Free The Assassin by Andrew Britton

hushed tones, along with his displeasure at having to leave so early in the ongoing offensive, despite its undeniable lack of success. It was a familiar refrain, but the German did not offer his usual sympathetic ear. Instead, he spoke quietly of another path. He murmured of men in the north who were waiting to act, and the names he used were instantly recognizable to al-Umari. Some were dated names that went back to his childhood, while others could still be found on every watch list in North America and Western Europe. Here, at last, was the possibility of a real victory. Rashid al-Umari listened intently for two hours and, the following morning, left Sadr City for the last time. He was not sorry to leave it behind.
    Since then, his meetings with the foreigner had been extremely limited, their last conversation coming ten days earlier in a musty apartment on the west side of Baghdad’s Jadriya district. In that meeting he’d been given the travel arrangements and the necessary papers, which might or might not have gotten him through an IPS checkpoint. Al-Umari was all too aware of the changing attitude in government service; the American-trained security forces could no longer be counted on to accept a generous bribe in return for safe passage, but as it turned out, he had not been forced to face that particular risk. In fact, the whole trip — including the border crossing south of the al-Maze military airport — had been astonishingly easy. The German had suggested that this might be the case, but that had not stopped him from delivering a seemingly endless litany of security precautions. The foreigner’s words were still clear in his mind, but Rashid al-Umari was a young man with a young man’s stubborn mentality, and the Old City of Aleppo was not without its charms.
     
     
    The Aleppo souq, one of the oldest in the north and the best outside of Damascus, was somewhat crowded in the early evening. Old women and young wives, most wearing the traditional chador, others daringly clothed in Western attire, ventured out of their homes as the heat finally dropped to bearable levels. It was dark beneath thick canvas draped over stone archways, the individual stalls lit only by crude iron lanterns dangling precariously overhead. Rashid al-Umari turned left on Souq al-Zarb and began making his way through the city market, moving slowly in an attempt to take it all in.
    It was truly a wondrous sight. It had been many years since he had seen such an array of goods; it seemed as though there was little one could wish for that could not be found in these crowded streets. Headscarves and jalabiyyas , the long robes worn by men and women alike, could be found in every size and color imaginable. He passed stalls bearing perfumes and spices, fresh meats and vegetables. He turned his head to gaze down one narrow hara and saw row after row of gleaming yellow metal. Another corridor was lined with stands heaped with antique silver jewelry. The sights of the bazaar battled only with the sounds; al-Umari was assaulted from every direction by the calls of Syrian vendors and the guarded replies of their potential customers. The steady sound of passing traffic to the east fought to drown out the tinny whine of an American pop song, which was emanating from a child’s battered radio. It was, Rashid thought, completely chaotic, and yet, there was also something strangely controlled about the whole scene, for these were a people separated only by the worn counters over which they traded.
    Certainly, it could not be compared to his own city. One could hardly turn around in Baghdad without seeing another American patrol. The superior smiles were always evident on those clean-shaven faces, despite the vast losses they had sustained. How can they be so persistent? Rashid wondered, the anger welling up as it always did. Why can they not accept that they have failed? It was incomprehensible to this young man that the Americans could be so