Rushed and panicked by the clash of time and distance, he stripped off his trench coat, balled it up, and jammed it into a shrub. Even if it wasn’t muddy, it would’ve served as a bull’s-eye, for it had been his uniform during the last frozen weeks.

He paralleled the curving street, then slipped into the trees on the opposite side and followed a path behind the buildings. Lights cast from the windows above him made a twisted chessboard of the uneven trail. His ankles wobbled and his wrenched back ached. He steadied himself for a few seconds against a stucco wall, then pushed himself forward.

Against the background of kitchen noises and televisions and the distant rumble of traffic, Hennessy heard a couple arguing in Arabic. It seemed to echo, not off other buildings, but rather from across the reflecting surface of the Mediterranean, from Algiers, where he’d spent ten days looking for Ibrahim.

The voices jerked his thoughts out of the present, and for a moment he felt the vertigo of waking up in a hotel room and not knowing what country he was in. Then the mirrored images of the two cities triangulated his position; not fixed, but seeming to move in pace with a receding mirage.

He paused and listened for footsteps behind him, thinking how close he thought he’d come to finding Ibrahim in Algiers, only to discover that he’d followed a false scent, one that had taken him through merchant-mobbed streets and burrowlike alleys, and finally out to the universities in Ben Aknoun, El-Biar, and Bouzareah. Days spent watching the entrances to the faculties of economics, only to be met with the emptiness of failure.