He’s Syrian,” said Cohen. “A Sunni peasant named Alamir Alaqua, you can spell it any way you wish, with or without hyphens, it makes no difference to us. Born in 1970. Raised in the north, a hundred or so miles east of Aleppo, in Syria’s narrow rim of arable land. His family are wheat people. His first eighteen years are unnoticed, and he never refers to them, it is said. One can imagine: working the fields, at prayer five times a day, beaten often, perhaps molested occasionally, part of a large family of minor distinction in a village named Tar’qu. To his father, and the rest of the world, he was but another beast of burden. That is all.”

“If,” said Gold, “you have some idealized vision of the international assassin as a man of erudition, you will be disappointed. This chap is a cold brute, utterly committed and sublimely talented.”

Bob nodded. He’d seen enough bullshit about snipers on TV and in the movies to know that almost nobody ever truly got it: the closure of mind, the dedication to skill and art, the commitment to the faith. But Bob got it, and he would never take such a man lightly.

“It was in the army that he showed his extraordinary gift. He shot a sixty-year-old Persian Mauser so well that he was selected for sniper school. For the first time in his life, he felt special. He completed himself by putting the rifle in use to Allah’s purpose.

“At the sniper school, taught by Saudi mercenaries, who themselves had been trained by American Green Berets, he was again picked out, developed, quickly promoted. And, again for the first time in his life, he had food in his belly. And respect from his elders. For the first time, he was a man.

“We assume he drew first blood in 1990. His targets, however, were not infidels but coreligionists. Under the first Assad’s realpolitik, Syria had joined the coalition against the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. No records exist, no tales of a legendary sniper among the Syrian forces of that war. Yet knowing his ambitions, it seems logical that he would have tested himself. I’m sure there are Iraqi widows owing to his efforts, the irony being that he served first against the men that he would later serve so ably for.”

But his real experience, Cohen said, came as a specialist with the minister of defense’s campaign to exterminate opposition to Assad and the Ba’athists in the ’90s. That fellow, Mustafa Tlass, was a mediocre general, a mediocre politician, an excellent sycophant, and a first-rate secret policeman. He used snipers to isolate and eliminate non-Ba’athist pretenders to power to solidify Old Man Assad’s rule. It was so much easier than raiding, interrogating, imprisoning, executing. One application of Bulgarian heavy ball from four hundred meters out and the problem was solved forever.