Veronica considers. "Maybe Susan knows who. Maybe Derek didn't invite her to Bwindi just because she's blonde and pretty. Maybe she was a lead."
"Huh." Jacob leans back instinctively to think, winces as the pressure causes the five whip wounds on his back to flare up, and hunches forward again. He closes his eyes and tries to arrange all the facts swimming in his mind, order them into some logical sequence. "OK. So Derek was investigating a smuggling ring and rumours they were connected to terrorists. He invites you and Susan to Bwindi because he wanted to make friends and sound you out, Susan because she worked at the camp, you because of Danton."
"Where else?" Veronica asks. "Where were his other calls? Where in Kampala?"
Jacob switches back to the map full of balloons, and zooms in on the Google street map of greater Kampala. There are markers almost everywhere in the city, both red and orange, but a few dense clusters stand out.
"This is here," Jacob says, indicating a little cluster on the east side of the city. "Calls to my phone. This is Derek's apartment, by the Sheraton." A dense clump of red near the center of town. "And here's his office." A thick cloud of red and orange to the north. "Those orange markers in his office, that other number, that must be Prester."
"What about this?" Veronica asks, pointing at a pile of orange markers a little south of downtown, between the Sheraton and the taxi park.
"No idea. They're all the same number. Not Prester, not the Semiliki number, someone else." He checks back against the raw data. "He started calling that number three months ago, and he's been calling them ever since, a couple times a week. What do you think that means?"
"I don't know. None of this makes any sense to me." She looks at him. "Why are you showing me all this?"
He hesitates. "I thought you'd be interested."
"I am, I guess. But why not take it to Prester or the US Embassy or something? Or did you already?"
"No. We can't do that."
She blinks. "Why not?"
"Think about it. Derek was set up by someone he was working for. Or with. I take this to the wrong person, they find out what I can do, they'll cover their trail and I'll just be getting myself into more trouble. I go to the Canadian or British embassy, they'll just pass the word on to the USA. The real reason I'm showing you is because you're the only person I know I can trust."
Veronica shakes her head. "You're being paranoid. I'm sure Prester or Strick –"
"You know what Derek was doing in the last couple months before we got grabbed? Investigating Prester."
Veronica stares at him.
"Yeah. Some big boss in the CIA, I don't know who, Derek never told me details, found out there was something rotten in the state of Uganda and sent Derek to investigate. When I got here Derek had me track Prester's phone calls. And in the last week before we went to Bwindi, you know what? He had me tracking Strick's calls too."
"But – no. Not Prester." Veronica thinks of what he said to them in Goma, in the lava field. "He told us what was happening. He was trying to help us."
"Or he was telling us what he wanted us to believe. Plus a few things we would have figured out or found out by ourselves anyways, but we heard them from him first, so it looks like he's a good guy. And while he's at it he just so happens to warn us to stop poking around and get the hell out of Africa for our own good. Just like Strick. They both wanted us gone."
"Maybe because they want us safe," Veronica points out.
"Maybe not."
"They don't even like each other."
"They're intelligence professionals," Jacob says. "They know how to seem like something they're not."
"You sound totally paranoid."
"Only the paranoid survive."
"Come on," she objects. "This is crazy. I mean, even if you're right, like you say, all you're doing is just getting yourself into more trouble. You want to know what I think? I think you should stop playing Sherlock Homes and go home."
"He was my best friend," Jacob says sharply. "Someone set him up. And us too. Someone murdered him, someone he was working with. I'm not just walking away."
A long moment of silence passes.
"You seriously think Prester and Strick might be working with Al-Qaeda," Veronica says, putting as much incredulity into her voice as