Agent in Place

The first family of Syria lives in a thirty-room guesthouse on the northern edge of the property, officially speaking, but Ahmed Azzam almost always spends the night in an apartment in his suite of offices a quarter mile away from his family in the palace proper. His wife also has an office suite at her disposal on the other side of the palace grounds, but with young children, she finds herself with the kids most nights in the guesthouse.

But not this night. This night the forty-seven-year-old first lady sat alone in a plush salon in her private apartment. At three a.m. she wore a sweater and a pair of designer jeans, her dyed blond hair was pinned up, and she sat on a white leather sofa with her legs curled under her.

She watched Al Jazeera World News with the volume low, and a satellite phone rested next to her.

She’d been like this for the past two hours.

Her half dozen personal assistants had been sent away for the night, so they were all back in their palace apartments, but they also knew they needed to keep their phones on. All six of them remained on call for the summons that often happened when Shakira was up late and scheming.

She might want food; she might want information; she might want someone to drive over and personally check on the nannies of the children to make sure they were watching over her two teenage daughters, Aaliyah and Kalila.

And if this happened, any one of her assistants would climb out of bed and do her bidding without hesitation, because the mercurial Shakira al-Azzam commanded just as much respect and fear among the staff as the president of Syria himself.

Shakira had not been raised to live in a palace. Born in London to Syrian parents, she had grown up in an upper-middle-class Western childhood. She studied business and graduated from the London School of Economics before taking a job at a bank in Switzerland. She worked hard and enjoyed the life of a successful young Western European. But on a trip home to London she met Ahmed al-Azzam, then a fledgling orthopedic resident working at a clinic in Fulham.

The two young and good-looking Syrians fell for each other quickly, and they were married within a year, and just a year after that they were forced to return to Syria when Ahmed’s father died of liver disease.

Ahmed had had no desire to lead Syria, but his older brother, the real heir apparent, had died in a car crash in Damascus, and the al-Azzam family would not relinquish the power over the nation that Jamal Azzam had fought so hard to acquire and maintain. For Shakira’s part, she’d had no aspirations to be first lady, but just like her husband, she fell into the job, and soon decided no one would ever take it from her as long as blood pumped through her veins.

Before the civil war that now ravaged her nation, Shakira had spent ten years cultivating an image. She was beautiful, brilliant, and unceasingly kind to everyday Syrians, and never more so than when the cameras were rolling. Despite ongoing accusations of atrocities attributed to her husband’s government, even before the war, she was a fixture among the glitterati in London, Paris, and Milan.

A New York fashion magazine had referred to her as “the Rose of the Desert,” and this moniker stuck with her for a decade. Another magazine had dubbed her the Lady Diana of the Middle East.

Ahmed was socially awkward, soft-spoken, and easily distracted. Shakira, on the other hand, was a master manipulator of her husband’s message, and she managed his relationship with his people. She controlled how his image and voice made it to the citizens of Syria and the citizens of the world.

Her husband was an Alawi, but Shakira was a Sunni, and when the war came she helped broker deals between many of the Sunni groups in Syria that were now helping the Azzam government in its war against the Sunni majority.

Few knew that much of her husband’s success, his power, his very survival, was due to Shakira.

The war had changed her husband. In the past three years the Russians had moved into Syria en masse to help Azzam, not because they liked him or believed him to be in the right in this struggle. No, they helped him because they wanted air and land bases in the Middle East, and access to a Mediterranean port. Along with the Iranians, the Russians had helped turn the tide against the rebels, and while Shakira had seen herself as invaluable to her husband for years, now she worried that his alliance with Russia was minimizing her importance to him.

Ahmed had grown into the scheming and brutal dictator that for fifteen years he’d only portrayed himself as while Shakira had served as the major power broker behind the scenes.

Though she, the Iranians, and the Russians had successfully bolstered her husband’s regime, bringing it from the brink of destruction to where they were now, within a year of outright victory in the brutal civil war that had raged for over seven years, the public image Shakira had carefully cultivated for herself had been utterly destroyed. The wider world knew her husband for what he was, and the wider world was not buying what Shakira was selling anymore. The civil war that the Azzam regime prosecuted mercilessly had eroded any lingering goodwill that the jet set, the Western press, and anyone outside the loyalist enclaves in Syria had for Shakira. No longer was she flying off to Italian islands to meet with rock stars to talk about world hunger. The EU had banned her from traveling into its borders, and sanctions locked down all of her husband’s personal bank accounts in Luxembourg and Switzerland, and more than half of hers.

The fawning media outlets of the world had long ago ceased fawning about Shakira.

Though her nickname before the war had been the Rose of the Desert, now people in the Western press had taken to referring to her as the First Lady of Hell.

* * *

? ? ?

And now, as Shakira sat watching television and glancing down to her satellite phone every minute or two, she thought about the last few years, what she had endured for her husband, and what he had put her through.

Shakira had introduced the enchanting young Spanish model Bianca Medina to Ahmed, and for that Shakira would forever be angry with herself. That Shakira did not know about the affair for the first year of it was her second major regret. She should have been watching her husband’s actions closer, for the sake of both herself and Ahmed.

It wasn’t the affair itself that bothered her. No, she didn’t care about who her husband slept with. He was slow and simple, boring and unloving to her. Shakira was involved in an affair of her own, after all, although she was certain Ahmed had no idea. As long as she raised the children and continued to support the regime, she had always felt her place was secure for the rest of her life, or at least the life of her husband. She’d lived her days certain that their mutual survival remained important to them both.

And then something changed.

Shakira had recently learned details about her husband’s relationship with his mistress, and now Shakira saw Bianca Medina as a threat, a threat that could destroy everything she’d worked so hard for.

So the bitch had to die.

A knock at the door was followed by the sound of footsteps in the entryway to her quarters. She had been expecting no guests, but she knew who it was, because no one else in her world would dare walk into her private salon without waiting to be acknowledged at any time of day or night, especially not at this rude hour.

The footsteps stopped as the late-night caller waited to be summoned, but before she called out, she glanced at her TV. Al Jazeera had just transitioned to a live cut-in on their programming; the screen changed from the TV studio to a shot of a darkened Parisian street, flashing lights and running police and medical personnel in the background.

Shakira smiled thinly, hopeful that the impeccable timing of the man at the door would fill in the details of the images on her huge television.

She spoke in French. “Come in, Sebastian.”

A man stepped through the darkened salon quietly. When she heard him walking up behind where she sat on the sofa, Shakira lifted the sat phone and held it up. “I thought you’d call. Someday someone will see you coming into my flat in the middle of the night. They’ll suspect you aren’t here to discuss my holdings in Switzerland.”

The man knelt in front of her, close. He leaned forward to kiss her, but she did not mirror the action. They did kiss, but she clearly had other things on her mind.

He said, “I was discreet. I thought it would be best if I delivered the news I have in person.”

“Tell me.”

He leaned in again, and she started to lean back and away. She was all business, and wanted this conveyed to the man. But as she tried to separate from him the second time, he brought a strong hand out, put it behind her head, pulled the face of the first lady of Syria to his, and kissed her hard on the lips.

Just as she started to kiss him back he let go, stood, and went to a chair on the other side of the coffee table.

Shakira quickly sat up and composed herself, hiding the fact that she’d even held a moment’s interest in his affections.