Florence of Arabia (3 page)

Behind this scrum of officialdom Florence heard the doctor
manfully
explaining that there was some possibility of subdural something, but it was clear tha
t he was being overruled. Bawad,
whose linger-snaps could summon a kingdom's resources, had brought his personal physician and orderlies to earn her off. Nazrah was, as far as the United States was concerned. Wasabi national soil.

CHAPTER
TWO

‘Why
did she call you?"

"You've asked me that twelve times." Twelve times over
the
course of three interrogations. Present at
this one were: Charles Duckett,
deputy
assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs (DASNE
A
); two frowns from the White H
ouse National Security Council: an FBI supervisor and a CIA guy introduced In a name most likely not r
eal who probably worked for McF
all. Also a stenographer who coughed.
Why.
Florence wondered, hadn't t
hey sent along someone from H
ousing and Urban Development?

"Then
I'm asking again. Aren't [?"

"Win don't you just box me?" She would have welcomed a polygraph at this point for variety.

"No one's talking about boxing you. Why did she call you?"

"She'd crashed her car. Charles. She looks out one window, and there are men with guns
everywhere.
We knew each other. We were friendly. I'm a woman. She found herself in a stressful situation. She proba
bly wanted to talk to a sympathetic person in the U.S. government. H
ard as they are to find."

"Why didn't you report it to us immediately?"

"I was going to
once the situation stabilized."

"Stabilized? Seques
tering a runaway diplomatic wife—the wife of Price
Bawad.
By what earthly definition doe
s this qualify as stabilizing the situation?"

"I was try
ing to buy some cooldown time. That's all. She was terrified. Call it a human transaction. Just so we're all clear. I'm not running an underground railroad for Wasabi wives. Okay?"

Duckett read from inside a red folder marked
top secret.
"You said to her. "t
ell them you're injured. Insist they take you to a hospital. Fairfax Hospital. Insist. Nazrah—do you understand?' Why Fairfax?"

That they had a transcript of Nazrah s cell-phone call to her indicated two distinct possibilities: that the CIA could spontaneously intercept any cell call made on its propertv. Or—more interestingly—that the government had
already
tapped Nazrah's cell phone.

"It's the closest hospital."

Duckett grumpily opened a green
top secret
folder and scanned. "You say you met with her on ... seven ... separate occasions."

"That's right. Four lunches, one tea at the Four Seasons Hotel. We went shopping
twice. It's all in the folder, the y
ellow one."

Duckett opened the yellow folder. "Are these reports complete?"

"H
ow do you mean, complete?"

"Did you report everything?"

"Of course. E
very thing relevant."

"What would you consider irrelevant?"

"Personal stuff."

"Define "personal.""

"Girl
talk." Probably the best way to explain it to this high-testosterone bunch.

Ducked sighed as only a bureaucrat can, from the very depths of his soul. "Florence, this is not Twenty Questions.
Everything
that she told you is relevant."

Florence looked at Duckett, then at FBI, at the White House pair, at CIA— who seemed to be regarding her with an expression that went beyond strictly business. She turned back to Duckett.

"Okay
. She told me that the prince likes to smoke hash, then dress up in cow boy boots and his tribal headdress and nothing else, then line up all four of his wives with their bottoms in the air and, well, 1 guess the technical term for it would be—"

"All right, that's all."

CIA burst out laughing. The White House mice looked stricken.

Florence said, "Next time a diplomatic wife confides in me, I'll be sure to put everything in writing."

"Would y
ou excuse us?" Duckett said to the others. He added to the stenographer. "You, too."

CIA flashed Florence a grin as he exited.

"God of heaven and earth,
why
would you reveal something like that?" Duckett said, aghast. "In front of
them?
Don't you understand the situation? The Wasabis are madder than hornets. If they find out that
State
has been retailing—to
CIA
—intimate details of..." He put his head in his hands. "Oh, what a disaster. They'll use this to crucify us.
You
know what they'll say, don't you? That you were on a personal vendetta."

"That's absurd. I was trying to help a fellow human being. Ridiculous as that may sound."

"You were married to a Wasabi. And you're Italian. 'Vendetta' is an Italian word."

"I'm as American as you are. And that is just completely out of line. To say nothing of stupid."

"Explain it to their Foreign Ministry!"

Florence had grown up fascinated by her grandfather's tales of the Middle Fast. At college she majored in Arabic studies and was fluent by the time she
graduated Yale. There she met H
amzir, a minor Wasabi princeling, charming, handsome, raffish, rich and, being a reservist fighter pilot in the Royal Wasabi Air Force, dashing. What American girl with
a predilection for the Middle E
ast wouldn't have fallen in love? They were married weeks after graduation.

After a honeymoon in the Mediterranean on a 125-foot yacht, Florence arrived in her new home of Kaffa to a succession of discoverie
s, exponentially depressing. H
amzir had not been straightforward about the realities of life as a foreign Wasabi bride. He'd told her that she would be exempt from the strictures governing Wasabi women.
Not to worry, darling!

Florence found herself under virtual house arrest, required to wear the veil outside t
he home and to be accompanied by
a male escort. With this much, she resolved to cope. But within three months, she discovered that her birth-control pills had been switched with sugar substitutes—the kind on
e puts in coffee. Confronted, H
amzir shrugged a
nd grunted that it was time, anyway,
(hat she bore him a
child. She retaliated in the Ly
sistrata fashion by cutting off sex. whereupon he went into a rage and announced the next evening over dinner—as if remembering a dentist's appointment the followin
g day
—that he was taking a second wife, a first cousin.
Pass
the lamb, would you'!'

The next mor
ning Florence drove herself (a fl
ogging offense) to the U.S. embassy and said.
Beam me up. Scotty.
Their response was
You got yourself into this, and now you expect us to get you out of it? Here, read this.
They handed her a pamphlet tilled "What American Women Should Understand When They Marry a Wasabi National." The State Department's reflexive response to any American in extremis overseas is to hand them a pamphlet—along with a list of incompetent local lawyers—and say. "We told you so."

Florence was not one to be deterred. She announced firmly that she would not leave the embassy except in a car driven by an embassy staffer, to Prince Babullah Airport. An enterprising young Foreign Service officer, like herself of Italian extraction, worked out a quick and dirty arrangement with the Italian embassy and got her out of the country on an Italian passport, to which Florence was technically entitled.

Back in the U.S.A., she went to wo
rk in Washington with a Middle Eastern
foundation. One day, bored, and thinking about the enterprising Foreign Service officer in Kaffa who had rescued her. she sat for the Foreign Service exam. She passed. Being fluent in Arabic and an expert on the culture, she was posted to Chad. After 9/11, it was thought that her skills might be
better suited elsewhere at Stat
e, so she was moved to Near Eastern Affairs.

Florence sai
d to Duckett, "Did they have a t
ap on her cell phone? Or did they intercept the call on the spot?"

"What does it matter? They have you on tape, urging her to flee. Practically issuing amnesty on the spot."

"But who taped the call? Who gave you the transcript?"

"McFall's person, Brent what
everhisname."

"Ask him how they
got it."

"They're not
going to tell me that.
You
know what pricks they are about sources and methods."

Florence whispered,
"Tell
him that you know what they were up to." Duckett stared. "Namely?"

"That CIA had a tap on Nazrah's phone lo
ng before she drove into the gat
e. That they were working on her. That they'd targeted her. That they were going to try to blackmail Prince Bawad through her."

Duckett
pursed his lips. "Thanks to you,
now they do have something on him."

"But they won't be able to use it if you tell them that you've seen through them. That you're on to them. That you've blown their operation. And that you're now going to climb to the top of the Washington Monument and scream your lungs out about it."

"But what if it's not true?"

"L
et the director of CIA deny it. To the president's face. In the Cabinet Room."

The lines on Ducket
t's forehead relaxed, as if he'd suddenly been injected with Botox. He let out a pleased, ruminative grunt. His loathing of the CIA went back to one of his first overseas postings. Ecuador. There, he had overseen the opening of one of
State
's dreary cultural exchange centers, this one designed to "highlight the historic synergy between the United States and Ecuador
." The next day it was blown up,
ostensibly by a local guerrill
a group, but in fact by the CIA,
who wanted to stage an anti-U.S. outrage in order to widen its campaign against the current set of rebels. Duckett had been licking this still-moist wound lor decades. He was smiling now.

He called the others back in. "I've
questioned
Ms. Farfalett
i. and I have established to my satisfaction that her version of the events is accurate and truthful. Now"—he picked up the transcript of Nazrah's call—"I'm not going to ask you, or you, how this call came to be intercepted. Because that would not only compromise sources and methods, it would
also raise the appalling possi
bility that one or more agencies of the U.S. government were spying on the wife
of
a diplomat. Not just any diplomat but the dean of the diplomatic corps—a close personal friend of the president of the United States."

"That's a bunch of shit."

"Which y
our director, or yours, can scrape oil" the bottom of their sho
es—in the Cabinet Room, after St
ate has presented
to perspective on the matter." F
BI and
CIA
stared.

"Alternatively" continued
Duckett, lord of the moment, "w
e can all of
us
agree that the matter is now closed. Princess Nazrah is, as we speak, on her way back home in a Royal Wasabi Air Force transport. The media is unaware. So. gentlemen, how shall we proceed?"

The White House people whispered with FBI and CIA. FBI said, none loo happily. "We're done here.
" On the way out, the CIA man w
inked at Florence.

The next morning Florence inserted her ID card into the State Department turnstile, half expecting the display to read
CANCELED,
like a maxed-out
credit card. But it let her in. Apparently, she still had a job in the United States government.

She sought out George. George was a desk-limpet in t
he Political/E
con section who amused himself during his lunch hour by devising crossword puzzles in ancient Phoenician, one of twelve languages he spoke fluently. He claimed to dream in seven of them, and George was not the sort to boast. His model was Sir Richard Burton, the nineteenth-century polymath-explorer who spoke thirty-five languages and dreamed in seventeen. One of the most daring adventurers of all time, B
urton was a curious role model f
or the agoraphobic George, who had managed to wriggle out of every foreign posting he had been offered, except for one eighteen-month stint in Ottawa,
during which he learned Micmac,
a complex native Canadian language.