“Stand still you devil!” cried the Sunni as his frustration disintegrated into doubt. With each passing second he began to fear that he was indeed fighting a demon, some desert ghost who could not be harmed by human weapons.

Then behind him, the Sunni heard Ibn Sabbah speak.

“Stop toying with him.”

For a fractured moment the Sunni thought that Ibn Sabbah had directed the comment at him; but then he saw the body language of the fida’i change. It was a subtle thing, a shift from acrobatic evasion to the attack posture of a hawk. With another blur of movement the assassin darted in under the Sunni’s next swing, slipping past the blade with a hair’s breadth to spare.

The Sunni felt the world freeze into a pinpoint of ice. He tried to speak, to ask what had happened, but his jaw would not move. There was a strange pressure under his chin, in his throat, and his brain felt wrong in ways the man could no longer identify. He heard a distant metallic sound and as an afterthought realized that he was no longer holding the sword. He saw the fida’i step back away from him, his hands equally empty. The Sunni reached up to touch his own throat and found the hard, cold edge of a blade there. That made no sense. How could a blade be in such an absurd place?

The room tilted as his knees gave way, and then the Sunni was falling, falling into the void with his jaws pinned shut so that he could not even speak the name of God.

The fida’i stood over him, his naked chest barely heaving to betray the effort he had just spent in the killing of these three men. On the floor, the Sunni lay with the hilt of the dagger pressed up against his soft pallet and the very tip of the blade standing an inch above the top of the man’s skull. The assassin glanced up at Ibn Sabbah, who nodded; then the assassin knelt and pulled his knife blade free.

Ibn Sabbah smiled down at the fida’i and waved him back to his place in line.

Yes, he thought, Ibrahim will be so very pleased.

Chapter Fifty-nine

Chapter Fifty-Nine

CIA Safe House #11

Tehran, Iran

June 15, 1:04 p.m.

I stared at Krystos. He would not meet my eyes.

My phone rang and I looked at the screen display. NO ID. I punched the button.

“Hello, Violin.”

“Joseph, are you all right?”

“Now’s not a good time.”

“I—”

But I ended the call. I was confused enough and didn’t need another cryptic conversation.