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Madrid.”
    Morrow thought for a moment. “The boy saw them?”
    “Andrews, yes. Damien, maybe.”
    “No. We'll use Kurtz. I assume everything's cleared up on the London end of things.”
    “They might know each other,” Janson reminded him. “From Bagram.”
    Morrow thought for a moment. A bad idea, and getting worse, he told himself. But then Kurtz had as much to lose as the rest of them. More, in fact. “Fax me what you have on the woman,” Morrow said. “I'll drive out to see her this morning.”
    A DECADE PREPARING FOR THIS MOMENT , Kat had thought as she stood at the Tangier ferry dock, paralyzed by fear. Ten years of study, and now that she was facing the place she wanted nothing more than to turn and run. She had expected a different Morocco altogether, Africa and Islam tempered by years of colonial rule into something pleasantly and unthreateningly foreign. But for this—the formless women in their black chadors, the grubby children who would not be put off, the frightening men with their leering offers of assistance—she had not been prepared.
    Europe. North Africa. Egypt. Turkey, she could hear herself say, Who knows?
    That first night, humiliated by her own weakness, recoiling at the filth and desperation of the place, she had gratefully allowed herself to be driven past the squalor of the medina, past the African prostitutes ranting outside the Bab el-Marsa and the mass of child beggars at the port entrance, to a tourist hotel in the ville nouvelle.
    Later, safely ensconced in her room, with its beige furnishings and fleur-de-lis wallpaper, she had assured herself that her discomfort had been a product of exhaustion; that, once she ate and slept, the panic she'd felt since stepping off the ferry would fade. The next day she would get up early and have coffee at one of Burroughs's little cafés on the Petit Socco, then hike up through the crooked streets of the old city to the casbah.
    But in the morning, after sleeping late, she ordered room service instead: strong French coffee and croissants, with two fried eggs. Sustenance, she told herself, for the day ahead. And what did it matter if she lingered? She had weeks here, months if she so chose.
    By the time she showered and dressed and left her room, it was early afternoon on the eleventh of September, the world she was about to enter and her relation to it already utterly and irrevocably changed.
    Downstairs, a small group of guests were huddled around the lobby television watching the first disturbing images of the attack on the World Trade Center. The second plane had not yet hit, and the early consensus was that there had been a terrible accident. But even in those first confusing moments Kat had known otherwise, had understood that she would be going home. And despite herself, despite the horror of what had happened, she had been relieved that this was the case, that she would not have to venture any further.
    She had not known about Max then, had not even imagined that her brother might be there in the towers. It was almost three weeks before she called her mother and learned that he was among the missing.
    A week later, while Kat was still in New York sorting through the detritus of Max's unfinished life, the official notification came through, informing Kat that she had three days to pack her bags and close up her own life before reporting for duty. Two months after that, she found herself on the frigid tarmac in Karshi-Khanabad, waiting for the C-130 that would take her and the rest of the interrogation team to Kandahar.
    K AT KICKED HER FRONT DOOR CLOSED behind her and lunged for the phone, slamming the receiver to her ear without bothering to look at the caller ID.
    “Hello?”
    Stuart's voice was so much like Colin's, their lowland accents so closely matched, that for a moment Kat was fooled into thinking everything was fine.
    “Colin?”
    He hesitated before correcting her. “No, it's Stu.”
    “What's wrong?” she asked