“Why were you here? I mean …” Vera stopped herself. She sank more when she recalled how Baby had not wanted to show her this tree. She’d been saying things like “Dun know if I can find it.” To which Vera had said, “You can. I know you can.” Baby protesting, Vera pushing—she should have just backed off. It was so hard to know when people were afraid, when they couldn’t be bothered, when they wanted to please you, when they really didn’t know.

To distract himself from Hoseyn, Will went to see how the recent downloads from Mosul were going. They came from five computers that were intact and three partially restored hard drives. There were already so many terabytes from other exploitation teams; Forensics was drowning in media. He offered to take a look at some. There were boxes labeled with address, time recovered, unit that made the retrieval, schematic on how it was found. Some boxes had a report in a slipcase on top. Most of them, he noticed, Forensics hadn’t touched.

He pulled on a new pair of gloves and took the thick archival lid off a stiff box not yet opened. He reached for the first plasticized envelope, so new it smelled a chemical lilac. He unhooked and unzipped the top and took out a disc the size of a matchbook. He signed his name to a log on the envelope.

The image came up. He could tell it was natural light. The air had a grain only sun could cause. No. There was a lamp in the foreground. Wait. Was it on? He squinted. Four figures were out of focus. Then the cameraman adjusted the lens, and they came out of the blur dressed in the black knit—ski mask, turtleneck, trousers—the kidnapper’s uniform. He’d seen more than one of their handmade movies. He almost ejected the disc, but he needed to consider the light. The execution house in Falluja, where the first cavalry had picked up the last beheading video, was shot in electric light. He’d watched it more than once. It triggered a discovery. Coalition controlled the electrical grid. Army Corps of Engineers could modulate the current, block by block, for the city. The next time, the next video, examined by software programmed to pick up modulations invisible to the eye, would be like a fingerprint. There would only be so many blocks where it could have been made. So what if they moved the hostage? There was always a trail.

They had not as yet put the power-grid changes into effect. It could be a coincidence there were no electric bulbs in this new video. But if it wasn’t a coincidence, it could mean that someone, perhaps inside, definitely someone supposedly on the good side, had shared secrets.