“The other day, with Julius. You knew all about his pistol. I asked him later, and he said you were right about the recall. Something about the early model firing when you dropped it. He said the Vektor’s not a very well-known gun.”

Pride, Klay chided himself, your fucking pride. He had fired a Vektor during his training with Major Thomas, part of his foreign weapons module. “I did a story on guns once,” he said. “Mechanical evolution of firearms. Blunderbuss to AR-15s, I think it was. That one was so futuristic it just stuck up here.” He pointed to his head.

“Yeah,” Tenchant said, “that’s what I figured. But when I searched online for gun stories by you, I didn’t find any . . .”

Relentless fuck.

Klay got to his feet, turned his back to Tenchant, and switched on the television with a remote. “Did you do a search on memory? Because mine’s not as good as it used to be. Must have been back when I freelanced. I did all kinds of stories back then. Happy to forget most of them.”

“Yeah, no doubt. Anyway, tomorrow I’ll start data mining, run transforms on the companies and names I came up with, and generate a link analysis we can look at. It’s going to be a helluva spiderweb, I’ll tell you that.”

Klay wiped his face with his T-shirt. “Do you have anything juicy I can use to surprise Botha? I’d like to disrupt his world tomorrow.”

“Not yet. What time’s your meeting?”

“Eleven.”

“Not enough time. I could hack it.”

Klay looked at him. “Hack what?”

“The Dogs’ air-gapped network. I have the feeling Sehlalo’s not giving me everything, you know? If we go early, you’d just need to have everybody in Hungry’s office for a few minutes with the door closed. Or get them outside somehow . . .”

“No. Out of the question. We’re not hacking Hungry’s internal system.”

“Okay. I was just throwing it out there,” Tenchant said and went back to reading his email.

“Out of curiosity,” Klay said, “could you do it?”

Tenchant’s eyes stayed on his laptop. “Yep.”

Klay sighed. “The answer is no.” For now, he thought.

“Got it. Maggie says hello,” Tenchant said. “She wants to know if I’ve seen an elephant yet. Do you think we will?”

“No. We’re on deadline.”