PROLOGUE
“There can be no peace!” said the Tall Man, for what must have been the fifteenth time. But this time he punctuated it with a sharp slap of a fist on the table, causing the ashtray to jump, as if he was tired of making the point over and over—all the while not offering any viable solution, Fitzpatrick noted.
The Tall Man was lanky, his limbs spindly, a long beard elongating his angular face. Fitzpatrick pegged him to be in his early fifties. There were nine others in the room, including himself; mostly Iranians as far as he knew, certainly Arabs. They’d tried sharing their names, all of them Ahmad This or Mohammad That—the Johns and Williams of the Middle Eastern world. He’d given up trying to even remember. Instead they were the Tall Man, the Scrawny One, the Ugly Guy, Scar Man.
Scar Man was by far the most interesting; he stood in the corner, sullen, his arms folded, a dark shadow over his face and a pink scar running beneath his left eye, sweeping across his cheek to his ear like a fishhook. Men who looked like that had stories. Whether they were real or not didn’t matter. It could have been that Scar Man’s scar was from a knife fight or a combat mission. It could have been from tripping over his own two feet or getting kicked in the face by a donkey. The truth didn’t matter; Fitzpatrick would bet money that whatever story he might share would be more aligned with the former anyhow.
Men who looked like that had stories, and he knew because he was a man like that. His own face, his body, was a roadmap of cicatrices, though the truth behind it was far less interesting than anyone might guess.
“Our resources are limited,” said Ugly Guy, apparently picking up on the Tall Man’s habit of stating the obvious. Ugly Guy’s face was pockmarked, pitted, and his nose came to a bulbous end bright red with burst capillaries. “We lack time, we lack manpower—”
“The greatest attack on US soil was carried out by fewer men than we, armed only with box cutters,” argued another, his appearance so unremarkable that Fitzpatrick had not yet come up with a nickname for him yet.
“They planned for years!” Ugly Guy argued. “We have but days. And since then security measures have been significantly increased. You know this. What we need is ingenuity. We need—”
“Money.” This came from Scar Man, the first word Fitzpatrick had heard the man utter, and he had to resist the natural urge to raise an eyebrow, to show that he was listening. “That is what we need, is it not? We lack time, and we lack people. The obvious solution is money.”
Fitzpatrick scratched idly at his beard, pretending he did not understand. The nine other men in the room had been speaking in Arabic, under the assumption that he did not understand. But he did. He’d picked up some of the language on tours in Iraq and Iran years ago, but it wasn’t until he’d founded the Division that he’d realized the necessity of it. Much of his former group’s work had involved the Middle East and North Africa; staging small coups, putting down rebel uprisings, assassinating troublesome tribal leaders.
He understood every word, but he pretended not to, and instead lit a cigarette from the crumpled pack in the breast pocket of his black T-shirt.
This place, this ramshackle building in which they had set up a temporary headquarters, used to be a food-processing plant and still smelled like it. It sat in a small industrial complex not three kilometers from the Sabzevar bazaar, a city formerly known as Beyhagh, in the Razavi Khorasan Province of northeastern Iran, approximately six hundred sixty kilometers from Tehran.
Sabzevar was a pleasant enough city, as far as cities in this shithole of a country went. Fitzpatrick had certainly been in far worse. At least here he could walk the streets freely, even identify as an American, without much trouble. Though that could speak as much for his muscled, six-foot-four frame as for the relative safety of the city.
Yet this place, the former food-processing plant, this was not a pleasant enough place. It stank. It was poorly ventilated. Too hot in the daytime and drafty in the night. Scar Man was, unfortunately, right; the group had no money. What little funding they had was from a sheikh whom the Tall Man had blackmailed for certain indiscretions that involved underage boys, the details of which Fitzpatrick had not asked and did not want to know.
He had few scruples. But fucking around with kids was unforgivable. The less he knew about the sheikh, the better, or he’d be inclined to put a bullet in the man’s head.
“The obvious solution, you say.” Ugly Guy raised a thick eyebrow at Scar Man. “If money is so obvious, how do you propose that we procure it? And what would we do if we had it?”
Scar Man’s lip curled. Clearly he had no plan but was simply frustrated at their situation. “We would be unfettered!” Scar Man argued. “We could buy weapons! Drones… explosives… We would not be sitting around and bickering about what paltry scheme we might be able to perform under these limitations!”
The Tall Man pointed a crooked finger at Scar Man. “There is nothing paltry about what we are doing here—”
But Scar Man just pointed one right back. “You least of all should have a seat at this table!” He was shouting now, his face reddening. “We talk about resources? You wasted our funds on this… this American dog! You dare to bring him here, to discuss our plans with him? You expect us to put any trust in him?”
“He knows things,” said the Tall Man, and Fitzpatrick held back a chuckle.
But Scar Man did not. “Ha!” he spat derisively. “Of what does he know? He is a contract killer. A fighter-for-hire. And by the looks of it”—Scar Man sneered in Fitz’s direction—“he lost his last fight.”
He said nothing, just continued to stare down at the tabletop. Scar Man wasn’t wrong; Fitzpatrick hadn’t always been this handsome. He kept his beard trimmed short these days because of the long white scar that intersected his chin, where hair refused to grow. From around his right eye and orbital bone spider-webbed a network of lines, creases in his face that would never go away.
And those were just the visible ones. Beneath his black T-shirt and dark cargo pants were more, many more, where the doctors had surgically reset bones and put his insides back where they belonged.
Fitz took a long drag on his cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray before speaking. And then: “I’ll tell you the story of my scars,” he said in near-flawless (though heavily accented) Arabic, “if you tell me yours.”
No one spoke. The Ugly Guy’s mouth fell slightly open, revealing a few empty sockets. Scar Man narrowed his eyes, seething, as he slowly took a step forward.
There was nothing overtly threatening about the way in which he advanced, but his body language spoke volumes. Shoulders back, elbows slightly cocked, jaw clenched.
Fitz had been expecting some pushback to his presence since the meeting had begun. His left hand rested on the hilt of a black-handled Ka-Bar. He pulled it, making sure that everyone in the room heard the sound of unsheathed steel before he set the wickedly sharp knife down on the table before him.
“You may be thinking you have something to prove,” said Fitzpatrick, his gaze boring holes into Scar Man, “but I promise that if you try, I’ll make your face nice and symmetrical again.” He drew a line across his own cheek, swooping around to his ear, miming the line of the man’s long scar.