“What’s the ‘fee’?” the pilot asked.

Sometimes it was better to let him set the price.

“Sixty thousand shillings,” said the agent—about a hundred U.S. dollars.

Not good, thought the pilot. Way too low for a guy who wants to play ball.

“Nothing extra for the late hour?” the pilot asked, holding out two hundred thousand.

The agent took sixty and wrote out a receipt. He was either the only honest cop in Somalia or already on someone else’s payroll.

Jake handed over a false passport, often called a “shoe” in the intelligence community. The agent pulled out a handheld scanner and interrogated the RFID chip inside the passport’s cover to corroborate the information printed between its covers.

But the shoe fit and the agent continued his inspection, checking the aft baggage compartment and looking under the seats with a flashlight. He opened all the luggage and examined the lavatory. He examined the cockpit and especially the communications gear. Apparently, whoever he was working for wanted a detailed report on the U.S. jet.

“What is the nature of your visit?” the officer asked.

“I’m looking for investment opportunities,” Jake said. He still had to play the game.

“Where are you staying?”

“The Jazeera Palace Hotel.”

The officer wrote it down and handed Jake the receipt.

Jake entered the glass-walled terminal. It was nearly deserted, with only AMISOM troops, Somali soldiers, and bomb-sniffing dogs inside. He caught a taxi to the Jazeera Palace, adjacent to the airport, where he ordered breakfast. He went to the lavatory before it arrived, changed his clothes, and slipped out the back of the hotel, where he took a second cab to another hotel.

Pickens was waiting down the block in the Toyota SUV.

“How did it go?” he asked.

“A shipping agent fed the pirates targeting data for the two Romanos ships.”

As was Pickens’s custom, the surveillance detection route took them through a particularly rough area of town where armed men loitered about and the few cars on the road were easy to spot.

Jake had a cable from headquarters waiting for him back at the safe house. The Agency had created a dossier on the Somali banker, with everything from his phone contacts and known associates to email traffic and internet browsing history. He’d been active in Mogadishu for decades, initially as a facilitator for the pirate syndicates, helping them collect ransom money and hide it from the international authorities.

But as the era of open-ocean kidnapping drew to a close, the man’s reputation as a money-laundering expert gave him entrée to the arms dealers and the warlords who kept the country at war. Jake pored over the dossier, looking for commonalities and building an association matrix—cross-referencing his phone records with shared contacts, dates, and events. The deeper Jake dug, the more links he found with one specific arms dealer, Cawar, and one specific warlord:

Yaxaas.

TWENTY-EIGHT