“I like photocopy machines,” David responded. “And making coffee. I’m really good at making coffee.”
David knew that he was taking a chance, letting the thoughts come out as words without much interference. But he wanted to make some sort of impression at least, and he seemed to be succeeding. Giovanni was really looking at him now, that smile still firmly fixed on his handsome face.
“What are you afraid of, kid? What really scares you?”
It was an odd question, and David didn’t know how he was supposed to answer. He could feel the rest of the table’s attention on him, all those super-rich and super-powerful Italians watching him stew.
Well, fuck it,
he thought to himself.
I’ve been honest so far. No reason to change tack midsail.
“Bears.”
David regretted the answer the minute it left his lips.
Bears?
What the fuck did that mean? But it was too late to take it back. Giovanni’s eyes widened a fraction of an inch. Then he crossed his arms against his chest.
“You’re a real smart-ass, aren’t you?”
David felt the heat rising in his cheeks. The conversation was not going well. Had he already screwed up his chance of getting in good with his idol, just minutes after meeting him? He wished Serena had been nearby to deck him before he’d let it go in this direction. But he was on his own.
“I try to be more smart than ass,” he said, in the way of a quick apology, “but sometimes they seem to blend together.”
Giovanni was smiling fully now, and David felt some of the pressure release. Maybe honesty had been the right choice all along. Giovanni was a god, to be sure, but he was also an Italian from Brooklyn.
“You got a sharp mouth, kid. When was the last time you got into a real fight?”
It was another strange question, and it kind of reminded David of the more bizarre interviews he’d had after business school, the kind where the guys in suits would try to throw you off by asking about the number of piano tuners in New York or the type of tree you’d like to be. But Giovanni wasn’t interviewing him—was he? Maybe Giovanni was kidding—or maybe again he was seeking the truth.
The last real fight he had been in? David immediately flashed back to his first year at Oxford. Even though he had been through the preppy training camp that was Williams, he’d still had much of the street in him. He’d been tapped for the crew team based on his moderately athletic size and sports résumé—he’d lettered in both football and baseball in high school—but he hadn’t quite gotten the knack of the Gentile endeavor. Then one sunny afternoon, during a multischool race on the Thames, the Cambridge crew “accidentally” bumped David’s Oxford boat. After the two boats reached the finish line, the other members of David’s crew had gotten out and were shaking the Cambridge team’s hands. Without pause, David had walked right past them, picked out the biggest guy on the Cambridge crew, and decked the guy with a right hook to the jaw. Even though David had nearly gotten
kicked out of Oxford for the incident, he had also gained the immediate respect of his crew team. They had felt he was just stupid and bullheaded enough to be their new captain—and nobody had ever “accidentally” bumped the Oxford boat again.
A good story, but David wasn’t sure whether it was something you talked about in the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom with guys like Giuliani and a police commissioner listening in. So instead, David once again went with the first thing that popped into his head.
“About two hours ago,” he said. “My girlfriend didn’t like my tie. She feels that it’s enough to have graduated from Harvard; you don’t have to wear your résumé on your shirt.”
Giovanni raised an eyebrow. “And you wore it anyway?”
David shrugged. “I like my girlfriend. But I worked my ass off to get this tie. It’s not often I get invited to events where I get a chance to wear it.”
Giovanni looked at David for a second. Then he grinned and reached into his jacket pocket. He handed David an embossed, robin’s-egg-blue card:
ANTHONY GIOVANNI, CHAIRMAN, NEW YORK MERCANTILE EXCHANGE.
“I like you, kid. I could use a smart-ass like you. See if you can get on my schedule.”
David stared at the card, sparks flying through his veins. Was Giovanni offering him a job? Well, not exactly—“see if you can get on my schedule” wasn’t quite the way Merrill Lynch had gone about it—but still, it was something, if not an open door maybe a window that wasn’t entirely locked. David jammed the card into his pocket, shook the man’s hand again, and started back toward his table. Before he’d gotten very far, Giovanni called out to him again.
“Hey, kid, next time listen to your girlfriend. If you showed up on the trading floor of the Merc wearing a tie like that, they’d be fishing you out of the Hudson the next morning.”
This time David was pretty sure Giovanni was kidding.
S
EPTEMBER
4, 2002
T
here was something uniquely soothing about the whir of helicopter blades. The rhythmic, circular disruption of air, each and every turn applying calculable lift, allowing a thing that should not fly instead to float, like a magic carpet in a child’s coloring book—a carpet made of steel and Plexiglas and in this case solid gold. Even as the rhythm slowed and the floating, five-ton, bug-eyed carpet came to a gentle rest on the jutting ivory-white helipad, the whirring blades continued their soulful cadence, the long steel appendages cutting slower and slower arcs until all that was left was the beat of the thing itself, the soothing rhythm of a thing that should not be—but, indeed was.
Khaled Abdul-Aziz let the rhythm of the great mechanical carpet wash over him as he half-crouched, half-walked out from under the slowing rotors of Sheik Oman’s luxury C-14 helicopter and onto the marble deck of the magnificently opulent yacht. When he was clear of the blades, he rose to his full six-foot-two and quickly surveyed his beautiful surroundings.
The view from the heavily tinted helicopter windows had not done the sheik’s yacht justice. The ship was, in a word, fantastic.
Over three hundred feet long from bow to stern, four stories high, with a deck of solid white marble. The helipad behind Khaled was actually only one of two matching pads; the other was barely visible now, a hundred yards away at the other end of the massive ship. In between, Khaled could make out all three topside swimming pools, each almost as pristine and azure as the Mediterranean that surrounded them. Though it was barely ten in the morning, both Jacuzzis were in full use, as was the regulation-size beach-volleyball court, complete with bone-white sand imported directly from a beach in Carmel, California. In fact, the yacht seemed fairly crowded, especially considering that this was not exactly a leisure cruise. But then, the sheik never traveled with less than a small army. The yacht alone kept a full-time staff of forty, and that did not include the sheik’s bodyguards, chefs, and attendants. Nor did the number include the beautiful women who always seemed to surround him—his wife, his seven daughters, and the miscellaneous hangers-on. Khaled doubted even the sheik could keep track of them all—or, for that matter, tell them all apart.
Khaled smiled as he saw Ali Agha, the sheik’s favorite bodyguard, approach down a red carpet that had been laid out across the middle of the marble deck. Khaled had always liked Agha, probably because he had known the man since his early childhood. Agha had worked for the sheik for more than twenty years now; when Khaled had first met the former Lebanese soldier turned body builder, he had thought he was some sort of giant, like something from a fairy tale. Of course, Khaled had been six at the time, visiting his uncle in his summer palace in the kingdom for the very first time. It was shortly after Khaled’s father’s death, and he had been in need of fairy tales.
But Agha was no mythical creature—he was flesh and blood. All three hundred pounds of him, at the moment jammed into a dark three-button suit that seemed about to burst at every seam. He was grinning like a madman by the time he reached Khaled at the edge of the helipad, and he held out both hands, pulling Khaled in for a monstrous bear hug.
“Salaam Alekhem,” Agha said, choosing the formal greeting, as the two had not seen each other for more than a year now. “Geneva has been good to you, Khaled. You look more like your father every time we meet.”
Khaled smiled back. It was a wonderful compliment. His father had been one of the most popular actors in the Arab world, before the cancer had cut him short. His success in film was so great that Khaled had been forced to choose a career path as far from the arts as he could so as not to compete with an image he could only tarnish.
“Alekhem Salaam,” Khaled responded. “And you look more like a mountain every day. Is the sheik well?”
“As well as can be considering all of his daughters are on board. I told him to leave half of them behind when we left Monte Carlo, but he never listens.”
“To any of us,” Khaled agreed.
As they spoke, he let Agha lead him across the polished deck. The breeze was warm and peaceful, even though they were a good mile from shore. But the breeze was always peaceful here, Khaled reminded himself. He had spent so much time in the more landlocked parts of Europe, he had almost forgotten how beautiful the South of France was this time of year. Now that he was finished with his schooling, he was hoping to spend more time in warmer climes. However, he knew that would not be his decision to make. The business school in Geneva had been expensive, and now Khaled had debts to pay. Debts he would gladly pay, considering who his generous benefactor had been.
“He’s in the parlor,” Agha said, pointing past a pair of bikini-clad blond women sunning themselves on deck chairs. “In case you’ve forgotten, down the hatch, first door on your left.”
Khaled nodded, trying not to stare at the women as he followed Agha’s directions. They looked young, barely as old as Khaled himself, and at least twenty-five years younger than the sheik, but that was really par for the course. The sheik had built himself quite a reputation over the years, and it was not
unwarranted. There were great benefits to being a secular innovator who also happened to be a high-ranking member of a royal bloodline. Especially a royal bloodline that happened to come from the most oil-rich region in the world.
The girls smiled at Khaled as he navigated past them, but he ignored their entreaties. He wasn’t shy, but he was proper; where he was from, women did not dress like that, and it simply wasn’t something he was used to. He had had one Western girlfriend during his college years at Cambridge, but she had been from a family almost as religious as his own. Different religion, of course, but she had not challenged his upbringing the way these two near-naked friends of his uncle’s might. So instead of responding, he simply bowed at them as he went past, then quickly entered the interior of the yacht by way of the open hatch.
A carpeted stairway led down into a vast, ornate parlor. The carpets were all real fur, the walls thick leather, and there was artwork everywhere. Khaled recognized one Picasso and two Mondrians; his uncle had always been a fan of the post-impressionists. Khaled wasn’t sure that the light from the twin Swarovsky crystal chandeliers hanging from the parlor’s ceiling was sufficient for the artwork, but he certainly would not have insulted the sheik by bringing the fact to his attention. The sheik took such things very seriously.
Khaled spotted his uncle on the other side of the vast room, seated at a beautiful antique wooden desk by a pair of circular windows. As usual, the sheik was dressed in his white robes, complete with headdress. His square chin was resting on one hand as he leafed through a thick notebook, his lips moving as he worked through some arcane calculations in his head.
He looked up as Khaled crossed toward him, and a huge smile broke across his sun-darkened face. He leapt up from behind the desk, clapping his hands together.
“Khaled. Right on time. I trust the trip from Geneva was no problem?”
Private jet from Geneva to Nice. Private helicopter from Nice down the French coast to Monte Carlo, where a second heli
copter had been waiting to take him directly to the yacht.
No problem at all.
“I would travel half the world by donkey to see you, Uncle.”
Khaled embraced the older man, nearly losing himself in the creases of the sheik’s robes. When he pulled away, he saw that there were tears in his uncle’s eyes. He knew what the older man was thinking: that Khaled’s father was there, in Khaled’s high caramel cheeks and striking dark eyes. Khaled took a step back, bowing slightly. Though the attention embarrassed him, he would never have complained. He owed the sheik so much. Geneva, Cambridge, before that a year at NYU—he would never have been able to make such a journey without the sheik’s money and influence. And now, he knew, he would have to begin to repay that debt. The sheik had brought him to this yacht for a reason—and though Khaled did not yet know the sheik’s plan for him, he would follow that plan to the ends of the earth.
The sheik shook the tears away, and without another word reached into the top drawer of his desk and retrieved a leather portfolio, zipped shut on one side. He looked Khaled straight in his dark eyes.
“You know the history of our family, Khaled?”
Khaled nodded.
“Of course, Your Excellency,” he responded, using the most formal words he could find. He wasn’t sure where his uncle was leading with this, but he knew he had not been brought to the yacht on a whim. His uncle had a plan for him—had always had a plan for him. “A thousand years in the desert—”
“Bedouins, nomads, wandering—and do you know how we survived for so long? Prospered, for so long?”
Khaled looked at the sheik. It was hard to picture the man he had always known like this—resplendent in robes, embraced by the trappings of an unimaginable fortune—as the heir to one of the oldest Bedouin dynasties in the region.
“We kept our eyes open,” the sheik continued, answering his own question. “And we saw when the sand was shifting.”
He took a heavy breath, then handed the leather portfolio to Khaled.
“The sand is shifting now, my nephew.”
Khaled unzipped the portfolio and glanced inside. It was a letter of acceptance, an appointment to a position the sheik had obviously arranged for him. Khaled looked up from the portfolio, eyebrows raised—then nodded. If this was how his uncle felt he could best repay his debt, then he knew where he was headed next.
He embraced the sheik again. Then he headed out of the parlor. The sun hit him full in the face as he rose back onto the deck. The bikinied girls were on their stomachs now, but still they smiled up at him as he passed. Khaled did his best to ignore them; his heart was pounding, and he could feel the tension rising in his chest.
Anticipation
.
The sands were shifting, indeed. And his uncle was sending him directly into the center of that coming sandstorm.