Of course as soon as Drexler arrived, he was thoroughly vetted by Syria’s notorious Mukhabarat, their General Intelligence Service, but he was cleared, and then he began doing the bidding of both Shakira and Ahmed, and he began working with the Mukhabarat on operations that involved keeping the foreign assets of the first family secure.
There were a great number of threats to the Azzams’ offshore finances. Government entities searching for them, reporters inquiring about them, third-party banks with questions about the legitimacy of the nominees on the trusts. Over time Drexler developed a large network of European employees to further the Azzams’ aims on the continent: cops in Paris, intelligence officials in the UK, corrupt lawyers in Luxembourg, computer hackers in Ukraine.
Shakira’s accounts stayed safe, and more money was funneled into them from time to time from the Azzams’ corruption schemes in Damascus.
This relationship between Drexler and the Azzams had been working well for all parties involved, and the Swiss contract agent had been fully busy with his tasks, when an affair between the first lady and Drexler developed. From Shakira’s side it was easy to see what fueled the desire. She was a woman locked away in a palace with few around her other than sycophants who were completely beholden to her loveless husband. When dangerous but exotic Drexler came into the picture, he met her gaze and showed his interest in her, and unlike other men, he was allowed confidential meetings with her in her private apartment.
It took no time for her to make a move on the attractive European.
Drexler, on the other hand, was motivated by a combination of two simple drugs: adrenaline and lust. He’d slept with a warlord’s mistress, a concubine of the Egyptian president, the wife of a Nigerian general, and even the daughter of the chief Interpol inspector in Greece in charge of his case. Sebastian Drexler was a hunter of pelts, and Shakira was suitable for hanging over his mantel.
There was nothing special about their affair to him. He’d had better, but over time he had come to worry that the cold and cruel woman might actually think she was in love with him, and in the dead of night he found this more terrifying than the prospect that Ahmed Azzam could find out about the affair and have him killed.
Sleeping with the first lady had been the riskiest thing in Sebastian Drexler’s life of danger a year earlier, when Shakira summoned him to her offices and asked him for discreet help on a delicate personal matter. Drexler, only too glad to ingratiate himself even further to the first lady and thereby solidify himself as a fixture in the Syrian regime, heeded the strange request to track down a Spanish woman living in Damascus and find out just what she was up to.
It seemed like it would be easy work. Shakira had made an enemy of some woman here in her country, she did not want to go through official channels to pursue what Drexler assumed was nothing more than a catfight, and he figured he’d have the matter taken care of in a couple of days.
He could not have been more wrong.
Drexler conducted a tail on Bianca Medina, doing most of the legwork himself, and he slowly came to the realization that this squabble between two women was, in fact, something much more.
The first tip-off was the high-level security protection. Medina never went anywhere without a special group of Alawi close protection officers ringing her. For a civilian this was unheard of in Damascus. His research into the detail showed him they were being paid for out of a special fund at a bank owned by high-ranking members of the ruling Ba’ath Party, and this worried Drexler even more than the security itself.
But he continued because the first lady was not one to piss off, and if his employers at Meier Privatbank ever heard that he wasn’t doing as instructed by their client, there would be hell to pay in Gstaad as well as in Damascus.
His surveillance of the woman’s home in the Mezzeh 86 neighborhood told him she didn’t seem to leave the house for work, and although she was single and she loved the nightlife, she definitely wasn’t connected to a large group of friends or acquaintances. She frequented the best clubs and restaurants in the city, but she always returned home alone, surrounded by her guards.
Drexler determined that unless she was sleeping with one of her protection detail, she was celibate.
And then, on the eighth day of his coverage, his worries that this operation might turn into something delicate were confirmed. Around midnight he noticed three nondescript vehicles rolling along Zaid bin al-Khattab Avenue in Bianca Medina’s neighborhood. Through his night vision binoculars he saw that they bore plates indicating they were owned by the presidential security force.
When the detail turned into the circular drive in front of Medina’s property, Drexler’s apprehension grew. And when the Alawi private security force left the house minutes later, the Swiss agent began to have grave concerns that he knew what was going on.
His fears were proven right when two more vehicles pulled into the property just after. President Ahmed al-Azzam himself climbed out and entered the home.
So . . . there it was. The president of Syria was clearly having an affair with this twenty-five-year-old Spanish model, and Drexler’s client in this matter was the president’s wife.
He knew instantly he had found himself between the biggest rock and the hardest place of his entire, exceptionally dangerous career. He could lie to the first lady: say he learned nothing about Bianca Medina. Or he could inform on the president of Syria, a man who could have him shot and dumped in a ditch whenever he wanted.
Drexler immediately went back to the first lady and told her that because of his obligation to his mission working to protect the assets held in Meier Privatbank, he no longer had the time he needed to devote to this personal side mission. This ruse lasted about five seconds. He’d known Shakira was an intelligent woman, but he’d not been prepared for how quickly she saw through his bullshit.
“Ahmed showed up at her house, didn’t he?” she asked.
“Ahmed? You mean your husband?” was Drexler’s too-casual reply, and he cursed himself for being so transparent.
To his shock, though, Shakira just smiled a little.
“I knew about the affair. I won’t tell you how I knew. Nothing scientific. Woman’s intuition, I guess. I thought perhaps you could bring me proof of the extent of it.”
There was no way Drexler was going to continue spying on Bianca Medina, not even for the second most powerful person in his patron nation. He replied, “I do not feel comfortable doing that. You understand, I’m certain, that President Azzam could make serious trouble for me.”
Shakira shrugged, then kissed her lover. “You’re sleeping with his wife. You think this is worse?”
Drexler said, “Here, in your apartment . . . your husband isn’t going to find out what I’m doing unless you tell him. But out there? Running surveillance on his mistress? I will be detected, and that will be seen as a hostile act.”
Shakira sighed and shrugged. “No matter. What you have done has been more than enough.”
This confused Drexler, and he pulled back out of her grasp angrily. “What have I done? I have no photographs. No information of what, exactly, is taking place.”
Now Shakira’s smile was genuine. “You try telling Ahmed that. I won’t tell him that I know of his affair with Bianca, but if he does ever find out I know, he’ll probably assume my own personal intelligence agent was the one who informed on him.”
It was a chilling comment, and Drexler did not know how to process it, but Shakira released Drexler from his duties regarding Medina that very night, and this relaxed him greatly.
He returned to his work for the General Intelligence Service and the interests of Shakira’s accounts at Meier Privatbank, and he considered himself lucky to be clear of the danger of reporting against one of his benefactors to his other.