(Excerpts)
by Ammar Merchant
PRINCE MAHMUD IBN HABIB fidgeted in his seat, staring at every passenger who boarded their small Air Asia flight, trying to determine if they were a threat.
His fiancée, Renata Bardales, knew it was a useless exercise. Mahmud wouldn’t be able to pick an assassin out of a church choir. She suspected that in his imagination they looked like bad guys out of movies—dressed in black, dripping with malice, the evil in their hearts writ large on their faces.
That just wasn’t true. Professional killers—the good ones, at least— often weren’t easy to spot. A smiling waitress or air hostess could hand you a poisoned drink. Your life might end in a fatal car accident caused by an innocuous, exhausted-looking man in a wrinkled suit. Just about anyone you came across could be a merchant of death.
Ren didn’t point that out to Mahmud, of course. He was more than anxious enough already. There was no reason to take him further out of his depth.
He was royalty after all, and had been raised like all Aldatani princes were, flying around in private jets, attending prestigious schools, en- sconced in a cocoon of privilege and safety alien to most of the planet. He didn’t know how murderous the world could be.
Ren, who had grown up in an “orphanage” where she’d been trained to fight and kill, was much better equipped to deal with being prey than he was.
So, even though being patient took some effort, she decided not to be irritated by his wide-eyed antics. Instead, she reached over, took his hand in hers, and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “Relax. It’ll be fine, habibi.” Renata’s use of the Arabic endearment, which had stopped feeling foreign on her tongue, made him smile a little. It wasn’t a sight she saw
very often these days.
“Inshallah,” he said. “I am just worried we stayed in Chiang Mai too long. We should have moved right after my last piece went to print. What if my cousin has found us? I’m sure he’s looking for me more intently than ever before.”
“Well, kings don’t usually appreciate attempted coups. Quien siembra vientos, cosecha tempestades.”
Mahmud raised his eyebrows. “What does that mean?”
Ren didn’t translate the proverb for him. She didn’t tell him it meant that “whoever sows the wind, reaps the storm,” because even though he’d never said it, she knew Mahmud felt terrible that his decision to oppose the tyranny of the Aldatani throne had completely altered the kind of life they’d expected to have together.
A year ago, when his father had called for massive democratic re- forms in Aldatan, including the provision of rights like free speech and fair elections, Mahmud could have disavowed him.
Mahmud wouldn’t have been a hunted man then. He would’ve been a hero to his government, but he wouldn’t have been someone she could love. As it was, Mahmud—though abroad—had joined his father’s cause and launched a social media campaign against the oppressive regime of his paternal cousin, King Nimir. He’d also published several exposés in Western newspapers detailing exactly how Aldatan surveilled and blackmailed its citizens, forcing them into either silence or submission.
His last article had been particularly incendiary, as it revealed the hypocrisy of his cousin, who pretended to be a pious Muslim because Aldatan used religion to control its people. The truth, however, was that the king was fond of succumbing to his baser instincts.
It was sure to have earned Mahmud his monarch’s renewed wrath, which was no trivial thing. Many who supported Mahmud’s father, Habib, had been jailed, killed, or disappeared. Habib himself hadn’t been seen or heard from in ten months. The Aldatani journalists with whom Mahmud had worked in the past were all corpses now. Mahmud himself had almost been kidnapped twice in Cairo.
He and Renata had been on the run since then, moving from city to city, country to country, trying to escape the reach of the Aldatani sovereign.
As she saw him scan the onboarding passengers with terrified eyes, Renata could see that the strain of it all was getting to him.
“Remember there’s help waiting for us in Bangkok,” she assured him. “Your brother might try to help us, but he’s just one guy. What can one man do against the might of an army and the weight of a crown?”
Renata shrugged. “That depends on the man, don’t you think?”
Renata didn’t know much about Bangkok, but the drive from Suvarn- abhumi Airport to the hotel where her “brother” was staying was enough to make her understand just how crowded a place it was.
They arrived late at night, but the city was still congested. She’d been to Los Angeles and Paris and London, and none of those cities could compete with the rush on the roads of Thailand’s biggest metropolis, where bikes wove through traffic and cars seemed to get impossibly close to each other as they attempted to inch toward their destinations. As their luxury cab neared the Al Meroz Hotel, however, it began to
pick up a little speed, and Renata realized they were heading away from the city center and the kind of glitzy places at which her fiancé liked to stay. Irfan Mirza seemed to have picked an establishment a little removed from the action that attracted so many to Bangkok. She wondered what that said about the kind of man he’d become.
She had seen him three years ago, at a “family” reunion, but they hadn’t spoken much. Mirza’s body language had made it clear that he did not want to be there. She figured he had only attended because the gregarious Finn Thompson, another “brother” of hers, had insisted.
Ren had never understood how the taciturn, dour Mirza and the cheerful, extroverted Finn had become close. It was like midnight be- friending noon. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did.
She didn’t know Mirza well—few people did—but when she found herself in trouble she couldn’t get out of, his was the first name that came to mind.
This wasn’t entirely rational. Some part of her, she knew, was still the weak little girl who had been kidnapped, trafficked, and purchased by the General. When she had arrived at his “orphanage,” where she’d be forced to train to become a soldier, she’d been beaten and bullied. Other, stronger kids had taken her food and forced her to do their chores. It was the survival of the fittest.
She had soon noticed that other children like her, those in need of protection, found it in Mirza’s shadow. She was safe when he was around, as was everyone else who needed help.
It was strange, in that he wasn’t their friend, he wasn’t sweet or warm or thoughtful. He was just . . . there, an iron shield when needed, com- pletely indifferent otherwise.
Now, decades later, in flying herself and Mahmud to Bangkok to meet him, she knew she was engaging in a ritual she had learned when she’d been young. Like an atheist turning to prayer when faced with a calam- ity, she was seeking Mirza out because she didn’t know what else to do.
“You’re very quiet, habibti,” Mahmud noted beside her. “I’m just thinking.”
“About?”
“My first trip to Aldatan.”
“When we met,” he remembered with a smile. “That was a good day.” “The best,” she agreed. “I wouldn’t have been there if it weren’t for Finn and his obsessive need to keep everyone from our orphanage con-
nected.”
“You don’t talk about it much. The orphanage, I mean.” “No. I don’t.”
Mahmud started to say something or ask something maybe, but then reconsidered. He knew she didn’t like talking about her past, and he was too kind to insist.
She smiled. After a lifetime spent among hard, rough men, she had chosen this slender, gentle, cultured bookworm with whom to spend her life. Presented with a world full of killers, she’d picked someone who would struggle to hurt a fly.
Sometimes—usually after a close brush with the Aldatanis hunting them—she couldn’t help but think about how reassuring having a part- ner who could hold his own in a fight would be. In those moments, she wondered if she’d made the right decision.
But she knew that they would have demanded answers from her in a way that Mahmud didn’t. He didn’t demand anything from her really. He was happy to just exist where she existed and this, she figured, was love or at least something close to it.
“What is it?” Mahmud asked when she continued to study him with her light-brown eyes.
“You’re good company.”
That earned her a broad grin. “An actual compliment? Are you feeling all right, señorita?”
Renata nodded as the car began to slow down. From her window,
she could see that they’d arrived at a hotel with an array of flags flying outside it. She recognized the ones belonging to Kazakhstan, Algeria, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco.
“It’s like the UN,” she joked.
“More like the OIC,” Mahmud corrected, and at her confused look added, “the Organization of Islamic Countries.”
He got out and held the door open for her before the taxi driver could. Renata followed and looked around at their surroundings as Mah- mud reached for his wallet. Her wandering gaze picked up the bright
headlights of a van heading in their direction.
She instinctively knew something was wrong. It took her a moment to realize what. The large vehicle wasn’t slowing down as it got closer to them. It was, in fact, gaining speed.
Then its driver-side door flew open and a man jumped out, while the van kept barreling toward them.
Renata screamed and launched herself at her fiancé, pushing him out of the way. As they tumbled to the ground, Renata heard the van smash into their cab in a violent collision that shattered glass and crushed steel.
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