He had been unfair to the old man. It pained him, thinking of the old Yemeni’s tears. What was left of the whispers in his own heart’s dark core? He had stopped hearing them. Not because of his muddied self; he had a single-minded self, one that saw clarity where there was silt and storm. The one clear thing was running. Running from his unit, running from Antar, running from Sellami and Benane, running from his family, running from ship’s police, running from Algeria, running from the Egyptian, running from Rafik, running from women, running from trusting Ghazi, running from Hank Bridges, running from the stranger he kicked, running from the helpful security guard, and running now from the old man who had loved him. He had seen each only as threat. He had made each strange rich creature into one person with only one quality. He had made a world where there was only one person beside himself: a person to run from.

He looked out the window into an afternoon of sun. They were on a highway with leafy trees behind concrete walls. High in the bus, all he could see distinctly were the tops of cars. From his vantage, the faces of oncoming drivers were interrupted by bursts of reflected light. He looked back inside the bus. He had taken a seat in the last row, to stop anyone he could not see from approaching, a carryover from his nights at Antar’s side. Light was faint behind the bus’s smoke windows, and it took him a minute to realize that every seat was taken. He could see backs of heads and some shoulders. Every so often, a head would turn to someone or something to the left or right, and if he craned to his side or strained higher, he could see the unmistakable face of someone he had never seen before, someone too, he understood with full force, like no one else on board.

Everyone was talking at once. A judge had granted the FISA warrant. “Gentlemen,” April said. She did not smile, even though she was feeling good. She had learned women don’t smile in the bureau. You smile, you’re pegged as weak. “We are all aware of the good news, so I won’t repeat the obvious. In keeping with last meeting’s breakthrough in information-sharing, let’s go around the table, five-minute time limits. Detective Baker, why don’t you start?”

Baker was uptight; he was trying too hard.