Ward handed him one of the beers and then took a seat on a sofa, indicating the one across from him. He studied Rapp carefully, absently bobbing one flip-flop on his toes as the former CIA operative sat.

“So, what’s the verdict? How did you like working for me?”

“The private sector’s not as relaxing as I was hoping.”

“I suppose not. But it wasn’t boring, right? And it was important. In my experience that motivates men like you. To the degree that there are men like you.”

Rapp took a pull on his beer. A home brew judging by the lack of a label. Pretty good.

“So, what are your thoughts on my problems, Mitch?”

“What problems?”

“Gideon Auma. If I send my people back to that area, what’s to stop him from attacking them again?”

“Nothing. Don’t send them back.”

“I don’t really have a choice. We’re doing vaccine trials there and the people have a unique genetic resistance to a potential serious side effect. Probably from a plague they survived at some time in prehistory.”

“Move them. Buy them all houses in Beverly Hills.”

“I tried. But they like it here. It’s their ancestral home.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you.”

“We could rebuild the facility with more security features.”

“You could. But Auma’s a bad combination of smart and insane. And his people are happy to die for him. The problem with trying to defend yourself by living behind walls is that you have to be perfect. If you get a hundred things right and one thing wrong, you lose. And you always get one thing wrong.”

“Then what would you recommend?”

Rapp took another drink of his beer. “The one thing you’ve got going for you with Auma’s organization is that it’s all about one man. With him gone, most of his followers would probably just go home. If I understand right, a lot of them were kidnapped when they were kids. Without him to tell them what to do and think, they’d be lost.”

“I’ve tried everything I can to get the Ugandan government to move against him, but they see it as too risky. And the American government’s even worse. The only person who cares less about Uganda than President Alexander did is President Cook.”

Rapp pointed through the slats that made up the house and toward the horizon. “You’ve built yourself your own little principality here. And that means no government’s going to have much of an incentive to interfere with you. But they’re not going to have much of an incentive to help you, either. Being the master of all you survey is only half the job. The other half is defending it.”

“I’ve never really thought of myself as a prince or the master of all I survey.”

“Really? Why not?”