“Which is?”

“Our decency.”

“The boys must have loved him at Cons Ops.”

“You may recall,” Janson reminded Jessica drily. “Consular Operations was not a debating society. He only spoke about it after.”

“After what?”

“After he shot his partner to stop him torturing an asset they had captured in Malaysia.”

“He shota fellow agent?”

“Twice in the head.”

“He shot an American? Jesus, Paul. No wonder he’s in a wheelchair. Who put him there?” Her eyes got big. “You?”

“Vengeance ain’t my style, Jesse. You know that. There is no revenge. Not on this earth.”

“Yeah?” She stared at him probingly. “Then who did it?”

“He put himself in that wheelchair.”

“Come again?”

“Doug stepped off the roof of our embassy in Singapore.”

“Suicide?”

“That was his intention. But the body doesn’t always obey the mind. He’d done too many parachute jumps to auger passively into the ground. His body remembered how to fall. Saved his life, if not his spine.”

“Wow… But you said he got shot.”

“That was a different time.”

“When did you step in?”

“When I found him begging on Washington Boulevard in Ogden, Utah.”

“How’d you track him down? VA hospital?”

“He grew up in Ogden. When it all goes to hell, people go home.”

Jessica Kincaid shook her head. “Sometimes I feel guilty.”

“For what?”

“All the good stuff you do that I don’t.”

Janson laughed. “One crusader in the outfit is plenty—Seriously, Jesse, you’re young. You’re in a different place; you’re still honing yourself, learning your craft. Go tell Mike we’re going to Africa.”

Jessica Kincaid stepped to the front of the plane and opened the cockpit door. Forty thousand feet under the Embraer’s long nose fenced farmland stretched for as far as she could see. Fields were green in the sunlight. Creeks and rivers were fringed with trees.

She laid a hand each on the shoulders of Mike and Ed. “Boys, you know where Africa is?”

“Heard of it,” said Ed.

“The boss wants to go there.”

Mike asked, “Any particular part of Africa?”

“Port Harcourt, Nigeria.”

She observed closely as Ed brought the changed destination up on the Honeywell Flight Management System. New-generation software integrated the Embraer’s WAAS GPS, waypoint data, and the Future Air Navigation System for flying under transocean Procedure Control. He began charting a course to minimize distance and fuel burn.

“Hang a right,” he told Mike, showing him the course. “We’ll fuel up in Caracas.”

Mike said, “Better get some sleep.”

“Soon as I enter our passenger manifest for Customs and Border Protection.”

Mike tossed a grin over his shoulder at Kincaid. “Miss Jessica, if I were to move over while Ed sacks out, would you like some left-seat flight time?”

“You bet!” she said, always eager to fly the plane. She listened while Mike radioed Atlantic Air Traffic Control Center, through whose airspace they were flying, to request permission to change their route. When he received clearance to turn to a new course, he eased the big silver jet onto its starboard wing.

“Be right back,” said Kincaid. “Soon as I check on the boss.”

She hurried to the main cabin, braced against the tilt. Janson was seated on the high side, staring out the window at nothing but sky. It’s more than Doug Case, she thought. It’s more than the doctor. The Machine sensed that something didn’t fit. She thought of challenging him, of saying, “Something else is going on. What is it?” But even if Janson was ready to admit it, she knew by the tilt of his head that he could not put it into words, yet.

FOUR

In the Free Foree camp, hidden in the caves that honeycombed the densely forested mountainous center of the island state, seven frightened men waited with their arms tied around the trunks of broad-leaf evergreen ironwoods.

Shafts of sunlight pierced the ragged canopy seventy-five feet above their heads where rampant vines were killing the treetops. The drone of a swift stream racing down the mountain muffled the sounds of nearby activity, heightening the prisoners’ sense of isolation from events that would determine their fate. They could not hear the shouting in the cave that sheltered the field hospital.

“What did they do to my father?” an angry Douglas Poe demanded of Dr. Terry Flannigan. The son of the leader of the Free Foree Movement was a tall, dark-skinned twenty-five-year-old with a wiry build, a hard mouth, and cornrowed hair.

“About everything you can do to a man and not quite kill him,” the doctor replied, working hard at maintaining enough detachment to keep his head on straight. When you were trying to put a patient back together again it did not pay to dwell on the nature of his fellow human beings who had taken him apart.

Flannigan glanced warily at the son. Douglas Poe seemed thoroughly unhinged by the sight of his tortured father. One false move, thought the doctor, and he, too, would end up tied to a tree with the others waiting to be shot. Flannigan shivered. The air was markedly cooler on the slopes of Pico Clarence and even cooler inside the cave.

About the only part of the poor devil they hadn’t tormented was his face. His eyes were closed—Flannigan had given him enough morphine from Amber Dawn’s first-aid kit to see to that—but if you didn’t look at the rest of him what you saw in his face was a once-vigorous sixty-eight-year-old with salt-and-pepper mustache and eyebrows, a thick head of kinky hair, dyed black and growing out at the roots, big elephant ears, a narrow Portuguese nose, a strong jaw, and the double chin and round cheeks of a man who enjoyed himself at the dinner table. Flannigan found it hard to believe that Ferdinand Poe had given up his pleasures to lead a revolution. Almost as hard to believe that he was their prisoner.

“If he dies, you’re next!” vowed the son.

“Fuck you!” said the doctor, who had nothing to lose. He could say what he wanted. They wouldn’t hurt a hair on his head unless the old man kicked the bucket. But even though they needed a doctor for dozens of wounded, angry-son Douglas would pull the trigger if his father died. Just as Douglas was about to pull it on the jerks tied to the trees. Not that the doctor would grieve for those bastards. They were the commandos who had boarded Amber Dawnand shot everybody, so whatever they got they had coming.

But where it got strange was that Douglas the son, Ferdinand Poe’s son, was accusing his own soldiers of going rogue. Terry Flannigan did not know what the hell was going on. Except that the commandos’ leader, the South African psycho who had murdered Janet, had disappeared before the rest got tied to the trees. Poe had sent a hundred men out combing the jungle for him with orders to shoot to kill. But the doctor had seen the South African operate on the long boat trip into the island and the dangerous slog through the swamps and forests and he would be very surprised if they caught the animal.

Douglas Poe reached for his father’s hand and felt him flinch as he touched him. “I thought you gave him morphine!” Douglas shouted accusingly.

“I told you not to touch him,” said the doctor. “If I give him any more he’ll fall into a coma. Your cave is not equipped to monitor a patient in a coma.”

“But when—?”

Terrence Flannigan resorted to an answer as old as Hippocrates and probably still current with witch doctors: “He needs time.”

Douglas Poe drew his pistol from the holster strapped to his thigh, spun on his heel, and stormed out of the cave. The soldiers tied to the trees craned their necks to watch him coming. They tugged at the ropes holding them to the rough bark. A man cried out. Another groaned. Their sergeant addressed Poe in measured terms: “Douglas, Comrade, we only did what you ordered us to do.”