“By whom?”
Tarek turned to his wife. “Who do you think?”
“You’re talking about Monsieur Voland?” Rima looked back to the dark hallway, in the direction of the bedroom. “Of course not. Voland is on our side. He has led us this far. In fact, with the exception of that American, who is a simple mercenary, everyone working with us has the same objective.”
“I don’t know,” Tarek said. “The American seemed to care about our cause for some reason.”
She took her husband by the hand. “He cares about one point two million euros. Come. Enough talk of our shadow men. Let’s move on to the next stage of our operation.”
* * *
? ? ?
Tarek and Rima Halaby entered the back bedroom suite just as the Spanish model stepped out of the bathroom; Bianca had let her hair down and she was now dressed in clothes Rima had bought for her earlier in the day. Dark jeans, a brown cashmere sweater, simple flats. She sat down at a small wooden table across from the Syrian couple, giving off no hint she’d been vomiting just minutes before. She had stopped shaking, her back was straight, her hands were folded on the table in front of her, and she appeared as if she had come for a job interview.
A young man with a submachine gun hanging off his shoulder sat on the windowsill and looked down to the misty parking lot below, and another man, small and thin and wearing a dark blue suit, sat in a leather wingback chair in the corner. He had wavy silver hair, but his face was enshrouded in darkness because he’d positioned himself outside the spare lamplight in the room.
Rima Halaby spoke first. “You are certain you are not hurt, daughter?”
Instead of answering, Bianca motioned to the man in the blue suit. “And who is that, there in the shadows?”
“He is a friend,” Rima replied.
Bianca looked at the man for a while, then turned back to the Halabys. “Tell me what happened tonight.”
Rima said, “A cell of terrorists from the Islamic State tried to kill you. My organization has prevented this, and we delivered you here, to safety.”
“What organization?” Bianca asked.
Now Tarek spoke. “Let’s begin with you. You are Bianca Medina, daughter of Alex Medina, a hotelier in Barcelona.”
“And for that I have been attacked by Daesh and kidnapped by you?”
“We rescued you. We did not kidnap you.”
Bianca said, “I am starting to wonder about that.”
“Your father,” Rima said, “Alex Medina of Barcelona. He was born Ali Medina . . . of Damascus, was he not?”
Medina lifted her chin a little. “And if he was, is that a crime?”
“No crime,” Rima said. “I’m just establishing your familial connection to Syria. I’ll come back to it. You are twenty-six years old; you began modeling at thirteen. You must have been very good at it, because you were traveling the world within a year. Living between Barcelona, New York, and here in Paris.”
“You read old magazines, I see.”
Rima went on. “At age twenty-four, during the height of your fame and success, you were invited to Damascus to attend a party honoring your grandfather, a construction industry giant in the nation and closely tied to the government in power. There you met Shakira Azzam, the first lady of Syria. The two of you became close friends. Before long you were invited to the palace for a party, and via this invitation you met Ahmed Azzam, the president of Syria.”
“That’s ridiculous. I barely knew Shakira, through European friends in the fashion industry, and I’ve never met—”
Tarek leaned over the table now. “There is no use in lying to us. You are here tonight because of your own actions. You are here for the same reason Daesh targeted you.”
“And what reason is that?”
“You are the lover . . . pardon my indelicacy . . . the mistress of Ahmed al-Azzam. The president of Syria. And this means you are having an affair with the most horrible man in the world.”
* * *
? ? ?
Bianca felt the muscles in her face quiver uncontrollably, so she turned away from her interrogators and looked to the wall in the room until she felt she could regain enough manufactured poise to face them.
Eventually she turned back and looked into the woman’s eyes. She chose the redhead as the target of her attention because she was softer than her husband, both in nature and in disposition, but Bianca Medina had no illusions that this woman would be kind to her. Medina constructed her facial expression to convey what she wanted it to convey, to play a role, just as if she were performing for a camera’s lens. She hid her emotions and insecurity and projected a practiced air of confidence, something she had learned from many years of modeling.
She was an expert at hiding who she was, of masking what she felt.
“You two are insane. I am no one’s mistress.”
And, just like a camera lens, Rima Halaby did not blink. She said, “We know everything, daughter. You will only waste time denying what we know to be true.” She put a hand out and rested it on Medina’s folded hands gently. “But don’t worry. No one here is judging you for your decisions.”
“All right,” Bianca said, and she pulled her hands a few inches closer to her, out from under Rima’s. “I have been living in Damascus. But that is only because my father has a home there. I needed to get away from Paris and New York. I wanted to return to my roots, to my heritage. There is no law against living in Syria with a Spanish passport. In fact, I also have a flat in Barcelona, and an apartment in Brooklyn.
“But I have no relationship with Ahmed Azzam.”
Rima surprised Bianca by reaching again for her hands, taking them in hers, and pulling them closer. “Listen to me, daughter. The information about your affair with Ahmed came from a well-placed source inside Syria. Someone who, frankly, knows everything about you and what’s been going on.”
Bianca forced a laugh. “A source? Who is this supposed source?”
Tarek leaned forward now. With a solemn tone he said, “The first lady of Syria. Shakira Azzam.”
There was no more posturing for Bianca, no more contrived poise. The color drained from her face, her eyes widened, and the muscles in her neck fluttered. She muttered a hoarse reply. “What?”
Rima nodded solemnly. “It’s true. Intelligence officials here in France intercepted a message out of Damascus to an ISIS operations commander in Belgium. It came from someone close to Shakira. The message mentioned that you would soon be taking a three-night trip to Paris to participate in Fashion Week, and it identified you as the mistress of the emir of Kuwait, who is a sworn enemy of ISIS. This is not true, of course. We assume Shakira wanted you targeted, but she did not want it made public that her husband was a philanderer. We have contacts in Syria, however, and they did some further digging on you. They determined you were the lover of Ahmed Azzam.”
Rima smiled sympathetically now. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but it seems Shakira was trying very hard to entice the Islamic State to murder you for sleeping with her husband.”
Bianca spun out of her chair and raced back into the bathroom. She slammed the door behind her, and the Halabys listened to her vomit again into the sink.
CHAPTER 9
The New Shaab Presidential Palace in Damascus sits on Mount Mezzeh, overlooking the Syrian capital, where the ultramodern, cubist complex looks more like a high-tech fortress from a science fiction film than any presidential residence. At 5.5 million square feet and constructed largely out of Carrara marble, it is a gargantuan display of dictatorial excess for everyone in Damascus to see, simply by looking up and to the west.
The New Shaab had been built in the midseventies, designed by a Japanese architect for Jamal al-Azzam, the father of the present leader of Syria, but Jamal never lived in the monstrosity himself; he deemed the palace too big and ostentatious for one family. And for the first dozen years of his son Ahmed’s rule, Ahmed Azzam agreed. Before the war came to the city, the Azzam family had lived in a modern but relatively nondescript home in a residential district of the Mezzeh municipality, west of the city center. But when bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings kicked off in the capital city itself, the pretentious citadel on the hill became the only safe place for the Azzams. Ahmed fortified the complex with his most trusted guards, police, and intelligence officials, and he moved himself and his family inside.