During Hal's briefing, Bolan could tell that April, sitting on the sidelines, had things she wanted to tell him. Important things, like how glad she was to see her man back from Minnesota in one piece. Bolan could read that much from those brown eyes, which could express so much without words. But those eyes also said that she understood that the mission came first. The mission always came first. April was, yeah, that kind of special lady. She would tell Bolan the important things — the man/woman things that existed only for the two of them — when she saw him again.

Bolan hadn't had time to listen to the full tape that Stony Man's computer wizard, Aaron "The Bear" Kurtzman, had compiled from the general's dossier, but he digested the particulars. And he didn't like any of them.

Bolan knew that since the revolution, Washington had welcomed any number of the Shah's regime into the country, especially those interested in someday restoring some kind of sanity to a homeland being systematically driven back into the Dark Ages by a religious madman.

But Nazarour did not fall into this category. The man was as self-serving as he was ruthless, with nothing save his own shadowy interests at heart. Bolan understood that the Shah's rule had been far less than perfect, and Nazarour epitomized the corruption that had been one of the regime's continuing problems. A man with untold millions pillaged from his years as a top-echelon officer in what the Shah's military had perverted into one of the most dread secret police agencies in the world. Yeah, that was Eshan Nazarour. The man sounded like Savage incarnate.

But whatever else the general was, he would indeed be perfect bait for the trap Bolan hoped to spring when Karim Yazid's hit team came calling.

The world was growing smaller in many ways. There were fewer and fewer places where men could gather and talk of freedom and peace and plans for a better future without yesterday's mistakes. America was one of those places, and it had to remain so. If not for Eshan Nazarour, then for his countrymen who were more honorable than he, who cared about their Iran and dreamed and, yes, plotted for a day when freedom — real freedom — would ring in that torn land.