Rome

Tradition holds that Rome was built on seven hills. The Janiculum, higher than any of them, is the eighth. In ancient times, it was given over to the cult of Janus—the god of exits and entrances; the god of two faces. Todd Belknap would need them both. On the third floor of the villa on the via Angelo Masina, a looming neoclassical structure with facades of yellow ochre stucco and white pilasters, the operative checked his watch for the fifth time in ten minutes.

This is what you do, he silently assured himself.

But this was not the way he had planned it. It was not the way anybody had planned it. He moved quietly through the hallway—a surface, blessedly, of solidly mortared tile: no squeaking floorboards. The renovation had removed the rotting woodwork of a previous renovation…and how many such renovations had there been since the original construction in the eighteenth century? The villa, built upon an aqueduct of Trajan, had an illustrious past. In 1848, in the great days of the Risorgimento, Garibaldi used it as his headquarters; the basement, supposedly, had been enlarged to serve as a backup armory. These days, the villa once again had a military purpose, if more nefarious in nature. It belonged to Khalil Ansari, a Yemeni arms dealer. Not just any arms dealer, either. As shadowy as his operations were, Cons Ops analysts had established that he was a significant supplier not only in South Asia but also in Africa. What set him apart was how elusive he was: how carefully he had concealed his movements, his location, his identity. Until now.

Ansari, it was known, was on the verge of a major arms deal, one that would involve a series of simultaneous exchanges among several parties. It was, from all indications, a deal of enormous complexity and enormous magnitude—something that perhaps only Khalil Ansari would be capable of orchestrating. According to humint sources, the final settlement would be arranged this very evening, via an intercontinental conference call of some sort. Yet the use of sterile lines and sophisticated encryption ruled out the standard sigint solutions. Belknap’s discovery had changed all that. If Belknap was able to plant a bug in the right place, Consular Operations would gain invaluable information about how the Ansari network functioned. With any luck, the rogue network could be exposed—and a multibillion-dollar merchant of death brought to justice.

That was the good news. The bad news was that Belknap had identified Ansari only hours before. No time for a coordinated operation. No time for backup, for HQ-approved plans. He had no other choice but to go in alone. The opportunity could not be allowed to pass.

The photo ID clipped to his knitted cotton shirt read “Sam Norton,” and identified him as one of the site architects involved in the latest round of renovations, an employee of the British architectural firm in charge of the project. It got him in the house, but it could not explain what he was doing on the third floor. In particular, it could not justify his presence in Ansari’s personal study. If he were found here, it was over. Likewise if anyone were to discover the guard he had knocked out with a tiny Carfentanil dart and stowed in a cleaning closet down the hall. The operation would be terminated. He would be terminated.

Was someone about to enter the room? Not good. Not good at all. It was an appalling irony. He had spent the better part of a year trying to locate Khalil Ansari. Now the danger was that Khalil Ansari would locate him.

Dammit! Ansari was not supposed to be back so soon. Belknap looked helplessly around the Moroccan-tiled room. There were few places for concealment, aside from a closet with a slatted door, at the corner near the desk. Far from ideal. Belknap stepped quickly inside and hunched down, squatting on the floor. The closet was unpleasantly warm, filled with racks of humming computer routers. He counted the seconds. The miniaturized motion detector he had placed in the hall outside could have been set off by a roach or rodent. Surely it was a false alarm.

The Yemeni eased his avoirdupois upon the leather chair at his desk, cracked his knuckles, and typed in a rapid sequence—a password, no doubt. As Belknap continued to squat uncomfortably in the recessed bay, his knees started to protest. Now in his mid-forties, he had lost the limberness of his youth. But he could not afford to move; the sound of a cracking joint would instantly betray his presence. If only he had arrived a few minutes earlier, or Ansari a few minutes later: Then he would have had the keystroke logger in place, electronically capturing the pulses emitted by the keyboard. His first priority was just to stay alive, to endure the debacle. There would be time for postmortems and after-action reports later.

The arms dealer shifted in his seat and intently keyed in another sequence of instructions. Messages were being e-mailed. Ansari drummed his fingers and pressed a button inset in a rosewood-veneered box. Perhaps he was setting up the conference call via Internet telephony. Perhaps the entire conference would be conducted in encrypted text, chatroom style. There was so much that could have been learned, if only…It was too late for regrets, but they churned through Belknap all the same.

He remembered his exhilaration, not long before, when he had at last tracked his quarry to earth. It was Jared Rinehart who had first dubbed him “the Hound,” and the well-earned honorific had stuck. Though Belknap did have a peculiar gift for finding people who wished to stay lost, much of his success—he could never persuade people of it, but he knew it to be true—was a matter of sheer perseverance.

A knock at the door, and a young woman—dark hair, olive skin, but Italian rather than Levantine, Belknap judged—let herself in. The severity of her black-and-white uniform did not disguise the young woman’s beauty: the budding sensuality of someone who had only recently come into her full physical endowments. She was carrying a silver tray with a pot and a small cup. Mint tea, Belknap knew at once from the aroma. The merchant of death had sent for it. Yemenis seldom did business without a carafe of mint tea, or shay, as they called it, and Khalil, on the verge of a concluding a vast chain of trades, proved true to form. Belknap almost smiled.

More clicking from the Yemeni’s keyboard. Ansari picked up a cellular telephone—undoubtedly a model with chip-enabled auto-encryption—and spoke in Arabic. His voice was at once unhurried and unmistakably urgent. A long pause, and then Ansari switched into German.

How much longer?

Ansari raised the small teacup to his mouth and took a savoring sip. He spoke again into the phone, this time in French. Yes, yes, all was on schedule. Words of reassurance, but lacking all specificity. They knew what they were talking about; they did not have to spell it out. The black marketeer clicked off the telephone and typed another message. He took another sip of the tea, placed the cup down, and—it happened suddenly, like a small seizure—he shivered briefly. Moments later, he sprawled forward, his head falling on his keyboard, motionless, evidently insensate. Dead?

It couldn’t be.

It was.

The door to the study opened again; the servant girl. Would she panic, raise the alarm, when she made the shocking discovery?

In fact, she showed no surprise of any sort. She moved briskly, furtively, stepping over to the man and placing her fingers at his throat, feeling for a pulse, obviously detecting none. Then she pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves and repositioned him in his chair so that he seemed to be leaning back, at rest. Next she moved to the keyboard, typed a hurried message of her own. Finally, she removed the teacup and carafe, placing them on her tray, and left the study. Removing, thus, the instruments of his death.

Khalil Ansari, one of the most powerful arms dealers in the world, had just been murdered—in front of his eyes. Poisoned, in fact. By…a young Italian servant girl.

With no little discomfort, Belknap rose from his squatting position, his mind buzzing like a radio tuned midway between two stations. It wasn’t supposed to go down this way.

Then he heard a quiet electronic hooting sound. It came from an intercom on Ansari’s desk.

And when Ansari did not respond?

Dammit to hell! Soon the alarm really would be raised. Once that happened, there would be no way out.

Beirut, Lebanon

“The Paris of the Middle East,” the city had once been called, as Saigon was once heralded as the Paris of Indochina and conflict-roiled Abidjan the Paris of Africa: the designation more of a curse than an honor. Those who remained there had proven themselves survivors of one sort or another.

The bulletproof Daimler limousine smoothly negotiated the mid-evening traffic on rue Maarad in the troubled city’s downtown, known as Beirut Central District. Streetlights cast a hard glow on the dusty streets, as if laying down a glaze. The Daimler navigated through the Place de l’Etoile—once hopefully modeled on the Parisian center, now merely a traffic-snarled roundabout—and glided along streets where restored buildings from the Ottoman and French Mandate eras stood alongside modern office blocks. The building before which the limousine finally stopped was perfectly unremarkable: a dun-colored seven-story structure, like half a dozen in the neighborhood. To an experienced eye, the wide external frames around the limousine’s windows gave away the fact that it was armored, but there was nothing remarkable about that, either. This was, after all, Beirut. Nor was there anything unusual about the sight of the two heavyset bodyguards—both wearing taupe poplin suits, in the loose fit preferred by those whose usual getup required a holster as well as a tie—who piled out of the car as soon as it came to a stop. Again, this was Beirut.

As the driver held the door open for him, the American looked around uneasily. Fiftyish and straight-backed, he exuded the bred-in-the-bone privilege of an interloper from the planet’s most powerful nation—and, at the same time, the unease of a stranger in a strange city. The hard-sided briefcase he held might have provided a further clue, or merely raised further questions. One of the bodyguards, the smaller of the two, preceded him into the building. The other guard, his eyes darting around him tirelessly, stayed with the tall American. Protection and captivity so often looked the same.

In the lobby, the American was accosted by a Lebanese man with a wincelike smile and black hair that appeared slicked back with unrefined petroleum. “Mr. McKibbin?” he said, extending a hand. “Ross McKibbin?”

The American nodded.

“I’m Muhammad,” the Lebanese man said in a whispery voice.

“In this country,” the American returned, “who isn’t?”

His contact smiled uncertainly and led his guest through a cortege of armed guards. These were strapping, hirsute men with small arms in polished hip holsters, men with wary eyes and weathered faces, men who knew how easily civilization could be destroyed, for they had watched it happen, and resolved to side with something of greater durability: commerce.

The American was ushered into a long room on the second floor with white stuccoed walls. It was arranged like a lounge, with upholstered chairs and a low table with urns of coffee and tea, but its ostensible informality did not disguise the fact that it was a place for work, not for play. The guards remained outside, in a sort of antechamber; inside were a handful of local businessmen.

“We are most grateful that you could meet with us,” said one of the men, who had been introduced as the owner of two cinemas and a chain of grocery stories in the Beirut area.

“You honor us with your presence,” said another chamber-of-commerce type.

“I am just a representative, an emissary,” the American replied airily. “Think of me as a placement officer. There are people who have money, and people who need money. My job is to place one with the other.” His smile snapped shut like a cell phone.

“Foreign investment has been quite hard to come by,” another of the locals ventured. “But we are not the sort to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“I’m not a gift horse,” McKibbin shot back.

In the antechamber, the smaller of the American’s bodyguards stepped closer to the room. Now he could see as well as hear.

Few observers, in any case, would have had any trouble discerning the various power inequities within. The American was plainly one of those intermediaries who made a living by contravening international law on behalf of parties who had to operate in secrecy. He represented foreign capital to a group of local businessmen whose need for such funding was far greater than any scruples they could afford about its provenance.

“Mr. Yorum,” McKibbin said briskly, turning to a man who had not yet spoken, “you’re a banker, are you not? What would you say are my best opportunities here?”

“I think you will find everyone here to be an eager partner,” replied a man whose squat face and tiny nostrils suggested the countenance of a frog.

McKibbin turned a chilly gaze to the man of Mansur Enterprises. “Audited? The parties I represent prefer a less formal system of bookkeeping.” Floating up from outside was the sound of squealing tires. Few paid it any mind.

The other man flushed. “But of course. We are, at the same time, quite versatile, I assure you.”

Nobody uttered the phrase “money laundering” nobody had to. There was no need to spell out the purpose of the meeting. Foreign dealers with unaccountable reserves of cash sought businesses in poorly regulated markets like Lebanon to serve as fronts, as entities through which illicit cash could be sluiced, emerging as legitimate business earnings. Most would be returned to the silent partners; some could be retained. Both greed and apprehension were palpable in the room.

“I do wonder whether I’m wasting my time here,” McKibbin went on in a bored tone. “We’re talking about an arrangement that depends on trust. And there can be no trust without candor.”

The banker ventured an amphibious half-smile, blinking slowly.

The fraught silence was broken by the sound of a group of men rushing up the wide terrazzo stairs: late arrivals to a meeting elsewhere? Or—something else?

The harsh, concussive noise of automatic gunfire stilled idle speculation. At first, it sounded like a burst of firecrackers, but the burst went on too long, and was too fast, for that. There were shrieks—men forcing air through constricted throats, emitting a keening chorus of terror. And then the terror spilled into the meeting room, like a rampaging fury. Men clad in keffiyehs charged in, aiming their Kalashnikovs at the Lebanese businessmen.

The meeting was over.

Rome

Todd Belknap raced to the study door and, clipboard in hand, made his way down the long hallway. He would have to brazen it out. His planned means of escape—descending to the inner courtyard and exiting through a delivery chute—was no longer possible: It would require time he could no longer afford. He had no choice but to take a more direct route.

When he reached the end of the hallway, he paused; at the landing below, he could see a pair of sentries making their rounds. Flattening himself in the crook of an open guest-room door, he waited several minutes for the guards to move on. Fading footsteps, the jingle of keys on a chain, the closing of a door: the ebbing sounds of movement in retreat.

Now he stepped lightly down the stairs and, casting his mind back to the blueprints he had studied, he opened a narrow door just to the right of the landing. It would take him to a back staircase that would avoid the main floor of the villa and lessen the risk of exposure. Even as he stepped through the threshold, though, he could sense that something was not right. A small twinge of anxiety arrived before he was conscious of the explanation for it: raised voices and the sound of rubber soles slapping against hard flooring. Men running, not walking. The disruption of routine. Meaning: Khalil Ansari’s death had been discovered. Meaning: Security at the compound was now at high alert.

Meaning: Belknap’s chances of survival were dwindling with every minute he remained inside.

Straight into an ambush.

He felt an iron grip around his left upper arm, a gun pressed painfully against his spine. A heat-and-movement sensor must have revealed his position. He whipped his head around and his eyes met the granite stare of the man gripping his arm. It was another, unseen guard, then, who had the gun to Belknap’s back. It was the less challenging position, and therefore occupied by someone who was surely junior to the man to his side.

Belknap took another look at him. Swarthy, black-haired, clean-shaven, he was in his early forties, at a stage of life where the seasoning of experience conferred an advantage that was not yet offset by any loss of physical vigor. A young man with muscles but limited experience could be overcome, as could the superannuated veteran. But everything about the way this man moved told Belknap that he knew precisely what he was doing. His face betrayed neither overconfidence nor fear. Such an opponent was formidable indeed: steel that had been hardened by duress but not yet fatigued.

The man was powerfully built, yet moved with agility. He had a face of planes and angles, a nose with a thickened bridge that had obviously been broken in his youth, and a heavy brow that jutted out slightly over reptilian eyes—those of a predator examining his fallen prey.

“Hey, listen, I don’t know what’s going on,” Belknap began, trying to sound like a bewildered factotum. “I’m just one of the site architects. I’m checking on our contractors. That’s my job, okay? Look, just call the office, get this thing straightened out.”

“Maybe you don’t speak English,” Belknap said. “I guess that’s the problem. Dovrei parlare in italiano…”

“Your problem isn’t that I don’t understand,” said the senior guard in lightly accented English, tightening his iron grip. “Your problem is that I do understand.”

His captor was a Tunisian, Belknap guessed from his accent. “But then—”

“You wish to speak? Excellent. I wish to listen. But not here.” The guard stopped walking for a moment, jerking his captive to an abrupt stop. “In our lovely stanza per gli interrogatori. The interview chamber. In the basement. We go there now.”

Belknap’s blood ran cold. He knew all about the room in question—had studied it on the blueprints, had researched its construction and equipment even before he had confirmed that Ansari was the villa’s true owner. It was, in plain English, a torture chamber, and of truly cutting-edge design. “Totalmente insonorizzato,” the architectural specifications had stipulated: completely soundproof. The soundproofing materials had, in fact, been special-ordered from a company in the Netherlands. Acoustic isolation was achieved by density and disconnection: The chamber was floated and lined with a dense polymer made of sand and PVC; sturdy rubber seals lined the door frame. A man could scream at the top of his lungs and be entirely inaudible to someone standing outside, just a few feet away. The elaborate soundproofing guaranteed that.

The equipment contained in the basement chamber would guarantee the screams.

He allowed a dull look of gratitude to settle on his face. “Good,” he said. “Fine. I understand this is a high-sec facility. Do what you need to do. I’m happy to talk, wherever you like. But—Sorry, what’s your name?”

“Call me Yusef,” the senior guard said. There was something implacable even in the pleasantry.

“But, Yusef, you’re making a mistake. You got no beef with me.” He slackened his body slightly, rounding his shoulders, subtly making himself physically less intimidating. They did not believe his protestations, of course. His awareness of that fact was all he needed to keep from them.

Opportunity came when they decided to save time by frog-marching him down the main staircase—a grand, curving structure of travertine adorned with a Persian runner—instead of the concrete rear stairs. When he saw a glimpse of the streetlights through the frosted window bays to either side of the massive front door, he made a quick, silent decision. One step, a second step, a third step—he jerked his arm from the guard’s grip in a feeble gesture of wounded dignity, and the guard did not bother to respond. It was the hopeless fluttering of a caged bird.

“Vigilanza fuori!” the seasoned guard, the man who called himself Yusef, muttered to his partner. The guards would have only seconds to decide how to respond: A captive had value—the value of the information he could provide. Killing him at an inopportune moment could, in the fullness of time, lead to recriminations. Yet a nonlethal shot had to be aimed with great care, all the more so when the target was in motion.

And Belknap was in motion, righting himself from a sprawl and now springing off a step as if it were a starting block, bounding down the rest of the staircase, his ankles like tightly coiled springs, and then surging toward the Palladian-style door. Yet the door itself was not his target; it, too, would have been magneto-locked shut.

Abruptly, Belknap veered off to one side of it—to a two-foot-wide ornamental segment of leaded glass, an echoing, though narrower, Palladian shape. The city of Rome forbade any visible change to the villa’s facade, and that included the ornamental panel. The blueprints ultimately called for it to be replaced with an identical-looking panel that would be rendered of a bulletproof and unbreakable methacrylate resin, but it would be months before the replica, which required the collaboration of artisans and engineers, would be ready. Now he threw his body at the panel, leading with his hips and averting his face to avoid laceration and—

It gave way, noisily popping out of its frame and shattering upon the stone outside. Elementary physics: The energy of motion was proportional to mass times the square of velocity.

He was alive.

Beirut

The conference room was rank with the foulness of perforated bodies betraying their contents: the old-penny stench of blood, mingled with odors alimentary and fecal. It was the fetor of the slaughterhouse, an olfactory assault. Stuccoed walls, pampered skin, costly fabrics: All were drenched in a syrup of exsanguination.

The smaller of the American’s bodyguards felt a searing pain spread across his upper chest—a bullet had hit his shoulder and possibly pierced his lung. But consciousness remained. Through slightly parted eyelids, he took in the carnage in the room, the awful swagger of the keffiyeh-clad assailants. The man who called himself Ross McKibbin alone had not been shot, and, as he stared, evidently paralyzed by horror and disbelief, the gunmen roughly slammed a mud-colored canvas hood over his head. Then they hustled the startled American away, swarming back down the stairs.

The bodyguard, gasping for breath, as his poplin jacket slowly reddened with his blood, heard the low growl of the van’s engine. Out the window he was able to catch a final glimpse of the American, his arms now bound together, roughly thrown into the back of the van—a van that now roared off into the dusty night.

The poplin-clad guard withdrew a small cellular phone from a concealed interior pocket. It was an instrument to be used only for emergencies: His controller at Consular Operations had been emphatic about it. His thick fingers slick with arterial blood, the man pressed a sequence of eleven digits.

“Harrison’s Dry Cleaning,” a bored-seeming voice prompted on the other end.

The man gulped for air, trying to fill his injured lungs before he spoke. “Pollux has been captured.”

“Come again?” the voice said. American intelligence needed him to repeat the message, perhaps for voiceprint authentication, and the asset in the poplin suit did so. There was no need to specify time and location; the phone itself contained a military-grade GPS device, providing not merely an electronic date-any-time stamp but a geolocation stamp as well, accurate to within nine feet in the horizontal plane. They knew where Pollux had been, therefore.

But where was he being taken?

Washington, D.C.

“Goddammit to hell!” the director of operations roared, his neck muscles bunching visibly.

Standing at the threshold of the D.O.’s office, a junior operations officer—café-au-lait skin; black, wavy hair that grew tight, dense, and low—flinched as if he himself had been berated.

“Shit!” the director of operations shouted, slamming his desk with a fist. Then he slid back his chair and stood up. A vein in his temple pulsed. His name was Gareth Drucker, and although he was staring at the junior ops man in the doorway, he was not actually seeing him. Not yet. Finally, his eyes did focus on the swarthy young staffer. “What are the parameters here?” he asked, like an EMT verifying pulse-rate and blood-pressure stats.

“We just got the call in now.”

“‘Now’ meaning—?”

“Maybe a minute and a half ago. By a recruit of ours who’s in pretty bad shape himself. We thought you’d want to know ASAP.”

Drucker pressed an intercom button. “Get Garrison,” he ordered an unseen assistant. Drucker was a lean five foot eight, and had been likened by one colleague to a sailboat: Through slight of build, he bulged when he got the wind in him. He had the wind in him now, and he was bulging—his chest, his neck, even his eyes, which seemed to loom behind his rectangular rimless glasses. His lips were pursed, growing short and thick like a prodded earthworm.

The junior ops officer stood aside as a burly man in his sixties strode into Drucker’s office. Light from the early afternoon sun filtered through Venetian blinds, bathing the cheap government-issue furniture—a composite-topped desk, a badly veneered credenza, battered enameled-steel file cabinets, the faded velvet-covered chairs that had once been green and were still not quite any other hue. The nylon industrial carpeting, always having been the approximate color and texture of dirt, was a triumph of camouflage if not of style. A decade of foot traffic could scarcely detract from its appearance.

The burly man craned his neck around and squinted at the junior operations officer. “Gomez, right?”

“Gomes,” the junior officer corrected. “One syllable.”

“That’ll fool ’em,” the older man said heavily, as if indulging a lapse of taste. He was Will Garrison, the Beirut operation’s officer-in-charge.

The junior man’s swarthy cheeks reddened slightly. “I’ll let you two talk.”

Garrison sought and obtained a glance of approval from Drucker. “Stay here. We’re both going to have questions.”

Gomes stepped into the office with a chastened, summoned-to-the-principal’s expression. It took another impatient gesture from Drucker before he sat down on one of the green—somewhat green, had been green, more green than anything else—chairs.

“What’s our move here?” Drucker asked Garrison.

“You get kicked in the balls, you double over. That’s the move.”

“So we’re screwed.” Drucker, the winds of outrage having gusted out, now looked as worn and battered as everything else in his office, and he was by far the newest thing in it, having held the position of D.O. for just four years.

“Royally screwed.” Will Garrison was perfectly cordial around Drucker, but he could not be called deferential. He had more years on him than any other senior Cons Ops manager, with an accumulated store of experience and connections that, just often enough, proved invaluable. The years had not mellowed him, Gomes knew. Garrison had always been a hard-ass by reputation, and if anything, he was only more so now. Around the shop, people liked to say that if there were a Mohs scale of hard-assedness, he’d pretty much top it out. He had a long memory, a short temper, a jut-jaw that jutted more when he was irate, and a temperament that started out at the setting “Vaguely Pissed” and got worse from there.

It was just as well that Drucker had little interest in any org-chart rituals of subservience. The bureaucratic nightmare, Gomes’s colleagues all agreed, was the classic “kiss-up, kick-down” kind of guy. Garrison might kick down, but he didn’t kiss up, and Drucker might kiss up, but he didn’t kick down. Somehow it worked.

“They took his shoes off, too,” Drucker said. “Dumped on the side of the road. So long, GPS transponder. They’re no fools.”

“Mother of Christ,” Garrison rumbled, and then, shooting a glance at Gomes, he charged, “Who?”

“We don’t know. Our man at the scene said—”

“What?” Garrison jumped.

Gomes felt like a suspect under interrogation. “The asset said the captors barged in on a meeting that had been set up between—”

“I know all about the goddamn meeting,” Garrison snapped.

“Anyway, it was a hood-and-hustle job. The bad guys threw him into a van and disappeared.”

“The bad guys,” Garrison repeated, dyspeptic.

“We don’t have much on the captors,” said Gomes. “They were fast and they were brutal. Shot up everybody else in sight. Headdresses, automatic weapons.” Gomes shrugged. “Arab militants. That’s my opinion.”

Garrison stared at the young man the way a butterfly collector with a long needle stares at a specimen. “Your opinion, huh?”

Drucker turned to the OIC. “Let’s get Oakeshott in here.” He barked the order over the intercom.

“I’m just saying,” Gomes continued, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice.

Garrison folded his arms on his chest. “Our boy got snatched in Beirut. You venture Arab militants were involved.” He spoke with exaggerated precision. “I bet you were Phi Beta Kappa in college.”

“I didn’t do the Greeks,” Gomes muttered.

Garrison made a sibilant pfut. “Goddamned greenhorn. Somebody gets snatched in Beijing, you’d announce you think a Chinaman did it. Some things go without saying. If I ask you what kind of van, don’t tell me ‘the kind with wheels.’ Com-fucking-prende?”

“Dark green, dusty. Curtained windows. A Ford, our guy thought.”

A tall, reedy man with a thin face and a nimbus of graying hair stepped into the office. A herringbone tweed blazer draped loosely around his narrow torso. “So whose operation was this?” asked Mike Oakeshott, the deputy director for analysis. He dropped himself on another of the more-green-than-not chairs, folding up his long, attenuated arms and spindle shanks like a Swiss Army knife.

“You know damn well whose,” Garrison growled. “Mine.”

“You’re the officer-in-charge,” Oakeshott said, with a knowing stare. “Who designed it?”

The burly man shrugged. “Me.”

The senior analyst just looked at him.

“Me and Pollux,” Garrison amended, with a concessive shrug. “Pollux, mainly.”

“Another Tour de France of backpedaling, Will,” said Oakeshott. “Pollux is a brilliant guy when it comes to operations. Not a guy for needless risk. So factor that in.” A glance at Drucker. “What was the game plan?”

“He was undercover for four months,” Drucker said.

“Five months,” Garrison corrected. “Legend was ‘Ross McKibbin.’ An American businessman who walked on the shady side of the street. Supposedly a go-between, scouting out laundering opportunities for narco-moohla.”

“That’s the right kind of bait if you’re after minnows. He wasn’t.”

“Damn right,” Drucker said. “Pollux had a slow-infiltration strategy. He wasn’t after the fish. He was looking for the other fisherman. The bait just got him a place on the wharf.”

“I get the picture,” Oakeshott said. “It’s George Habash revisited.”

The senior analyst did not need to elaborate. In the early 1970s, the Palestinian resistance leader George Habash, known as the Doctor, hosted a secret summit in Lebanon for terror organizations around the world, including ETA in Spain, the Japanese Red Army, the Baader-Meinhof gang, and the Iranian Liberation Front. In the years that followed, Habash’s organization, and Lebanon generally, became a place where terrorists from all over came in search of armaments. The Czech-model Skorpion machine gun that was used to murder Aldo Moro had been acquired in the Lebanon arms mart. When the leader of Autonomia, the Italian revolutionary group, was arrested with two Strela missiles, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine actually claimed the missiles as their property and requested their return. By the fall of the Berlin Wall, though, the Lebanon arms markets, the relay systems through which extremist organizations from around the world could buy and sell the tools of their deadly campaigns, had settled into a long decline.

No longer. As Jared Rinehart and his team had confirmed, the nexus was being revived: The circuits were buzzing again. The world had changed—only to change back. A ballyhooed new world order had grown old fast. The intel analysts recognized something else as well. Armed insurrection did not come cheap; the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research estimated that the Red Brigade spent the equivalent of a hundred million dollars a year maintaining its five hundred members. Extremist groups today had extreme needs: plane travel, special weaponry, marine vessels for transport of munitions, the bribery of officialdom. It added up. Plenty of legitimate businessmen were desperate for a quick cash infusion. So were a small but significant number of organizations devoted to organized mayhem and destruction. Jared Rinehart—Pollux—had devised a strategy to get into the buy-side of the equation.

“Espionage ain’t bean bag,” Drucker mused softly.

Oakeshott nodded. “Like I said, Pollux is as smart as they come. Just hope he didn’t outsmart himself this time.”

“He was getting close, making good progress,” Garrison said. “Want to get in tight with the banking community? Start making loans and they’ll come around soon enough, just to take a look at you. Pollux knew that one of the guys at the meet was a banker, with fingers in a lot of pies. A rival, not a supplicant.”

“Sounds pretty elaborate, and pretty expensive,” Oakeshott said.

Garrison scowled. “You don’t get into the Ansari network by filling out an application.”

“The penny drops,” said Oakeshott. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. The same night that Ansari’s supposed to be in his citadel of evil, finalizing a three-hundred-million-dollar chain deal for midsized armaments—the same night that he’s dotting t’s, authorizing digital signatures, and stowing a shitload of cash in one of his numbered accounts—we’ve got Jared Rinehart, a.k.a. Ross McKibbin, sitting down with a roomful of greedy shopkeepers in Beirut. Then he’s snatched by a band of towel-heads with Kalashnikovs and attitude. Same night. Anybody think that’s just an accident?”

“We don’t know what went down,” Drucker said, gripping the back of his chair as if to keep his balance. “My gut says that he played the part of the rich American businessman too well for his own good. The guys who bundled him off probably figured he was worth a lot as a hostage.”

“As a U.S. intelligence agent?” Oakeshott sat up very straight.

“As a rich American businessman,” Drucker persisted. “That’s what I’m saying. Kidnapping is pretty common in Beirut, even now. These militant bands need cash. They’re not getting it from the Sovs anymore. The Saudi royals have pulled back. The Syrians are turning into skinflints. My guess is that they took him for the guy he claimed to be.”

Oakeshott nodded slowly. “Puts you all in a pretty pickle. Especially with what’s happening on the Hill.”

“Christ,” Drucker muttered. “And tomorrow I’ve got another meeting with that goddamn Senate oversight committee.”

“They know about the op?” Garrison asked.

“In general terms, yeah. Given the size of the budget item, there was no way around it. They’re probably going to have questions. I sure as shit don’t have any answers.”

“What kind of a budget item are we looking at?” Oakeshott asked.

A bead of sweat on Drucker’s forehead pulsed along with the vein beneath it, glinting in the sun. “Half a year means major sunk costs. Not to mention the manpower involved. We’ve got considerable exposure here.”

“Pollux’s chances are going to be better the sooner we do something,” Gomes said earnestly, breaking in. “In my opinion.”

“Listen to me, kid,” Garrison said with a baleful stare. “Opinions are like assholes. Everybody’s got one.”

“The Kirk Commission finds out what’s gone down,” Drucker put in quietly, “I’m going to have two. And I don’t mean opinions.”

Despite the shafts of midday sun, the room had come to seem shadowed, gloomy.

“I don’t mean to be out of line, but I’m confused,” Gomes said. “They took one of our guys. A key player, too. I mean, Jesus, we’re talking about Jared Rinehart. What are we going to do?”

For a long moment nobody spoke as Drucker turned toward his two senior colleagues and silently canvassed their opinions. Then he gave the junior officer a styptic look. “We’re going to do the hardest thing of all,” the director of operations said. “Absolutely nothing.”