He loved this peaceful oasis which sat in the middle of his country fortress surrounded by thousands of armed troops like the eye of a hurricane. How many millions had it cost him? It mattered not the blink of a gnat’s eye. Yet like the gnat, this Scorpion intruded on his serenity. With a sigh, Abdul Sa’ad turned his mind back to the report from Moscow.

Those clumsy Russians had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, he thought. Their crude Tartar mentality understood nothing of the interplay of plot and counterplot, the intricacies of the arabesque. They had the same answer for everything: more guns.

The Americans were just as crude. Worse. They hadn’t even the excuse of being godless barbarians like the Russians. To the Americans, everything was money. They were like spoiled children. Allah had been too kind to them.

He remembered his first trip to America, when he was in his teens. They took him to see Niagara Falls. He stood open-mouthed, his eyes wide as saucers.

“When do they turn it off?” he had asked, unable to imagine that such a torrent of fresh water could be anything other than man-made. He remembered how his face burned as they all laughed.

“Never,” they had said. And he knew in that very instant that Allah had damned them with an abundance that made them weak. Then they tried to corrupt Arabia with their evil.

But he would show them the way.

He plucked a sugared fig from a silver bowl and chewed it thoughtfully. Nothingness and sweetness; that is Islam. At the heart of the labyrinth is emptiness and submission. Absolute purity of thought, and physical sensuality. Allah had plucked him out even as he had plucked the fig from the bowl.

Nuruddin had twice failed to destroy the Scorpion because he had not understood the nature of his enemy. An unusual mixture, this Scorpion: half Bedu and half American. But was this Scorpion a romantic who liked running around in a flowing sheet or was he truly dangerous?

According to Moscow’s report, the Scorpion was a Moslem. That meant he was committed and therefore dangerous.

He had lived as a Christian with the Bedu for years, and only then converted.

How very odd, Abdul Sa’ad mused.

Arabia, 1956

Arabia, 1956

NICK HAD BEEN LIVING with the Mutayr for nearly five years when war broke out between Egypt and Israel. They first heard the news in the souk in al Hasa, where he had gone with Sheikh Zaid, who wanted to buy some gold jewelry. The gold was for Faisal, so that he could offer a muttra, the bridal price he would have to pay in order to marry his cousin, Madawi. Sheikh Zaid held up a gold necklace. It gleamed like burning coals in the sunlight.

“How do you know it’s real gold?” Nick asked.

“If you don’t know the thing, you must know the man,” Zaid replied.