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Mallory felt a chill race through him.
“May be delayed.”
Who would have told her that? Did she make it up? An
“acquaintance?”
He picked up the office phone and started punching in her number, but then stopped, remembering that he was supposed to be mad at her.

Instead, he went back to the computer screen to search for flights to Saudi Arabia.

Douglas Chase still felt a rumble of apprehension every time he made the journey to the waiting room in Building 67. It was a privilege, of course, to be summoned. But he had made this journey so many times that it seldom felt that way to him anymore.

It wasn’t only the inconvenience—the absurd layers of security and secrecy and the wait, which could surpass an hour. It was also the man himself: a cold, complicated person who rarely showed gratitude to the people closest to him. A man he was to refer to only as the “Administrator.”

The Administrator had done some nice things for Douglas Chase, paying him handsomely over the years for carrying out what had often seemed routine negotiations. He had also praised him in ways that no one else had. That was how the Administrator hooked people: he made them feel special. That had stopped some time ago, and yet the man still had an inexplicable hold over him.

When the door to the Administrator’s office finally slid open, Douglas Chase stood and his apprehension evaporated.

He silently took a seat in front of the familiar desk and waited. His boss was reading a report. He would not look up or speak for seven minutes.

Finally, the Administrator showed his thin, flat smile.

“I need you to arrange for an unusual payment.”

“All right,” Chase said.

“It has to be completed quickly. Before October 5. You’ll have to deal with your fellow in Johannesburg on this.”

“All right. A payment to whom?”

“Isaak Priest.”

Chase nodded. The Administrator then gave him the details, none of which Douglas Chase was permitted to write down.

As he stood to leave, Chase decided to ask one last question. Occasionally, the Administrator allowed him a glimpse of the larger picture. “What happens on October 5?” he asked.

“The wheel of history turns,” his boss said.

As he left the office, Douglas Chase felt exhilarated. Such was the power of the man known as the Administrator.

JON MALLORY LAY IN
bed blinking at the morning light. The air was cool through the window screen and he smelled something good cooking in someone else’s kitchen. Then he heard the sound again that had wakened him. He reached for his cell phone and saw the call was from Saudi Arabia.

Honi Gandera
.

“Hello,” he said, sitting up.

Charlie had warned him to be careful, to use disposable phones and pre-paid calling cards. To avoid saying actual names during phone conversations. It had seemed a little paranoid to Jon at first. Not anymore.

“Jon?”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s Honi.” Jon winced. “I’ve checked around a little for you.”

“Okay.”

“I made some inquiries. I was able to find someone who knows your brother.”

“Really. Go on.”

“Has done business with him, anyway. I don’t think you’ll find him here in Saudi Arabia, Jon.”

“No?” Jon walked to the window, suddenly wide awake.

“His company is based in Riyadh,” Honi said. “With an office in Dubai. But their contracts, their business, is mostly elsewhere.”

“Where?”

“I’m told he had an ongoing project in Kuala Lumpur. But I understand he is, or was, in Nairobi most recently. I’m told he may be renting an office there right now, as well as an apartment.”

Jon squinted at the sunlight in the trees, feeling a surge of hope. “That’s quite a bit of information. How did you get it?”

“Good fortune. I located someone who worked with him. A subcontractor. All in confidence, of course. But a reliable man.”

“Any indication that he’s there now?”

“Yes. That’s what I’m told. I can’t vouch for it, Jon. He’s quite a mystery, your brother.”

“I know that. Do you have a contact? An address? Anything else?”

“Yes, actually, I do,” he said, and gave it to him—a street address on Radio Road, twelve blocks from the twenty-four-hour Green and White Club, in downtown Nairobi.

Jon jotted down the street number on the pad beside his bed and began to memorize it. “What’s he doing in Kenya? Do you know who the client is?”

“I can’t give you a name. This is the rest of what I was told: His company has been setting up surveillance systems outside of the city. Possibly for a private business moving to the Rift Valley. Apparently, he may have a message for you there, in Nairobi.”

“Really. A message?”

“That’s what I was told.”

“That he may have a message for me there?”

“Yes.”

Jon waited a moment, not sure how much of it to believe. “Okay,” he said. It was, in fact, a lot more information than he had expected, and he wondered about its integrity—if this might in some way be a trap.

Don’t try too hard. The information will come to you. Learn to identify it and understand it. Pay attention
. Among the last things his brother had said to him.

“
Bettawfeeq
, my friend.”

Good luck
.

“Likewise.”

OUTWARDLY, THE TALL, STURDILY
built man with short-cropped blond hair and a stubbly growth of beard seemed no different from the other passengers on the Metro train hurtling toward the suburbs of northern Virginia, fifty feet beneath the streets of Washington, D.C. Eyes slightly glazed, looking toward an advertisement above the doors. Holding onto a pole for balance as the subway car lurched side to side through the underground tunnel at sixty miles an hour.

But Charles Mallory’s mind was not in idle mode this afternoon. He could not afford that. Not after what had happened to Paul Bahdru. He was using the time in transit to work through puzzles. To think about three people who were going to figure in his life over the next several days. And to wonder about a fourth.

Charlie was en route to a meeting with Richard Franklin, head of the CIA’s Special Projects Division, his only remaining liaison with the intelligence community and his sole point of contact on what Franklin called “The Isaak Priest Project.” It was Franklin who had sent him to Africa to find Priest.

Mallory and Franklin had weeks earlier established a private code, a simple system of communication based on numbers. Six numbers, six meanings. Valid for six meetings, during the span of this operation. A system known only to them—although that was what he had thought with Paul Bahdru, too. And somehow that had gone terribly wrong.

The message Franklin had sent began, “Thought this was interesting.” Four words. Corresponding with a number. The number representing a meeting place that the two men had agreed upon and memorized. A code that existed only in their heads.

Number 4 referenced a parking space at a shopping center garage in Arlington, Virginia, a five-minute walk from the Ballston Metro stop. Pasted in the window with Franklin’s message had been a news
story about anti-government uprisings in Iran, something Franklin had evidently copied from
The Washington Post
‘s website. For Charles Mallory, the story contained only two pieces of pertinent information, and they had nothing to do with Iran. Two other numbers, agreed upon verbally, which corresponded to words in the story. Six and seventeen.

A date and a time.

Charlie had counted out the words in the story: The sixth was “protest,” the seventeenth “nullify.” One signified a day of the week, the other a time. The first word contained seven letters, translating to the seventh day of the week.
Saturday
. The second word corresponded to a number, also. “Nullify” began with “n.” The fourteenth letter in the alphabet. Which translated to 1400 hours.

So, Richard Franklin was asking to see him at 1400 hours.

2
P.M
. on Saturday. Today.

The rest was up to Charlie. He was not obligated to accept the request or even to acknowledge it. That was the arrangement. If he wanted, he could let it disappear into cyberspace and move on. But this time, he
would
respond. He had to. This time, he needed to know more. After Kampala, there was too much at risk, and there was nothing, it seemed, that he could afford
not
knowing.

As the train snaked through the concrete tunnel below the Virginia suburbs, Charles Mallory glanced at a man standing by the opposite set of doors who had let his eyes linger on Charlie a moment too long. He took inventory of the others—a young man holding onto a pole, nodding to a beat playing through earphones; an older woman staring at a newspaper, then closing her eyes, then opening them, then closing them—and returned to the man. He was not going to look at him again, he saw. It was okay.

Charlie went back to his thoughts. To the three people:

A defense contractor named Russell Ott, who had helped coordinate the surveillance project code-named Tribal Eyes.

Ahmed Hassan, the assassin who had tried to kill him in France, whose organization was known as the Hassan Network.

And his father, whose final message about a shadowy African businessman named Isaak Priest included several questions, one of which might be answered by a former colleague of his father’s. A man named Peter Quinn.

CHARLES MALLORY EXITED
the subway train and proceeded through the underground tunnel to the parking garage in Ballston Common Mall. He walked with the crowds as long as he could, then took a stairway into the garage. He found the designated spot, on the third level. An Escalade, parked earlier in the day, presumably, reserving the space.

Charlie looked at his watch as he approached the passenger door.

1:59
P.M
.

He reached for the handle, pulled open the door, and got in. Behind the wheel was a familiar face: Richard Franklin, Ph.D. Head of Special Projects Division. Former deputy director for clandestine services. Former CIA analyst. A mentor to Charles Mallory when he had come to work for the Agency years ago.

“Greetings.”

“Richard.”

“I’m glad you decided to do this.”

“Not a decision I made, Richard.”

FRANKLIN GLANCED AT
him but said nothing. Didn’t speak for the next twenty-seven minutes as he drove them through the busy suburban streets to the Beltway and then out toward Virginia farm country. Franklin was an unusual mix of intelligence and instinct. Silver-haired, in his mid-sixties now, he conveyed an air of knowledge and sophistication, yet he retained a robust physical presence, as well—an active man who, like Charles Mallory, understood the connection between mental and physical acuity. He was dressed in a tan sports jacket and open blue shirt, khaki slacks. Driving five miles an hour above the speed limit, he took them into the rural suburbs of northern Virginia, where the road became two lanes. Winding, hilly terrain. Horse country. Then he made another turn, onto a long gravel road, finally pulling up to a stone house set on a slight rise.

Franklin’s division, Special Projects, fell under the umbrella of the CIA’s Special Activities Division. Traditionally, the SAD had been divided into two sections, one for paramilitary operations and the other for political action. But the distinctions had blurred with the
rapid development of new technologies and cybercrime. The division relied heavily now on “blue badgers”—private contractors like Charles Mallory, who were not officially part of the government and did not carry identification showing they were.

Franklin stopped under the carport, next to another vehicle, a Jeep Liberty with Maryland plates. This was a safe house, owned by the government. Its parameters were fenced off, the grounds protected by wireless sensors, monitored by camera towers and a guard station at the rear gate. A wide open, nearly flat space; no one could approach the house without being spotted from a distance.

No house is really safe, though
, Charlie thought.

“Fly here from Nice?” Franklin asked as they walked to the side door.

“To Heathrow. Heathrow to Dulles.”

“British Air?”

“Continental.”

“How are their meals these days?”

Mallory shrugged. “Airplane food.”

“Get to see a decent movie, anyway?”