Khalid gasped.

Zero looked from one man to the other, then tugged at his friend’s galabia, demanding that he translate. Khalid spoke softly in Arabic, and a look of ecstasy came over them both. For a moment, Wilson was afraid Zero might burst into tears.

So he slapped him on the back with a laugh, and basked in his bodyguards’ delight. They were good kids, and it was nice to see them happy.

Da Rosa sat by himself at a separate table, nursing a gin and tonic. As he watched the celebration unfold in front of him, he shook his head in disbelief. This guy, d’Anconia, was a piece of work.

Little Ping was notified of the wire transfer by e-mail at eleven a.m. the next morning. Wilson confirmed the transaction in a call to the St. Helier bank twenty minutes later. At noon, he met the Pings at the Banque du Zaïroise du Commerce Extérieur. Together, the three of them went into the bank, leaving their bodyguards outside, warily eyeing one another. It was, Wilson reflected, quite a crowd. Zero and Khalid on one side, and on the Pings’ behalf, their counterparts: four young gunmen in T-shirts and sunglasses, none of whom was old enough to drink in California.

Inside the bank, the older Ping examined the diamonds for a second time. When he’d confirmed that this was the same batch that he’d seen the day before, he moved the diamonds, head and all, to a second safe-deposit box – one that he’d rented for the purpose. With a satisfied look, he shook Wilson’s hand. “That’s that,” he said.

Wilson cocked his head. “Except for that other thing…”

Big Ping nodded. “Of course,” he said, and beckoned Wilson to follow him. “We take care of that now.” Together, they walked back to the Chinaman’s office.

Wilson didn’t know what to expect. He had very mixed feelings about what was going to happen. He liked the boys, he really did. But their loyalties were to Hakim, not to him, so they were a danger to him now. Hakim’s associates would soon come looking for their money, and when they did, it would be a whole lot safer for Wilson if Zero and Khalid weren’t around to help them.

Which was too bad. Terrible, really, but that’s the way it was. Great men did terrible things. How else were they to accomplish their dreams? That was the tragedy of the world-historical man. He sacrificed his humanity to the greatness of his vision and, in doing so, condemned himself to a kind of solitary confinement, sealed off from the rest of the human race by the impenetrable barrier of his own greatness.

You don’t blame a lion for killing a gazelle. It’s what the lion does.

When they arrived at the door to the office, Little Ping took Wilson by the arm, and nodded toward Zero and Khalid. “Tell them to wait here.”

Khalid heard and understood.

Little Ping had sodas and chairs brought to them. Zero thanked him effusively, and the boys sat down outside the heavily carved wooden door, just under the sign with the lucky numbers.

Going up the stairs to the second floor, not knowing what to expect, Wilson stood before a window, watching the alley with Little Ping. Soon, Big Ping huffed up the stairs, talking quietly on a cell phone.

Zero and Khalid were talking and laughing when a dusty pickup truck with improvised armor appeared at the end of the alley. Zero got to his feet, shooing the truck with his hand. The driver ignored the gesture, and began to back into the alley, ever so slowly. As he did, the truck began to emit a slow beep, warning people out of the way. Beep beep beep.

Khalid jumped to his feet with a shout, yelling angrily at the driver to get out of the alley. Beep beep – Khalid fired a warning shot into the air. And then the truck accelerated.

There was nowhere for them to go. The truck was almost as wide as the alley. In a panic, the boys fumbled with their guns, finally getting off a burst of shots, as they staggered backward into the concrete wall of Big Ping’s emporium.

There was a shriek of panic, and one of them (Wilson thought it was Khalid) screamed “Mr. Frank!” Then the truck slammed into them, cutting Zero in half and mangling Khalid from the hips down.

The building shook, but Wilson couldn’t take his eyes away. Watching the scene in the alley was like watching an anaconda devour a pony. It was horrible and mesmerizing all at once. The truck rolled slowly forward a couple of feet, its tailgate dripping. Khalid lay writhing on the ground, his right arm thrashing uncontrollably, as the driver shifted into reverse. Beep beep – The truck rolled over them, and the building shivered a second time.

The warning signal stopped as the truck rolled back the way it had come out, and stopped. The driver’s window rolled down, and da Rosa stuck his head out from behind the steering wheel. Seeing the mess at the end of the alley – his handiwork – he gave the men on the second floor a thumbs-up.

Big Ping nudged Wilson with his elbow and, grinning, said, “Like… flyswattah!”

CHAPTER 18

Just the sight of her irritated Pete Spagnola. Which was not good, since she was his deputy and Spagnola saw her three or four times a day. A Smith graduate, she was arrogant, ambitious, and, though still nominally young, fat enough to seem almost matronly. Even her gender-bending name pissed him off. Madison Logan. It sounded like an airport.

Because of something powerful and armored in her physique, he had, in a moment of inspiration, dubbed her “Humvee.” The name was so apt that it prompted guilty laughter the one time he’d let it slip. But it had gotten back to her, of course. (That was one of the problems: Everything got back to her.)

He was himself, by his very nature, a risk taker. That’s what had driven him to join the Central Intelligence Agency – his love of adventure. It was an irony of fate, then, that a guy who might have prospered as a NASCAR driver or a jungle guide had ended up mired in such a stolid bureaucracy. The Agency, once proud of its nimble and bold spies, had long ago adopted a don’t-rock-the-boat mentality so profound that even the collapse of the Soviet Union had gone unremarked upon until after the fact. (To have mentioned it earlier would have encouraged budget cuts.)

To make matters worse, Spagnola worked under embassy cover. He spent his days laboring among the worker bees of the State Department, a bureaucracy even more constipated than the Agency’s own.

Eighteen years of keeping his head down, and more or less going through the motions, had nearly extinguished his ability to pay attention to his work, except in the most superficial way.

So when Humvee tapped on his office door, and Spagnola gestured her in, he wasn’t really listening to what she said. Not at first, anyway. She was talking a mile a minute, like his daughter did, Bugs-Bunny-fast, a veritable burst-transmission.

He was wondering if he could wangle an extra day’s leave so he could take the family skiing. And he was thinking about the recent volatility of one of his investments, a Canadian natural gas play in Kazakhstan.

But some intensity of focus on Humvee’s part got through to him, or maybe it was the name she dropped: Bobojon Simoni.

Simoni was the al-Qaeda operative who’d gotten himself killed two weeks earlier, when the BfV raided his Berlin apartment. “What?”

“I said we made a mirror image of Simoni’s computer, and when we took a look at it, we found an application called Stegorama.”

Spagnola frowned. “Stegorama?”

“It’s a steganography program. In this case, freeware – you can download it from the Net. You know what steganography is?”