The Aisha Prophecy (31 page)

Clew heard the emphasis. He shut off the recording. He said to Leland, “We’re clear, sir. Go ahead.”

He heard another heart-felt sigh on Leland’s end. Leland said, “If only I’d listened to you. If only I’d followed those tail lights.”

“If you had, I wouldn’t know any of this.”

“I will submit my resignation on Friday,” said Leland. “My position is no longer tenable. I will then go public with all that I know. I will release the tape you just made. Doing so is the only way I can think of to thwart Haskell from using that suicide note.”

“There’s thwarting and there’s thwarting,” said Clew.

“Meaning what? Have him killed?”

“Let me deal with this, sir.”

“Then what about Bentley? What about Leeds? These are three exceedingly powerful men. I suppose you could always nuke the whole Grove. That way, you’d be sure of getting all three. Reduce them all to scorched floating molecules. All copies of that note would be vaporized as well. That way, I’d be able to go merrily along without fear of being blackmailed or pilloried in the press.”

“Sir…”

“Of course it would trigger a world-wide recession. All those dead CEO’s. A panic on Wall Street. That might not be so bad if we time it just right. We could buy a few shares on the cheap.”

“Sir, I’m going to ask you to say nothing further to anyone else on this matter. You said Friday; today’s Wednesday. Give me those two days.”

Another long silence. Then, “Could it be true?”

“Um… what part of it, sir?”

“Could Haskell be right? Could it be Harry Whistler? Could Whistler be moving against the Saudi royals? Could he be in competition with Haskell after all?”

“No.”

Leland’s voice strengthened. “Just no? You’re that sure? He has those girls in his house. He has Aisha in his house. How do you know he’s not using that prophecy to distract the Saudis–no, the whole Muslim world-while he pursues a scheme of his own?”

It was Clew’s turn to sigh. “I’ll look into it.”

Clew could hear Leland drumming his fingers. When he spoke again, his voice had a weariness to it.

Leland said, “I will hope to hear from you, Roger, before I hand my letter to the president. Whatever the truth, there’s one fact that’s inescapable. I have dishonored myself and the office I hold by not summoning the authorities to that room at once.”

Clew could have argued, but it would have been no use. He could see in his mind the ghost of Howard Leland’s father standing at the shoulder of his eldest son. He was saying, “You must do what is expected of you, Howard. You must always do the honorable thing.”

But Clew saw his own father materializing and saying to the other, “What is it with you people?”

Then Leland’s father lifting his chin and saying, “I beg your pardon?”

“Your son was set up. You want him to roll over? I’ve got news for you, pal. You get hit, you hit back. You play to win. Look at my kid. He’s a devious little bastard, Can’t fight worth two shits man to man, but he wins. I remember one time…”

“Pop… shut the fuck up.”

“Roger?” Leland’s voice. “Did you just say something?”

Oh, Christ. “I said buck up, sir. We’ll talk when you get here.”

“I won’t be stopping at the office today. I need to spend some time with my wife.”

“By all means. We’ll talk tomorrow. Until then, sir.”

Clew sat back in his chair. He replayed the recording. Leland wants to release this? In a pig’s ass. He looked at the time. He saw that he had almost an hour before he had to leave for the airport.

He called the researcher who’d given the first briefing. She’s a good one. Name’s Tatiana. Twenty years in foreign service. She, and both her parents before her.

He read off the names, Haskell, Bentley and Leeds. “I want everything we have. All their holdings, where they live, where they work, where they play.”

“Tax records?” asked Tatiana. “For those I’ll need your signature.”

“Come and get it. Oh, and add Rajib Sadik.” He spelled the name. “Find good recent photos of all four. And don’t forget that issue of the Bahrain Tribune.”

“I’m on it. How soon?”

“You’ve got less than an hour.”

“Sir?”

“Can’t help it. Things are starting to pop.

TWENTY NINE 

If Elizabeth had been asked to guess who had caused this, she supposed that she would have guessed Shahla. Frightfully abused at the hands of her father. Abused by a system that allowed him to pimp her. Abused by two weekend “husbands,” business contacts of her father’s, who saw not a person, but a firm young body. He’d told both of them that she was a virgin. Shahla’s mother was too weak to stop it. Or as the Nasreens had put it, too ground down.

The scars that this left were still plain to see. Shahla often tensed up in the company of men unless at least two other women were present. But Shahla had the tools to get even.

Shahla, of the two, was the serious one. At nineteen, she’d already reached her senior year in college. She’d carried two majors, Journalism, Social Sciences. She’d had several essays published on the need for reform and especially on feminist issues. The papers that printed them kept getting shut down, but she’d achieved a measure of celebrity. In Iran, these days, reformist journalists are like rock stars. Nearly half the population’s under twenty. She’d been arrested twice, treated roughly, then released. The arrests only added to her stature.

Shahla’s father, some minor official, had apparently been pressured to control her or else. That’s probably when he started renting her out. After the first time, she applied to the Nasreens. She was accepted, but not before the second. She gathered the usual insurance material concerning some of her father’s business dealings.

Whatever the reason, all arrangements had been made for her to get out of Iran. The time and place of the rendezvous was set. But Niki, her sister, had followed her there and threatened to blow any chance of escape unless Shahla agreed to take her with her. The Nasreens didn’t want her. They were ready to abort. They thought that Niki was just another sullen teenager. Immature, self-absorbed, an indifferent student, perhaps jealous of her more accomplished sister.

Shahla told the Nasreens that she understood. They hadn’t bargained or planned for her sister. But Niki had apparently burned a few bridges making sure that they couldn’t go back. Shahla told the Nasreens that they’d try on their own. If they could reach the border and get past the minefields, they would cross into Kurdish Iraq. The Nasreens relented. They took Niki.

Elizabeth brought Shahla into the study and sat her in front of the computer screen. Shahla asked, “What is it? Do I have some mail?” She showed no hint of unease.

Elizabeth told her, “Just read.”

Shahla saw the name Farah. It caused her to smile. But then as she read the message that spoke of her, the color drained from her face. She covered her mouth. She couldn’t speak.

“She died for refusing to say where you are. They knew that you’d been emailing your friends in Tehran even though you were warned against doing so.” Elizabeth reached past her to scroll through the messages. She said to Shahla, “Keep reading.”

Shahla did so. Blinking. Rapidly blinking. Her head began shaking from side to side as in disbelief at the words on the screen.

Elizabeth said to her, “Let’s hear it.”

She said, “I… don’t know what you want me to say. I never knew any of this.”

“You did write to your friends, did you not?”

Shahla looked up at her. “Never. Not once.”

Kessler said to her, “Shahla… you signed your name. These were all your friends. You not only told them that the prophecy was real, you claimed to be the handmaiden of ‘she who has come.’ There doesn’t seem much point in denying it.”

A low moan arose from deep within Shahla. She began rocking back and forth in her chair. The moan increased in volume. It went up in pitch. First a wail. Then a scream. The scream was “Niki!!”

It was Niki. Always Niki. And acting alone. Within the hour, they’d pieced it together, having gathered all four girls in the study. First came the prophecy. How had that started? The beginning, it seems, was entirely innocent. Just four girls chatting. It occurred soon after the sisters and Rasha arrived at the Hilton Head facility. Aisha had been assigned as their counselor. Rasha had asked Aisha if she’d heard of the prophecy, her name being Aisha and all. Aisha remembered hearing about it while she was a child back in Cairo. Aisha and Rasha were both aware that a lot of Sunni girls are named Aisha. And many of their mothers would have told them the story of Mohammed’s young warrior wife. Some of those mothers would have told them of the prophecy.

Rasha said, “It was never, ‘Hey, maybe it’s you.’ It was more about being proud of the name and being guided by Aisha’s example.”

How is it that Rasha knew of this prophecy? She had come across it back in Riyadh. She was doing a paper on the Berbers for school. She got interested in Muhammad ibn-Tumart because he believed in women’s’ rights. Within limits. She says she never thought much more about it.

But then she met Aisha, the first Aisha she’d known. Now she remembered little clues in the text that seemed to fit her new friend. Aisha was young, not yet at full womanhood. Aisha was dressed in white when they met and was usually in tennis clothes thereafter. Then, of course, there was that East and West business. On top of all this, she thought Aisha was beautiful. The text did not describe her as such, but physical beauty is assumed in such cases. “Pure of heart” also seemed to fit the bill. As did Elizabeth, Aisha’s friend and protector. Protectors are like guardian angels.

To Aisha and Shahla, this was just conversation. To Aisha, it was also embarrassing. Especially the part about how beautiful she was. She could have done without the “Pure of heart” as well. This led to some ribbing, according to Rasha. She said none of them took it to heart. Niki, however, had asked Shahla at one point, “Don’t you wish this was true?” She asked, “Don’t you wish you could be there when she comes to Tehran and calls our dear father to account?” But Shahla had no wish to revisit that subject. She thought that was the end of it. It wasn’t.

Niki had asked Rasha where she found the text. Niki told her of a web site, some Moroccan museum. Nike found it later on her own computer. On a whim, she started to spread it. She sent it first to an Internet Café that she’d used a few times in Tehran. But it was Shahla who’d used that café the most often. It’s where she’d written and distributed her essays. Most other girls who used it were her friends, not Niki’s.

Niki was never a popular kid. Even girls of her own age thought her to be sly. Being overweight didn’t help either. Shahla had many friends. Her sister did not. Niki sent this mail to Shahla’s friends, all of whom she knew, and pretended that she was Shahla. She knew that they wouldn’t take it seriously from her, but they’d believe a message from Shahla.

Niki was quaking as she made this admission. She kept her eyes on the floor. She could not look at Shahla.

But no harm was done at first. The authorities took no notice. At the start, Niki’s messages got lost in the crowd of a millions of messages on thousands of sites. Weeks went by before it started to snowball. Did Shahla’s friends believe it? Perhaps. More likely not. But for some it was fun to consider and pass on. Niki did prime the pump and she did keep it flowing, but it quickly took on a life of its own. Soon on some of those web sites there were clerics and scholars debating the prophecy’s legitimacy and some of them were actually confirming it. On others, Muslim women were arguing with each other over who needs Aisha’s help and who doesn’t.

Now the authorities were forced to take notice. Arrests were made at the Internet Café. If it wasn’t the source, it’s from where it was spread. The source was found to be a young woman named Shahla who claimed to be the first among Aisha’s handmaidens. Her friend Farah was arrested, lashed out of her mind. Did Farah believe it? Perhaps not at first. Sadik said that, in her pain, she began to hallucinate. Aisha, he thought, became real to her. She was also determined not to betray this handmaiden who she thought was her childhood friend, Shahla.

It was Niki as well who stole the ten billion. Or rather, primarily Niki.

The Darvi sisters and Rasha had first met in France, at a Nasreen safe house in Toulon. They stayed there for two or three days. While there, they were encouraged to email their families to say they were safe but would not be coming back.

Both Shahla and Rasha brought computer disks with them. They both turned them over to the Nasreens because that was part of the agreement. They told the Nasreens, in broad strokes, what was on them. The Nasreens checked them out on the safe house computer, but only to see that they were readable.

Elizabeth said to Kessler, “That’s all they do with them. As a rule, they never make use of them unless…”

“Unless they need the leverage, I know.”

And that was that. Or that seemed to be that. A few days later, all three were in South Carolina. A few weeks after that they had moved to Belle Haven. Each girl was given an on-line computer. This was for home schooling primarily. They were given a list of firm do’s and don’ts. The biggest ‘don’t’ was letting anyone know where they were. No contact with friends or family back home unless it went through the Elizabeth and then the Nasreens.

Which Niki ignored.

Well, in fairness, not entirely, thought Kessler. She insists that she never said where she was. But she did do a search of several Islamist web sites to see who, if anyone, was looking for them. All she did was type in each of their names. The only hits she got were in reference to Rasha. The source, she said, was one of Rasha’s male relatives who was apparently directing the search for her. He’d eventually enlisted the Wahhabi Hasheem. The cousin listed several places where she might have been taken. One was the safe house on Hilton Head Island. It was, however, well down the list because it was thought to be more of a dispersal point than any sort of permanent location.

Even so, she decided that was getting too close. She should have told Elizabeth, but she didn’t. She told Rasha, however. She brought her up to her room. She showed her all the traffic between this cousin and the Saudi sheik who heads the Hasheem. This would not have been possible on an ordinary computer, but this was Harry’s system. It was not ordinary. Niki asked Rasha what made her so important that they’d send the Hasheem after her. She knew that Rasha was a princess. She also knew that in her case that was not so big a deal. Was all this because she’d been promised to this sheik? It seemed there had to be more than his wounded pride at stake for such a wide hunt to be justified.

She then asked Rasha what was on the disk that she’d given the Nasreens in Toulon. Rasha told her about Saudi Overseas Charities. Hundreds of numbered off-shore accounts, much of that money embezzled. She said her father knew that she’d copied those files because she’d told him when she emailed him from Toulon. She’d promised that she wouldn’t tell anyone she had them unless any harm should come to her mother and as long as he left her alone.

But now all bets were off as far as Niki was concerned. The problem was that the Nasreens had the disk. Rasha hadn’t kept a copy after all. They could go to Elizabeth, have Elizabeth get it back. But Niki thought it was probably useless by now. The Saudis would surely have hidden that money or at least changed the passwords to get into their system. Rasha agreed that somebody might have, but not her father; he wouldn’t know how. Nor did she think he’d tell anyone else. If he did, he knew they’d crucify him. Well, not crucify, thought Kessler. They don’t do crosses. But beheading was not out of the question.

Niki said that if it’s true that no-one else has changed the passwords, maybe Rasha could still get into those files. As she’d seen, Harry’s system could get in almost anywhere. Rasha didn’t want to try it without clearance from Elizabeth, but Elizabeth, at the time, and this was only last Saturday–had gone out to the gym, as had Kessler. Niki said, ‘Let’s at least see if it’s still there.’ Rasha agreed to go only that far. The web address hadn’t changed for Saudi Overseas Charities. In short order she saw that the passwords hadn’t either. Rasha saw that almost nothing had changed except that some of the balances had grown larger.

Niki asked Rasha whether she could get at it. Could they help themselves to some of that money. Rasha said that she could, but she wouldn’t. For one thing, some of those accounts were legitimate. Rasha wasn’t sure which was which. For another, although a transfer was possible, transfer it where? She had no place to put it. She had no account of her own. Niki’s answer? She said, “But Martin does. And Elizabeth does. And Elizabeth has no love for the Saudis.”

Rasha says that she told her, “Not all Saudis, Niki. Only men. And only some. Don’t forget that my mother’s a Saudi.”

She said that Niki answered, “I have a mother, too. And mine didn’t do a thing to help Shahla. She wouldn’t have stood up for me either.”

“Well, mine has done everything for me.”

Rasha, aware that this could well hurt her mother, told Niki to leave it alone. She wasn’t about to take their money. Niki, however, had a suggestion. She was looking at columns, names, numbers and amounts, and asked Rasha if Rasha could scramble them herself. Rasha said that she could, but what good would that do? Niki said that way she’d have the only original. She could let her father know what she’d done. She could tell him that she’d put them back as they were if he promised to call off the hunt.

Rasha wasn’t convinced. Her father’s promise would be worthless. Niki argued that it was still worth a shot. After all, if Rasha’s family did manage to track her, they’d have found Niki and her sister as well. The hunters might decide that in order to get at them, they’d need to kill Elizabeth and Martin.