“I need some cash,” Nuri said.

“And?”

“I need money.”

“Why do you think I have money?” snapped Melissa, sitting down on the sleeping bag. She pushed back to the wall, spreading her legs in front of her. She was wearing black fatigues.

“Look, I just got off the line with my boss,” said Nuri. “He told me I should shoot you if you didn’t cooperate. And he was serious.”

“Give me a break.”

“I know you got a stash of money,” he said. “Nobody works in Africa, especially out here, without bribe money. Piles of it.”

“Why do you need money?”

“I’m going into Duka and nose around. I have a cover as an arms dealer.”

“I have a few thousand, that’s all.”

“It’s a start.”

“I go with the money.”

Nuri shook his head. “Ain’t gonna work.”

“It has to.”

“Nope. Come on. I have a cover here I’ve established. I go in with an American girl—I’d be dead.”

“You don’t exactly look like you belong,” said Melissa. “You’re the wrong color.”

“I’m from Eritrea,” said Nuri. His cover story wasn’t that far from the truth, if you went back two generations. “I’m an Italian. Don’t make a face—it worked for months. I can speak most of the tribal languages, including Nubian, as well as Arabic.”

“I’ll bet.”

“You want Lango or Madi?”

“Nobody speaks Lango up here,” said Melissa.

“No shit. That wasn’t my point.”

“Look, we can work together,” she told him. “We don’t have to be enemies.”

“Just give me the cash.”

“You’re stuck if I don’t. There are no cash machines outside of the capital, which is too far for you to go, right? And Eritrea isn’t going to help. Because there’s one person in Eritrea, and you can never get ahold of him. And the embassy is useless.”

“I can call Washington,” he told her. “And have you ordered back home.”

“Look, there’s no need for us to spit at each other,” she told him. “Let’s work together.”

Nuri frowned.

“You can’t cut me out,” she told him. “Tell your boss I want to be involved.”

“My boss?”

“Colonel Freah.”

“Danny’s not my boss. He commands the military people.”

“And what are you?”

“I’m Agency, just like you. We work as a team.”

“Who’s in charge of the operation?”

“We both are.”

“There has to be one person in charge. One.”

“You going to tell me how to run my operation now?”

“I’m not trying to argue with you. I’m sorry.” She shifted against the wall. “Let me go into town with you.”

“So the guys in the truck can recognize you?”

“They never got close enough to see me. It was dark.”

“What part of the company do you work for?”

Melissa didn’t answer.

“How long have you been covert? Or are you a tech geek who found her way over to the action side?”

“I’m not going to play games,” Melissa said. “I work for Harker—talk to him.”

“Look, give me the money,” he told her. “I need to go in right away. You’re in no shape right now. You should have taken more morphine. At least you’d get some rest.”

“You’re a doctor now?”

“Are you?”

“I trained as a nurse.”

Nuri put up his hands. She had an answer for everything.

Finally, Melissa went over to the footlocker and opened it. She hunched over it, counting money out.

“This ought to be enough,” she told him, handing over a wad of hundred-dollar bills.

Nuri started to count it.

“There are fifty,” she told him. “Five thousand.”

“That may not do it.”

“It’ll have to.” She slammed the top down with her right hand, pulling it halfway out of the sling.

“You should get your arm fixed.”

“It’ll be fine. You go and scout. OK. But I want to go on the mission.”

“If there is a mission, that’ll be up to Danny.”

“I thought he wasn’t your boss.”

“He’s not. But he’s more objective than I am.”

Boston managed to patch up Melissa’s motorcycle well enough for Nuri to ride it across the border into Elada, a medium-sized town in Eritrea, about an hour and a half away. He bought a counterfeit Rolex, some AK-47s, an old Colt service automatic, ammo, and two pair of khaki uniforms for a hundred American dollars; he could have shaved at least another ten off the deal if he’d had exact change.

Finding a decent vehicle was a different story. Pickup trucks, even those in poor condition, were valuable and rare. Nuri wanted either two trucks, or a truck and Land Rover; he’d stick a few of the Whiplash people in the back of the pickup as bodyguards. But he couldn’t find anyone willing to sell. The best he could do was work a trade for a battered Mercedes sedan—his motorcycle, a thousand American in cash, and three stolen credit cards.

The credit cards were Agency cards, disabled by MY-PID two minutes after the transaction. It would undoubtedly be at least a full day before the buyer found out: Elada didn’t have any ATMs, nor were there any in the rest of the country.

The car ran decently, and came with three-quarters of a tank worth of diesel. Which was enough—Nuri drove it about five miles south to a field where the Osprey was waiting. Danny had decided to speed things up by flying it across to Sudan.

“I have uniforms for two bodyguards,” Nuri told Danny as the Osprey took off with the car chained beneath its belly. “How about Flash and Boston?”

“Boston can go, but Flash is going to stay with the aircraft in case we need backup,” said Danny. “I want to come.”

Boston was imposing physically, but his real asset was an angry, craggy face that would scare even a close friend into thinking he was just waiting for an excuse to kill. Flash, though white, had the lean, undernourished look of a down-on-his-luck white mercenary who very likely was nursing sociopathic tendencies.

Danny was big physically, and Nuri knew from experience that he was in excellent shape and was a great shot. But he had a quieter, almost benign face—too relaxed, too in control. The ideal bodyguard out here was just this side of criminally insane.

“You think you can do it?” Nuri asked.

“I’ve gone undercover here before.”

“This is different. You’ll have to be completely silent. If they hear your accent up here, we’re dead.”

“I’m not worried,” said Danny.

Nuri picked up one of the uniforms. “Here you go, then. I hope it fits.”

Chapter 4

Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland

Breanna spotted Jonathon Reid’s gray Taurus parked with its running lights and engine on near the edge of the tarmac as the C-20 turned off the access ramp from the runway. She unbuckled her seat belt and went to the door, waiting while the aircraft taxied over.

“Pilots say the plane should be refueled inside an hour, ma’am,” said the sergeant who was working as the crewman. “If you’d like, I can try and hunt up something to eat.”

“A bagel?” she asked. “With butter?”

“I’ll give it a shot, ma’am.”

Breanna waited impatiently for the aircraft to halt. It seemed to take forever to travel the last twenty or thirty yards. Finally it eased to a stop. The crewman dropped the fold-down stairs, and Breanna trotted down them into a light rain. She walked over to the car and got in on the passenger side.

Reid handed her a cup of coffee.

“The news is that bad?” she asked.

Reid had an extremely droll sense of humor, but he didn’t laugh now.

“I’m guessing what’s going on here,” he told her. “I’m guessing there’s an unauthorized assassination program involved. There are no official records or minutes anywhere. No NSC notes. And I did check, through the back channel.”