“Fair enough. The square mile containing the town of Iria in southern Syria has to be looked at not by us but by satellites. Ours is called TecSAR. It’s very modern, I’m told. Its product will be flashed back to this building and examined by experts. They will debate like rabbis. They will come up with what looks promising to them. Drones will be dispatched to follow up on the promising areas. Lower-level, longer overhead, more precise cameras. They will return, their film will be developed, and that will be examined by the same experts to see what is what.”

“When will all this happen?” said Bob.

“It happened yesterday,” said Cohen.

•   •   •

It took a while for him to adjust his eyes. The room was dark, hushed, pristine, and without personality, full of cut-rate office furniture in the style of the ’50s, and so air-conditioned it was like a meat locker. Cohen and Gold and a more somber man, who said nothing, sat around the table, waiting patiently as Bob examined the twenty-by-twenty-inch sheaves of photo paper placed before him, sometimes using the jeweler’s loupe provided. He had trouble manipulating the awkwardly large sheets before him.

“You can’t do this on a screen?” he asked. “And click on sections you want to look at closely? Like in the movies?”

“We haven’t caught up with the movies, that’s on next year’s budget. Then again, that has been the case with budgets for the last ten years. Always something happens.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll try my best.”

At first, it was just patches of light and dark, slashed by white streaks, occasionally with some kind of nubbin on the streak. There were, as well, dark smears of some kind of textured fabric, and occasionally a cluster of squares, some larger than others. It was abstract. A compass embossed on each photo established true north, and a rubric underneath issued data on time, altitude, position by longitude and latitude, as well as other information he didn’t understand.

“The drones are quite helpful,” said Gold. “They fly too high to be visible with the naked eye—even Juba’s—but their camerawork is quite detailed. Time over target: six hours. Two drones on-site, ever since the TecSAR pictures looked interesting. This stuff is a few hours old. Perhaps our friend Sergeant Swagger might bring something to it our interpreters don’t understand.”

Bob went through the photos again, beginning to make sense of them. The streaks were road, the patches were field, the dark smears were hills covered by forest, the squares were farmhouses, the smaller squares compound outbuildings, the straight lines fences demarking patches of field. In time, he settled on two. He went over each carefully and finally discarded one of them.

“This one,” he said to the men at the table, indicating the remaining photograph.