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terrified of what the news might be.
    He cleared his throat and glanced at his watch. The meeting started in five minutes. Hilzoy could show right now and it would still be too late.
    But Hilzoy wasn't going to show. Not today, not ever. Alex could feel it, a sad, sickening weight in the pit of his stomach. He knew the feeling. He remembered it.
    I better call the VCs, he said.

    Chapter 5 OOPS
    Ben sheltered from the rain under one of the elegant porticos of the Blue Mosque, surrounded by scores of chattering tourists and keeping an oblique eye on the mosque's exit, fifty feet away. The Iranians had gone in ten minutes earlier, having walked from the hotel exactly as Ben had hoped. He knew from his earlier reconnaissance of the area that there was only one exit, so he hadn't followed them in.
    The people around him conferred over their guidebooks in a dozen languages and snapped nonstop photos of the soaring minarets and massive semidomes and rows of ablution spigots. Ben kept his hat pulled low and the jacket zippered over his chin, his breath fogging before him. This wasn't an ideal place to do the job-it was too open, there were too many potential witnesses, it was too close to where he had been staying-but if an opportunity presented itself, he would take it, and he didn't want to be recognizable afterward in some idiot tourist's photos.
    During their stroll from the hotel to the mosque, the scientists had showed no sign of security awareness. The VAVAK guys, though, were reasonably sharp. They had stayed one ahead and one behind the scientists, never letting the gap between their positions close to below twenty-five feet. Dropping one at point-blank range would mean having to engage the other from a distance, and possibly allowing the scientists to escape in the meantime. Going after the scientists first would mean giving the VAVAK guys an extra second to get their shit together and then an opportunity to engage from two different directions. The ideal was to drop all four almost instantly and walk away clean, and the VAVAK guys were naturally trying to make something like that as difficult as possible.
    In addition to their tactical positioning, the VAVAK guys were also obviously surveillance conscious, but here they were operating at a disadvantage. Ben was pretty sure he knew their likely destinations-the major attractions of Sultanahmet and Seraglio Point-and their likely routes, so he could afford to lose visual contact from time to time. Also, the area was crowded with tourists, many of whom would be walking from one spot to the next in the same sequence the Iranians were following. Under the circumstances, multiple sightings of the same person wouldn't mean much. Toughest of all, about half the hundreds of people in the area were hunkering under black umbrellas and keeping their heads down against the chill and the rain, as Ben was, which made it hell to pick out individuals.
    But Ben was operating under one significant disadvantage: he was alone, while the people he was using for concealment were mostly in pairs and groups. So from time to time he made sure to consult his own guidebook with studied fascination, to jot down some notes about the mosque's six minarets and turreted corner domes and special entrance for the sultan, to shoot a few photos, and to otherwise blend as much as he could with the tourists around him.
    When the Iranians emerged, one of the scientists and one of the VAVAK guys headed down the steps and turned left while the other two remained under the portico. Ben instantly understood why they were splitting up: the scientist had to hit the head. He knew the restroom they were going to use, too, and it would have been ideal: small, secluded, at the bottom of a flight of stairs at the corner of the mosque grounds. But if something went wrong, he might come out of this with only half the job done, maybe less. No, better to wait for the right moment when he could catch them all closer