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the blows, but knew they weren’t real. Laiveaux guessed that they probably took him to have a nice meal and a cigarette. “I’m fine. You?”
    Turner nodded slowly. “Good.”
    They only kept him in the cell with Laiveaux to keep up appearances, hoping that Laiveaux would divulge a piece of pertinent information to the double-crossing bastard. The man had been probing him with questions, whether the safe houses were still secure, hoping to catch a crumb of information that the General might drop.
    “That stuff you said about the new agent in Kabul.” He lit a cigarette, handing it to the general as he lit one for himself. “Was it true?”
    Laiveaux took a drag, stood up, taking a last sip from the bottle. In a flash he smashed it against the wall and stuck the bottle neck against the man’s throat. “Don’t make a sound,” he whispered, pinning the man against the wall.
    The cigarette dangled from Turner’s lip.  
    “What else do they know?”
    Turner shook his head, wide-eyed.
    Laiveaux grabbed the cigarette from his lip, clamped a hand over his mouth and pushed the coal into his cheek.  
    The man’s face went red and a vein throbbed in his forehead. The sickening stench of burnt flesh hung between them.
    Laiveaux waited for the man to suck in a couple of breaths from flaring nostrils before slipping his hand from his mouth.
    “They were going to kill me, General,” Turner said, a tear rolling past the wound on his cheek.
    “What else?”
    The man closed his eyes. “That’s all, I swear. The longer I took with the info, the longer I lived.”
    “You sure?”
    The man nodded furiously.
    Laiveaux clamped his hand over Turner’s mouth and ground the cigarette into Turner’s forehead, tossed the butt to the ground. “Who are you working for? And don’t bullshit me.”
    The man closed his eyes, shaking his head.
    Laiveaux stuck the bottle to his neck and pulled it across. A fine trickle of blood seeped on to Turner’s shirt. “Who?”
    “I don’t know,” the man sobbed.
    Laiveaux had expected as much. “Do you know about the missiles?” He had received a black letter containing threats that he was going to wipe out strategic sites, and he had noticed hundreds of missile launchers move into position.
    The man shook his head.
    “What are the rocket launchers targeting?”
    The man shook his head, fear in his eyes. “I don’t know.” He blinked away a tear. “I swear.”  
    Laiveaux slit a gash into the man’s cheek.  
    “I swear, please stop.”  
    Laiveaux grunted, he had gotten as much as he was going to out of the man. He slit his throat. Turner clutched his neck, choking, trying to speak. He dropped to his knees, blood spurting from the wound. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, like a fish out of water. He had a questioning look on his face. He fell to his side, thrashed for a couple of seconds and went limp.
    Rehan swung the door open and pointed his rifle at Laiveaux. “What’s going on?” he shouted in Arabic.
    Laiveaux dropped the bottle and lifted his hands. “I was just venting some of my frustrations on Agent Turner over here.”
    Rehan ran and kneeled next to the man. He cast Laiveaux an accusing glance. “He’s…He’s—“
    “Dead. I know,” Laiveaux said and picked up his cigarette. He puffed and the coal started burning again. He took a deep drag and blew out the smoke through his nose. “I don’t expect you to understand, Mr. Rehan, but, unfortunately, loose lips sink ships.”  

Alexa lifted her head over the edge of the dune and looked through her Steiner binoculars. She rubbed a bead of sweat from her eyebrow with the back of her hand before resuming her observation of the small shanty town in front of them.
    The sun beat down on her back, so she had dug herself into the sand. According to his GLD chip, Laiveaux was in one of the buildings in the remote village in front of them. They had been scoping out the place since early that morning