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robe belt. Secures his wrists with the laces from the man’s running shoes. Gags him with a washcloth. Slips the Viper into the small of his back—no need to advertise. Unfolds the knife, using its tip to coax open theman’s thin wallet and clamshell cell phone. He memorizes the last four numbers called. He’ll need to write them down in the next few minutes; his memory isn’t what it once was.
    The dishwasher regains consciousness with a kind of terror in his eyes that serves a purpose for Knox: the man is not used to this kind of treatment. He’s new at this. An amateur.
    Things just keep getting better and better.
    Knox can taste the sandstorm; feel the grit between his teeth. A look out the window confirms a premature nightfall; the city’s in the heart of a violent dust cloud. The condition can last for days. It can ground aircraft, stop taxis and buses from running. Be a real pain in the ass.
    Knox speaks kindergartner Arabic, hoping his message gets through.
    “You were sent?” Knox says. He moves his own head first in a nod, then shaking to indicate “no.” He repeats his question.
    The man nods.
    Knox has found no weapons on the man.
    “To hurt me,” he states.
    The man panics.
    “To watch me.”
    Another violent shake of the head.
    “To warn me.”
    Again.
    “To tell me.”
    The man nods.
    Knox plucks the towel from the man’s mouth. The dishwasher speaks far too fast. Knox picks out: “Akram,” “speak,” but loses the rest. He allows the man time to calm down.
    “Again,” Knox says.
    This time he gets: “Akram speak you.”
    Knox toys with the man’s phone with the knife.
    “I call?”
    The dishwasher shakes his head.
    “Not here.”
    “Where?”
    “Machine café.” It takes Knox a moment to process “machine” as “computer.”
    He glances back at the window, moving like the skin of a timpani drum as it’s buffeted by the wind.
    “Shit,” Knox says.

7
    A rriving at Atatürk International, Istanbul’s primary airport, Grace is both tired and hungry. She doesn’t want to do the math to determine how tired, but doesn’t require calculations to know how hungry. She has an hour and seven minutes before Mashe Okle, traveling as Mashe Melemet, is scheduled to land. She sits down with a salad at Greenfields, carrying a soy mocha from Starbucks. She calls her driver, tells him to wait. Kills forty-five minutes eating slowly while catching up on iPhone e-mails.
    Grace does not do well with free time. Her brain gets ahead of itself and starts tripping over discarded thoughts like a lost hiker stumbling over fallen limbs in the forest. Even at a meal, as tired as she is, she can’t help herself.
    She embedded code in the Emirates Airline’s server to alert her to any outside IP addresses searching the manifest for flight numbers 975 and 123. She built a trap to catch others like herself as a security measure, something Emirates should have done in the first place. Having received no such alerts, she has every reason to believe she’s alone in having identified the Melemet alias and flight schedule. But her mind won’t let it be.
    Ten minutes.
    Immigration desks are the fly strips of terrorism pest control. Face recognition software has improved exponentially in the past five years, to the point at which X-ray imaging in an airport’s full-body scanner can utilize an individual’s skull features to overcome attempts at disguise like glasses and wigs. If the man Grace is set to follow has tripped a list in Tehran or the UAE or is identified passing through Immigration here in Turkey, airport security will follow him. Turkish agents might arrest him. Where does that leave Dulwich’s plan? Why weren’t contingencies made?
    A Knox rule she’s absorbed: you can’t win the game if you don’t know all the players.
    Dulwich has either been told Okle is not in the international database of persons of interest, or Dulwich’s mystery client is none other than the Turkish government or