Just a week earlier, the surrounding neighborhood had been evacuated and sealed when security forces were alerted to a smoking vehicle on a nearby street. A military demolition team had examined the stolen delivery truck and found it packed with thousands of pounds of homemade explosives—and a faulty detonator. Traffic in the neighborhood had been frozen for the better part of a day while the bomb was defused.

Four blocks east of Villa Somalia was the safe house Pickens had been using for the past twenty-six months. It was close enough to the villa to benefit from the additional security but far enough away that it wouldn’t become bug-splat the next time someone tried to kill the president.

Like many private homes in the area, the quarter-acre property was surrounded by a high concrete wall. The small house had a pale yellow exterior and a red roof. Aside from a few pockmarks from a decade-old mortar attack, it would have looked at home anywhere in the tropics.

Pickens opened the sliding steel gate with a remote control. He kept a variety of cars, trucks, and motorbikes on the property. They were rotated often, swept regularly for tracking devices, and rented through shell corporations set up by the Agency—with the collision-damage waivers fully paid up.

Jake and Pickens walked across the small courtyard under a cloudless blue sky that had dropped less than an inch of rain on the country in the last two years. The two men entered the house and spent an hour reviewing what had gone right, and what had gone wrong, during their meeting with Dameer. They’d had several similar encounters and were still no closer to identifying who was behind the resurgence of piracy.

Jake had just suggested a change in strategy when the buzzer rang for the front gate. A live video feed popped up on Pickens’s cell phone of a lone man standing on the street. Lean, relaxed, with a medium-brown complexion and an untucked shirt, he looked like half the men in Somalia.

Pickens buzzed him through the gate and led him through the front door.

“I’m Steve,” he said as he shook hands with Jake.

“Steve is a major in Army Special Forces,” said Pickens. “His team is here killing terrorists.”

“Our mission,” Steve clarified, “is to improve border security, allow the rule of law to take hold, and give the democratically elected Somali National Government a chance to save the country.”

“That’s a tall order,” Jake said. “How are you going about it?”

“By killing terrorists,” Steve deadpanned. “Over the past six months we’ve started using their tactics against them: disruptive attacks, destroying their infrastructure, and killing high- and low-value targets to show them that no one is safe. It’s already hurting operations and recruitment.”