Prologue
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PrologueIn the months that followed my arrest and subsequent trial, I had the pleasure of receiving copies of Talya’s journal. She recorded her misadventure in such a way that I, for one, learned how she managed to survived it all. It all seemed fantastic to me – even to this day.
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The evening was quiet. I sat in one of the lounge chairs and looked at the shadows of the trees in the park. They were the giants of my thoughts; each was a memory of too many deaths, too many conflicts, too many power figures who were trying to rule the lives of millions of people with evil as the maestro of this unbridled and obscene orchestra of drug addiction.
Many questions that needed answers were dancing in front of my mind’s eye like a hundred question marks at the end of each of the paragraphs of my life. One of these question marks, which was perhaps a running winner to the finish-line of my answers, was, “Why wasn’t Slimane in Miami?” Everything had pointed to him being in that city for the past two years at least. I had deduced that he was back in West Africa by now, hoping to reconstruct his empire on the ruins that I and Khalid had left in their wake. Was that a sound deduction, or was I mistaken? He had a profitable and elaborately hidden business flourishing in Florida, so why wouldn’t he stay where ‘business was good’ rather than running off to where he wasn’t yet needed or where he had no one to help him? And, why didn’t the agency realize that the Nassau House was a trap, or that Ben Slimane had never occupied it, let alone making it his headquarters?
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