knees, he whispered, “Who are you?”
“I am known by several names. You don’t need to hear them. God knows who I am, and that is enough. Now tell me, who hired you to assassinate holy warriors?”
“I don’t know.”
The man on the left side of Sophia slid a knife into her breast. She writhed, thrashed; the veins and tendons in her neck stood out like cords as she tried to scream against the tape.
“Perhaps, perhaps not. We will explore that. Let me ask another question. Who is your contact, the man who gives you your target and pays you?”
There was no hope — none! All they could hope for was a quick end. “He is a Russian,” Nate Allen said as he stared at Sophia, writhing with the knife in her.
“You’re lying. You work for the CIA.”
The man on the couch shoved his knife slowly into Sophia, who groaned against the tape.
“No,” Nate Allen hissed.
“Who, then?”
“Jake Grafton.”
When he heard the name, Abu Qasim knew he was hearing the truth. Yet he wanted more, a lot more.
The torture and questions went on until Sophia passed out from loss of blood. Her blood was all over her, the floor and the man beside her, who was obviously enjoying torturing her. When she fainted, Nate Allen spit in Qasim’s face.
The man wiped the spittle from his face and, with a glance at Sophia, nodded. The knifeman pointed a silenced pistol at her head and pulled the trigger. Her head slammed back. The knifeman let her corpse fall to the floor.
His interrogator put the muzzle of the silencer on his pistol against Nate Allen’s forehead. “Tell the Devil that Abu Qasim sent you,” he said, and pulled the trigger.
A week later Abu Qasim attended a meeting in Karachi. Eight men were there. After they prayed, the man on Qasim’s right, an Egyptian, said, “Abdul-Zahra Mohammed was the fourth brother of the inner circle to die in the last six months.”
“The CIA is sending these killers,” another man said. “Two of them are Russians, I am told, and one is thought to be a German. Some are Americans. They have killed four of us and we have now killed two of them.” He didn’t bother to mention the four holy warriors that Nate Allen and Ricky Stroud had gunned down in the space of seven seconds. After all, the sons of Islam were on their way to Paradise, and there were plenty more believers to take their place. Every devout brother wanted to go forth to meet the Prophet with the blood of infidels on his hands.
“The American CIA is getting information from the banks and shipping companies that our brothers dealt with,” Abu Qasim said. “The owners and officers who control these companies are cooperating with the American CIA. The CIA spies discreetly investigate, look for patterns and report to an officer of the CIA named Jake Grafton. He recruited these killers, names their victims and pays them. When I learned of this, I thought that if we took precautions, were careful, avoiding these companies as much as possible, Jake Grafton would have little success. I was wrong. He is a clever man and his men are competent.”
The others nodded. Allah’s enemies had the help of the Devil, so of course they were clever, which made the glory of defeating them so much greater.
The infidels who run these companies fancy themselves the new Crusaders,” Qasim continued, “and like the Crusaders of old will be utterly consumed by the fury of Allah.”
“Who are they?” one of his listeners demanded. Abu Qasim gave him a name. “There are others,” he said, “but that name I know.” Actually he knew all the names — he had gotten them from Jean Petrou — but he didn’t want these men knowing and discussing those names. Even the walls have ears.
“lnshallah” several said forcefully. God willing.
“Stated simply,” Abu Qasim continued, “the problem is to kill them before they kill us. And, of course, to do it in such a way that the power of Allah is on full display to the nonbelievers.”
“Allah akbar” his listeners muttered. Yes, indeed, God is great!
CHAPTER FOUR
Her name was Kerry Pocock, she was as English as tea and toast, she had a gorgeous head of long, curly, dark brown hair, a good figure and a smile to die for, and she was an MI-5—British counterintelligence— op. Oh, yes, she was married to a guy who ran a pub and had two kids. She hadn’t shown me their photos yet, for which I was grateful. Tonight she was wearing a lovely dress and a simple necklace of real pearls.
We were sitting in a really nice restaurant in Mayfair, the hip and trendy section of London. The place had white tablecloths, real silverware, bustling uniformed waiters and soft light. Since we were in the British Isles, I ordered a single-malt Scotch whiskey. She ordered a bottle of French wine.
“A whole bottle?”
“You can help me with it, if you like.”
The waiter presented us with menus in bound leather, and we opened them. I heard her sharp intake of breath — she had seen the prices. I scrutinized them. They looked in line, I thought, for a high-toned beanery in New York or Washington, if the prices had been in dollars. They weren’t. They were in pounds, so if you doubled the numbers you got roughly the price in U.S. dollars, which is the currency Uncle Sugar pays my salary with.
My name is Tommy Carmellini — I think I introduced myself before — and I work for the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, or, as it’s referred to in some profane quarters, Christians In Action. Not that we are all Christians, because we aren’t, nor is there a lot of action. Most of what we do involves ruining perfectly good paper with ink squiggles and symbols. Entire forests have their existence violently terminated so we can have paper to ruin. But on this wet, chilly winter’s night I wasn’t destroying paper; I was out on old London town with a beautiful woman.
“Bit expensive cutting a dash in here,” she remarked, not looking up from the menu.
“Good thing this dinner is being paid for by loyal American taxpayers,” I muttered.
“Those colonials have their uses.”
Kerry was pondering her dinner choices when the man we were here to observe, one Alexander Surkov, a Russian expatriate, came in with two other men. They sat at a table near the window, Surkov with his back to me, which was fine. He didn’t know me, had never actually seen me, and I didn’t want him getting a good gander at my face since I was going to be following him for some weeks. I didn’t want to make eye contact, so I, too, concentrated upon the menu.
“What’s good?” I asked Kerry.
“When I got this assignment yesterday,” she said, “my officemates said the beef is excellent. All these French dishes… one never knows what one is getting. I’m a toad-in-the-hole or fish-and-chips girl myself.”
Yesterday after I learned that Surkov had made this reservation, I asked MI-5 if they had a female staffer who might like an expense-account meal in a good cause. The ladies of the CIA London office somewhere near my age all pleaded prior commitments or jealous spouses. Kerry was my volunteer.
Mayfair was the heart and soul of the Russian community in the U.K. Here the refugees could spend money like drunken sailors, soak up vodka, talk Russian as loudly as they wished and hang out with other people just like them, all the while pining for the good old days when Mother Russia was a worker’s paradise and they were in the driver’s seat.
Surkov had been a KGB man, then, when Communism imploded and the bureaucrats reshuffled, a foreign intelligence service officer. Six years ago he left the agency and got into the private security business in Moscow, which meant he guarded old Communists who were emerging from the closet as new capitalists by buying up government assets on the cheap and selling them dearly, getting filthy rich in the process, then, a couple of years ago, he decamped from Russia and moved his wife and daughter to London, where he set up a consulting business, supposedly helping Western companies that wanted to do business in Russia learn what permits they needed, who
