No one knew just how big of a story a single clue might turn out to be, or how significant or profound.  Some stories, even where least expected, turned out to be genuinely earth-shattering and enough to launch even the most minor career into the journalistic stratosphere.

Others were about life and death.

15

15

When the polished chrome elevator doors parted, Mido Saad looked different from the picture Mona had found.  He was older by several years and now well into his seventies, when a person’s physical appearance seemed to accelerate to the downside, fighting against both time and fate.

His dark face was overly sullen, with cheeks whose skin was thinning along with the rest of his face and body, covering lean muscles not as strong as they once were.  His white hairline was visibly receding.

However, even with the malaise of old age well upon him, Saad’s movements betrayed nothing of the sort as he stepped purposefully from the private elevator, walking smoothly and well-balanced down a long, empty hallway covered in polished marble below beige painted walls.  Plain and unadorned, it extended almost a hundred feet to a secured doorway at the opposite end and located sixty feet below ground and more highly protected than many Swiss vaults.

Walking in silence, the only notable sound came from each step of his Berluti leather shoes off the marble flooring.  He walked slowly and methodically until he reached the reinforced metal door, where he placed his palm upon a small scanner and waited for the giant lock to disengage.  The door obediently slid open.

It was a simple room, formed from three feet of solid concrete and measuring thirty feet along each inside wall and painted in the same bright beige as the hallway. The room maintained a perfect 68-degree temperature and carried not so much as a whisper of sound.

They were called safe rooms by some.  Panic rooms by others.  But to Saad, it was more than that.  It was his thinking room.

A place utterly devoid of all distraction.

A large modern computer desk sat along one wall with its screen powered off.  Next was a bar and an overhead television screen facing four plush leather chairs covered in smooth, black Royalin leather arranged in a semicircle in the center of the room.

These were demure and modest accommodations, given the significance of both the room and its owner, all of which were merely secondary in purpose.

The room's real purpose was dedicated almost exclusively to what covered the rest of the four walls.

Hundreds of pieces of standard 8½x11 inch sheets of paper filled nearly every square inch of available surface, each carefully and meticulously hung beside one another in a veritable mosaic of drawings.  They were bright and vivid and each one hand colored.