Bianca felt the muscles in her face quiver uncontrollably, so she turned away from her interrogators and looked to the wall in the room until she felt she could regain enough manufactured poise to face them.
Eventually she turned back and looked into the woman’s eyes. She chose the redhead as the target of her attention because she was softer than her husband, both in nature and in disposition, but Bianca Medina had no illusions that this woman would be kind to her. Medina constructed her facial expression to convey what she wanted it to convey, to play a role, just as if she were performing for a camera’s lens. She hid her emotions and insecurity and projected a practiced air of confidence, something she had learned from many years of modeling.
She was an expert at hiding who she was, of masking what she felt.
“You two are insane. I am no one’s mistress.”
And, just like a camera lens, Rima Halaby did not blink. She said, “We know everything, daughter. You will only waste time denying what we know to be true.” She put a hand out and rested it on Medina’s folded hands gently. “But don’t worry. No one here is judging you for your decisions.”
“All right,” Bianca said, and she pulled her hands a few inches closer to her, out from under Rima’s. “I have been living in Damascus. But that is only because my father has a home there. I needed to get away from Paris and New York. I wanted to return to my roots, to my heritage. There is no law against living in Syria with a Spanish passport. In fact, I also have a flat in Barcelona, and an apartment in Brooklyn.
“But I have no relationship with Ahmed Azzam.”
Rima surprised Bianca by reaching again for her hands, taking them in hers, and pulling them closer. “Listen to me, daughter. The information about your affair with Ahmed came from a well-placed source inside Syria. Someone who, frankly, knows everything about you and what’s been going on.”
Bianca forced a laugh. “A source? Who is this supposed source?”
Tarek leaned forward now. With a solemn tone he said, “The first lady of Syria. Shakira Azzam.”
There was no more posturing for Bianca, no more contrived poise. The color drained from her face, her eyes widened, and the muscles in her neck fluttered. She muttered a hoarse reply. “What?”
Rima nodded solemnly. “It’s true. Intelligence officials here in France intercepted a message out of Damascus to an ISIS operations commander in Belgium. It came from someone close to Shakira. The message mentioned that you would soon be taking a three-night trip to Paris to participate in Fashion Week, and it identified you as the mistress of the emir of Kuwait, who is a sworn enemy of ISIS. This is not true, of course. We assume Shakira wanted you targeted, but she did not want it made public that her husband was a philanderer. We have contacts in Syria, however, and they did some further digging on you. They determined you were the lover of Ahmed Azzam.”
Rima smiled sympathetically now. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but it seems Shakira was trying very hard to entice the Islamic State to murder you for sleeping with her husband.”
Bianca spun out of her chair and raced back into the bathroom. She slammed the door behind her, and the Halabys listened to her vomit again into the sink.
CHAPTER 9
The New Shaab Presidential Palace in Damascus sits on Mount Mezzeh, overlooking the Syrian capital, where the ultramodern, cubist complex looks more like a high-tech fortress from a science fiction film than any presidential residence. At 5.5 million square feet and constructed largely out of Carrara marble, it is a gargantuan display of dictatorial excess for everyone in Damascus to see, simply by looking up and to the west.
The New Shaab had been built in the midseventies, designed by a Japanese architect for Jamal al-Azzam, the father of the present leader of Syria, but Jamal never lived in the monstrosity himself; he deemed the palace too big and ostentatious for one family. And for the first dozen years of his son Ahmed’s rule, Ahmed Azzam agreed. Before the war came to the city, the Azzam family had lived in a modern but relatively nondescript home in a residential district of the Mezzeh municipality, west of the city center. But when bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings kicked off in the capital city itself, the pretentious citadel on the hill became the only safe place for the Azzams. Ahmed fortified the complex with his most trusted guards, police, and intelligence officials, and he moved himself and his family inside.
The first family of Syria lives in a thirty-room guesthouse on the northern edge of the property, officially speaking, but Ahmed Azzam almost always spends the night in an apartment in his suite of offices a quarter mile away from his family in the palace proper. His wife also has an office suite at her disposal on the other side of the palace grounds, but with young children, she finds herself with the kids most nights in the guesthouse.
But not this night. This night the forty-seven-year-old first lady sat alone in a plush salon in her private apartment. At three a.m. she wore a sweater and a pair of designer jeans, her dyed blond hair was pinned up, and she sat on a white leather sofa with her legs curled under her.
She watched Al Jazeera World News with the volume low, and a satellite phone rested next to her.
She’d been like this for the past two hours.
Her half dozen personal assistants had been sent away for the night, so they were all back in their palace apartments, but they also knew they needed to keep their phones on. All six of them remained on call for the summons that often happened when Shakira was up late and scheming.
She might want food; she might want information; she might want someone to drive over and personally check on the nannies of the children to make sure they were watching over her two teenage daughters, Aaliyah and Kalila.
And if this happened, any one of her assistants would climb out of bed and do her bidding without hesitation, because the mercurial Shakira al-Azzam commanded just as much respect and fear among the staff as the president of Syria himself.
Shakira had not been raised to live in a palace. Born in London to Syrian parents, she had grown up in an upper-middle-class Western childhood. She studied business and graduated from the London School of Economics before taking a job at a bank in Switzerland. She worked hard and enjoyed the life of a successful young Western European. But on a trip home to London she met Ahmed al-Azzam, then a fledgling orthopedic resident working at a clinic in Fulham.
The two young and good-looking Syrians fell for each other quickly, and they were married within a year, and just a year after that they were forced to return to Syria when Ahmed’s father died of liver disease.
Ahmed had had no desire to lead Syria, but his older brother, the real heir apparent, had died in a car crash in Damascus, and the al-Azzam family would not relinquish the power over the nation that Jamal Azzam had fought so hard to acquire and maintain. For Shakira’s part, she’d had no aspirations to be first lady, but just like her husband, she fell into the job, and soon decided no one would ever take it from her as long as blood pumped through her veins.
Before the civil war that now ravaged her nation, Shakira had spent ten years cultivating an image. She was beautiful, brilliant, and unceasingly kind to everyday Syrians, and never more so than when the cameras were rolling. Despite ongoing accusations of atrocities attributed to her husband’s government, even before the war, she was a fixture among the glitterati in London, Paris, and Milan.
A New York fashion magazine had referred to her as “the Rose of the Desert,” and this moniker stuck with her for a decade. Another magazine had dubbed her the Lady Diana of the Middle East.