A terrorist attack on an American general in Turkey sparks a worldwide manhunt for the most dangerous man alive – a jihadist called Ibrahim. For Special Agent Tom Dupree the race against time to stop the jihadist’s new and devastating plot against the US is not only a desire to protect the homeland, it’s also personal. But Ibrahim is planning an attack the likes of which has not be seen before, one that doesn’t use suicide bombers or conventional weapons.

The second in Gary Haynes’ ‘Tom Dupree’ series, State of Attack is a fast-paced, action-packed thrill ride across four continents. Mixing politics and espionage, State of Attack appears to be lifted from the pages of today’s news. Thrillers don’t get any more realistic or gripping than this.

Also by Gary Haynes

State of Honour

State of Attack

Gary Haynes

Copyright

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2015

Copyright © Gary Haynes 2015

Gary Haynes asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9781474030724

Version date: 2018-09-20

GARY HAYNES

studied law at Warwick University and completed his postgraduate training at the College of Law. As a lawyer, he specializes in commercial dispute resolution. Outside of work, he is active on social media, comments upon Middle East politics and keeps fit at his local boxing gym. You can find him on Goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/GaryHaynes

Writing is a lonely pastime, but to get a book into shape for publication, it becomes a collaborative process. I would like to thank Helen Williams at Harlequin for spotting my potential and for her encouragement and enthusiasm, and my excellent editors Dean Martin, Victoria Oundjian and Lucy Gilmour for their attention to detail and helpful suggestions.

For my three wonderful children, Charlie, Grace and Josh.

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Book List

Title Page

Copyright

Author Bio

Acknowledgement

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Chapter 96

Chapter 97

Chapter 98

Chapter 99

Chapter 100

Chapter 101

Chapter 102

Chapter 103

Chapter 104

Chapter 105

Chapter 106

Chapter 107

Chapter 108

Chapter 109

Chapter 110

Chapter 111

Epilogue

Endpages

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

Western Syria

The dry air stank of the dead.

Basilios Nassar knew they would come soon, and when they did, many more would die. Perhaps all those who remained here would die, he thought.

Basilios was clean-shaven, with curly black hair cut tight to his head. He’d put on weight in the last few years, his muscle definition hidden by an extra layer of fat. He was squatting behind one of his Christian town’s hastily erected defences – a makeshift barricade made of burnt-out cars, sand-filled oil drums, charred beams and scorched wooden doors. It was strewn across the main access way, which was in truth little more than a truck-wide dirt track.

On his right stood a skinny old man, the baker, his face hollow and blood-caked. On the left, the young goat herder, dishevelled and trembling. The white sun burned their bare heads, and sweat stains peppered their dusty clothes.

A ground-based barrage of rockets had all but decimated the town. Houses had become burning shells, the heat so intense that it had singed the earth in parts. The mute animals, an assortment of dogs, sheep, chickens and donkeys, lay bloodied and savaged amid the desolate ruins, as if the town had morphed into an open-air slaughterhouse.

He and his fellow survivors had done their best for the dead. They’d wrapped the corpses in white sheets and had placed them in what little shade remained, beneath a blackened wall that abutted the cracked slabs of the small plaza. Hours before, the old women, plagued by flies, had held aloft sacred wooden icons and had wailed for their loss. Now it was 14.25, and the stench from the bloating bodies was overpowering.

Basilios’s brother and father had been badly injured during the airborne assault. Their twisted, pain-racked bodies were slumped against what was left of the outer sandstone wall of the Greek Orthodox church of Antioch, like grotesque effigies. He’d tried to put their suffering out of his mind, and in the past half an hour they’d calmed down a little. When they’d first become wounded, their screams had filled the air and his eyes had filled with tears. But he knew their injuries were fatal. Whether or not he’d join them in Heaven would be left to the will of God. He had some maiming and killing of his own to do.

Syrian Christians had lived in relative peace with their Muslim countrymen for decades. But everyone knew the men they faced were different. Basilios’s people called them Salafists, heavily-armed Sunni fanatics from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan; many other countries, too. There was even talk of red-bearded Chechens.

They’d already destroyed a Christian village to the north of Damascus, less than twenty miles away in Wadi al-Nasara, the so-called “Valley of the Christians”. Basilios’s town, close to the Lebanese border, was next on their list.

It would have been unforgiving odds even if the townsmen had been a trained force. For a bunch of farmers and artisans armed with a few ancient AK-47s, hunting rifles and shotguns, together with a few US hand grenades that Basilios had bought off a Lebanese Christian, making a stand was suicidal. But the women and children, those who could still walk or crawl, were heading for the nearby hills, and the men and older boys had decided to give them the best chance of survival: a little more time.

In the eerie silence, Basilios sensed movement above. He glanced up and saw a flock of cranes flying south, their long necks outstretched. Even the birds are leaving, he thought.

Moments later he felt the goat herder tug at his sleeve before pointing ahead. Basilios peered through the intentional gap in the barricade, seeing the telltale plumes of sand dust in the distance. They are coming, he thought. They are coming now.

He did his best to stop his chest from heaving. The men and teenage boys around him were relying on him to be strong. He was the only professional fighter among them, having spent ten years in the Syrian army before returning home. Fingering his gold cross, given to him by his grandmother when he was a child, he calmed himself as best he could. He knew that if he freaked out, they’d be overrun in a few minutes.

With that, he heard the sound of fast-approaching vehicles. Thirty seconds later the loud cracks from a heavy machine gun sent those around him into a petrified inertia, as if they were desert leverets caught in headlamps.

He wiped the sweat from his brow. “No shooting until I say,” he said, his tone ostensibly controlled. It was all he could do to attempt to quell the rising sense of fear, as palpable now as the dust at his feet.

He brought up his AK-47 to chest level. It had an extra curved magazine, affixed with black masking tape, jutting down a couple of inches from the one wedged into the well. The gas-operated assault rifle could pump out forty rounds a minute in semi mode, and over double that on fully auto. But he reckoned they would be up against at least fifty fighters. He checked the AK’s magazine before jabbing it back into the well, and clipped the gun’s short sling to his webbed belt.

Letting the weapon hang down, he shoved his hand into a cargo pocket. Pulling out an M67 fragmentation grenade, he held the spherical steel to his blistered lips. He willed it to detonate with devastating effect, rather than make a dull phut as much of the cheap ordnance he had used in his army days had done. His thoughts were focussed on killing his enemies; only that.

Hearing the trucks’ roaring engines clearly now, he gritted his teeth and gestured to the others to raise their assortment of weapons. Six ounces of composition B explosives, he thought, capable of causing casualties within a range of fifteen yards. Due to its weight, he could throw it three times that distance, which meant that he might be able to take out at least half of the men in the first truck before they had a chance to disembark. If they managed to evade the blast, he knew it would be over quickly.

He guessed the Salafists were Jabhat al-Nusra Front rebels, or terrorists from the Islamic State group, formerly known as ISIS, the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which referred to a desired caliphate from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean to southern Turkey. The latter had joined forces with al-Qaeda, although after their rampant brutality, even that organization had disowned them.

They were well-equipped with M60 recoilless assault rifles and M79 Osa anti-tank rocket launchers procured from Croatia, as well as tanks and Humvees left behind by the retreating Iraqi army. But these weapons, state-of-the-art as they were, had been almost useless against the Syrian army’s cluster and barrel bombs. That had brought about a stalemate in the Syrian civil war, but a stalemate that had turned ninety per cent of the country into an anarchic killing field.

Not that they’d be dropping out of the cloudless sky to shatter the Salafists’ bones anytime soon. Basilios knew the nearest detachment of President Bashar al-Assad’s defenders was miles away. Truth was, he didn’t trust them either, especially after they’d teamed up with Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon and Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Like their Sunni enemies in this sectarian civil war, Shia Muslims weren’t exactly fond of Middle East Christians. As for the politically-motivated Free Syrian Army, they were busy fighting against Assad’s men in the far north and the jihadists in the south. Syria was a maelstrom of violence, and he was resigned to his fate.

Peering through the gap in the barrier, he saw the lead truck entering the decimated narrow street, the heavy Browning .50 cal M2 machine gun mounted on the deck randomly spitting out high-calibre rounds at a rate of over five hundred per minute.

Within a few seconds one of the bullets hit the goat herder in the neck as it passed through a paint tin with the ease of a fine blade through gossamer. The boy fell instantly, blood oozing out of the entry wound as he twitched in the dirt. The old baker bent down to the boy, cradling the floppy head. Basilios watched as the boy’s eyes bulged and watered like those of a stranded catfish. But as the old man started to pray in Aramaic, their mother tongue and the ancient language of Christ, he knew it was a shot to the carotid artery and was lethal.

Feeling wretched, Basilios spread his feet and held the grenade in his abdomen. He removed the safety clip and placed his left index finger in the grenade’s pin. Keeping a firm grasp on both the grenade proper and the safety lever, he pulled the bent pin, straightening the soft metal as it was released.

He jumped up and heaved it towards the truck. Bobbing back down, he jerked up the AK that was hanging over his thigh and, peering through the gap in the barrier again, braced himself. He hoped the searing fragments from the grenade would pierce organs, shred muscle and sever arteries, that his enemies’ bodies would resemble the wreckage about him.

The grenade exploded in a bright orange-white flash, the sound oddly muted. But the shrieks that followed soon afterwards could have woken a coma patient.

Once he’d recovered from the disorientating effects of the shockwave, Basilios motioned to his comrades to stay low, and ensured they’d clicked off the safeties on their weapons. Then he scaled the haphazard wall, his movements so frenzied that he gashed his leg on the edge of an iron girder, and sucked up air like a sprint swimmer. He reached the top in less than three seconds, using a couple of wedged-in planks of wood that he’d positioned when the barricade had been built.

Ignoring the searing pain, he dropped down onto the hard-packed dirt on the other side of the barrier and launched himself at the paralyzed truck, firing from the hip in automatic mode. Slaloming to avoid the cratered earth, jagged masonry and smouldering timbers, he felt no fear. He felt nothing, in fact, but a crazed desire to kill.

Chapter 2

A mackerel sky is a harbinger of a storm, Tom Dupree’s long-dead mother used to say when he was a kid. As he turned his gaze back to the redbrick facade of a high-end shoe store on M Street, Georgetown, Washington, DC, he just hoped it would be confined to a change in the weather. He was wearing a charcoal-grey, loose-fitting suit, a matching silk tie and aviator shades. It was early morning, seven hours behind Syrian time, the half-hidden sun appearing to linger above the outskirts of the great cityscape.

Georgetown was an historic neighbourhood situated in the north-west of the capital along the banks of the Potomac. The street was clear of the majority of commuters and tourists who’d clog it up in an hour’s time. Tom was standing on the sidewalk after exiting an adapted black SUV.

He pushed his clear earpiece in a little deeper with his left forefinger and spoke briefly to his team via his push-to-talk, or PTT, radio. Adjusting his plastic hip holster, which held his standard-issue SIG Sauer P229 handgun, with his right hand, he felt edgy. He always felt edgy protecting the offspring of a foreign dignitary in DC, but today’s charge was special, at least as far as the suits on Capitol Hill were concerned.

The Russian president’s daughter stepped from an up-armoured stretched limo parked five yards away with the gracefulness of a ballerina, her slim legs sheathed in silk pantyhose. The Russians had brought their own cars, flown in on Tupolev Tu-330 transport planes. The cars had dual foot-pedal controls, just in case the driver had a heart attack or got hit in the head by a high-velocity projectile from an anti-material rifle. The hoods were reinforced for ramming, the tyres of the run-flat variety. They always had at least three with blacked-out, bulletproof glass, the other two acting as decoys.

But despite the impressiveness of the vehicles, it was the president’s daughter who caught everyone’s eye. Before Tom had seen her photo, one of his team had said that she was hotter than the Mojave Desert come midsummer. He’d told him to hush his mouth and show a little respect. But he hadn’t lied, he thought.

She walked like she knew it, too. Hips swinging, her mouth a half-petulant, half-seductive pout, as the handles of her Gucci bag rested in the V of her slender arm. The three Russian agents, who Tom took for Presidential Security Service men, or maybe FSB, the successor organization to the KGB, walked around her in a triangular formation.

They were bulky, with close-cropped hair, like Tom’s buzz cut; their faces as hard and expressionless as concrete busts. Despite his normal rising sense of paranoia in such circumstances, Tom could think of a lot worse assignments than helping to guard Pouter, as she’d been nicknamed by one of his protective detail. He’d let that one pass, but only when they weren’t in radio contact. The DS command centre had given her the pro-name the Fabergé, a form of codename, and that was just too damn clumsy.

His Bureau of Diplomatic Security team – four men and two women – flashed their blue-and-gold badges to the few rather bemused-looking pedestrians on the sidewalk before cordoning it off with their outstretched arms. There was no need for PD tape here, although a couple of counter snipers from the Support Unit of the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service were on the flat roof of a three-storey brownstone row house opposite. A few million bucks’ worth of realty, for sure, Tom thought. Two more armed agents in black fatigues were positioned at the back of the store, and two more in front. There was an emergency response team sitting in two SUVs a hundred yards away, monitoring the scene on secure laptops. The president’s daughter was in a multi-layered security bubble; one that would take a platoon of hardened US Marines to burst through, and Tom reckoned she knew this, too.

The female owner of the store and her staff had been security vetted, and she’d agreed to open early, although she hadn’t been told who her only VIP customer would be. The advance detail with their magnetometers and K-9 sniffer dogs had done their job; all regular procedure. Pouter was due back at Blair House, the official state guest house for the President of the United States – POTUS – in half an hour. Located at 1651–1653 Pennsylvania Avenue, it was only a mile and a half away. Still, Tom was as vigilant as a polar bear with a newborn cub. After watching Pouter walk into the store, he scanned the immediate vicinity and assumed radio contact with the snipers, who confirmed the surrounding buildings were still clear. Satisfied, he ordered his team to let the civilians pass.

But his antennae were up.

Chapter 3

As return fire pinged through the air about him, Basilios dived down and rolled in the stony track before raising the AK, the stock tucked into his shoulder. A man with a mangled left leg was bleeding out by the truck’s front passenger-side tyre, while another was half-crawling towards the tailgate. The Salafist was leaving a trail of blood as black as oil. Basilios knew that meant he’d been hit by a round in the liver and that he had thirty minutes tops to live. Seeing movement in his peripheral vision, he clenched his jaw and focussed.

There were just two remaining able Salafist fighters, and they were heading for the safety of the remnants of the surrounding buildings, letting off short automatic bursts as they ran. Basilios guessed they were fearful of the truck exploding. But before he had a chance to let off a burst of his own, they fell like bowling pins, cut down by scattered volleys from his comrades.

A few seconds later, he signalled for them to cease fire and, raising himself up, jogged over to the twisted hunk of metal that was the truck. Two Salafists were motionless in the front, their faces lacerated almost beyond recognition by careering shrapnel. But as he bent down to recover their superior weapons, he heard two more pickup trucks enter the street.

The men behind the barrier called out to him to get back. Straightening up, he turned towards the end of the road and saw the unmistakable outline of two shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled grenade launchers being aimed in the direction of the barricade aboard the approaching trucks, the rear tyres fishtailing with acceleration.

He darted towards a nearby doorway, using his free hand to signal to the men to disperse. As he reached the doorway, he had to duck down under a hanging lintel before spinning around and crouching in the brick dust. He guessed they were Yugoslav-made 90mm RPGs, favoured here due to their light weight, and the reinforced plastic design. Just a little over twenty-four pounds when armed, two trained men could load and fire six unguided projectiles in a minute. He knew the rocket was propelled from the launcher at a speed of two hundred and fifty yards per second. It was accurate enough to be used effectively against large armoured vehicles up to half a mile away. The barricade wouldn’t stand a chance.

The rockets hit the barricade a couple of seconds later, crippling explosions that sent up a flurry of metal shards and wooden splinters, and caused the middle section of the wall to implode. After the initial din and the devastation caused by the blast, Basilios heard the trucks skidding to a halt. Vaguely, through the dust cloud and to the left of the lintel, he glimpsed the fighters disembarking and running forwards in a jagged line, strafing the remnants of the barrier. They shouted out: Allahu Akbar. And he knew it was almost over.

As those men and boys who were still able returned sporadic fire, Basilios saw a fighter emerge from the subsiding dust. He was sprinting towards the doorway. Basilios scrambled back and stood up, letting the AK drop to his side from the clip. If he shot the man, he would give away his position, and by the way things were going outside, that meant he’d die before he could wreak a sufficient revenge.

He pulled out a piece of cloth from his cargo pocket and used it as a tourniquet to stem the flow of blood from his leg. Wincing, he eased further back into a dark recess, his right hand going for his combat knife. Gritting his teeth in frustration, he realized he’d dropped it in the melee. Even so, he figured he’d have to dispatch the man quickly and quietly. He squatted down, half hidden behind an overturned wooden table and waited.

The fighter ducked through the doorway to avoid the swinging lintel before pivoting around to face the street. He was bearlike, the sleeves of his combat jacket rolled up, revealing thick forearms covered in dark matted hairs. His head was wrapped in a black bandana, the hallmark of al-Qaeda-inspired militants. Basilios knew that the noise from the discharge of small-arms fire and the shouting and screams of battle would mask his steps, but thick beads of salty sweat rolled down his forehead and into his eyes as he began to move forwards.

At the last moment, the man clearly registered Basilios’s presence and, turning his head, he began to swing his assault rifle around. Basilios hit him hard in the exposed floating rib with the stock of his AK, winding him. He cracked his skull with the AK’s metal butt. Dazed, the Salafist buckled, and knelt in the dust, his head lolling to one side.

Basilios wrapped his arm around the bull-like neck and jerked him up with great force before dropping to the floor. There was a strangely intimate crack as Basilios fractured the man’s C2 vertebrae as if it was parched wood. The burly body went limp, and Basilios eased the dead man’s head to the rubble. But it had been the first time he’d killed a man so close up that he could feel his last breath leaving his body. It left him feeling both energized and shattered.

He moved to the other side of the building, careful to avoid the electricity cable that had fallen through the shattered roof and lay doglegged on the floor. The cable’s live end vibrated and popped and fizzed, evidencing that the portable generator was still intact, or at least functional.

He crouched by a shell hole, listening to the small-arms ricochets and the shrieks from the wounded. He saw two helmeted fighters dragging a boy of no more that fifteen by his hair from the remnants of the wooden shack opposite. They wore green flak jackets and wraparound shades, their postures menacing. The boy was weeping and pleading for his life. They propped him up against a concrete wall and, as he covered his face with his hands, they stepped back and raised their carbines.

Basilios knew the boy’s father, a decent man, who plied his trade as a mechanic among the surrounding towns and villages. He did his best to rationalize the situation, but as they reversed their short rifles, about to bludgeon the kid to death with the metal butts, he took aim and fired at their legs, three rounds each. As they collapsed to the floor, he saw the side of the boy’s head explode in a mass of blood and bone fragments.

Devastated, he scanned the flat roofs above and saw a sniper edging back behind a pile of plastic chairs before turning and half crawling towards the adjoining building.

Basilios glanced around the doorway, telling himself that he would mourn the boy later. Those townsmen who hadn’t fled were dead or dying. There was nothing to be done except to try to survive and then join up with the women and children in the hills. Perhaps I will be able to lead them to safety? he thought.

They couldn’t return to the town, that was for sure. In those towns and villages where the Sunni Islamists had taken control, it’d been a liberation that had turned into a religiously-motivated occupation. People received forty lashes for stealing, and teenagers were beheaded for voicing a barely inappropriate reference to the Prophet. Sharia law had been imposed with a dogmatic ferocity. He didn’t want to imagine what it would be like for a Christian town.

Move, he thought. Keep moving or die.

Chapter 4

Twenty minutes later, Pouter emerged onto the sidewalk again, her hips still doing the swinging routine. One of the Russian security detail, a blond guy with sloppy lips and tombstone-grey eyes, who looked as if his mother had substituted breast milk for protein shakes fortified with creatine, held four meringue-coloured paper bags dotted with little lilac flowers.

Tom guessed they held shoe ware worth more than he made in months. But the bags looked absurdly incongruous, and he shot one of his team a disdainful stare as the guy was about to snigger. Ed Swift, a rookie agent from Kansas, who was yet to get a scratch on active duty. Truth was, Tom had to repress a smirk, too. The Russians were kind of touchy about such things.

The rear door to the limo was opened and Pouter slid in. Tom breathed a sigh of relief and ordered his team to mount up via his PTT. He sat in the front of the SUV next to the driver, Sam Collins, a veteran DS agent, who Tom had worked with on three foreign-embassy assignments and trusted like a brother.

Sam had shaved what was left of his hair. He stood six-four and two hundred and twenty pounds, most of which was functional muscle. At fifty, he could still down most of his fellow agents before they’d finished clenching their fists. As he pulled away from the kerb, Tom opened up a secure laptop and checked the route ahead via images sent from a small UVA, an unmanned surveillance drone, which was being controlled by an ex-US Air Force pilot at the nearby Marine Corps Base Quantico.

The ride back to Blair House was smooth, the Russian vehicles moving in a convoy up front. Tom watched Pouter exit the rear limo and strut over the few paving slabs to Blair House, the tricolour of the Russian Federation flapping on a flagpole in the centre of the building. The building had a beige-coloured limestone facade, with green shutters. It was one of four connected terraced townhouses that made up the one hundred and nineteen-room complex.

When she’d gotten safely inside, Tom and his team could relax. Their remit didn’t extend to guarding the exterior, let alone protecting her inside her suite. A fresh DS team would ensure the perimeter was secure for the dayshift, and the Russians looked after their own at close quarters.

As Pouter walked up the steep steps with her bodyguards, sheltered from the light rain that had begun to fall by the dark green canopy, Tom was glad it was home time for him, too. But as she got just a couple of yards from the door, it was flung open abruptly. A suited man barged out, brandishing a handgun, and Tom willed the Russian bodyguards to fill the space between them and his charge, to fling her to the rear and pump ten rounds into the guy’s chest.

He barked a series of short orders via the PTT and hit the emergency button under the dash. That sent an ultra-quick response requirement to the local PD, the Secret Service, the FBI and the DS. The SUV’s four heat-seeking cameras clicked into 360-degree vision for the various agencies that were now surveying the scene on video screens, just in case the hovering low-level drone got knocked out or malfunctioned. But by the time his team were halfway to the flight of steps, with their SIGs drawn, he could see that the Russian agents had holstered their own handguns.

He held up a field scope and recognized the face of the ostensible attacker from his briefing photos. The man was in fact the Russian president’s fifteen-year-old nephew and the handgun was a squirt gun that he was now firing into the face of the hulk carrying the shopping bags.

The kid had a mental age of nine, according to Tom’s security briefing notes, and that meant that all anyone would feel would be sympathy. Still, his team had reacted well, even Ed the rookie. Drills had their place in producing long-term muscle memory and instinctive positive action, but there was no substitute for a real test. He radioed his team to stand down and called it in before making a mental note to pat Ed on the back and say a quiet encouraging word.

Suddenly, he felt overcome with exhaustion. He hadn’t had a day off in a month due to a minor epidemic of flu at the Washington office. His father, a recently promoted three-star general who worked at the Pentagon, was in Ankara, Turkey, at present, but he was due back in a week’s time, and Tom had arranged to take a short, well-deserved vacation to spend some downtime with him.

“You okay, Tom?” Sam said, as he fired up the SUV.

“Yeah, just a little tired. You know how it is.”

“Yeah, goddamned adrenalin dump with nowhere to go,” Sam replied, referring to the anticlimax on the steps of Blair House.

“Let’s get outta here, Sam.”

As Tom rested his head against the SUV’s headrest, feeling jaded, he knew he’d worked long and hard to heal the relationship with his father. He no longer felt anger towards him for deserting his mother when he was eight. He still blamed him for her subsequent miserable existence and his own sense of betrayal in his formative years, but he didn’t hate him any more.

Once Sam had dropped him off at the departmental lot and he’d typed out his report on his laptop, it would be less than a week before he could drive out of DC and over one of the four-lane road bridges that crossed the Potomac to his one indulgence in life: his retreat.

But he had a nagging feeling about the prospects of getting some quality downtime. In the last few months, every time he’d thought life would experience a little peace, he’d gotten the mental equivalent to a jab in the ribs with a cattle prod. All his senses were telling him that it wouldn’t be any different, but he couldn’t think of one reason why.

Chapter 5

In Syria, the white sun had mellowed into a tangerine-coloured half crescent, sinking beneath the mountainous horizon, the temperature falling ten degrees already. Dusk wasn’t far off. Basilios was huddled a yard or so beneath the rim of a multiple rocket crater. It was half-filled with fetid water, leaking from fractured sewerage pipes. The smell resembled rotting cabbages, the three corpses strewn around him turning rigid as rigor mortis set in.

He’d replaced the makeshift tourniquet with a wrapped shirt sleeve, and had kept up the pressure by twisting a thin piece of wood that he’d pushed through the knot. After killing another six Sunni fighters, his desire for revenge was beginning to abate.

Glancing up now, he saw that the acrid smoke created by the explosions had drifted away. But the fires that had raged in the town’s decimated stone and timber buildings had created a thick black-grey cloud that was floating towards the east. He decided to wait until darkness had fallen to make his escape. He would have a better chance. The Sunnis didn’t have night vision, he guessed. Certainly not goggles, although they could have the odd infrared scope.

The attackers had checked out the interlinked craters about five minutes after he’d scrambled into the hole. As he’d heard the footsteps approaching, he’d stuck his head and shoulders underneath a corpse’s torso, conscious of the brown-red blood still leaching out from the exit wounds. After a burst of semi-automatic fire had thudded into a couple of the dead bodies, the craters had been deemed safe, he’d assumed. A hot shell casing had landed on his leg and had burned him even through his desert-tan combat pants, but he hadn’t flinched.

Time passed, slowly. But when the light had faded to the point where his passage could only be betrayed by the receding fires and sketchy moonshine, he decided to act. With his back pressed to the hard-packed mud above the water level, he eased up the crater with his heels, refusing to moan as the movement exacerbated the pain from his leg wound.

He turned sideways and glanced over the stony rim. Thirty yards or so away, mess tins rested on oil burners, and backpacks and weapons were stacked in clusters, the stony ground strewn with spent casings. A broad-shouldered man urinated on a dead body. A solitary dog barked. Basilios could just about make out his family house, the ground carpeted with ash around it. The single-storey structure had been rendered a shell, with crisscrossed blackened beams and shattered stonework. He figured his father and brother had been murdered by now, too, as all the other townsmen had been. But there was nothing to be done.

He scrambled over to the other side of the crater, his AK resting across his curled arms. He’d decided to crawl towards the drainage ditch in the opposite direction to the Sunnis and follow the cut as it ran parallel to the ridge about four miles away. He’d find his mother and sisters and comfort them as they pulled at their hair and mourned their dead.

Then he froze.

He’d sensed someone behind him, and strained now to hear a telltale sign, a heavy breath, a step, a round being chambered. A split second later, he heard a voice speaking in Arabic.

“Everyone in your town is dead. You are either a coward or lucky.”

With an adrenalin rush coursing through his veins, Basilios knew he had two choices: surrender or turn and engage his enemy. Knowing that the Salafists had beheaded those who had given up or were injured, it wasn’t much of a decision to make. But as he was about to turn and discharge the rounds that were left in his clip, the man talked again.

“I will let you live so that you can tell others what will happen to them if they resist us. It seems you are lucky then.”

The accent was foreign and he couldn’t pin it down. But there were jihadists from over seventy countries here, almost fifteen thousand men, or so he’d read, and he dismissed the thought. If the man let him live, he could lead the women and children to safety, which had become his purpose now. He felt he had no option but to turn his head around and let the AK fall from his grip.

The man standing atop the craters was around the same height as him, Basilios thought, dressed in black combat fatigues. He had long straggly hair and an equally unkempt beard. Otherwise, his head was covered by a black headdress. He was unarmed save for a handgun slung low under his armpit and a sheathed sword at his waist. His features were angular; his fingers long and elegant-looking like a pianist’s.

“I’m no coward,” Basilios said.

With that he heard the sound of crunching boots and five jihadists appeared at the rim of the crater, encircling him. Two of them shouldered their assault rifles and jumped down on either side of his bunched-up body. They dragged him up and, pulling his arms behind his back and unclipping his AK from his padded belt, half dragged him to level ground, whereupon they forced his head down. Straining so as not to show the pain in his leg, Basilios was frogmarched over to the man he now figured was their leader.

Getting within a few paces of the jihadist, Basilios was pushed down onto his knees, as his arms were splayed and pushed up painfully behind him. The pressure on his head increased, so that all he could see was the man’s dirt-stained sandals.

“You people are a plague upon the earth,” the man said.

Basilios heard a distinct sound and knew exactly what had happened: the leader had unsheathed his sword. He couldn’t stop himself from panting, knowing he had been duped. His mother and sisters would be alone in a dangerous world now, but he hoped God would forgive him for what he’d done. Amid his bitterness, he said a silent prayer.

But the strike didn’t come. Instead he felt the sword rest on his shoulder. He risked a glance at it. The blade was still bloodstained. He felt it move under his chin and push upwards, coaxing him to look up. He didn’t consider he had any option but to comply.

“Allah is most Merciful and Compassionate,” the man said. He motioned over his body with his left hand as if he was not quite of this world. “It is not I, His humble servant Ibrahim, who has saved you this night. Remember that, Christian. Now run like a dog. Run. Run.”

With that, the man withdrew the sword, and Basilios glimpsed briefly the faint triangle of scars above the man’s right wrist as his sleeve had ridden up, as if he’d had moles removed there.

Basilios was temporarily stunned. He didn’t know if it was a cruel attempt to extend his torment. Perhaps I will be cut down as I stand up or shot in the back as I head for the drainage ditch? he thought. But he knew he didn’t have a choice. As the congealed blood-soaked blade was lifted from his shoulder, he raised himself up in as dignified a fashion as possible, given his wounded leg and escalating uncertainty. He turned without looking at the leader and hobbled towards the ditch.

But he didn’t suffer any further humiliation. In fact, the men seemed to show him a grudging respect, nodding slightly and waving their hands in gestures of encouragement. He had survived.

Chapter 6

When Basilios was some twenty yards away, the man who’d called himself Ibrahim handed the sword to a subordinate, who had stepped over to him for that purpose.

“Take it home for me, brother,” Ibrahim said, but hesitated.

He always hesitated at this point. To him, the weapon, steeped as it was in centuries of sacred warfare, possessed its own consciousness, and sometimes he thought it seemed to pulsate with the burden of it.

“Take good care of it.”

The man nodded.

Ibrahim’s potentially hazardous journey back to the Palestinian territories would not allow him the luxury of carrying his sword, but his select men would go via the tunnels in north-west Egypt, masquerading en route as opportunistic antique dealers before being smuggled into the Gaza Strip.

The other men took out their cellphones and started to take further videos and photos of the decimated town, which they would post on their burgeoning social media sites. The rationale was principally twofold: to recruit foreign jihadists and create fear in their enemies. It had been an effective digital strategy here, and particularly so in neighbouring Iraq.

Ibrahim had his eyes closed now and began reciting verses from the Qur’an, quietly, holding his hands crossed at his chest. Ibrahim’s Shia enemies prayed with their hands dangling by their sides, like apes, his imam had told him years ago. But the Christians didn’t even recognize the Prophet, peace be upon him. Killing them had been God’s will, he believed.

As for the release of the sole survivor of their attack on the town, that wretch would simply ensure that his own reputation as a ruthless commander would spread, adding to his already growing kudos. If these things hadn’t been a factor, he would have killed the Christian when he’d been forced to kneel before him.

He felt whole here, able to play out the purist doctrines of his religion, as he saw it. But the old one, the Amir, had called for him. People had told him it would be so, and then his real mission would begin in earnest. A great mission, Ibrahim thought, the Silent Jihad. And after the brief detour he’d decided to make to Ankara, Turkey, he would devote what little time he’d consented to have left on this earth to it.

The dry wind picked up, bringing with it the stinging sand grains, which clogged up engines and weapons, and swelled the eyes. He wrapped the ends of his black headdress over his mouth and nose. The aroma of lime grooves and climbing jasmine shrubs had left this place. They may never return, he thought. There was nothing but the dank odour of his unwashed sweat and the familiar scent of death.

“A plague is coming,” he whispered in Arabic, “a plague to wipe out a plague.”

Chapter 7

Six Days Later

A heat haze rose above Ankara’s melting tarmac, the capital of Turkey experiencing its hottest summer in twenty years. Western tourists strolling around the historical centre of the city, situated upon a rock-strewn hill, stayed in the shade, their reddened skin pressed close to the battlements of the ancient citadel. If a breeze could have been bought with hard cash, there would’ve been a lot of takers. Even the fine-boned Angora cats hid in alleys under concrete overhangs, their feral nature drained by the fierce midday sun.

A little under a mile away in an inconspicuous office building with a bare concrete facade, the general, Tom’s father, was sitting on a padded chair in front of a chipped mahogany desk. He was wearing dark blue slacks and a white, open-necked shirt. His hair was turning from sandy to grey, but his waistline remained lean due to a mixture of jogging and a healthy diet. Although the room had functioning AC, beads of sweat formed on his furrowed forehead and rolled down his back. He thought it was just bad luck that it was so damned hot.

The Turk behind the desk was called Hassam Habib. He appeared to be too young to be taken seriously in intelligence circles. Mid-thirties at most, the general thought, his crow-black hair and eyebrows so immaculate that he looked as if he’d just had a makeover. He was a handsome man, with prominent cheekbones, a thin high-ridged nose and eyes as unblemished as shellfish flesh. He was an analyst in MIT, the Turkish National Intelligence Organization. And he was looking as if he’d found himself in the wrong job.

The general knew the Turks had their problems, as every independent state did. The country was desperate to join the EU, for economic reasons, but they just couldn’t get to grips with the necessity for human rights and political expediency. And just as the threat of terrorism from the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, was abating, they had to deal with the fallout from the Sunni-Shia conflict.

It was no longer confined to the Middle East and was taking hold in Turkey, too, fuelled by disgruntled Shia refugees from Syria, people who didn’t take too kindly to the Sunni Turkish president’s call for the downfall of the Assad regime. Then there were the Alevi, followers of a Muslim sect that made up twenty-five per cent of Turkey’s population. As a result of increasing sectarian violence against them, they were rioting on the streets and calling for independence. Habib had a right to look a little stressed, the general thought.

After they’d finished some small talk, the wooden office door creaked opened and a rotund middle-aged woman in a stained white dress, that seemed two sizes too small, walked in carrying a tray inlaid with brass. She didn’t speak, but served coffee and a glass of water to each of them before leaving, placing the general’s cup on a lace doily that was already positioned on a small half-moon table tucked into the side of the chair. On the other side of the chair the general had placed his brown leather briefcase.

“Do you like our coffee, general?” Habib asked after finishing two short slurps.

“I like it just fine,” the general said, although like most things in Turkey he found it too harsh.

“Not too bitter for you?”

“I said I like it just fine.”

Habib’s mouth became a closed-mouthed smile. “Now, general,” he said. “How may I be of assistance to you?”

“There’s a man we are particularly interested in,” the general replied, picking up the cup off the doily. “He’s come up on our radar. He’s known only as Ibrahim. The Sunni jihadists call him the Sword of Allah. You heard of him?”

Habib pouted his generous lips before rubbing his angular face.

“I said, you heard of this Ibrahim?”

The general had found Habib’s actions too contrived. The guy wasn’t looking to buy time. He was looking to sell intel.

“It’s a common Muslim name, is it not?” Habib replied, taking a sip of water. “But a modern-day Khālid ibn al-Walīd, I think not,” he went on, referring to the original so-called Sword of Allah, a companion of the Prophet and his greatest military tactician.

“Look, we can dance around this all afternoon, if you like, but why don’t we just cut the bullshit and get right to it? Whatcha say, huh?”

“You Americans. So loud. So aggressive,” Habib said, his tone half serious.

“I apologize if I’ve offended your sensitive side.”

“I can see you don’t want to be, how you say, subtle about this.”

“Subtlety’s a luxury we can’t afford right now.”

“All right, general. No more dancing around, as you put it. I presume I don’t have to spell out the rules?”

“You don’t,” the general said.

He replaced the cup and leaned forwards, legs splayed, fingers interlocked between them, paraphrasing in his own mind what Habib would have said: I will deny all knowledge of what takes place in this office and when I have a chance for revenge I will take it.

Habib nodded. “There’s a rumour that he is protected by the Turkish mafia, and by the militant arm of Hamas in the Palestinian territories,” he said, referring to the Sunni terrorist group. “There are also rumours that he has strong links with Al-Shabaab in East Africa.” He puckered his lips. “Rumours, general, are very dangerous things, are they not?”

The general eyed the younger man. That was a helluva statement, he thought. He made sure his face didn’t show any emotion. “What are my chances of finding him?”

Habib snickered. “Zero, my friend,” he said. “You will never find him. He is a shadow, they say, a puff of grey smoke in the great conflagration that is the warring Middle East. But he has eyes and ears all over, by all accounts. Why do you want to find this man? I mean, apart from the fact he is a terrorist?”

Good question, the general thought.

Chapter 8

Tom had driven for nearly an hour. It was dawn, the muted outline of the fading crescent moon flanked by rolling cumulous clouds. His retreat seemed as if it was in the remote countryside, despite being only about a mile from Arlington County. A hundred-year-old, two-storey farmhouse surrounded on three sides by cornfields and elm coppices. Situated on the banks of the Potomac River, which was a natural border between Virginia and DC, its location was just about perfect for him.

He parked his ten-year-old silver Buick Century and got out. He walked over the flint-ridden path to the porch, admiring the apple orchard nearby. It was skirted by a tarmac walkway that led to a narrow road. On either side of the path, a pristine lawn sloped gently all the way down to the tree-lined banks of the river.

He could just about make out a patch of water in the half-mile-wide stretch. He could relax here and forget about the world of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, at least for as long as he wasn’t contacted via his secure cellphone. He paid a part-time gardener to look after the grounds and keep an eye on his collection of bonsai trees, the man’s wife helping out with cleaning now and then; but apart from them, people rarely visited. He lived alone.

When he couldn’t afford the time to drive up here he stayed in his small redbrick townhouse in Columbia Heights, a couple of blocks from the Metro station, located in the north-west quadrant of DC. It was an ethnically diverse neighbourhood that had been left semi-derelict for decades after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, in 1968. But the last twenty years had seen significant redevelopment, with a burgeoning middle class and an influx of brand names. But he still felt solitary, even there.

The farmhouse was voluminous, some three thousand square yards, with high ceilings and moulded cornices. It had been bequeathed to him from his paternal grandfather, although they had only met on a couple of occasions, due to his sporadic relationship with the general. Once inside, he turned on a lamp and drew the heavy drapes, before tossing his laptop case onto a sofa and tugging at his silk tie. Strolling to the pastel-blue kitchen, with a Picasso calendar on the wall, he glanced at the time on the microwave on the polished granite tabletop, beside the digital radio: 05:12.

After eating a three-egg omelette, he stood up and strolled through the archway into his study area, holding a mug of black coffee. The house seemed overly large now, and he only used a few of the rooms. Switching on the ceiling light, he walked over to the leaded window, made an opening in the off-white Venetian blinds.

Catching a glimpse of his reflection in the windowpane, he thought he looked tired and apprehensive. Moments later, the local fox emerged from a small copse of trees. It had something in its mouth that looked like the carcass of a dead rodent. Something it had hunted down and killed, rather than scavenged. It looked up at him for a few seconds before returning to the shadows.

Two of the study’s walls were lined with bookshelves, containing numerous first editions that had belonged to his grandfather. On the third, hanging at a height of two yards above a console table nestled against the wall, was an original by Tsuguharu Foujita, a Japanese artist who’d applied traditional Oriental ink techniques to French themes. The painting was of a blonde, bare-breasted woman, her head turned to one side. He considered it exquisite. A painting he said expressed perfectly his dual love of European and Far East art. Like all the other art in the house, the Foujita was his.

Sitting at the table, he fired up his home laptop. The screensaver was a photograph of the Empire State Building. An avid collector of trivia, he still marvelled at an extraordinary fact every time he looked at the image. The skyscraper was one hundred and two storeys high. On July 28, 1945, a B-25 bomber had crashed into the side of it by accident, killing fourteen people. Remarkably, the elevator operator, one Betty Lou Oliver, had survived a descent of seventy-five storeys, actually inside the elevator. It was still the longest recorded fall of its kind.

He grinned, as he always did when he recounted her unintended escapade.

He didn’t like to check his private emails on his work smartphone and considered it inappropriate to carry a separate private one, so having a laptop here and at the townhouse was his way of keeping in touch with his few friends. Lester Wilson, an ex-US Marine who owned a private security business, and the only man Tom could call a true friend, had sent him a series of un-PC picture jokes. He knew he did it partly to wind him up and partly to loosen him up. There was no malice in Lester, except if someone was stupid enough to cross him. His punch was like a kick from a tormented mule.

After reading a few other emails from service providers and deleting promotional spam, he closed the laptop down, thinking that he hadn’t seen Lester in a while, despite both of them being based in DC, and made a mental note to catch up once he’d seen his father.

He stretched his arms up involuntarily and yawned loudly. He hadn’t slept in twenty hours but he was almost beyond it. He decided that he’d check on his bonsai plants, try to relax his mind and then hit the sack.

Chapter 9

Habib flipped open a silver casket and fingered a cigarette rolled with brown paper that he seemed desperate to smoke. He didn’t replace it. The general couldn’t figure out if he was trying to give up the habit or if he was just being polite. Maybe it was just a ritual, or another kind of habit. It didn’t matter. He’d had the same negative response concerning Ibrahim from every intelligence man he’d spoken with in Ankara. He brushed his slacks with his right hand before speaking.

“As I said, he’s come up on our radar, nothing more. Why are they protecting him?”

Habib shrugged. “Political and religious allegiances. And money. What else is there?”

“Can you give me something else?”

Habib closed his mouth, drew in his lips and shook his head.

Thinking the guy was overdoing the histrionics, the general said, “I could really make it worth your while.”

“A bribe, general?”

The general felt like saying: what the hell are you talking about? We both know I agreed to pay you a bribe already. But instead he decided to play along in the game a little. He sensed that Habib would enjoy it, that somehow he demanded it. But more importantly, the general believed that it would facilitate a positive outcome.

“Did I say that?” he said.

“It’s a fair question.”

“Let’s just call it a gift from one intelligence professional to another,” the general said, although in his mind he said, You want me to give you a goddamned contract signed in blood, or what?

“Then I accept this gift in friendship and cooperation, but only as such. A man told another man who told his brother who told me that a baba called Maroof, has, well, certain knowledge concerning this man. I dismiss it as mere speculation and womanlike gossip, of course,” Habib said, waving the unlit cigarette between his slender fingers in front of him sanctimoniously, yet with an effete air.

Interesting, the general thought. He eased himself back in the chair and crossed his legs. “Idle speculation, to be sure. But just between us, and to pass the time, if you will, who is this Maroof, the baba?”

“They say he is a degenerate who is addicted to heroin and Russian prostitutes, but powerful, nonetheless. Who knows?”

The general knew the Turkish mafia dominated the global smack trade. They processed the raw opiates from the Middle East in underground labs and trafficked the drug to the US and Western Europe. He knew too that the local mafia were more deadly than the Albanians and equalled the Mexican cartels in terms of savagery, favouring prolonged torture. The babas, or godfathers, were shadowy figures, who employed death squads such as the Grey Wolves. It was well-documented by the CIA that the so-called Turkish “Deep State”, an arrangement between the babas, politicians, intelligence services and high-ranking military officers, was impenetrable. The mafia ran protection rackets and in turn paid protection to those who could otherwise destroy them.

“Anything else?” the general said.

“That’s it.”

“You sure?”

Habib picked up the phone from its cradle and gestured towards the general with it. “Shall I call for your car now, general?”

The general decided not to push it. He had a lead and that was more than he’d expected before he’d entered the office. The game had come to an end. He stooped to the side and took a notepad and pen from his briefcase. He found that it elicited a more honest response than a recording device. It was a simple psychological tool whereby the interviewee perceived a lesser sense of replication, perhaps because it lacked the evidential value of a verbatim recording.

“Now, this damn conflict – what’s the army’s position?” the general asked, knowing that Turkey’s army was the second biggest in NATO.

His question was a genuine one. Part of his remit was to find out if there was any chance that the army would take a hard-line stance. Maybe even enact a coup, a temporary military government to ensure full-blown anarchy didn’t break out on the streets.

The “Deep State”, the state within the Turkish state, the general knew, had been born of the military’s paranoia since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey was constantly on the brink of some sort of collapse, they believed. It was ultra-nationalistic and, by its very nature, undemocratic and corrupt. But Turkey was a trusted ally, at least for now, and with the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East, the general had been briefed that the White House and the State Department were more than keen to keep it that way.

As Habib spouted the official party line of the increasingly Islamic party that held power, the general couldn’t stop his mind from wandering to Ibrahim. The man was becoming a menace, stirring up Sunni Muslim agitation and recruiting jihadists from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Initially, he’d come up on the Mossad’s radar, the Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations.

Things were sketchy, but the Mossad would get short shrift from the Sunni Turks, so this had been down to him. The Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, his employer, a relatively new federal agency under the control of the Defense Department that was part of the overarching foreign military espionage organization, wanted the guy found: dead or alive. Osama bin Laden style, although that was only known to a handful of people in the US.

“So, general, I’m sure you have other pressing business. But let me give you some friendly advice. Despite the heat, negotiating the political landscape in Turkey is like walking across a frozen lake, so you would do well to tread light from now on.” Habib smiled his closed-mouthed smile.

The general nodded. Habib was right, despite what appeared to be his change in attitude. Perhaps the bribe has mellowed him, the general thought. The Turk was richer by ten thousand US dollars, after all.

He reached down to his briefcase, replaced the pen and pad, got up and left without saying a word, feeling a little shabbier than when he’d first arrived, despite the intel. But then again, he always did after doing deals like this. When he’d worn a uniform life had seemed so much simpler, so much more black and white.

Chapter 10

After a full ten seconds, Habib opened a desk drawer with his free hand and took out a silver Zippo. He lit up and took a long pull on the cigarette before taking a disposable cellphone from his inside jacket pocket.

He’d get paid by the Americans. He liked that, even though he had put his pension, if not his life, in jeopardy. But he consoled himself by thinking that if the worst happened, he and his young family could run, and there were a lot worse places than the US to run to. They would put him into some sort of witness protection programme. It would be fine.

He laughed out loud like a crazy man. Habib, the double agent. Yes, he liked that. And the best part was that he would get paid whether the general died or not, given what he knew was about to transpire.

He walked over to the window and looked out at the seemingly boundless cityscape, at the blocks of glass and steel and the powder-blue tiles of the ancient minarets. These were the two stories of Turkey, he thought, at once a modern free market economy and a Muslim state that still believed dogma was relevant. As a result, he foresaw a great calamity about to afflict his country, the strains of which were already apparent. The dichotomy between women who wore make-up and Gucci shades, and those who wanted to beat them for not wearing the hijab.

But most of all he feared the Sunni-Shia conflict and all of its violent offshoots. He didn’t want his wife and two girls to be around when the streets were filled with sectarian gangs and armed militias. He had joined MIT to protect them, but, the dangers of his duplicity aside, no one could protect them from what was coming, he believed. He glimpsed movement in his peripheral vision and looked down at the windowsill. A moth was there, with speckled brown wings. It was crawling around as if it was drunk. He looked closer and saw that it was dragging one of its back legs behind it, which had been clearly rendered useless. He put his outstretched fingers close to it, as if he was coaxing it to climb up. But the insect just scuttled around even more slowly in a decreasing circle.

He thought about opening the window to let it fly out but quickly realized it was dying, probably of old age or sheer fatigue. And as he looked at it dragging its leg behind it in that self-defeating circle, he saw the general in his mind’s eye.

He’s just left, he texted with his thumb.

Chapter 11

Ibrahim was sitting at a dark wooden table with a pristine white tablecloth, the sides flanked by empty terracotta pots. The open-fronted café, protected from the sun by a red-wine-coloured canopy, overlooked a square, a paved pedestrian area dotted with stubby palm trees set in whitewashed stones. He was wearing a cinnamon-coloured suit and a brown collarless shirt. His long dishevelled hair had been styled professionally and rested low on the nape, his beard reduced to a goatee, the sign of an intellectual in Turkey.

A few yards away, a young man was selling ice cream from a shaded, hand-drawn cart, and children were lining up excitedly. It was 12:36 in Ankara, seven hours ahead of DC. Despite the heat, those locals who weren’t labouring in the open for a living appeared carefree and relaxed.

People forget easily, Ibrahim thought, or perhaps chose to believe nothing changes. The debris from a demonstration that had taken place the night before, and which he’d witnessed from the small balcony of his hotel room, had been all but cleared away. Riot police had used water cannon and stun grenades to disperse the anti-government demonstrators. If it had started up again this morning, the truck bombing, days in the planning, would have been thwarted.

This was an Alevi sector of the city. Filthy heretics, he believed, whose women wore Western clothes and prayed with their men. But within a few minutes the sedate Ankara scene would descend into a man-made hell.

He opened a copy of Zaman, the popular Turkish newspaper, and feigned reading the business page. There were four other people sitting in the café, a couple of old men, their faces streaked with deep lines like unironed T-shirts, a smart-suited professional woman, who smelt of lavender, and the pot-bellied owner. Ibrahim was six-foot two, so sitting made him less conspicuous. He knew that many Western intelligence agencies refused to employ a surveillance operative over five-eleven for just that reason.

He’d entered the country via Cologne under a forged passport, assuming the identity of a Muslim child who’d died at birth in that German city. Many Turks lived and worked there, and he’d been one of over a hundred who’d flown into Ankara’s Esenboğa Airport. Despite what he was about to do, he felt safe; untouchable, even.

He felt a tug on his suit sleeve, and peered down. A little girl was standing next to him, her wide, luminous eyes desperate to convey hope. But there was no hope there, he thought, just a form of dulled resignation. She was barefoot; her olive-green dress dirt-stained and frayed. He guessed her hair hadn’t seen shampoo for a month, and her fingernails looked like a coal miner’s. She was a gypsy girl, no more than seven years old, and he wanted her gone from the area. The truck bomb he was going to detonate would cause havoc. He didn’t kill little girls when he had a choice in the matter. Little Sunni Muslim girls, at least, as most Turkish gypsies were.

He checked his heavy wristwatch. He had time to spare.

She held out her hand, begging, but said nothing. Ensuring no one was paying attention he folded the paper and slapped her face with it, just hard enough to cause involuntary tears without leaving the skin marked. She turned and ran. He watched her until her fragile frame had reached the sidewalk proper and had crossed the narrow street at the square’s perimeter, her dark curly hair becoming lost among the crowds on the other side. When he was sure that she was out of harm’s way, he allowed himself a faint smile.

The bomb had been placed in a large wooden crate, which lay now on the bed of the stationary flat-back truck, covered with a heavy-duty tarp. There was no possibility of planting a bomb onto the chassis of the limo itself. Even if his associates could’ve arranged clandestine access, the chassis and wheel arches would have been checked regularly with mirrors, and an onboard bomb-detection system would have picked up anything that had been missed, as it scanned for magnets and noise signatures. A detached bomb had been the best option.

He would sit and wait, as if he was just another Turkish intellectual reading a newspaper and sipping the strong coffee; just another man shaded from the intense sunlight enjoying people-watching. But in reality he was about to become the most dangerous man alive, and one day, a day that was fast-approaching, after what he said was this somewhat irritating if necessary act, the world would know that, too.

Chapter 12

Tom had taken a lukewarm shower in his first-floor bathroom and had put on sweatpants and a T-shirt. He walked downstairs now and out of the kitchen door into the conservatory that ran almost the length of the back of the property and housed his sensitive bonsai trees. He had six inside, planted in ceramic pots, and a dozen outside, the hardy perennials.

There were weeping figs, Californian redwoods, junipers, Black Hills spruce, and bald cypress. He’d spent the last two years doing his best to re-create what he considered the greatest bonsai of them all, an imitation of the five-needle pine. The original, some five hundred years old, was one of the National Treasures of Japan and was documented as having been cared for by a Shogun.

Stepping forwards to a wooden table, he unfurled a cloth wrap-around and stared at his collection of bonsai tools. They were held in place neatly by their individual pockets, like an electrician’s kit: the leaf trimmer, the root hook, the branch bending jacks, and the concave cutter. The bon referred to the tray-like ceramic pot, with drainage holes, in which the miniature trees grew. The sai meant cultivation. The pot confinement kept the trees small, together with regular pruning of the roots and crown. The bending jacks were used to create the hanging branches effect.

His five-needle pine was on a bed of coarse sand and Akadama clay pellets, imported from Japan. He breathed in, began to prune the branches, taking particular care, as excessive pruning could kill the tree. Twenty seconds later, he wrapped some copper wire around the trunk and used a length to connect two branches. Then he watered it: a growing work of art.

That done, he walked back out of the kitchen to the living room and settled down on his ox-blood sofa, with a book of Picasso paintings in his hands. After flicking through a few pages, he focussed on Woman Ironing. Truth be told, he always focussed on this representation of the Spaniard’s masterpiece. He’d seen the original in the Venetian Hotel’s Guggenheim gallery in Vegas ten years back. It’d lingered in his mind like an exotic view experienced on a vacation, or the face of some former girlfriend.

The painting was superficially mundane, the colours of an overcast day, and had hung on the gallery’s steel outer wall via magnets. Painted in the master’s Blue Period, it was the study of a near-emaciated young woman hunched over a heavy iron, pressing a shirt. The woman appeared to be worn out. A sympathetic portrayal of the exploited poor, he’d read; a study in melancholy. Looking intently at it now, she reminded him of his mother.

He stood up and walked over to his drinks cabinet and fixed himself a Jack Daniel’s and Coke. No ice, about three fingers’ worth. Sipping his drink, he realized he had to focus on the living rather than the dead. After he’d gotten a little closer to his father, he’d questioned him about Dan Crane, the enigmatic CIA operative who’d watched his back as he’d tracked down the Secretary of State after she’d been kidnapped in Islamabad thirteen months ago.

His father had told him that he’d gone to Beirut to rescue Crane from Hezbollah in the eighties, and, unofficially, had paid for his release. Crane hadn’t given away the general’s identity to his kidnappers, so the general couldn’t give up on him, either. It was a code of honour between men and women who risked their freedom and lives on a regular basis, Tom knew.

Tom’s next assignment was a so-called mannyguarding, the close-protection of a foreign diplomat’s child, and he was getting sick of it. Crane had offered him a job in the clandestine services provided by the CIA after he’d been responsible for saving the secretary, and, taking a hearty slug of the Jack and Coke, he knew that that was getting more appealing by the day.

He looked over at the book once more, at the Woman Ironing. His mother was dead; it had been a shitty life in the years between his father leaving and her death. But bitching about it to the man who hadn’t even left him with his surname would mean he would become a sullen bore, and Tom had resolved to make things right between them.

Chapter 13

The general had reported to the Pentagon on the position regarding the likely protection of Ibrahim by the Turkish mafia and the Muslim terrorist groups via a secure satphone a couple of minutes ago. He’d left Habib’s office and had snuck into a nearby alcove, anxious neither to be seen nor heard. Now, after stepping out of an old-fashioned cage elevator, he walked across the dull grey flagstones to the revolving exit doors, nodding to the two plainclothes operatives sitting behind a desk to the right beneath a wide staircase.

Outside, the heat was still oppressive and the general was glad that his chauffeur had had the wits to park the black Mercedes limo beneath the splayed branches of a deciduous tree in the small courtyard. The chauffeur was standing with a couple of police outriders that MIT had seconded to protect the limo, but which the general felt were unnecessary.

But he was a three-star general now, the de facto head of operations at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and he conceded the security went with the territory. Besides, Turkey wasn’t Switzerland, and suddenly he had a nagging feeling concerning what Habib had told him about Ibrahim, despite the bribe. In retrospect, he wondered if it had been given too eagerly, and he felt the ice on that metaphorical frozen lake shift a little beneath his feet. He felt played in a game within a game.

As he walked down the stone steps to the gravel at ground level, he focussed on the trio of men in front of him, seeing that they were smoking foul-smelling Turkish cigarettes in the shade beneath an overhang. But they stubbed them out quickly when he called out to them, and scampered over to where the limo and the motorcycles were parked like rebuked teenage kids. It was a scene he’d seen many times in foreign countries. Those at the top were treated with deference, irrespective of their vices, and outside of the States he always had the feeling of stepping back in time.

The chauffeur opened the back door, the general dipped in, leaving the seatbelt hanging, and he was driven out of the building’s courtyard. As the limo passed between the wrought-iron gates that abutted a tarmac slope leading to the street proper, he considered the possibility that MIT was protecting Ibrahim, too. There wasn’t a lot of logic to it other than some overarching but misguided geopolitical strategy regarding the Sunni-Shia conflict, and, for now at least, there was nothing to be done. He was doing his job and, after just four more appointments today, he would soon be home to spend some downtime with Tom.

He was looking forward to seeing his son. He knew he’d been through a helluva lot before he’d come of age, most of which, he, as his father, had been responsible for. He’d read a bit about how kids were affected by the break-up of their parents and how an absent father was about as healthy for a teenage boy as a diet of fries and pizzas, but he had vowed to change that a while back and they were now forming something that could be termed a wholesome relationship. And, less than two years off a retirement, which he intended to spend sailing in the Caribbean and playing golf in Palm Springs, he could involve his son in that, as and when time permitted.

As the outriders stopped oncoming traffic at intersections, the general glanced outside the limo’s smoked-glass window. Old men in flat hats were sitting under the awnings of hookah bars, puffing on the pipes and drinking the sticky coffee. Tired-looking women swept store fronts clean of dust and garbage, and young men sat astride mopeds, wearing shades and tight jeans, pretending, he guessed, that they were in a photo shoot.

But there was a distinct lack of females wearing the hijab, and he guessed that the metropolitan people of most countries tended to value personal freedom above tradition. It was different in the rural provinces, a fact that was being exacerbated by the rift between modernists and Islamists, something, he knew, that would dominate politics in the Greater Middle East for maybe the next twenty years. That and the other two main fault lines: the schism in the Muslim faith between Sunnis and Shias, and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian issue.

After about ten minutes, the limo took a sharp right and, slowing down to take account of the motorcyclists’ sudden reduction in speed, seemed to crawl along at no more than fifteen miles per hour. The general thought the road looked like a back alley, bordered by the rear of rundown apartment blocks and derelict warehouses. But as he looked ahead and saw that it led to a well-populated square with squat palm trees, he figured it was a shortcut.

The chauffeur, who had several chins and a neatly trimmed moustache, and who the general had secretly nicknamed Oliver Hardy, turned his head forty-five degrees, and spoke pidgin English. “This Alevi part of city. Many problems. They like to fight police. No respect for government.”

The general kept silent. He’d read about the Alevi as part of his substantial briefing on the country before he’d left the States. It was a sect that had evolved from Shia Muslims in a Sunni dominated country. Some referred to them as Sufi-Shia, due to their unorthodox spiritual practices.

Even before the recent outbreaks of sectarian violence, they’d existed alongside the Sunnis in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and loathing. They’d always seen themselves as a pragmatic counterbalance to Sunni extremism. But they had strong ties with the Shia-based Alawites in Syria, even if many of them didn’t agree with Assad’s tactics, and this had literally enflamed the enmity with the Sunnis.

But something else was bothering him, too. He couldn’t pin it down, and wasn’t anything more than an ill-defined notion. Somehow the general felt that this Ibrahim would pose a whole new threat. Even if it was just a whim, he knew that in his business something akin to an animal sixth sense could save your life if you let it, and his was just about to spike.

As the car reached the edge of the square, and turned right along the one-way street that edged it, the general heard the motorcycle engines revving little more than a split second before the MIT outriders sped away.

“They crazy men,” the chauffeur said, raising a hand in the air.

Not crazy, the general thought, but in on it. He knew something bad was about to happen. He just didn’t know if it would be an assault by submachine gun-wielding assassins, an IED, or a kidnapping attempt.

“Stop the damn car and run,” he shouted as his left hand went for the door handle.

Chapter 14

Remaining seated at the café, Ibrahim knew that the vehicle the general was travelling in wasn’t an up-armoured limo; all part of the setup. As the motorcyclists reached a suitable distance, he used the newspaper to mask the removal of the cellphone from the pocket of his pants. He’d done the same as he’d received the text message from the MIT officer, Habib, who’d had the meeting with the general just minutes earlier. There was no coded text, and that meant that it was game on.

When the limo came parallel with the parked truck, he thumbed the cell, still hidden beneath the paper, in order to activate the bomb by remote control. It was a simple procedure, ringing the vibrate mode on another cell attached to the explosives by conducting wires. This cell had been modified, using an electric match – a small amount of primary charge fitted around the battery that ignited when the current passed through it – as a detonator.

Two seconds later, the truck rose a full three yards into the air, leaving a gaping crater instantly. Due to the force of the blast, the shockwave made the Merc somersault to the right before crashing into the crowds who were jamming the sidewalk. No one could survive that, he thought. It would take hours for fire crews to cut free their mangled bodies from the wreckage.

But the immediate aftermath was eerily calm, as if the explosion had rendered everyone deaf and dumb. Allah was Most Compassionate and Most Merciful, but He demanded the death of unbelievers. When the screaming and activated fire alarms cut through the silence, Ibrahim felt a calmness and contentment he had never known, a spiritual euphoria that he hoped would last for hours afterwards.

It was good practice for a terrorist to walk calmly away from an incident that they’d created. But, apart from the dead or injured, those in the square were either running for the exit routes, or were paralyzed with shock or fear. With the sound of the wailing of the injured in his ears, he began to sprint in the opposite direction to the bomb wreckage, feigning distress.

Ibrahim saw the white Ford Fiesta pull up at the designated place, a grocery store twenty yards down the adjacent street. As he got within a few feet of the car, the back door was swung open. The Turkish mafia had wanted to use an S series Mercedes, but he’d insisted upon a more popular and less conspicuous form of transport. He’d also ensured that no one exited the car and held open the door for him, something that could garner attention, even with the ensuing chaos around him. He got in and opened a translation App on his secure smartphone.

“No speeding,” he said in Turkish.

It was vital that he got to his destination undetected. The Amir was waiting for him and the Silent Jihad was about to begin. He was on a short timeframe, too, but speeding was a bad idea. The cops could be bribed and he had influential friends in the highest echelons of Turkey’s “Deep State”, but an enforced delay could be fatal. Some dumb cop could even attempt to make a connection. As a result, he might even be overlooked, and he couldn’t allow that to happen. He’d been reaching this point for years. Resting his head against the rear seat, he studied the folds of skin on the driver’s neck, reminding him of a slab of pork belly. He thumbed the APP.

“How long before we get there?” Ibrahim asked.

The black-suited man in the front passenger seat turned around. He had a thin, pitted face and a dropping moustache, a scar that ran from his left eye to his jaw line. “We drive you, we don’t like you. Keep you fucking mouth shut and we get there quicker,” he said in Turkish.

Ibrahim didn’t understand him, but the tone was obvious enough. He guessed the man had swapped a shoeshine kit for a switchblade years ago. He chose to ignore him. He nodded, appearing subservient.

The plan had been conceived following a report by a middle-ranking officer in Turkish military intelligence, who was in the mafia’s pocket and reported to them intermittently on any potential crackdowns on the smack trade. The officer had informed the mafia, who had in turn informed Ibrahim for the usual fee regarding relevant anti-jihadist intel, that he’d found out that the general had been working on the case for six months.

When Ibrahim had heard this he knew that that meant the general was capable of getting close. If he did, he might be able to not only thwart what had now become his raison d’être, but also interrupt or even sabotage the mission as a whole. And so he had found out what he could about the man.

Once he had he knew the general had to die. It was the only decision to make. Ibrahim had decided to do it himself. It was a risk being so close to mission time, but it was riskier to get more people involved with the assassination of a top-ranking US military official. He didn’t want any mistakes made so close to the Silent Jihad.

He closed his eyes now. It was done. There would be no comeback and he was going on to greater things. By the time he opened his eyes he told himself that he would have forgotten the general had ever existed.

Chapter 15

Halfway out of the car door, which abutted the café and store fronts, the general had seen a white-red flash and had heard a massive explosion. Vaguely, he’d sensed that he’d been flying through the air; that he’d been cut by what had felt like dozens of razorblades. He’d landed on his back with a sickening thud, his bloody head jarring. The world had turned black.

Three minutes later he tried to blink and realized that his eyelids were heavy with, he guessed, brick dust and flecks of tarmac. He couldn’t feel his legs or his arms, but there was a searing pain in his chest. Smelling burning gasoline, he heard people screaming and the sound of sirens from fast-approaching emergency vehicles, although the noise was muted, as if he was wearing padded ear defenders. Then the competing sounds simply began to merge into a dull drone. But he could make out another distinct smell, a smell that was both sweet and nauseating. Grimacing, he realized it was his own burning flesh.

“Jesus,” he said, his voice little more than a murmur.

He tasted blood and chocked as bile rose in his throat. He did his best to keep it down but the conscious effort made his head swim. The pain moved over his body in waves. With that came the realization that his breathing was shallow and wheezy. It seemed as if his airway had all but closed over and his lungs had partially collapsed. There was no way he could move his limbs an inch.

Feeling what he took for the sun beating on his forehead, he risked opening his right eye partially. As grit made him blink repeatedly, he glimpsed the sky directly above him. It was shrouded by thick black smoke. Despite this, the heat intensified and he realized it was coming from a fire. Fearing being burnt alive, the sky began to rain red-hot ash, which settled on his face and fizzled out, and felt to him like the caress of death.

Blinking still, he sensed someone bending down to his face. He winced involuntarily, fearing the worst. The person began speaking in Turkish, a low, muffled voice, or so it appeared. Then his head was being raised. The pain in his head and neck made him clench his teeth and moan. Something was placed around his neck, supporting it. Something smooth yet firm, which, despite his dazed state, he realized was a brace.

When he was raised off the ground he felt the urge to vomit again. His head ached; his eye closed. But as quickly as the pain had risen in a crescendo, it began to abate now, the throbbing being replaced by numbness, even in his neck and chest. He felt as if he was floating and, incongruously, a closed-mouthed smile crossed his face. Morphine, he thought. Thank God for morphine, although he’d felt no prick from a needle, and that meant he might be paralyzed, albeit in one or more of his limbs.

But as he was being carried his head seemed to explode, his skull crack and shift, despite the drug. He sensed what felt like warm blood flowing from the back of his head to the nape of his neck. He panicked, his mind forming words he couldn’t express.

With that, he lost consciousness.

Chapter 16

Tom had drawn the heavy drapes to hide the encroaching sunlight and lay asleep now on his bed, his angular face lost between two chocolate-coloured buckwheat pillows. His cellphone on the nightstand began to buzz in vibrate mode, moving around like a kid’s toy whose battery had almost juiced out. His half-limp hand stretched out and picked it up.

Yawning, he said, “Who’s this?”

“Mr Dupree?”

It was a man’s voice. Businesslike, he thought, blinking his eyes slowly like a reptile.

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“Can you be at Langley in an hour, sir?”

He rubbed his face with his free hand. “Langley? What time is it?”

“Zero one thirty, sir.”

Tom sighed. “You kiddin’ me?” He’d been asleep for the best part of eighteen hours.

“It’s important, sir.”

“Yeah. What’s this all about?”

“Your father, sir. It’s about your father, General Dupont.”

He sat up, switched on the arc light on the nightstand to his left. “What about him?”

“Langley in an hour, sir. The NHB,” the man said, referring to the New Headquarters Building.

Tom thought for a couple of seconds. “Okay.”

The line went dead.

He put the cell down back on the nightstand, pushed back the duvet and vaulted out of bed. What the hell did the CIA want to say to him about his father at this hour? he thought. As he pulled on a pair of jeans and a black sweater, he decided that trying to work that out would be an impossible task and, at best, could only lead to increasingly negative conclusions.

He knelt down, opened the drawer on his nightstand and eased out his badge and SIG. He clipped the badge to the belt on his jeans and, out of habit, released the handgun’s magazine, checking there was a full complement of twelve .357 SIG cartridges, and that the chamber was empty. Satisfied, he walked to his closet and took a nylon windbreaker from a hangar.

Apart from his time as head of the Secretary of State’s protective detail, and a couple of occasions when he’d been in the DS counterterrorism unit, he hadn’t had any interaction with the CIA. Truth was, he felt uneasy around them, not because he feared them, but rather because he found their take on the world changed with a disconcerting regularity. One day some group was an ally, the next it was a sworn enemy.

The CIA had advocated airstrikes against the Assad regime in Syria, which would bolster the Sunni jihadists there, and then a few months later, they’d advocated airstrikes against the same Sunni jihadists to bolster the Shia regime in Iraq, and he couldn’t imagine living his life in that way. Then there was Dan Crane, of course, the man who’d been saved by his father and had helped him find the secretary. The guy was a walking contradiction, too.

Thinking this he headed out of his second-storey bedroom and down the staircase without turning on the lights. Reaching his study he couldn’t remember where he’d left his small recording device. To the world, it was a fountain pen. Sam, his veteran DS driver, had told him once that when he had to meet with the CIA or Homeland Security he should tape it. Given that this meet had something to do with his father he felt it was doubly important.

He flipped the light switch. The sudden brightness had caused his tropical fish to dart for cover. The huge tank, which lined the fourth wall, appeared to be empty. It could be a full twenty minutes before they emerged from the encrusted rock formations and clumps of green plants, and begin to swim in the open again, circling the miniature Doric columns. They were timid souls, Tom thought; or perhaps paranoiac ones, like him. Not a bad trait for a fish in a tank to have. He scribbled a note for the lady cleaner to change the water and put in a fresh delayed feeder.

He got a text message, a world security update from the DS’s counterterrorism unit. Truck bomb kills thirty-four in Ankara. Two American casualties.

Chapter 17

It was only a twenty minute journey to Fairfax County, Virginia. Tom was driving his Buick, the streets deserted but well lit. The CIA HQ was known as Langley after the unincorporated community it was situated in a few miles west of DC. But it had been called the George Bush Center for Intelligence since 1999, a compound consisting of a couple of major linked buildings set in two hundred and fifty-eight acres of land.

After passing through the high-level security checkpoint, Tom parked his Buick in the visitors’ car lot and walked to the entrance of the New Headquarters Building, or NHB. It was a chilly early morning, dawn still hours away. He passed the “Kyptos” sculpture, which ran from the entrance to the north-west corner of the courtyard, a massive S-shaped copper screen containing numerous coded messages, and felt his sense of unease heighten.

The single-storey section of the compound was flanked by two marble pillars, the glass facade on either side bathed in a yellowish glow from the security lights. Atop the pillars, an elongated, curved glass roof gave it the appearance of a modern art museum, rather than the most sophisticated intelligence hub on earth. The NHB, completed in 1991, was characterized by two, six-storey office blocks and was situated on a hill behind the well-known Old Headquarters Building, with its iconic CIA seal in the entrance lobby.

After being processed by internal security and given a laminated visitor’s badge, Tom entered the lobby area of the NHB, which was dotted with commemorative plaques and an impressive collection of donated statues. The four-storey glass atrium between the two tower blocks had three model drones suspended overhead. They were beetle-black and would ensure that visitors were left in no doubt that what went on here was deadly serious, Tom thought.

The main entrance to the NHB was on the fourth floor of one of the blocks, with an impressive skylight ceiling. Tom stepped out of an elevator into the corridor. At the end, he could see the still well-lit structure of the Old Headquarters Building, integrated by a network of further corridors, the wall space broken up by hung works of abstract art of the Washington Color School.

Before he could be questioned at the reception desk, he noticed a slim young woman dressed in a black business suit with a large-lapelled white shirt walking towards him. Her blonde hair was cut in a neat bob, her gait confident.

As she held out her long-fingered hand to greet him, he caught a waft of her perfume. Expensive and classy, he thought, reminding himself that he hadn’t been in a relationship with a woman for close to three years. He was left feeling oddly remorseful about that, given the circumstances of his visit.

“Cindy Rimes,” she said with a distinct New York accent. “Thank you for coming, Mr Dupree.”

Tom shook her hand and nodded. “My pleasure, ma’am.”

He got the impression that she was slightly embarrassed by her name, but couldn’t think why. It was as good a name as any. He didn’t ask her why he’d been woken up and told to report here. He’d get the answers regarding his father soon enough, he figured.

“Please follow me, sir,” she said, leading him down the corridor.

Getting about halfway up the corridor he saw a large alcove and was invited to sit on a low-slung chair behind a chrome and glass table, containing several copies of the National Geographic and promotional material for the agency. Apart from a water cooler and a vending machine, the space was empty.

Thirty seconds later he watched another woman approaching him, her hair in a French plait. She was wearing a fawn skirt and pearl-white blouse. He declined the offer of coffee and was led into a meeting room nearby. Judging by the acres of glass at the NHB, he reckoned it was the only room without windows. It was roughly thirty feet square, with bare walls and a tiled floor. He sat on a chrome-armed chair at the oblong pinewood table and waited. The woman, a six-foot redhead, with flawless skin, a twenty-thousand-dollar porcelain smile and an Ivy League assuredness, had said that someone would be along shortly.

After a couple of minutes, the door opened without a knock and a heavy-set man in his early sixties entered. He wore a dove-grey suit and shiny loafers. Dan Crane, the newly appointed director of the agency’s National Clandestine Service, although that was classified.

He sat at the table and immediately began to ride the chair. “You look better than the last time I saw you, Tom,” he said. “But saying that, you couldn’t have looked worse if you’d been trampled by a herd of goddamned wildebeest. Those jokers in the DS handed you a medal yet? Saving the Secretary of State’s ass singlehanded like that. I told ya, come work for me.”

“You put weight on?” Tom asked. He didn’t like Crane’s jibe about the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and his back was up. Crane had a habit of doing that.

“Nah. Lost a couple of pounds in point of fact.”

“What’s this all about?” Tom said.

“Your father was the victim of a truck bomb in Ankara.”

Tom felt nauseous, his brain finding it hard to digest what he’d been told. He clenched his jaw and grimaced.

“You wanna glass of water? Something stronger?” Crane said.

Tom fought hard to hide his shock; his pain, too. “Just tell me he’s okay and then give it to me frame by frame.”

Crane stopped riding the chair, eased forwards a fraction and pinched his forehead. “He survived the blast, but the last I heard, he’s in a bad way.”

“You don’t have anything up to date? I heard there were two American casualties.”

“No. Sorry, Tom. He was there on an official visit to find out how the sectarian violence is panning out, and whether there’s a threat of civil war. Face-to-face is always preferable,” Crane said. “They hit him in a square. The bomb was likely Semtex. The Americans were a couple on a world tour. Pensioners by all accounts. Goddamn bad luck.”

“That it?”

Crane nodded.

“If you’re holding out on me, I won’t take it kindly.”

“I’ll forgive you that one, Tom, cuz of your old man and I like ya. But you keep pulling my chain, I won’t take kindly to that, either,” Crane said, and he began to ride the chair again.

Tom nodded, almost imperceptibly.

Crane smiled, his lips closed. “Okay then. The Pentagon is sending a medical team. If he’s up to it, he’ll come home where he belongs. I’m sending four CIA paramilitaries to make sure there ain’t a replay. You’re free to go along, too.”

“Who was it?”

“We don’t know. Yet,” Crane replied. “But I promise you this, Tom, when we do they’ll either rot in solitary, or the earth.”

Chapter 18

Ibrahim had been driven for three hundred and forty miles due south on state highway D715 to Bozyazi, a journey that had lasted just over seven and a half hours. Bozyazi was a remote Turkish town on the Mediterranean. The roads from either direction along the coast or over the Taurus Mountains, which formed a monolithic backdrop to the town, were too hazardous for sightseers, and that was good.

From there he’d been put aboard a fishing boat that had motored the forty-seven miles to an isolated bay in the Karpass Peninsula in northern Cyprus, which the Turks had styled the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus following the military invasion in 1974. Not one country had recognized it as legitimate, yet it still existed.

Ibrahim had left the fishing boat in the remote bay and, with his head and face covered by a white linen scarf, had been rowed ashore the last half a mile, where he’d been met by two Turkish Cypriots who dealt smack for the mafia to European tourists and residents on the island. He hadn’t liked having to rely on these types, but the Afghan Taliban had been growing and trading heroin for years to fund their jihad and it had been a necessary evil, he’d believed.

He’d stayed hidden in a beach shack for several hours before heading south-east via the Mediterranean Sea for a further sixty-two miles. He’d travelled in the hold aboard a small freighter, with a cargo of fruit bound for Lebanon. It was the most religiously diverse country in the Middle East, albeit due to ongoing sectarian violence, it was the most segregated, too.

The main religions, Ibrahim knew, were Muslim and Christian. In terms of percentages of population, there was an equal split between the Sunnis and Shias, closely followed by Maronite Christians. The Sunnis primarily occupied West Beirut, the north of the country and the southern coastal regions. Given his ultimate destination, the Gaza Strip in the Palestinian territories, the freighter had travelled down the coast to the ancient Phoenician city of Sidon, a major port about twenty-five miles south of Beirut.

Sidon was the third largest city in Lebanon. If a man wanted to stay hidden, Ibrahim had learned, he had two choices: go somewhere remote or somewhere teeming with humanity. But their network was growing after the death of bin Laden. Apart from Hamas and the Islamic State group, there was al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al-Shabaab in East Africa, a dozen more smaller affiliated organizations. Even the hawks in Washington, he’d been told, were admitting that al-Qaeda and militant jihad generally was on the rise.

After docking, he’d been met by a local Sunni fighter, who’d driven him in a rusted Mazda to Sidon’s walled medieval city. It was located on a promontory jutting out to the Mediterranean, a veritable maze made up of a plethora of narrow alleyways. After resting up in a first-storey room a hundred yards from the Sea Castle, and eating a meal of fresh fish, bread and citrus fruit, he’d linked up with a two further Islamists and had been hidden in the back of a truck beneath a pile of cardboard boxes and a filthy tarp.

He’d been driven to within six miles of the Rosh HaNikra Crossing between the small coastal city of Naqoura, Lebanon, and the northern Israeli kibbutz that bore the name of the international boundary. But he hadn’t been able to cross over there as the terminal was operated by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon and Israeli Defence Force, the IDF, and forbade the passage of tourists or visitors. Instead he’d been led along a narrow goat track to the outskirts of the city.

The Gaza Strip was surrounded on two sides by Israel, and travelling in what Ibrahim considered to be the most anti-Muslim country on earth was just too dangerous. The routes into Gaza were either open or closed and the situation changed regularly, depending on whether or not Hamas and Israel were at war. Even entry by sea to Gaza was a hazardous lottery.

A land, air and sea blockade had been in force by Israel since 2007. This was in direct response to Hamas winning legislative elections there the year before and their victory against Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in the subsequent battle for the city. The Israelis had long memories and, despite the promises, things remained the same, especially after the intermittent kidnapping of Jewish settlers led to violent IDF incursions into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Israel maintained the blockade on the basis of preventing rocket attacks and to curtail Hamas’s ability to obtain ordnance for skirmishes. Following international pressure the blockade had been lessened in 2010, with Israel allowing civilian goods into Gaza. But the damage had been done. The economy hadn’t recovered and unemployment was at forty per cent, with manufacturing decimated, and the restrictions on people entering and exiting the region continued unabated. The war that took place in the summer of 2014 had brought about such enmity between the two sides that a lasting solution appeared to be hopeless.

The naval blockade was secured by Israeli patrol boats that fired on Palestinian fishing vessels, which strayed beyond the designated three nautical miles’ demarcation line from the shore. Despite the Turkish Prime Minister threatening to use warships to protect aid reaching the Gaza Strip, the position remained fraught to say the least.

Still, Ibrahim knew that it was the only way in, apart from what was left of the tunnels that connected the Egyptian town of Rafah to the south with the Palestinian refugee camp of the same name. But the Palestinian border with Egypt, like that on the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which together with Gaza made up the Palestinian territories, was heavily fortified, albeit lacking the West Bank’s high barrier. Besides he’d suffered from claustrophobia since childhood, and he knew many of the tunnels could be precarious, so it had been agreed that entry by sea was the only option.

The coast around Naqoura was rocky, the sea a tantalizing kaleidoscope of emerald, turquoise, silver and gold. The distance to the Gaza Strip was just over two hundred and twenty miles. After struggling into on a full-body wet suit, including a balaclava-type hood, both to keep the sun from his head and to add to his disguise, Ibrahim had been put aboard a sixty-foot luxury motor cruiser, with a gleaming white hull, the interior finished in pale oak and leather upholstery. The boat had been supplied by a Lebanese businessman who was sympathetic to the region-wide Sunni jihad.

Drinking a glass of fresh orange juice now, Ibrahim waited for the cruiser to head off and plough through the calm coastal waters of the Mediterranean at a rate of thirty knots. The plan was to cut the engines four nautical miles out from the shoreline of the Gaza Strip, and allow Ibrahim to swim to the demarcation line, whereupon he’d be picked up by a friendly Palestinian fishing boat out of Gaza City.

But a crew member came up to him as he was sitting cross-legged on the deck, feeling the salty sea spray on his face. Ibrahim thought the man looked about twenty, with sparse facial hair and bat-wing ears. He handed Ibrahim a secure satphone. Somewhat perturbed, he took the call. It was from a Turkish brother, who spoke fluent Arabic. It was bad news.

A flotilla of aid boats out of Bodrum, Turkey, was converging off the coast of the Gaza Strip. The Israeli Navy had sent all of its patrol boats in Squadron 915 out of Eilat, its southernmost city, together with Shayetet 13, an elite naval commando unit specializing in counterterrorism and boarding, and a couple of corvettes, to intervene.

As a result of this and what turned out to be empty threats by the Turkish Prime Minister, Ibrahim knew he could either wait until it was over, which could be a few days if there was a standoff, or go to Egypt. Due to the urgent need for his presence in Gaza City, the Turk stated that, if he was up for it, arrangements had been put in place for him enter the Gaza Strip via Egypt.

“Egypt it is then,” Ibrahim said.

The motor cruiser would not be wasted, he thought, and would be used to transport him out of eyeshot of the coast all the way to the northern Egyptian coast on the Mediterranean. But he shivered involuntarily, kidding himself that it was down to wind chill, even though the sun was high and white. Walking over to the sheltered cabin, he knew with a rising sense of unease, if not horror, that Egypt meant the tunnels.

Chapter 19

It was midmorning in Lafayette, Louisiana, and the Somali had to be taken alive. Dan Crane had flown down aboard one of the CIA jets that were on standby 24/7 for just that purpose. The FBI had informed him that they had intel that pointed to the Somali having links with Al-Shabaab, the militant jihadists in the Horn of Africa, who carried out major terrorist attacks in neighbouring Kenya. Crane was there because they also had evidence that he’d travelled both to Syria and Iraq.

But more importantly the man had been sleeping with a CIA woman, a PA, who had been caught downloading a file on the agency’s investigations on Ibrahim, and, as soon as she’d been taken into FBI custody, she’d wept and admitted her treason. Crane thought of her as a rather pathetic and flawed individual, a minor player to be sure, but he was hoping for more from the Somali. He hadn’t been in the field for years, but due to the calibre of the suspect, he’d wanted to make sure there were no fuckups when he was taken, and no hitches after it.

The detached bungalow was set back about twenty-five yards from the residential street. It was surrounded by a rusted mesh fence bisected by a small, wrought-iron gate. The bungalow was wooden, painted olive green. There was a large porch, with a roof, supported by pillars built from cement and inlaid with large smooth stones.

The bungalow had been under surveillance via satellite imagery for three days and nights. Two seasoned counterterrorism agents had spent alternate twelve-hour shifts checking it out on a computer screen in DC, monitoring the comings and goings. A physical stakeout had been put in place as soon as the man’s identity had been confirmed.

The front yard was unkempt. A mass of yellowing grass, clovers, dandelions and wild azaleas, as well as bunches of purple thistles and all manner of weeds. A large Ford pickup truck was parked on the uneven driveway to the right-hand side of the building. There was no garage. The truck was painted metallic red, with customized dragons breathing fire along the doors. The twin exhaust pipes gleamed in the humid heat of the day. Faint, intermittent laughter could be heard from the front room.

Despite Crane’s status and skills, the law stated that the CIA didn’t have jurisdiction in the homeland, something that was frequently ignored, especially when national security was threatened. He crouched now beside an FBI SUV, just far enough away to be outside of the peripheral vision of anyone within the bungalow.

Both ends of the street had been cordoned off by the local PD, with squad cars, rolls of yellow tape stating POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS, and half a dozen officers at either end. A black FBI SWAT truck was moving up the other side of the street to Crane, at about five miles an hour. It stopped and the helmeted, black-clad seven-man team disembarked, carrying bulletproof shields, pump shotguns and Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns. They hunched down, and followed the line of the adjacent property’s low brick wall, which abutted the sidewalk.

Crane noticed that the laughing had stopped, but it didn’t worry him. The intel had made it clear that the suspect could be armed, but unless he had a Gatling gun mounted on the windowsill, he didn’t stand a chance.

Once the team reached the end of the wall, they rushed forwards. The front man opened the gate and the team split apart, as they had rehearsed. Three headed for the front door, two covered the sides, while the remaining pair jogged to the rear.

Crane edged closer, positioning himself behind a parked sedan, within clear eyesight of the events that were unfolding.

Just as the ram man hit the door with the first strike, a chair crashed through the front window, clearly making everyone jittery. Shards of glass rained down on the grass. Then what looked like a grenade landed on the patio.

“Jesus,” Crane said.

Chapter 20

The long-range CIA CASA 212 jet had stopped off to refuel in an RAF base on the east coast of England, en route to central Turkey. It had landed at Ankara Güvercinlik Army Air Base located in the Etimesgut district six miles west of Ankara, home to the 1st Army Aviation Regiment. Tom was onboard, together with the CIA operatives and medical team. He’d seen a squadron of S-70A helicopters and a couple of transport planes gleaming on the tarmac as the jet had touched down, with a couple of bumps that had made his stomach flip. He hated flying.

Still feeling nauseous, he and the team were met by a couple of intelligence officers from MIT, who said that the general had been moved from the Gülhane Military Medical Academy in Ankara for security reasons. He was now being cared for at a secret military hospital near the outskirts of the capital that catered exclusively for MIT operatives and the Turkish military injured in targeted terrorist attacks. It wasn’t a glass haven like the GMMA, they explained, but it had the best doctors and most up-to-date equipment in Turkey, and was, of course, secure.

A minivan with tinted windows and two black SUVs, front and rear, appeared from behind a shimmering hangar housing Beriev amphibious aircraft, and Tom and the others were on the move again, pleased to be out of the crippling heat.

Thirty minutes later, after driving past acres of young spinach fields and a small village with an ancient minaret, the vehicles took a left onto a dirt track. The track passed through an arid plain, a pair of crumbling ancient Roman pillars the only visible landmarks. The driver of the van began radio contact with someone, so Tom figured they were getting close to their destination.

With that a military checkpoint came into view. An M113 was parked at the roadside, a tracked armoured personnel carrier, with its hallmark M2 Browning machine gun mounted on the front, its operator replete with steel helmet and dust googles. Apart from the two crew, and the gunner, another ten infantrymen were manning the checkpoint around a pole resting on two oil drums. Given the presence of the APC, Tom figured it was more symbolic than functional. But the convoy didn’t stop; the pole was removed and they were simply waved on.

As the minivan passed the soldiers, Tom noticed that one held a Dragunov sniper rifle, the others standard-issue M16A4 assault rifles.

“They all look young,” he said.

“Turkey’s still got the draft,” a guy called Gabriel said, sitting across from Tom.

Here, he was the lead CIA paramilitary operations officer of the agency’s National Clandestine Service, a Texan with an immaculate dark beard, close-cropped hair and shoulders as wide as a steer’s. Given the complexion of his skin and chestnut-coloured eyes, he could pass for a Turk.

“That so?” Tom said.

“Should bring it back stateside, you ask me,” another operative said.

That’s bullshit, Tom thought. The last thing the US military needed was a bunch of kids who didn’t want to be there. He didn’t like the idea of the hospital’s security being left to draftees, either.

Looking at the world outside now, muted by the blacked-out glass, Tom saw a small unmanned military vehicle dip down parallel to the van about thirty yards away.

“A Bayraktar UAV, “Gabriel said. He had Heckler & Koch HK416 assault rifle fitted with an EOTech day sight and camouflaged in desert-tan, barrel upright between his heavy thighs. “They can hand launch them same as a kid does a balsa-wood glider. It’s made of carbon fibre and Kevlar, in case you were wondering.”

From a distance, Tom thought that it did look like a kid’s glider, although in fact it had a wingspan of two yards. “What’s it driven by?” he asked Gabriel.

“An electric motor powered by battery. But don’t be fooled. It’s cute. Got a unique parachute system so it can land on a mountain top, no problem. Payload’s cute, too. Thermal imaging camera at night. Flown through an autopilot system equipped with advanced software algorithms. Reliable recon, which is exactly what the little bird is doing right now.”

The other operatives called Gabriel the Professor. After the lecture, Tom understood why. But it made him feel better about the level of security the Turks had put in place for the hospital. That and the fact that the van passed another two makeshift checkpoints manned by heavily-armed Turkish Marines, resilient and seasoned, by the looks of them.

Ten minutes later, Tom saw the checkpoint at the entrance to the hospital. There was a barrier painted a staggered red and white like a barber’s pole, a concrete pillbox to the left, a small sentry building to the right, with barred windows. Two guards were standing either side of the barrier, wearing white helmets. They had Belgium bullpup-designed FN P60 submachine guns slung over their shoulders and calf-high gaiters.

There was a twelve-foot-high fence surrounding the hospital complex, topped with concertina razor wire, and metal security bollards set at three-foot intervals before it. A couple of Cobra military attack helicopters, and the Turkish TOROS artillery rocket systems in disposable launcher pods, together with three more APCs, added muscle to the defence of the isolated hospital. What else was here, was anyone’s guess, Tom thought. But it was impressive enough as it was.

After the lead SUV had stopped for about thirty seconds at the barrier in front, the minivan pulled away a sedate pace. The buildings beyond were mostly single-storey, Tom noticed, punctuated by square lawns, the grass being kept green beneath the baking sun by sprinkler systems.

The vehicles followed a tarmac road that cut through the middle of the complex, other roads branching off at ninety-degree angles, the complex having a grid design. Nurses pushed men in wheelchairs, the odd doctor walked by in a white lab coat. Here, the only sign that this was a military hospital were the occasional Jeep Wranglers and military policemen, the Askeri İnzibat, with their white belts and red armbands.

The little convoy stopped outside a whitewashed building, with slatted blinds at the windows, and a shrub garden either side of the paved walkway.

“I’ll take a minute with my father, okay with you guys?” Tom said.

Some nodded. Gabriel said, “Sure thing.”

The minivan had AC, but when Tom stepped out into the dry late afternoon heat it hit the back of his throat as he inhaled and seemed to burn like acrid smoke. He thought he caught a whiff of chloroform above the scent of lavender coming from the shrubberies and ducked to avoid a huge hornet, black as hell, that buzzed by.

“That’s their latest high-spec UAV,” Gabriel said, walking behind Tom with the medics and paramilitaries.

A couple of the guys snickered and Tom guessed he was just trying to lighten the mood. The heavy glass fire doors were opened by a man who Tom took for an orderly and, as he placed his feet on pale-blue tiles, he immediately felt the cool air on his skin.

Let him be okay, he thought. Let my father live.

Chapter 21

When the grenade had landed the three front FBI men had flung themselves to the ground and had called out warnings to their unseen buddies. The two that had shields had used them to cover their heads, even though they were wearing standard-issue protective Kevlar helmets.

But no explosion occurred.

Three seconds later, a lanky black man in his late twenties opened the door and raced out, barefoot. He was dressed only in a pair of tight, ripped jeans. He had a machete in his hand and looked wide-eyed and crazy. Stoned, Crane guessed.

The FBI men got up. An agent with a pump shotgun shouted at the black man to drop the weapon, to get down on the ground. But he only shouted back in a foreign language that Crane recognized. He drew the machete back behind his shoulder, as if he was about to hurl it at the agent with the pump.

The dumb sonofabitch, Crane thought. But before he could intervene the blast from the shotgun hit the man in the chest and lifted him off his feet. He landed with a thud on the grass. The other two SWAT men had already entered the front of the house and Crane heard shouting and screaming. He ran forwards, his Kimber Eclipse II in hand, with its five-inch barrel and iron dovetail sights.

As soon as he got to the black man, he could tell he was close to death. He was gasping for air like a fish on a line. The wound to his chest was awful. The pellets had imbedded themselves in such a manner that the skin looked diced. Like hamburger meat. He heard him mumbling. His few words were indecipherable. Tears rolled from his wide eyes. Then he was just staring into space, and Crane knew he’d just died.

“A mad crack addict,” the SWAT man said, coming up to Crane’s shoulder. “I didn’t have a choice.”

Crane turned on him. “That blade would’ve bounced off ya ballistic vest like a rubber ball off a wall,” he said, shaking his head.

The FBI guy looked dumbfounded.

Crane walked over to the missile that had been tossed from the broken window after the chair. He knelt down and examined it, without touching it. It was a black paperweight, designed to look like a grenade. Hearing a commotion, he looked up. Two black women of similar ages to the deceased were being led from the bungalow. They were heavily made-up and wore pink bikinis and multicoloured headscarves. They were shouting and struggling. The SWAT guys had cuffed them and were gently pushing them forwards, despite the tirade. When they saw the dead man, they began to wail.

Then a second back male appeared. He had a beard and out-of-control hair, and looked about thirty-five. He was barefoot, like all the others, but he was wearing a pair of combat pants, a red silk shirt, a ton of gold chains and a gangster cap. He’d been cuffed, too.

Crane saw the unit chief speak to one of the agents before walking over the grass towards him. He was a tall man, perhaps six-three, with an elongated neck, pallid skin, and wiry gray hair, a pair of thick black-rimmed eyeglasses perched halfway down his hooked nose.

“That’s the Somali,” he said, thumbing over his back in the opposite direction to the stiff.

Crane felt like whooping, but just walked past the man to where the FBI were now frogmarching the Somali down the path, each limb tucked under a hefty arm. Crane held up his splayed hand at he got to them. “Stand him up,” he said, taking a cigar from his breast pocket.

One of the FBI men looked over to the unit chief. As Crane lit up, he glanced over, too, seeing the man nodding. The Somali was manoeuvred upright, as if he was a plastic drinking bird.

Crane took a deep pull on his cigar, blowing out the smoke through his nostrils like an old dragon. “You’re screwed, son. There’s only one way out for you.”

“What do you want from me?”

“You speak, English. That’s good. We’ll talk when you’re in a cage. But you clam up on me, well, nobody will be able to save you. I’ll see to it that you get thrown in with the crazies. Simple. There’s only one option. Only one.”

“What option?”

“Well, that’ll be me, son.”

“I want a lawyer.”

“Yeah, and I want me a beach house down in Santa Monica. Besides, you think a lawyer will save you from what’s coming? Not even God can save you from what’s coming. Only me. Now you remember my face, son.”

Crane gave the Somali a closed-mouthed smile before looking at the FBI man who’d sought the okay from the unit chief. “You can flip him over now.”

A metallic grey minivan pulled up parallel with the bungalow and a broad-shoulder guy wearing jeans jumped out of the passenger side. He walked around to the back and opened the twin doors.

The unit chief walked over to Crane and asked him what the hell was happening. “He’s a US citizen, least he has been for the last few years,” he went on.

Crane put his hand into his breast pocket and handed over a piece of paper. The unit chief peered down at it, his face turning pale.

“That don’t matter no more,” Crane said, feeling ambivalent. He jabbed at the document with his thick forefinger. “And that’s the president’s signature.”

The document authorized the Somali, now a US citizen, being taken into military custody. A trial was deemed superfluous, and was legal, under the broad anti-terrorism provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act.

The CIA paramilitary who’d opened the doors came over to the FBI agents holding the Somali. “Just toss him in there, okay guys,” he said, gesturing towards the minivan.

As they looked nonplussed, Crane patted the CIA guy on the arm. “You keep that mother safe for now, you hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

Chapter 22

The upscale motor cruiser that Ibrahim had been travelling in had sped down the Mediterranean Sea at a distance of fifteen nautical miles from the coast, safely away from the internationally recognized twelve nautical miles’ limit. It had berthed in the Egyptian coastal city of Rafah in northern Sinai.

The democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood, fellow Sunnis, had been deposed by the Egyptian military in a coup d’état led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the army chief, on July 3 2013. As a result, what would have been a friendly city for Ibrahim was now a potentially lethal one. The subsequent election, boycotted by many Muslims, had elected el-Sisi as the new president. No big surprise to Ibrahim.

Following the subsequent outlawing of the Brotherhood as a political entity, a move supported by the educated middle classes of Cairo and Alexandria, as opposed to the rural poor, who were devout, the essentially secular and pragmatic Egyptian military had embarked on a process of healing wounds with its old allies. In 2013, it had closed the Rafah crossing to Gaza indefinitely. Previously used as an entry point for Muslim pilgrims en route to the hajj in Saudi Arabia to the south via Jordan, Ibrahim knew it was in response to jihadist violence in the Sinai after the deposing of President Morsi.

Ibrahim met up with a couple of the young men from the Sinai-based Islamic terrorist group, Ansar Bayt Al- Maqdis, who were responsible for the violence. They would guard him as he travelled to the tunnels. He would be met on the other side of the border by his Hamas brothers, and, if all went well, be taken to see the Amir in Gaza City. He already had forged papers for his time in Gaza, having travelled there on several occasions, and the Egyptians had handed him fresh ones for the Sinai after a brother had radioed ahead to Rafah. There hadn’t been enough time to get new ones made so they’d had to adapt existing ones, stolen in a marketplace by professional pickpockets.

An hour later, after transporting him to Rafah in the back of a Toyota pickup truck, his body covered by hessian sacks full of dates and olives, they dropped him off in a side alley and told him to walk to the fourteenth house on the right in the adjacent street.

As the pickup pulled away Ibrahim brushed off the old brown suit he’d been given to wear and covered his head with a red and white chequered keffiyeh headdress. This was as far from Cairo as you could get in Egypt, both in miles and in views and customs, and he would have to look the part. He carried a small plastic bag in which he’d put a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Other than this he had no personal possessions.

Walking up the dusty alley bordered by rundown, concrete apartment blocks, he watched a couple of skinny dogs scavenging around a pile of garbage beneath a rusted-out fire escape. Otherwise nothing stirred. Even in the shadows the heat was in the low hundreds, and as he reached the sun-baked street he glanced back, feeling the first tendrils of claustrophobia as he thought of the tunnel that awaited him.

Be vigilant, he thought. Be strong.

In December 2009, Egypt, with technical assistance from the US and France, had begun to erect a steel wall along the Gaza border, which had been sunk eighteen yards below the surface. They had reinforced the border area with a thousand troops to protect construction crews from Palestinian sniper attacks. The construction process had already damaged almost a hundred smuggling tunnels and Ibrahim knew that not only had many fighters perished, but the process had hit Hamas financially, given that it charged an annual fee of two-thousand five hundred US dollars for their use.

The only comfort was he knew that the Gaza-Egypt border was seven and a half miles long, and, as yet, most of the construction had been confined to either side of the Rafah terminal some miles away. Even the bloody incursion by the IDF in the summer of 2014 hadn’t destroyed more than a third of the tunnels there, as the Israelis had focussed on the tunnels that had led directly into Israel, especially in the north and east of the Strip.

The street had never seen tarmac and was crater-ridden and stony. A woman wrapped from head to foot in a black and light blue burqa was walking beside her husband as he sat astride a bedraggled donkey. A small group of barefoot kids with dirt-stained clothes threw rocks at a tin can. Seeing an Egyptian Army armoured personnel carrier pass along an abutting street about fifty yards away, Ibrahim kept walking so as to not to draw attention to himself.

Seconds later an open-topped military jeep with a roll bar passed behind the APC. It stopped abruptly and turned down the street towards Ibrahim. He looked behind him. The kids scattered, the old man drew his hand over his neck before gesturing towards the alley with a crooked finger.

“Go, go,” he said.

But Ibrahim knew if he ran there was a good chance he’d get caught, and if he did, he didn’t want to think what the Egyptian Army would do to him in such a remote and volatile place. He’d heard they had carte blanche from the generals to quell the unrest by any means, and in northern Sinai that meant days of torture, followed by imprisonment in a hellhole or death.

He decided to stand his ground and take his chances.

Chapter 23

Inside the military hospital’s lobby, Tom saw two doctors with stethoscopes draped around their shoulders standing before him like sombre sentinels. One was a clean-shaven man wearing thick eyeglasses, the other an elegant-looking woman, with her blue-black hair in a neat bun. She was holding a black clipboard and as Tom got closer he could see that her lips were full, almost lascivious, her eyes dark and humane.

She smiled without revealing her teeth, holding out her hand to greet him. “Mr Dupree?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“I am Doctor Asani. Your father’s doctor. I hope you had a comfortable journey.”

“Just fine, thank you, ma’am.”

The male doctor said nothing, neither did his resigned expression change, which Tom felt wasn’t a good sign.

“This way, please,” she said, leading him out of the well-lit corridor, the walls of which were dotted with oil paintings showing various scenes from Turkey’s military history.

Tom stopped in his tracks. He said, “My father first. Then we can talk. If that’s okay with you, ma’am.”

She looked a little taken aback, but the closed-mouthed smile soon returned. Tom reckoned she wasn’t used to being contradicted.

She nodded. “But I must warn you that your father cannot speak,” she said. “He is in a coma.”

Tom clenched his jaw, nodded back. Dear God, he thought, a coma.

“Don’t touch anything,” she said, as if he was a school kid.

About ten yards down a blue cinderblock corridor, Tom entered the windowless private room, which was about fifteen foot square and painted a milky white. It had a low ceiling, decent enough AC, an empty nightstand and a closed closet. The general lay on his back in a metal-framed bed, hooked up to a ventilator and three monitors.

There was a saline drip and another two tubes leading from his hands. He looked wraith-like, his body appearing bony and frail beneath the flimsy disposable paper gown. His head was bandaged; his freshly scarred face gaunt and grey around the breathing apparatus. His visible forearms and calves were lacerated.

Tom took out his small Buddha that he always carried with him and rubbed its mahogany surface with his thumb. But when he knelt and prayed that his father would live, it was to the Christian God, not the man, Siddhārtha Gautama.

He moved forwards now, stretched out his hand but retracted it. It wasn’t because of what the doctor had said, but rather the fact that he felt his father’s bones would somehow crumble under his touch, his skin turn to powder like a butterfly’s wings.

So he began to talk, just that, just words. He couldn’t recount the great times they’d had together when Tom was a kid, because there weren’t any. He just talked about the journey here, a mundane and detached summary.

A few minutes later the door opened and Gabriel came in, holding a secure satphone. He looked awkward. “Sorry to intrude. But it’s urgent.” He gestured with the phone.

“Who is it?”

“The boss.”

“Yours or mine?”

He thrust the phone out, but then placed it on the nightstand. “I’ve posted two paramilitaries outside. Good men.”

“Thanks.”

He left. Tom walked over and picked up the phone.

“How is he?”

It was Crane’s voice.

“‘Bout the same as you were told before I set out, I guess.”

“I thought he might recover given the time it took you to get there,” Crane said.

“No you didn’t. So what’s the deal?”

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