Scalise didn’t respond. He adjusted his French cuffs. He nodded curtly to his driver, who went outside to start the car. The other man crossed the lobby and took a position beside the front door with his hand on the latch. When Scalise reached the door, the man opened it. But Scalise paused. He turned and looked directly at Klay. Tom had never encountered eyes like Scalise’s. They were small and the deepest black he had ever seen. “This your boy?”

“That’s my son,” Jack Klay answered.

Scalise put on his hat and left.

•   •   •

It was Christmastime now, still 1977. The kitchen smelled like sugar cookies. His mother asked if he and Sean wanted to help her pick out a tree. Klay ran into the front room to get his coat and mittens from the closet under the stairs. Sean ran upstairs to get their mother’s purse. Klay’s shoe had come untied. “We do not have untied shoes, uncombed hair, or shirttails out” was one of his father’s rules. Klay sat on a bench in front of the living room’s faux fireplace to tie his shoe. He was bent over, fumbling with his laces, when his mother walked past. She wore a red wool coat and black shoes.

“Wait for me,” he said, his outsized fingers fumbling the laces.

She kept walking.

He called to her again.

Finally he got his shoe tied. He was racing Sean down the morgue ramp to the driveway when his mother turned the key in the ignition. The explosion tore the doors off the garage. Klay and his brother were thrown into the street.

Nicky Scalise sent white Asiatic lilies to the funeral. “My condolences to you and your remaining family,” the card read.

•   •   •

Klay lay on the bed in Botha’s damp prison cell. He wept until he had nothing left. Then he got to his feet. He was calm. He could see beyond this room, beyond the cage he’d put himself in. He had been the boy on Krieger’s buffalo hunt. Naïve to the danger standing next to him. Unarmed in the company of killers.

•   •   •

Eliminating him was the CIA’s next logical move. Botha believed it. Why else move him to solitary, with Thabo posted outside his cell? Klay didn’t look at Botha’s laptop. He didn’t need to do research. He knew what was coming.

He poured a glass of Botha’s cognac and waited. He did not have to wait long.

A DIFFERENT SET OF TEETH

Zambian Airspace

Klay woke bound in dual shoulder restraints. Barrow sat in an oversized leather recliner across a table from him. They were in the air. Behind Barrow the private jet’s interior looked like a well-appointed home theater. The plane appeared to be empty.

“Mistakes were made,” Barrow said, dabbing his cheek. “Possibly we should have involved you from the beginning. Hard to know. These things can go so many ways.”