Command was established in unmarked GMC Suburbans in the satellite parking for Logan at the end of Brooks Street. The situation was not optimal. Lights were on as of 1 a.m. They awaited word on whether to go in while the three targets were awake or defer until lights out.

April slammed down the phone. “We are so fucked.”

“What?” asked Mark.

“Kamal—gone.”

“Gone? Where?”

“They go in and find some woman in there.”

“Wait, wait.”

“I’m telling you. He’s gone.”

Lahouari, Ali, and Hamid were sleeping in the living room on a mattress and a chair and a couch. Their five roommates were distributed in the kitchen, the hallway, the bathroom tub, and a bedroom that was really a closet. If you wanted to take a leak in the middle of the night, you went out the window of their ground-floor apartment and pissed in the bushes.

A naked Lahouari had tiptoed over his brothers and darted through the January air to his favorite spot behind a hedge. He was almost done when he heard what sounded like burglars. Before he could think, two men pushed him to the ground, smashing his face into ice-hard dirt and the smell of warm urine.

“Rafik made them,” Mark said. He had just hung up the phone.

“How could he? That’s not possible. Limo, Italian suits—”

“It’s two a.m. The club just closed down. They searched. Unless he’s underneath the floorboards, he’s not there.”

They wanted permission to turn on the engines and get some heat in the Suburbans. They’d been sitting there thumb-twiddling for five hours. It was freezing. The SAC said no. Everyone agreed she was a bitch.

“They’re never going to go to bed,” April said.

“I don’t get it,” Mark said. “My God, it’s three in the morning.”

“You don’t get it? I do.”

“What.”

“They’re worried about Heather. She never came home. Those lights will stay on past sunrise.”

Mark looked at April. “That’s what you heard.”

“Heard?”

“Listening.”

“Oh, in the van.”

“Yeah. You heard it in Heather’s voice. How they care about each other.”

Aziz, Mourad, and Ghazi had gone back to inking cups to keep their minds off the obvious. It was four-thirty. Something bad had happened to Heather. They’d already had the conversation about calling the police. That’s what Americans on television did. When someone went missing, they called the cops. Officer always said there was nothing they could do. We need a body, they always told the frantic family.

In the home country, no family would call the police. Police were the ones who ferried the missing to guest treatment under orders. Ghazi would call the army if he thought irhabiya were involved.

“But what could a bureaucrat answering a phone really do?” asked Mourad.

“What would you do?”

“I would call your father,” Mourad offered.