Years ago when he was an angry young man living abroad, the narrator was recruited as a sleeper agent by the Chinese.
As the book opens, he is a mid-level diplomat two years from retirement at the United States embassy in Rabat, where he has been assigned the dead-end job of monitoring Morocco’s treatment of women and children. When an underaged prostitute murders a distant member of the royal family, he snoops around the crime scene and the Palace puts pressure on the ambassador to have him reassigned out of town.
Exiled to Marrakech, he hires a traditional storyteller as an informant. The storyteller and his wife use the money he pays them to smuggle counterfeit Marlboros across the desert from Algeria . . . with disastrous results. When the narrator is activated by the same Chinese spymaster who was responsible for the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salam, he is forced to team up with the storyteller to smuggle 2,000 pounds of plastic explosive to Chinese-backed terrorists.
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