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Gallo grunted again, then suddenly leaned forward and tapped on the divider in front of him, signaling his driver to stop the car.
Then, without another word, he gestured with his cigar toward the door.

David crawled across the backseat, pushed the door open, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. The street ahead of him was dark and fairly deserted; he wasn’t sure what time it was anymore. He felt a chill that had little to do with the temperature as he watched Gallo come out of the limo behind him. Then Gallo pointed toward a storefront directly ahead of them, a place with smoked-glass windows and a slanted, bright green awning. Through the glass David could see huge slabs of meat hanging from hooks. Flanks of beef, twists of Italian sausages, prime cuts of sirloin and pork—

A butcher shop.
Gallo had dragged him deep into Brooklyn to see a butcher shop.

David turned to ask what the hell he was doing there—but Gallo just strolled past him and reached for the milked-glass door beneath the awning.

To David’s surprise, the door was unlocked. Gallo stepped inside, leaving David outside on the sidewalk. David glanced back at the limo—then up and down the deserted street. He knew he could probably find a cab back on Eighteenth—but hell, he hadn’t come all this way to turn back now. Maybe Gallo was psychotic, but he was also a multimillionaire, and a powerful player at the Merc. David couldn’t risk angering the man even more than he somehow already had.

He took a deep breath and followed Gallo into the butcher shop.

The first thing that hit him was the smell: the scent of raw meat was so thick, it nearly made him gag. The shop was deserted and small, barely ten feet across, with refrigerated shelves on two sides loaded down with various cuts of beef and pork. Directly across from David was a low counter with a cash register, a pair of stainless steel scales, and a large wooden chopping block. Gallo was to the right of the block, leaning back against the counter. His cigar was still in his mouth, but his hands weren’t empty: he
was holding a wooden baseball bat. Not a miniature slugger, like in Giovanni’s office, but the real thing, the heavy wood stained by age and possibly use.

David stood there, staring at the bat, as Gallo looked up at him.

“My grandfather swept the floors here when he was twelve years old. He came to this country, and he swept blood and meat and bone so that he could make enough money to buy food for his brothers and sisters. For six years, he swept this fucking floor.”

Gallo’s wrinkled arms strained as he lifted the bat a few inches into the air.

“Two days before his eighteenth birthday, the owner of the shop took a delivery of thirty milk crates from a cousin in the dairy business; he couldn’t move the crates, so he asked my grandfather to take care of it. My grandfather took the milk to the trading exchange across the river. There he discovered a new life for himself. And he gave that life to my father. And my father gave that life to me.”

David shifted his weight from foot to foot, trying to think of something to say. He wasn’t sure what Gallo was trying to tell him—but he had a feeling it had little to do with him specifically and more to do with Giovanni, Reston, and what they represented.
Gallo had brought him to Brooklyn to make a point.

Before David could come up with any words, Gallo raised the bat again.

“You know what this is?”

David swallowed. Gallo grinned at him from behind his cigar.

“I’m not going to hit you, kid. I’m just asking you a question. Do you know what this is?”

David shrugged.

“I think so.”

“No, you don’t know a fucking thing.”

He tapped the baseball bat against the floor, then stared right at David.

“This is Bensonhurst. This is Brooklyn. This says that you don’t walk into
my
neighborhood and try to take what’s
mine.
”

Gallo opened his gnarled hand and let the baseball bat clatter to the floor. Then he took a step forward, straightening the lapels of his overcoat. David instinctively took a small step back. For the first time, he understood exactly why Gallo hated him so much. Like this butcher shop, the Merc was Gallo’s neighborhood. Reston and Giovanni were trying to take that neighborhood away from him. Automating the exchange, internationalizing the trade of oil—any steps toward modernization were a direct threat to Gallo and what his family had built. Gallo truly was a dinosaur. He probably couldn’t even turn on a computer, much less use it to trade oil. Reston—and by extension, David—was threatening Gallo’s way of life.
His neighborhood.

David knew he needed to defuse the situation—quickly. He repeated what he’d said earlier in the elevator.

“I’m not here to cause any problems—”

“Bullshit,” Gallo interrupted. “Giovanni and that rat Mick of his, Reston, they’ve got you spying on my boys. But that don’t make any difference to me. My blood has been running through that exchange for more than a hundred years. And don’t you ever forget—no matter who’s sitting up there in the corner office, I run the Merc.”

Even from across the butcher shop, David could feel the man’s breath against his skin. David wanted to get the hell out of there—but he wasn’t going to turn his back on the old man. Instead, he shrugged again, clasping his hands behind his back.

“I’m sure you’re right. I’m just trying to get by, like everyone else.”

Gallo choked out a laugh. With his right hand, he reached into his overcoat and pulled out a thin manila envelope. Then he looked right at David.

“I hope, for your sake, that’s true. I really do. Because I don’t think you know who you’re dealing with. See, I keep an eye on my traders—and anyone who gets close to them.”

He suddenly held the envelope up in front of David’s face.

“Which means I’m keeping an eye on you too, Harvard boy.
And I don’t care what position they give you, you’re still Giovanni’s little shit to me. So watch your toes, little shit. You can bet I’m watching ’em. Every fucking day.”

Gallo let the envelope fall to the floor in front of David. Then he walked right past him, heading for the door.

David waited until Gallo was gone, the door swinging shut behind him, before he bent down to pick up the envelope. His stomach churned as he undid the clasp and removed a single black-and-white photograph. A sheen of sweat broke out across the back of his neck as he turned it over in his hands.

The photo had been taken by some sort of telescopic lens, from a distance that had to have been at least a hundred feet, maybe even more. Still, David had no problem making out the image—because it was as crisp and clear as the day on which it had been taken.

A mane of cascading curls. A hand resting gently beneath the crook of a chin, a Harvard ring clearly visible on one finger.

It was a picture of him and Serena, kissing outside the Gucci store on Fifth Avenue.

N
OVEMBER
25, 2002

F
or the third time in ten minutes, Khaled’s life flashed before him.

Eyes wide with fear, screams lost in the fierce sand-tipped wind whipping across his face, he felt himself go completely airborne, his body suddenly contorting as he struggled vainly to keep his grip on the searing hot vinyl seat beneath him. There was a moment of complete weightlessness—and then he felt a hand catch him by the wrist and, with almost inhuman strength, yank him back down.

He crashed against the passenger side of the open-topped jeep and wrapped both arms around the flailing twist of rope that passed for a seatbelt. Then he turned to stare at the man who’d just saved his life—not coincidently, the same man who was continuing to endanger it as well.

The Pakistani was hunched over the jeep’s steering wheel, one hand on the gear shift between them, the other adjusting a pair of overly large driving goggles. Most of the man’s dark face was obscured by the goggles and a bright yellow, turtle-shell-shaped construction hat that had been pulled down low over his thick black hair, but beneath a thick, bushy, brown mustache, he was
grinning like a madman, his teeth abnormally white in the glare from the midday desert sun.

“That was a good one,” the Pakistani shouted over the wind. “I think we got five feet into the air. You should really hold on to that seatbelt, young sir. As you can see, the path can be quite treacherous.”

Khaled turned back to the mud-spattered windshield, peering out at the brown scar of mud and sand that supposedly counted as a “path.”
Treacherous
was the understatement of the century. And it certainly didn’t help that the jeep was traveling at close to seventy miles per hour, or that the Pakistani seemed to be purposefully aiming at the errant dunes that intermittently marred the way.

Still, it had been Khaled’s choice to take the tour, and he had known from the minute he met the Pakistani manager at the complex’s main helipad that the man was a character. Dressed in dirty white overalls, with that yellow construction helmet and that same maniacal smile, the man had first introduced himself as Saumya Das, an old friend of Khaled’s uncle, and then had proceeded to tell Khaled a story about the sheik and a party in London that involved a cricket bat thrown through a second-story window and a pair of Slovakian models taking turns behind the wheel of the sheik’s Lamborghini—resulting in the car being driven into a ditch, the Slovakians hitchhiking back to the hotel, and the car being lost for three weeks. Khaled hadn’t doubted the accuracy of the story—he knew there were many similar stories involving his uncle, as the public sheik was extremely different from the one Khaled knew in private—but he’d had trouble picturing the sheik hanging out with the five-foot-four, mud-spattered Pakistani. Still, he’d been grateful that the man volunteered to show him around, especially considering that Khaled’s expedition to the neighboring country of Qatar had been so last-minute and that he’d arrived at the fairly remote location in the middle of the small country without any real notice other than a single phone call from his office at the
Ministry of Finance. Without any real hesitation, he’d gladly accepted the jeep tour of the Pakistani’s complex. Of course, that was before he’d witnessed the man’s questionable driving skills.

Now that they were circling the Dukhan oil field for the second time, Khaled wished that he had opted for a video tour in the man’s air-conditioned office instead. At the moment, Khaled felt like he’d just stepped off the front line of a war. His hair was sticking straight up from his head, and his clothes were soaked in sweat. There was sand lodged in every possible crevice, and his skin burned where it had made contact with the jeep’s seats and the metal roll bar above his head. The desert sun was high in the sky, and the temperature had to be more than 120 degrees. The steady blasts of wind did nothing to cool the air around him, and if it wasn’t for the thin scarf that Khaled had wrapped around his mouth, he doubted he’d have been able to breathe at all. And from the looks of things, he was certain he’d be trapped in the jeep with the crazed Pakistani for some time to come.

It had taken an entire hour to get around the massive complex the first time, and the Pakistani was obviously trying for a better time in their second pass. Perhaps it was one of the ways the men who worked in the desert oil field passed the time—or maybe the Pakistani really was insane, a product of days spent laboring in the searing heat of the Qatar desert and nights dreaming about parties staffed with sheiks and Slovakian prostitutes.

Well,
Khaled thought to himself as the jeep took another hairpin turn and he held on to the “seatbelt” for dear life,
you wanted inspiration. If this place doesn’t inspire you, you might already be dead.

The truth was, up close and in person, the scale of the Dukhan oil field was truly amazing. From the air, it was a yellow and brown yawn of earth that stretched for eighty kilometers, a twisting mass of steel tubing, grated catwalks, and skyscraping, fire-belching smoke spires that almost defied description. But here on the ground, it was ten times as monstrous—like some sort of alien construct that had been dropped right down into the middle
of the desert, a churning perpetual motion machine of levers and gears and pipes and stacks, spitting dark smoke and flame from every conceivable angle.

“Bigger than you expected?” the Pakistani asked as he yanked the steering wheel to the right to avoid a pothole that would surely have swallowed the jeep entirely. “That’s usually how people feel when they see Dukhan up close. It’s the largest oil field in the region by a factor of five. And one of the top three in the world.”

Khaled nodded, squinting through the windshield at the twists and turns of the piping that disappeared like great straws into the very earth. He knew from his own research that the oil field had brought Qatar—and its sheiks—almost unbelievable wealth. Millions of dollars a day in fact, which was even more spectacular considering the entire country was barely the size of Rhode Island—and yet largely because of Dukhan, it had one of the largest GNPs in the region.

And like most of the nations in the Middle East, Qatar had only one export.

“Nearly three hundred and thirty-five thousand barrels every day,” the Pakistani shouted. “We’re now capable of over one hundred and twenty million barrels a year. From a mother lode that’s estimated at nine billion barrels, maybe more. It’s quite staggering, isn’t it?”

Khaled exhaled, now barely noticing the sand and wind whipping at his teeth. He had traveled to Dukhan for inspiration—because in his mind, if he truly wanted to know how to properly spend a sheik’s fortune, he needed to know what it was to be a sheik. There was the religious component, of course, and the political implications. But the very definition of sheikdom was power—and power, in the Middle East, had only one real source. Dukhan had therefore been the obvious choice, because of its size and proximity to Khaled’s new home—and also, more importantly, because Dukhan had been feeding the region and its sheiks since the 1940s. The birth of this belching monstrosity in
the desert coincided with the birth of the modern Middle East, and the two were distinctly intertwined.

“And what happens to the oil after you pull it up from the ground?” Khaled asked.

“It goes through the pipeline to the refinery at Mesaleed.”

“And then?”

“Well, to the market, of course,” the Pakistani said, guiding the jeep through a patch of swirling sand. “We are partnered with a dozen international firms, which ship the refined and unrefined barrels across the oceans. Our oil goes all over the world. What is pulled up from the sand today, a week from now is in the tank of a Volvo in some parking lot in a mall in Nebraska.”

Khaled felt a smile fighting the stiff wind that battered his face. Without realizing it, the Pakistani had summed it all up in that one sentence, beginning in the desert in Qatar and ending in a place in the middle of the United States, a place that most on the Arab street could not even imagine—and certainly could not understand. And yet, from the Pakistani’s vantage point as one who lived and breathed oil—sometimes literally—that was the way the world seemed: different parts of the same sentence.

This is an answer, Khaled realized. If not
the
answer, certainly one of a possible many.

He turned from the Pakistani back to the monstrous oil fields, then to the great and swirling desert that surrounded them.

Khaled knew in his heart that the Black Blood of Allah was not simply a source of power. Oil was also a river that flowed from east to west.

Perhaps there was a way to turn that river around.

To turn a source of power into a source of peace….