“The great Beih Saad,” said Omar.

It was all coming together.  One enormous, mind-numbingly complex puzzle whose pieces initially didn’t seem to fit at all was finally beginning to do just that.

Until Omar broke the silence with a shrug and a question.

“But why?”

“Why what?”

“Why… all of this?” he said, motioning back to the screen.  “Why spend so much time creating a system so vast and extraordinarily complicated and then pay a huge amount of money every year to keep people from looking at you?”

“To hide something, obviously.”

“Like the children.”

Mona nodded.  “Like the children.”

He continued staring.  Thinking.  “But we don’t even know what that is.”

It was true.  The woman who’d jumped into the back of Omar’s car had never given her name—intentionally.   But she’d provided a lot of information on how the children were secretly being handed off.  Swapped, as she called it, with UNICEF children who would be rotated back into Saad’s Rainbow houses in some strange, repeating cycle.

And yet, one of the things the strange woman had been sure about when it came to Saad’s bizarre operation was that the children weren’t being used for sexual reasons.

Which made a strange kind of sense.  At least to Omar.  Child trafficking operations had been successfully run for years in circles far less complicated than Saad’s.  And in trafficking, you didn’t purposely damage your product, physically or mentally, as deeply uncomfortable a term as it was to think of children as a product.

He knew enough to know that the people in charge of such rings were business-minded, unlike the predators eagerly waiting on the other end of the transaction.

There was something different in play here.  What it was, he couldn’t say.  But a vastly overcomplex system seemed odd, unless Saad was going to extreme lengths to ensure he was never caught.

But he had more than enough money to buy himself out of any serious problem, so none of it still seemed to make sense.  Which brought them back to the same question—why?

As if reading his mind, Mona spoke up.  “If he had all that money, what would he need that much protection from?”

“He can’t bribe everyone.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bribing so many influential people in numerous countries would have to be hugely complicated and very risky.   Political landscapes and people constantly change.  It would take a tremendous amount of money and time to stay on top of it all, all the while trying to keep out of view. It just seems… nonsensical.”

“Then where does that leave us?”

“In the same place,” said Omar. “For some reason, the man just wants to remain completely out of sight.  Invisible.  But why?  What could he possibly be trying to hide from everyone that would justify so much effort and cost over several decades?”

Mona sat quietly next to him, thinking.