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But Sally Kantanga, who owned the farm, could not wake them this morning.
    “Not any of them. What’s the matter with them?” she asked. Dr. Oku saw that she was sweating profusely, even though the morning air was still cool.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m going to call Tihka Hospital on the radio.”
    By ten o’clock, forty-three people had died at the clinic and in the still-moist grasses outside. Many others were lined up or lying in the dirt, waiting to see her. Sandra Oku had run out of blankets and sheets to cover the victims, and eleven of the bodies lay uncovered. Sixteen others, including Nancy Makere, her daughter, and Sally Kantanga, were sleeping deeply in what she had called the Recovery Room. No one was going to recover this morning.

THREE
Washington, D.C.
    THE CALL FROM CHARLES Mallory had been scheduled for 8:30 A.M . Eastern Time. Fourteen minutes ago. For many people, fourteen minutes didn’t mean much; for Charles Mallory, it did. The missed connection could only be a message. That much, at least, was clear.
    Jon Mallory knew very little about his older brother these days. Didn’t have an address; didn’t know if he was married or had children; couldn’t reach him if he needed to. He knew only that for the past several years, Charlie had operated an intelligence contracting firm known as D.M.A. Associates, and that it was based somewhere in Saudi Arabia.
    He knew other things about his brother, though. Things that wouldn’t change over time—that he was a brilliant, headstrong man who harbored obsessions, one of which was punctuality. During the seven weeks that they had been in contact, Charlie had never missed an appointment. He had never been a minute late. If he hadn’t called this morning, something was wrong.
    Still dressed in his pajamas, Jon Mallory breathed the cool morning air through the screen window of his rented house in Northwest Washington. He stared at the notes on his computer screen—records of previous conversations; encrypted e-mails; enigmatic instructions, seemingly unconnected phrases—combing through them for a telltale clue, some nuance that he might have missed.
    It was one of those deliciously mild September mornings in Washington. Sixty-one degrees, 5 mph winds, 54 percent humidity. A perfect day for biking on the towpath or wandering among the museums and monuments of the National Mall.
    This wasn’t a morning that inspired him to be outside, though. Something had happened overnight, something still outside his frame of reference. The answers that he had expected this morningwere not going to arrive. Instead, he had been given a new problem, and it would take him several days, maybe longer, to figure it out.
    “Just remember what I say,” Charlie had told him. “I’m going to meet a witness. After that, I’ll give you details that you need to report.… Don’t lose contact with me.”
    “I won’t. I just wish we could talk in person,” Jon had said.
    “We can’t. Not yet.… If I don’t contact you this way, I’ll contact you another way.”
    A different conversation, weeks earlier:
    “False fingerprints. That’s going to be part of the deception. You need to be a witness to something that hasn’t happened yet.…”
    “How will I know?”
    “I told you.”
    “By paying attention.”
    “Yes. Information will come to you.”
    Jon Mallory heard the scuffles of rubber soles on the basketball court down the street, the ping of the ball against the rim, and he thought of the long summer afternoons of his childhood in the suburbs seven or eight miles north of here: playing Horse and Around the World at the junior high playground with his brother, aiming at a rusted basket with a torn metal net.
Visualize it: leaving your hand, arching perfectly, going in
. The absence of Charlie in his life over the past decade had sometimes felt to Jon like a death in the family. They had been best friends, always finding ways to amuse and entertain each