“Hullo.”
“Jack, Oliver Pritchett in London.”
Gannon’s memory ignited and he recalled his anger.
“Hey!” He sat up, cradling his head with his free hand. “What the hell’s going on? Your guy stood me up! The WPA spent a shitload of money to send me to London then here, and Corley doesn’t show!”
“I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe something came up. This is unlike Adam. I can’t reach him.”
“So what now?”
“I’m going to do something we never do with our people.”
“I’m waiting.”
“I’ll give you his private address. You can go bang on his door.”
“That’s a start.”
Gannon ordered a small breakfast to his room, showered and shaved. When his breakfast arrived he ate as he dressed, then got a taxi.
According to Pritchett, Corley lived on a tiny side street off of Rue Calcutta, in the district l’Ocean, not far from the Kasbah des Oudaias.
The neighborhood was quiet.
Gannon asked his driver to wait, then walked down the narrow zigzagging street. It was a bright, clear morning.
The quarter was deserted; the only sounds gulls overhead. The ancient square houses were small, neat, built of stone. Many had parapets. They were painted white with blues, pinks and greens, their windows covered with wrought-iron bars. Some had flower boxes and planters with palms near the entrance. Others had rooftop gardens or clotheslines laden with garments drying in the sun.
A gull shrieked just as Gannon reached Corley’s address: number 104, a small white house trimmed in coral- pink. He knocked on the wooden door, dark and heavy with its ornate design. A full minute passed without a response. He knocked again, harder this time.
Nothing.
He pressed his ear to it.
Nothing.
He tried to look through the windows, but the ironwork made it difficult. He went around to a small sun- warmed patio. Fragrant from the dozen or so flower boxes, the patio gave him a view over rooftops to the sea.
When Gannon came to the back door he stopped.
It was slightly open.
What the hell?
He blinked, thinking. Then he leaned into the doorway.
“Hello!”
The weather-worn door creaked as he pushed it open to a small kitchen. It was clean with a sand-colored linoleum floor, white shelves, white tiled walls and a gas stove.
“Adam!”
The house was silent as Gannon continued to the living room. Two small sofas with print designs faced each other over a coffee table. Everything was bathed in yellow from the sunlight filtered by the closed yellow curtains.
Everything was in place. He checked the bedroom, the single bed, the quilted spread, the desk, dresser, goatskin lampshade. All in order and tinted blue from blue curtains.
“Adam?”
Gannon moved on to the bathroom.
At least that’s what he figured the next room to be, given the white door was ajar and he glimpsed a mirror. As he reached out his hand to open the door, he hesitated.
The house was too still.
He swallowed.
As he slowly pushed the door open, a prickly sensation shot up the back of his neck. A shoed foot was hanging over the lip of the bathtub. He then saw a hand, an arm, blood splattered over the white tiles, before he met Adam Corley’s eyes.
Staring into him from a wide-eyed death mask.
A sound.
Something moved fast behind Gannon.
39
Somewhere in Morocco
Nearly two hours outside of Rabat a convoy sped along a dirt road, cutting across a vast stretch of forgotten territory.
The sun hit the chrome on the first two cars; both were government-owned Peugeot sedans out of Temara. The last vehicle was a late model Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen that had been dispatched out of Ain Aouda. Only a few of the men involved were members of the DST-Direction de la Securite du Territoire-the Moroccan secret police.
No one knew the identities of the others.
Dust clouds billowed from their trail, forming a rising curtain that concealed their destination and intention.
The man lying on the back floor of the G-Wagen, under a canvas tarp, stripped naked, shackled and blindfolded was Jack Gannon. His brain throbbed and his mouth tasted as if it had been stuffed with burlap and he recalled an overwhelming smell.
Chloroform?
The last thing he remembered was discovering Adam Corley’s corpse amid a bloodbath in his Rabat home.
Gannon forced himself to cling to the drone of the wheels, to breathe deeply and calmly. He concentrated on the murmur of French coming from his captors at the front of the vehicle. He tried to pick up any information, a tone, a word he might know.
A cell phone rang, and the man who answered spoke in a language Gannon didn’t recognize. The vehicle slowed to a halt, and he heard muted shouting through the closed windows. Dread gnawed at the edges of his mind and he tried not to imagine what awaited him.
Had he been able to see through his blindfold he would have discerned the high chain-link fence topped with razor wire securing the low building, which was half-submerged in the earth. It was a secret facility that did not exist. Not officially. In intelligence circles, it was known as a black prison.
For several years, the building had received suspected terrorists transported on ghost flights from countries that denied knowledge of activities conducted within its walls. It was undocumented work performed by contractors expert at obtaining information from any resistant subjects delivered to them. Some of the interrogators had extracted intelligence on the attacks in Casablanca, Madrid, London, Bali and on September 11. They had also thwarted a number of planned attacks that remained unknown to the world beyond its barbed-wire gates.
A sudden blast of 110-degree heat overwhelmed the SUV’s air-conditioned interior as the doors were opened.
Gannon was yanked out.
Stones pricked his bare feet and the ground burned his soles as he hobbled with his captors a short distance before they pushed him indoors. The air was cooler but he was nearly overcome by the stench of urine and excrement. The drone of flies was alarming and he feared he was among corpses. As Gannon was shoved along the building’s reeking corridors, he found his voice.
“I’m an American citizen. I want to call my embassy.”
A sharp pain exploded in his buttocks from the kick of a large steel-toed boot. Gannon’s knees buckled and he
