18

An explosion of daylight suddenly filled the room.

Blinded, Marcus winced and turned away. He heard boots approaching. At least six sets of them. Maybe more. Then he felt something smash into his stomach. The force of the blow knocked most of the wind out of him. This was followed by savage blows upon his chest, back, and legs. When the beatings stopped, the rag was jerked out of his mouth and he was ordered to open his eyes and stand.

He complied, but someone grabbed the chains around his hands and jerked them above his head, hooking them to a winch of some kind. Then a motor began to whine. Marcus’s arms were yanked higher and higher over his head until he was on his tiptoes and finally hanging in midair.

The door at the other end of the wide rectangular room was now wide-open. It was a garage door—three of them, actually—and Marcus realized that he was in an auto repair shop. He could see tools and diagnostic devices of various kinds hanging on the concrete walls. The floor, too, was concrete and covered with oil stains.

To his right, he saw a doorway to an office of some kind.

To his left . . .

Marcus froze. He blinked hard to make sure he was really awake, that he was actually seeing and not imagining what was next to him. But sure enough, to his immediate left was an Iranian-made surface-to-surface ballistic missile mounted on the back of a mobile launching vehicle about the size of an American fire truck. The solid-propellant missile was covered with black printing. Marcus could not read the words, but he was certainly familiar enough with Farsi to know that what he was looking at was the language of Iran. Almost ten meters long, this was not one of the clunky old unguided Zelzal-2 models from the late 1990s. This was a gleaming new Fateh-110 with a precision state-of-the-art guidance system and a range of upwards of three hundred kilometers—easily capable of hitting Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, Israel’s two biggest and most populous urban areas.

Just then, someone jabbed a thick wooden truncheon into Marcus’s ribs. The pain was intense, but he refused to give his captors the satisfaction of making a sound. Looking around, he noticed six hooded men, all sporting automatic rifles, taking up positions around the shop. The one who had hit him, however, was not hooded, and Marcus found himself staring at a young man no more than thirty years old, wearing green fatigues and a maroon beret. He was tall. Marcus pegged him at about his own height—six feet one—give or take an inch, and about his own weight, roughly 190 pounds. The man was broad-shouldered and muscular and clearly knew how to take care of himself. He sported a dark mustache and a scruffy, almost-patchy beard. In his hands was the truncheon. Yet what most captured Marcus’s attention were the man’s eyes. Brooding and gray, these were the eyes of a cold-blooded killer, the eyes of the man he’d first seen on the security road, the man who had sent fifty thousand volts into his chest.

“My name is Colonel Amin al-Masri,” the man said in a husky, almost-raspy voice. “To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

Marcus said nothing but stored away two new pieces of information. First, if this guy was really a colonel—and there was no particular reason to think the man was inflating his résumé in front of his men—then this was a fairly high-ranking officer in the Hezbollah hierarchy. Second, if the man had just given his real name, then he wasn’t Lebanese. Al-Masri, Marcus knew from his extremely limited Arabic, meant “the Egyptian.”

“Let’s start with your name,” the colonel repeated in heavily accented English.

Still, Marcus did not speak.

“Okay—whom do you work for?”

Nothing.

“Obviously you are an American,” the Egyptian continued. “Obviously you’re doing advance work for someone in your government. But who?”

Silence.

“Who is coming to our border? And when?”

Marcus hung there from the winch mounted on the ceiling, head pounding, adrenaline surging, blood boiling. He felt a flash of anger in his eyes and saw the colonel’s cold gray eyes react with anger as well. The man made a waving motion with his left hand, and one of his henchmen rushed to his side. He was carrying a bucket, which he set down under Marcus’s feet. Using a bayonet attached to the end of his AK-47, the man speared a wet and dripping and filthy sponge from the bucket and proceeded to wipe it across Marcus’s chest and feet. Then the man retreated into the shadows for a moment, only to return with what looked like jumper cables. The man attached one set of clamps to Marcus’s toes and the other set to his bare, wet chest.

“Let me be perfectly clear,” al-Masri said. “If you talk, you live. If not, you die. Take your pick. I really couldn’t care less. I’m sure your colleagues would be more than happy to tell me what I need to know.”