The Haj - Leon Uris [208]
The prince shrieked out a front-page story that a three-man delegation of West Bank refugees had arrived in Zurich and demanded credentials to the arbitration convention. They had said in a news conference that King Abdullah was holding fifty-two refugee boys as hostages in an Amman prison.
‘Who are these intruders, Your Highness? What are their names?’
‘There is a Bedouin, a Sheik Ahmed Taji. There is Charles Maan, the nonbeliever of whom we have already heard, and there is a Haj Ibrahim al Soukori al Wahhabi.’
‘I know them,’ Kabir answered.
‘I want them assassinated!’ the prince screamed.
‘No, that will do us no good in Switzerland. Look, give me an hour and I will be at your villa.’
Prince Ali Rahman was attired in a silken morning gown. His long thin face held an indelible stamp, the beak of the Saudi family resembling that of a desert hawk, which he truly was. Although far down the line of succession, Prince Rahman had emerged into the top circle of power in a royal court stocked with hundreds of princes and princelings.
Ali Rahman was of the proud old breed. He had ridden alongside his grandfather, the great Ibn Saud, who went to war for control of the Arabian peninsula at the turn of the century. Ibn Saud had rid the place of the Turks, outlived a British protectorate and had driven their archrivals, the Hashemites, out of the Hejaz. Ibn Saud declared a nation, which without the burden of modesty he named after his family. In the early 1930s he had initiated oil explorations with the Americans, a move that was now beginning to cause billions of dollars to gush into a dry treasury.
Ali Rahman was given the task of investing the new fortunes. He was not a sophisticated man in matters of international finance but he had native shrewdness.
Fawzi Kabir had long had an operational base in Switzerland and during the war had shown great finesse in the intricate business of arms dealing and transforming or hiding funds. When one of the ranking princes dropped nearly a half-million dollars in IOUs at the Monte Carlo gaming tables in a twelve-hour streak and could not make his markers good, he became a candidate for imprisonment. Fawzi Kabir cleverly bailed out the wayward prince, a move that caught Rahman’s eye.
Kabir could offer a full range of financial services, interesting investments, floating of high-interest loans, stashing untraceable millions. He made enormous sums for the Saudis and enormous commissions for himself, so much so that Kabir moved into Zurich, a crown city of hidden accounts. The Effendi had only to sit behind the desk of his mansion in Zollikon and appraise the endless petitioners from banks, arms merchants, drug runners, floundering little nations with mineral deposits.
The royal family was just getting around to placing its young heirs in American and British universities. There were fifty of them on the Continent now, with their entourages. Kabir controlled their funds, covered their gambling debts, their fifty-thousand-dollar hotel bills, their purchases of jewelry and cars, their pursuit of European flesh. He kept their excesses out of the papers and saved the royal family from numerous potential humiliations.
When the United Nations called for an arbitration conference to present all outstanding Arab claims from the war, Kabir engineered its location, had it held in Zurich, and had himself named as head of one of the Palestinian delegations. Prince Rahman leased an enormous villa in the wooded Zurichberg district and the two conspired to manipulate the conference. A new chapter in Saudi political thinking had opened: the use of vast oil revenues combined with blackmail and the outright purchasing of allies. The prince knew that if he could control the avaricious mind of Fawzi Kabir, he might well control the Arab world, or, at least, manipulate it to Saudi whims.
Kabir’s first move was to get a signed agreement from all the Arab states and delegations that none could negotiate with or sign an agreement with the Jews on their own. The Saudis had not fought in