It was to Hadrian’s Loyal Truex that Conor White waited to send his urgent and necessarily secure postmidnight e-mail. Another man might have been nervous about what he had to report; he wasn’t. As far as he was concerned he was in the middle of a war, and war was not only deadly but often troublesome and, these days especially, highly unpredictable. Moreover, he had been and still was a highly trained professional soldier. He acted accordingly.

12:25 A.M.

He pressed the pound sign on the keyboard. Immediately a message flashed on the screen in front of him: YOUR LXT DIGITAL IS ACTIVATED. PLEASE ENTER YOUR PERSONAL CODE.

White’s fingers reached out, and he entered the code. Instantly the words LOCK FUNCTION appeared on his screen. It meant the transmission line from Conor White, SimCo/Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, to LoyalTruex, Hadrian/Manassas, Virginia, was secure.

Immediately he typed in the following: We’ve got a potential bad one. There are photographs of our guys unloading arms to the rebels.

Two seconds passed, then Truex replied.

Photographs?

CONOR WHITE: Yeah. Clear as day. No doubt about who our guys are if somebody wanted to examine it. I’m included with the other ops. I’ve seen several of the pics myself, computer-printed hard copies. They were taken last week. All have date codes.

LOYAL TRUEX: Have the photos been distributed?

CW: Not that we know. The copies I saw were brought to our guys in the field by a local native who wanted to sell them.

LT: Who took them?

CW: Old German priest in Bioko. The army got him, he’s in a coma. His place was searched. His printer found and destroyed. Digital camera found, too. Only camera he had. No photographs, no extra prints discovered. The memory card was new. The old one with the photos is missing.