TEN
PROLOGUE
They knew.
He couldn’t nail down, of course, the when and where he suspected he’d been found out, but Reza Nahru sensed the angry heat of a killing mood in the barracks as soon as he was roused from sleep.
“Get up! On your feet! The general wishes to speak with us!”
There was real menace, he thought, in the way his brother Iranians glanced at him, then turned away, a few of them wrinkling noses as if they were in a hurry to clear a bad stench. He was on his feet, reaching for his assault rifle when Bahruz Fhalid growled, “Leave it.”
And then he knew he was a dead man, beyond any scintilla of a doubt.
Time seemed suspended, and he found it strange to the point of some peaceful, easy feeling how he could so calmly accept the inevitable, go and face down his own death. At least, he told himself, he wouldn’t die alone, since he heard both men were likewise told to leave their AK-47s where they were leaned up against respective edges of their cots.
Small comfort. Dead was dead.
A moment stolen to look at Tabriz and al-Hammud, rising now from their cots under the dark scowls and black eyes of AK-47s, and he still couldn’t help but wonder how his treachery had been uncovered.
It had to have been his CIA contact in Port Sudan or perhaps Khartoum. The secret meetings, accepting the envelopes of cash from the CIA’s contract agent in Sudan, had been spied out somehow, by someone. Sudan, he knew, was crawling with Iranian agents, all manner of former SAVAK thugs, and he could have cursed himself for not being more careful in watching his back. Too late to kick himself now—clearly word of his deceit and betrayal had trailed him all the way down to Madagascar.
The sweeping courtyard was just beyond the door. The massive stone walls of the garrison, once home to French soldiers, would be smeared with his blood when he was marched out there to be shot.
Death at the hands of his own. Shot down like a mad dog in the street. A sorry testament, he decided, to a bad life.
A fitting end.
“A moment to pray?” he asked Fhalid.
“Be quick about it.”
He slumped to his knees, shut his eyes, clasped his hands. As a Muslim, once devoted to God and his will, committed to prayer and to his faith, he had somehow, somewhere lost that faith, his belief in right and wrong, stripping himself of any sense of humanity. No, he wasn’t one hundred percent certain on exactly where and when he had stopped believing in God, but supposed it had begun when he had left—abandoned—his wife and three children in Tehran, right after the way with the Iraqis. From there, a pit stop in Beirut, beefing up on weapons and intel. There, rallying an elite corps of freedom fighters, mapping out strategy against the infidels. Then on the Gaza Strip, where he’d recruited the poor, the angry and the desperate out of Palestinian refugee camps to blow themselves up in Tel Aviv, martyrs for God. There was also an American diplomatic entourage wiped out in Pakistan not long ago that he had played no small role in arranging. At least twenty of the men gathered in the barracks had also been part of creating slaughterhouses in six different countries.
And it was his knowledge of these incidents that had brought the CIA to his doorstep in Port Sudan, dark shadow men picking his brain, putting the ultimatum to him. Play ball or else.
They wanted names and whereabouts of his fellow brothers in jihad. They wanted to know from where recent shipments of high-tech weapons were coming from, to find their way into the hands of his fellow Iranians.
So be it. A change was long since coming anyway. Sometimes, he thought, conversion of the soul just came to a man, a virgin bride eager to marry the one she loved, or sometimes the man actively and with passion he had never before known sought out the inner cleansing. Who could say?
But for some time Nahru had questioned the morality of the so-called holy way against the Great Satan. He asked himself if God was the creator of all men, why, then, would he want the blood of the innocent on his divine hands?
Silently Nahru asked God to have mercy on his wretched soul.
“Up!”
“We had a deal!”
Rising, eyes wide open, Nahru nearly laughed out loud when the moment of truth was revealed. The old Nahru would have unleashed a torrent of vicious cursing on al-Hammud. The new man simply felt a sense of curious relief sweeping over him. If nothing else, his own Judas would die beside him.
Al-Hammud began blubbering for his life to be spared. “You told me—”
Fhalid stung the man’s face with a backhand that slapped flesh with the sound of a pistol shot. “Get these jackals out of my face!”
Nahru allowed himself to be shoved and manhandled through the door. He
