Luke’s little squad was walking now, guns out. The cluster of tents was just up ahead, flaps billowing in the desert wind. A tall man in flowing brown robes and a head wrap stood at the doorway of the largest tent.

“Don’t kill him,” Luke said. “We need him.”

The man’s beard was dark, with streaks of gray in it. His eyes were piercing. He seemed angry, confident, and not at all afraid.

He said something in Arabic.

One of the SAS guys turned his rifle around and butted the man in the face. Instantly, the man fell to the ground. His hand went to his jaw. The angry look on the man’s face only became angrier.

The SAS men looked down at him.

“That’s for Gilmour,” he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

1:30 p.m. Arabian Standard Time (5:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

A Safe House

Baghdad, Iraq

Luke watched the militia leader from the corner of the room.

“In a moment,” Big Daddy Cronin said, “if you won’t give me the answers I’m looking for, I am going to hold your feet to the fire. Do you know this saying?”

The militia leader was sitting on a wrought iron chair. It looked like it might have had a seat cushion at one time, but that was long gone. Now there was just the rusty metal that made up the chair.

The man had black hair to go with his long black beard. Both were streaked with gray. His shirt and pants were gone—he was stripped to the underwear. He was thin and very fit, like a man who got a great deal of physical exercise on short rations of food. His boots and socks were gone—his feet were bare. The right side of his face was swollen from the blow with the rifle butt.

The man’s hands were manacled around the back of the chair, the chain looped through the chair’s openings, and was cinched tight. He was belted to the seat with a leather strap. His legs were out straight. His feet were bound together with heavy tape around the ankles, and were held in wooden stocks, making it impossible to move them. Moreover, the way he was strapped to the chair, and with his legs encased in wood, he had no leverage.

Big Daddy Cronin waited for the Iraqi translator to finish speaking. The translator was a slim, balding, middle-aged man in a nondescript, short-sleeved green uniform with no markings of any kind. He had a pencil-thin mustache. He wore heavy sandals on his feet. He could almost be a nurse, or a doctor, if doctors wore sandals.

There were five men in the room. Big Daddy, the translator, the heavily bearded mujahideen who had only recently commanded a militia, Ed, and Luke. Luke thought it better if Trudy and Swann missed Big Daddy at work.