“Why are you trying to locate Harold Middleton?” Chambers interrupted, taking the disk from her hand.

“Because he’s a material witness,” Connolly said. “In an international case that involves a triple homicide in Warsaw, and another one, or possibly by now two—”

“Was I not absolutely clear?” Kalmbach said, his face flushing, but the DHS man put a hand on Kalmbach’s sleeve, apparently to silence him.

“Agent Connolly,” Chambers said softly, “Harold Middleton’s file is blue-striped.”

She looked at him, then nodded. A blue stripe indicated that a file was sealed for national-security reasons. Part of Middleton’s military record had been designated as codeword-classified. That meant a level above even top secret.

“Why?” she asked finally.

Kalmbach scowled and said nothing. The man from Homeland replied, “How do I put this in a language you’ll understand? This is above your pay grade, Agent Connolly.”

“Meaning I’m off the case?” she blurted out.

“No, Agent Connolly,” Chambers said. “Meaning that there is no case.”

10 - JIM FUSILLI

10

JIM FUSILLI

Leonora Tesla stepped out of the yellow taxi on the busy northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and 35th Street, and hustled into Macy’s. She emerged with her hair trimmed short and punked, wearing a black button-down blouse with the collar curled high, black slacks and black flats—in many ways, the opposite of what she wore 24 hours earlier when she killed Günter Schmidt. A new black-leather shoulder bag, tucked tight under her arm, held a change of underwear and what remained from the moment she steered Schmidt’s body toward the ravaging hyenas down in the wadi: her sunglasses, cash, credit cards and passport, her portfolio and her most valued possession, her fully loaded iPod, a gift from Harold Middleton.

She called the Human Rights Observer from a payphone in Herald Square. An intern answered and told her Val Brocco hadn’t come in. A flu, she reported; his message said he intended to spend a second day in bed. Tesla decided against giving her name and demanding his latest cell number, consoling herself with the thought that Brocco’s bordering-on-obsessive sense of precaution might serve him well. It’d better: To find Middleton, they’d tried to kill her, sending an agent to Namibia for the task. No doubt they already had at least one agent in metro D.C., where Middleton and Brocco were based.

Next, from the lobby of Madison Square Garden, she tried Jean-Marc Lespasse in Parkwood, North Carolina. Mr. Lespasse, she was told, was no longer with TDD—Technologie de Demain, the company he founded. And, no, the receptionist added tersely, there’s no forwarding information. Sure enough, the last cell number Tesla had for Lespasse was no longer active.