“All right, I have it.” She repeated the coordinates back to him.

“And you pinkie swear that you wrote it down, with a pencil?” he said, folding up his map. “This is not on anything that is even potentially connected to a network?”

She hesitated. “Pinkie swear.”

“Okay. Do not share this. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Unless . . .”

“Unless?”

“If you don’t hear from me within ninety minutes, call in the fucking SWAT, the FBI, the CIA, call the army, the air force, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts.”

“What is this?”

“I’m going to plead the Fifth on that one . . . but I will tell you it has to do with Ortega.”

“Oh . . .” She sighed, and he could practically hear her rubbing her temple. “How much danger are you in exactly?”

“I honestly don’t know. Possibly none?” Probably lots.

“How, um . . . risky is the thing you are about to do?”

“Extremely. I’m going to try to talk to someone, but I don’t know if they’re receptive to being talked to.”

“I see.” The way she said it made him think she suspected that it might not be a who he was trying to talk to, but a what.

“Ultimate pact of trust,” he said. “Setting my stopwatch. Ninety minutes.”

She swallowed so hard he could hear it over the phone. “Ninety minutes, starting now.”

He set it to sixty, to give himself a thirty-minute buffer in case there was any problem with cell phone reception. “Okay, um . . . I love you?”

“Oh . . . I love you . . . too?”

“Right, sorry,” he said in a tone that failed to belie his fear that this might be the last time they ever spoke. Last time he’d dropped an L-bomb to Paris, it had been years ago, and he had been very drunk. “I . . . You know. I don’t say it enough. To anyone. So just an FYI. You’re my friend, and I love you.”

“Kaveh?” Her voice cracked with worry.

“Ninety minutes,” he said and snapped his phone shut. He spent five of those minutes in the front seat of the Land Rover, windows down, staring at the limb of a branch, a superstitious corner of his mind waiting for the wind to nudge it, to tell him, “Time to go.” To give him a sign. But today was not a windy day.

His instincts about sources were usually correct—who would talk, who wouldn’t, what type of charm would work on whom and what wouldn’t. His journalistic instincts were his greatest asset (well, that and his hair), the thing that had propelled him to the top of his field. It was therefore instinct, not rationality, that made him decide that Enola was the play, not Ampersand.