“’Fraid so.”
Francis told him the six-digit code.
“Remember what I told you,” said Mac. “I wasn’t here.”
Chapter 17
27 Avenue Montaigne
Paris
“Excellency. A pleasure to see you again.”
“Save it, Paul,” said TNT. “It’s me. Not my father.”
“You’re looking well,” said Paul Sassoon. “My son relies on you for his fashion advice. You’re costing me quite a lot of money.”
“I’m paying you quite a lot of money,” said Tariq. “But I’m happy that your son has such good taste.”
“God forbid he wants one of your cars.”
“If all goes according to plan,” said Tariq, “one day very soon you will be able to give him one.”
Paul Sassoon was the family banker. Half Swiss, half Qatari. Fifty years old. Elegant. Monied. It was after midnight, and he looked like he’d just stepped out of a board meeting. Not a hair out of place, his tie just so, his three-piece suit absent a wrinkle.
Tariq plopped down on a sofa and kicked his feet onto a low table. No suit for him. A flowing whitethobe(to please his father) and vintage Adidas Robert Haillets straight out of the box, circa 1978, the year they started being known as “Stan Smiths.” He snapped a selfie of his shoes and posted it.
“Sorry, Paul,” he said, putting away the phone. “Have to keep the public happy.” He cracked a bottle of Pellegrino. “So then, what do the jackals want now?”
A new day. Tariq’s preferred time for business. When others were asleep. When eyes were closed. They sat together in the study on the fourth floor. Bookshelves filled with leather-bound classics lined the walls, floor to ceiling. Dumas, Hugo, Proust. All first editions. There was a German globe dating from the seventeenth century and a Rembrandt self-portrait and a Tiffany lamp from the old New York Public Library.
“Lean times,” said Paul Sassoon. “Funding is drying up.”
“They lost a war,” said Tariq. “No one wants a repeat performance.”
“Their view is that with additional funding, a different outcome was possible.”
Tariq’s laugh was a cry of outrage. It was always the same. More money was the answer. When the intifada failed, it was for lack of money. When Hezbollah’s rockets missed their targets ... lack of money. When October 7 brought down the wrath of God ... lack of money.
In every instance, Tariq and his family had stepped up. Fifty million. One hundred. Two hundred. And for what? Tunnels. He was not paying them to build a subway system. He was paying them to kill Jews.
The problem, Tariq reasoned, was scale. Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS ... none of them thought big enough. All suffered from the same limited perspective, the same lack of vision. It was up to Tariq to show them.
He rolled up his sleeves, and as he did most nights, when executing his responsibilities, he reflected on how he had arrived here, especially on the most recent part. It had been a pleasant childhood. School in Doha, Amman, then in England. Eton, of course. Then college in the States. California. The Golden State. He was an adequate student, not an outstanding one.
Tariq was one of twenty children; he had one older brother, two younger sisters, and too many half brothers and sisters to count. The cousins numbered in the hundreds. A veritable menagerie of Al-Sabahs. In such an environment, it had been ingrained in him not to stand out. To go along. To be one of many ... and to please keep his voice down while he was at it. He came to see that it was not just as an Al-Sabah but as a Qatari that he’d been taught not to seek an identity.
Everyone knew the Saudis. They had a brand. Saudis were too often seen as loud and brash and vulgar and threw their money around for everyone to admire. There was the story about a Saudi royal taking over the tenth floor of the Dorchester hotel, one of London’s finest, and making a fire in the hall to roast a lamb. A sheikh straight out of the desert. This was an Arab, one step removed from a barbarian; a far cry from the media-savvy, progressive scion who ruled the country today—Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as “MBS”—yet only sixty years separated the two men.
The Emiratis came to prominence in the nineties, a country of seven tiny states ruled by the Maktoum family. Smart, forceful, elegant, and disciplined. Abu Dhabi had oil. Dubai didn’t. But Dubai did have warm weather, an attractive geographic location, a liberal tax code, and, not to be forgotten, alcohol, all under the guidance of a farseeing leader. Behold the miracle on the Gulf.
But what was Qatar’s identity? It was a small thumb sticking into the Persian Gulf, blessed with abundant natural gas, plenty of sand, three million natives all on the national dole, and the soccer World Cup, already forgotten. Qatar had no reputation, good or bad.
Growing up, Tariq decided that anonymity didn’t suit him. Maybe it was because he’d spent too much time in the West. Maybe it was just how he was made. Either way, he liked attention. He found his way to social media naturally. First Myspace, then Facebook, and on to Instagram, TikTok, Telegram, Twitter (or X), and all their varied cousins. It was the type of celebrity that suited him best. Attention without the messy part, that being human interaction. For that he had family and more family and more after that.
So, when exactly did two million likes stop being enough to satisfy his hungry, attention-seeking soul? When did his desire—no,his addiction—for likes morph into something sharper and more fiery, something called “ambition”? Tariq could give you the date. It was the night two years before, when he’d taken over responsibility for the funding of extranational organizations. He called them “freedom fighters.” Others called them more pejorative names.
This, then, was power. People kowtowed to him, both as Tariq, or TNT, and as the secret representative of the Qatari government. And not just random handles in the Twittersphere. These were important people. Government ministers, heads of state, ranking executives. Movers. Shakers. The Davos crowd. Their attentions gratified him in a way his vain, meretricious interactions on social media never could.
