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said, “This wasn’t supposed to happen, was it?”

He had closed his eyes and tried not to answer.

She had whispered, “It can’t happen again, can it? Until this business is over.”

The memories were difficult, as she had warned him they would be. But they were also a way to pass time now, a trick that he sometimes used to stay alert—and a diversion, a safe harbor from thoughts of what had happened in Kampala. The more recent memories. Of Paul Bahdru. Of what had gone wrong.

He sat at the table, listening to the sounds outside, his right hand holding the weapon. Waiting.

“We shouldn’t have done this,” she had said, sitting up, turned away from him.

“What’s the point of saying it, though? Or thinking it?”

He leaned on an elbow, watching her.

“Because it’s a distraction. We can’t afford distractions. Also, it’ll hurt when I have to go.” She looked at him, her sober eyes glinting with a faint glow of the streetlight. “And you know I don’t have any choice. I’ll have to go.”

“But you’ll come back.” He turned away. “Or I’ll visit you.”

“You know that?”

“Yes,” he said. “We can make whatever reality we want.”

“Can we?”

“Of course.”

But he knew now that his words would never come to pass—not as he had intended. Because Frederick Collins was going to die today. There was no alternative. After “this business” was finished.

This business.

He remembered Paul Bahdru’s voice, then, the pleasant lilting pitch, a musical sound as distinctive as a fingerprint. A sound that he would never hear again. This feels like a calling now, Charles. It’s all passed along, to witnesses. They think if there are no witnesses, then no one can prove anything. Telling him things. Trusting him. If something goes wrong, you do what I would have done.

A voice in his head. Words that only two people ever heard. That was the arrangement. Maybe they had been wrong about that, too.

Soon, he would have answers. They were coming to him. Right here to this room.

“Trains,” Paul had told him, speaking in Swahili. “There is a transportation infrastructure, connected with a copper mine. Very simple but effective. I don’t know where it is, but I’m told it’s not far from a river ‘named for a monkey,’ and the river is the shape of a backwards S.”

“But you said there is a trick.”

“Yes. The trick is they do not bring in outsiders. Who might see things they shouldn’t see.”

“The work is all done by local people.”

“Yes. During the first stages, they are hired for several days at a time. It is the only work that is available, so they take it, naturally. Some of them are housed in employee barracks. The men work long hours for a few days. Then they are transferred, bused to another site. Sometimes they end up going to three or four sites. They are treated well. Or indifferently. But they must work.”

“For how long?”

“A week or two, at most.”

“Then they get sick.”

“Yes. There are two parts. None of them knows about the second part. That’s the trick. They’re part of a mechanism.”

“And the mechanism is controlled by this man.”

“That’s what I am told. A man called Isaak Priest.”

It was well after midnight when Charles Mallory finally heard the footsteps that he had been waiting for. Purposefully quiet. A soft sound of rubber on asphalt that to untrained ears might have seemed to be the wind fluttering an awning or an animal’s steps. Except that it came and went with a regularity that he recognized: sneaker soles moving through the alley. Step step, step step. Stopping. Louder, closer, passing right by the open front window, but across the alley. The footsteps slowing briefly. Then moving faster again, becoming quieter as they reached the next block. Then nothing.

Charlie felt his senses sharpen, acclimating now to this threat. He listened more acutely, gripping the butt of the Glock, shutting out everything else—the distant voices, the occasional sound of car engines on the Promenade —picturing the man walking in shadows to the next block, turning south. Circling the building, making certain there was no other entrance.

It was four and a half minutes later when he heard the sound again. Rubber soles on asphalt, coming back through the alley shadows toward the carpenter shop. From the same direction as before.

Charlie was outside now. He had hurried across the alley and was standing in a sunken entranceway, opposite the shop. Picturing what the predator would have seen if he had looked through the window with binoculars or a gun sight: a man seated beneath a blanket in an easy chair against the far wall. The man would appear to be wearing headphones and a ball cap. Leaning forward. The only light in the room was from the dial of an old stereo on an end table by the chair.

He knew that there were only a handful of people capable of tracing him so quickly, of accessing the satellite technology that could locate and identify him. He would know in three or four minutes if his guess was correct.

The man would have to decide; or more likely, he already had. There was only one entrance and only one window. The man knew that now. He had already considered his options, assessed the risks.

All but one of the other alley windows were dark. The exception was a second-story loft four doors down, where someone was playing heavy-metal music.

Charlie pressed into the wall, as the shadow of the figure moved closer. Listening to the barely audible scrape of the rubber. Step, step. Stop. Step, step. As the man came closer, Charlie began to recognize him. A small, wiry man, wearing a dark jacket, black pants, a knit cap. A man who went by the name Albert Hahn, although his real name was Ahmed Hassan. He was one of the “cousins,” an operative Charles Mallory had learned about some seventeen months ago. A “specialist.” Hired as a consultant for a CIA/NSA operation called Tribal Eyes, a surveillance project aimed at finding terrorists in the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Charles Mallory watched him.

The man had several options, but only one good one. He could try to enter the building first and do his work cleanly inside. But that would be risky; Mallory could be waiting for him. For the same reason, he also probably wouldn’t chance walking or standing in front of the window. A safer scenario would be to wait until his target came out, but Mallory suspected that they wanted this done quickly. This evening. Using an explosive or incendiary device lacked precision; more importantly, it wasn’t Ahmed Hassan’s M.O. More likely, he would find a spot in the deepest shadows along the west side of the alley, where he could have a clear shot at the figure in the chair through the window.

Maybe afterward he would retrieve a “souvenir” and send it to Charlie’s liaison in Washington. Maybe. First, though, he would stand at a spot in the alley and home in on the figure through a telescopic rifle sight.

Charlie had already determined where that spot would be: a recess along the west wall of the alley at a diagonal, at approximately a fifty-degree angle to the shop. He was standing four feet from it now, waiting.

The man slid sideways along the wall of the alley, nearer to where Charlie stood. He was carrying something flush against the right side of his body. Step, step.

He was less than ten feet away when he suddenly stopped and turned, looking behind him. Charles Mallory held his breath. A small shadow moved along the base of a building. A cat, perhaps.

The man resumed his motion—not quite walking—along the shuttered back of a warehouse, taking short, deliberate sideways steps. Approaching the spot. Mallory knew what he was feeling. Understood how focused he was on accomplishing the thing he had come here to do. The man stopped tight against the wall, sized up the arrangement. He lifted a rifle. He was close enough now that Charlie could smell the damp wool of his jacket and see the details of his gun—an M24 military rifle, the kind used by American Army snipers in Iraq and