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For Cindy and Eric, who got me back in the game
CONTENTS
KHALID BIN MOHAMMED STADIUM
SHARJAH, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, MARCH 2011
The FIFA operatives arrived at the stadium past noon, prepared to disrupt the crime that was tearing football apart. Sharjah was a short drive up the road from Dubai, but it felt like a world away, in the unglamorous dust, a face of the United Arab Emirates that most Westerners never saw. Unlike Dubai, Sharjah didn’t look like a place where someone could get rich overnight. This made it a fitting location for the criminals who had infiltrated the game of football. Their specialty was illusion, and events in Sharjah were about to give them another lucrative ninety-minute return.
The match set for that day –
