Late on the second day, the body of a SAVAK agent who had been watching Amira was found on a dung heap south of the city. The search took on a new seriousness. The next morning, someone discovered that a Mr. and Mrs. Rochon had crossed the Turkish border at Bazargan. Philippe Rochon! Ali reflected bitterly that the trap he had tried to set in al-Remal had, in a perverse way, sprung on his own hand.

Rochon’s involvement made Paris the most likely destination for the trip. SAVAK agreed, but with the death of their colleague, the secret police had grown decidedly cool toward Ali. He wanted his own men in Paris. The Remali intelligence service was practically an arm of the royal family—one of Ali’s uncles was its director—and its best agents in Europe were rushed to the French capital to wait and watch. Ali had no way of knowing that the two who were assigned to Orly arrived just as Paul and Amira were driving away. The more Ali thought about it, the more he was convinced that his brother-in-law was behind it all. He had never liked Malik. The man was a commoner, after all, like his bitch of a sister, no matter how rich he was making himself, and he apparently fancied himself a European, enlightened, superior—the same delusions that afflicted Amira. Undoubtedly, the gigolo doctor—who was finished, Ali would make sure of that—was just a dupe, a pawn, an excuse.

Then came the news from the wilds of eastern Anatolia. At first, Ali believed that Amira and Karim must indeed have died with Rochon in the wreck, and his hatred of the woman alternated with grief for his son. But at heart, he had never trusted anyone, and there were many things to doubt in the accounts coming out of Turkey. He sent men to investigate, and soon they told him that Malik was there.

To Ali, there were only two possibilities. The first was that something had gone terribly wrong with Malik’s plan and that he was in Turkey to find out what had happened. The second was that the plan had come off perfectly, right down to some treachery that had left the French doctor’s corpse as a smoke screen, and that Malik’s presence on the scene was merely added smoke.

If the first, Amira and Karim were probably dead. If the second, they were certainly alive. In either case, Malik was to blame for everything—and for that, Ali would take vengeance, in his own way, in his own good time.

He swore it to himself and to God.

26. A New Woman

A New Woman

Amira followed it all in the newspapers and on television. It had taken the press only a few days to connect her with the woman missing in Philippe’s accident.