She pulled a chair toward the bed, her voice was nearly a whisper. “I will share details with you because I think Julius was right. But this is not for your magazine and this is not because I trust you. We—Julius and I—must bring Ncube to justice. It’s the only way to stop this country’s cycle. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” he said flatly.

“No one, Tom, can know.”

“You can trust me, Hungry.” His words were just sounds in the air.

She responded with the sigh of a prosecutor who was long past hoping for the truth. She took a deep breath and began. “Okay. A year ago we received a tip on our corruption hotline. Go to a certain spaza shop. We went and we found a row of thumb drives taped beneath a shelf. The drives contained over a terabyte of documents. At first we assumed it was simply evidence of corrupt business deals. It turned out to be much larger. Each of the individual deals was a leg, a segment of a leg. There were multiple legs. We don’t know how many. They all connect to a single body.”

“Who?”

She waited. “No one, Tom, can know.”

“I won’t tell anyone, Hungry.”

“It’s an investment fund of some kind run by Terry Krieger. The partners are intelligence agencies from around the world. There’s MI6, Mossad, the Australians, our people. The CIA is an investor, Tom.”

Klay stood and started to pace, grinding a palm into his forehead. “CIA and Krieger.”

She continued, “Ncube is one of their . . . I don’t even know what to call it . . . one of their facilitators.”

Klay faced Hungry. “How do you know this?”

“We broke the code on one of the projects. A tin mine in Congo. There was an insurrection, Krieger’s people took it over. We identified the South African intelligence officer involved. That was our Rosetta stone. We’ve been slowly deciphering their operations ever since.”

“Kisie,” Klay interrupted.

“Kisie. Yes, that was the name of the mining town. How did you know?”

Had the Agency used him? Had Eady used him?

“I need to meet the intelligence officer you identified,” he said.

“Not possible.”

“You questioned him directly?”

“We did,” she said uneasily.

“Hungry, I need to see him. What’s his name?”

“His name was Mo Rademeyer. State Security Agency. And he’s dead.”

“Tied to this?”

“It presented like a home robbery, but he’d been tortured, beyond the usual.”

Klay processed the geometry of what she was telling him.

Hungry continued, “Your CIA and Terry Krieger are colluding with Ncube to prey on my country. Ncube holds the door open for them.”

Klay crossed to the window. He edged the curtain away from the wall and looked outside. Across the street was a Wimpy Burger and a KFC. Below the street was lined with cars; pedestrians going places like insects, leading normal lives. “When was it?”