Yet here he was plastered into a seat ten thousand feet above the ground—oh, perdition take that particular line of thinking—on the strength of a single phone call.

He clutched the armrest as the plane banged through another patch of rough air, and reassured himself: This was not some cutthroat warlord baring rotten teeth, parting with dubious information at an inflated price. This was Prince Asiyah Sekibou, intelligence baron, just this side of an old friend. The last person Aristide knew who had seen Cyril DePaul alive, the last to speak to him, to hear his radio transmissions, and he was asking for nothing at all.

That roused Aristide’s suspicions. Asiyah wanted something from him. But as many stones as he turned searching for some reason the prince might be lying—a trap, a ploy, a plot—he found he could not convince himself it was anything less than the truth. That certainty took the bottom out of his belly more surely than the airplane’s sudden change in altitude as the pilot brought them down toward Souvay-Dadang International.

Asiyah was waiting on the tarmac in the back of a black auto that would have been discreet at the curb, but was less so parked in the midst of a dozen airplanes.

Dawn had just begun to breathe into the east, paling the cobalt sky where it was not already bleached by the lights of Dadang. A bald woman in aviator sunglasses she did not need held the rear passenger door for Aristide, then got into the driver’s seat and put the car in gear.

“It’s good to see you,” said Asiyah. He did not look as if he had been to bed; stubble textured the skin of his jaw, and there was a small stain on the front of his wrinkled red tunic, as though he had spilled—

“Coffee?” He offered Aristide a green metal thermos.

Aristide took the flask and cranked the lid open. A blast of bitter, fragrant steam cleared his altitude-stuffed sinuses and blunted the edge of his headache. It caught in the back of his throat and made him start to cough: a phlegmy hack that had latched onto his lungs about a year ago, which no mentholated cigarette or mustard compress would dislodge. He should see a doctor, but after his last appointment he was honestly afraid to. Like the plane, it put ice in his belly that even the barrel of a gun would not.

He poured coffee carefully into the lid of the thermos, which doubled as a cup. “Did you expect I might be drunk?” he asked, in between cautious sips.

Asiyah shrugged. “I only thought you might need something.”

Aristide poured a second cup and swallowed too quickly, to keep from saying something tart, which his disheveled state would instantly belie. When he had finished, he screwed the lid back into place and, addressing the thermos rather than Asiyah, asked, “Well. Where is he?”

“Safe.”