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Soon, he would have answers. They were coming to him. Right here to this room.

It was well after midnight when Charles Mallory finally heard the footsteps that he had been waiting for. Purposefully quiet. A soft sound of rubber on asphalt that to untrained ears might have seemed to be the wind fluttering an awning or an animal’s steps. Except that it came and went with a regularity that he recognized: sneaker soles moving through the alley. Step step, step step. Stopping. Louder, closer, passing right by the open front window, but across the alley. The footsteps slowing briefly. Then moving faster again, becoming quieter as they reached the next block. Then nothing.

Charlie felt his senses sharpen, acclimating now to this threat. He listened more acutely, gripping the butt of the Glock, shutting out everything else—the distant voices, the occasional sound of car engines on the Promenade—picturing the man walking in shadows to the next block, turning south. Circling the building, making certain there was no other entrance.

It was four and a half minutes later when he heard the sound again. Rubber soles on asphalt, coming back through the alley shadows toward the carpenter shop. From the same direction as before.

Charlie was outside now. He had hurried across the alley and was standing in a sunken entranceway, opposite the shop. Picturing what the predator would have seen if he had looked through the window with binoculars or a gun sight: a man seated beneath a blanket in an easy chair against the far wall. The man would appear to be wearing headphones and a ball cap. Leaning forward. The only light in the room was from the dial of an old stereo on an end table by the chair.

He knew that there were only a handful of people capable of tracing him so quickly, of accessing the satellite technology that could locate and identify him. He would know in three or four minutes if his guess was correct.

The man would have to decide; or more likely, he already had.
There was only one entrance and only one window. The man knew that now. He had already considered his options, assessed the risks.

All but one of the other alley windows were dark. The exception was a second-story loft four doors down, where someone was playing heavy-metal music.

Charlie pressed into the wall, as the shadow of the figure moved closer. Listening to the barely audible scrape of the rubber. Step, step. Stop. Step, step. As the man came closer, Charlie began to recognize him. A small, wiry man, wearing a dark jacket, black pants, a knit cap. A man who went by the name Albert Hahn, although his real name was Ahmed Hassan. He was one of the “cousins,” an operative Charles Mallory had learned about some seventeen months ago. A “specialist.” Hired as a consultant for a CIA/NSA operation called Tribal Eyes, a surveillance project aimed at finding terrorists in the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Charles Mallory watched him.

The man had several options, but only one good one. He could try to enter the building first and do his work cleanly inside. But that would be risky; Mallory could be waiting for him. For the same reason, he also probably wouldn’t chance walking or standing in front of the window. A safer scenario would be to wait until his target came out, but Mallory suspected that they wanted this done quickly. This evening. Using an explosive or incendiary device lacked precision; more importantly, it wasn’t Ahmed Hassan’s M.O. More likely, he would find a spot in the deepest shadows along the west side of the alley, where he could have a clear shot at the figure in the chair through the window.

Maybe afterward he would retrieve a “souvenir” and send it to Charlie’s liaison in Washington.
Maybe
. First, though, he would stand at a spot in the alley and home in on the figure through a telescopic rifle sight.

Charlie had already determined where that spot would be: a recess along the west wall of the alley at a diagonal, at approximately a fifty-degree angle to the shop. He was standing four feet from it now, waiting.

The man slid sideways along the wall of the alley, nearer to where Charlie stood. He was carrying something flush against the right side of his body. Step, step.

He was less than ten feet away when he suddenly stopped and turned, looking behind him. Charles Mallory held his breath. A small shadow moved along the base of a building. A cat, perhaps.

The man resumed his motion—not quite walking—along the shuttered back of a warehouse, taking short, deliberate sideways steps. Approaching the spot. Mallory knew what he was feeling. Understood how focused he was on accomplishing the thing he had come here to do. The man stopped tight against the wall, sized up the arrangement. He lifted a rifle. He was close enough now that Charlie could smell the damp wool of his jacket and see the details of his gun—an M24 military rifle, the kind used by American Army snipers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hassan moved sideways a step, then another, slightly shorter, step. Charlie saw his dark, cold eyes, concentrating on the window. His eyelashes dropping and rising. He saw him lift the gun again and aim. Sighting his prey. He lowered it, moved another step. Focused, insanely focused. Charlie held his breath again. When the man moved once more, he raised his right hand and fired the Glock, seven inches from Hassan’s left temple.

The rifle fell to the asphalt first, then Hassan on top of it.

Charlie quickly checked the man’s pockets for a wallet, a cell phone, cash, anything at all. Nothing. His pockets were empty. He left him there and hurried through the alley to the north street end, then a block and a half to the Peugeot. He drove through the busy night streets toward the harbor.

They had surprised him in Kampala. This time, he had won. But Frederick Collins was going to have to disappear now. For good. And, for a while at least, Charles Mallory would have to disappear, too.

THE
WEEKLY AMERICAN
OFFICES
were in the Foggy Bottom section of Northwest Washington, a few blocks from the State Department and about a half mile from the National Mall. The magazine occupied the first three floors of a small 1960s office building: advertising and circulation on the first floor, editorial on the second, executive offices on the third.

Jon Mallory kept a cubbyhole office on the second floor, which he shared with another writer. Jon visited the offices once or twice a week, mostly to talk with Roger Church, his editor. Offices made him uneasy.

Once he finished going through his e-mails, he knocked twice on Church’s office door, which was always one-third open. Church was a rangy, soft-spoken Brit with a mop of silvery hair, once an almost legendary international reporter who seemed trapped now in an editor’s job.

He looked up from his computer and motioned for Jon to come in and close the door. As was customary, his tie had been loosened three or four inches, his shirt sleeves rolled up below his elbows.

“Busy?”

“No. Please.”

Church, who always seemed willing to engage in conversation, had the restless energy of a twenty-five-year-old and the weathered, lined face of an old man. Jon Mallory admired him.

“A lot of e-mails about your blog this morning.”

“Or lack of it.”

“Yeah. People were expecting something.”

“I know, sorry. I hit a snag yesterday. Maybe I was a little premature in writing what I did.”

“No need to be sorry. As I said the other day, I’m with you on this. Nothing I’ve heard has changed that.”

Jon looked at him. “Okay,” he said. “What’ve you heard?”

Church showed a rare smile and shifted in his chair. “One of our board members weighed in,” he said. “Same concerns you’ve already heard. We’re creating ‘misleading impressions.’ Raising unnecessary questions.”

Jon could guess who: Kenneth Luskin. Billionaire investor. Executive board member of the Gardner Foundation. Colleague of Perry Gardner.

“People aren’t reading the whole story, he says,” Church went on. “They’re just seeing what the blogs and wire services pick up.”

“I hope that’s not true.”

“Some are, some aren’t.” Church stroked the sides of his chin. “I understand it, Jon. It goes with the territory. Any foundation that’s as large and influential as they are is going to be the subject of controversy from time to time. And considering all the good they do, they’re naturally going to be defensive. That’s business, and this is journalism.”

“Okay.”

“What I like about your stories is they
don’t
take a point of view. You’re writing about people. These larger issues are background. Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with letting people know a little about how philanthropies operate. How charitable foundations invest their money. I’d like to see a third story.”

“Good. I would, too.”

Church looked out toward the State Department building rising above the university offices and a parking garage. “You know, Jon, there was a man I used to know called Arthur Caswell. A great reporter who once worked for British intelligence in Africa.” He absently tugged at his shirt sleeve. “One of his pet theories was that over the past several decades, the West—America in particular—has become overwhelmed by what he called moral laziness. He characterized it as an epidemic that worsened proportionally as the world’s problems worsened. He had this idea about active endorsement versus passive endorsement, and how we’ve increasingly come to passively endorse some very terrible things. He’d give the example of what happened at the end of World War II—the fire-bombings and the nuclear annihilation of Japanese cities, which killed tens of thousands of civilians—as active endorsement.”

“We endorsed them in the context of the war.”

“Yes. We even rationalized that they had a moral purpose.”

“Preventing millions of additional deaths, supposedly, had the war continued,” Jon said.

“Yes, supposedly. More recently, we have accepted that tens of thousands of civilians died in Iraq in the course of our war there.”

“That’s active endorsement.”

“Yes. Passive endorsement is different: Knowing an atrocity is occurring and making no effort to stop it, even if we have the capacity and the resources to do so. Or, worse, not bothering to think about it. Keeping our concerns narrow and close to home. Eyes closed.”

“Like Rwanda? Or Darfur?”

“Among many other examples, yes. This kind of endorsement, of course, has no moral purpose. Caswell used to say that as problems worsen, particularly in the developing world, we will become increasingly lazy in our response, as a kind of deflective mechanism. Otherwise, we would become too overwhelmed.”

Jon shrugged an acknowledgment. “Kind of makes sense.”

“Your stories are telling people things about a part of the world they know very little about. About countries they’ve never even heard of. Places that ninety-nine percent of them will never visit. I think that’s good, Jon. Let’s keep telling them things they don’t know. Maybe open some people’s eyes a little.”

Church turned to Jon, then. He was frowning. “So, anyway, what’s the snag?”

“Pardon?”

“You said you hit a snag.”

“Oh. My source disappeared.”

“Your brother.”

Jon nodded. Roger was the only person he had told about his anonymous sources—and only after some coercion; it was the only way the magazine would run his stories. He had revealed two of them, the only two he had: Big Gulp, a telephone source who lived in Silicon Valley and sometimes called Jon from pay phones outside 7-Elevens, and his brother.

“Disappeared how?”

“He was supposed to call yesterday.”

“And? …”

Jon showed the palms of his hands. “He didn’t. He was going to give me something.”

“ ‘New details,’ you said.”

“Yeah. But something happened.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. I know my brother.” Jon Mallory looked away, worried suddenly that something had happened to Charlie, that he might be dead. “Anyway, I think I’m going to travel for a bit. Thinking about maybe taking a little trip to Saudi Arabia. See some of the sights.”

Church tugged at one sleeve, then the other. “Joking?”

“Partly.”

Jon stood to go.

“Oh, by the way, if you haven’t seen Melanie Cross’s blog from last night, you might take a look.”

“Okay,” Jon said, wincing. “Thanks, Roger, as always.”

Jon left the door a third of the way open, as Church liked. His heart began to race as he walked down the hallway, thinking about Melanie’s blog, which he had avoided looking at today. He returned to his closet-sized office, booted the computer, hit his “Favorites” button. Clicked open her site. “Cross Currents,” she called it. In large letters under the name, in case anyone missed the pun, was her byline: “By Melanie Cross.”

He skimmed through her entry from the night before. This one seemed pretty straightforward: a Federal Trade Commission insider’s reaction to the proposed merger of a major online ad-serving company with one of the world’s largest search engines—a story she’d been covering in the newspaper. But then Jon’s eyes drifted to the bottom of the entry, to her “Etc.” section, and he saw what Roger was talking about: