There were Iraqis and Syrians and Turks in the row left to be killed this morning on the banks of al-Azzam Lake, and soon the escorts had their hands on the shoulders of a twenty-eight-year-old with matted hair curled in an afro, blood smeared on his face, and a black eye, and they pulled him up and along, beginning his short stroll to his death.
That left forty-one in the row of tied and kneeling men in orange jumpsuits, and the next man to wait his turn looked much the same as the others. Filthy tangled dark hair in his eyes, flecked with bits of rubble and glass. His head down in supplication, his gaze averted from the impossibly horrific scene going on before him. Blood was caked on his bearded face from the beating he had taken in the makeshift prison the night before, and his nose was swollen; a punch to his jaw had left it scraped and bruised, and he was unable to open it fully. He also had a savage cut above his right ear and a bloody gash over his left eye.
Still, he was not much worse off from the rest of the prisoners still alive.
The main difference between him and the others was a small distinction and would serve as no comfort to them. He’d die first, and they’d die after.
* * *
? ? ?
The prisoner to the left of the man with the beaten face raised his head now, defying the orders of the captors, and he looked at the horror around him. His name was Abdul Basset Rahal, and he was Syrian, a rebel soldier in the Free Syrian Army; he had been captured late the afternoon before along with the prisoner with the beaten face who was next in line to die. Rahal was a brave twenty-four-year-old, but he was scared now; he was human, after all. Still, he took solace in the fact that he would be martyred by his death, like all of the others save for the man on his right. Rahal felt sadness for the beaten man at his shoulder, because he had done so much to help; he had been a lion in battle, a true hero in their righteous cause, and now he would die without achieving martyrdom.
Because he was no Muslim.
Abdul Basset Rahal had only met the man the day before yesterday, but already the Syrian thought of the American as a fellow warrior, a kindred spirit, and yes . . . even as a friend.
The Syrian found some peace in the fact that he would share his last few breaths with this great soldier, and peace in the fact that the ISIS captors had not learned that this man was a Westerner, because they certainly would have made a bigger show of his death for the camera, and whatever manner they would have chosen, it would have been so much more horrible than a simple rifle shot to the temple.
The American was lucky; he’d get a bullet to the brain and then it would be over.
Rahal looked back down at the salty shore between his knees as the two escorts returned.
The American was cut away from the others; there was a scuffle of boots on the rocks, and then the American was grabbed by both shoulders, yanked to a standing position, and pushed away, hauled off along the waterline and towards the pier.
Rahal called out to him, careful to speak in Arabic, because although he spoke English fluently, doing so would tip off the ISIS monsters of the American’s true origins.
“Habibi!” Friend! “I swear it has been my great honor to fight and die alongside you.”
For his words Rahal received a rifle butt to the back of his head, knocking him onto his face and pulling other prisoners down with him by the rope tied around their waists.
But the American either had not heard him or did not understand, or perhaps his jaw was just swollen shut, because he made no reply.
* * *
? ? ?
Courtland Gentry’s bare feet slapped along the wooden pier; the coarse twine wrapped around his wrists in front of him bit into his skin. The AK barrels held by the men at his sides jabbed against his low back, and he felt the eyes of the other fourteen ISIS gunmen behind him. He’d counted them when they got out of the trucks, and he counted them again as he was brought to the water’s edge with the others.
He passed the unarmed cameraman and kept going, glanced up now, and focused his eyes on the blood-drenched far edge of the pier. The masked man with the wired-stock AK and the daggers in his belt beckoned him with a bored wave of his rifle; he was a thick man, but even so, Gentry could see that the executioner had his chest puffed out, no doubt for the video and the attention paid to him by all on the hillside, confederate and enemy alike.
The American prisoner continued forward; his fate lay at the end of this pier.
The walk was short . . . as if fate were anxious to get on with its day.
One step past the executioner Gentry was forced to his knees; he slipped in the gore coating the wooden planks but recovered. He knelt with his head bowed and gazed down three feet to the surface of the lake, the water swirling bloodred in the brown. The body of the most recent victim had drifted a few yards away, and this meant the American wouldn’t crash into him as he himself went into the lake, not that this gave him any great consolation at all.
The escorts behind him took a half step back, their gun barrels close to his head, and then Court heard the sling swivels of the executioner’s rifle as the man lifted the weapon and trained it behind his right ear.
This was it.
Courtland Gentry lifted his head, squared his chin, and fixed his eyes in resolution.
“Here we go,” he whispered.
* * *
? ? ?
Abdul Basset Rahal, the young Syrian who would be the next to die, did not watch the execution of the American warrior. He just closed his eyes and listened for the boom of the rifle. When it came, it seemed louder than all the others now that he was focused fully on the sound, and the report had only just trailed away when the splash came.
Al-Azzam Lake had accepted its newest victim, and the Syrian knew it was now his time to walk to the edge of the bloody pier.
CHAPTER 1
ONE WEEK EARLIER
Cimetière du Père-Lachaise is the most visited cemetery in the world, but the Paris landmark was all but deserted on this rainy, gray, and cool weekday morning. An elderly couple fed squirrels on the cobblestones; a dozen young people stood solemnly in front of Jim Morrison’s fenced-off but simple plot. A group of German hipsters lounged among the graves surrounding Oscar Wilde’s tomb, and a lone man took photos of the statue of Euterpe, the muse of music, as she wept above composer Frédéric Chopin’s mausoleum.
There might have been seventy-five visitors in all on the property, but the cemetery spread over one hundred hilly and wooded acres, so anyone who wanted privacy could find it easily here in the warren of tombs, crypts, cobblestoned lanes, and old oak.
And one man had done just that. A dark-complected fifty-five-year-old with thinning gray hair sat alone a few rows up the hill from Molière’s tomb, on a small bench that one had to either know about or stumble upon to locate. His name was Dr. Tarek Halaby, and there wasn’t much about the man to make him stand out from the average Parisian of Middle Eastern descent, although someone with knowledge of fashion might pick up on the fact that his raincoat was a Kiton that ran north of two thousand euros, and they might therefore come to the quite reasonable assumption that this was a man of significant means.
As he sat there in the stillness of the cemetery, Halaby pulled out his wallet and looked at a small photo he kept there. A young man and a young woman standing together, smiling into the lens, with hope and intelligence in their eyes that said the future was theirs to command.
For twenty seconds Halaby stared at the photo, till drops of rain began to fall, splashing on the image and blurring the smiling faces.
He dried the photo off with this thumb, put his wallet back in his coat, and looked up to the sky. He lifted his umbrella and got ready to pop it open, but then the phone he’d placed on the bench next to him buzzed and lit up.
He forgot about the impending shower, put down the umbrella, and read the text.
Crematorium. Alone. Lose the goons.
The man in the raincoat sat up straighter and looked around nervously. He saw no one: only tombs and gravestones and trees and birds.
Cold sweat formed on the back of his collar.
He stood, but before he began walking he sent a reply.