“What in hell is going on out there, Zuwayy?” Pavel Kazakov asked angrily on the secure phone. This time, Kazakov put the call on the speakerphone, so his aide Ivana Vasilyeva could hear how the great “king” of Libya bleated and whined like a sheep being led to slaughter. Kazakov knew how Vasilyeva, a former commando and trained intelligence officer in the Russian army, hated weak men— Jadallah Zuwayy, the man who claimed to be a descendant of Arab kings, would infuriate her. “Why are you calling me now?”

“Hey, Kazakov, this was your idea to begin with!” Jadallah Zuwayy retorted. “This is your fault!”

“My fault?”

“It was your suggestion to retaliate against the commandos that attacked Samah,” Zuwayy said. “That’s what I did. They somehow found out where I was, broke into my sanctuary, and threatened to kill me! He smashed my nose! He threatened to kill me, my entire family, break into my computers, and destroy my military bases.”

“They sound like extremely powerful, efficient, and well-informed commandos,” Kazakov commented dryly. I could use an entire battalion of them, he said to himself. Something that Zuwayy said nagged at his brain.. . . “Or your soldiers need more security training.”

“How could he have found out where I was? That information is top secret!”

“Zuwayy, the entire world knows about your pleasure palace in Jaghbub,” Kazakov said. “They know that it is the entrance to your escape route if there is ever a coup against you; they know it is where you bring young girls for whatever perverted pleasure you get out of screwing children. Besides, Jaghbub is less than forty kilometers from the Egyptian border—any good special-operations team can get in and out of the area in mere hours. You ought to try a security back-trace on yourself some time, Zuwayy—you might be surprised to learn some of the things anyone can find out about you if they tried.”

“This is outrageous!”

“Just shut up, Zuwayy,” Kazakov said. “Nothing has changed. You should have just killed all those captives, then set a trap for those commandos when they returned to finish you off. You should have never turned them over to the Egyptians. At least you had the brains to turn them over to Khan and not to Salaam.”

“That commando said he was going to kill me if I didn’t turn them over to the Egyptians,” Zuwayy said. “He got into the sanctuary so easy, I didn’t—”

“Hold it,” Kazakov interrupted him. “You said, ‘that commando.’ Do you mean to say there was only one commando?”

“I told you there was only one!”

“But you said a minefield and your military base were also hit.”

“They were, but only one commando got into my sanctuary,” Zuwayy said. “He neutralized the guards and was waiting for me when I—”

“He ‘neutralized’ the guards? How? Did he kill them?”

“No. He had no weapons—he didn’t even touch them.”