But then Jamal could not imagine life any other way.

A small ticking sound echoed softly through the darkness. He’d sunk the ten-by-twenty room into the earth and the water sometimes found its way through the rocks. In a way the sound was comforting. A sort of gentle reminder that the clock was winding down. The time was so close now. So very close.

The smell of musty dirt crowded his nostrils. A twenty-watt bulb glowed under a copper shade on his desk, casting a rust-colored light over the ancient wood. To his right a large cockroach skittered across the wall and stopped. Jamal stared at it for a full ten seconds, thinking that a cockroach had the best of all lives, living in its own darkness without thought for more.

He walked to the wall, snatched up the insect before it could move, and quickly pinched off its head. Jamal returned to the desk and set the roach on top of the hot copper shade. Its headless body twitched once and then stilled.

Jamal pulled on his headset and punched a phone number into the pad before him. The electronics along the wall to his right were the kind one would expect in a submarine perhaps, not here in this dungeon. But there was more than one way to remain hidden from the world and Jamal possessed no desire to sink beneath the waves every time he wanted to pull his strings. Of course, bringing the electronics here, of all places, had not proved a simple matter. It had taken him a full year to pull it off without raising suspicions.

The protected signal took thirty seconds to find its mark. The voice that spoke into his earpiece sounded as though it came from the bottom of a well. “Hello?”

“Hello, my friend.”

The man’s breath stilled. Jamal’s voice had that strange effect on men.

A shiver rippled through Jamal’s bones. “It is ready?”

It took a few seconds for the man to respond. “Yes.”

“Good. Because the time has come. You will begin immediately. You can do this?”

“Yes.”

“Listen very carefully, my friend. We can’t turn back now. No matter what happens we cannot turn back. If anything happens that might threaten our plans, you will accelerate them, do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Jamal held the man in silence for a moment. He picked the roach from the shade and pulled its wings off. The body had been slightly baked and a smell similar to burnt hair rose to his nostrils. He bit the thorax in two and rolled the one half in his mouth, allowing saliva to gather. He put the other half back on the hot shade. Only breathing sounded in his earpiece.

“Perhaps you’re forgetting who you’re speaking to, Abdullah,” Jamal said, and then spit out the bug. “If you cease to please me, I will unmake you as easily as I made you.”

“You did not make me. I did not need your interference. I could have done this without you.”