“Wave off if it doesn’t feel right,” Pickens said. “We can always do it tomorrow.”

“We’ll do a couple of dry runs when you’re back.”

—

PICKENS HAD BEEN gone for a couple of hours by the time Jake started the old Toyota Corolla. The car’s white paint had absorbed so much sunshine over the years that it had blistered and cracked, but it blended in seamlessly with the fabric of Mogadishu.

He had the IMSI catcher on the passenger seat next to him.

Saahid’s house was on the northwestern edge of the city, close to the Dayniile district, and Jake noticed two vehicles that seemed to take an unusual interest in him during the forty-minute drive, but he carefully followed a surveillance detection route that he and Pickens had established. The silver pickup truck that had followed him for several blocks turned away after Jake drove around a traffic circle, and the man on the motorcycle continued on when Jake made a U-turn at an intersection. It was a sparsely populated area and, after he passed a beige hatchback heading in the opposite direction, he was alone on the road.

Jake had spent countless hours poring over imagery during his time as an analyst—searching for clues in photographs taken from air, land, sea, and space. For years, he’d used cutting-edge technologies such as spectral imaging, ground penetrating radar, and persistent wide-area aerial surveillance to evaluate potential threats from half a world away.

But there was no substitute for being on the ground.

The tree cover in the pirate’s neighborhood was denser than when the satellite images had been taken and the road was narrower and in worse condition. Trash covered the roadside where shadows mottled the ground. He could manage no more than ten miles per hour in the low-slung Toyota as he bounced over the rutted dirt road.

Jake began to have doubts. With the only access road in such poor condition, it would be risky to snatch the pirate from his home—and that assumed he was home; the IMSI catcher hadn’t yet registered a signal.

Cellular coverage was spotty in the area, and it was possible that Saahid didn’t use the phone at home, or maybe he was simply out for a few hours, but the alarm in the back of Jake’s mind that had kept him alive in some of the worst places on earth was starting to ring.

He checked his rearview mirror.

There were no one else in sight.

He’d just returned his eyes to the road when he spotted a tree that had fallen across half the road. He swerved onto the shoulder and the sun glinted off a discarded paint can, stuck in a pile of trash.