From where he was perched, Barnstable could see her monitor, but the articles about the hit-and-run were gone. Catherine had hit a key to switch to the default—bond and equity tickers with a Bloomberg news crawl.

“Oh no,” she said. “He’s just a little . . . annoying sometimes.”

“Well,” said Barnstable, starting to stand—her sharp desk edge was pinching his thigh. “Aren’t they all?”

Game

GAME

It was desert all around but in this village by the Euphrates there was green, as there had been, more or less, for about five thousand years. And there was life. Small whitewashed houses. The rumbling of generators. Somewhere a bawling baby. An hour before dawn an ancient Volvo truck with a load of live chickens rumbled up and sputtered to a stop near a low-roofed house with decaying stucco walls. The driver got out to check his load of squawking fowl. A keen observer might have noticed that he was looking more at the house than at his chickens. The driver saw no such observer, and he saw nothing stirring in the house. So he turned to the chickens and told them, “Go!”

Seven other Navy SEALs emerged from beneath the birds and nodded to the driver, who stayed where he was to watch the surroundings as the seven moved to the house, front and back. A petty officer first class from Laramie, Wyoming, forced a door with his Ka-Bar and was first inside. He found a guard sleeping in a chair and killed him with the same knife, sticking it into the side of his throat, then pulling it forward through the carotid artery. Bloody but quiet and fast. Then he and three others moved into the main room, where two ISIS fighters were napping on cushions and one man was tapping at a device attached to a monitor. The man at the keyboard looked up, startled, and one of the men who was napping turned out not to be napping. With surprising speed, he pulled out a pistol and got two shots off, narrowly missing one of the SEALs, before he and the others were mowed down by four M4A1 carbines. No one was left alive but the Americans. The keyboard went clattering to the floor.

“Secure the computer,” said the squad leader, a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant from Minnesota. “We’re here for the intel.”

“Actually, sir,” said the petty officer from Wyoming, who had moved to the screen and was looking it, “it’s not a computer.”

The lieutenant moved over to see it himself.

“It’s a PlayStation 4,” said the petty officer. “My little brother got one last Christmas.” He gestured to the dead terrorist and then to the monitor. “It looks like this guy was playing Murder City.”

Lake City

LAKE CITY