a two-block diameter. Maybe thirty houses in all.”