Two minutes later, Katsaris fiddled with the lock of another iron gate as Novak and Janson looked on. The gate opened with a groan.

The flashlight played off matted hair that had once been blond.

“Please don’t hurt me,” the woman whimpered, cowering in her cell. “Please don’t hurt me!”

“We’re just going to take you home,” Theo said, angling the beam so that they could assess her physical condition.

It was Donna Hedderman, the anthropology student; Janson recognized her face. Once the KLF had captured the Steenpaleis, they had evidently moved the American woman to its dungeon as well. The two high-profile captives, they must have reasoned, would be easier to guard in one place.

Donna Hedderman was a big-boned woman, with a broad nose and round cheeks. She had once been heavyset, and even after seventy days of captivity, she was not lean. As was the way with terror groups of any sophistication, the KLF made sure that its prisoners were amply fed. The calculation was brutality itself. A prisoner weakened by starvation might succumb to disease and die. To die of disease was to escape the power of the KLF. A prisoner who died could not be executed.

Even so, Donna Hedderman had been through hell: it was apparent from her bleached, fish-belly flesh, her clumped and tangled hair, her staring eyes. Janson had seen photos of her in the newspaper articles about her kidnapping. In the pictures, from happier days, she was round, beaming, almost cherubic. “High-spirited” was a recurrent adjective. But the long weeks of captivity had taken all that away. A KLF communiqué had dementedly called her an American intelligence agent; if anything, she had left-wing sympathies that would have ruled out such employment. She had been singularly sympathetic to the plight of the Kagama, but then the KLF scorned sympathy as a nonrevolutionary sentiment. Sympathy was an impediment to fear, and fear was what the Caliph sought above all else.

A long pause. “Who do you work for?” she asked in a quavering voice.

“We work for Mr. Novak,” Janson said. A sidelong glance.

After a beat, Novak nodded. “Yes,” he said. “They are our friends.”

Donna Hedderman got to her feet and made her way toward the open gate. Edema had swollen her ankles, making her stride unsteady.

Now Janson conferred quietly with Katsaris. “There is another way, and right now it looks like the better bet. But we’ll need to pool resources. We each have an ounce of Semtex in our kit. We’ll need them both.” A small wad of Semtex, along with a detonation device, was included in their gear, standard spec-ops equipment for missions into uncertain environments.

Katsaris looked at him closely, then nodded. Janson’s tone of voice, the specificity of his instructions, were, for whatever reason, reassuring. Janson had not lost it. Or if he had, it was only a momentary lapse. Janson was still Janson.