It was an impressive show of force. We were all armed up with nowhere to go.

Okay, I admit it, I am a big fan of Jack Reacher, Easy Rawlins, Dave Robicheaux, Spenser, all the crime-solving tough guys, but as Howie had taught me, real-life investigations rarely involve punching out bad guys or figuring out the meaning of some obscure clue that had evaded even the most astute readers. Good information almost always comes from a reliable source or deep digging into piles of boring paperwork. I Zoomed, Skyped, Duo’ed, and FaceTimed with reporters and continually checked in with my sources. I put Mighty Chair to work too, giving Cher key names, words, and phrases and telling her to scour the internet for them. She reported regularly, “I have not found those words yet, boss.”

“Thank you, Cher,” I replied, still amused that I couldn’t help thanking her.

I activated my Rollie Network, reaching way back to my days in the field. This was the real worldwide net, consisting of many good people with whom I had grown up in the world of guns, guts, and secrets. People I had met on my path whom I knew I could trust. It included men and women I had worked with and fought side by side with in my first life, as well as those I had met and cultivated in my second life—mercs and spooks who were still living on the dark side, chasing bad guys and developing good intel, as well as people who had moved into management positions, often in international or corporate security. They were spread out across the world, my PEWS, my personal early warning system.

I dug deep and came up with a jumble of nothing. Everybody had heard something, but none of it made sense to me. Too many wires were crossing and leading nowhere. A lot of might-be’s and could-be’s, a few look-at-those-guys. It was a new offshoot of ISIS. It was a resurgent Taliban. It was Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Boko Haram; it was Al-Shabab; it was the homegrown White Legion of Honor; it was a team of mercs employed by North Korea or Russia. It was Colonel Mustard in the parlor with the candlestick. I didn’t buy any of it. The most sophisticated watchers in history were using the most sophisticated technology to keep track of these people. If they pooped in Pakistan, we would hear it in Langley.

A guy who didn’t exist working at a place with no name that wasn’t there, a battle buddy I had pulled out of a burning Humvee in my last life, hinted that an alliance had been formed between two or more terrorist organizations. He had no names—“an all-star team of bad guys,” he called them. Maybe, but doubtful; if that had been true, somebody somewhere sometime would have overheard a whisper or droned in on two people together who shouldn’t have been together. More than that, though, the competition between these groups for funding, for recruits, for power, for recognition was so extreme it was impossible for me to believe they could work together to plan, coordinate, and carry out attacks of this magnitude. I’d spent almost three years moving in and out of Afghanistan. At times I went to places that don’t show up on any maps, meeting with shadows, enlisting cooperation, making payoffs, carrying messages. Some tribal feuds go back generations. These were men who would pull knives arguing over what to have for dinner. No way I believed they could get along well enough for long enough to pull off something like this. And then keep quiet about this success? No, no way. But. But if it was true … if they had figured out how to cooperate, now that was a scary thought.