At first, she believed it to be a matter of simple timing, those properties being some of the first real estate purchased by Saad in the early 1960s, long before his corporate entities had come into existence, but she dismissed that idea once she discovered several other real estate holdings purchased around the same time.  Those had been rolled beneath the umbrella of Saad’s empire several years later.

So why not the others?

Upstairs, Dalilah’s two young children screamed playfully and ran up and down the hallway in what sounded like a herd of thundering animals.

“Get ready for bed!” she yelled, angling her head toward the stairs.

A few documents later, she was again interrupted by more laughs and then a muffled crash, immediately followed by a burgeoning cry.

She was up from the table in an instant, rushing for the stairs and reaching the top in half a dozen steps.  At the end of the hall, she found her twin boys on the floor of their bedroom, one crying and holding a cheek while the second stared sheepishly up at his mother.

“What happened?”

“We… just fell.”

With an irritated sigh, Dalilah knelt and pulled her crying son’s hand from his face, searching for blood and relieved to find none, just redness and tears.

She pulled him firmly to his feet before grabbing the second boy with her free hand.  “What did I tell you about playing before bed?”

Both were smart enough to say nothing.  Each received a light swat before she ushered them back down the hall.

“Brush your teeth!” she barked, hovering over them while they scrambled for their toothbrushes.

When the younger of the two displayed a set of sad eyes, she frowned.  “You do not get immunity just because you’re the one that fell.”

The boy obediently inserted the toothbrush into his mouth and began brushing.  He looked away as he did and missed the sudden change of expression on his mother’s face.

Immunity.

Diplomatic immunity.

“Go to bed when you’re done.  I’ll be right there.”

With that, Dalilah Baraka disappeared from the bathroom and raced back downstairs, jumping through files she had open on her computer.

It was the last window she checked, and she immediately sat down to read.

It wasn’t diplomatic immunity, per se.  That was for foreign diplomats who were exempted from specific laws or restrictions by the countries in which they were working.  Mido Saad wasn’t a foreign national or a diplomat.  But there were similar provisions in various Egyptian laws regarding its citizens.

The Emergency Law was enacted in Egypt in 1958 during the Arab-Israeli War.  Known also as Law No. 162 of 1958, the act created numerous restrictions upon its citizens. Eventually, this catalyzed the great rise of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, political desperation in which police powers had been extended for decades along with numerous forms of censorship, all legalized by the Arab Republic of Egypt.