“You will do it, or Libya does not get its partnership in Salimah, your workers stay in your country and fester in their poverty, and the Muslim Brotherhood starts to look on you and your king as a gutless failure while Egyptian warplanes cruise their skies.”

“This ... this will be most difficult...

“Then we have a deal, Minister?”

He hesitated once more—but there was no reason to do so. “We have a deal, Madame,” he said. “If His Highness agrees, our forces will pull back immediately.”

Juma Mahmud Hijazi walked into Zuwayy’s office several minutes later, his face completely expressionless. “Where the hell have you been, Juma?” Tahir Fazani asked irritably. It appeared as if Jadallah Zuwayy was even more morose and depressed than before.

Hijazi ignored Fazani. “Listen, Jadallah, I think we have a solution to the problem,” he said. Fazani looked quizzically at his longtime friend and coconspirator, but wisely kept silent.

“What are you talking about, Juma?” Zuwayy asked.

“A... a back-channel contact I’ve been developing in the Egyptian government,” Hijazi replied carefully. “I just got a call from them. They’re willing to talk. The government wants to negotiate a cease-fire.”

“I will only accept a surrender,” Zuwayy said. “The Egyptians surrender to me, and they allow us to occupy the Salimah oil fields as reparations for the death and destruction they’ve caused in Libya.” Both Hijazi and Fazani both rolled their eyes in complete exasperation—now, they realized, Zuwayy had gone completely over the edge. He wasn’t thinking clearly at all anymore.

“Don’t worry about anything, Jadallah,” Hijazi said. “The Egyptians will agree to all our demands. They will cease attacking our bases, they will lay down their weapons, and they will withdraw from the frontier.”

“I want Salimah too. They will cede Salimah to me immediately.”

“Jadallah, they’re not going to just cede Salimah to us or anyone—we have to pay to become part of this cartel.”

“Pay? I’m not going to pay them to belong to something that is already ours!”

“Jadallah, we will become equal partners with the consortium of Western oil companies that built the pipeline and are drilling the wells—and we don’t have to lift one shovel or get our hands messy,” Hijazi said. “Our investment could be returned to us a hundredfold per year. They will also allow Libyan workers in to work there.”

“What good is that?”

“We need to show that we won something from this battle,” Hijazi said. “We can say we forced them to give us a stake in that oil project, but they can’t say we forced them into giving it to us. We also take care of our workers by giving them access and jobs in the world’s largest and richest oil project. They look weak because they handed over part of their project to us, and we look like a partner because we paid for our percentage.”