Katsaris slid a nylon-mesh brush through the bore hole of another automatic weapon, checking for any cracks, carbon deposits, or other irregularities, and then he looked straight into Janson’s eyes. “You once told me something, Paul. Years ago. Now I’m going to tell it to you.” He reached over, placed a hand on Janson’s shoulder. “There is no revenge. Not on this earth. That’s storybook stuff. In our world, there are strikes and reprisals and more reprisals. But that neat, slatecleaning fantasy of revenge—it doesn’t exist.”

“I know.”

“Helene’s dead, Paul.”

“Oh. That must be why she hasn’t been answering my phone calls.” His deadpan was masking a world of pain, and not very well.

Katsaris’s gaze did not waver, but he squeezed Janson’s shoulder harder. “There is nothing—nothing—that can ever bring her back. Do what you want to the Kagama fanatics, but know this.”

“It was five years ago,” Janson said quietly.

“Does it feel like five years ago?”

The words came out in a whisper. “Like yesterday.” It was not how an officer spoke to those he commanded. It was how a man spoke to the person with whom he was closest in the world, a person to whom he could never lie. He exhaled heavily. “You’re afraid I’m going to go berserk and visit the wrath of God upon the terrorists who killed my wife.”

“No,” Katsaris said. “I’m afraid that on some gut level, you think that the way to wipe the slate clean, the way to honor Helene, is to get yourself killed by them, too.”

Janson shook his head violently, though he wondered whether there could be any truth to what Katsaris said. “Nobody’s going to die tonight,” he said. It was a ritual of self-assurance, they both knew, rather than a statement of probabilities.

“What’s ironic is that Helene always had real sympathy for the Kagama,” Janson said after a while. “Not the terrorists, not the KLF, of course, but the ordinary Kagama caught in the middle of it all. Had she lived, she probably would have been right by Novak’s side, trying to work out a peace agreement. The Caliph is an arch-manipulator, but he exists because there are genuine grievances for him to manipulate.”

“If we’re here to do social engineering, we’ve been given the wrong equipment.” Theo ran a thumbnail against a combat knife, testing its keenness. “Besides, Peter Novak tried that, and look where it got him. This is a strict in-out. Insertion and extraction.”

Janson nodded. “If everything goes right, we’ll be spending a total of a hundred minutes on Anura. Then again, if you’ve got to deal with these people, maybe it’ll help if you know where they’re coming from.”

“If we’ve reached that stage,” Katsaris replied grimly, “everything will have gone wrong that can go wrong.”