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efforts of the cartels and the worldwide Islamist jihad for their mutual benefit. It also took a healthy profit for doing so, but it was deserved.
    Barak took a glass of champagne from the first-class attendant and considered what little he knew about the upcoming meeting. The encrypted message from his sponsors simply directed him to the island of Aruba and a villa on the eastern shore. There, he was to meet a man who would identify himself only as Ryan. He was instructed to brief the man on plans he’d been putting in place for twenty-five years. Actually, longer than that if you counted all the years since he’d decided to become a warrior. That was two days after his eleventh birthday, when his father had been hunted down and assassinated. The Jews had learned of his father’s close relationship with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the head of Hitler’s SS Muslim Panzar Division in World War II, and had sent a team of young Israelis to kill him. Barak had vowed his revenge on the Jews.
    His father had fled to Egypt after WWII. He lived under the protection of Gamal Abdul Nasser, until the Jews tracked him down. He had worked with the Mufti to plan the liquidation of the Jewish population in the Middle East after Hitler won the war. Those participants the Jews found, they killed, often in front of their families. Barak remembered. He had watched his father, on his knees in the street in front of their home, still cursing the Jews when he was executed. He would never forget. It was a memory he kept alive each night, as part of his evening prayers.
    With the help of the Muslim Brotherhood, his mother fled to France and opened a small village bakery. A lot of Arabs were in France after the war, and Barak assimilated easily and did well in school. After de Gaulle rose to power, France reached out to the Middle East to assist it in limiting the powers of Russia and America. Barak was soon courted by the military for service in its special operation forces. His ethnicity and physical prowess were factors, of course, as well as his reputation for a fierce determination to win at any cost. While still in secondary school, his red flags playing soccer were legendary.
    After the selection process and recruit training, he was given specialized training to work with foreign local forces that France wanted to support militarily, especially in the Middle East. Colonialism was a thing of the past, but providing the assistance of its Quiet Professionals, as its special forces were known, often reaped some of the same benefits.
    While he was in Iran working with the Shah to assist the Sultan of Oman to put down a rebellion, he came to the attention of the movement. When the Shah fled Iran in 1979 and the Savak , Iran’s secret police, was dissolved, Barak and other foreign sympathizers were imprisoned. When his true sympathies were discovered, albeit under torture, he was asked to join the Islamic fundamentalist movement. He hadn’t hesitated.
    In the end, a farsighted plan was approved with his unique gifts in mind. It required him to assume a new identity and move to America, to establish a base for training fifth column forces capable of striking deep into the heart of the Jews’ ally.
    With a nest egg of twenty-five million dollars and twenty-five years, he had accomplished everything that had been asked of him. Now he was directed to discuss it all with someone he’d never met and had little reason to trust.
    When his United Airlines flight landed at Aeropuerto Internacional Reina Beatrix in Oranjestad, Aruba, Barak collected his Hartmann carry-on and deplaned. After passing through customs, he made his way directly to the taxi area in front of the island airport. Waiting beside a white Mercedes S600 sedan he saw a driver wearing the dark green cap he’d been told to look for. He nodded to the man and glanced around. Several men seemed to be interested in the Mercedes, but no one seemed to be overly interested in its passenger.