“I traced the originating account. Very difficult, even with sardine key. Required nonreusable backdoor codes—burned through valuable property to push through. Just like American pop song, ‘What I Did for Love,’ da?” He hummed a few bars as Janson glared. Then he reverted to the matter at hand. “Reversed asymmetric algorithm. Data-mining software go on hunt for pattern, search out signal buried in noise. Very difficult …”

“Grigori, my friend, I don’t need the War and Peace version of this. Cut to the chase, please.”

Berman shrugged, slightly miffed. “Powerful computer program does digital equivalent of triathlon competition, Olympic level, no East German steroids to help, but still identified originating account.”

Janson’s pulse began to race. “You are a wizard.”

“And all a great joke,” Berman repeated.

“What are you saying?”

Berman’s smile grew wider. “Man who pay you to kill Peter Novak? Is Peter Novak.”

As he arrived with his small convoy at the training camp, Ahmad Tabari felt a glimmering of relief. Traveling hopefully, he had long known, was overrated. Despite the many hours he had spent in a meditative trance, it had been a long journey and felt like one. The Caliph had made his way first by air to Asmara, in Eritrea. No one would have expected to find the head of the Kagama Liberation Front there. Then he had taken a high-speed boat north along the Red Sea coast to land in the Nubian deserts of northern Sudan. A few hours after landing, his Sudanese guides had taken him on the long and bumpy tracks through the desert, up to the camp near the Eritrean border. Mecca was only a few hundred kilometers to the north, Medina only the same distance farther. It pained him to know that he was as close as he had ever been to the holy places and yet could not walk where the Prophet, blessings be upon him, had stepped while he was on earth. He accepted, as always, God’s will, and he drew strength from the righteousness of his cause. Despite the recent setbacks in the Kenna province, the Caliph was a leader in the struggle against the corruption of the West, the brutality and depredation of a global order the West imagined to be “natural.” He prayed that his every choice, his every act, would move his country closer to the day when its people would rejoin the ummah, the people of Islam, and he could be their rightly guided Caliph in more than name.