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Hans dropped the receiver as he yelled, “Gunshots! There have been gunshots!”
Unthinking, Hans ran toward the door, his body moving in a way he couldn’t have imagined was still possible. Unquestionably, someone had come to rob the team of The Fire of the Desert. His clients were in mortal danger.
Had the gunmen waited for this moment and the papers of authenticity?
Had Hans’s own actions somehow led to this catastrophe?
Clinging to the handrail with both hands, Hans raced to the ground floor, hoping to somehow help the men. He threw open the street door, then froze mid-stride on the stoop as he stared down at the bodies.
The men’s heads were missing chunks of skull.
The handcuff still encircled the leader’s wrist, but the briefcase was gone.
As Hans grabbed at the handrail to steady himself, he looked down the street. There, he saw a woman in a black dress and heels lifting the briefcase and placing it into her car before sliding behind the wheel and driving nonchalantly down the road.
Hans lifted his gaze to the building across the road where three men with rifles in their hands stared down at him. One lifted his gun and was taking aim, the barrel lining up to bring Hans down, too.
The pressure of this scene sat like a boulder on Hans’s chest. It was too heavy, too much. Hans couldn’t find space in his lungs for a breath. Radiant pain shot fire down his left arm, and a greasy sweat stung his eyes.
The colors around him dimmed to gray, then black, as his knees buckled beneath him.
His wife was right, after all, Hans thought as his body collapsed into a heap at the bottom of the stairs. The isolation of his office meant no one would come to help him.
Chapter One
Red
An old-fashioned incandescent bulb swung naked overhead. Its dim light drew fuzzy shadows on the blue-tiled walls. Johnna Red leaned over the sink to scrutinize her appearance past the spider web cracks edging the bathroom mirror.
She looked as shitty as she felt.
Her olive skin had a greasy cast that was oddly gray as if she’d mixed ashes into fat and polished her face. Turning her head this way and then that, Red concluded that blush or lip stain would make her ghastly pallor that much more obvious. Mascara would call attention to her glassy, feverish eyes.
Would her appearance frighten her asset?
Probably.
She wished she could delay their meeting, giving herself a day—or two … maybe three—in bed, recovering. But this was the day Moussa was driving from the capital to his next meeting. Passing through Tal Afaya, he could stop for lunch without raising suspicions about his doings.
He’d said it had to be today, whispering into his phone, “This needs your government’s immediate attention, I would think. Yes, I think this very much.”
Skittish, anxious Moussa was a pencil-pushing yes-man who made no decisions and was of no consequence in the grand scheme.
Not to his organization, anyway.
He worked for a major import-export company. Their international dealings came with a veneer of respectability, but credible sources indicated that they dabbled in disruptiveactivities. Possibly, they were getting bolder and had turned to funding terrorism.
Thatwas what Red aimed to discover.
In Moussa’s role at the company, sitting in the same office suite as the owner, jumping to his boss’s every demand, he was a shadow that garnered little thought or attention beyond his scrambling efforts to appease.
Keeping the coffee and tea hot and flowing as politicians and government officials stepped through the carved wooden doors—to sit, visit, and accept their side money—meant essential conversations could be overheard.
Yes, to the CIA, a shadow like Moussa could be gold.
Red had been developing him for months, and luckily, she’d found two points where she could leverage him—he wanted money to ease his daily life, and he wanted his son to go to an American university to become a doctor—that meant at least a decade of school so at least a decade of intelligence gatheringifMoussa proved helpful.
Since Moussa had just agreed to become Red’s asset, they hadn’t gotten to the point in their relationship where she could train him in the dos and don’ts of his role—how to know what kind of information was useful, how to gather it without tipping his hand, and how to pass it along to her without pulling attention their way.