Surgeon Sheik's Rescue

She’d been with her then-boyfriend, Derek, on a separate assignment at JFK when the blast occurred. They’d seized the moment, covering the event from an eyewitness perspective, and the Daily had let Bella run with the story as it continued to unfold over the following days, weeks, months.

She’d done good work—demonstrating a talent not only for political reporting but showing her capability as a passionate features writer, digging deep into the characters and issues behind the tragedy.

Derek in turn had shot what was now an iconic image of the injured and bloodied Dr. Tariq Al Arif racing from the burning jet with his fiancée, Julie Belard, hanging limp in his arms.

Seconds after Derek had taken that famous photo, the prince had dropped to his knees and tried to resuscitate Julie, but a second blast caused by escaping jet fuel had sent chunks of shrapnel flying into the back of his head and left side of his body, severely wounding and concussing him. In the ambulance the sheik lapsed into coma. Days later he was flown home by his family where he was cared for in a private clinic. Seven weeks after the bombing, the palace press office put out a terse statement announcing Dr. Al Arif’s death.

There were still no arrests, and there’d been no public memorial service—only a small private affair in Al Na’Jar attended by Tariq’s immediate family. None of Julie Belard’s family attended, which Bella had found strange.

The story seemed to end there, as had her job with the Daily.

But Bella had trouble letting go of both her job and the prince.

During the months of covering his story, she’d become obsessed with Tariq—the aggressively good-looking surgeon prince with a brilliant mind was also an accomplished cellist and fierce polo player. Horsemanship, she’d learned, was a talent Tariq had acquired as a young boy in his desert kingdom under the tutelage of his father. Music was a gift he’d inherited from his mother’s side. But he’d also been a healer at heart, and this passion had led him into neurosurgery, and to the United States.

Bella had come to see Tariq as a man with one foot in an ancient and exotic past, the other firmly planted in a new world, and when she’d heard of his “death,” something inside her had grieved.

Many a lonely night she’d spent staring at the photo of Tariq fleeing that jet, thinking of the anguish in his features, the desperate passion with which he’d tried to revive his fiancée. She realized, on some level, she’d fallen in love with the idea of the prince. This was why she was so unwilling to let go of him, or his story. It also felt unfinished.

And so it had started.

Desperate for a way to keep her hand in the political news scene, to finish what she’d started, Bella had taken a hotel housekeeping job and gone over to the “dark side” to join Watchdog. The site was run by Hurley Barnes, an old friend of Bella’s from her college days, along with his techie girlfriend, Agnes, and their ex-CIA hacker buddy, Scoob.

It was ironically fitting, she supposed, for Bella DiCaprio, an orphan—a reject who’d been abandoned as a two-day-old baby in a bassinet at a Chicago hospital facility for unwed mothers—to go live along the cyber fringes of society, writing with a bunch of wack-job-genius nerds, always struggling to be accepted by the mainstream but never quite managing to hang in, or pull it off.

Still, it grated—it went against everything she’d fought for her whole life—to be accepted. And her goal remained to get back, get even, prove that Bella DiCaprio was not done.

Not without a fight.

Bella’s first order of blogging business for Watchdog had been to phone Julie Belard’s father—Pierre Belard—France’s ex-ambassador to the U.S. She’d wanted to interview him about the death of his daughter and her fiancé. The ambassador had explained that Tariq’s funeral had been kept small for security reasons, and the Belards had understood the Al Arifs’ need for privacy at this time. This was why they’d not attended.

When she asked the ambassador more about Julie as a person, he told Bella his daughter used to love to holiday with the extended Belard family on Ile-en-Mer off the Brittany coast, and as a child she’d been fascinated by stories of the ghost in the abbey on the far side of the island. He’d also said that for the past three years Julie had returned to Ile-en-Mer with Tariq to attend the opera festival held each summer on the island, and that the couple had gotten engaged there.

Bella had done more digging and discovered that a large financial donation had been made to the Ile-en-Mer opera fund in Julie’s memory. After deeper cyber investigation with the help of her techie friend Scoob, Bella learned the donation had been made by a shell company owned by the Al Arif Corporation—the same company that had quietly purchased the Abbaye Mont Noir itself two years ago. Bella found it strange the donation had been made only in Julie’s name.

Then, when she’d called an island travel agent inquiring about the Abbaye Mont Noir and its ghost, the agent told her the new owner himself had recently moved in, and the abbey grounds had been closed off to the public. On probing further, Bella was told the owner was a mysterious and reclusive foreigner who’d been badly scarred down his left side. She’d become convinced it was Tariq living in that abbey, that the palace had lied about his death.

Her laptop beeped suddenly, jolting her back to the present—her download was complete.

Reseating herself at her computer, she hurriedly scanned the thumbnails for the shot where “Tahar” had turned his face to her. She clicked on it.

His mist-framed features mushroomed onto her screen, and Bella’s heart started to pound. The intensity in his damaged features—the anguish, the pain, the rage—she’d captured it all in this haunting, ghostly image. And with his hood back off his head, his hair wet, she’d caught him somehow naked, stripped in the face of the elements. As raw and vulnerable as he once was powerful.

A strange energy curled through Bella.

She touched the screen with her fingertips, traced the lines of his face.

Why are you hiding?

What would it mean to you to be exposed?

She knew what it would mean to her.

It would be her way back into a real job, especially if she found out how this story linked to an anonymous tip she’d received alleging that Senator Sam Etherington had been behind an attempt to assassinate Tariq’s youngest brother, Omair, in Algiers last summer.

The tip had been sent to Bella’s Watchdog account after the Maghreb Moors—or MagMo—a terrorist group led by a mysterious man known only as The Moor, claimed responsibility for assassinating Tariq with the jet bomb.

Bella had run this news coupled with a hard-hitting blog post taking Senator Etherington to task on his national security stance, and asking how he could promise an electorate oil from a Al Na’Jar when the kingdom itself was under threat of a MagMo-fueled coup.

An anonymous instant message had popped up on her screen less than an hour after she hit Publish. It read:

You want to know the connection between Etherington and the Al Arifs? Etherington was behind a U.S. black ops unit attempt to assassinate Tariq’s brother Omair in Algiers last summer. The unit is called STRIKE. Strategic Alliances, a D.C. consulting company, is the front for STRIKE. Just ask Travis Johnson who ordered him to have Omair killed...Oh, wait, you can’t ask Johnson—coz he’s dead himself!!!

The IM had exploded into an emoticon bomb puffing smoke. Another laughing face emoticon rolled next to the bomb.

Watchdog had tried to trace the IM, but whoever sent it was good, too good. Scoob laid a digital trap in the hopes of snaring the sender if another tip came in.

Meanwhile, Bella had tried to find out more about Strategic Alliances. All she’d learned was that the company consulted for the government, that the CEO was a man named Benjamin Raber, and that Travis Johnson, an employee under Raber, had been shot dead execution-style in an underground parking garage a month ago—no arrests, no leads. Nothing.

Scoob had helped her scour cyberspace for other links between the Al Arif family and Etherington, coming up only with a newspaper photo of Sam Etherington’s missing ex-wife, Dr. Alexis Etherington. She’d been seen with Dr. Tariq Al Arif at a medical convention in Chicago more than ten years ago. The coincidence was strange.

No one ever found out what had happened to Alexis, an ophthalmic surgeon who, oddly, had been a specialist in the same genetic illness that had rendered Tariq’s oldest brother, King Zakir, blind during the first year of his reign.

Blood humming, Bella had instantly called the palace press office in an attempt to locate Sheik Omair Al Arif, but the palace shut her down the minute they found she no longer worked for the Daily. It just fired her anger and lust to get this story. Bella continued searching for any online mention of Sheik Omair Al Arif, but he’d not made any public appearance for well over a year. He seemed to have simply vanished off the face of the earth.

Until, possibly, now.

Madame’s words crawled through her mind.

I think the man might have been Monsieur Du Val’s younger brother...according to the villagers who saw his face—he and the Monsieur have similar features...

Bella opened an older file on her laptop and pulled up Derek’s iconic image of Tariq racing from the plane. In the photo the left side of his face was gashed open, awash with blood that filled his eye socket and blackened his torn, white shirt. His features were twisted with indescribable anguish.

She juxtaposed this image with the one she’d just taken on the cliff.

And there was no doubt in her mind.

It was him.

Tahar Du Val was Tariq Al Arif, next in line of succession to the Al Arif throne of Al Na’Jar.

The weight of her discovery suddenly felt heavy, a little frightening. Would exposing him bring danger to his door, or to hers? How did all this connect to Sam Etherington?

And who had tried to kill her?

Outside the wind began to moan through the eaves, the wash line clinking against a pole in the courtyard.

Bella scrubbed her fingers through her curls, Madame Dubois’s words sifting into her mind.