“Yes … I’m sure I will,” Slaton replied. He was caught off-guard, but in fact had seen such arrangements before. Grossman had no heirs, and the dealings of his dubious life had instilled that most powerful of urges for a man at death’s door—a guilty conscience. There was probably more to it. Perhaps grandparents who’d died in a concentration camp, or an old lover who’d been killed by a Hezbollah suicide bomber. If Slaton were to look closely enough at the colorful life of Benjamin Grossman, it would be there.

“Aren’t you going to ask?” Krueger said, giddy with anticipation.

“Ask what?”

“How much.”

Slaton did ask.

Krueger told him.

Chapter 33

THIRTY-THREE

Farzad Behrouz could see little to distinguish the door he was watching from a hundred others along the dust-caked street in central Molavi. The apartment was situated on the first floor of a five-story affair, a welcome advantage—surprise was far easier to keep without ten sets of boots clambering up switchback staircases. He watched a cat on the front step nose hopefully around an empty saucer. There was one window on the face of the flat, at this hour closed and in south Tehran certainly locked, and behind the glass was a small flowering plant that looked oddly vibrant in the dim light.

The four cars were in position, three on the front street and one in the back alley, the last team not meant to take part, but simply there for containment should any vermin scurry out the back door. Standard procedure. There were no lights on inside the flat, and had not been since nine-thirty—this from the advance surveillance group—which implied that their target had been asleep for roughly an hour. Satisfied, Behrouz chopped a finger from his seat in the lead car to set the assault in motion.

Ten men spilled into the street. It was probably eight more than they needed, but then shock was always an intended subtheme. The two men in the lead, carrying a hundred-pound battering ram, didn’t bother to knock. They hit the door on a dead run and it yielded to a single blow, slamming back hard and then hanging by its hinges in the aftermath at an awkward angle, rather like a drunk clinging to a lamppost.

The cat ran for its life.