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Nothing could have confirmed Ulrich’s point more emphatically than the silence on the other end of the phone.
    “I’ll get in touch with Bilton right away,” Ulrich said. “Let’s keep each other posted.”
    He hung up, put his glasses on the table, and sat for a moment with his face in his hands.
    There was nothing he could do. The Agency was in charge, Ulrich’s involvement was reduced to that of a messenger boy … They were done, they were all done. Ever since the tapes were first discovered missing, he’d been living on borrowed time. No, since before then, even. Since he’d first figured out what to do with the Caspers. That’s what had killed him. He just hadn’t realized it until now.
    It wasn’t fair. For so many years, he’d tried so hard to protectthe nation, and he just … he just couldn’t anymore. And without him, who would?
    And then some deep part of himself cut through the thickening mists of despair. He wasn’t helpless. He didn’t need to defer to the idiots at the CIA who had caused this catastrophe in the first place. He didn’t have the power he’d once wielded, true, but he still had the contacts. In the end, the contacts might matter more. All he had to do was use them. Use them well.
    He put his glasses back on, took another swallow of Maalox, and picked up the secure phone.

3
Lungs of a Dragon
    On his second day in the Manila city jail, Ben was still telling himself it could have been worse. But it wasn’t easy to figure out how.
    Out of habit, he’d been traveling sterile. His passport, his wallet, anything that could identify him—it was all inside the safe in his room at the Manila Mandarin Oriental. Even the magnetic room key was under a loose cobblestone on Paseo de Roxas, where he’d left it when he first set out that evening. The Philippines didn’t fingerprint visitors at immigration, at least not yet, so at the moment of his arrest, the only clue to his identity was the five thousand pesos and change in his jeans pocket. Which was no clue at all, thank God.
    His mind had been a shambles of conflicting emotions: exultation at having fought and prevailed; worry that he’d accidentally killed someone; fury at having been so stupid and incompetent;fear about what was going to happen to him. On top of everything else, humiliation. Being arrested by the local third world gendarmerie was about the biggest embarrassment a black ops soldier could suffer. He’d laughed at stories of guys it had happened to, thought they were fuckups and incompetents. But look at him now. He was one of them.
    He was determined to keep his options open, to say nothing that might unwittingly preclude subsequent possibilities. He didn’t respond when the cops told him one of the men he’d fought was dead, his neck broken. Maybe they were lying, though his gut told him, sickeningly, it was true. He was silent when they pretended they were his friends, he was silent when they knocked him down and beat the shit out of him. Part of him was aware that his silence was probably making things worse. But having lost control of everything else, he found himself clinging to whatever pathetic sense of dignity and power he could derive from the simple ability to deny his interrogators his voice.
    Eventually they told him they didn’t care, the guy he killed wasn’t Filipino and he wasn’t Filipino so why were they wasting their time? They’d dumped him in the Manila city jail, which Ben quickly learned from some of its English-speaking inhabitants had been built for a thousand inmates and currently housed more than five times that number. There were people of all ages, mostly Filipino but a few foreigners, too, convicted murderers serving life sentences alongside ordinary people who couldn’t afford bail and were just waiting for their day in court. It was so hot the concrete walls caused second-degree burns, so crowded the prisoners had to sleep side by side on the ground in shifts, and stank so