Raven Strike

Chapter 1

Danny Freah jumped from the Osprey just behind Ben “Boston” Rockland, the team sergeant, and John “Flash” Gordon, the second-ranking NCO. Melissa Ilse was huddled near the rocks.

“Flash, grab the bike!” yelled Boston. “Let’s go, people, we need to get moving!”

Danny trotted over to Melissa. She was crouched down, in obvious pain, holding her shoulder. Sugar — CIA covert officer Clare Keeb — was standing over her, her SCAR-H/MK-17 rifle poised, even though a scan of the area had shown no one nearby.

“Probably dislocated,” said Sugar, keeping her eyes on the terrain.

“It’s definitely dislocated,” said Melissa.

Danny knelt down. Melissa wasn’t what he expected. She was young — twenty-four, maybe, slim and tall, nearly five-ten, he thought, helping her up gently. Even in pain she had a beautiful, flawless face. Her skin was a half shade lighter than his; he hadn’t realized she was African-American.

“I’m all right,” she insisted. “We have to get the aircraft back. Do you know where they went?”

“We’ll take care of that,” said Danny. “Right now we have to get of here. The sun’s coming up. We don’t want anyone to see us.”

“That’s not important.”

“The hell it’s not,” said Boston gruffly.

“Come on, into the aircraft,” Danny told her. “Or do we put you on a stretcher?”

“Ow, my arm!” Melissa shrieked as Boston tried to help her on the other side. “Do you know how to pull it back into place?”

“Sure, but I ain’t doing that here.”

“We’ll treat it,” said Danny. “Get into the aircraft.”

Boston put his hand on her back. “Come on, sister.”

“I’m not your sister, asshole.”

Boston gave Danny a grin behind her back.

Just like Boston to start pushing buttons, thought Danny.

A half hour later they were back at the base in Ethiopia. The team had taken over one of the smaller buildings to use as a combination common area and command post. Sugar and Danny brought Melissa there and examined her shoulder. It was swollen, and seemed to have some ligament damage as well as a dislocation.

“Best place for you is up in Alexandria,” Danny told her. “They’ll put you out, get the shoulder right, and send you home.”

“What?”

“There’s a good hospital there. And—”

“I’m not going to a hospital,” she insisted. “There’s no need. It’s just dislocated. Just push it back in place.”

“This ain’t like the movies,” said Sugar. “You don’t know what else might be screwed up or broken. You need X rays, and really they oughta do an MRI on you. I’d guess you have rotator cuff tears—”

“Just can the talk and put it back in place.”

“Don’t go ghetto with me, girl,” snapped Sugar. She had earned her nickname because of her extremely sweet nature, but she could be a demon when someone rubbed her wrong.

“I know what I’m talking about,” insisted Melissa. “I’m a nurse.”

“Yeah, and I’m the President of the United States.”

“I’ll handle this,” said Danny. “Shug, go see what Nuri’s up to. All right?”

“Anything you say, Colonel.” Sugar rolled her eyes and left.

A half-dozen small canvas camp chairs had been left in the building. They were the only furniture, if you didn’t count the boxes and gear the Whiplash team had brought. Danny pulled over one of the chairs and sat down in front of Melissa. She had her shirt pulled down, exposing the top half of her breast as well as her shoulder.

Danny concentrated on her shoulder, gently touching the large bruise.

“I don’t think popping it back into place is a good idea,” he said.

“Have you ever done it before?”

“Have you?”

“Twice.”

“On yourself?”

“No.”

“If the muscle and ligaments are torn—”

“I need to get Raven back. It’s in Duka. I’m the only one here who can get in there and find it.”

“That’s not even close to being true,” said Nuri, standing near the door. Sugar was next to him. “Who are you working for?”

“Who are you?”

“Nuri Lupo. I spent six months out here, living with the rebels. I’ll tell you one thing, you’re damn lucky you’re alive. Riding out through those hills? American? Woman? Anyone who found you could have hit you over the head and hauled you back to their village. Ransom on your dead body would have set them up for life. And that’s if they dealt with us — give you to al Qaeda or one of the groups they support, you’d be worth a lot more.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“I’ll bet. Who do you work for?” Nuri asked. “Are you even authorized to be here?”

“If my shoulder didn’t hurt so badly, I’d slap your face.”

“All right, kindergarten time is over,” said Danny. “Sugar, get her some morphine.”

“I’m not taking any morphine,” insisted Melissa.

“If you want us to fix it, you’re getting a shot,” said Danny.

“I have a job to do here, Colonel. I’m not doing anything that will endanger it. And I’m sure as hell not going to Alexandria or anywhere else for a hospital. I’m not leaving until we have Raven.”

“That may be a while,” said Nuri.

Danny looked over at Nuri. “Let’s talk outside,” he told him.

Melissa grabbed him as he started to get up.

“I need to do my job,” she told him. “I don’t want morphine. I don’t want to be knocked out. Give me aspirin. That’s all I need.”

“I doubt that,” said Sugar. “Your muscles are in splint mode. Super hard. You need something to relax them.”

“Just get aspirin.”

Sugar glanced at Danny.

“Try aspirin,” he said. “Can you get her shoulder back into place?”

“I can try,” said Sugar. She sounded doubtful. “If her muscles relax enough.”

“How about a half dose of the morphine?” asked Danny. “Just enough to loosen up.”

“All right,” said Melissa. “Half a dose.”

“They took the aircraft to an old warehouse building near a train line,” Nuri told Danny outside. MY-PID superimposed the locator signal on a satellite image of Duka and the surrounding area, projecting it onto a large slate computer Nuri had tied into the system. “The train line was built about a decade ago for some mining operation, but it hasn’t run in years. Most of the locals live in huts on the south and western ends of town, but people will squat in empty buildings all the time. We can’t really be sure what the hell’s going on there without having a look from the ground.”

He moved his finger over the screen, increasing the magnification.

“There were at least two different rebel groups in Duka when I was here,” Nuri went on. “They sometimes work together, at least to the extent that they don’t kill each other. Which is saying something out here.”

“MY-PID have anything new?”

“Nothing more than I’ve said. They’re really small bands.”

“What about this Raven project? Is it related to the place, Duka?”

“I don’t think so. There’s no connection with Li Han and the town. He may have been in the area, but he’s been working with the Sudan Brotherhood. They’re much farther south.”

“So he’s out of the picture?”

“Probably ran off,” said Nuri.

“Anything new on Raven?”

“Totally black,” said Nuri, with more than a hint of I-told-you-so. “Not available in any system MY-PID has access to either. I thought of telling it to go over the wall.”

“Don’t,” said Danny sharply.

“I didn’t.”

Going over the wall meant telling the system to break into Agency computers and other systems that were supposed to be off-limits to it. Theoretically, the safety precautions built into the computer system — meant to prevent it from ever being used against the U.S. — would prevent this. But MY-PID had enormous resources, and Nuri was sure the system could get in if asked.

Which he still might do. He just wouldn’t tell Danny about it.

“What’s Duka like?” asked Danny.

“Typical shit hole. Little city. Used to be about ten times the size but shrunk with the fighting over the past two years. Relatively peaceful now. Two rebel factions share control. One’s religious. The other’s just crazy.”

Nuri had been in Duka twice. He’d had dealings with a man named Gerard, who was the unofficial head of a band of rebels from a tribe whose name — phonetically, “Meur-tse Meur-tskk”—was bastardized by Western intelligence services into Meurtre Musique—“murder music” in French.

The group was actually a subgroup of the Kababish tribe, with a historical connection to French colonists or explorers who had apparently intermarried with some of the tribe during the eighteenth or nineteenth century. It was now more a loose association of outcasts and their families than an extended family, too small to have any influence outside the area where they lived.

The other group — Sudan the Almighty First Liberation in the Name of Allah, to use the English name — was larger, with informal and family ties connecting them loosely to other groups around the region. Like Meurtre Musique, the members were Islamic, but somewhat more observant. Despite their name, they were not affiliated with the powerful radical Islamic Sudan Brotherhood, which was a dominant rebel force in the south.

Meurtre Musique and First Liberation ran the city; the only government presence was a police station “staffed” by a sixty-year-old man who spent most of his time in Khartoum, the capital well to the west.

“You think we can get into the city with the Osprey?” Danny asked.

“Attract a hell of a lot of attention,” said Nuri. “We’d be better off going in low-key, or maybe waiting until night and scouting around.”

There was a short, loud scream from inside the hut. A string of curses followed.

“Sounds like Sugar fixed the princess’s shoulder,” said Nuri.

“What’s her story, you figure?” Danny asked.

“Besides the obvious fact that she’s a bitch?” Nuri shook his head. “Women officers are all one of two kinds — either they use sex to get what they want, or they play hard-ass bitch. She’s the second. We should get rid of her. Shoot her up with morphine and pack her off. The shoulder’s the perfect excuse.”

“This is her operation.”

“No, it’s our operation,” said Nuri. “Her operation ended when the aircraft crashed and we were called in to clean up. I don’t like the fact that it’s walled off, Danny. There is a huge amount here that they’re not telling us.”

“I know.”

Sugar came out of the building. She was smiling.

“Done,” she told Danny. “She didn’t want to wait for the aspirin to take.”

“She gonna be all right?”

“Phhhh. That attitude tells me she wasn’t all right to begin with. I’m gonna get some chow and get some rest, Colonel, all right?”

“Sure. You setting up your own tent?”

“You got that right. I’m not sleeping with those pervs. No way, Colonel.” She thrust her finger at Nuri in mock warning. “And you watch yourself, too, Mr. Lupo.”

Sugar exploded with laughter and sauntered away.

Danny picked up the small touch screen and looked at the satellite image. The warehouse where the UAV was located could be attacked easily enough, but he’d prefer to make the assault at night for a host of reasons, starting with operational security. The question was whether they could wait that long.

“How likely are they to move the UAV, you think?” he asked Nuri.

“I have no idea. We don’t even know who has it. If it’s one of these groups, they won’t bother. They have no place to go with it. If it’s just someone moving through — which I doubt — they’ll probably wait until nightfall and start out again. In that case, they’ll be easy to take on the road. Shoot out the driver, grab the bird, and go home.”

“What about Li Han?”

“It could be him,” said Nuri. “This isn’t a Brother village, though. He’d be a fish out of water.”

“Isn’t he already? Being Chinese?”

“True. Maybe we should go in and nose around a bit.”

“Just walk in?”

“Drive in,” said Nuri. “I’ve been here before. I’ll use my old cover. We can plant some bugs for MY-PID to use. Augment the feeds from the Tigershark.”

“OK.”

“Hell, I may be able to buy the damn thing,” added Nuri. “Save us a lot of trouble.”

“Buy it?”

“We’re in Africa, remember? Everything’s for sale.”

“Not to us.”

Nuri laughed. “I’m a gun dealer. I had some dealings with a man named Gerard, trying to sell him some guns. If he’s involved, it’ll be for sale. And if he’s not, he’ll tell us who is.”

“That’s safe?”

Nuri laughed again, this time much harder.

“Of course it’s not safe,” he said when he regained control.

Chapter 2

With the UAV located and the CIA officer recovered, Turk’s job settled into a sustained fugue of monotony. He had to orbit above Duka, watching to make sure that the rebels or whoever had grabbed the UAV remained in the warehouse building with it. He had two problems: conserving fuel and staying awake.

The second was by far the hardest. Turk had a small vial of what were euphemistically known as “go pills” in the pocket of his flight suit, but he preferred not to take them. So he ran through his other, nonprescription bag of tricks — listening to rap music tracks and playing mental games. He tried to trace perfect ellipses in the air without the aid of the flight computer, mentally timing his circuits against the actual clock.

His eyes still felt the heavy effect of gravity.

He was at 30,000 feet, well above the altitude where anyone on the ground could hear him, let alone do anything about him. As far as he knew, his only job now would be to circle around until the Raven was recovered. At that point he could land, refuel, and head home.

Maybe with some sleep in there somewhere.

Turk amused himself by thinking of places he might stop over. The Tigershark had been at a number of air shows — the aircraft had been built as a demonstration project and toured before being bought by the Office of Special Technology — so as long as he could get Breanna to agree, he could take it just about anywhere.

Maybe Paris. They said the women were pretty hot there.

Italian women. Better bet. He could land at Aviano, find some fellow pilot to show him the city…

“Tigershark, this is Whiplash Ground. How are you reading me?”

“I read you good, Colonel. What’s our game plan?”

“We’re thinking of sending someone into the city to scout around. If we have an operation, we’re not going in until tonight.”

“What’s the status on that tanker?”

“We’re still waiting to hear.”

A tanker had been routed from the Air Mobility Command, but it wasn’t clear how long it might be before it would arrive. Not only had the mission been thrown together at the last moment, but Whiplash’s status outside the normal chain of command hurt when it came to arranging for outside support. Tankers were in especially short supply, and finding one that didn’t have a specific mission was always difficult.

“I can stay up where I am for another two hours, give or take,” said Turk. He glanced at the fuel panel and mentally calculated that he actually had a little more than three. But it was always good to err on the low side. “If the tanker isn’t going to be here by then, it might be a good idea for me to land and refuel at your base. Assuming you have fuel.”

“Stand by.”

Turk gave the controls over to the computer and stretched, raising his legs and pointing his toes awkwardly. This was the only situation where he envied Flighthawk pilots — they could get up from their stations and take a walk around the aircraft.

Not in the B-2s that were controlling the UAV fighters now, of course, but in the older Megafortresses and the new B-5Cs. Then again, most remote aircraft pilots didn’t even fly in mother ships anymore; they operated at remote bases or centers back home, just like the Predator and Global Hawk pilots.

Scratch that envy, Turk thought.

“Tigershark, we have a tanker en route. It’ll be about an hour,” said Colonel Freah, coming back on the line.

“I’ll wait,” he told Danny. “Give me the tanker frequency and his flight vector, if you can.”

“Stand by.”

Chapter 3

Nuri needed to gear up to go into Duka. The first thing he needed was better bling. An arms dealer could get away with shabby clothes, but lacking gold was beyond suspicious. At a minimum, he needed at least a fancy wristwatch. Transportation was critical as well.

Most of all, he needed American dollars.

Which was a problem. The CIA had temporarily closed its station in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. The nearest officer was in Eritrea somewhere.

“Use the cash the existing operation has,” said Reid. “I’m sure they have plenty.”

Reid seemed grouchy, probably because of the hour. D.C. was eight hours behind eastern Africa, which made it close to two in the morning there.

“I’m not getting a lot of cooperation,” said Nuri.

“Shoot them if they don’t cooperate.”

It didn’t sound like a joke.

“Get back to me if there’s still a problem,” said Reid before hanging up.

Melissa had gone to rest in her quarters, one of the smaller huts farthest up on the hillside — not a coincidence, Nuri thought, as she had undoubtedly chosen it for the pseudo status its location would provide.

From a distance, all of the buildings looked as if they had been there for ages. But up close it was obvious they were recent additions — the painted exterior walls were made from pressboard, relatively rare in this part of Africa.

Even rarer was the door on Melissa’s hut, all metal. Nuri knocked on it.

“What?” she snapped from inside.

“You awake?”

“I’m awake,” she said, pulling open the door. Her right arm was in a sling.

“Can we talk?”

Melissa pushed the door open and let him in. There was a sleeping bag on the floor. A computer and some communications gear sat opposite it, pushed up against the wall. The only other furniture was a small metal footlocker. A pair of AK-47s sat on top, with loaded magazines piled at the side. A small, battery-powered lantern near the head of the sleeping bag lit the room.

“I need some cash,” Nuri said.

“And?”

“I need money.”

“Why do you think I have money?” snapped Melissa, sitting down on the sleeping bag. She pushed back to the wall, spreading her legs in front of her. She was wearing black fatigues.

“Look, I just got off the line with my boss,” said Nuri. “He told me I should shoot you if you didn’t cooperate. And he was serious.”

“Give me a break.”

“I know you got a stash of money,” he said. “Nobody works in Africa, especially out here, without bribe money. Piles of it.”

“Why do you need money?”

“I’m going into Duka and nose around. I have a cover as an arms dealer.”

“I have a few thousand, that’s all.”

“It’s a start.”

“I go with the money.”

Nuri shook his head. “Ain’t gonna work.”

“It has to.”

“Nope. Come on. I have a cover here I’ve established. I go in with an American girl — I’d be dead.”

“You don’t exactly look like you belong,” said Melissa. “You’re the wrong color.”

“I’m from Eritrea,” said Nuri. His cover story wasn’t that far from the truth, if you went back two generations. “I’m an Italian. Don’t make a face — it worked for months. I can speak most of the tribal languages, including Nubian, as well as Arabic.”

“I’ll bet.”

“You want Lango or Madi?”

“Nobody speaks Lango up here,” said Melissa.

“No shit. That wasn’t my point.”

“Look, we can work together,” she told him. “We don’t have to be enemies.”

“Just give me the cash.”

“You’re stuck if I don’t. There are no cash machines outside of the capital, which is too far for you to go, right? And Eritrea isn’t going to help. Because there’s one person in Eritrea, and you can never get ahold of him. And the embassy is useless.”

“I can call Washington,” he told her. “And have you ordered back home.”

“Look, there’s no need for us to spit at each other,” she told him. “Let’s work together.”

Nuri frowned.

“You can’t cut me out,” she told him. “Tell your boss I want to be involved.”

“My boss?”

“Colonel Freah.”

“Danny’s not my boss. He commands the military people.”

“And what are you?”

“I’m Agency, just like you. We work as a team.”

“Who’s in charge of the operation?”

“We both are.”

“There has to be one person in charge. One.”

“You going to tell me how to run my operation now?”

“I’m not trying to argue with you. I’m sorry.” She shifted against the wall. “Let me go into town with you.”

“So the guys in the truck can recognize you?”

“They never got close enough to see me. It was dark.”

“What part of the company do you work for?”

Melissa didn’t answer.

“How long have you been covert? Or are you a tech geek who found her way over to the action side?”

“I’m not going to play games,” Melissa said. “I work for Harker — talk to him.”

“Look, give me the money,” he told her. “I need to go in right away. You’re in no shape right now. You should have taken more morphine. At least you’d get some rest.”

“You’re a doctor now?”

“Are you?”

“I trained as a nurse.”

Nuri put up his hands. She had an answer for everything.

Finally, Melissa went over to the footlocker and opened it. She hunched over it, counting money out.

“This ought to be enough,” she told him, handing over a wad of hundred-dollar bills.

Nuri started to count it.

“There are fifty,” she told him. “Five thousand.”

“That may not do it.”

“It’ll have to.” She slammed the top down with her right hand, pulling it halfway out of the sling.

“You should get your arm fixed.”

“It’ll be fine. You go and scout. OK. But I want to go on the mission.”

“If there is a mission, that’ll be up to Danny.”

“I thought he wasn’t your boss.”

“He’s not. But he’s more objective than I am.”

Boston managed to patch up Melissa’s motorcycle well enough for Nuri to ride it across the border into Elada, a medium-sized town in Eritrea, about an hour and a half away. He bought a counterfeit Rolex, some AK-47s, an old Colt service automatic, ammo, and two pair of khaki uniforms for a hundred American dollars; he could have shaved at least another ten off the deal if he’d had exact change.

Finding a decent vehicle was a different story. Pickup trucks, even those in poor condition, were valuable and rare. Nuri wanted either two trucks, or a truck and Land Rover; he’d stick a few of the Whiplash people in the back of the pickup as bodyguards. But he couldn’t find anyone willing to sell. The best he could do was work a trade for a battered Mercedes sedan — his motorcycle, a thousand American in cash, and three stolen credit cards.

The credit cards were Agency cards, disabled by MY-PID two minutes after the transaction. It would undoubtedly be at least a full day before the buyer found out: Elada didn’t have any ATMs, nor were there any in the rest of the country.

The car ran decently, and came with three-quarters of a tank worth of diesel. Which was enough — Nuri drove it about five miles south to a field where the Osprey was waiting. Danny had decided to speed things up by flying it across to Sudan.

“I have uniforms for two bodyguards,” Nuri told Danny as the Osprey took off with the car chained beneath its belly. “How about Flash and Boston?”

“Boston can go, but Flash is going to stay with the aircraft in case we need backup,” said Danny. “I want to come.”

Boston was imposing physically, but his real asset was an angry, craggy face that would scare even a close friend into thinking he was just waiting for an excuse to kill. Flash, though white, had the lean, undernourished look of a down-on-his-luck white mercenary who very likely was nursing sociopathic tendencies.

Danny was big physically, and Nuri knew from experience that he was in excellent shape and was a great shot. But he had a quieter, almost benign face — too relaxed, too in control. The ideal bodyguard out here was just this side of criminally insane.

“You think you can do it?” Nuri asked.

“I’ve gone undercover here before.”

“This is different. You’ll have to be completely silent. If they hear your accent up here, we’re dead.”

“I’m not worried,” said Danny.

Nuri picked up one of the uniforms. “Here you go, then. I hope it fits.”

Chapter 4

Breanna spotted Jonathon Reid’s gray Taurus parked with its running lights and engine on near the edge of the tarmac as the C-20 turned off the access ramp from the runway. She unbuckled her seat belt and went to the door, waiting while the aircraft taxied over.

“Pilots say the plane should be refueled inside an hour, ma’am,” said the sergeant who was working as the crewman. “If you’d like, I can try and hunt up something to eat.”

“A bagel?” she asked. “With butter?”

“I’ll give it a shot, ma’am.”

Breanna waited impatiently for the aircraft to halt. It seemed to take forever to travel the last twenty or thirty yards. Finally it eased to a stop. The crewman dropped the fold-down stairs, and Breanna trotted down them into a light rain. She walked over to the car and got in on the passenger side.

Reid handed her a cup of coffee.

“The news is that bad?” she asked.

Reid had an extremely droll sense of humor, but he didn’t laugh now.

“I’m guessing what’s going on here,” he told her. “I’m guessing there’s an unauthorized assassination program involved. There are no official records or minutes anywhere. No NSC notes. And I did check, through the back channel.”

“OK.” Breanna had suspected as much when he said he wanted to talk about it in person.

“But it’s the weapon that worries me,” said Reid. “Raven doesn’t refer to the UAV. It was a program to develop software that could seek out and destroy whoever it was targeted against. It could control a variety of platforms. In fact, it could go, on its own, from one to the other. That was its goal.”

“Is that possible?”

“I don’t know.” Reid took a sip from his coffee. “After seeing everything Dr. Rubeo has come up with, I’d say anything is possible.”

“Hmmm.”

“This weapon would be able to take over programs of other countries,” continued Reid. “There was a white paper, very restricted access, that talks about guarding against these things.”

“You should really talk to Ray about it.”

“I’d like to. But I don’t know how much to trust him.”

“I trust Ray implicitly.”

“Would he feel obliged, morally, to discuss it with anyone else?”

“What do you mean?”

“If the Agency has created a weapon that can’t be controlled, and accidentally set it loose, who would he feel he had to tell?”

“What do you mean, it can’t be controlled?”

Reid sipped his coffee, momentarily turning his gaze to the drops of rain landing on the windshield.

“The implication of the white paper was that this software would be like a virus, released into the wild,” he said, still looking at the rain. “Once out there, it would just run relentless until its target was found.”

“You think the Agency would test that without any safety protocols?” said Breanna. “That would be insane.”

“I don’t know what they’re doing. I would assume they would have some sort of safeguard. And I don’t know if any of this is even possible. But…”

“But?”

“But they’re definitely going after someone in the Sudan, they’re definitely using a UAV no one else has known about, and they’re definitely being extremely secretive. And the person the Whiplash team rendezvoused with in Africa joined the Agency as a software scientist before transferring about a year ago to covert ops.”

“We have to ask Edmund what’s going on,” said Breanna.

“I have. He won’t say. I have a few favors to call in,” added Reid. “And I’ll talk to Dr. Rubeo.”

“Then what?”

“I’m not sure.” Reid put his coffee cup back in the holder. “I have to ask you not to share this with the senator.”

“Zen?”

“I don’t— This could be a real political football in Congress. And…” He paused. “I’m not sure the President knows. In fact, I’d almost bet she doesn’t. Just from Edmund’s reactions.”

“You think they’d run an assassination program without telling the President?”

“Without a doubt,” said Reid.

By the time she reboarded the C-20, Breanna felt drained. Recovering the UAV — they had located it and were planning to go in as soon as it was dark — was exactly the sort of mission Whiplash had been created for. The political implications of Raven, even if it were “just” an illegal assassination mission, were something else again.

She hadn’t even been thinking of Zen until Reid mentioned that he couldn’t be told.

They both had jobs where it was necessary to keep a certain amount of separation between work and home, and therefore to keep certain state and political secrets from one another as well. But if Breanna knew that the CIA was breaking the law, and being extremely irresponsible as well — could she in good conscience not tell Zen about it? What would he say to her when he found out?

Because something like this would eventually come out. Surely.

Hopefully, Reid was overthinking the situation. Losing a top secret UAV would certainly be enough to circle the wagons.

And just because he couldn’t find any approval in the system for the assassination didn’t necessarily mean there hadn’t been one.

“Ma’am?”

Breanna looked up at the tech sergeant, standing in the aisle next to her seat.

“Got you your bagel,” he said, smiling as he handed her a tray. “I have to ask you to buckle your seat belt.”

Chapter 5

Li Han circled the wrecked aircraft. It was worth even more than he’d thought at first glance. It was unique, far more advanced than anything he was familiar with. Granted, he wasn’t an expert in UAVs, but he knew a great deal about computers and processing technology, and what he saw here was truly impressive.

The building in Duka hadn’t changed at all since he’d been there last. Nor had Duka itself — still a sleepy backwater occupied by tribesmen barely removed from the medieval ages. The people walked around in a mixture of modern and ancient dress, and were armed with AK-47s and the like, but they still thought the way people thought in the Stone Age. If he had been a sociologist, he’d have found it fascinating.

But he was not. He was a scientist, and not even that.

His escorts were all sleeping upstairs, even the two men who had been posted by the door as guards. Just as well.

While the locals posed no threat, Li Han knew the Americans would be looking for the aircraft. Embedded in its skin were two devices sending repeater-type radio beacons, obviously intended for tracking. One of them had been damaged in the crash, but the other was still working. Carefully removing them, he’d placed them into the back of the truck, covered them with a tarp, and had the Brothers drive them to another building a kilometer away. It was an elementary ruse, but at least he’d have some warning if the Americans came.

He put his knee down on the dirt floor as if genuflecting before the marvel in front of him. The airfoil was made of carbon-fiber and metallized glass, with a few titanium elements. The manufacturing process was so advanced he doubted it would be of interest to any Third World country, even the Iranians. The Russians might not even be able to duplicate it.

The Chinese, of course, would be highly interested, but they were the one country he could never deal with. Not even on this. The ministry considered him a traitor, and would pay any price for his head.

Selling the engine would be easier. It was a downsized turbine, nothing particularly fancy or difficult to copy. The Israelis were very much interested in lightweight engines for their own UAVs, and they paid extremely well. But being that this was American technology — markings indicated at least some of the parts had been manufactured by GE — it was possible, perhaps even likely, that they already had access to it. They might even have helped develop it.

As far as he could tell, the optical sensors were trashed beyond use and even recognition when the aircraft crashed. The same went for the infrared sensor, though in that case he thought some of the parts might be salvageable and potentially salable to Iran for their own research. The price wouldn’t be high; it was more likely something he could throw in to make a larger deal.

The weapons system was a straight Hellfire missile setup. He could get about three thousand dollars for the salvageable mount and related electrical parts — not even pocket change. The missile itself would have fetched much more, but part of the propulsion system had shattered on impact and appeared irreparable.

And then there was the computer and guidance system, which looked to be the equivalent of a mainframe computer stuffed into a box no bigger than a woman’s purse.

UAVs were essentially radio controlled aircraft. Their “brains” received radio signals, then translated those inputs into electrical impulses that guided the throttle and the various control surfaces. In truth, it wasn’t all that complicated — children’s toys had been doing something similar for decades. The circuitry for sending flight data and information from the other sensors was trivial.

But this UAV’s brain was far different. It had six processor arrays, all clearly custom-built. This suggested a parallel computing architecture that would be overkill for even the most complicated aircraft. Not only could you fly a Boeing Dreamliner with this much power; you could fly an entire fleet of them.

And still have plenty of processing room left for a championship game of chess.

The obvious conclusion was that the computer flew the aircraft without the help of a ground pilot. But what else did it do?

Li Han was determined to find out. His only problem was to do that without destroying the programming.

And to do it here. It seemed safer to hide out in Duka than attempt to return to the Brothers. But that meant limited power. The electricity in the house worked only a few hours a day, and he didn’t want to attract attention by getting a gas generator like some of the locals. He had battery lanterns, and his laptop was extremely powerful, but there was no mistaking the musty basement for a Shanghai computer lab. He was lucky to even be in a building with a basement, as crude as it was.

The overhead light flickered as Li Han leaned over the computer box. There were two network interface plugs, the standard 5E receptacles used by local area networks around the world. There was also a pair of much larger connectors that looked to Li Han like specialized optical cable receptors. These were irregularly sized, larger than the thumb-sized hook-ins one would find on advanced audiovisual equipment in professional studios or similar applications.

Clearly, the 5E connectors were his way in, but he didn’t have any 5E wiring.

Could he find it here?

There was a sound outside, upstairs — an engine. Li Han froze. For a moment he expected the worst: a missile crashing through the roof. But the noise was just a truck passing on the road.

He took a deep breath and began thinking about where he might find a computer cable in this part of the Sudan.

Chapter 6

It was well after 2:00 a.m. by the time Jonathon Reid got home. The house was quiet, his wife sleeping. It was a modest house by Georgetown standards — three bedrooms, a bath and a half, no granite or marble on the property, and the only thing “faux” was the fake flower on the kitchen windowsill. Reid or his wife cut the small lawn themselves. But the house felt like an immense place tonight. He walked through the downstairs rooms quietly, absorbing the space and the quiet. Thinking.

Possibly, he was making too much of this. There was always that danger when you only saw parts, not the whole.

Reid slipped quietly into the master bedroom. He took off his clothes and reached to pull the blanket down. But as he started to slip into bed, he realized there was no way he would sleep. He looked at his wife, her face turned away from him. As good as it would feel to curl his body around hers, he didn’t want to wake her.

He left the room and walked to the far end of the hall, to the guest room. It had been his oldest daughter’s room years before. Repainted several times, it bore no visible trace of her, but to Reid it still felt as if she were there. He could remember setting up her bed the first night they moved in. He’d sat here countless times, reading her stories.

He could close his eyes and imagine himself on the floor next to her bed, telling her while she slept that he had to go away again, explaining that it was his job and that even if he didn’t come back — something he would say only when he was positive she wasn’t awake — he still loved her, and no matter what, would be her father and protector.

Reid eased himself down to that very spot on the floor next to the bed, then leaned back and stared at the ceiling. A dim brownish light filtered in from the window, casting the room in faded sepia.

If the CIA was running an illegal assassination program, from a country it had been ordered to leave, with a potentially uncontrollable weapon, what should Jonathon Reid do? Where was his loyalty? What was his moral obligation?

The CIA was his life. He had a deep personal relationship with the director, not to mention countless fellow officers, present and retired, who would surely be affected by any scandal.

He also had a deep personal relationship with the President. He was one of her husband’s best friends, and hers as well.

And there was his obligation to his country, and to justice.

How did those obligations sort themselves out here? What exactly was he supposed to do?

Li Han was not on the preapproved target list. It was possible, though unlikely, that he had been added under a special mechanism allowed by national security law; those proceedings were compartmentalized, and there was always a chance that Reid’s search — thorough, and itself skirting the bounds of his legal duties as a CIA officer — had missed this particular authorization.

Even so — even if there was no authorization — did that make the targeting wrong? Li Han was such a despicable slime, such a threat to the country, that his death could easily be justified. Truly it would save lives; he wasn’t running an agricultural program in Sudan, after all.

The Agency’s development of the UAV clearly had begun under the previous administration. While the recent reorganization did not allow for such programs, there were always gray areas, especially when it came to development.

Given the CIA’s long history of producing such weapons, not to mention the Agency’s record of success, this was another area that at worst might be a minor transgression. And certainly in his case, given Reid’s relationship with the Office of Special Technology and Whiplash, Reid could easily be criticized for trying to guard his turf. And in fact he might even be doing that, unconsciously at least.

Utilizing a software program that could hunt down and kill on its own? Without authorization?

Raven sounded like science fiction. But then, nearly everything that they did at the Office of Special Technology sounded like science fiction as well. So did half the gadgets covert officers carried in their pockets these days, at least to an old-timer like Reid.

What should he do?

He’d need more information — talk to Rubeo, look at the authorizations he hadn’t had a chance to access. Confront Edmund. Ask what exactly was going on.

Then?

Well, he had to go tell the President, didn’t he?

She might actually know about the program. She might have authorized every single element. It was possible.

Maybe he just didn’t know the whole story. Maybe the original Raven was just a pipedream, and had become a sexy name for a cool looking aircraft. Maybe there was nothing special about the aircraft at all.

“Jonathon, what are you doing on the floor?”

Reid looked over at the doorway. The dim light framed his wife’s silhouette. In that instant she was twenty-five again; they had just met, and she was the most beautiful woman he could ever imagine, in every sense of the word.

She still was, to his eye.

“Jon?”

She came over and knelt by him. “Are you OK, honey? Is your back bothering you?”

“I was feeling a little… stiff,” he said. It wasn’t a lie, exactly, just far from the truth. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

“Sitting on the floor isn’t going to make your back better,” she said. “Come on and get a heating pad.”

“I’d rather a nice backrub,” he said.

He reached his hand up to hers. She took it. Forty some years flew by in her grip.

“Come to bed,” she told him softly.

Reid got up and followed her to their room.

Chapter 7

Danny Freah hated to lie, even in the line of duty. It was the one aspect of Whiplash and working with the CIA that he didn’t particularly like.

In his role as a covert officer, Nuri often pretended to be someone else. He was a smooth liar, a born bullshit artist and a good actor: as soon as he put on the watch and jacket he’d bought in Asmara, he became a slime-bag arms dealer. The performance was utterly believable.

By contrast, Danny felt awkward in the uniform, and not just because it was a little tight around the chest. Fortunately, his job was simple — follow Nuri and keep his mouth shut.

Duka had grown around a small oasis on a trading route that led ultimately to the sea. It had never been a particularly large city, though during the short period when the railroad was active it quadrupled in size. Most of the people who arrived during that tiny boomlet had left, leaving behind a motley collection of buildings that ranged from traditional African circular huts to ramshackle masonry warehouses. The place was far from prosperous, but what wealth was here was expressed in odd pieces of modern technology. Power generators hummed behind a number of grass-roofed huts, and Danny saw a few satellite dishes as well.

The huts were the most interesting to him. These were in the oldest part of town, clustered along the western edges. Most sat in the center of small yards and garden patches. A few of the yards had goats and even oxen. There were also chickens, which wandered near the road as the Mercedes approached.

Danny hit the brakes several times before Nuri told him it was senseless — the birds would only get out of the way at the last moment, no matter how fast or slow he was going.

“You’re sure about that,” said Danny.

“They always do.”

“Why do they let the birds roam around? Aren’t they afraid of wild animals?”

“Lions?”

“Well—”

“I doubt there have been lions or even hyenas around here for centuries,” said Nuri. “Lions would be worth a fortune. The hyenas they’d kill for meat.”

Though Danny’s ancestors had come from Africa, he wasn’t sure where. He felt no connection to either the land or the people.

“This place was pretty poor, right after the railroad stopped,” continued Nuri. “A bunch of aid organizations got together and tried to help. Most of the money was siphoned off by the central government.”

“That why there are so many rebel groups down here?”

“Not really. People expect corruption. The resentments with the government have more to do with tribal rivalries and jealousies, and outside agitators,” added Nuri. “The outside people come in, find a malcontent or some crazoid, give him a little money and weapons. Things escalate from there.”

“Are the Iranians here?”

“Not so much. Hezbollah tried getting some traction a little farther north, but it didn’t work out. The Brotherhood, which is made up of Sudanese, isn’t even that strong. You can be from the next town or a related tribe and still be considered an outsider.”

“Like us.”

“Oh, we’re definitely outsiders. But we have money,” said Nuri. “And we’re not going to stay. So we’re in a special category. They like us. Until they don’t.”

Danny swerved around a goat that had wandered near the highway. The Mercedes fishtailed and the rear wheels went off the road. He fought the car straight, half on and half off the pavement, then gently brought it back.

“About a half mile more,” said Nuri calmly. “There should be a road heading to the east.”

Worried that even going near the abandoned warehouse buildings would seem suspicious, Nuri had Danny drive through the city to a rise about three-quarters of a mile north of the warehouse area. He got out there, making a show of stretching his legs and then pretending to go off to the side to relieve himself in case anyone was watching.

Reaching into his pocket, Nuri took out a small case about the size of a quarter. He opened it, then gingerly removed what looked like an oversized mosquito from the interior. It was literally and metaphorically a bug — a tiny video camera was embedded in the eyes; the legs were used as antennas. The rest of the body was a battery, with about a twelve-hour life span.

He walked into the weeds and positioned the mosquito. Its circuitry had woken up as soon as he took it from the box.

“MY-PID, are we connected?” Nuri asked, tapping his ear set. The control unit he was using looked exactly like a higher-end civilian cell phone system such as a Jawbone Icon; rather than using Bluetooth to connect to a cell phone, it had a proprietary burst radio connection to talk to the control unit in his pocket. The control unit in turn connected to the MY-PID system via a link with the Tigershark, orbiting overhead.

“Connection established,” replied the Voice.

“Do you have a visual on the target warehouse?”

“Affirmative. Visual on target.”

“Gotcha.”

“Rephrase.”

Inside the car, Danny used a pair of binoculars to examine the building where the UAV transponder was located. It was a simple metal structure, roughly two stories high and about 200 by 200 square feet. There were a dozen other buildings, most very similar, scattered around the area, all butting close to the railroad tracks and now disused sidings. There were clusters of houses near them, run-down shacks and battered brick buildings. Most were not occupied, according to MY-PID, which based the claim on the infrared readings from Tigershark’s sensors.

There were two openings in the target building: a large garagelike door facing the road, and a standard-sized door nearby. There were no windows.

MY-PID said there were two people inside the building. They appeared to be sleeping.

“No guards outside,” said Danny as Nuri got back in the car. “Just the two inside.”

“Not that we can see,” answered Nuri. He pulled out the MY-PID control unit, which was dummied up to look like an iPod Nano. He could have the computer tell him what it saw, but preferred to see it himself, even if it was on a ridiculously small screen. “There are kids playing on the other side of the railroad track. They probably get a few dinars for spotting strangers. Or anybody else.”

“Those kids are only seven or eight years old,” said Danny.

“Another year and they’ll all have guns,” said Nuri, sliding into the car. “Center of town is back the way we came.”

Danny toyed with the idea of simply driving up to the building and having a look. The Osprey and two of his men were a few minutes away, hunkered down in the desert. If things looked easy, he could call it in quickly and they could haul the UAV away.

But things rarely went as easily as they looked. Most of Whiplash’s advanced gear was still back in the States and wouldn’t be available for at least another twenty-four to forty-eight hours. While he wasn’t about to wait that long, it was better to wait for dark and come in with the whole team.

“Take a left ahead. There,” said Nuri, pointing. “The roads are all dirt from here on. I’ll warn when the next turn is coming up.”

They worked their way around a patch of houses to an open area that served as Duka’s business section. Small buildings were arranged haphazardly around the large dirt lot. There was a garage with several cars out in front; next to it were a pair of buildings with tin roofs that held small storefronts. A larger building, this one of brick, stood opposite the shops. About the size of a small ranch house in the States, the structure was shared by a medical clinic, a post office, and a store that sold farming gear.

Their destination was next to the clinic building: a squat, thatch-roofed pavilion that looked like an open-sided tent. About the size of a train car, it ran back from the open square at a slight angle, and was filled with a variety of benches, picnic tables, and cast-off plastic chairs. It was filled with people, more than two dozen, scattered in various groups. A pair of white-headed gentlemen played chess near the front; farther back, two men with machetes stood behind a squat, pale-skinned man whose face was covered with pimples.

The man was Gerard, the de facto leader of Meurtre Musique. He sat in a red plastic chair, gazing straight ahead.

“Someone should stay with the car,” said Nuri.

“Boston, you stay,” said Danny. “I want to get a look at him.”

“You got it, boss.”

Danny got out and followed Nuri into the pavilion.

“Bonjour, Gerard,” said Nuri, rattling off a greeting in French.

Gerard stared straight ahead. Danny thought he looked like a strung-out heroin addict.

“I hope you have been well.” Nuri pulled over a chair and sat down, just off to the side of Gerard.

Danny walked over and stood behind him. He had arranged the strap on his rifle so it hung down near his hand; he kept his fingers on the butt grip, ready just in case.

The two men with the machetes eyed him fiercely, but soon turned their attention back to the general area. Danny wondered why: most of the people beneath the shed roof were old, and couldn’t have hurt themselves, let alone Gerard. His gun was the only one visible.

“Je voudrais de l’eau,” said Nuri. “I’d like some water. What about you?”

Gerard’s head moved ever so slightly downward. Nuri straightened in his chair and turned toward a woman standing nearby. Gerard said something; the woman replied, then left, crossing the street.

Nuri continued his slow assault on Gerard’s silence, telling him that he had been doing much traveling in the past several months, seeing many people and learning many new things. He used French, even though it wasn’t his best language. He’d taken off the MY-PID ear set — Gerard might have wanted it if he’d seen it — but could speak the language reasonably well without the computer translator’s help.

He could have been speaking Portuguese for all the results he was getting. Gerard remained silent.

The man was a cipher. The first time they had met, Nuri thought he was stoned on some local alcoholic concoction; there were an almost infinite variety. But he’d spent considerable time with Gerard at their second meeting, and saw that he only drank pure water. And when the barrier actually came down — when Gerard broke his silence and spoke about the guns he was interested in buying — he was quite articulate and even a good negotiator. Nuri had decided that the stony glare was part of some sort of religious commitment, Gerard’s version of meditation or prayer.

His girl brought back two bottles of water. Nuri checked the seal to make sure his hadn’t been refilled from a local tap — always a possibility, and sure to induce diarrhea — then opened his. Gerard stared at the bottle, then took it. He had a small sip. Nuri sensed he was ready to talk.

“Are you happy with your current supplier?” Nuri asked in French.

“Hmmmph,” answered Gerard.

“I don’t want to make trouble,” said Nuri. “If there comes an opportunity, I am always ready.”

Gerard handed the water bottle back to the girl. She was thirteen or fourteen, probably a relative as well as a mistress. Nuri tried not to be judgmental. Things were different here, and he had a job to do.

“We are satisfied with the Russians,” said Gerard in English.

“Russians?” Nuri switched to English as well. “They’re supplying you now?”

Gerard said nothing.

“They do give good prices,” admitted Nuri. The dealer might or might not be Russian; anyone from Eastern Europe was likely to be considered a Russian — Poles, Ukrainians, Georgians. All were more likely candidates, and most likely operating on their own. When he was last here, the real Russians were notably absent. “If you are satisfied, then there is no need to change. A good relationship is worth more than a few bullets, one way or the other.”

Gerard remained silent.

“And the government — have they been giving you much trouble?” Nuri asked.

“They are monkeys,” said Gerard. “Imbecilic monkeys.”

“Yes.”

“What would be of use to us would be medicines,” he said. “Aspirin would be a very good thing.”

“Aspirin? Of course. Yes. I believe I could arrange to find some of that. For the clinic?”

“The clinic is run by thieves,” said Gerard. “We have established a new one.”

“What other medicines?” asked Nuri.

Gerard rose. He moved stiffly, but compared to how Nuri had found him, he was a dynamo.

“I will take you to talk to the doctor. We will go in your car.”

Danny followed Nuri to the Mercedes. Gerard, the girl, and the two guards came as well. They got into the back with Boston, while Nuri took his place up front. Danny didn’t like that — it was far too dangerous, he thought — but there was no way to tell Nuri that.

Gerard gave directions from the back in French. Nuri translated them into African, and MY-PID — connected via the team radio — retranslated to English.

The directions took them to a single story building that looked very much like an American double-wide trailer.

“Wait in the car,” Nuri said as the others got out.

“No way,” said Danny.

They exchanged a glance. Nuri frowned, but didn’t protest when Danny followed him inside the building.

They were met near the door by a black woman in her early twenties. She was enthusiastic and friendly, and clearly didn’t speak the local language — she fumbled worse than Nuri did over the greeting.

“Do you speak English?” she asked. She had a British accent; Nuri pegged her as a volunteer, here to do her part for world peace.

“Certainly, Doctor,” Nuri answered.

“I am not a doctor,” she said, leading them through the crowded reception room. “I am just a nurse. Marie Bloom.”

“I’m sorry. Gerard introduced you as a doctor.”

“I think they use the word for anyone with a medical interest.” She smiled at Gerard, nodding. “He has been very good to us. You are here to see our clinic?”

“We may be able to supply some medicines for you,” said Nuri. “Through Gerard’s generosity. If I knew what it was you needed.”

“Oh that would be wonderful. Let me show you around.”

The two examining rooms were austere, furnished with basic tables and some cabinets. There were two rooms with beds where patients could rest, a pair of small offices, and a storeroom. A dozen people, all women or children, were being seen by two aides, both locals whom Marie had trained. They had been open only a few weeks, said Marie, but already had seen a number of difficult cases, including many patients with AIDS.

“We are going to be involved in a program,” she said. “But for now, we send those with AIDS to the capital. We can’t really help.”

“What about the other clinic in town?” Nuri asked.

Marie glanced at Gerard before answering.

“Many people won’t go there.”

That had to be because the other clinic was associated with Sudan First. The friction between the two groups was new.

Most likely it wasn’t serious, or Gerard would not have been in the city center. But you could never tell.

“Give me a list of what you can use,” said Nuri as the tour ended. “And I will see what I can do.”

Nuri led Danny back to the car without Gerard and his small entourage. Boston was in the driver’s seat; Danny got in the back.

“Why didn’t you ask about the UAV?” asked Danny as Boston backed out onto the road.

“The time wasn’t right,” said Nuri.

“Why not?”

“Let me handle this, all right? We have to get this medicine.”

“That’ll take weeks.”

“No. They just want over-the-counter drugs mostly. I’ll fly to Egypt and buy it. It’s all simple stuff. The clinic’s a gold mine of information. If we could find a way to talk to some of the women who are waiting to see someone, we can figure out what’s going on.”

“It’s not worth waiting,” said Danny. “The longer we wait, the better the odds someone else will come and get in the way. We can take two men out pretty easily.”

The sun had set; Boston turned on the headlights and found that only one worked, and only on high.

“I know we have different approaches to things,” Nuri told him after a few minutes of driving in silence. “But I don’t think there’s any harm in waiting.”

“I agree giving medicine to these people is a good thing,” said Danny. “But we can give it to them after the operation. My orders are to recover the UAV as quickly as I can. We’re going in tonight.”

“The only reason I’m giving it to them is so we can recover the UAV with a minimum of fuss,” said Nuri. “I don’t really care about helping them.”

“That hardly cements your argument.”

“Well it’s true. Listen, if we can do it with a minimum of fuss—”

“We can,” said Danny. “We go tonight.”

Chapter 8

In the end Li Han solved the problem like he solved many problems: shortly after sunset, he had Amara bring him three teenage boys, gave them each five American dollars, and told them he would give the first to return with the proper cord another twenty dollars.

Amara predicted they would have a cord by morning. Instead, all three of the boys returned within the hour. One had a cord with RCA plugs; the other two, however, had found network cables. Which building in town they’d stolen them from was irrelevant to Li Han; he paid both young men as promised.

“You should give that one something as well,” suggested Amara as the other two were paid. “Having an angry thief in the city is not a good thing.”

“Yes,” said Li Han, nodding. It was a wise suggestion; Amara had more intelligence than he’d thought. He gave the boy three dollars in consolation, then watched as Amara explained.

Amara spoke English as well as Arabic and the local lingo, but there was something else about him. He had a curiosity about him that the others lacked, and he seemed to put it to good use. Perhaps he could be useful.

“Are you good with computers?” Li Han asked him when the boy was gone.

“I use them for e-mail. The Web, that is all,” answered Amara.

“You can’t program?” Li Han booted his laptop up.

“No, I cannot.”

Amara’s accent was thick, and at times his vocabulary strained, but his grammar seemed perfect. Li Han suspected that he had been to the States or at least Europe, something rare for a Brother.

He let Amara watch as he hooked up his laptop to the aircraft’s brain. There was no response, and he couldn’t get his system to recognize it as part of a network. He tried the other plug with similar results.

The problem, he thought, might be that the UAV’s brain wasn’t powered; he made sure he had voltage flowing from a battery to the motherboard, but had not bothered to examine the network hook-ins.

“Here, watch me,” said Li Han, starting to examine the circuitry.

“What are we doing?” asked Amara.

“We are looking for a break. A cut wire, a bad solder connection. It’s a guess,” Li Han added.

He quickly found a small unattached wire. Unsure where it had been attached, he narrowed down the possibilities until he found what looked like a match to the broken solder on a small post near the transformer section. This was some sort of last minute patch, something added possibly to allow the network connector, though it was impossible to tell without a schematic.

Solving the connection mystery gave him another problem: he had no soldering gun. And he suspected that would be a hell of a lot harder to find than a network cable.

Li Han went upstairs to the common room and looked over their supplies. There was a large medical kit with syringes. Filled with morphine, they had been stolen some weeks before from an aid group.

He squirted the drug out. Amara eyed him curiously.

“Do you have a lighter?” Li Han asked him.

“No.”

“Does anyone?”

“Swal smokes, though it is forbidden.”

“Get the lighter from him.”

Amara went over to one of the youths sleeping on the side. He woke him, then had him walk to the opposite side of the room. They argued a bit — Li Han could tell the boy was lying about not smoking. Amara insisted. Swal, who was bigger, pushed him and started back to the nest of blankets where he’d been sleeping. Amara grabbed him; Swal shoved him violently across the floor.

Li Han put down the needle. With two quick strides he was halfway to Swal. He took his Glock from his belt and raised it just as Swal pulled his arm back to swing at Amara.

Swal froze. He held out his hands. Amara said something to him. Swal reached into his pocket slowly, then took out the lighter.

By now the others were awake, and staring at them.

“Translate, Amara,” said Li Han. “When I ask for something, I want it immediately.”

“But—” started Amara.

“Translate!”

Amara did so.

Swal nodded that he understood. When his head stopped bobbing, Li Han put a bullet through his temple.

“We will have no traitors in our group,” said Li Han. He held out his hand. “Now give me the lighter.”

Chapter 9

Breanna thanked the major who had shown her to the secure communications area. The sergeant waiting at the console handed her a handset, then walked to the other side of the room to give her a little privacy, pretending to fuss over something there.

“What’s the situation, Danny?” she asked, holding the phone to her ear.

“We’re going to go in tonight to the building where the UAV is,” he told her.

“Good. You spoke to Jonathon?”

“Yes. He made quite a deal about our being discreet. Don’t worry,” said Danny. “I should mention that Nuri wants to hold off until the morning. He thinks he may be able to make a deal for us to get it back without any bloodshed. But that may take at least another day, probably two or three.”

Under other circumstances, Breanna might have been inclined to wait. But given what Reid had told her the night before, the decision was easy.

“Get it back now. Go in ASAP.”

“I intend on it.”

Breanna hesitated. How much should she tell him?

Her inclination was everything. But if something went wrong — if he was captured and started to talk, that would make things worse.

“Call me as soon as the operation is complete,” she said. “Danny — this one’s important.”

“They always are.”

Chapter 10

Danny Freah checked his weapon and his watch, waiting for the signal from Boston. Boston and Sugar were approaching the front of the target building from opposite directions, aiming to cut off any reinforcements from the nearby warehouse. Both had grenade launchers on their SCAR assault guns; their job was simply to delay any response from that direction until the Osprey could swing overhead and back them up. The aircraft’s Hellfire missiles and chain guns would make short work of the building and anyone trying to take them on.

The rest of the Whiplash team, six men, were all with Danny. Once Boston and Sugar were in place, the two teams would move up to the north side of the warehouse. They’d plant charges on the sides, and at a signal, blow themselves a doorway.

Whiplash used a patterned explosive string that was designed to act like a can opener on a metal wall. The explosive in the device was metered and focused in a lenslike pattern that peeled down the top of the panel as it blew in.

The Whiplash team members were armed with SCARs configured either as submachine guns or as submachine guns with grenade launchers. Each wore special lightweight body armor that could resist anything up to a.50 caliber machine gun bullet at fifty yards. Their smart helmets had full face shields whose screens could provide either infrared or optical feeds from the cameras embedded at the top; the circuitry also provided some protection against sudden bright flashes — handy when using flash-bang grenades during an assault. The helmet com systems connected them with the others in the team, MY-PID, and a dedicated Whiplash com channel that connected with Room 4.

There were still only two men inside, both at the south end of the building. If they resisted, they’d be killed. If they surrendered, they’d be bound and then left after the operation — they were of no value once Whiplash had the UAV.

Danny flexed his fingers, waiting for Boston to check in. The air felt cold, even though it was well into the fifties. His stomach started to churn — that always seemed to happen lately, the acid building right before the action.

“I have someone moving inside the building,” said Turk, watching from above in the Tigershark. “Uh, going to the north, maybe that front door.”

“What’s up with Building Two?” asked Danny quickly, asking about the nearest building, which was roughly seventy yards away, diagonally across the road.

“No movement. Guy is definitely heading for the door in Target Building.”

“Copy,” said Danny. “Boston? Sugar?”

“Yeah, I copy,” said Sugar. She was huffing, obviously running to get in position. “Hang on.”

“Subject at the door,” said Turk.

Danny switched his view to an overhead feed from the Tigershark. He could see Sugar moving up to take the man when he came out, Boston covering her nearby.

“Team, get ready,” he told the others. “You hear a gunshot, move in. Blow the panels and go.”

“Subject is outside,” said Turk.

The circuit was silent. Danny waited, acid eating at his stomach. The Tigershark, orbiting to the north, lost sight of the front of the building.

“Down,” huffed Sugar finally. “He’s down. I bashed him on the back of his head. Went down like a bowling pin.”

“Truss him and drag him away from the building,” said Danny. “Tell me when you’re ready.”

More waiting. The acid started creeping up toward his windpipe.

“I’m good,” she said finally.

“We’re good, boss,” added Boston. “Go for it. We got your back.”

“Teams up,” said Danny. “MY-PID — what’s the other tango inside the target building doing?”

“Subject is immobile. Appears to be sleeping.”

The explosives were set. The team backed away, just far enough to stay clear of the blast.

“On three,” said Danny, reflux biting at the back of his mouth. “One, two…”

Chapter 11

Jonathon Reid pushed the sheaf of papers across the conference table toward Ray Rubeo.

“This is the white paper,” Reid said. “Is the program discussed here feasible?”

Rubeo frowned.

Perhaps it was because of the hour, Reid thought. It was not yet 5:00 A.M. But Rubeo himself had suggested the time.

The scientist always frowned. In fact, he seemed to be in a perpetual bad mood. He was a genius — his track record at Dreamland alone was proof — but he was a sourpuss even so. He gave the impression that he walked around in a different universe than mortal men. When he spoke to someone, it was as if he was coming down from Mount Olympus. How he had ever managed to get along with the Air Force command, let alone the bureaucracy of the Defense Department, was unfathomable.

Rubeo’s company was one of the Office of Special Technology’s main contractors, and among other things was responsible for building the highly secure facility they were sitting in. Rubeo had enormous influence at the Pentagon, but how he managed to deal with the generals there without being knifed — literally — Reid would never know.

The scientist turned the paper around and looked at the title. He frowned again. He turned over a page, looking at the names of the authors.

The frown deepened.

He turned over another page, reading a sentence or two of the executive summary, then flipped into the body of the paper, seemingly at random.

The frown seemed to reach to his chin.

Rubeo turned to the references at the back.

“It would have been nice if they had at least got the citations right.” He pushed the paper back toward Reid.

“So your opinion?” asked Reid.

“About the paper? Or the possibility of the program you’re referring to?”

“The latter, Doctor.”

“Of course it’s feasible,” said Rubeo. “The individual elements are trivial. The main difficulty is designing a tool that can interface with unknown control systems.”

“Layman’s terms?”

“Hmmmph.” Rubeo took hold of his earlobe, as if pulling it might turn a lever inside his brain that allowed him to speak in plain English. “The difficulty is re-creating in software the flexibility of the human mind, and at the same time enabling that software to use the benefits of its computing power.”

Rubeo paused. Translating his thoughts seemed several times more difficult than working out a complex mathematic problem for him.

“A man can drive a car,” he continued. “He can fly an aircraft. He can shoot a gun. He can fire a missile. The same man can do all this. If you have the right man. If he has the proper training. His software, if you will, is designed precisely for this function. To duplicate that is not a trivial matter.”

“Can we duplicate it?”

“Of course. The question is whether it’s worth the effort. And, as these authors point out — somewhat sloppily, I might say — whether it’s worth the risk.”

“Is it?”

Rubeo reached for his coffee cup. It was filled with hot water — probably some sort of health fad, though Reid didn’t ask.

“Why is this important?” Rubeo asked after a small, birdlike sip.

“I’m not sure I can tell you. I don’t know all the facts yet either.”

The frown became a smirk.

“Doctor, have you worked on a program similar to this?” Reid asked.

“I’m not sure you understand, Mr. Reid. The ultimate goal of any advanced artificial intelligence regime implies this ability. Creating an autonomous intelligence in and of itself implies that you have mastered the prerequisites for this. A program that can learn to fly an airplane can learn to do other things.”

“So the program used to guide the Flighthawks could do this?”

Rubeo raised his right hand to his face, running his index finger along his eyebrows. It almost seemed to Reid that he was underlining some thought behind his cranium.

“Of course not,” said Rubeo finally. “Those codes are strictly limited. There are difficulties with propagating the intelligence in an autonomous manner such as what’s laid out here. I don’t want to get too technical for you, and you’ll excuse me, as I don’t intend to insult you, but there has to be a certain amount of space for the program to function. Constraining it — well, it might work, but not as intended.”

“Have you worked with something like this?”

“Mr. Reid, you will recall that my curriculum vitae includes heading the scientific team at Dreamland. We had many, many projects under development there. More specific, I cannot be. Even with you,” added Rubeo. He took another sip of his water.

“Can I speak to you in confidence?” Reid asked.

“You have my confidence.”

“What I mean, Doctor, is can I ask you some questions without them leaving the room?”

“It would depend on the questions.”

That wasn’t good enough, Reid thought. Yet he needed a candid opinion. And he wanted to discuss the issue with someone like Rubeo — with anyone, really.

But what if Rubeo felt obliged to talk to someone at the Pentagon or in the administration about it? What if he saw it as a moral issue that had to be aired?

Reid wanted to be the one to make that decision. Assuming it had to be made.

But he needed to know. Perhaps he could back into the answer without arousing Rubeo’s suspicion.

“If another government had this weapon—” Reid started.

“I doubt anyone has this ability,” said Rubeo flatly. “We would see it in other weapons.”

“So no one is this advanced?”

“The Israeli drones can’t do a third of what the early versions of the Flighthawk could handle,” said Rubeo. “And I would use that as a measuring stick.”

“What about us?” said Reid. “Could we do it?”

Rubeo took another sip of his water, then set it down and leaned forward on the table.

“Have we done it?” asked the scientist.

“I don’t know,” admitted Reid. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

“I see.”

“I’m concerned about the implications,” explained Reid.

“As well you should be.”

“Can safety precautions be built into it? The paper says that they would be ineffectual.”

“Potentially ineffectual,” said Rubeo. “I can’t make a judgment without knowing much more about the specifics of what we’re talking about.”

Fair enough, thought Reid.

“There would be physical limitations, depending on the hardware. And different contingencies. I’m sorry to be vague — the portability issue is not trivial, but it can be overcome. Conceivably.”

“If it were up to you, would you allow such a weapon to be used?” asked Reid.

Now Rubeo’s lips curled up in the faintest suggestion of a smile — a rare occurrence.

“I don’t make those sorts of decisions,” he answered. “In my experience, it is a very rare weapon that, once created, is not used.”

Chapter 12

Danny jumped up an instant after the explosives blew out the panel. It was a neat penetration, a literal door for the Whiplash team to run through. The first trooper inside tossed a flash-bang grenade in the direction of the lone occupant. The man fell from the chair where he’d been sleeping; two Whiplashers reached him before the room stopped reverberating. One put his boot against the man’s back and his gun against his head, just in case he had any notion of moving. The other trussed his arms and legs with thick zip ties.

“Where the hell is the plane?” yelled Thomas “Red” Roberts, who’d been tasked to secure the UAV. “All I see is the pickup truck.”

Danny nudged Red out of the way. He was right. The only thing inside the building was the truck.

Danny flipped the shield on his helmet up. A single lightbulb near the front threw dim rays around the large room. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he pulled the signal receiving unit from his pocket and turned it on. The device was relatively simple — it beeped as it tracked the transmitter, the signals getting closer and closer together.

It was a solid tone.

He went over and peered over the back of the truck. There was a small jumble of what looked like debris near the cab. He picked it up — it was a hunk of plastic with some circuitry attached. Undoubtedly the tracking transmitter.

Damn.

“Movement in Building Two,” said MY-PID.

“Two, three people moving to the front,” added Turk, who was watching the feed.

“Osprey up,” said Danny. “Red, Marcus — search this damn place.”

“Already on it, Cap,” said Marcus. He was another of the new recruits, a former Ranger, also trained as a helicopter pilot. Danny hoped to use that specialty in the future.

There was a burst of gunfire from the front of the building.

“Boston?”

“They ducked back inside,” said Boston. “Didn’t look like they had weapons.”

The Osprey’s heavy rotors pounded the ground as it approached. Red went to the passenger side door of the pickup truck.

“Wait!” yelled Danny. “Check—”

His warning was too late — the truck exploded as Red pulled open the door.

Chapter 13

The past was gone, erased and buried from his memory, shocked out of him, drugged away. The past was gone and the future was blank; only the present remained, only the present was real.

Mark Stoner shifted in his bed, staring at the ceiling.

What was the present, though? Working out? Getting better?

Better from what?

It was all a jumble, a knot of torn thoughts.

Zen. Who was Zen?

A friend. Someone he knew.

But why was he in a wheelchair? And what was a friend, exactly?

Someone he saw a lot.

What was he supposed to say to him? What was he supposed to do?

Stoner leaned to the side. Dr. Esrang had given him a radio. He turned it on and began flipping through the stations.

“… Two out, and here comes Granderson. He flied out his last at bat. The former Yankee is batting just.230 this year…”

The words were strangely familiar. Stoner tried to puzzle out what they meant.

Baseball.

He knew that. The game.

He knew everything about it, didn’t he? He could picture what was happening in his head. He saw the batter swing and miss.

A memory floated up from deep within his consciousness. He was at a game with his grandfather.

His grandfather!

There was a past.

Baseball.

Stoner folded his arms across his chest and listened as the game progressed.

Chapter 14

The explosion blew Red back into Danny. Both men fell against the floor. The explosive charge was relatively small, and their body armor absorbed most of the blow. Still, there was enough of a shock to knock both of them out for a second. Danny came to with Flash leaning over him.

“Cap, you OK?”

“Yeah,” managed Danny. He got to his feet with Flash’s help. Red was shaken, but uninjured except for some cuts and bruises — the biggest one to his pride.

“Nothing in here,” said Flash. “You want to evac?”

“Right. Let’s get out of here. Take the prisoner with us. Both of them — get the guy Sugar knocked out.”

“On it.”

They left through the hole at the side. Boston and Sugar joined them as they crossed over the railroad tracks, running into a small clearing where the Osprey could land and pick them up. Danny could smell the exhaust in the wash from the Osprey’s rotors as the aircraft swooped toward them, its engine nacelles angled upward in helicopter mode.

His head was pounding. He paused as the aircraft settled down, counting his men to make sure they were all there. Flash had cut their prisoner’s leg restraints away, but he held his man by the arms as they moved double-time toward the rear of the Osprey. The prisoner was small and skinny, a young teenager.

Sugar had the other POW on her back. This one was tall — close to six feet — but just as skinny as the other.

Both were probably useless, Danny realized. Whoever had booby-trapped the truck probably figured they were disposable.

“We’re all here, Cap,” said Boston, taking up the rear.

“All right, let’s get the hell out of here.”

“What happened?” asked Boston as they ran up the MV-22’s ramp.

“They booby-trapped the door of the truck and we missed it,” said Danny. “We were lucky. And sloppy.”

Chapter 15

Li Han crouched at the edge of the culvert, watching as the Osprey rose. Its wings began to tip forward; it seemed to stutter to the right, and for a moment he thought it would crash. But the stutter was an optical illusion — the aircraft pivoted, turning away smoothly as it accelerated into the distance.

He had a clear shot for a Stinger missile.

But even if he’d had an antiaircraft weapon ready, it would have been foolish to attack. The aircraft was undoubtedly equipped with a detector and countermeasures, and even if he did succeed in taking it down, he’d be telling them he was still nearby. Better to remain a mystery.

Afraid he might be given away by the locals, Li Han had slipped out of the warehouse with Amara and most of the others, taking over a house about a quarter of a mile away and working on the UAV there. But even that had seemed too close, too small a precaution — as soon as he’d heard the explosion, Li Han had taken Amara with him and run from the building, using a door in the basement.

Now he felt just a bit like a coward.

But caution was always in order, especially when dealing with the Americans.

“What now?” asked Amara behind him.

“We’ll go back inside the house,” said Li Han, thinking. “They won’t attack again tonight.”

They would be watching. He’d have to lay low for a while.

What if he sold the UAV back to the Americans? They’d certainly be motivated buyers.

Amara might be able to broker the deal. He was a little puny physically, but he was smart. And the sight of Swal being shot hadn’t unnerved him; he’d disposed of the body quietly. He seemed to realize that Li Han had done it for him, to reinforce his authority with the others.

“Are we going?” asked Amara. “How long can we stay in this city?”

“Your English is getting better all the time,” said Li Han.

“You didn’t answer the question.”

Li Han smiled to him, then turned and led the way back to the house.

Chapter 16

Reid flicked off the viewer as the Osprey took off. He didn’t like monitoring the missions; there was too much temptation to micromanage. When he was in the field, he would never have allowed it.

But times were different now. The best he could do was not interfere.

He was about to call Breanna when the computer announced that she was holding on the line.

“You’re psychic,” he told her, picking up the phone. “I was just about to contact you.”

“Do we have it?”

“Regrettably, no. The tracking transmitter was removed from the body of the UAV. It was booby-trapped, but we had no injuries.”

“Well that’s something, at least.”

“We’re reasonably sure that the UAV itself remains in Duka. But at the moment I think even that’s a guess. Nuri is planning to go in tomorrow and check around. I don’t know that there’s much alternative.”

“The replacement satellite should be on station in a few hours,” said Breanna. “In the meantime, I’ve found a Global Hawk to augment the Tigershark so Turk can get some rest. We’ll have surveillance, but no connection to MY-PID.”

“That shouldn’t be an immediate problem.”

“We may need more force there,” added Breanna. “And I’m going to get more of their equipment over there. This is more serious than we thought at first.”

“The military side is your prerogative,” said Reid. “But I can’t emphasize enough that we have to be very quiet about it. If the Iranians or the Chinese or anyone else sees we’re making a big fuss, they may get nosy. Even if we recover Raven at that point, we may have jeopardized the weapon.”

“I understand, and Danny does, too. Did you talk to Ray Rubeo?”

“I did.” Reid stopped pacing. “I’m going to talk to Edmund again. Based on that conversation… Based on that conversation, I may have to talk to the President. A number of things trouble me.”

“Do you want me to come?”

“I think under the circumstances it would be best if I handled that myself,” said Reid. “I still don’t have the whole picture. Whether Edmund will give it to me or not remains to be seen.”

Chapter 17

Milos Kimko stood in the shadow of the small hut, watching the aircraft fade into the distance. He was nearly three miles from where it had landed, but even without his binoculars he could tell it was an Osprey: only the American aircraft could move so quickly from a hover.

And what were the Americans doing in this forsaken corner of Africa? Taking sides with one of the two rebel groups who shared control of the town? Simply meeting with them?

Possibly. But what to make, then, of the explosion that had woken him?

The Russian rubbed his eyes. He was tired, physically worn by his job to assess the rebel movements in eastern Sudan. The SVR — Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or Foreign Intelligence Service — had sent him to Khartoum a few weeks before, and he’d been traveling in the brush ever since.

He had a cover, and a side job, as an arms dealer. It was an excellent entrée to the locals, given the prices he was able to offer. The SVR subsidized the price; in fact, Kimko suspected his supervisors were keeping a portion of the money he sent back for themselves.

The sound of the Osprey’s engines faded. Kimko debated with himself. Should he go and see what they’d been up to now, or should he wait for the morning?

He’d been planning on continuing north at dawn, but that could be changed; it wasn’t like anyone there was setting their watches by him.

But why not take a look around now? He had nothing better to do, truly. The fresh air felt good.

It would also take his mind off the fact that he desperately wanted a drink.

Kimko went back inside. The round hut was tiny, a one room refuge that combined a bedroom, sitting area, and primitive kitchen in the space of four or five square meters. He went to his knapsack on the far side of the bed and took out his gun and holster; he picked up his thick sweater from the floor where it had fallen. He was still losing weight — even with the sweater and the shoulder holster, the jacket hung from his shoulders like an oversized bathrobe, two or three sizes too large. Not long ago it had been tight.

But that’s what Africa did to you. It shriveled you to nothing. It was terrible to foreigners, but just as hard on the natives; everyone he met had an empty look in their eyes, as if their souls had drilled through their skulls and fled.

A pile of clothes lay at the foot of the bed. Kimko took a five euro bill from his wallet and dropped it on the clothes. Hopefully, the woman who owned the clothes would be gone before he returned.

Chapter 18

The Whiplash team was quiet the entire way back to Ethiopia. Even Sugar, who normally could have been counted on for a dozen wise cracks and half as many put-downs, said nothing.

Red, who’d been closest to the IED when it went off, had been cut in several places and badly bruised, but was spared more serious injury by his helmet and armored vest. A large piece of shrapnel had sliced past the outer fabric into the carbon-boron layer, exposing the intricate web of the protective material. He stared at the slice the whole trip back.

“I’m sorry, Cap — I checked for wires and didn’t see anything,” he told Danny after they hopped out of the Osprey. “I looked underneath, in the back — I didn’t see explosives in the seat or anything — I just — I don’t know.”

“Forget it,” Danny told him. “Focus on the mission.”

“Lettin’ him off easy,” said Boston, watching Red head toward the hut the team had taken over for quarters.

“The bomb kicked him harder in the butt than I could,” answered Danny.

“I doubt he checked it right,” said Boston. “His helmet should’ve picked something up, even if it was a grenade.”

“I’m sure he forgot to reset it inside,” said Danny. “He won’t forget next time. That’s what counts.”

The Whiplash helmets had embedded chemical sniffers designed to warn of IEDs, or improvised explosive devices. But these could easily be confused in a combat situation, where the detection threshold was fairly high — you didn’t want your own grenade or explosive pack setting off the alarm. So the settings could be dialed back, or what the designers called “normalized,” with a reading taken before the actual operation. That reading was supposed to pick up the presence of the chemicals already in the group making the assault. That reading set the threshold for subsequent readings. Roughly speaking, the gear would see that the team had twelve ounces of PETN before the action, and the chemical sniffers would sound the alert only when a thirteenth was detected.

In the situation inside the warehouse, the helmet should have been reset before the truck was examined. This took up to ninety seconds, and in the heat of battle was often forgotten. But there were other reasons the explosive could have missed, and Danny saw no point in calling one of his team members a liar.

“Whoever set the bomb was pretty smart,” he told Boston. “He’s a couple of steps ahead of us.”

“I guess.”

“Has to be their Mao Man, Li Han.”

“I agree.”

“Put the prisoners in separate tents,” Danny told him. “I’ll get Nuri and we’ll talk to them.”

“You got it, Cap. Hey, heads up — storm headed our way.”

Boston pointed toward the small huts. Melissa Ilse, right arm in a sling, was striding in their direction, moving at a speed that clearly indicated she wasn’t pleased.

Danny kept up his own deliberate pace toward the main building. “Ms. Ilse, what can I do for you?”

“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“I didn’t know I was your alarm clock.”

“Listen, Colonel…”

She took hold of his right arm. As Danny turned toward her, Melissa’s glare reminded him of a look his wife had given him when he told her he wasn’t running for Congress. Ever.

Not a good memory, that.

“I’m in charge of this operation here, Colonel,” said Melissa. “This is my op.”

“No, Ms. Ilse, I’m afraid—”

“Melissa.”

“Right. This is a Whiplash operation. I’m in charge.”

“You’re supposed to help me. Help.”

“I really don’t care to argue.”

Danny started walking again. She fell in next to him.

“Obviously, you didn’t recover the UAV.”

“That’s right,” he said.

“I insist that you involve me in any other operation. Do you understand?”

“Your arm better?” asked Danny.

“Colonel, I insist.”

She followed in a huff as Danny entered the main building. Nuri was inside, talking with someone on a satellite phone. Jordan was fussing with the coffeepot.

“Your guys are all right?” asked Jordan, glancing over as he came in.

“Yeah. Just barely,” said Danny.

“Coffee?”

“Sure.”

“Melissa?”

“No thank you,” she said frostily.

“A little strong,” said Jordan, handing the coffee over.

“I’ll say,” said Danny.

“Keeps me awake.”

Nuri finished his call and came over.

“I’m sorry,” he told Danny.

Danny nodded. Nuri was sincere; he wasn’t an I told you so kind of guy.

“My drugs are on the way,” said Nuri. “They should be here by first light. I’ll go back and nose around.”

“They’re not going to connect you with tonight?”

“Nah. They may think you were coming to get me. I’m a criminal, remember? That’ll only help my reputation.”

“I think Li Han was behind this,” said Danny.

“Could be.”

“I think that’s a very good guess,” said Melissa. “I’m sure he’s still in Duka.”

“I think it’s kind of hard to be that definite,” said Nuri. “We thought he was in the warehouse.”

“He’s still in Duka.”

“What do you think?” Danny asked Jordan.

“I don’t know. Booby-trapping the truck would be very much like him. Finding the transponder? Definitely. But anything’s possible. These people aren’t stupid; they’ve lived by their wits out here for a long time.”

“We brought two guys back,” Danny told Nuri. “Maybe you can get something out of them.”

“Sure,” said Nuri.

Melissa followed them out of the building.

“Unless your Arabic’s a lot better than mine,” Nuri told her as they neared the tent, “I think you ought to stay outside. The less people who see you, the better.”

She gave him a scowl but didn’t argue.

Nuri adjusted the MY-PID ear set and followed Danny inside the tent. A teenager lay on the floor, arms and legs bound by zip ties. The tent was illuminated by a 150-watt bulb in a work lamp hanging from the peak.

Nuri knelt next to the prisoner. The kid was so still that even though his eyes were open, Nuri thought he was sleeping.

“As-Salamu Alaikum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuhu,” Nuri said in Arabic. May the One True God’s Peace and Blessing Be Upon You.

The young man’s eyes opened a little wider, but he said nothing.

“Why did you try to kill my friends?” asked Nuri. When he didn’t get a response, he switched to Nubian, the dominant tribal language of the North, and repeated the question.

Nuri’s Nubian wasn’t nearly as fluent as his Arabic, and the differences in the dialects added considerable difficulty. He would at least have no trouble translating: MY-PID could handle it instantaneously. Indeed, as soon as the Voice heard him use the language, it would make suggestions, allowing him to refine his speech as he went along.

The computer’s help proved unnecessary.

“You think I don’t know English?” said the prisoner.

“I didn’t want to insult you by using it,” said Nuri.

The kid made a face.

“How old are you?” asked Danny.

“What kind of question is that for a warrior of God?” snapped the boy.

“You’re not fighting for God. You’re trying to get Dr. Thorika into power,” answered Nuri, referring to the opposition figure supported by the Brotherhood.

“Phhhh, Thorika.” The prisoner tried to spit, but his mouth was so dry he couldn’t even force spittle to his lips. “We fight for the rule of Islam.”

“You’re with the Brothers?” said Nuri, who of course had suspected as much, based on what he knew of Li Han. “Have they stopped backing Thorika?”

The prisoner frowned again, perhaps realizing he had given Nuri more information than he should have.

“I didn’t know the Brotherhood had people this far north,” said Nuri in a reasonable tone. “Why have you come into the territory of your enemies?”

“All Sudan is our territory. We have friends everywhere.”

The kid switched to Arabic as he repeated several slogans popular with the Brothers. Nuri let him talk for a while before finally cutting him off.

“What about the Chinese scientist? Why is he in charge of you?”

“He is not in charge of us.”

The interview continued in that vein for several more minutes. Nuri concluded that the prisoner was older than he looked, but even so probably didn’t have much information that would be immediately useful.

The second prisoner stuck to Arabic, but was more talkative, volunteering that “the Asian” was in the city, though he didn’t know where. He said he was fifteen, and Nuri believed it; he had clearly not been trusted with much information, and didn’t seem to know that much about the UAV.

“They’re the usual teenage riffraff the Brotherhood recruits,” said Melissa derisively outside the tent. “They’re ignorant. They don’t know anything.”

“The first one spoke English pretty well,” said Nuri.

“So? It’s the official language. One of them.”

“The usual slugs don’t speak it as well as he does,” said Nuri.

“Li Han doesn’t speak Arabic, or any of the local languages,” said Melissa. “They needed someone who could communicate with him.”

“If Li Han is so good, why is he working for them?” asked Danny. “Why isn’t he working for Iran or Syria?”

“He has worked for them,” said Melissa. “He’s here because al Qaeda gave the Brotherhood money to hire him. He’s being paid ridiculously well to help them set up communications networks, arrange their computers. Forge networks.”

“Does he work for them, or the Brotherhood?”

“What difference does it make?”

“It makes a difference,” said Nuri.

“The Brotherhood. They contacted him through an intermediary. I’d guess he knows where the money comes from.”

“And where do they get it?” said Nuri. His tone made it clear he was speaking rhetorically. “The big oil states, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the rest. It’s blood money — we’ll pay you off if you don’t try and overthrow us, or preach too hard in our mosques, or do something else that will upset our business arrangements. Whatever it is Li Han is doing out here, he’s getting a ton of money for it. More than you and I will ever make in a hundred lifetimes.”

“That’s true,” said Melissa. “He’s helping them organize. That’s why it’s important to take him out now.”

“Getting the UAV back is our priority,” said Danny.

“Absolutely,” she said.

“I want access to the file,” said Nuri.

“What’s our next move?” Melissa asked Danny.

“It’s not ‘our’ next move,” said Nuri. “I’m going back to see what’s going on. We’ll take it from there.”

“I’m going in with you.”

“No again,” said Nuri.

“Colonel, this is my mission,” said Melissa. “Raven is in Duka somewhere. I have to find it.”

“This is our mission,” said Danny. “All of ours.”

Nuri tried to suppress his anger. He could tell what Danny was thinking: he saw this as a squabble between two Agency officers, a turf battle. But Nuri knew there was a lot more going on here than they’d been told — he doubted the assassination operation had been authorized, and there was no telling what else was up. Melissa was exactly the sort of gung-ho idiot higher-ups threw into a situation where the Agency didn’t belong.

“I’m going to the clinic with the drugs,” he said. “After that I’ll check with the other group. I’m not convinced that Li Han is still in town, but if he is, I’ll hear about it.”

“I could go to the clinic,” said Melissa. “I’m trained as a nurse. I’ll gather information in the city.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” said Danny. “Your arm’s in a sling.”

“I don’t need it.” She pulled it out. Pain showed on her face, but she let it dangle. “Raven is mine. It’s my job to find it.”

“We can get the information ourselves.”

“You haven’t done very well at it to this point.”

Danny scowled.

“I’m going,” said Melissa. “I’d be there now if I hadn’t taken a spill.”

Why not let her? thought Nuri. If she was going to be a jackass, why not let her park herself inside the clinic? She’d be out of the way there.

Sure. And then they’d capture her, torture her, and she’d tell them everything she knew about Raven and whatever else she was involved in.

But on the bright side, maybe they’d kill her.

“You can’t stop me,” Melissa insisted to Danny. “This is my mission. My job.”

That was another thing that bothered Nuri — she kept addressing Danny, not him, or at worst both of them.

“They’ll think you’re a spy in the clinic,” said Nuri. “They’ll know you’re American.”

“Of course they’ll know I’m an American. I don’t lie about that. There are a lot of Americans in Sudan.”

“Not a lot,” said Nuri. “And they’re all aid workers.”

“So?” She kept staring at Danny.

“Fine,” said Nuri. “It’s your funeral.”

Chapter 19

Herman Edmund’s schedule was ordinarily too tight for Jonathon Reid to expect an immediate meeting, even on an important matter, and given their conversation the other day, Reid doubted that Edmund would be motivated to make time. So he was surprised when Edmund’s secretary kept him on the telephone when he made the request, and even more surprised to hear the CIA director’s voice rather than hers a few seconds later.

“I was going to call you myself,” Edmund said.

“We need to talk.”

“Have you had breakfast?”

“Much earlier.”

“We’ll call it an early lunch, then.”

“We should talk in a very secure place,” said Reid.

Edmund hesitated for the slightest of moments before telling Reid that he had exactly the same idea.

They ate in the director’s dining room, only the two of them.

Reid ordered a cup of yogurt.

“You want to talk about Raven,” said Edmund as soon as the attendant left.

“I do.”

“Jon, it’s an unfortunate situation.”

“I think we both know it’s more than that,” said Reid.

Edmund raised an eyebrow. He pushed back in his chair, nearly reaching the wall. Photographs of all the Agency’s past directors hung in a line above their heads; William Casey glared down above Edmund’s.

“I understand that you’ve been making inquiries,” he said.

“I’ve been discreet.”

“As always,” said Edmund.

“You can’t expect me to put the lives of my people on the line without knowing what they’re being risked for.”

“Come on, Jonathon. That’s bullshit and you know it. People do that every day here. You do it, I do it — it’s the nature of the business.”

“The program is illegal, isn’t it?” said Reid. “There’s no executive order authorizing that Li Han be killed. And that’s the mandated procedure.”

“I never discuss specific orders like that.”

Reid was tempted to repeat Edmund’s line about bullshit back at him, but he didn’t.

“The UAV project is probably borderline as well,” Reid said. “But what I’m truly concerned about is Raven itself.”

“You told me you had located the UAV.”

“Raven is not the aircraft,” said Reid. “I need to know about the software, Herman. I need to know how much of a danger it is.”

“Software is software. It flies the plane.”

“That’s not all it does.”

“In this case, it is.”

“What are the safeguards?”

“I don’t know the technical data. Obviously, I’d be out of my element discussing them. As would you.”

“I want to speak to the people who developed the software and the computer that it runs in,” insisted Reid. “I want them to talk to my experts.”

“Can’t happen.”

“Why not?”

Edmund shook his head. “Can’t.”

A buzzer sounded.

“Come,” said Edmund loudly.

In response, the attendant opened the door and wheeled in a tray with their food. The director had ordered a cheese omelet with home fries.

“I had the chef hold the onions,” said Edmund. “I have meeting with the Secretary of State later. Though on second thought, maybe that would have been a good idea.”

He laughed at his own joke. Reid said nothing until the attendant left. “My fear,” he said then, “is that the program, if it were to get into the wild, would be unstoppable.”

“What do you mean, in the wild?”

“Like a virus. It has that sort of capability.”

“It doesn’t work that way, Jonathon. Your tech people should be able to tell you that.”

Reid rose as Edmund took a bite from his omelet.

“Where are you going?” asked the director.

“I’ve lost my appetite.”

“Sit down, Jonathon.”

This was exactly the sort of situation Reid had dreaded when he decided to return to the Agency after his retirement. But it was also exactly the reason he had not taken the post of DDO.

“I don’t think we have anything else to talk about,” he said coldly. “If you’re not going to give me full access to the Raven program, anything else either one of us says would be pointless.”

“Jonathon—”

Reid hesitated, half expecting Edmund to change his mind, or perhaps appeal to their long friendship. But the director said nothing else.

“Maybe I’ll be hungry later,” said Reid, pocketing the yogurt before leaving.

Chapter 20

Turk had now been up for an ungodly number of hours, and while his own personal record was in no danger of falling, he was nonetheless feeling the strains of fatigue. With the Whiplash team back in Ethiopia and a Global Hawk now overhead for surveillance, he was no longer needed. Assuming the satellite arrived in a few hours, he could even go home.

Until then he had to stay nearby. So he called Danny and cleared himself to land at the Ethiopian base.

The runway was a long hash mark just off the peak of a ridge in the mountains, a little on the short side, though not a problem for the diminutive Tigershark. But the field wasn’t exactly the smoothest, with an almost wavy pattern running across the tarmac about halfway down, and several dozen poorly patched craters scattered over its length. The Tigershark took a couple of hard bumps as she landed, knocking Turk against his restraints. A funnel of dust followed him down the runway.

One of the Whiplash team members took a truck out to meet him, and guided him to the maintenance area — a lone fuel truck standing in the middle of an open space.

The Tigershark had been designed to operate from forward bases, and the aircraft’s engine intakes had special screens designed to lessen the possibility that they would ingest engine debris. This base was rough even by Whiplash standards, however; he’d need some help checking the runway before takeoff.

Turk popped the canopy, secured the aircraft, then clambered down to the ground. His muscles felt as if they’d atrophied after his long stint in the air.

“Captain Mako, welcome to Shangri-La,” said Boston, hopping from the truck that had escorted him in.

“Hey, Boston.” Turk stuck out his hand. “Long time no see. Call me Turk.”

“Yes, sir, Turk.”

“Where can I get some food and a bunk?” he asked.

“Empty beds in either that little building over there, next to the two big ones,” said Boston, pointing. “Or else one of the tents. We have prisoners in the ones with guards outside them.”

“I’ll stay out of those.”

“Not a bad idea.”

“Where’s Colonel Freah?”

“That would be the big building on the left.”

“Wash the windows and check the oil,” said Turk as he started for the building.

“Jeez, very funny, sir. I never heard that one. Har-har.”

Turk cracked up. Corny jokes always put him into a good mood.

He walked up the slight rise toward the buildings, warmed by the sun as it poked between the nearby peaks. He was just pulling open the door to the large building when someone on the other side yanked it from his hand. A furious cloud flew out of the door, knocking him back.

It was the most beautiful cloud he’d ever seen.

“Wow, aren’t you pretty,” said Turk.

“And aren’t you an asshole,” said Melissa, practically spitting at him.

“Come on,” laughed Turk. “You must have seen bigger ones.”

“Asshole.”

Turk watched her walk away. He had never seen a pair of fatigues move with such sexual energy before.

“Enjoy the show?” asked Danny Freah when he turned back around.

“I would have landed hours ago if I knew the sights were so pretty,” said Turk.

“Watch yourself, Captain.”

“I will, Colonel. Definitely. Say, you got a minute? I may need a little help inspecting the runway to make sure we don’t have debris before takeoff. Plus, I have a couple of ideas about where the bad guys may be.”

Danny frowned at him. “I have to go into town. Talk to me while I walk.”

Nuri waited impatiently by the Mercedes for Danny to finish talking to the pilot. They should have been in Duka already. It was important to show that he had no connection with the raid; so important that he was willing to go in even without a connection to MY-PID.

Of course, this might be a wild-goose chase. The rest of the aircraft could be hundreds of miles away by now.

“Sorry that took so long,” said Danny, finally coming over. “I wanted to make sure we have some more people and gear in case you can’t work out a deal.”

“How long before it gets here?” asked Nuri.

“It’s en route. It may be a while.”

Nuri walked to the driver’s side door. “I’ll drive.”

“Hold up,” said Danny.

“What?”

“I thought we were taking Melissa.”

“She’s not here, that’s her problem.”

“What is it with you and her, Nuri?” said Danny. “What do you have against her?”

“She’s not telling us the whole story,” said Nuri. “And I don’t trust her.”

“You have to keep the Whiplash people cut out of the picture.”

Harker was practically shouting. Melissa started to raise her right arm to rub her forehead, but a shock of pain stopped her. Sugar probably had been right — she almost certainly had torn a ligament.

“Look, the only way to get the UAV back is with their help,” Melissa told her boss.

“That’s not a question — get it back.”

“Then I have to work with them. You sent them.”

“I didn’t send them. The director sent them. Not the same thing.”

She glanced at her watch. She was ten minutes late. Nuri would have a fit.

Hell, he’d probably left without her. It would be just like him.

“I have to go,” she told Harker.

“Melissa. Get this done. Take out Mao Man. If you—”

She killed the line, turned off the phone, and shoved the sat phone back into the safe box in her footlocker. Her other phone was already in her pocket.

Melissa locked up everything, then paused at the door. She didn’t have a mirror; all she could do was glance down at her clothes.

Frumpy. But that was the best she was going to manage. She pulled open the door, locked it behind her, and started down toward the Mercedes. No one was standing near it, and her first thought was that she wasn’t late at all. Then she realized that both Danny and Nuri were inside.

She started to run.

“About time you got here,” said Nuri as she pulled open the door. He started the car and put it in gear, not waiting for her to buckle her seat belt.

“Gonna be a long drive folks,” said Danny. “Let’s all relax. Where you from?”

“San Francisco,” Melissa said.

Nuri felt his cheeks burning as the two began a trivial conversation about their backgrounds.

The problem was that she was good-looking. If she’d been ugly — or better, if she’d been a guy — Danny would have played it entirely straight. He’d have kept her at arm’s length, trusted everything Nuri said. She’d be back at the base, or even in Alexandria, where she couldn’t screw anything up.

Granted, she might be useful at the clinic. Maybe.

Nuri’s foul mood settled over him as he drove. About two miles from the border, he went off the main road to bypass the guards at the main crossing, using a trail he’d spotted from the satellite photos. It was clearly well traveled — though dirt, it was hard packed, and even doing fifty, the Mercedes raised little dust. Within an hour, they were approaching Duka.

“We’re going to switch, right?” asked Danny. “I’m your driver.”

“Right,” said Nuri, feeling a little foolish. He took his foot off the gas and coasted to a stop. “Thanks. I forgot.”

Chapter 21

If the Agency was running a deeply dangerous and illegal operation, how far would it go to keep the secret to itself?

The ends of the earth, and beyond.

The first step from the director’s dining room felt like liberation to Reid; he knew what he had to do, and there was power in that certainty.

But with every step that followed, doubt crept in, then paranoia.

Would Edmund order he be detained? Or even killed?

It was a ridiculous idea, Reid told himself. Even if they hadn’t been friends, Edmund would never do such a thing. Nor would any director. He was sure of it.

And yet, he couldn’t seem to shake the paranoia. It intensified as the day went on, until it began to feel like a hood over his head, furrowing his vision and pushing him physically closer to the ground. Reid spent the afternoon in Room 4, studying more of the data, reviewing everything that might be even tangentially related to Raven.

That alone would have stoked his fears — the more he learned about the class of programs, the more he realized Raven was potentially unstoppable. “Killer viruses,” declared a paper written by an Australian researcher. The man foresaw a cyber war that would paralyze the world inside of five minutes.

A little past 4:00 P.M. the phone system alerted Reid to a call from the Senate Office Building. Thinking it was Breanna’s husband or his staff looking for her, he took the call, and found himself talking to a member of Senator Claus Gunter’s staff.

“Mr. Reid, can you hold for the senator?” asked the secretary.

Reid hesitated for a moment. Gunter was a member of the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee, but Reid barely knew him.

But of course he had to be polite. “Surely.”

“Jonathon, how are you?” said Gunter, coming on the line.

“I’m fine, Senator. Yourself?”

“Very good, very good. I wanted to speak to you in confidence. Is that possible?”

“I’m at your disposal, Senator,” said Reid.

“You know, between you and I, George Napoli is retiring from the DIA in a few months,” said Gunter.

“I hadn’t heard that.” Napoli was the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“In some quarters, your name has been raised,” said Gunter.

Reid realized immediately what was going on — he was being bought off. He wondered — did Gunter know about the operation, or was Edmund using him?

Surely the latter.

“Interesting,” said Reid.

“Is that the sort of post… you’d be interested in?”

“I hadn’t really given the matter any thought,” said Reid. It was best to be noncommittal — it might draw more information from Gunter. “I hadn’t known it was even coming open.”

“Well it is. And a lot of people think highly of you. On both sides of the aisle. I believe the President could be persuaded,” said Gunter.

“It is an interesting opportunity,” said Reid. “Who— Are there people putting my name forward?”

“I’ve heard in several places,” said Gunter, so breezily it was clearly a lie.

“I don’t know if I would have support,” said Reid. “I don’t know the members of the Intelligence Committee very well.”

“This will go through my committee, Defense,” said Gunter.

“I see. But even inside the CIA there might be people opposed.”

“I wouldn’t worry about a problem from that quarter. Perhaps we should have lunch.”

“I’d love to,” said Reid. It was a lie, of course; he’d sooner lay down across traffic on the Beltway. “When were you thinking?”

“I’ll have my secretary check the schedule and give you some dates.”

Reid’s first reaction as he put the phone down was relief: Edmund clearly had decided to try to buy him off. This meant his paranoia was completely unjustified — you didn’t try to kill someone you were bribing.

But once contracted, paranoia is a difficult disease to shake. He began thinking that it could every easily be a ploy to make him drop his guard. And the more he told himself that he was being ridiculous, even silly, the more the idea stuck.

He finally decided that he had to talk to the President as soon as possible, if only to retain his own sanity.

Even a longtime friend like Jonathon Reid couldn’t just show up at the White House and expect the President to see him. Christine Mary Todd was far too busy for that. Most evenings she spent away from the White House, at receptions or in meetings. And getting a formal appointment without giving the reason to the chief of staff could take days, if not weeks.

Getting in to see her husband, on the other hand, was far less onerous.

At precisely five after five Reid left his office to go to his car. He took a deep breath before stepping out of the elevator, assuring himself there was no reason to be so paranoid, and that if there was a reason, he would face his fate with equanimity and honor.

There was an unexpected thrill in that — a sense of the old excitement he had felt as a field officer so many years before.

But he had an old man’s heart now. Just walking to the car nearly exhausted him.

As Reid put his key into the ignition, he thought how easy it would be to attach a bomb to the wires, how quickly he would go.

There was no bomb; there was no plot; there was nothing but his paranoia. As far as he could tell, he wasn’t followed from the lot, nor on the local roads as he wended his way across town.

But his caution didn’t fade. Reid drove to the Metro and crisscrossed his way around the capital, changing trains willy-nilly amid the rush-hour throng.

He came up at the Mall and walked to the Smithsonian. Inside, he found one of the few pay phones left in the city, and called Daniel Todd’s private cell phone.

“Danny, this is Jon, how are you?”

“Jon — I almost didn’t answer. Where are you?”

“Knocking around in the city — it’s a long story. What are you doing?”

“At the moment I was heading for dinner,” said Todd.

“After dinner?”

“Probably watch the Nationals on the tube. They’re playing the Mets. I’d love to see them win.”

“You’re going to the game?”

“Too late for that. I’m staying in to watch.”

“Want some company?”

“You’re stooping to baseball?”

“Yes.”

“Game’s on at seven. I’ll leave word.”

Chapter 22

It had been two weeks since Milos Kimko had drunk his last vodka, but the taste lingered in his mouth, teasing his cracked lips and stuffed nose. He longed for a drink, but there were none to be had, which was a fortunate thing for a man struggling to break the habit.

The locals all chewed khat, an ugly tasting weed that supposedly mimicked amphetamines. Kimko thought it made them crazy and wouldn’t go near it. The homemade alchoholic concoctions, brewed in repugnant stills, were even worse. He therefore had a reasonable shot at staying sober long enough for it to take.

Africa was not exactly a punishment for the career SVR officer, much less a rehabilitation clinic. It was more a symbol of his diminishment. Milos Kimko had once been a bright star in the Russian secret service, a master of over a dozen languages, an accomplished thief and a persuader of men, a large number of whom were still in the SVR’s employ as spies. For several years he’d headed the service’s Egyptian operation, and at the time had contacts throughout the Middle East. He had even helped, behind the scenes, negotiate several of the secret pacts with Iran that Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin had used to outmaneuver the U.S. and its allies during the Clinton administration.

But that had been his high point. Instead of the assignment in Moscow he coveted, he was rotated into Western Europe, and from there, inexplicably, to South America. He could blame drinking for his downfall, but that was a lie; the drinking was a consolation, not a reason. He never knew whether he had inadvertently crossed someone or if one of his bosses had coveted his wife. Both, probably.

Petra had been gone five years now, a distant memory.

Kimko smiled at the server as she brought his tea. He sniffed it first — you couldn’t be too careful here — then took a sip. As he set down the cup, a short African with a scruffy beard entered the café.

Girma, the man he had come to see.

Kimko rose to get his attention, then sat back down. Girma sauntered over.

“Well, my friend, you are looking well this morning,” said Girma in Arabic.

“And you.”

Girma sat. He headed the local faction of rebels known in English as Sudan First, and had a reputation as slightly unbalanced. The waitress rushed over with a pot of fresh tea brewed especially for him. It was a local concoction, sprinkled heavily with khat.

“The weather is pleasant this morning,” said Kimko.

The two men chatted about the weather for a few minutes, wary lions sizing each other up. The full name of Girma’s group translated as “Sudan the Almighty First Liberation.” Its beliefs varied according to the person and, as near as Kimko could tell from his two days here, the hour. But it was larger and somewhat richer than the other group, Meur-tse Meur-tskk. The leader of Meur-tse Meur-tskk, an improbable French-loving African named Gerard, was even crazier than Girma, spending most of his time staring into the distance. So Kimko knew that if he wanted information, Girma and Sudan First were the ones to deal with.

He had heard rumors in the south that the Brothers were trying to forge an alliance with Girma, but had so far not put enough money on the table to cement it. That was the problem with true believers — they failed to see that corruption was the easiest way to a man’s soul.

“Did the commotion last night wake you?” asked Kimko after Girma had his second cup of tea.

“The commotion?”

“The Americans attacked one of the buildings outside town.” Kimko wasn’t sure if Girma was faking ignorance or if it was genuine. “Near the train yard. I assume it was an attack on your rivals, Meurtre Musique.”

“Meurtre Musique are our friends,” said Girma carefully. He studied his tea before placing it down. “Why do you say they were attacked?”

“There was an Osprey in the air last night. I happened to be awake and went there for a look. There had been an explosion, but otherwise I saw nothing important. The children told me this morning it had once been a warehouse for rice.”

“The rice warehouse.” Girma shook his head. “That isn’t Meurtre Musique’s. Why would they take our building?”

“It’s your building?”

“All of Duka is ours.”

“Who were the Americans attacking?” asked Kimko.

“The Americans are not here. You are obsessed with Americans.”

Kimko let the comment pass.

“There was a robbery last night, that is one bad thing that happened,” said Girma. “I know of that — and when I catch the thief, his hand will be cut off.”

“Where was the robbery?” asked Kimko.

“The clinic.”

Kimko nodded.

“Meurtre Musique is jealous. They cannot be trusted,” said Girma darkly.

“Jealous?”

“They have opened their own clinic.”

“I see.”

“For a long time we have lived side by side, but now I see — they can’t be trusted.”

“What was stolen?”

“Wires for the computers.”

“Wires?”

“To tie something up. They aren’t even smart enough to take the computers. Imbeciles.”

Kimko sipped his tea. The theft of computer wires was even more interesting, if perplexing, than an attack on a warehouse.

“If the Americans were to attack someone,” said Girma finally, “it would be the Brothers.”

“The Brothers? They’re here?”

“Yes, the government chased them from the mines to the south. They haven’t contacted us, but of course we know everything that goes on in the city.”

Except for the most obvious things like Osprey attacks in the middle of the night, thought Kimko.

“I expect they will talk of an alliance again,” said Girma. “They are always anxious for one.”

“I wonder,” said Kimko, “if there might not be a way to talk to them.”

“Why would you talk to them? They have no power here.”

“Of course not. You are the power,” said Kimko. “Still, it might be useful.”

“To sell them weapons?”

“Perhaps.” Kimko saw the slight pout on Girma’s face. “Of course, if I made a sale, I would pay a commission to whoever helped make that possible. A nice commission.”

“Hmmmm.” Girma drained his tea and poured a fresh cup. “A meeting could be arranged.”

“Good.”

Girma rose. “Come with me.”

“Now?”

“I believe I know where they are. There is no sense waiting, is there?”

“Certainly not.”

Chapter 23

Danny let Nuri do the talking when they arrived at the clinic, hanging back and watching Marie Bloom. People who worked with NGAs — nongovernmental agencies — were always an odd mix, and for Danny at least, hard to read. Both Nuri and Melissa had assured him that she was a volunteer, not a British agent. Naiveté and religious devotion had brought her here, Nuri assured him, in a way that made it sound several times more dangerous than warfare.

The two boxes of medicines were accepted almost greedily. Bloom didn’t ask many questions of Melissa, whom Nuri claimed he had recruited while getting the supplies. Melissa said that she worked for WHO, the World Health Organization, and was due in Khartoum in three days. A colleague would pick her up in forty-eight hours and give her a ride.

As she was talking, one of the children who was waiting with his mother ran over and grabbed her leg, apparently playing a game of hide and seek with another kid. Melissa bent down and smiled at him, asking in Arabic what his name was.

Watching, Danny once more thought of Jemma, though this time in a much kinder way. She had always had a soft spot for kids, before and especially after they learned they couldn’t have one.

He curled his arms in front of his chest and frowned the way he assumed a bodyguard would. The others took no notice.

“Next stop, Gerard,” said Nuri when they were outside.

“You think Melissa is OK in there?” asked Danny.

“They won’t hurt her,” said Nuri. “I’m sure they think she’s a spy, but they think that of everyone.”

“I don’t know.”

“She wanted to be there. Relax, Danny. They don’t generally kill women.”

“Not generally?”

“We’re in a lot more danger, I’ll tell you that.”

“That’s not very reassuring.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

Chapter 24

The lookout yelled from across the street as soon as the Range Rover drove up.

“Who?” hissed Li Han.

“Girma. Sudan First,” added Amara, naming the Islamic rebel group that shared control of the city. “He’s coming to the house.”

“How does he know we’re here?” asked Li Han.

Amara didn’t answer. It was probably a foolish question, Li Han realized — the town was so small any stranger would stand out.

“Let him come.” Li Han moved his pistol in his belt, making it easier to retrieve, then pulled a sweatshirt over his head.

Amara opened the door as Girma and his small entourage approached. Besides the Muslim rebel there were two bodyguards and a blotchy-faced white man with greasy, dark hair. The white man was wearing a thick flannel shirt and a heavy suit jacket.

A Pole or a Russian, Li Han guessed. What did this mean?

Had the brothers betrayed him? They had seemed cowed since he shot the tall one, but that was the problem with Africans — they always snuck around behind your back.

“I have come to see the Brothers!” bellowed Girma, practically bouncing into the house. He was overflowing with energy — probably hopped up on khat, Li Han realized.

“We are here on other business,” said Li Han in English. Amara translated.

“Who are you?” asked Girma, switching to English himself.

“A friend.”

Girma gave him an exaggerated look of surprise, then turned and spoke to Amara in what Li Han gathered was Arabic, though it went by so quickly he couldn’t decipher the words.

“They are wondering why we are here and have not greeted them,” said Amara.

“Tell them we were afraid that we would bring them trouble.”

“Why would you bring us trouble, brother?” said Girma. “Are you running from the Americans?”

“What Americans?” asked Li Han.

“The Americans attacked a building not far from here last night,” said the white man in English. “Were they looking for you?”

“No,” lied Li Han. “I didn’t know there was an attack. Why would the Americans come here?”

“Then whose trouble are you afraid of?”

“Who are you?” asked Li Han.

“Milos Kimko. I work with friends in Russia. We are making arrangements to bring weapons and supplies to our friends here. Perhaps we could help you. You are part of a very impressive organization.”

“I’m just a friend.”

“I see. But these men are Brothers.” He gestured at the others, whose white African clothes hinted at their alliance. “Pretty far north for the Brotherhood, aren’t you?”

Li Han didn’t answer. He didn’t like the man, whose accent he had by now noticed gave him away as a Russian. Like many of his countrymen, he was clearly full of himself, a big talker who undoubtedly delivered less than half of what he promised.

This was, however, clearly an opportunity.

“I am always looking for a chance to do business,” added the Russian. “I give many good prices.”

“Do you buy as well as sell?” asked Li Han.

“Buy what?”

“You mentioned the Americans. I haven’t seen them, but I have seen a weapon they have. It was an aircraft, a robot plane. I wonder if it would be worth money to you.”

“We have Predators,” said Kimko disparagingly. “Our own versions are better.”

“This is not a Predator,” said Li Han. “This is a much more capable aircraft.”

“A Flighthawk?”

“Better even.”

“How do you know?” Kimko asked skeptically.

“I’ve seen it fly.”

“Show it to me.”

“I don’t have it,” lied Li Han. “But I could arrange to show you parts, and give you a photo. Would your government be willing to pay?”

“I don’t work for the government.”

“Whoever you work for, then,” said Li Han.

“Maybe.”

“I will deliver a photo to you this evening in town,” he said. “Where will you be?”

Kimko eyed Girma carefully as they got back into the Range Rover. Girma had started off the meeting with surplus energy. Now he was positively agitated, rocking as he sat in the backseat of the truck. He took his pistol out and began turning it over in his hand, examining it.

“This aircraft may be of great interest to me,” Kimko said. “Have you heard anything about it?”

The African didn’t answer. He reached into the pocket of his shirt and pulled out a small sack; he took out some dried, broken leaves and pushed them into his mouth.

More khat. Just what he needed, Kimko thought.

“Do the Americans fly UAVs here often?” he asked. “I wonder if there are other wreckages we could look at.”

Girma shook his left fist in the air and pounded the seat in front of him.

“It is that Gerard’s fault,” he said loudly. “He stole our wires.”

The back of the Rover was about the last place Kimko wanted to be. But there was no graceful way to escape. Or ungraceful, for that matter.

“I know my friends would be very, very interested in paying money for American weapons and technology,” said Kimko, desperately trying to change the subject.

“I will kill him,” said Girma. This time he slammed the seat with his right hand — and the pistol.

“Tell me what you need, my friend,” said Kimko. “What wires? Let me make a present to you. It is fitting for our friendship. Show me the wires you need, and I will get you twice what you had. Because of our friendship.”

Girma turned toward him, eyes wide.

“You are too good a friend,” said Girma.

“Nothing is too good for you,” said Kimko.

“I kill him!” yelled Girma. He pounded on the back of the driver’s seat. “Take me to the square.”

“Girma, it might be good if—”

“Take me now!” shouted Girma, raising the gun and firing a round through the roof of the truck.

Chapter 25

A diehard baseball fan, Zen Stockard had adopted the Nationals as his favorite team partly because he loved underdogs, and partly by necessity — they were the only team in town. He had a pair of season tickets in a special handicapped box, and often used them to conduct business — though any baseball outing with Senator Stockard was generally more pleasure than business, as long as the home team won.

Tonight, with the Nationals down 5–1 to the Mets after three innings, pleasure was hard to come by.

“A little better pitching would go a long way,” said Dr. Peter Esrang, Zen’s companion for the night. Esrang was a psychiatrist — and not coincidentally, a doctor Zen had personally asked to take an interest in Mark Stoner’s case.

“Jones always has trouble in the first inning,” said Zen. “He gets a couple of guys on and the pressure mounts.”

“Psychological issue, obviously,” said Esrang.

“But after the first, he’s fine,” said Zen as Jones threw ball four to the Mets leadoff batter in the top of the fourth.

“I don’t know,” said Esrang, watching the runner take a large lead off first.

Jones threw a curve ball, which the Mets clean-up hitter promptly bounced toward second. A blink of an eye later the Nats had turned a double play.

“Now watch,” said Zen. “He’ll walk this guy on straight fastballs.”

There was a slider in the middle of the sequence, but Zen was right — the player never took his bat off shoulder.

“How would you fix this guy?” he asked Esrang. He pushed his wheelchair back and angled slightly to see his guest’s face.

“My specialty isn’t sports,” said Esrang. “But I wonder if it might be some sort of apprehension and overstimulation at first. Nervousness, in layman’s terms. His pitches seem a lot sharper than they were in the first inning.”

“Could be,” said Zen.

“A variation of performance anxiety.”

“So what do you do?”

“Have him pitch a lot of first innings,” said Esrang. He laughed. “Of course, that’s not going to work well for the team.”

“Maybe if he pitched no first innings,” said Zen.

“That would be another approach.” Esrang sipped his beer. “Break through that barrier.”

“Change the scoreboard so it looks like it’s the second inning?” asked Zen. “Or hypnotize him.”

“I don’t trust hypnotism,” said Esrang. “But if you could change his environment, even slightly, it might work.”

A perfect segue, thought Zen. “I wonder if something like that would work with Mark.”

Esrang was silent for a moment.

“Do you think it would?” asked Zen.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I was wondering if perhaps he might go out for short visits,” said Zen. “Little trips.”

“Senator, your friend is a potentially dangerous individual. Not a big league pitcher.”

“Jones is pretty dangerous himself,” laughed Zen as a ball headed toward the right field bleachers.

Zen let the subject rest for a while, ordering two beers and sticking to baseball. The doctor surely felt sandbagged, but in the end that wasn’t going to matter one bit — eventually they were going to help Stoner. Somehow.

A pop fly to the catcher ended the Mets half of the inning. The Nationals manufactured a run in the bottom half with an error, a steal, and two long fly ball outs.

Jones struck out the side in the top of the second, his only ball missing the strike zone by perhaps a quarter of an inch.

A shadow swung over the sky near the edge of the stadium as the players ran to the dugout. Esrang’s head jerked up. Zen followed his gaze.

“What’s that airplane?” asked the doctor.

“That’s security,” said Zen. “The D.C. police are using UAVs to patrol some of the airspace over the past few weeks.”

“It’s a Predator?”

“No, civilian,” said Zen. “The plane is smaller. But the idea is basically the same. They have infrared and optical cameras. They’re just testing them for crowd control right now. A few weeks, though, and they’ll be using them to give out tickets.”

“Really?”

“That’s what they claim.”

“Hmmm.”

“Personally, I think the money would be better spent on foot patrols.” Zen was on the committee that oversaw D.C. funding, and had actually voted against the allocation, even though it was mostly funded by a private grant. “High tech has its limits. You need people on the ground, in the loop. Here you’re spending the equivalent of six police officers — I’d rather have the people.”

“I can’t disagree,” said the psychiatrist.

“Plus, I’ll probably be the one getting the ticket,” laughed Zen.

A roar rose from the crowd. Zen turned in time to see a ball head over the right field fence.

“Here we go,” he told Esrang. “Brand new ballgame.”

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea,” said the psychiatrist. “But we have to be careful.”

“The UAVs won’t give out the tickets themselves.”

“I mean with Mark.”

“Oh, of course.”

“The drugs they used, we don’t have a good handle on the effects,” said Esrang. “We don’t know exactly if they’ve made him psychotic. He’s very focused; he’s very internal. I can’t completely predict what he’ll do.”

“He hasn’t harmed anyone since he’s been in custody. Or done anything aggressive.”

“I realize that. I know. But—”

The Nationals third baseman cracked a hard shot down the first baseline. Esrang jumped from his seat to watch as the player zipped past first, took a wide turn at second, and raced for third. He slid in under the tag.

“Not bad,” Esrang told Zen, sitting back. “But I would never have given him a green light on three balls and no strikes.”

“No.” Zen held his gaze for a moment. “Sometimes you take a chance, and it works out.”

“Hmmm,” said Esrang.

Chapter 26

Nuri gave Gerard a big wave as he walked through the large pavilion. The African was more animated today than he’d been the day before; he actually nodded back.

“I just dropped off the medicines you asked for at your clinic,” Nuri told him, setting down his rucksack and pulling over a camp chair. “They are very happy.”

Gerard frowned. “You should have given them to me first.”

“Those were just aspirins and bandages,” said Nuri. “Little things that anyone could bring.”

He pulled up his backpack and started to open it. One of the bodyguards lurched forward as if to stop him.

Gerard raised his hand and the man froze.

“This is ampicillin,” said Nuri, taking out a bottle of pills. “This is important medicine that only an important person can deliver.”

Pretending he wasn’t flattered, Gerard feigned a frown and put out his hand. He took the bottle of antibiotics and opened it, pouring a few pills into his palm.

“Each of those is worth several dollars,” said Nuri.

“Hmph.” Gerard held them up to his nose, sniffing them.

“They only work if you’re sick,” said Nuri, worried that Gerard was going to eat them. He didn’t know how they would affect him.

Gerard poured them back into the bottle.

“Six bottles,” Nuri told him. “And there are some other medicines as well. They’re labeled. Your doctor will be very impressed.”

Gerard handed the bottle back. “Let us have something to drink. Coke?”

Danny sensed trouble as soon as the white Range Rover turned the corner. Dirt and dust flew in every direction as the nose of the vehicle swung hard to the left and then back to the right. He took a step forward, closing the distance between himself and Nuri, who was sitting on one of the camp chairs in front of Gerard.

The Rover skidded to a stop. A man jumped out from the rear, raising his arm.

“Down!” yelled Danny. He threw himself forward, pushing Nuri to the ground as the man near the car began firing.

Gerard joined them as his bodyguards began returning fire.

“Go! Come on, let’s go!” hissed Danny, grabbing Nuri and pulling him in the direction of the building next to the pavilion where they’d gone to meet Gerard. Someone got out of the Range Rover and began firing a machine gun; the bullets chewed through the tables at the front and the canvas overhead. There was more gunfire up the street, screams and curses.

“What is it? What is it?” demanded Nuri, as if Danny had an answer.

“The building — come on,” Danny told him, pulling him to the back of the building where they had some hope of getting out of the cross fire. But a splatter of bullets from the machine gun cut them off. Danny spun back, ready to fire. But when he raised his head, the Range Rover was speeding down the street.

One of Gerard’s bodyguards continued to shoot. The man’s gun clicked empty; he dropped the magazine and reached for another, firing through that. He didn’t stop until he had no more magazines.

A half-dozen people lay on the ground. Two or three moaned; the others were already dead. Blood and splinters were everywhere. One of the picnic tables had been shot in half, its two ends reaching up like a pair of hands praying to the heavens.

Gerard sputtered in rapid French.

“Stay down,” Danny told Nuri, crouching next to him. “There were people firing from up the street.”

“They were with Gerard.”

“What’s he saying?”

“He’s asking who did this,” said Nuri, who’d drawn his pistol. “Dumb question. Has to be Sudan First.”

Nuri got to his knees, listening as Gerard continued to yell.

“He says it was Girma’s truck. That’s Sudan First.”

“Time for us to get out of here,” said Danny.

“We’re going to have to help clean this up,” said Nuri.

“What?”

“We have a car. We have to take the victims to the clinic.”

This wasn’t a particularly good time to be playing good Samaritan, thought Danny, but Nuri made sense. A half-dozen armed men had appeared from other parts of the square. They formed a perimeter around the battered pavilion. Gerard stood a few feet away, railing in French against whoever had done this. He’d taken a pistol out and was waving it around.

“Go get the car,” Nuri told Danny. “I’ll explain.”

By the time Danny retrieved the Mercedes, two of Gerard’s men were waiting with one of the wounded, a gray-haired old man whose face was covered with blood. Danny guessed that the man was already dead, but didn’t argue; he helped three other people into the front seat, and took another into the rear.

“I’ll stay,” said Nuri, running up to him. “Gerard will help us now.”

“Be careful,” said Danny.

“I’ve been in much worse situations. Speak as little as possible,” added Nuri. “Very little. They’re going to be suspicious. The cover will be that you’re a mercenary from Australia, probably a wanted criminal. They might accept that.”

“I don’t sound Australian.”

“They won’t know.”

The two bodyguards climbed on the trunk; Danny rolled the windows down so they could hold on, then backed into a U-turn to get to the clinic.

Marie Bloom was not the naive do-gooder that Melissa had taken her for at first. On the contrary, Bloom was a steely and wily woman who started questioning her as soon as Nuri and Danny had left.

“What spy agency do you work for?” she asked, getting straight to the point.

“I’m not a spy,” Melissa told her.

“Lupo didn’t just find you on the street,” she said. “You’re an American. You’re with the CIA.”

“I am an American,” Melissa said. She fidgeted in the office chair. It was a small room; if she held out her arms, she could almost touch both walls. “I was in Kruk last week. There were problems in one of the camps. I had… trouble.”

“What sort of trouble?” asked Bloom. Her voice was borderline derisive. She leaned against the bare table she used as a desk; it doubled as an examining table for infants.

“There were problems with one of the supervisors,” said Melissa. “He tried… let’s say he pushed me around.”

“And then what happened?”

“I took care of it.”

Bloom frowned, and reached for Melissa’s shoulder. She jerked back instinctively.

“I know it’s hurt. Let me see it,” said Bloom.

Melissa leaned forward reluctantly.

“Take off your shirt,” directed Bloom.

Wincing, Melissa unbuttoned her blouse and slipped it back on her shoulders, exposing the massive bruise.

“You dislocated it,” said Bloom, probing gently at the edges.

“I put it back in place.”

“Yourself?”

“I had help.”

“He pulled it from the socket?”

Melissa didn’t answer.

“I would bet there’s tearing,” said Bloom. “The rotator cuff—”

“I’ll be fine,” said Melissa. “Someone is going to meet me. We’ll go to the capital and I’ll go home.”

She pulled her shirt back into place. She didn’t think Bloom fully believed her story, but the injury was certainly authentic, and it made everything else at least somewhat plausible. In general, that was all people needed — an excuse to find something believable.

“What are you taking for it?” asked Bloom.

“Aspirin.” She shook her head. “I’m OK.”

“We have hydrocodone.”

“No. You’ll need them for real patients.”

“As if you’re not hurt? You think you’re more stoic than the next person?”

“I saw a hell of a lot worse at Kruk.”

Bloom gathered a stethoscope, a thermometer, and gloves from a basket at the left side of the desk. “How do you know Gerard?”

“I have no idea who he is.”

“Lupo?”

Melissa shook her head. “He was a convenient ride. I needed to go. It sounded like a good solution.”

“You travel with people you don’t know?” said Bloom, her voice once more harsh. “That’s very dangerous.”

“One of my supervisors said he could be trusted. He’s a criminal, I know,” added Melissa. “But he didn’t try to hurt me.”

“How much did you pay him?”

“When my friend comes, I’ll give him a hundred dollars.”

“You have it?”

“My friend will have it. I don’t.”

“I hope your friend has a gun,” said Bloom. “Several.”

Melissa rose and started to follow Bloom out of the office. As she opened the door, they heard gunfire in the distance. Bloom tensed.

“What’s going on?” asked Melissa.

“I don’t know.” She turned around and went to the cabinet behind Melissa. Reaching inside, she took out a pistol — an older Walther automatic. She put it in her belt under her lab coat. “Get ready for anything.”

Danny drove the car to the clinic’s front door, scattering a flock of birds pecking at the dirt. A thin man in a white T-shirt coming out of the building jumped back, fear in his eyes as Danny slammed on the brakes. The two men on the back leaped down and pulled open the doors, helping the wounded out of the car.

Except for the soft purr of the engine, it was eerily silent. Danny picked up a woman who had been shot in the arm and carried her inside. She was a limp rag, passed out from the loss of blood but at least breathing.

That was more than he could say for the man they’d lain across the backseat. Danny stopped the two guards as they picked him up and moved him out of the car. He put his finger on the man’s pulse and shook his head.

They carried him in anyway.

The last person in the car was a young boy, unconscious but with a good pulse and steady breathing. Six or seven large splinters of wood were stuck in his face; small trickles of blood ran down across his chin and neck to his clothes. There was a stain on his pants where he’d wet himself, and another — this one caked blood, near his knee.

Danny picked him up, cradling him in his arms as he walked him inside the clinic. The reception room had become an emergency triage unit, with the patients spread out in the center of the floor. The people who’d been inside already stood at the far end, occasionally stealing glances at the wounded, but mostly trying to look anywhere else. Danny wanted to talk to Melissa, but she was tending one of the wounded, and he worried that going to her now would blow her cover, or his.

One of the men he’d come with tapped his shoulder, indicating that they should go back. Danny followed him silently. He glanced at the little boy as he left, hoping to give him some sign of encouragement. But the boy’s eyes were still closed. Danny wondered if the kid would ever overcome the real wounds of the day.

“The Chinese man put him up to this,” Nuri told Gerard as they surveyed the ruined pavilion. “Where is he?”

“I’ll kill him,” said Gerard. His glassy stare had been replaced by one even more frightening; his eyes were almost literally bulging from his sockets. Two veins pulsed in his neck.

“I’ll pay good money for him,” said Nuri calmly. “I know people who will pay us if we give him to them alive.”

“I kill him.”

“He’s worth more to me. To us. More alive.”

“Why would you save a murderer?”

The Mercedes rounded the corner, Gerard’s men hanging out the windows. Nuri went over to help the last of the wounded get in. Gerard stopped him as he bent to an old man.

“He’s not hurt,” said Gerard gruffly.

“He’s holding his side.” The man wasn’t bleeding but seemed in obvious pain. “We have to get him in the car and take them to your clinic.”

“No, they will find their own way,” said Gerard. “You must take me to my house in the hills.”

“I have other places to go.”

“Take me,” demanded Gerard.

The bodyguards bristled.

“What about the wounded?” asked Nuri.

“If you are my friend,” said Gerard, “you will help me, not them.”

“Get in the car,” said Nuri, deciding it was the wisest thing to do.

Chapter 27

It had gone to hell so quickly that Kimko couldn’t process all that had happened. But the basics were clear enough: Girma had shot up the center of town, killing or wounding at least a half-dozen people, all allied with Meur-tse Meur-tskk. There was certain to be a lot more fighting.

Kimko might have viewed the conflict as good for business if he hadn’t been mixed up in the middle of it.

His best plan, he thought, was to get away as quickly as possible. But Girma didn’t look ready to let him leave.

“You will see our great victory,” Girma told him as the Range Rover sped across the desert to the foothills where Sudan the Almighty First Liberation had a fortress. “We will crush our enemies.”

“You will need more ammunition. I can fetch it.”

“We are fine. After the battle.”

“Not before? Are you sure?”

“You will admire our mortars in action.”

“What are you going to do with mortars?”

“We will fight. We will destroy our enemy.”

“You can’t attack them in the city.”

“Don’t tell me how to fight!” screamed Girma. He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out more khat leaves, thrusting them into his mouth.

Li Han studied the laptop screen, looking at the coding he had retrieved from the UAV’s brain. With the proper connection — and power from the batteries — getting in was easy.

Relatively.

The control interface was written in a variation C++. If he’d been back in his lab in Shanghai, accessing the underlying code would be trivial; he’d have any number of tools and a large number of computers to help him. But here, all he had was a laptop with less memory than the UAV’s brain.

The interface was designed to be easily accessed. Li Han managed to get a full dump of the program despite the fact that he couldn’t get past the encrypted password, preventing access to the interface itself. He could see the logic of how it worked, though he couldn’t yet access the commands. Until he managed that, he wouldn’t be able to fully understand what he was looking at.

He might be able to replace the encrypted code section with his own revision, recompile and run the program. The problem was, he didn’t have the tools. His Toshiba laptop, upgraded with the latest processor and a trunkload of memory, was state of the art and could easily run a suite of debuggers and other tools. But he didn’t have them.

He could get the tools from any number of places online — Shanghai University would be his top choice, as he had a full set of broken passwords and knew the system intimately. But he assumed the Americans were tracking his satellite phone, so tethering the laptop to it would be as good as telling them where he was.

He noticed Amara staring at him.

“You’re interested in what I’m doing?” asked Li Han, amused.

Amara shrugged.

“Do you know how to work these?” Li Han pointed at the laptop.

“I can work a computer.”

At best, you can handle e-mail and Web surfing, thought Li Han. But the boy had potential. He could be trained.

At least to a degree.

“The UAV has a brain. I’m trying to tap into it,” said Li Han. “The program is written in a fairly common language. I think that’s only the interface. They encrypted part of the underlying assembly language, but it uses this chip.” He pointed at the encryption circuitry on the circuit board. “See, they were worried about someone breaking through the transmission, not physical security. So I can use what I know about the chip myself. I emulate it. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”

“Your program breaks the code.”

“Something like that,” said Li Han. Amara had missed a few steps, but that was the gist. “I need an Internet connection. I need to access some documents. Technical documents — I don’t remember how some of these things work.”

Lying slightly made the explanation simple.

“I don’t know if there are Internets here,” said Amara.

“If I had a sat phone, I could make my own connection,” said Li Han. “But it would have to be one that the Americans couldn’t trace to me. Or to you. You know how they are watching.”

There was a commotion upstairs. One of the brothers called down to Amara and told him that a small boy had run up to the house and was knocking furiously on the door.

Li Han went upstairs. When they let the boy in, he collapsed just across the threshold, tears streaming from his face as he unleashed a long paragraph of words.

“There has been fighting,” explained Amara. “The two groups.”

“That’s inconvenient.”

“People have been killed,” said Amara. “We should be ready to leave.”

“Where do you suggest we go?”

Amara didn’t answer.

“We stay here for now,” answered Li Han. “Ask the boy if he knows what a satellite phone is. Tell him I’ll pay for one — twice as much as I did for the wire.”

Chapter 28

Dan Todd thrust a glass into Jonathon Reid’s hand as soon as Reid walked into his private den in the White House residence.

“Taste it,” demanded Todd.

“What is it?”

“Bourbon. Taste it.”

Reid sniffed dubiously at the glass. The color was a very dark amber, and the liquid had the consistency of gear oil.

“What do you smell?” Todd asked.

“Cigarette smoke.”

“Ha!” Todd was a chain-smoker, and the room smelled of Marlboros. “Try it. It’s supposed to be a hundred and three years old.”

Reid took a very small sip from the glass.

“Well?” asked Todd.

“Hmmm,” said Reid.

“One hundred and three year old bourbon,” continued the President’s husband. “Allegedly.”

He laughed, then downed a shot.

“Smooth,” said Todd. “This is what you get when the governor of Kentucky is trying to curry favor with the President. Of course, what he doesn’t realize is that the President doesn’t like bourbon.”

“But her husband does.”

“True. But if there’s one person in the world who has no influence with the President, it’s her husband.” Todd took another sip. “Maybe it is a hundred years old. It’s certainly dark enough. But how would I really know?”

“You don’t,” said Reid.

“Absolutely — but then we take much on face value. So what do you need to see her about?”

“I’m sorry to use you like this.”

“Nonsense, Jonathon — you’re not sorry to use me at all.”

“It has to do with the Agency.”

“Well, I figured that.”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Absolutely not.” Todd laughed. “She’ll poke her head in around ten. Let’s see how much money I can take from you in head-to-head poker before then.”

They had a twenty-five cent per hand limit, but Reid had still lost over five dollars by the time the President came by to see what her husband was up to.

Dan excused himself when the President came in, claiming he was going to raid the kitchen.

“I stumbled on something you probably don’t know about,” Reid told the President as soon as they were alone. “It’s possible that you do. But one way or the other, I think you should.”

Reid briefed her quickly, hitting the main points: illegal assassination, secretly developed UAV, potentially uncontrollable artificial intelligence program.

If she knew about any of it, it didn’t show on her face.

“I’m not going to insult you, Jonathon, by asking if you’re sure of all this,” she said when he was done.

“I am sure of it, Chris.”

She nodded. “Who else knows?”

Reid assumed that she was in fact asking whether Breanna Stockard’s husband knew.

“Ms. Stockard is aware of most of what I’ve told you. She is in charge of the recovery. I don’t believe she’ll share any of the information with her husband.”

A faint smile came to the President’s lips.

“Zen and I are getting along fairly well these days, all things considered,” said Ms. Todd. “It’s not him I’m worried about.”

“Of course. As far as I can tell, the information has been very tightly controlled in-house. But I simply don’t know for sure. They’re not exactly sharing.”

“What’s the status of your operation to recover the plane?”

“We’ve traced it to a village, and we’re trying to get it back. We had one operation already, but unfortunately our information was incomplete and the UAV wasn’t there.”

“I see. Even when we get it back,” added the President, “there’s a much bigger problem here. Isn’t there?”

“Exactly. That’s why I wanted you to know.”

Chapter 29

The larceny of the local youth was astounding. A half hour after Amara told the boy he needed a satellite phone, he had three. None of them had the proper circuitry to be tethered to his laptop, but that wasn’t critical — Li Han simply removed their ID circuitry for use in his own. He was online within the hour.

He lost the connection with Shanghai some forty minutes later, but that was just as well — there was always the possibility of being detected if he remained on for too long. And the next set of operations could be done entirely with the laptop.

The battery was edging downward. The power was off and there was no indication when it would be on again. He’d need to get it recharged at one of the houses that used a generator.

Unless one of the children could steal one of those as well. No doubt they could.

Li Han moved his finger across the touch pad, then gave it a soft double tap.

And then, almost against his expectations if not his best hopes, the command screen for the UAV appeared.

Or at least what should have been the command screen appeared. It looked more like a database entry screen.

And half of it was filled with a photo of his face.

He leaned away, trying to make sense of the screen. What was this? The architecture of the program made it clear this should be the command module, and yet how could it be?

It was the command screen, if the logo at the top in thirty-six point Helvetica bold type was to be taken at face value.

How would this run a UAV? Li Han knew that the aircraft was flying itself when it came to simple flight commands, but he expected this section to contain an interface to a ground station.

The left side of the screen had location data at the top: a line with GPS coordinates that appeared to be in Africa, undoubtedly where he had been when the drone went down. Below that were the words SUBJECT CONFIRMED.

Then a blank space and the word: TERMINATE.

Below that: PROJECT ONGOING.

And at the bottom: STATUS: HOLDING.

All the words were in blue, except for STATUS: HOLDING, which was in red.

Li Han stared at the screen. He’d set up the program to run with his debugger. He was about to go back to the shell so he could get a peek at a different part when the words on the screen began blinking: STATUS: SEEKING.

The program was active in the laptop, or at least thought it was.

What the hell was going on?

Chapter 30

Gerard’s “fortress” consisted of a row of slum buildings behind a patchwork of round huts and small lots at the western end of the city. The buildings, most smaller than a one-car garage back in the States, were pushed together in a jumble behind an abandoned dump. It could be reached only on foot; Danny parked the Mercedes at the edge of the landfill and they hiked in through a maze of alleys.

Two men were sitting in the front room of the two-room shack, drinking some home-brewed concoction. Gerard shouted something at them and they leapt up, grabbed a pair of rifles from the floor and ran outside.

A piece of fabric separated the back room from the front. Gerard pushed it aside and led them into the room; there he introduced Nuri but not Danny to the five men sitting on the floor, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and talking. They were all members of the Meurtre Musique hierarchy. Gerard’s overview filled the four youngest with energy, and they immediately left to rally different members of the group. The fifth, well into his sixties, sat stoically, nodding as Gerard repeated what had happened with more detail.

Danny wanted to get Melissa and get the hell out of there, the sooner the better, but Nuri sat down and started a conversation in French. They talked for nearly a half hour, Danny standing by the curtained door, sliding his hand up and down the barrel of his assault rifle, one eye on the front door. Finally, Nuri rose, and despite the others’ protests, took his leave.

“What took so long?” asked Danny as they left the building.

“We’re being watched,” whispered Nuri. “Wait until we’re back in the car.”

They wended their way back out through the alleys. There were men with Kalashnikovs on the roofs. On the way in Danny had spotted a couple of kids playing and some women working in the yards; all were gone now.

“The older man had heard there were strangers in the village,” Nuri explained when they got to the car. “One was Asian. I asked him where he thought he might be. He gave me a few different possibilities. They’re on the other side of town.”

“You’re not suggesting we go there now, are you?” asked Danny.

“Why not? We’re not part of their war.”

“I’ll remember to say that when the bullets start flying.”

Li Han was examining the interface coding when Amara came trotting down the steps.

“Someone is coming,” he said breathlessly.

“Who?” demanded Li Han.

“A white man,” whispered Amara. “He’s speaking Arabic.”

“Ask what he wants. Then get rid of him.”

Li Han went up with him, crouching in the front room while Amara went to the door. The African shouted something; the man outside answered in Arabic.

“He says he is looking for a man who found a UAV,” said Amara. “He wants to make a deal.”

“Tell him you don’t know who it is.”

“He named a man from Meur-tse Meur-tskk.”

Li Han shook his head. “You don’t know who it is. Say nothing else. If he talks, don’t answer.”

The man outside seemed reluctant to leave. Li Han watched from the corner of the window as he finally walked away with his bodyguard to a Mercedes and drove away.

“Who was he?” Li Han demanded, rising.

“A gun runner or spy, I guess,” said Amara. “He had a foreign accent.”

“Obviously. He’s white.”

“He said he would make a very good deal if he could find the man who had the aircraft.”

“Did he speak English?”

“Not to me.”

“You should have asked,” said Li Han, though he hadn’t thought of it himself.

Chapter 31

A woman’s voice answered from behind the door of the second house. She knew nothing of an aircraft or a man from China.

“Can I come in and talk to you?” asked Nuri.

“You can talk to my husband when he comes home,” said the woman.

“When will that be?”

“I don’t know.”

Nuri asked a few more questions, then told the woman he would try back later. He backed away, reaching Danny in a few steps.

“What do you think?” asked Danny.

“Could go either way. I stuck a bug near the door stop. MY-PID will activate it once the satellite comes overhead.”

“I think it was the first house.”

“Maybe,” agreed Nuri. “But we still have two more to check. One thing that’s very unusual — ordinarily, people are extremely friendly to strangers. The shooting has everybody on edge. Very on edge.”

“So I see.” Danny nodded in the direction of two men with AK-47s standing in the shadows at the side of the house across the way.

The muscles in Nuri’s shoulders immediately tensed, and his throat tightened. But he’d been in situations like this dozens, even hundreds of times in Africa. He continued to walk toward the car, keeping an easy, almost lackadaisical pace.

“They’re just watchin’ us,” said Danny.

“Yeah. Just move nice and easy.”

Danny opened the driver’s side door but didn’t get in. Nuri went around and got in the car. He kept his eyes straight ahead, but took his pistol out from his waistband.

Danny eased into the seat, pulled the door closed and started the car.

“You have to make a U-turn,” said Nuri.

The Mercedes stuttered as it started out of the turn, then stalled.

“Shit,” muttered Danny.

He turned the car over — once, twice. It wasn’t starting.

“Don’t flood it,” whispered Nuri.

“No shit.”

“Maybe our friends will push us,” said Nuri.

The car caught. Danny put it into gear gently and they edged forward.

“Maybe our friends will push us?” mocked Danny after they turned the corner.

“I was making a joke.”

“It wasn’t very funny.”

“It was funny. A little.”

“Not even a little. Which way to the next house?”

Nuri consulted the map on MY-PID.

“About a quarter mile down here. Take a left. There should be a bunch of huts.”

There were. There were also three men with guns blocking the way.

“What do you think?” Danny asked, slowing to a stop in the middle of the intersection.

The men were standing about ten yards away. Each held a Belgian FN Minimi machine gun. They were relatively large guns, but the men were so big the weapons looked like scale models. The man in the middle had a bandolier of bullets around his neck and was dressed in generic fatigues similar to Danny’s. The other two wore the dusty, cream-colored clothes more common there.

“I’ll ask what’s going on,” said Nuri. “Stay in the car.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Danny.

“Just wait.”

Nuri pushed open the door and got out. His heart was pounding.

“Hello,” he said, starting in English. “I am looking for a Chinese man named Li Han.”

There was no reaction from any of the trio as he gave his spiel. He switched to Arabic but did no better.

“Are you with the Brothers?” Nuri asked finally.

“The Brothers are dirt,” said one of the men, using English. He fired off a few rounds to emphasize his point.

“Right,” said Nuri. “Can I get through?”

“You better leave, mister,” said the man who’d fired. “Now.”

Nuri thought it best to comply.

Chapter 32

Melissa finished taping the bandages on the old man’s arm and straightened. He turned his head toward her as she rose. The pupils in his eyes were large black disks, edged by the faintest gray. They met hers for a moment, drilling in with a wordless question.

Am I going to live?

“You’re going to be OK,” she said in Arabic.

The old man’s eyes held hers as she put her hand on his back and eased him to his feet. Melissa helped him from her corner of the examining room, gently pushing him past the table where Marie Bloom was working on another patient.

Bloom’s patient was a young boy who had caught shrapnel in his leg. He was much better off than the old man or any of the other patients they’d seen, but the pain on his face touched Melissa in a way none of the others had. She suddenly felt overwhelmed by sympathy for the people here, like a tree that had bent under the weight of heavy snow until finally it snapped.

“Who’s next?” she asked in English.

The aide who’d been helping triage and organize the patients shook her head. They were done.

For now.

Melissa went back to help Bloom get the boy down from the table. He winced, unable to put much weight on the leg.

“We’ll have to get one of the men to carry him home,” said Bloom.

“I’ll take him,” said Melissa. She dropped down to one knee, propping him up as he continued to test his leg. She guessed he was four or five. “Where’s his mother?”

“She was one of the dead,” said Bloom.

The boy’s shirt was splattered with blood, and Bloom had cut off the bottom of his pants leg to work on him. He wore sandals rather than shoes.

“One of the women I treated earlier is his aunt,” said Bloom. “I sent her home already. That’s where he should go.”

“It’s terrible,” said Melissa.

“Yes.” Bloom frowned at her.

“What’s wrong?” Melissa asked.

“Go ahead and take him home.”

“Where?”

Bloom said something to the boy in Nubian. They spoke for a few moments, getting directions to his house.

“He’ll show you where he lives,” Bloom told her finally. “He can’t speak English, or very much Arabic.”

“All right.”

“Be careful. It should be quiet for a while, but there’s sure to be a reprisal. They won’t try to kill you since you’re an outsider, but in the cross fire anything can happen.”

“I’ll be safe.”

“Here.” Bloom pulled a satellite phone from her pocket. “Call my number if you have a problem.”

“I’ll be OK.”

Bloom gave her a stern look.

“What’s your number?” she asked. “Let me try it and make sure it works.”

The boy couldn’t have weighed more than thirty pounds. Melissa took him in her arms, boosting him up against her shoulder as she started out. The clinic was at the top of a knoll; he lived in one of the round grass huts at the bottom. The boy jerked his arm forward, pointing with his whole hand, fingers spread wide to show her the way.

Small garden patches surrounded the huts; here and there a goat was tied to a post or wandered freely around the property. All the people, however, were hiding inside the structures. Melissa felt as if they were being watched but saw no one as she followed the boy’s directions, turning right along a rutted path, then left and left again. Finally his hand swerved to the right, and she walked through an opening in a low fence of shrubs, entering a dirt-strewn yard just big enough to house the wreckage of an ancient flatbed truck.

The vehicle’s tires had long ago rotted away. The metal body and frame were covered with red rust. There was a large hole in the center of the cab roof, and part of the front fender had disintegrated into flakes. Dirt was piled on the bed; a hodgepodge of weeds grew from it.

The hut was in better condition. Made of straw and mud, the thick fronds of straw on the roof stretched down gracefully in a circle over the body of the house, whose cementlike walls were smooth and seemingly impenetrable. A carpet hung in the doorway, shutting off the outside world.

“Hello!” shouted Melissa as she approached. “Hello!”

The carpet moved at the bottom. The head of a child about the age of the one she was carrying poked out from the side. The boy in her arms wiggled around, pushing to be freed. Melissa went down on one knee to release him, sure he wouldn’t be able to stand. But after a few tentative steps he managed to hop to the door of the hut, shouting to the people inside.

The carpet was pushed away by a woman about her age. A worn, worried look on her face, she stared at Melissa a moment, then beckoned her inside.

“I have to get back,” Melissa said. But the woman reached out and took her hand, nudging her forward with a forced smile. Even in extreme grief and danger, the local tradition of hospitality was still upheld.

The interior of the hut was practically bare. Four children sat at one side on woven mats, a pile of grass dolls in front of them. The boy Melissa had taken home already sat among them, moving the doll as if it were a plane or perhaps an angel, leaving for heaven.

The interior walls were covered with shallow cracks where the mud had dried ages ago. A series of lines came down the sides, raised designs that to Melissa looked like random squiggles and rays, though they were obviously a conscious design. There were no windows, but the roof’s circular rafters left an open space above the wall where air could circulate.

The woman who had invited her in scooped up a water bottle from the ground and offered it to her.

“Thank you, but I’m not thirsty,” she said.

The woman didn’t seem to understand. She said something unintelligible — Melissa only knew that the words were neither English nor Arabic — and pushed the water bottle toward her. Melissa took the tiniest sip possible from the water. When she handed it back, the woman refused — it was a present, gratitude for helping her nephew.

“Thank you,” Melissa told her. “Thank you.”

She nodded and backed out of the hut, trying to remember the turns she’d taken to get there.

“You were good with the patients,” said Bloom when she returned.

“Thank you.”

“But you’re not a nurse. Not with any experience here, at least.”

Two hours before, Melissa would have argued and worked hard to keep her cover. But whatever change she’d undergone had affected every part of her.

“I am trained as a nurse,” she told Bloom. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

“Why is it?”

“I’m looking for an Asian man. Chinese. His name is Li Han. He’s a murderer.”

“I don’t know him.”

“He came into the city a day ago.”

“I don’t know him.”

“One of your aides may. He has something that doesn’t belong to him, and I have to get it back.”

“Are you going to arrest him?”

Melissa shook her head.

“You’re going to kill him?” asked Bloom.

“If we can.”

“Was he responsible for this?”

“I don’t know,” said Melissa.

“There’s so much tragedy here. You’re just going to add to it.”

“No. Li Han has caused a lot of deaths. He helps people who want to murder others. We have to stop him. And we can.”

“That won’t end the violence here.”

“It’ll help.”

Bloom raised her right hand to her mouth, biting her ring finger as she considered what to do. For the first time, Melissa noticed she wore a narrow wedding ring.

“You remind me of myself,” said Bloom. “I was like you.”

“How’s that?”

“I worked for MI6.”

In fact, Bloom still did, though now informally. She’d quit the British Intelligence Service some years before, haunted by what she had seen in Africa, the suffering. She tried to join the Red Cross, then a group sponsored by the Anglican Church. For various reasons — very possibly her background as a spy — they wouldn’t take her. Persistent, she finally settled on a little known agency called Nurse for the Poor. It received a considerable amount of money from the British government, undoubtedly at MI6’s behest.

“The idea is to find terrorists before they become terrorists,” said Bloom.

“Do you know who Li Han is?” asked Melissa.

Bloom shook her head. She seemed to have aged a decade, perhaps more, in the few minutes they’d been speaking.

“I give the service reports from time to time, but they don’t tell me anything. I–I’m doing more by helping the people here.”

“Even people like Gerard.”

“Oh, he’s a loon.” Bloom smiled. Her British accent had suddenly become more pronounced. “But his group is better than the other, to be honest. They’re all nuts here, the leaders. But the people are sincere. Loving.”

Melissa nodded. She thought it odd that a spy, even a woman — especially a woman — would use the word “loving.”

But maybe that’s why Bloom was an ex-spy.

“I’ll help you,” Bloom told her. “But you must protect my people. These people.”

“All right,” Melissa said.

“Come.” Bloom rose. “Let’s talk to them.”

Chapter 33

Well before she became the country’s first female president, Christine Mary Todd had carefully studied the power of the presidency. Among the many conclusions she had reached was that much of this power consisted of imagery. The pomp and circumstance of the office were not just props, but weapons that could be yielded by a prudent President.

So was the President’s motorcade, especially when it pulled across a suburban lawn at five o’clock in the morning.

President Todd picked up the phone from the console as the limo came to a stop amid a swarm of black SUVs.

“Mr. Edmund, I hope you’re up,” she said when the head of the CIA answered his phone. “We’re going to meet this morning.”

“Uh—”

“Right now would be fine… Yes, thank you. Don’t worry about the coffee; I’ve brought my own.”

Todd put the phone down.

“David, are you ready?” she asked her chief of staff, David Greenwich, who was sitting in the front seat of the limo. Though generally an early riser, Greenwich gave a barely conscious “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Let’s go make Mr. Edmund’s day.”

Ms. Todd strode up the walk, heels clicking on the concrete. She wore pumps and a presidential skirt — knee length, a careful and distinguished drape. Her Secret Service detail buzzed around her; one or two of the agents may have had trouble keeping up.

Edmund’s wife opened the door. She was in her bathrobe.

“Nancy, good morning,” said the President.

“Herm is, uh — upstairs.”

“Very good. I noticed a new bed of daffodils outside,” added Ms. Todd as she walked into the hallway. “They’re really lovely. Don’t bother with me — I know the way.”

It had been some time since Todd had been in the house, but it was easy to find the way to the master bedroom — up the steps in the main hall, a slight turn to get to the front of the house, then a short walk across a very plush red carpet.

Red is such an ugly color for a carpet, the President thought as she walked to the bedroom door.

“Mr. Edmund — are you decent?”

“Uh — uh, Madam President,” stuttered Edmund from behind the door.

The President pointed to the door and nodded at one of her Secret Service escorts. He reached out and opened the door, filling the frame and entering quickly. Todd waited for a second agent to enter — out of discretion rather than fear that Edmund was waiting inside with a bomb.

Though he would surely wish he had been when she was through with him.

“I was just getting dressed,” said Edmund, who had pulled on a pair of trousers but was still wearing his pajama top. “What’s going on?”

“I want to know about the Raven project,” she told him. She went to the upholstered chair at the side of the room, pushed it around so it angled toward him, and sat. “Everything. Assassination, drone, and most of all, software.”

“I—”

“And when you are done, we’ll discuss your letter of resignation,” she added. “Coffee?”

Chapter 34

The aide offered to take Melissa to the house near the railroad tracks where she’d seen the armed strangers. Melissa glanced at Bloom. Bloom nodded.

“Let’s go,” said Melissa.

The aide’s name was Glat. She spoke only a little English, but they didn’t need many words to communicate. She led Melissa down the hill toward the main part of the town, then veered to the left, across the main road. They passed a small collection of cone-topped huts built so close to each other they looked like mushrooms, then hiked up a road lined by more prosperous houses, cement structures all recently built.

Yesterday, there had been a variety of sounds in the city, everything from the high-pitched whine of boda-boda motorcycle taxis to the shouts of children playing. Now it was dead silent.

Her guide slowed abruptly. Melissa put her arm on the woman’s shoulder.

“It’s all right,” she said. “If you’re scared, we can go back.”

The woman kept going, though her pace was barely faster than a small child’s. The road turned to the right and left the buildings behind. The railroad tracks were about fifty yards ahead.

Melissa had a pistol under her shirt, but she had no illusions of taking on more than one or two gunmen. Still, she kept walking, determined to at least figure out where the house was — to redeem herself, and her mission.

To impress Colonel Freah, too, though she didn’t dwell on that as they neared the house.

Intending to keep his appointment with the Russian despite the fighting, Li Han hid the computer and the UAV’s brain in the tunnel.

Upstairs, his young escorts seemed even edgier than normal. Shooting the tall one — whose body was buried somewhere outside — had made them fear him, but not to the degree that Li Han couldn’t worry about getting shot in the back himself. He watched them warily, even as he stepped outside.

He spotted the insect then, a large mosquito perched in the crevice of the rocks just in front of the door. His instinct was to swat at it with his hand, but as he pulled back to swing, he realized there was something odd about it. Not only did it seem slightly too big, but it was abnormally placid.

Was it a listening device?

Li Han walked past it. He’d scanned the building for bugs when he arrived, but not since then.

He turned and walked back into the building as if he’d forgotten something. He went downstairs to his tools, got out the detection device, then held his breath as he turned it on, preparing himself for the worst.

Nothing.

But of course there was nothing here. He swept it around slowly, like a priest offering a blessing.

Still nothing.

He walked through the house slowly, moving around the walls. He paused at the front door, reaching up and down the frame, even though it wasn’t strictly necessary to be that physically close. Still not getting anything, he moved outside and went to the mosquito.

Nothing. Nothing.

But it was clear to him now that the bug wasn’t a real insect. Maybe it only turned on when it heard human voices.

Li Han knelt behind it. He held the detector next to it, then spoke softly in Chinese. There was no indication that the bug was transmitting. He spoke louder; still nothing.

It must be dead. Perhaps it would be worth something to the Russian. Li Han stuffed it into his pocket.

Melissa grabbed Glat’s arm as she saw the shadow near the house thirty yards away.

It was a gun, swinging against the arm of the man as he walked toward a car.

Quickly, she pulled her guide to the side of the nearby building. The woman started to say something; paranoid, Melissa threw her hand over Glat’s mouth and hushed her.

“Ssssh,” she said, pointed to the ground, then nudged the young woman into a crouch. “Stay. Stay,” she repeated. “Do you understand? Stay?”

Glat nodded that she understood.

Easing to the side of the building, Melissa dropped to her knees, then spread out along the ground, peering out around the bottom of the building. A truck had pulled to the front of a building. Two men were in the front seat. She couldn’t see anything else. It was too dark to make out their faces.

The truck started and began moving in their direction. Melissa rose to get a better view. As the vehicle passed, she caught a glimpse of the man on the passenger side in the front.

Asian.

Mao Man.

Li Han.

Chapter 35

Fresh from his nap, Turk went down to check on the Tigershark.

“Pimped it out for you, Captain,” said Flash, who was pulling guard duty. “We were going to paint it pink, but we ran out of primer.”

“Pity.”

Turk reached up and put his palm on a panel just below the opening to the cockpit. The aircraft buzzed, then the forward area began to separate like a clamshell. The Tigershark did not have a canopy per se — all visuals were provided by a matrix of sensors embedded in the skin. This allowed for a much sleeker — and lower — cockpit area that was tucked into the body just in front of the wings.

“Looks a little like a sardine can,” said Flash.

“An aerodynamic sardine can,” said Turk, reaching into the cockpit and taking out the smart helmet. He put it on, made a link with the aircraft’s flight systems, then had the computer begin a preflight instrument check.

Someone knocked on the back of his helmet. Turk pulled it off. It was Boston.

“Sorry to knock on your hat, Captain.” Boston grinned. “Colonel Freah was wondering if you could talk to him for a minute.”

“Sure. Where is he?”

“Back in the Sudan. Use this.” Boston held up a sat phone. “I’ll get him for you.”

Turk put the helmet back on the seat of the Tigershark. The aircraft would perform its own self-check. Boston, meanwhile, made the connection.

“Colonel, you’re looking for me?” asked Turk, taking the phone.

“Satellite is still a few hours away,” said Danny. “We’re wondering if you can get back on station. You can leave as soon as it’s here.”

“Yeah, roger that,” said Turk. “Beats the hell out of hanging around here.”

Chapter 36

Milos Kimko eyed the driver nervously as they headed into the town. Two of Girma’s men were sitting behind him, guns ready; another pair were in the back. Traveling with them was only a hair less dangerous than traveling without them, Kimko thought. Girma was clearly becoming crazed, and his band would surely follow his lead.

The driver stopped the truck abruptly. They had reached the gas station where Li Han suggested they meet. Fortunately, it was at the southeastern end of the city, a good distance from the areas favored by both sides.

The street was empty, the station closed. Kimko debated whether to get out. The vehicle offered a modicum of protection, but it was easier to see in the dusk, making it a logical target.

Nervous energy got the better of him. He opened the door. The others hopped out with him. Instead of fanning out like proper soldiers or trained bodyguards, they clustered together, clumped near the car as he prowled near the gas pumps, looking around the shadows of the building for ambushers or lookouts.

A flask would be welcome now. A drink.

No. He would play this through, get what Li Han had to offer, and turn it into a ticket out of here.

Danny drove the Mercedes up the road leading out of town and glanced at his watch. The Tigershark wouldn’t be in range for another five minutes. At that point they could activate the bugs they had planted, and use the Whiplash system to communicate.

“Where the hell is Melissa?” grumbled Nuri. “She was supposed to meet us.”

“We’re a little early.”

“I don’t even trust that she saw Li Han.”

“Where’s the truck?”

“Still at the north end of the city.”

Danny pulled the car off the road. They expected Li Han to get on the highway at some point, then try and go south in the direction of the Brotherhood’s strongholds. The Whiplash team had loaded up in their Osprey and was en route. Once they were sure it was Li Han, Danny would order the team to prepare an ambush. They’d catch him on the road south.

If it was a false alarm, they’d go back to square one.

“Someone’s walking up the road,” said Nuri. “In our direction.”

“Melissa?”

“Can’t tell. Not enough resolution. They’re holding something — could be a gun. Pistol.”

“All right. Wait here,” said Danny, opening the car door.

“Where you going?”

“I’m going to make sure it’s not an ambush.”

Danny slipped the door closed, then trotted down the road to a small cluster of bushes. He turned around, looking at the car, then took a few steps past the brush. Whoever was coming would see the bushes and expect someone to be waiting there.

He trotted another twenty yards down the road, then went off it into the open field and lay flat. The person would be focused on the brush if not the car, and miss him completely.

His right knee complained as he folded himself onto the ground. Middle age was creeping up on him; the sins and strains of his youth were coming back to haunt him.

“Nuri?” he asked over the team radio.

“A hundred yards,” said Nuri. “I can’t tell if it’s her.”

“Call her phone,” said Danny.

Li Han stood at the edge of the roof fingering his binoculars, watching the Russian at the gas station about a half mile away. Kimko had four bodyguards with him, but they were back by his truck, useless if he was attacked from anywhere but the road. From what Li Han had seen, he’d made only the most precursory check of the area before stopping.

He was disappointed. He’d always heard that Russian intelligence agents were the best in the world. But obviously they didn’t send the best into Africa.

A vehicle drove past the gas station. Li Han watched as the bodyguards took cover behind their truck. They’d be dead meat if someone in the car fired a grenade.

No one did. The car sped past, continuing around to the eastern side of the city.

The Russian had stepped into the shadows as it approached. He moved out of them now, going toward the northern edge of the small property.

Li Han decided he would come from the south on foot.

“Go,” he told Amara. “Drive as I told you. I will meet you there.”

The Brother nodded.

Melissa nearly jumped when her phone rang. She took it from her pocket, telling herself to relax and move slowly. She crouched at the side of the road as she answered.

“Yes?” she whispered.

“Where are you?” asked Nuri.

“On the road where we were going to meet.”

“Wait.”

She could see shadows up the road ahead. She’d assumed it was Danny and Nuri’s car, but now she wasn’t sure.

“Danny is about ten yards on your left, on the east side of the road,” Nuri told her. “Put one hand up. When you do, he’s going to get up.”

This is a bit much, she thought, but she did it anyway, turning in Danny’s direction. A shadow emerged from the field.

“Hey,” yelled Danny.

“Hey.”

“The truck you spotted is parked near a building at the southern edge of town,” said Danny, running to her. “Come on. We should have a pretty good view of the proceedings in a few minutes.”

Kimko saw the pickup approaching and hissed at the gunmen back by the car to get ready. Just as he ducked down, he realized someone was walking up from behind the service building. He turned around and saw the outline of a man with a pistol pointing at him.

His heart fell toward the ground; his lungs clutched.

“It’s me,” barked Li Han.

It took several seconds before Kimko could breathe again. Those seconds were filled with an incredible thirst.

God, for some vodka.

“Why are you playing games?” asked Kimko in English.

“Why did you bring so many people with you?”

“Bodyguards. There’s fighting in the city. Two factions. Did you bring the photos?”

“I brought some things.”

“Show me.”

Kimko led him over to his truck. Meanwhile, the vehicle that had been approaching pulled into the gas station, stopping a few yards from the truck.

The guards are useless, thought Kimko. They were too used to intimidating people simply by flashing their weapons around. In a real fight, they’d be so much chum in the water.

Kimko got into the truck. Li Han got in on the other side, then took a cell phone from his pocket and turned it on.

“It has no SIM chip,” said the Asian. “It can’t be tracked. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried,” said Kimko.

“Here,” said Li Han, handing over the phone.

There was a small mélange of colors on the tiny screen. At first glance the image seemed to be nothing — indiscriminate shapes. Slowly, Kimko recognized a black triangle and a round sphere — the blurry outline of an aircraft.

He paged to the next image, and then the next. These were sharper. The object was definitely an aircraft, but it looked like no UAV he’d ever seen. Assuming it was a UAV, it would certainly be of interest back home.

Assuming.

“This looks like a model,” said Kimko harshly. “A prop for a movie.”

“It’s not.”

“How do I know?” Kimko started to hand the phone back.

“You can keep that,” said Li Han. “Show it to your experts. Here. This is from the aircraft, the interior of the wing. Notice that it has writing.”

He took a thin, long piece of metal from his pocket. Only a little larger than a fountain pen, it looked like a miniature shock absorber. It had a series of tiny numbers and letters stenciled on the bottom.

“It is an actuator,” said Li Han. “It moved a piece of the wing that acted as a flap. The material is still attached. You can see it’s a metallized glass. Very rare.”

Kimko turned it over in his hand.

“How do I know this came from the aircraft?”

Li Han reached for the phone. He paged back through the images, stopping on a dark rectangular blur.

“It is the item on the right,” said Li Han, handing the cell phone back. “Do you see?”

Kimko really didn’t see, but others would. Even if the Chinaman was a fraud, this whole enterprise was certainly worth talking to Moscow about. It was definitely a ticket out of Africa.

But if he was a fraud, it could backfire.

“One million euros,” said Li Han.

Kimko chuckled. “A million euros? For a broken piece of metal?”

Li Han didn’t respond.

“I don’t think this is worth a million euros,” said Kimko. “A million euros would not be appropriate.”

Kimko started to hand the phone back. Li Han wouldn’t take it.

If it were a UAV, and if Moscow didn’t know anything about it, then certainly it would be worth a million euros.

Maybe, maybe not. The best thing to do would be to let someone else make the call. In that case, if it were a fraud, then there would be no blame on him.

“I think one million euros is too much,” said Kimko. He sighed, as if making a deep concession. “But if perhaps I could have one of my people inspect it, then we could negotiate seriously. People who know about these things,” added Kimko. “I don’t. I’m not an expert.”

“No one sees it until I’m paid.”

“Well that’s impossible, then. This could all be a fraud.” Kimko started to reach for the door handle, then remembered this was his truck — he shouldn’t be the one to leave. They sat for a few moments in silence.

“Maybe an inspection could be arranged,” said Li Han finally. “If you made a down payment.”

Kimko snorted. “Impossible.”

“I will give you something else. You’ll pay for that.”

Kimko made a face. Now he knew the man was a con artist. Whether it was his truck or not, he was getting out. He reached for the door.

“Here is a CIA bug,” said Li Han, reaching into his pocket.

Once more Kimko’s lungs seized. Li Han was worse than a con man — he was a plant, an agent.

“It’s inactive,” said Li Han, opening his palm. A small insect was inside. “Take it and I’ll show you.”

Unsure what else to do, Kimko reached for the insect. He picked it up gingerly. It felt real.

Men would be shooting at them any moment, he was sure. This was all a setup.

Li Han reached into his pocket again. He took out a small radiolike device and flipped it on.

“See?” said Li Han. “No radio signal. You see my needle. The bug doesn’t work, but you can examine it and see how they do it.”

“I’m sure we have millions of these,” said Kimko.

“One thousand euros. Now.”

“We have many of these,” said Kimko. He didn’t trust Li Han’s detector, and in fact wasn’t even sure the bug was a listening device. It looked more like a plastic model, a gag toy. He started to give it back.

“A thousand euros as a down payment.” Li Han pushed his hand away gently. “The device as a token of my sincerity.”

“I will give you five hundred euros right now,” said Kimko, deciding now it was the only way to get rid of him.

Li Han folded his arms and looked down at the floor of the truck. Kimko wondered if he should go higher. No, he decided — he shouldn’t have made an offer at all.

“Five hundred will do for now,” said Li Han. “There is a three-story building near the railroad tracks that once belonged to the stationmaster. You will meet me there at dusk tomorrow if you intend to purchase the aircraft. It won’t be there,” added Li Han, “so you needn’t try any tricks. Come alone. I will take you to it, and you will transfer the money to an account. Once the transaction is complete, we can all be on our way. Come alone. Alone.”

“Understood,” said Kimko.

“They’re leaving,” said Nuri, watching the video feed on the MY-PID slate. It was coming directly from the Global Hawk; the Tigershark was still a few minutes away, and MY-PID itself still wasn’t online. “The car with Li Han seems to be going back to the house,” said Nuri. “If it does, then we should follow the second truck, see where it goes.”

“I want Mao Man,” said Melissa, leaning forward in the backseat.

“We’ll get him,” said Nuri. “Relax.”

Nuri zoomed the screen out as the vehicles continued to drive. He couldn’t watch both for very much longer.

“Li Han has to take priority,” insisted Melissa.

“He’s your problem,” said Nuri. “We’re here for the UAV. Danny, we have to choose. I say we go with the truck. We can relocate Li Han easily.”

“You could say the same about the truck,” answered Melissa.

“Nuri’s calling the shots on the surveillance,” said Danny. He put the Mercedes into gear. “Which way am I heading?”

As soon as Li Han was out of sight, Kimko told the driver to get on the road and go south. He pulled his ruck from the floor of the truck and reached inside, taking out a small fabric pencil case. He unfolded a metallic instrument from inside a small cocoon of bubble wrap, pushed its two halves together and turned. An LED at the end blinked red twice, then turned green. This was a bug detector, simpler in operation than Li Han’s, though more sophisticated, or so Kimko thought. It detected all manner of radiation; if the mosquito was a listening device, it would find out.

The light stayed green, even when he put the other end of the stick against it. He began to speak.

“I wonder if this is really a listening device,” he said in Russian. “I doubt it. He has taken my euros and I will never see him again.”

The light remained green.

Probably it was phony. But then, so was the money he had handed over.

Kimko replaced the detector carefully back in its little nest. He took his satellite phone from the ruck and tapped the numbers; it was time to talk to Moscow.

Turk eased off the throttle as the Tigershark reached the ellipse marked out on his helmet display’s sitrep map. The map gave the pilot a God’s eye view of the world, with his target area in the center screen; he switched to the more traditional American view, showing the plane in the center, then keyed his mike to talk to Danny.

“Tigershark to Whiplash Ground — Colonel, I’m on station. You should have an affirmative hookup.”

“Roger that, Tigershark. Ground acknowledges. Starting the handshake.”

Turk smirked at the terminology. Handshake. All the damn radios did was squawk at each other.

Having five hundred euros in his hand made Li Han feel almost insanely giddy. It was foolish and stupid — he had far larger sums than that in any number of his accounts, and several thousand in American dollars stuffed into his boots. Yet he couldn’t help the intoxication. He’d been raised in a dirt-poor village in northwestern China; when he was growing up, the family pig ate better than he did. All the years since had done nothing to erase the memories of abject poverty and worthlessness, and only magnified the importance of money. Of cash. Of bills that passed smoothly between your fingers.

He folded them carefully, then put them in his pocket. Back to the problem at hand.

“Why did the program execute once it was in the laptop?” Li Han said aloud. He spoke in his native Chinese, trying to work out his problem with an invisible colleague. “And what does it think it’s doing? Is it trying to go after me? I wonder what sort of intelligence it has. Because clearly it has intelligence.”

“What are you saying?” asked Amara in English.

“Something you wouldn’t understand,” snapped Li Han in Chinese.

The young man didn’t understand what he said, but the harsh tone came through, and his face turned to a frown. Li Han felt a twinge of guilt — Amara wasn’t a bad kid. He should be kinder to him, especially since he thought he would be useful.

“I am exploring a problem,” Li Han said in English, trying to make his voice kinder. “The aircraft’s brain is a computer. When it interfaced with my computer, it acted as if it were alive. It started to operate. Do you know what that means?”

“The program began to work on its own.”

“Exactly. Which is not something it should do.”

He isn’t completely ignorant, Li Han thought. He might be taught; he could be useful.

“I don’t entirely understand it yet,” continued Li Han. “I think it is some sort of control unit that is plugged into the brain and then programmed. But the programming is very involved. My face and a file of information about me was there.”

“Why?”

“Good question. I’m not sure. It is clear I was its target. These weren’t surveillance images. So was the aircraft programmed to watch me? I think so. How did they do it? How is this connected to the rest of the software, the part I haven’t seen? I’m not sure. That is what I am pondering.”

“Why is all this useful?”

Li Han couldn’t help but smirk. Amara was not stupid, but there were clear limits.

“Let’s say we want to watch someone,” he explained. “Let’s say we want to target the President of the United States for surveillance. If we gave the computer all of the information, could it do it? That is my question — because the information about me is in the command deck, the portion of the program that is supplying controls. Why would it be there otherwise? I don’t know,” added Li Han. “We must do more work.”

“You are going to sell it to the Russian.”

“Not that part,” said Li Han. “Not the brain. The brain is self-contained.”

Li Han explained how he had pulled it from the aircraft.

“I believe it could work in another aircraft,” he added. “I’m not entirely sure. I need to experiment more.”

They took a left turn off the main highway moving west, away from the city.

“Where are you going?” Li Han asked.

“You told me you wanted a new place.”

“True,” said Li Han.

Suddenly, a host of suspicions fell on him. Paranoia surged back. Where was Amara taking him?

Li Han put his hand down casually, letting it rest on his holster.

They drove about two miles, climbing up a low hill. Li Han’s suspicions grew, then eased. If Amara had wanted to kill him, any place would do. They had already passed plenty of abandoned fields.

“It’s just ahead,” said Amara. “Twill will be there. If he waves, then we must go on by. You should duck then,” he added. “It will be a signal that he is being watched.”

“Why so far away?” asked Li Han.

“We expect fighting in the city. We don’t need to be caught.”

Li Han stared out the window. It was reasonable, but he wasn’t sure — it still might be a trick.

Too elaborate for Amara. But he was being more assertive than before — far more assertive.

There was a small building near the road on the left. Twill, the thin man with the close-cropped hair, stepped out from the shadow.

He didn’t wave.

“There he is,” said Li Han.

Amara slowed, then pulled off the side of the road, stopping just in front of Twill. Li Han got out. There were two pickups parked near the building. Even in the dark it looked like a good burst of wind would knock it down.

“This isn’t much of a building,” he said, starting toward it.

“Too bad if you don’t like it,” said Amara, suddenly next to him.

Li Han, surprised by the sharp tone, started to turn.

Amara’s first bullet caught him in the side of the head. By the time the second struck his forehead, he was already dead.