Mason offered Ahmed a cigarette while casually checking the exits for the quickest escape route. He knew Ahmed’s men were discreetly pulling security in the area, but he never relied on others to protect him.
“I cannot believe that you still smoke those foul things,” Ahmed said, his face crinkling in disgust at the offered cigarette. “You Americans might not be the most cultured people, but you have excellent tobacco. Put that away and have one of mine.” Mason returned the offending pack to his pocket, slipped one of the American cigarettes from Ahmed’s battered silver case, and lit it with his Zippo.
Mason took a deep drag, trying to remember the last time he’d had a Camel.
Smoking might have been a bad habit, but it was all he had left, and he planned on enjoying it for as long as possible.
“I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve had one of these.”
“They are much better than those nasty French Gauloises you carry around with you, but I’m very certain you did not come all this way to talk about tobacco.”
“I have to go to Libya.”
Ahmed nodded, motioning with his cigarette for Mason to continue. “For the file, I assume? Do you think that is wise?”
Mason felt the first spark of self-doubt as he studied his mentor. Ahmed was a slight man and barely five foot seven; one could even call him diminutive. His aquiline nose, dark brown eyes, and salt-and-pepper beard gave him a cultured, almost urbane air, but it was all a clever façade. Beneath the day-to-day trappings was the iron will and fastidious mind of a vicious predator who had lulled more than one man to an untimely death.
“The American I was working for, the one with the CIA, he made a call to someone and I have no idea who it is. Somehow this is all connected to Barnes, and the Anvil Program, but I can’t get my head around it. Someone has to be pulling Barnes’s strings, and whoever it is must be all the way at the top. The only intel I have is at the safe house.”
After breaking with Barnes, Mason had needed some insurance to protect him from the military. He’d used a program to hack into the colonel’s personal computer and downloaded most of the hard drive before the breach was detected. If he was killed, Ahmed was supposed to send it all to the American press. But while he was still alive he needed to get to the laptop, which had been stashed at one of Ahmed’s safe houses. He desperately hoped it would give him some answers.
Ahmed let out a paternal sigh and watched the smoke curling up from the end of his cigarette. After he’d gathered his thoughts, he fixed his steely gaze on his American pupil.
“You have been working for your American masters for too long, my friend. I warned you about the CIA. I told you that man wasn’t going to give you a free pass back to America, did I not?”
“I’m just trying to get the hell out of here.”
“How have you lived so long being this naive? If it wasn’t so sad, I would laugh.” Ahmed threw his hands in the air and shrugged his shoulders in a manner that showed his bewilderment with the whole affair.
Ahmed had been a Gaddhafi loyalist, and a colonel in Libya’s intelligence service. The man had run more black operations than any other agent. His claim to fame had been an operation in Switzerland, where he’d used a banker’s family as leverage to gain access to funds the United Nations had frozen. He had developed quite an impressive network of contacts — until the Americans came. Regime change cost him everything, and when he became a fugitive, the United States placed him on the terror list. Like Mason, he could never return home, but unlike his American friend, Ahmed only fought for those who paid him the most money.
“It’s not something I would expect you to understand.”
“What I understand and what I know are two separate things. I know that your own men tried to kill you. I know your country doesn’t care about the Arabs and that your president doesn’t care how many must die to protect its interests.”
Ahmed fell silent, the painful memories getting the best of him. When he spoke again the Libyan’s voice was low and hard.
“You and Zeus are what’s left, and they will take you too if given the chance.”
Ahmed had been around the block more times than he could remember, but the day Zeus brought Mason to his house, the Libyan had found himself at a total loss. He hadn’t believed the American’s story at first, but while the wounded American slept, he had checked with his sources and was shocked to find that Mason had been telling the truth.
He couldn’t believe that so many men had ignored the colonel’s visible descent into madness. The Libyan had asked Mason over and over how the American soldiers could have stood by and watched Barnes shoot a six-year-old girl in the head and then massacre the rest of her family.
Mason watched the emotion slipping over his friend’s face. Ahmed was by no means soft but there was a deep reservoir of sadness inside him, fed by horrors most men would never know.
The waiter appeared with their tea and the two friends lifted their cups in silence. Mason took a moment to enjoy the complex aroma of the brown liquid before taking a sip. The key to good chai was the delicate mix of tea, sugar, and milk. Much like life, success lay in the balance.
Good tea encourages the mind to wander, but unfortunately all of Mason’s good memories were gone. The thought of returning to Libya evoked a powerful stirring inside his soul as painful memories poured out.
Unwelcome images and sounds rushed past their barriers, like flames seeking oxygen. He could feel himself falling backward into his own mind, and his heart began racing in his chest.
On that desperate day, he could hear the static from the radio as he tried to make contact with his team. He smelled the red dirt and the copper scent of blood in his mouth. Rounds cracked low over his head. Some were so close he could hear them cutting through the air, while others ricocheted off the pile of bricks in puffs of dust and broken concrete. The rebels began flanking his position.
Oh shit, not now.
Mason was fighting for his life one second and the next he was back at the table, his heart rate jacked through the roof.
He caught Ahmed watching him from across the table and felt ashamed of the weakness that must have been written across his face. Mason struggled to decipher the Libyan’s expression and then it hit him: it was compassion.
“Ahmed, when the uprising started in Libya, do you remember how quick we turned on Gaddhafi?”
“I assume by ‘we’ you mean your government?”
“Yeah.”
“I remember telling him not to trust your president, but he assured me that he had certain… How did he say it? Oh yes, ‘assurances.’ ”
“What does that mean?”
“It is funny you put it that way, because that is what I asked him. You must realize that the man was utterly deranged, out of touch with reality. I told him that my job was to protect him and the country, but he was so certain that—”
“Certain about what?” Mason asked. He suddenly felt like he was on the verge of a great discovery, and all he had to do was coax it out of the notoriously closed-lipped spy.
“He was certain that the Americans needed him. One of your generals was flown in, a week before the riots began. He had a closed-door meeting with the president, but I’d had Gaddhafi’s offices bugged long ago, so I was privy to the entire conversation.”
“What did they talk about?” Mason willed himself to calm down; he had always had his suspicions about the operation and knew deep down that someone besides Barnes had been calling the shots.