“Sounds right.”

“And then it gets messy, the hostages get killed. What happens next?”

Shafer saw where Wells was headed. “The public pressure, we’d have to invade. Teach them a lesson.”

“Because from what I saw today, these guys, they’re young, but they’re real soldiers—”

“You took out four by yourself.”

“It was close. I’m not saying they could stop a commando team for long. But long enough to kill the hostages. Wasn’t there something like that in Nigeria?”

“Last year. The British sent in a team to rescue two hostages. They didn’t get there in time.”

“Let me chase this, Ellis.”

“I have to tell Duto what you found. You want this kid Wilfred choppered out, he’s going to insist on knowing what happened. And you know I’m right about that body. It needs to come home. Not fair to the family.”

“Give me the night. One night.”

“Best I can do, if the delay with the numbers from Thompson’s phone is my guide, NSA will need at least twenty-four hours to get anything on the Somali mobile numbers. So I’ll call over on those, and I’ll tell Duto what you found. But I forgot to ask you exactly where the camp is. Oops. He’ll make me call you back, but I can’t make you answer—”

“Thank you, Ellis.”

“Not finished. By the time Duto wakes up tomorrow, I won’t be able to put him off any longer. And he wakes up early. Which means within twenty hours, give or take, early afternoon tomorrow your time, dawn here, we’ll have a team on the way to the camp to pick up what’s left of Scott Thompson. And the families are going to know. After that, you better figure things will happen fast. Not to mention whatever James Thompson tells the Kenyan police.”

A long sigh from the other side of the world. “I get it. Can I go now?”

After all he’d done, Wells still acted every so often like the high school football star he’d once been. The coolest kid in town. Shafer relished those offhand moments. He hoped they revealed that Wells’s sunny Montana boyhood hadn’t entirely fled his soul.

“Try not to get in too much trouble.”

“Call me if NSA comes through.” Click.

Shafer returned his attention to the bowl on his desk. Unfortunately, the life expectancy of Frosted Flakes was measured in minutes. They sagged in the Lactaid like an overage starlet’s arms. Even so, Shafer shoveled them into his mouth, hoping the sugar rush would give him a kick start as he imagined how to spin this call to Duto.

He’d just finished when the phone on his desk trilled. This time the caller ID showed Duto’s office.

“I saw the press conference. You were right.”

“Not why I’m calling. Can you come up? There’s something you need to see.”

Duto’s personal assistant, a bright-eyed thirty-something who would surely join Duto in his quest for the Senate, led Shafer into the director’s giant seventh-floor office. Shafer had been introduced to the assistant at least twice but refused to remember his name. Duto raised a single finger, the universal Give me a minute sign, and went back to pecking at his keyboard.

Over the years, Duto’s office had filled with the gifts that men like him received for the work of their subordinates. The items ranged from kitschy to extraordinary. Tucked on a bookshelf, on a cream-colored card an eighth-inch thick, a personal note from Prince William. In tightly scrawled blue ink, the prince elliptically thanked Duto for disrupting a terrorist plot against Kate Middleton on a trip the princess had taken to Turkey. Hanging on the room’s far wall, a fifteenth-century Katana samurai sword, three feet of sleek and vicious steel. The sword arrived after the agency intercepted four North Korean operatives plotting to bomb Tokyo’s subways. On Duto’s desk, the depth gauge from a miniature submarine that a Mexican drug gang had used to move tons of cocaine. The Drug Enforcement Administration offered up the gauge to commemorate the agency’s help in disrupting the cartel.

The sheer number of tokens in the office testified both to Duto’s longevity as director and the CIA’s reach. The agency went wherever the United States had interests, and the United States had interests everywhere. Even eastern Kenya. Shafer wondered what trinket Duto would receive if the agency rescued the hostages. Probably nothing. He’d settle for a Senate seat.

Shafer grabbed the Katana off the wall. The sword’s blade was narrow and angled and polished so closely that it seemed to glow. Shafer took a practice swipe. Duto ignored him and kept typing. The assistant raised a hand.

“I don’t think you should be doing that.”

“Avast, Handy Smurf—”

“Handy Smurf?”

“Out!” Shafer sliced at him. The blade nearly sliced off the tip of the assistant’s tie. He fled. Shafer raised the Katana high in victory.

Duto stopped typing. “Unnecessary.”

“I get bored, I act out.”

“Put it back before you hurt yourself.”

Shafer sat, resting the blade on his lap. “Think they’ll let you keep it?”

“Sadly, no. I didn’t know when I got it, but it came straight out of the Tokyo Museum. Been appraised at six hundred thousand.”

“A little over the gift limit.”

Duto turned his laptop around so Shafer could see the screen. “Recognize her?”

The woman’s face filled nearly the entire screen, with slivers of a mud wall visible behind her. She had circles under her eyes and a scared puckered mouth. But she was still beautiful. Still Gwen Murphy.

“This was emailed to Brandon Murphy’s personal account six hours ago.” Duto pulled up two more photos, Hailey and Owen. “These two went to the Barnes and Broder families.”

“Not Scott Thompson’s parents?” Shafer said. Though he knew that Thompson’s parents hadn’t gotten a photo and never would. A half-eaten corpse would be tough to ransom.

“Nothing yet. They’re freaking out, which is understandable.”

“Do we know where they came from?”

“Nairobi. NSA has tracked the IP address to a few square blocks of downtown. They claim they’ll have an exact location in the next two hours. But we’re all assuming it’s a public space, an Internet cafe or unlocked hotspot. They’ll look for surveillance, but Nairobi’s not DC. Very few cameras, even downtown.”

“Have we told the Kenyans?”

“Not yet. The feeling is this thing’s too hot already. You can imagine, the parents went crazy when they got these. The FBI is trying to talk them down, asking them to stay calm, not go public. The families emailed back, asked for proof of life. Nobody’s heard back yet, but we’re assuming the photos are real. Our experts say they look real.”

“They look real to me. Any guesses on location?”

“The background doesn’t give much to go on. The images are poor quality, like they were shot on a cell phone and then sent to another phone.”

“Can NSA—”

“Trace the number and location of the first phone? They say it’s unlikely. There’s some specific technical reason, data compression and whatnot, but don’t ask me to explain.”

“Was there a ransom demand? A note, anything?”

“Just the pictures. Put that big brain to work and tell me what it means, Ellis. Why now? Is all the noise we’re making about an invasion getting to them?”

Shafer busied himself putting the sword back on the wall, buying a few seconds before he had to answer Duto. He didn’t see any alternative to the truth, didn’t see how lying would help.

“Wells found a camp where they were being held, but they’re gone now. He thinks that James Thompson set them up and that last night some Somali bandits found them and hit the camp and took them.”

Duto grabbed the submarine depth gauge, a piece of steel the size of a soup bowl, and in one quick motion

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