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Ayda Khoury

Pera Palace Hotel

Istanbul, Turkey

Farah tells me to sit tight in my room while she contacts her smuggler and works Friends of Syria as Farida Lujayn. She's supposed to be here at Pera Palace for the talks and can't afford to look guilty of collaboration on the Bab al-Hawa. She's hauled my whole suitcase from my old hotel to my borrowed suite. Wasn't the hotel under surveillance by Hezbollah?

Omar's supposed to be in the signals assurance suite, not the conference suite where she is, so he sneaks out and spends the next several hours prepping me to go to Lebanon.

To be taken as a hostage, into Lebanon.

Guess I'll see where I came from after all.

Omar gives me maps, emergency numbers, Lebanese vocabulary, metro geography quizzes, and a PDF spec sheet of a tracking chip.

"This is basically the in-house version of the VeriChip," he says. "You know, the one people put in their cats. You can buy these on the open market; they're well-tested, they're safe. It goes in a wide-bore needle and they inject it. -I'm not going to do that. A medical officer from the station will do that, and he'll give you some antibiotics and stuff.

"It only transmits a few feet. You'll have a watch that I'm going to fit with a face with official Gencon art from last year so it'll look like a souvenir watch older than this operation. It'll have a long-range transmitter that will run off the watch battery and rebroadcast the chip signal to satellite. It'll have redundancy; the chip will also broadcast to your phone. The Hamadehs will probably let you keep the phone until you get to Beirut, because they'll want you to call home at regular intervals.

"Because if you're dead and Farida's really doubling, the U.S. will probably kill them by drone strike or something, and if you're dead and she's not doubling for the U.S., well, maybe Mossad will avenge you. I'll give you a new phone because the hezbollahis have had hold of yours."

In our industry, physical access equals owned device, though I doubt either of the Hamadehs have the technical skill. I don't want to find out the hard way, and I'm glad he doesn't either.

"More redundancy," says Omar. "If they think anything on your computer is true-and I bet you've got Agency software on there for them to reverse engineer, if nothing else-your laptop is more valuable than you are, so they're not likely to get rid of it. Leave the 4G card in it, even though you'll be throttled to LTE in Lebanon, and I'll make sure your laptop picks up signal and rebroadcasts too. I know there are deadzones, but if this tracker goes dark for too long, we are coming. Qatar trades. If they actually take you hostage in Beirut, remember, Qatar State Security is coming for you."

I must be insane. Farah broke up Vienna and I made Omar help, and I'm supposed to believe they're not going to let me be killed by Hezbollah.

Omar fishes a phone in a black rubberized case from his back pocket and hands it to me.

"Your identifier phrase is 'there are enough spoons to go around," he says. "Wait here. I want to introduce you to somebody."

Omar goes out into the conference and leaves me waiting in the suite. What am I doing?

There's a difference between wearing the white hat and dying with Alex Hart.

That's really the worst they can do to me, isn't it? Kill me? How bad can it be? I looked for death myself for years; I just never had the methodology. Torture me - they could torture me to death.