GROZNY, RUSSIA—Coming eye to eye with the mysterious guerrilla mastermind he had been hunting for the past several years, a shackled Secretary of State John Kerry looked on Thursday as a notorious and brutal Chechen terror leader removed his mask to reveal the scarred face of Kerry’s former mentor. “No, it can’t be—the explosion in Iran, the fire—you’ve been dead 15 years,” said the bruised and bloodied U.S. cabinet official, staring in disbelief at the former black-ops expert who had taken Kerry under his wing and spent years training him in espionage, explosives, and martial arts before his apparent death while sabotaging an Iranian oil pipeline. “It’s been you this whole time, hasn’t it? You were behind the kidnapping of the Russian attaché, the uranium stolen from Seversk—all of it. How could you turn your back on everything we fought for? I looked up to you. I trusted you!” At press time, Kerry was promising his mentor that he had watched him die once and he would do it again.

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