Ward nodded thoughtfully. “I concede that there’s a good chance that David’s dead. But Gideon Auma doesn’t seem to think so or he’d have pulled out. And the idea that I want you and your men to go wander around the jungle hoping to get lucky is flat-out wrong. I don’t operate that way and I wouldn’t expect you to. What I’m asking you to do is devise a safe, effective plan and then execute it.”

“You’re talking about a lot of money to chase a ghost. Equipment and good people don’t come cheap.”

Ward smiled and reached for his coffee. “Everything’s cheap to me, Mitch.”

9

ABOVE SOUTHWESTERN UGANDA

THE CIA’s Gulfstream G5 wasn’t a bad way to fly, but it wasn’t the only way. As hard as it was to believe, it had been six months since Rapp had last been on a chopper—freezing his ass off and bleeding all over everything. This time he had no bullet wounds, temperatures were in the high seventies, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. He was sitting on the floor of the cabin with his legs hanging out, savoring the hurricane of rotor wash.

He’d been surprised by how enthusiastic Claudia had been about him accepting Nick Ward’s offer, but now he was starting to understand. He’d tackled changing his life with the same all-or-nothing, sheer-force-of-will approach that he brought to everything in life. Maybe that wasn’t the answer here. Maybe trying to turn himself into a devoted family man, bike racer, and gentleman farmer overnight was overly ambitious. Normality wasn’t something he’d experienced since college, and it might be better to ease in.

“We’re coming up on the hospital,” the pilot said over Rapp’s headphones. “I’ll swing around so you can get a good look.”

“Roger that, Fred.”

The deep green of the mountaintop they were skimming suddenly dropped away, leaving hundreds of feet of air beneath his boots. He squinted into the sun as they banked to follow a red scar of a road winding through the valley below.

The terrain wasn’t that different than what surrounded his house in Virginia, though the flora seemed significantly denser. They weren’t far from Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and based on what he was seeing, it was accurately named.

Even at altitude, David Chism’s research campus was hard to miss—a black stain on the otherwise unbroken green of the landscape. A few charred walls were still standing but it didn’t look like it would take much more than a stiff breeze to collapse them. Some of the site had been excavated in what Rapp had been told was a thorough search for bodies. Apparently, a hidden safe room had been found intact but empty.