Chapter 106
I WAS HOME at my beach house with the air-conditioning on high, wearing a suit and tie for my nine p.m. teleconference with the COO of the Hong Kong office. We were getting into the nitty-gritty of the operations budget when I got an urgent text from Mo-bot saying, Turn on the tube. It’s about the Sumaris.
I typed, I was there when they went down.
Mo-bot returned fire in caps. GO TO CNN. NOW.
I told Fred Kam that I had to call him back in five minutes, then I switched on the tube. I found the story running on CNN under the banner Breaking News.
I was looking at one of those picture-in-picture views. There, on the small picture, was a large, bearded man identified as Colonel Balar Aram of the kingdom of Sumar. He was behind a podium that bore the emblem of the United Nations, and he was wearing a stiff, sand-colored uniform with ribbons over the breast pocket, stars above the brim of his hat.
Surrounding the small picture of Colonel Aram was a larger picture of a violent protest on a wide, dusty street. The crawl at the bottom of the screen said, Sumari protesters storm the American embassy in Larumin, capital of Sumar.
The street protest was moving toward a two-story gray building with an American flag flying over the door. The protesters were highly agitated; street-wide chains of angry men with banners reading Down with the U.S.A. Down with American pigs. As I watched, they began throwing stones and bottles at men leaving the embassy heading toward black cars.
I tuned into the interview. Anderson Cooper was saying, “Colonel Aram, you are head of Ra Galiz. That’s the special forces division of the Sumari military.”
“Yes, and in particular, we are the official guard to the royal family. Both Khezir Mazul and Gozan Remari are cousins to King Naraal, may he live forever, and the royal family has sent a formal rebuke to the United States for this outrage against our country.”
“As I understand it,” Cooper said, “Mazul and Remari are being questioned in the murder of a desk clerk in a hotel in Los Angeles—”
“That is a lie and it is an obscenity,” Aram interrupted. “Our people are principled. They would never kill anyone unless it was on the battlefield. And never a woman. Khezir Mazul is a national hero, and his uncle Gozan is a learned man, a scholar. He has no violence in him.”
Aram continued, “The arrest and attempted expulsion from the U.S. is an outrage against a law-abiding nation. Prince Khezir and Prince Gozan will be released, not because of diplomatic immunity, but because the police cannot charge them. There is no evidence of any kind. This is just like when the Italian diplomat Carlo Rizzo was arrested on the word of a chambermaid.”
In the background picture, cars were being rocked on the street in Larumin, protesters trying to open the car doors. It was maddening. How had Mazul and Remari become the victims of this story?
Maybe that had been the idea from the beginning.
I’d been looking at the Sumaris as criminals attacking women of Los Angeles. But maybe they’d been playing on the world stage from the beginning.