The Command

“We’ve just started, Commander,” Aisha told him. She kept her eyes on the road. More than once, she’d caught him staring at her. “We did the first-pass interviews, that’s all. We’ll let them stew a little and call them back in.”

“Well, don’t let it go too long. Anybody you like?”

A storekeeper second had avoided her eyes all through the interview. He was cool, didn’t know anything, but he’d shifted on his seat to avoid confronting her, even when it meant facing Diehl. He was from Detroit. His name was Childers, but the others referred to him sometimes, she’d noted, as Jaleel.

“There might be one,” she said, glancing at the rearview. The cross street to the palace was coming up. She got in the right-hand lane and signaled.

“Who? Which one?”

She didn’t want to answer that, both in case she was wrong, and in case she was right — in case they had to take the man to court-martial. Better to keep what they suspected to themselves, until they were ready to bring charges. And as it turned out, she didn’t have to, because a faultlessly uniformed constable in white gloves was swinging open the gates to the palace. “Here we are,” she said brightly, and pulled in.

* * *

The ministry was new and white, like every government building on the island. When she’d got here she thought at first it was like coming home. More like home than Harlem, with the kids yelling and throwing dirty snowballs when she and Zara walked to the madrassa. Here she heard Arabic in every shop and street, accented differently than the Nation taught it, but still the fluid lovely language the angels spoke, laced with compliments and whimsy and the familiar words of the Prophet, peace be upon him. An administrator from the Awali Hospital had asked if he might take her to lunch. She’d daydreamed about leaving her job and living here.

So sometimes it felt like home. And then there were times when it didn’t, not at all.

Like when she’d been bending over a dead body, and children had thrown mud clods at her. Calling her “American devil.” How had they known? Of course, of course, the huge white car.

Hooker got out, and she started, recalled from her thoughts, and followed the men inside.

* * *

The conference room had been furnished by the Swedish consortium that had built the palace. It was all blond laminate and recessed lighting. There was a back-projection screen for briefings. Steaming silver urns and trays of cookies and succulent Iraqi dates waited on a side table. The servants, or waiters, or whatever they were, were straightening chairs and offering coffee and tea. Hooker went straight for a paunchy, sharp-bearded Arab in a spotless silk thobe. Aisha got coffee, checking out the room as she sipped.

The men wore uniforms, business suits, or the white robe and headdress. She was the only woman. The Bahrainis had a few in their charities and their labor and social affairs ministries, but they didn’t appoint them to the security organs.

Bahrain was an Arab state, but it had hosted first the Royal Navy and then the U.S. Navy for many years. The air force had operated from the base at the south end of the island during Desert Storm. To the tourist, the island looked free and open, with its glamorous hotels and night clubs where liquor flowed. To business, it was a haven. When it became obvious the island’s oil reserves were running out, the government had created a free-trade sector that pulled shipping companies, banks, and merchants in from all over the Mideast.

She hadn’t learned any of this from Diehl. He didn’t care about anything outside the walls of the base. In fact, he’d made cracks about the locals she hadn’t liked at all, although she hadn’t said anything. No, she was just the good little Muslim girl… She’d picked it up talking to the locals, mainly wealthy Sunni women she met in town, in the stores, when they made salat together in the little prayer areas in the malls. She loved to shop and buy clothes for her mother and her aunts, and there were beautiful modest fashions here and what else did she have to spend her money on? The women were surprised to hear she was American, and outspoken in setting her straight. The rest she got from her own reading, the local papers, Al-Hayat, the Gulf Daily News, the Middle East Economic Digest.

For the less well-off residents, especially the Shi’a, things were more tightly run. The State Security Court could detain persons without charge or trial for up to three years. The Security and Intelligence Service had hundreds of agents and there were rumors of torture. But the emir hardly ever executed anybody, enjoyed a joke, and — she’d heard from a flight attendant she ran into one night at the Al Hamra— enjoyed the women he invited to his personal beach, far from the eyes of ordinary Bahrainis.