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least.”
    Frank Burke was the probable heir of the agency when the current head’s resignation took effect a month from now. He was shorter than average, but had the presence of a large man—with broad shoulders; a powerful-looking shaved head; a fancy handlebar mustache, jet-black and not dyed; and an aggressive walk. He was a compulsive consumer of lime-flavored hard candies. It was as if they exercised his jaw.
    â€œI went in right away because I thought speed essential, sir,” I lied to Burke now.
    Burke made a mocking sound in his throat.
    The instrument panel told me that our plane had crossed into Somali airspace, but no markings below indicated this. No troops or fences. No roads or villages. The savannah looked the same down there—soaked and misty—as it had five minutes ago. There were some thorn trees. We passed over a large lake churned up by a herd of pinkish animals—hippos. There was the sense of rushing into a vacuum, being sucked—or suckered—forward by fate.
    I said, “Sir, if the committee is in session, is there a problem at home?”
    â€œNot your concern.”
    â€œSir,” I persisted, aware that the admiral was trying, with his eyes, to get me to shut up, “I’m unclear why an incident in Africa concerns the bioterror committee. Is there something I need to know?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œAre you ordering me to turn around?”
    Burke tended to consider himself the smartest guy in the room, which, I had to admit, he often was. And the committee—set up after a sarin scare in Sacramento two years ago—was an interagency group with a direct line to the President in the event of a bioterror incident,
but at home, not abroad
.
    Burke told me now, “We could have sent in drones to look the place over before you put yourself in jeopardy.”
    The pilot of our small twin-engine 1978 Cessna 421 Eagle, was named Farhan, which, in Somali, means “happy,” which he was not. Our Doppler radar screen glowed bright red, which meant bad rain and wind ahead, and the plane began pitching violently as a sudden storm pummeled us at fifteen thousand feet. The ground disappeared.
    â€œDrones won’t work, Frank. Cloud cover,” said Admiral Galli, on Burke’s left. Trim and weathered, the hero of the most recent Gulf oil spill had sparse gray hair, youthful clear blue eyes, and adeceptively calm manner. He, too, was furious that I’d not called him right away. But he wouldn’t mention this in front of the others. He’s that way.
    To Galli’s left, on-screen, was Chris Vekey, thirty-four, from Emergency Preparedness. The former major in the CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service was a public health expert whose job in the event of a bio-attack was to help coordinate containment. She was a petite, voluptuous brunette with blue-black hair cut to the neck, framing a cupid face. Mouth a lovely bow. Part Irish, part Cherokee. She’d formerly tracked TB outbreaks in low-income Vietnamese immigrant neighborhoods, then joined the Gates Foundation Africa anti-malaria effort, then rejoined government. An ex-teenage mom from Alabama, she’d been stripped of her high school valedictorian title when she became pregnant. She never revealed the father’s identity. She worked her way through Auburn U, then Yale School of Public Health. She was still single, soft-spoken but tough, and Burke had an avuncular weakness for her because, like him, she’d come up the hard way. She was the most intoxicating-smelling woman I’d ever met. She and her teenage daughter lived in a converted spice warehouse in Northwest D.C. The odors had permeated their apartment. She smelled of cinnamon, vanilla, tropical islands. Between her gorgeous face, fit body, and smell, she turned heads wherever she went. You could sense the animal inside her. It made her gray business attire seem as sexy as bathing suits, Eddie said.
    â€œShe