Sebastian Drexler sat in his office, thinking over his conversation with the Halabys and this mysterious American working for them. He’d told the man he expected they would have more dealings with one another, and he fully anticipated this to be the case. He hoped he’d see him at the end of a gun barrel, and on the streets of Paris, for two reasons.

One, Drexler saw himself as more than capable in a fight, and taking down this American who was making so much trouble for his operation would be supremely satisfying. And two . . . More than anything on this Earth, Sebastian Drexler wanted to go home to Europe.

Here in Damascus he had money, power, women, and respect, but he dreamed of seeing his home continent again, of being around Westerners and Western food, customs, and ideals.

But he knew he had to be careful in Europe, because if the police in any nation on the continent picked him up, he’d never set foot outside a prison as long as he lived.

Drexler was born in the picturesque Swiss mountain village of Lauterbrunnen to parents who owned a climbing-expedition tour company, and he became a top-ranked youth alpinist before leaving the nation of his birth for university. Educated in international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, he then spent a few years in his nation’s foreign intelligence service. But the slow pace of Switzerland bored him, so he left his home country and took a job for a private risk management firm specializing in helping large corporations navigate their business interests in dangerous African conflict zones.

Drexler was bright, cunning, ruthless when he needed to be, and ambitious. After a couple years working for multinationals, he went out on his own, peddling his expertise as a veteran intelligence operative with third-world experience to well-heeled African warlords. He spent two years working under Gaddafi but got out before the fall of Libya. Then he spent two more years in Europe doing the remote bidding of Nigeria’s corrupt leader Julius Abubaker, and then he did stints supporting the aims of the leadership in Egypt under Mubarak, in Zimbabwe under Mugabe, and in Sudan under Bakri Ali Abboud.

He was a field man who could think, not a mindless gunman but a well-versed and broadly trained operative. He could protect, he could investigate, he could surveil his clients’ opposition and assess his clients’ threats. And yes . . . he could assassinate.

Hell, Sebastian Drexler could raise armies and sack nations.

But he grew tired of the Third World and sought employment back on his home continent. It took Sebastian Drexler years to make his way back to Europe, but finally he left Africa and was discreetly hired by one of the oldest family-owned banks on Earth, Meier Privatbank of Gstaad. The institution employed him as a “consultant” for ultra-affluent private clients, assigning him to those who needed Drexler’s discreet physical and mental abilities to help keep their funds right where they belonged: at Meier Privatbank.

He broke up family squabbles that threatened accounts with all manner of subterfuge and silenced his clients’ legal problems with intrigue and violence. In rural Denmark, a wealthy family patriarch with cancer decided he wanted to remove all his holdings at Meier, some thirty million euros, and donate them to medical research. The younger members of the family were livid, but legally, there was nothing they could do.

The children consulted the bank; Sebastian Drexler arrived at the family estate outside Silkeborg and poisoned the patriarch to death with tainted meds before he could complete the transaction.

The patriarch’s kids were pleased, as were Drexler’s employers at Meier.

Drexler did not have a conscience; he had a code. He served the wishes of his employer without question or hesitation. He would cheat, intimidate, maim, kill; he would fund an insurgent attack on a factory in Morocco, contract and sanction a street criminal to stab a lawyer over his wallet in Athens to get him off a case—do anything that would further the wishes of his bank’s clients to keep his bank’s balance sheet large and risks to his clients’ assets small.

Life was going well for Drexler, but eventually his crimes caught up with him. Interpol identified him as a criminal and a killer for his actions in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, and they began investigating his rumored ties to the Swiss banking industry.

His employers could have washed their hands of him, but instead they made him an offer. He was told there was work for him, lucrative work, in a place Interpol would never persuade the local police to arrest and extradite him.

One of his bank’s largest clients had a need for a personal agent, someone to help her navigate a tricky political and criminal climate both at home and abroad, and a well-rounded, well-connected operative like Herr Drexler might be able to succeed in this mission quite handily.

He was offered the job as the personal action arm of Shakira al-Azzam. He would not be stationed in Europe—which was good news, because Drexler was now persona non grata in Europe—but in Syria itself. If he moved to Damascus to work for the beautiful and powerful first lady, she would win, the bank would win, and Drexler would win.

Well . . . that was how it was all sold to him, and he leapt at the chance to get out of his dangerous predicament in Switzerland. But he had no idea of the dangers in which he’d find himself in Damascus. Even as a personal agent of a member of the first family, it was a perilous environment.

Syrian president Ahmed al-Azzam himself had to sign off on the plan, and he was agreeable to the idea, for the very simple reason that the hundred million euros in Switzerland at Meier Privatbank was essentially the last of the money he and his wife had socked away abroad as a hedge against being overthrown at home. If the Swiss bankers who’d managed to hide his loot this long wanted to send a European spy to work full-time keeping their financial interests protected, then Ahmed knew this would work better than his own intelligence service trying to do the same.

Of course as soon as Drexler arrived, he was thoroughly vetted by Syria’s notorious Mukhabarat, their General Intelligence Service, but he was cleared, and then he began doing the bidding of both Shakira and Ahmed, and he began working with the Mukhabarat on operations that involved keeping the foreign assets of the first family secure.

There were a great number of threats to the Azzams’ offshore finances. Government entities searching for them, reporters inquiring about them, third-party banks with questions about the legitimacy of the nominees on the trusts. Over time Drexler developed a large network of European employees to further the Azzams’ aims on the continent: cops in Paris, intelligence officials in the UK, corrupt lawyers in Luxembourg, computer hackers in Ukraine.

Shakira’s accounts stayed safe, and more money was funneled into them from time to time from the Azzams’ corruption schemes in Damascus.

This relationship between Drexler and the Azzams had been working well for all parties involved, and the Swiss contract agent had been fully busy with his tasks, when an affair between the first lady and Drexler developed. From Shakira’s side it was easy to see what fueled the desire. She was a woman locked away in a palace with few around her other than sycophants who were completely beholden to her loveless husband. When dangerous but exotic Drexler came into the picture, he met her gaze and showed his interest in her, and unlike other men, he was allowed confidential meetings with her in her private apartment.

It took no time for her to make a move on the attractive European.

Drexler, on the other hand, was motivated by a combination of two simple drugs: adrenaline and lust. He’d slept with a warlord’s mistress, a concubine of the Egyptian president, the wife of a Nigerian general, and even the daughter of the chief Interpol inspector in Greece in charge of his case. Sebastian Drexler was a hunter of pelts, and Shakira was suitable for hanging over his mantel.

There was nothing special about their affair to him. He’d had better, but over time he had come to worry that the cold and cruel woman might actually think she was in love with him, and in the dead of night he found this more terrifying than the prospect that Ahmed Azzam could find out about the affair and have him killed.