The huge bodyguard kicked another of the stools away, and Albadi crushed his eyes shut, as if that would also drown out the strangulated gurgling as another life was extinguished.

Drummond smirked. “Two left. Soon we will run out of servants, then it will be your turn.”

Albadi kept his eyes closed and Drummond leaned over him. “It’s not very pleasant, watching a man die like that, and knowing that it’s all because of you. But, Doctor, you really are missing something that is truly beautiful.” He tapped the man’s face with the scalpel. “I could make you watch, you know. A little incision here, and here, and then peel away the upper lids on both your eyes – no hiding then, hmm?”

Drummond sighed. “Doctor, or at least doctor of literature, I know the human body so well. I know how to caress it to heavenly pleasure, or take it to Hell when I expose nerve clusters and then play them like a harp.” His smirk deepened. “But the music yours plays will not be to your liking: of that, I can assure you.”

“Kroen.” Drummond held up two fingers, and the last two stools were kicked away. He waited until the sounds died away to only the creaks of stretching rope fibers. He sighed. “I have done this dozens of times, to stronger men and women than you. They all talk, they always talk.” He grinned. “Just to be clear: you are already dead. Your future is known and it is me who will have the pleasure of taking you forward on that journey. But the way I take you is up to you – swift and painless, like you are just getting tired and so cross over into a gentle sleep from which you never wake.” His eyebrows went up slightly. “Or screaming for hours on end as I reduce you to a thousand slices of bloody flesh and shrieking nerve ends.”

Drummond waited a moment longer, and then held up both hands, surgeon-like, with one holding the scalpel.

Albadi whimpered, and then nodded. Drummond leaned over him. “I have a secret to tell you.” He snickered. “I don’t really care about the Book’s copy, and I know exactly where your visitors are going…I only want to make sure you tell no one else about it.” He kissed the blade and smirked. “Doctor, I think we both know that I was always going to torture you.” He placed the blade on Albadi’s thigh, just over the femoral nerve, and then drew it down.

*

On the Lebanese-Syrian border, an Israeli agent of the elite Metsada Division stopped her roadside interrogation as she received the coded security squirt from the Americans. Her lips compressed in a tight line: she knew well the territory the Americans were in – there were Al Qaida, ISIS, the United Islamist Front, Party of a Thousand Martyrs, and a dozen other armed brigades crawling all over the area. With luck they might make it – but there was precious little of that left in Syria any more.