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being innocent would probably be the worst thing that could happen to someone in a place like this. What were they going to do, admit that for three, five, seven years, they’d caged up a guy who
—oops
—hadn’t even done anything, and never even gave him a hearing? Yeah, fat chance of that. Better to just leave you where you are. You’d been there that long already, and it wasn’t like anyone was asking about you. Let sleeping dogs lie, baby. Wait long enough, and eventually they’d be sleeping for good.
    The next morning, as he dozed on the concrete, he was awakened by a hard poke in his ribs, which were still bruised from some well-placed kicks delivered by Manila’s finest. He shot to his feet, his back to the wall, adrenaline rocketing through him. Threeguards regarded him, their truncheons out. He looked from one to the other. Reasonably good odds, maybe, but what was he going to do—cut through these three and then levitate over the wall?
    One of the guards motioned with his truncheon. Ben nodded and started walking.
    They took him to a small room with faded green cinder-block walls and a single rattling fan that in its uselessness seemed only to worsen the clinging wet heat. A black man in jeans, sneakers, and a red polo shirt, obviously fit and somewhere in his fifties, was sitting at a peeling linoleum table in the center of the room, his shaved head beaded in perspiration. He shook his head in mild disapproval as Ben entered.
    “Damn, son,” he said in his gravelly Mississippi Delta baritone. “You look like shit warmed over.”
    Despite everything that had happened between them, and despite the humiliation of having his commander find him like this, Ben was so flooded with relief his legs went rubbery. He knew his situation was bad, but until this moment he hadn’t realized just how near he’d been to actual despair, how convinced he was beginning to feel that no one would ever find him.
    He breathed in and out a few times, pulling himself together. When he trusted himself to speak, he said, “What are you doing here, Hort?”
    Hort laughed, the sound deep and not at all unfriendly. As always, Ben was struck by the man’s complete ease and confidence, by his natural command presence. Colonel Scott Horton was a legend in the black ops community. He had personally designed and now commanded Ben’s secret unit, the absurdly blandly named Intelligence Support Activity, and his exploits in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and elsewhere were such that he was held in awe not just by his men, but even by the Joint Special Operations Command brass who were his nominal superiors.
    The laugh slowly died away, a paternal grin lingering in its aftermath. “When I heard they had visiting hours in hell, I just couldn’t stay away.”
    “I don’t need you to bail me out.”
    This was so obviously untrue Ben immediately felt like a blustering child for saying it, and expected another baritone chuckle in response.
    Instead, Hort said, “It’s not a question of what you need. I’m responsible for you.”
    Ben knew he was being stupid, but anger was the only thing keeping him together and he was afraid to let it go. “Got a funny way of showing it.”
    “Don’t ask me to apologize for putting the mission ahead of the man, son. I already told you, it was the toughest call I’ve ever had to make.”
    Hort had been tasked with securing and erasing all knowledge of an encryption application called Obsidian. The op started with the liquidation of the inventor and the patent examiner, and would have taken out Ben’s younger brother, Alex, too, who was the inventor’s lawyer, along with Sarah Hosseini, an associate at Alex’s Silicon Valley firm. But Alex had realized he was in over his head and had called his big brother for help. Together, they’d managed to turn things around, though not before Hort, in the service of putting the mission before the man, had tried to erase all three of them.
    “Yeah, well don’t