What an idiot, Vasilyeva thought. She had bribed a Tripoli drug pusher to spread her name around as a trained nurse and anesthesiologist; she had been admitted to the residence almost immediately. Zuwayy liked whores and he liked heroin—he was a slave to both. But apparently he disliked having his nurses and his whores around for too long, so he usually had them killed after about a week in the residence.

That was not going to happen to Vasilyeva.

The drug she had administered was not heroin but thiopental sodium, an ultra-fast-acting, short-duration sedative. Zuwayy was not unconscious, just very relaxed. Vasilyeva removed the rubber tube from his arm and swabbed the injection site. “Do you feel all right, Highness?”

“You can leave me now.”

“Not quite yet, Highness. Where is the female American prisoner, the one called McLanahan, and the other American prisoners?”

“The American spies? In my interrogation facility.”

“Which ones? Where?”

“Who are you, woman? Why do you care about the Americans?”

“I’m here to take care of your problem with the Americans, if you just tell me where they are.”

“I don’t care to tell you.”

Vasilyeva had to remember to be patient. Thiopental sodium, also known by its brand name Sodium Pentothal, was just a mild sedative, not the much-vaunted “truth serum” fiction writers made it out to be. If the subject didn’t want to talk, thiopental sodium couldn’t make them do it. Eventually, however, she could get the information from him. She needed to learn a little more about his peccadilloes, fantasies, fears, and weaknesses. One or two more days and she would have him eating out of her hand.

She prepared a small dose of heroin and, as expertly as the first time, injected it into a vein, “jacking it off’ by drawing blood into the syringe in and out several times before injecting it all into his arm.

He looked at Vasilyeva with half-closed, dreamy eyes. “Are you going to kill me now?” he asked.

“I have no such orders, unless you resisted,” she said.

“Good. I was hoping to get rid of those damned Americans anyway—I should’ve shipped them off to Mersa Matruh and had them zapped with the neutron bombs along with the others.”

“How very interesting. So you deliberately killed those prisoners at Mersa Matruh with a neutron weapon? It wasn’t an Egyptian insurgency group or Hamas or Hizb’allah or any of the other right-wing Islamic terrorist groups? It was you?”

“Sure. I wasn’t going to let the Egyptians get the glory for saving them. I wish I did the Americans too.”

“Of course. So, is it true that you are not really a Libyan king, but just an ordinary army soldier who is pretending to be a king?”