small sofas with print designs faced each other over a coffee table. Everything was bathed in yellow from the sunlight filtered by the closed yellow curtains.
Everything was in place. He checked the bedroom, the single bed, the quilted spread, the desk, dresser, goatskin lampshade. All in order and tinted blue from blue curtains.
“Adam?”
Gannon moved on to the bathroom.
At least that’s what he figured the next room to be, given the white door was ajar and he glimpsed a mirror. As he reached out his hand to open the door, he hesitated.
The house was too still.
He swallowed.
As he slowly pushed the door open, a prickly sensation shot up the back of his neck. A shoed foot was hanging over the lip of the bathtub. He then saw a hand, an arm, blood splattered over the white tiles, before he met Adam Corley’s eyes.
Staring into him from a wide-eyed death mask.
A sound.
Something moved fast behind Gannon.
39
Somewhere in Morocco
Nearly two hours outside of Rabat a convoy sped along a dirt road, cutting across a vast stretch of forgotten territory.
The sun hit the chrome on the first two cars; both were government-owned Peugeot sedans out of Temara. The last vehicle was a late model Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen that had been dispatched out of Ain Aouda. Only a few of the men involved were members of the DST—Direction de la Sécurité du Territoire—the Moroccan secret police.
No one knew the identities of the others.
Dust clouds billowed from their trail, forming a rising curtain that concealed their destination and intention.
The man lying on the back floor of the G-Wagen, under a canvas tarp, stripped naked, shackled and blindfolded was Jack Gannon. His brain throbbed and his mouth tasted as if it had been stuffed with burlap and he recalled an overwhelming smell.
Chloroform?
The last thing he remembered was discovering Adam Corley’s corpse amid a bloodbath in his Rabat home.
Gannon forced himself to cling to the drone of the wheels, to breathe deeply and calmly. He concentrated on the murmur of French coming from his captors at the front of the vehicle. He tried to pick up any information, a tone, a word he might know.
A cell phone rang, and the man who answered spoke in a language Gannon didn’t recognize. The vehicle slowed to a halt, and he heard muted shouting through the closed windows. Dread gnawed at the edges of his mind and he tried not to imagine what awaited him.
Had he been able to see through his blindfold he would have discerned the high chain-link fence topped with razor wire securing the low building, which was half-submerged in the earth. It was a secret facility that did not exist. Not officially. In intelligence circles, it was known as a black prison.
For several years, the building had received suspected terrorists transported on ghost flights from countries that denied knowledge of activities conducted within its walls. It was undocumented work performed by contractors expert at obtaining information from any resistant subjects delivered to them. Some of the interrogators had extracted intelligence on the attacks in Casablanca, Madrid, London, Bali and on September 11. They had also thwarted a number of planned attacks that remained unknown to the world beyond its barbed-wire gates.
A sudden blast of 110-degree heat overwhelmed the SUV’s air-conditioned interior as the doors were opened.
Gannon was yanked out.
Stones pricked his bare feet and the ground burned his soles as he hobbled with his captors a short distance before they pushed him indoors. The air was cooler but he was nearly overcome by the stench of urine and excrement. The drone of flies was alarming and he feared he was among corpses. As Gannon was shoved along the building’s reeking corridors, he found his voice.
“I’m an American citizen. I want to call my embassy.”
A sharp pain exploded in his buttocks from the kick of a large steel-toed boot. Gannon’s knees buckled and he was dragged into another room.
Distant shouting and screams echoed. The floor was wet as he was positioned with his feet spread apart. Chains clinked and steel collars were clamped to his ankles.
His plastic handcuffs were replaced with steel ones that were fastened to chains. The cuffs gouged him as his wrists were hoisted over his head. He had to stand on his toes to touch the ground.
“What have I done?”
A fist drove so fast and deep into Gannon’s gut he felt his organs squeeze against his spine and reflexively vomited. The hot contents of his stomach flowed over his skin.
He wheezed through tears.
“The question for