Vizier Hashin was bored. This time Henry's thumbs had ben dislocated and the parts of Henry's legs that still had live skin on them burned - and he still couldn't break Henry, make him cry for mercy, or even get him to talk.
Dihya warned me not to meddle in this business, Henry thought, after he regained consciousness on the cold floor of his pitch-black cell. She thought I was too old to get back into the spy game. I do so hate it when my wife is right...And now she'll try to save me....again. But this time she'll fail. Then the pain surged back over him and he stopped thinking at all.
At 55, Henry Doyle has it all: wealth, happiness, a loving wife, a young son, and most important, his life − after a violently successful, 35-year career as a spy, a soldier of fortune, and as needed, a paid assassin. To the men he'd led in battle against Napoleon, he was El Habibka, the legendary Bedouin cavalry general. To the French who hated and feared him, he was more ominous: a shadow − a Sufi ghost -
le wraith qui disparaît.
When Napoleon escapes captivity on Elba in 1815 to return as Emperor, Henry comes out of retirement, risking all to stop him - and fails, winding up in an Algerian dungeon tortured by his enemy Vizier Hashin.
His half-brother Peter Kirkpatrick, a dashing American privateer captain, sails for Algiers in a daring, but utterly foolhardy rescue attempt.
Henry's wife Dihya, knowing nothing of Peter's plan, determines to free her husband the only way she can think of: by becoming an odalisque in his captor's harem. Her weapons are sex, her courage, and her razor-sharp shreu dagger.
The Most Bold and Daring Act of the Age weaves together three journeys: Peter Kirkpatrick's attempt to fight his way into Algiers to rescue Henry; Dihya's infiltration of Hashin's harem to accomplish the same goal; and Henry's spiritual torment as he confronts what he fears is the loss of everything he has loved in the world.