the streets; donkeys were in corrals or tied to wooden hitching posts. The town around him looked, quite literally, like something from biblical times, with the one big exception being the old, crumbling mosque in front of him. There were no mosques here in the time of Christ, but surely this particular view that he had, sitting at the open-air fishmonger’s stall, must not have changed one iota since the twelfth century. He imagined himself back in those days and wondered if some spy or assassin had crouched at this very place at this very time of morning, with nefarious designs on a target in that mosque or in that ancient-looking building across the square.
Only then did he notice the few anachronisms in the scene. Several donkey carts were in view, but all had thick rubber tires instead of ancient wooden cartwheels. Much of the metal roofing and siding of the shacks in view were rusted oil drums or even large tin coffee cans. A broken blue plastic bucket hung from a rope outside a second-story window.
Without warning a voice spoke, close. It startled him, and he grabbed for his pistol and rose, bumping his head on a loose wooden shelf above him in the shack before recognizing that the voice was Zack and that it had come through his headset. He knelt back down, mad at himself.
“Good morning, Six, wherever you are. Me and the boys are just finishing our second cup of coffee, then we’ll get geared up and head to shore.” The sound of a long stretch and a sigh. Obvious dramatic effect. “Damn. Sure as shit is nice working for the man, not running rogue, sitting scared by yourself in the dark somewhere, hoping like hell that rat running up your leg doesn’t bite you in the balls because you can’t afford to move and give away your position.”
Court looked down. There was no rat on his leg. He chastised himself for looking.
“Pretty soon, bro, you’ll be back workin’ with us. Of course you’ll still be the outsider, but I promise I’ll let you join us for a cup of joe from time to time.”
Gentry nodded. It would be good to be part of a team again, even if there were a few caveats to the relationship.
“First things first, though. Let’s get through this morning. One out.”
“Roger that,” whispered Court to himself; he did not transmit to Hightower. He rose slowly, avoided the shelf above, and crossed the tiny alleyway towards the side entrance to the bank. He picked the lock in under thirty seconds; it was a simple tumbler job that needed just two narrow tools and a few jiggles of the torque wrench to defeat.
Inside it was pitch-black; stale dust wafted in the moonlight shining through circular and arched windows. Court pulled his penlight from his pocket and turned it on, put it in his mouth, and crossed down a small colonnade that ran along the eastern side of the large, open building. This place had been around for hundreds of years, Gentry could tell, but apparently banking was no longer such a big deal in Suakin. Most of the space was open and empty, with a few desks and telephones, wooden filing cabinets, and steps that went down to a basement. Court continued on to the main entrance and found it exactly as drawn up in the diagrams Zack had provided him. There were stairs to the left and the right of the front double doors. The steps went up to a narrow atrium over the doors, where large windows looked out over the square. Gentry took a few minutes to stage his gear, hustling a half dozen times up and down the spiral stone staircases to position equipment where he would need it when Oryx and his security detail came storming through the door, thinking they were saving themselves from an attack in the square.
Court looked out the open windows of the atrium, getting a good look at the square for the first time. It did not look like a square, in the sense that Court knew the word from his travels in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. It was the size of two football fields, completely unpaved, not a blade of grass, just a big, flat expanse of hard earth. On the opposite side of the bank were some rickety looking two-story buildings, whitewashed colonial-style architecture but dingy, their filth obvious even in the moonlight shine. To the northeast, the right