Hanaa pushed back in her chair. “You have been watching too much MTV, Risha. You will be soon wearing a bikini top and bootie shorts in public. Calm down and face reality. You will stay here, just like us, and we will all be married off to some distant cousins or friends of our fathers. A dull but pleasant life with a rich man who pampers us, just like our mothers and our grandmothers.”
“You want to leave, too,” Risha shot back. “I know you do. Remember that Victoria’s Secret catalogue that we found? What’s the point in wearing that sexy stuff if you cannot show it off?”
Taja was not as brave. She loved Risha and Hanaa but both of them pushed the bounds of propriety. “Be quiet, Risha. People can hear.”
“So let them listen. I don’t care.” She went back to her cell phone when it buzzed in her palm, and passed it over to Hanaa. “Gabir wants me to send him a picture.”
“Don’t you dare!” Taja was horrified.
“Oh, I won’t.” Then the dark eyes flashed beneath the long bangs of dark hair that swept across her forehead. She spun the cell phone around, held it at arm’s length and snapped a picture of herself, holding up the cardboard coffee cup with the company’s green logo in plain view. She attached it to a text message and hit the SEND button.
“You fool!” Taja hissed. “Don’t you understand what you just did? He already knew your name and now he knows exactly where we are because this is the only Starbucks in Khobz. What will we do if he comes here with his friends? He can blackmail you into doing anything he wants just by threatening to show your picture to your family, or even to the muttaween. He owns you now, Risha. He owns you! We must leave.”
“Well, you didn’t do anything at all, Taja,” said Risha. “Anyway, Gabir would never betray me, so nothing is going to happen. The Religious Police cannot monitor cell phone traffic and Wi-Fi. So we can go, but let’s do some shopping first. I feel like buying a bright new scarf with daddy’s money. And wouldn’t it be just terrible if Gabir actually decided to come down to the mall for a café au lait?”
RISHA WAS THE FIRST one grabbed when the girls emerged from the upscale clothing boutique on the second floor, then rough hands snatched Hanaa and Taja and pinned them both against the glass display window.
“You little whore!” roared a deep voice as a man with a shaggy beard and in the robes of the muttaween, the feared Religious Police, hurled Risha to the floor. As she fell backward, the abaya rode up past her ankles, and then was snatched upward further along with the edge of her denim skirt to expose her knees and thighs. The first stroke of the camel-hide whip was instant and hard, and laid a bloody stripe across her right shin.
Risha screamed, more from surprise than pain. She had hit the floor so hard that she bounced and slid a few feet, and clawed for balance. The second whip stroke slashed her right knee and brought another yelp, this time in pain. Two muttaween were wielding the whips, one on each side of her, the signature loose red clothes circling their heads and with their eyes lustfully on her naked legs. She heard Taja and Hanaa scream and saw them being held against the storefront by other muttaween.
“Stop! Don’t hurt me! I have done nothing wrong,” she yelled as loud as possible.
Another whip stroke came down, but she rolled away from it, only to go into the path of the whip of the second man. It sliced her thigh with a deep sting and blood flowed from the wound. A crowd was gathering and some young men were laughing, one of them recording the beating on his video camera. In the front row, cheering on the whip handlers, was Gabir.
A dark sense of betrayal and outrage seized Risha’s soul. He was a police informant and had used the Web to track her down! They intended to make an example of her to instill fear in other girls. Hot tears came to her eyes.
Another whip stroke fell across her legs, but this one didn’t seem to hurt as much, hardly at all as the pain was soaked up by her rage. Risha knew she had only a few moments before they took her away and she grabbed for her shoulder bag and fumbled it open. The muttaween were still yelling. She could not understand what they were saying and did not care. Gabir! The bastard!
Her palm found the canister of pepper spray, she yanked it out and pointed the nozzle at one of the whip men and pressed down. The surprise was total. A mere girl was fighting back! Her attacker stumbled backward, dropping his whip and rubbing his eyes with a yowl of pain, causing the second one to pause briefly before coming at her even harder. He dodged in close until he was standing directly over her, then knocked the can from her grip. It bounced away into the crowd.
His lashes were being aimed at her upper body and her face, in pure vengeance. Although she felt the whip crack her cheeks, Risha was not going to give up. She reached into the bag again and her fingers closed on the bone handle of the knife. The little button! Her thumb found it and she pressed hard, and the blade flipped out and locked. She would kill Gabir for betraying her!
Using her left hand trying to protect her eyes from the whip, Risha jabbed directly upward with the knife and the sharp point slid smoothly into the groin of the attacking man standing over her. She pulled back and jabbed again, and again, as hard as she could. He screamed and dropped his whip and she slashed even more, the blade ripping into the femoral artery deep in his inner thigh. Blood spurted out in a purple rope.
The crowd went silent. This petite girl had blinded one muttawa and stabbed another one in the balls! Both had fallen. Impossible!
Risha still had the stained knife in her hand and her own blood oozed from the long whip marks. She ignored the pain and rolled to her knees. The scarf and the abaya had been torn from her head and her long black hair hung before her face in disarray, giving her the look of a rising evil spirit. Her eyes locked on Gabir and she moved toward him. He dropped his coffee cup and backed away.
The two muttawas who had been holding her friends had released them and now crashed into her, knocking Risha back onto the slippery, bloody tiles, screaming and punching her. The thick butt ends of their whips became bludgeons that rose and fell against her head. Risha managed to deeply slash the hand of one before the knife was knocked away and the two heavy policemen beat her savagely. She was already unconscious by the time one of them grabbed a handful of her raven-black hair and repeatedly slammed her face onto the hard stone until she was dead.
19
THE WHITE HOUSE
PRINCE ABDULLAH NORMALLY WOULD be wearing a well-tailored business suit when he visited the Oval Office. His driver would slip quietly through the back gate on East Exec and stop beside a green-canopied walkway used by special guests to enter the White House with some protection from the media cameras. This time was different: The prince was driven up the long, curving driveway in full view of the press corps, which had been alerted to his visit and was waiting in a pack as he arrived at the front entrance of the West Wing.
The immaculate ebony limousine halted beneath the colonnaded entrance and a Marine guard in dress blues opened the car door. The prince stepped out, wearing elegant white robes that flowed like a wind-smoothed sail and an Arab kaffiyeh, a square of pristine white cloth folded into a triangle and held to his head by cords of spun gold threads.
He paused to smile and wave for the cameras and then turned to his left to do the same for the startled tourists gathered across the green lawn, beyond the big fence. Reporters shouted out questions, but he only continued to smile and wave, and then he stepped inside. Neither the president nor any senior member of the administration had been sent out to greet him.