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intersections. Technicals were more common than police cars. Jack saw a burning car on a side street but not a person in sight, only a pack of wild dogs foraging for food.
    Yet beyond the filth and chaos were touches of natural beauty, from green mountains beyond the city limits, to soaring palm trees at the edge of white sand beaches, to the sparkling blue Mediterranean. If the breeze was right, fresh salt air cut through the city’s stink. Grapevines and guava trees graced stately old homes. Impressive ruins from past civilizations dotted the region. Dreamers whosquinted and held their noses imagined that Benghazi had the raw makings of a beach resort.
    Rone drove along the Fifth Ring Road at the outer reaches of the city to avoid temporary barricades and checkpoints. He cut across to the Fourth Ring Road, then wended his way to the Western Fwayhat neighborhood. The area was Benghazi’s best address, home to decent restaurants and pricey stores, where the remaining foreign envoys clustered in estates surrounded by walls of cinderblock, mud, and stone topped with razor wire and broken glass. Although the neighborhood was better than most, it was still Benghazi.
    As they approached the CIA Annex, Rone taught Jack the names that the GRS operators used for the local streets, like Racetrack, Gunfighter, and Adidas. Not far from their destination, Rone radioed the front gate so he and Jack wouldn’t be vulnerable while waiting for someone to let them in. Soon Jack would meet the other contract operators at the Annex, men he’d come to know as Tanto, Tig, D.B., and Oz, along with a CIA staffer who was the GRS Team Leader.
    In his radio call, Rone reported that he had minimal control of the pickup, meaning that he had left the vehicle for a period of time while at the airport. An agency staffer who oversaw Annex security would need to inspect under the hood, around the wheels, and everywhere else someone who hated Americans might have planted a bomb.
    Rone and Jack pulled up to a steel gate in a ten-foot-high concrete-and-brick wall. Security cameras looked down on them. Although it was supposed to be a secret location, or at least a discreet one, Jack immediately realized that they weren’t fooling anyone. Even a casual observer would havenoticed the tight security, not to mention the carloads of Americans driving in and out, day and night.
    The gate to the CIA’s Benghazi Annex compound swung open. A guard raised a steel traffic arm and waved Rone and Jack inside.

TWO
    The Annex

    R ONE AND J ACK PULLED INTO THE CIA A NNEX, A LUSH, walled oasis in the rough desert of Benghazi. Originally built by a wealthy Libyan hotel owner as a multifamily compound, the property was nearly square and covered more than two acres of land. Its generous size, perimeter walls, and multiple houses, but most of all its proximity to the State Department’s Special Mission Compound, made it an ideal base of operations for the US covert intelligence service. For a price, the hotel owner was happy to rent it to the Americans and move his family elsewhere.
    The Annex’s main features were a guard post, a gardener’s shack, and four comfortable one-story houses, each with about three thousand square feet of living space. Large, well-tended lawns stretched behind each house to the surrounding walls. The houses were repurposed as combination work and residential quarters for roughly twenty Americans on-site, including the Benghazi CIAbase chief, Bob; his deputy; male and female case officers; analysts; translators; specialists; and GRS operators. A wide driveway cut diagonally through the Annex property. At its center was a small triangular courtyard where four turtles wandered in the shade of a picnic table.

    After the pickup was checked for explosives, Rone drove Jack to the farthest house from the gate, which the Americans called “Building C.” The Annex’s command center, Building C contained the most secure intelligence area, the Sensitive