Jasper tapped the side of the prince’s bed, his hand thudding lightly on the metal rail. “You have nothing to worry about,” he said in Arabic. “You’ll be in excellent hands.”

“God willing,” the prince said in English.

Jasper stepped away and found Mr. Awadi, nodding confidently to him.

But the prince’s handler didn’t look as confident. “He has everything in the world to worry about,” said Awadi. “By the looks of things here. What could happen next? Infection from a doctor who doesn’t wash his hands?”

Jasper smiled. “No.”

“Or maybe the doctor did wash his hands, but the soap wasn’t soap and instead it was—”

“He’s a very lucky man,” Jasper interrupted. “To have made it this far . . . He has luck on his side.”

“He has God on his side,” said Mr. Awadi, closing his eyes and bowing his head.

“Allahu Akbar,” Prince Saif said weakly from his bed.

And then the room filled with a chorus of Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, with all the Saudi guests joining in, the music of their appeals rising and falling like a round of cicadas. Jasper bowed politely and left the room as the last of the cicadas fizzled out.

“Jackson told me to talk to you.”

It was Sam, the super recognizer. He had his tie in his hands, rolling it around his finger like a little kid would.

“Talk to me about what?”

“About what to do,” said Sam. “I mean, I know what to do . . . but—”

“Have you gone over the whole roster?”

Jasper had created a yearbook-style page of everyone who would be present during the operation, all of their high-res color photos for Sam’s savant-like abilities to keep, organize, and recall. The prince didn’t need to have any strange faces in the operating room.

“I’m still waiting for the rest,” Sam said.

“That was it.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah,” said Jasper. “What, you wanted to show off?”

“I’m just used to a lot more faces.”

“Remind me to take your number when this is all done. I’ll take you to Vegas.”

Sam scratched at his temple. “Why Vegas?”

Jasper shrugged. “You know . . .”

“It doesn’t work for cards.”

“Oh. I thought, you know . . .”

“Can we get back on topic?”

“Yeah,” said Jasper. “We probably should.”

Sam looked around, crossed and then uncrossed his arms, and leaned close to Jasper. He whispered, “There’s been a gentleman.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve seen a gentleman quite frequently walking by the room, always looking in. And he seems very much out of place.”

Jasper checked the hall, both ways, although he wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. He just knew that he felt a sudden creeping paranoia.

Sam kept up with the whispering. “For one, he shouldn’t necessarily be up here on this floor. I’ve found his photo in the security directory. He’s a lab technician. Victor Demidov.” Sam pulled a phone from his pocket and started thumbing the screen. “So, unless he’s got a sick friend or some nurse up here he keeps visiting . . .” Then Sam turned the phone to Jasper, showing a staff photo of Mr. Demidov. “Ever seen this guy?”

Squarish head. Widow’s peak. Upper lip that hung over the bottom.

“No.”

“He’s also out of place because of the way he moves,” said Sam. “The way he looks. His behaviors. Everything.”

“Is he Russian?”

Sam winced. “Is Victor Demidov Russian?”

“I mean, how Russian? Does he speak it?”

“I’ve never heard him speak.”

“Hmm.” Jasper tapped his foot. It was good timing, hearing about this lab technician.

“Well?” said Sam.

“I was just about to head down there. I’ve got some samples to analyze.”

“Yeah?” said Sam. “And?”

“Let me know if you see him around.”

“Yeah,” Sam grunted. “Anything else?” The guy had horrible social skills.

“Sure,” said Jasper. “What’s my body language saying?”

“You want to hit me.”

Jasper laughed. “You know, you’re pretty good at this.”

* * *

Victor Demidov was nowhere to be found on the lab floor, so Jasper went ahead with his work, running tests on the contents of blood bags and IV solutions lined up for the surgery. There was no such thing as being too careful. Midway through the process, he got the call from Jackson about a thwarted entry into one of the building’s environmental control systems.

“Someone tried the password over a hundred times,” Jackson said. “In the old morgue.”

“That’s interesting.” Jasper’s eyes glanced through a chemical analysis of one of his samples. He had too much work to do.

“Interesting?”

He picked up another page, looking for the item number and then matching it with one of the blood bags. Check and recheck. “Can’t you get someone else? I’ve got these fluids to clear, and then I have to run them upstairs for the surgery.”

“You’re closer.”

“The surgery is closer. It’s in fifteen minutes.”

“The morgue is two floors below you,” said Jackson.

Jasper tossed one of the pages aside. “A rat walked across the keyboard.”

“A hundred times?”

“Two rats. They’re fucking.”

“Then I want to know what kind of rats they were,” said Jackson. “Go check on it.”

At that moment, no amount of password fails in an old basement morgue could distract him from what was most important—making sure that anything that might potentially be used or injected into the prince was safe and untampered with. However, the sight of Vic was a distraction that he couldn’t ignore. Jasper could see him in the corner of his eye, crisscrossing a hallway, rushing in and out of two rooms, their doors slamming shut each time. The lab technician looked just as he did in the photos, only more bug-eyed, pale and squirrely. And he was now pushing a trolley carrying several boxes, wheeling it quickly in and out of the rooms.

As Jasper finished up his current sample, he kept looking up at the latest door Vic had exited, waiting for Vic to return. When he was satisfied that he wouldn’t, Jasper made his way to the door with a casual stroll, like he not only belonged there in the lab, but that he belonged inside that very door.

Only he didn’t. It was locked.

“Hey, Jackson,” he said into his phone while reading the room number on a small placard near the door. “Any chance I can get access to LT303?”

“No,” said Jackson. “That’s not on the morgue level.”

A moment later, after some mild arguing with Jackson, and after Jasper’s swipe badge had been updated with an expanded allowance, and after that swipe badge triggered a green light above the lock, the door finally opened into a small, dim office. The lights were off, but there was a small desktop lamp which gave off a low reddish glow, giving Vic’s personal office the coziness of a bedroom. There were family photos on the desk, personalized knickknacks like Matryoshka doll paperweights and dog-eared concert tickets held up on a metal filing cabinet by takeout pizza magnets. There was also a harsh chemical smell. It reminded Jasper of the battlefield. A burnt-hair type smell. He found the source in the corner of the room, where several buckets and plastic soda bottles stood. There was foil folded over the tops of the bottles. It didn’t look like hospital lab work. It looked more like something from the pages of The Anarchist’s Cookbook.

Leaving the room and then quickly returning with a hypodermic needle and a sample vial, Jasper carefully collected a small sample of the dark, noxious liquid. He brought it out of the dark office and into the brightly lit, sterile lab area, and to his current workstation where he pushed aside his blood samples to make room for a potentially more important experiment.

Before entering the sample into the analysis machine, Jasper tried a low-fi, human analysis first, wafting the vial near his face and taking a slow, careful inhalation through his nose.

Ammonia.

He put down the vial and turned off the machine, capping the syringe and pocketing it before heading back to Vic’s lair of an office. The analysis machine would take more time than he had. His time, that narrow sliver of minutes between blood samples and checking on some computer in the morgue, only allowed for blind and unscientific rummaging through drawers and boxes. He started with a wire metro rack, checking for containers of whatever chemicals Vic had been mixing. Ammonia nitrate, perhaps. Nitroglycerin. Something obvious that would just scream the intentions of a bomb-making terrorist. But it was all harmless stuff. Old binders of chemical analysis sheets, hypoallergenic latex gloves, card stock, old takeout menus.

In a shoebox he found a bunch of loose nails, the box almost half full of them, loose, heavy, and sliding around. Why would a lab technician have so many nails? For the family portraits on his office wall? Or for stuffing into small lengths of pipe as shrapnel?

Jasper tried to put the office back to how he’d found it, but gave up the process when Jackson called again. There was more activity in the morgue. He should have been on his way there. Where the hell was he?

But Jasper changed the subject. “Jackson? Do we have bomb-sniffing dogs?”

There was a slight pause from Jackson. And then he said, “Not yet.”