And then he thought of Nico. If this didn’t go well, Nico would never know what had happened. He’d probably assume Larison had abandoned him and gone back to his wife. The thought of Nico left that way, forever wondering, doubting, was like a vise around his heart.

No. It wouldn’t end that way. He had all the cards. And he was playing them well. He’d gotten this far, hadn’t he?

He wondered again whether Hort would be involved. And if so, what dumb young fool Hort would set against him. Whoever he was, Larison might have felt sorry for him. But he didn’t. They’d burned the pity out of him. The only pity he had left he would save for himself.

Less than an hour after his arrival, Hort walked Ben out of the Manila city jail. A sedan with a driver who looked like Diplomatic Security drove the two of them back to the Mandarin Oriental, where Ben showered, vacuumed down two plates of pasta and a beer, and passed out. Hort woke him at eight. The car took them to the airport, where they checked into adjacent first-class seats on a Philippine Air flight to Los Angeles. The luxury was anything but standard, and Ben took it to mean that whatever Hort wanted, it needed to be done ASAP. This would likely be Ben’s last chance to sleep for a while.

The moment they were in the air, Hort took out an ordinary iPhone and selected an application that would pump out random subsonic signals to scramble any listening devices. The military called the application the Susser, meaning subsonic signals scrambler, but like so much other military hardware, such as the GBU-43/B massive ordnance air blast-more widely known as the Mother of all Bombs-this one, too, had its own nickname: the Cone of Silence. Everyone knew the national carriers allowed their nations’ spy services to bug the first-class seats for industrial espionage.

Hort set the phone down on the armrest between them and put a Bluetooth earpiece next to it. “These are for you,” he said. “There’s more information on the phone, but we’ll get to that.”

“Okay.”

“Two days ago, someone contacted the new director of central intelligence,” Hort said, his voice so low it was almost inaudible over the background roar of the engines. “This someone has gotten hold of some extremely sensitive materials and wants to be paid for their safe return.”

Ben pinched his nostrils and cleared his ears. “How sensitive are we talking about?”

“A hundred million dollars sensitive. That’s what our blackmailer is asking for. Payment in uncut diamonds, none larger than three carats. Small, anonymous, easy to move.”

“What do they have, photos of the president in flagrante?”

“I wish that’s what this were about. No, what they have is interrogation videos.”

Ben thought for a moment. “I read somewhere the CIA had destroyed a bunch of waterboarding videos. First there were just a couple, then they admitted closer to a hundred, something like that?”

Hort nodded. “That’s the story they told the papers. Truth is, they never destroyed anything. The destruction story was just disinformation they put out when they discovered the tapes were missing.”

“Yeah, but this story broke… I forget, but it’s been years.”

“December 2007. That’s when they discovered the tapes were missing, that’s when they started trying to cover it up.”

“And then…”

“And then in March 2009, they changed the story. Ninety-two tapes, not just a few.”

“Why?”

“A throw-down to the new administration. The word was, the newbies were going to investigate the tapes’ destruction more seriously than the previous one was inclined to. So the message was, ‘This is much worse than you think. Investigate and you’ll never get anything done on the economy, or health care, or global warming, or jack shit. An investigation will go in a hundred directions you don’t want. It’ll eat you alive.’”

“I don’t get it. In the end, what did they think was going to happen? Were they hoping the tapes really were destroyed?”

“That’s exactly what they were hoping. And it wasn’t a bad working theory, if you think about it. Someone should have destroyed those tapes-can you imagine what would happen if they got out?”

“Why the hell make tapes in the first place? Are they crazy over there?”

Hort shrugged. “The signal-to-noise ratio wasn’t great on the information they were getting from the program. Truth is, most of the people we were picking up, we weren’t even sure who they were. Informants were accusing people we’d never heard of, dirt-poor Pakistani farmers turning in some Arab just because they didn’t like him or didn’t want to pay him the money they owed. Settle a grudge by accusing your enemy of terrorism and collect a bounty at the same time-who could resist that? And with the methods the CIA was using, fabrication was a problem. So they tried to develop a mosaic, cross-referencing everything they extracted in the interrogations. Fabrication is random; the overlaps have more credibility, that was the theory. So every new bit of intel extracted meant they could look at previous intel in a new light. For that, they needed records, something they could go back to.”

“Yeah, records. Transcripts. Not video. Not if you don’t want to get crucified on CNN.”

“Transcripts miss things. They needed to be able to examine the totality of circumstances: when did the subject say what he said, what was being done to him at the time, what were his facial expressions at that moment, his body language, were there other indices of fabrication? They were trying to mine every bit of value from the information they managed to extract. That was the whole point of the program. The tapes were a key part of it. And there was supposed to be an element of intimidation, too. You know, ‘What are your tough-guy terrorist friends going to think when they see this video of you crying and begging like a baby?’”

Ben had heard corridor talk about the program. Most of it sounded pretty stupid to him, but that was true for a lot of Agency initiatives and it wasn’t his problem. Until now, anyway.

He cleared his ears again. “These tapes… were there copies?”

“No. One set of originals, and that’s what the blackmailer has.”

“Even so, do we know that whoever took them and whoever is using them are the same? If they’ve been brokered, every middleman in the chain would have made copies.”

“My gut tells me they haven’t been passed around. First, because in all these years, no one’s heard a peep about these tapes being circulated. Second, if you’re smart enough to steal the tapes, you’re smart enough not to broker them. The risks are similar, but the real payoff only comes when you hit up Uncle Sam. Who else is going to come up with a hundred million dollars in diamonds?”

Ben couldn’t find any fault in Hort’s reasoning. “All right. What do we have to go on about the blackmailer?”

“So far, nothing. Initial call placed from a cloned sat phone. Communication through an anonymous private email account established at the caller’s instruction after that. We traced the points of access, of course. They’re all over the eastern United States. We’ve tried to triangulate. No luck. No tie-in with surveillance cameras outside an Internet café, nothing like that. The people we’re dealing with are good, no question.”

“So working backward from the blackmail doesn’t get us anything. What about from the initial theft? Assuming we’re dealing with the same person or group.”

Hort nodded slowly. “There, I think I might have a lead or two.”

Something in Hort’s tone, and in his use of “I” instead of “we,” contained a world of subterranean meaning. Ben paused, knowing Hort wanted him to figure it out.

“You haven’t told the CIA.”

Hort looked at Ben and nodded again, obviously pleased. “Go on.”