“No, not for a while.” Peyton looked around, wondering if he would say something else. Finally, she said, “What about you?”

“No, me either. Kind of tough with the job.”

“I know what you mean.”

Jonas’s mood seemed a little lighter, his nervousness gone. He put the backpack over his shoulders and walked to the door. “All right then. Lock up tight. See you in a few.”

“Will do,” Peyton said, watching him leave, a puzzled expression still on her face.

She took a triangular wooden block from her duffel and wedged it under the door. Just in case, she also moved a wood-framed chair from the desk and placed it against the door handle. She set a can of mace by her bed and hid a sheathed boot knife under the pillow beside her.

She assumed that the hotel washed the sheets regularly but figured the comforters were rarely cleaned, just wiped off and left to collect all manner of germs and bugs from hundreds of guests each year. So she took the comforter off the queen size bed she would sleep in and placed it on the dresser. She definitely didn’t want it near her face. Being germ-conscious sort of came with the territory in her line of work.

For the first few years of her career, she had done exactly what she’d advised her EIS agents to do: she had called her mother whenever she landed for a deployment. As she’d grown older, she had gotten out of the habit, but that night in Nairobi, sitting on the stripped bed in her hotel room, Peyton dialed her mother.

Lin Shaw answered on the second ring, and Peyton got the impression that she had been crying.

“Everything all right?” Peyton asked.

“Yes, dear. Where are you?”

Peyton told her, and they made small talk, about the flight, and her sister, and her mother’s quilting. After Peyton’s father passed away, Lin had raised her son and two daughters alone. Peyton had always been close to her mother, but that night, for the first time in years, her mother ended the call by saying, “I love you very much.”

When she hung up, Peyton wondered if her mother was sick. She got the distinct feeling there was a secret of some sort her mother wasn’t telling her.

For some reason, her mind wandered to her brother, Andrew. He had died in Uganda, in 1991, while working on an AIDS awareness campaign for the WHO and Ugandan government. On a hot summer day in August, he was working in a village in the eastern part of the country, inside Mount Elgon National Park, when a forest fire consumed the village, killing Andrew, his Ugandan liaison, and all the residents. They had to verify his identity based on dental records and personal effects. At the funeral, on an overcast day in San Francisco, there was very little left to bury.