“Not in my experience,” he said. This time his smile wasn’t as bitter. “Besides, Irene won’t let you kill me—she sees me as a useful idiot. And you still listen to her, right? She’s the only one now that Stan Hurley and Thomas Stansfield are gone.”

“You’re heading out onto some pretty thin ice now, Nick.”

“I live my life on thin ice. There’s no way for someone like me not to.”

Two men with trays appeared on the steps and Ward pointed to the table by the railing. Rapp took a seat, and they were served the springbok that Coleman had promised.

“Can I assume you’re going to question Auma, Mitch? Find out where he got his information and put an end to all this?”

Rapp didn’t answer immediately, calculating how much to say. “Yes. But it probably won’t be that simple. People with the kind of information he was fed don’t deal directly with men like him. They work through intermediaries. Finding the original source will take a little effort.”

“Everything worthwhile does,” Ward said, popping a bite of meat in his mouth and chewing thoughtfully. “So, we’ll be kept here incommunicado until you’ve tied everything up? With me watching everything I’ve built collapse? With my people’s families thinking they’re dead?”

“Look, Nick. I know this isn’t ideal, but if you want to help the world, here’s a good opportunity. We’ve got Auma and we’ve killed a lot of his followers. But there are a lot left and most of them are probably beyond redemption at this point. Without central leadership, they’ll break up into small terrorist cells and still have the capacity to bring down a lot of misery on the people around here. One of the things I can find out is the location of their camp. The Ugandan government doesn’t want to operate on the border, but Scott can. And with an exact location, he can turn that camp into a burning hole in the ground.”

They ate in silence for a few minutes before Ward broke it. “I suspect that there are a lot of children in that camp who aren’t beyond redemption. And a lot of slaves—largely young girls. They’d all die.”

“Happens every day, Nick. You’re a big-picture person. You know as well as I do that all those pictures aren’t pretty.”

Ward shook his head. “I can’t order people dead and then pay mercenaries to make it happen.”

“Why not?”

“We’ve talked about this before, Mitch. I’m wealthy. Or at least I was until I met you. But that doesn’t give me the right to do whatever I want.”