The Good Son

21

T heo seems frozen. The footsteps and the rattle of armed men sound closer on the stairs. Ahead, Abu Lais beckons urgently to them. Sonia shoves Theo forward, putting all her weight behind it. His instincts take over and both of them dash into the room at the end of the hallway. Abu Lais shuts the door behind them. Theo is stunned, staring at the other man. He says, “It is you. They told me you were dead.”

Wazir’s face breaks out in his famous smile and Sonia sees her son throw his arms around his brother. The men embrace, and Theo begins to ask a string of questions in rapid Pashto that Sonia can barely follow, but this reunion is interrupted by a pounding on the door. Wazir motions them to the far corner of the room and opens it.

Sonia hears a brief conversation in Arabic and then heavy footfalls and shouted orders.

Wazir says, “The sentry on the roof was shot. They thought it was one of the locals, a sniper, because they thought it was impossible for anyone to get up on the roof without passing them. I told them to stay inside and that I doubted that anyone would try to assault the house.”

He sits at the desk chair, as if normal business can now resume.

Theo asks, urgently, “Wazir, what are you doing here?”

Wazir shrugs. “I’m a Pashtun and this is Pashtunistan. Where else should I be? Let’s say it’s a long story. I don’t have to ask what you’re doing here-you came for her. But by God, I’m glad to see you!”

Theo is grinning and shaking his head in amazement. Then he sobers and says, “I’m sorry. I shot one of your friends.”

“They are not my friends,” Wazir says. “They are nominally under my orders, but in fact they were sent to watch me. The Arabs are very suspicious, especially of Pashtuns. You might even have done me a favor.”

“I don’t understand.”

He looks at Sonia. “How much does he know?”

“I have no idea,” she says. “I don’t even know how he found this place.”

“How did you?” asks Wazir.

“That’s a long story, too,” says Theo. Sonia studies his face as he looks at the other man. It is like flipping through one of those books that depicts the range of human expressions: love, anger, astonishment, confusion; each blooms, flickers, dies, and is succeeded by another. Her heart aches.

Theo says, “I can’t believe it, Wazir, by God, it’s been half a lifetime! Where did you learn English? You sound like an American.”

“I practically am. I was in the States nearly as long as you. I was educated there, Case Western and Berkeley.”

“How? The last time I saw you, you were a Pashtun mujahid. How in hell did you get a college education?”

“A Ph.D., actually.”

“And you never tried to contact me in all those years?”

Wazir looked a little embarrassed at this and asks Sonia, “Can I tell him?”

“That’s up to you, Wazir,” she says. “I’m retired.”

“Retired from what?” asks Theo. Now the confusion on his face gels, with an angry flush, a knotting of the brows. “Wazir, what is she talking about? What in hell is going on?”

Wazir leans back in his chair and takes a deep breath, lets it flow out.

“Well, let’s see-where to start? Let’s start with your mother.”

He makes a rotating motion with his fingers.

“The axis, the source of it all. Sonia’s the reason I got an education in America. She pulled me out of the jihad just like she pulled you, but in my case I did a little better in school than you did. I can see you’re about to ask why she did such a thing. Why me? Well, I’m smart, she knew that from Aitchison College and our many conversations up on the roof at your grandfather’s house, and she needed a smart Pashtun with good mujahideen credentials.”

“I don’t understand,” says Theo.

Wazir looks at Sonia, eyebrows elevated in surprise. “You never told him?”

She shakes her head.

“Told me what?”

After a considerate pause, Wazir answers, “Your mother has been an asset of the Central Intelligence Agency for a very long time, and she’s been involved in a very deep Agency game, probably the deepest it has ever played.”

“That’s crazy,” Theo says. “Sonia’s not a CIA agent.”

“Asset. There’s a difference. Think about it for a minute, Theo. In 1973, Sonia Laghari probably knew more about Soviet Central Asia than any other American. She was an embarrassment to the KGB. Don’t you think the CIA would’ve been interested in her? And they were. An agent approached her and she turned him down: oh, no, she was not going to spy for America. Then, what happened to your grandfather happened, and we did what we did. As I’m sure you know, she thought you were dead too, and when she found out you weren’t, it was nearly as bad, because you were lost in the jihad. You, her last child; she was desperate to get you back. And they knew this. They contacted her in Zurich again, and this time she agreed to do anything they asked her to do if only they would get you out. They gave her a contact in Peshawar, and he arranged for you to be snatched and taken to America. So then it was time for the payoff, and the payoff was me.”

“Why did they want you?” Theo asks. “They were funding the jihad all along, they had access to all the leaders, and you were just a foot soldier.”

“Yes, then I was, but I was also young. I could be-how should I say it?-groomed for greater things.”

“I don’t understand. Are you saying the CIA educated you? For what, to spy on the jihad?”

“Not exactly. Let me give you a hint. My B.S. is in physics, and my doctorate is in nuclear engineering. My thesis was on new computational approaches to the analysis of nuclear explosions. The research was paid for by the Department of Energy, the people who manufacture nuclear weapons.”

Sonia is silent, watching her son’s face as he thinks this through. She feels a wave of shame, another blast of her failed-mother grief, and also compassion for what she has allowed to happen to him. He is not stupid, her boy, but neither is he Wazir; no, she has not groomed him.

At last Theo says, “You’re a Trojan horse.”

This provokes another sunny smile on the handsome face. “Exactly! I am Abu Lais, the great hope of the whole jihad to lay hands on nuclear weapons. Isn’t that a joke?”

“Yeah, it’s hilarious,” says Theo, unsmiling.

Wazir does not notice this, his grin grows broader. “Yes, and the kind of joke only a Pashtun can really appreciate: Pashtunistan, the Brillo pad of intersecting betrayals.”

“Why you?” Theo demands. “Why do you get this terrific education, courtesy of Uncle Sam?”

“As I said, it’s a long story,” Wazir says, not smiling now.

“We got time,” says Theo. “I like long stories.” He unslings the AK, props it against the wall, sits down on the charpoy. Sonia sits next to him.

“Theo… the gun,” she says. “I think you can put it away, yes?”

He looks at the Stechkin in his hand, realizes he has been gesturing with it, gives her a quick annoyed look, replaces the pistol in its holster, and returns his attention to Wazir.

“Okay, brother,” says Wazir. “So, it’s 1987, the jihad is winding down, and the CIA is thick in Afghanistan. And what do they see? This Soviet threat they’ve been working against for their whole lives is crap. The great Red Army can’t even provide bullets and food for its troops. The idea that this army could attack Europe or anywhere else against the wishes of the U.S. military is revealed as nonsense, Chad with rockets, and all that. So they start asking, Where’s the next enemy? And what do they see? They see the jihad, the movement they helped to create, and at the center of this movement is a man they have built up into a great leader, and what a surprise! They find this great leader has no love for America; in fact he sees that America, far more than Russia, is the reason the Muslims are groaning under oppression. America is the prop for the Saudis, for the Egyptians-”

“Bin Laden,” says Theo.

“Yes. And the CIA tells this to Washington, but Washington doesn’t listen, communism has always been the enemy and always will be the enemy, and if, for some reason, communism falls, there will be an era of endless peace; democracy and capitalism will spread throughout the world, the end of history, and so forth. But one small group of operatives had their eyes open. They’d read the books bin Laden read-Sayyid Qutb and others in the same vein-and they understood that his goals were the destruction of the apostate regimes, the recovery of Palestine, and the re-creation of a caliphate that would unite the entire umma under one political roof. Well, of course this is ridiculous on the face of it-the Prophet, peace be upon him, was hardly dead before the umma fell apart into factions, where it has remained to this day. But uniting the world under a supposed Aryan master race was ridiculous, and the dictatorship of the proletariat was ridiculous too, yet the world paid dearly in blood for these two absurdities, and the same could happen again.”

“Get to the fucking point, Wazir,” says Theo. Sonia feels the atmosphere in the room changing, growing more tense. She can feel the anger pouring off her son like waves of heat from a stove; she has never seen this part of Theo before-he has always been careful to shield her from it, but not now-now she really understands that her boy kills people for a living.

Wazir makes an acquiescent gesture. “All right. Very simply: In 1987 elements in the CIA conceived a plan to recruit a mujahid and train him in the United States as an expert on nuclear weapons, so that if the jihad ever came close to getting nuclear material, they would have someone on the inside, a sleeper, as they say. The operation was codenamed SHOWBOAT and it was secret beyond secret, so secret that this person had to be recruited outside normal CIA channels. Not only the recruit, but the recruiter had to be perfectly secure. So they thought of your mother, who famously had turned down the CIA’s overtures. A man named Harry Anspach, who had been deeply involved in the Russian jihad, had noticed a young warrior named Kakay Ghazan, and done the usual background check on him. Anspach was making a list of the future leaders of the jihad, should it ever turn against its sponsors, and in the course of this he was surprised to find the connection between you and your mother. I believe he thought you might be a candidate for his sleeper. He had your mother contacted in Zurich with the news that you were still alive and that Harry Anspach in Peshawar would be willing to help her get you out of Afghanistan, for a price. She immediately left for Peshawar, with the results you know. You were taken and returned to America,”

“But they didn’t make me the sleeper,” says Theo.

“No. I’m afraid your mother had another candidate for that role. I’m sorry, my brother, but you would not have been suitable. As I recall it, you were having problems with your studies at the age of ten. So I was recruited instead, and my existence is secret from all but a tiny handful of people. I am not on any list of assets, and my handler is not a CIA agent. My handler is codenamed Ringmaster, and I believe you can guess who she is.”

Here he glances at Sonia and goes on, “Anspach understood the doomsday scenario was that al-Qaeda might get hold of nuclear material. India had exploded a nuclear weapon in 1974, and everyone knew Pakistan was working on one. Pakistan is a Muslim nation full of people sympathetic to the jihad. It was only a matter of time before doomsday arrived. So when the jihad gets hold of some plutonium or whatever, what do they do with it? You can’t make a nuclear device in your kitchen like you do a roadside bomb. You need an expert, with excellent mujahideen credentials, who has kept contact with the movement throughout his education and who has been allowed to dig into classified material, despite those connections, protected of course by Anspach and his friends. AlQaeda needed someone like Abu Lais, and here he is, finished and packaged by the CIA. Naturally, such a figure is close to the leadership of al-Qaeda, but he doesn’t betray them, not even for 9/11 does he betray them; oh, no, he is far too valuable. He waits for the moment when the jihad obtains nuclear material. Yes, Anspach is a farseeing man, Theo, farseeing and very covert. And here we all are.”

The confusion is back on Theo’s face, Sonia observes. He says, “But there isn’t any nuclear material.”

There is a silence now, and Wazir takes a long moment before responding. “Why would you think that, Theo?”

“Because I invented the whole thing. It’s a scam. We needed a serious effort to rescue my mother, and the only way the U.S. was going to send a competent force into Pakistan was if they thought Pakistani weapons-grade uranium had gone missing. Farid and the family generated a set of fake conversations to convince NSA that there’d been a theft.” He turns to his mother. “I had to do something. America wasn’t going to try to rescue you, and the ISI was in with the kidnappers. I sent another phony message the other day saying the bomb was here in Paidara. I have a radio. In a minute I’m going to make a call saying that I’ve located the nuke and the specials will come in and secure the area and that’ll be it.”

“Oh, Theo!” cries Sonia.

“What?” he says, and sees that Wazir is looking at him with a peculiar expression on his face: amazement, dismay, the kind of look one uses with madmen on the street.

“If true, that’s actually quite amusing,” Wazir says. “Because, you know, there was a theft. I have seventy-five kilograms of enriched uranium. And I made it into bombs.”

“He’s joking,” Sonia says, looking at her son, wrenching a false smile onto her face.

“Are you?” Theo asks. He draws his terrible pistol and rises, changing his position, moving slightly on the charpoy so that his mother is not blocking a potential shot at Wazir.

Wazir seems unconcerned. “Of course not. Do you want to see one? I have it here.”

He goes to the corner of the room, draws aside the tarp, and reveals a packing case. Theo’s pistol comes up to cover him.

From the packing case Wazir takes a large stainless steel box, the kind mechanics use to store their valuable tools. It is obviously quite heavy, and Wazir has to strain at the handle with both hands to lift it out onto the table. He opens it with a key.

Theo rises and looks inside the box. It contains a steel cylinder eighteen inches wide by about thirty long that fills nearly the whole of the interior. The rest of the space is taken up by a small green plastic container the size of a lunch box, on top of which is a keypad and several small LED lights.

“It’s based on the W-82/XM-785 artillery shell from the sixties,” Wazir says, “but it’s a little more advanced. My own design, really. Fifteen kilograms of fissionable material, beryllium reflector, weighs less than a hundred pounds. It’s a linear implosion device. The fissile material is formed into an egg shape and it’s surrounded by a cylinder of high explosive rigged for simultaneous detonation at each end. An inert wave-shaper channels the shock wave so as to compress the egg into a spheroid to achieve supercriticality. The calculated yield, best case, would be over two kilotons, but I’d be happy with one point five or even one. Of course I haven’t tested it, but the math is right and the people I used for the assembly were all Dara artisans. I figured anyone who could manufacture a perfect working replica of a Beretta nine-millimeter out of an old crankshaft could do the job. The firing sequence runs off IGBT transistors rather than krytron tubes, not as efficient but a lot more available. I had the boards custom made in Malaysia and wrote the software myself. This is one of six.”

He smiles like a schoolboy who has given the right answer. Then he sees that Theo is pointing the pistol at him and he frowns a little.

“Why are you pointing that at me, Theo?” he asks.

“Why? Fuck it, Wazir, you’re my brother, but I’m not going to let you blow up an American city with that thing.”

Wazir looks stunned; he gapes. “An American city? Why on earth would I do such a thing? That’s crazy!”

“Thank you. That’s a good description of al-Qaeda.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Theo! There’s no such thing as al-Qaeda. Was there such a thing as the jihad? You were there. It’s just different factions. Sometimes they cooperate; sometimes they fight. Some of them are maniacs; some of them are perfectly reasonable people trying to fix an intolerable situation, which is the oppression and humiliation of the umma. Sure there are some who’d love to destroy New York or Tel Aviv, but I’d be a maniac myself if I listened to them. You saw what happened when those idiots knocked down two office buildings on 9/11. Can you imagine what America would do, what Israel would do, if we blew up one of their cities? They have thousands of nuclear missiles. They’d massacre every Muslim in the world.”

“So what are you going to do with them?”

Sonia says, “He’s going to blow up Ras Tanura.”

“What?” says Theo.

“It’s the Saudi oil terminal. Ten percent of the world’s oil supply flows through it,” she says.

“Yes,” says Wazir, “and we will also take out the Khor-el-Amaya terminal in Iraq and Kharg Island in Iran. The other bombs will go to the giant Saudi fields, Ghawar and either Khurais or Manita, I haven’t decided. All at once, of course. The world oil supply will be reduced for a period of several years by about forty percent. Yes, they can rebuild, but it’s going to be hard to do in radiation suits in eighty centigrade heat.”

Theo looks at his mother, remembering her television interview.

“This was your idea.”

“I was speaking theoretically,” she says. “I had no idea he was going to put it into actual practice. He’s going to kill thousands of people. Do you think I wanted that?”

Theo realizes that his gun is pointing at her and he moves it away. He says, “Mother, just once I wish you’d tell me the truth.”

“That is the truth,” she says. “Ask him.”

Theo turns to Wazir. “Well?”

“Does it matter?” Wazir says. “Really? Ideas cause events. That’s the story of the twentieth century. Do you think that the theoretical anti-Semites, respectable people all of them, all the intellectual race theorists, ever imagined Auschwitz? Or earnest European communists ever imagined the Gulag or Katyn Forest? What did I learn from her in all those years, Theo, when she was more my mother than she was yours? That oil is the curse of the umma; that it is inherently corrupting, worse than slavery; that Wahabi puritanism funded by oil is essentially a fraud, a fig leaf the Saudis use to salve their consciences while they live like emperors; that what the umma needs more than anything is to be left alone to find its way back to God; and that it will never be left alone as long as the oil flows smoothly out of the terminals. So that’s one reason why I am going to turn off the taps.”

“What’s the other reason?” asks Theo, after a pause.

Wazir’s face changes, and Sonia sees the mujahid boy flash out again, a startling resurrection, and in thick Pashto he says, “Revenge, of course. I am a Pashtun, after all.”

“Revenge for what?”

“For everything!” cries Wazir. “Against being manipulated. Against being treated like a tool. Against the arrogance that believed I could be treated so. Against the arrogance that allows a tenth of the world to live in peace, comfort, and security, ignoring the miseries of the rest. Against the idea of collateral damage. Against the lazy stupidity of the Americans and the diligent hypocrisy of the oil sheikhs. That world has to be smashed. It can’t go on. But I am only one man and that’s all I could think of. Is that enough?”

“It’s enough,” says Theo. “But I can’t let you do it, brother.”

“Why not? Don’t you feel the same way?”

“It doesn’t matter what I feel. I’m a soldier and you’re an enemy. It’s an honor thing. Where are the other bombs?”

“What if I don’t tell you? Will you torture me?”

“Don’t be stupid, Wazir!”

“She knows,” says Wazir, pointing at Sonia. “She helped me set up the networks under the noses of her CIA masters, and it was easy because none of them could imagine blowback on this scale. You could torture her as well.”

Theo looks at his mother, and she thinks it is the same look he wore when he was a little boy and she came home from her long journeys, a look that said, Why did you leave me? What did I do wrong? A look that is a window into a heart that can never be healed.

“Is he right, Mom?” Theo asks. “Is he telling the truth?”

She says, “Why did you come, Theo? You’re not supposed to be involved in this.”

“Well, I’m sure as hell involved now. So tell me! He’s blowing smoke, isn’t he? I get the CIA connection, I get the whole Trojan horse thing. But you didn’t know about the bombs, did you? You didn’t help him plan this?”

Sonia remains silent. She can hear her own breathing and Theo’s and the faint sounds of the village night, someone coughing, the distant rumble of a truck, a night creature calling, the wind. It goes on, this silence, for a long while, it is almost a contemplative silence, she thinks, waiting for God to speak, but at last it is Wazir who speaks.

“You know, Theo, I’m not sure you understand your mother. She’s a very strange person, and I say this as someone who has met some very strange people indeed. Did you know she followed a Sufi pir all through the trip to Central Asia? She didn’t put that into the book. An odd brand of Islam, really. They believe that everything written about God is in some sense wrong, because if you propose a complete picture of God, it’s not God by definition, because God is beyond all human description. And it follows that Saint Paul was somewhat wrong and the Gospels are somewhat wrong and the Prophet, peace be on him, was somewhat wrong too. God doesn’t make deals with His creatures. He’s always a surprise, and trying to chain Him to a human religion is folly. That’s what she taught me and I believe it, because otherwise the world does not make a bit of sense.”

He laughs, a little hysterically, Sonia thinks, but Theo doesn’t even smile. Grimly, still covering Wazir with his pistol, he rummages in his pack and pulls out a coil of rope and what looks like a cheap portable radio.

“What are you doing, Theo?” she asks.

“I’m going to tie up Wazir, Mom. And then I’m going to call my control and tell them I’ve located the nuke and for them to come and get it. And us. Wazir, put your hands behind you.”

Theo moves behind the chair with his rope, and the moment he is thus distracted, Sonia stands, snatches up the AK, and points it at her son.

“Let him go, Theo.”

He looks at her blankly. “What’re you doing?”

“I’m letting Wazir escape. The Americans will lock him up forever. They’ll torture him.”

Again she sees the emotions wash across the screen of his face. He really is a sweet boy at heart, she thinks; there is no real guile in him, or meanness. He says, calmly enough, “And if not, what are you going to do, shoot me?”

“I will certainly disable you. I’m a very good shot, as you know, and I am not going to have Wazir rot in an American prison. I would do exactly the same if the situation were reversed.”

Theo nods and backs away. Wazir rises and speaks a few words to Theo, so softly that Sonia cannot hear them, and then he picks up the duffel bag.

To Sonia he says, grinning again, “I presume I can’t take my bomb.”

“Just go, Wazir,” she says, “and may God protect you.”

“And you also,” he says and goes to the window. He tosses the duffel bag through it and climbs out.

Sonia watches her son raise his pistol and point it at Wazir. She puts the front sight of the AK on her son and her finger on the trigger.

They stand that way for a second or two, like a diorama of some awful historical event, and then Wazir is gone. They can hear his feet scrabbling as he descends the rough wall and the thump as he lands.

Theo clicks his pistol to safe and tosses it on the table.

“Would you really have shot me?” he asks.

“Of course not,” she says. “Would you have shot Wazir?”

“No,” he says, and shrugs helplessly. “Then what the hell was all that about?”

“Reflexes to satisfy our various codes of honor. Insect responses. What will you do now?”

“Like I just said, get on the radio, tell them I’ve secured the nuke, and call in the Rangers. They’ll be here before dawn.”

“They’ll do a lot of damage.”

“That’s what they’re for,” he says, and fiddles with his fake Chinese radio. In a few moments it crackles with voices and Theo speaks cryptic words and numbers into it. He signs off and leaves the thing on the table, a green light glowing on its face.

He says, “This is the safest house in town as long as that beacon is on. They’re going to be very, very careful with our gadget here.”

They both look at the metal case. Sonia shudders and turns her eyes away from it. Theo says, “Yeah, the mind can’t quite grasp it. Two thousand tons of TNT, did he say? It’s like something from another universe. It shouldn’t exist, but there it is. And he built it. I can hardly look at the fucking thing, and Wazir built it! Tell me, do you think he really has five other bombs out there somewhere?”

“I have no idea. I was astounded that he had even one.”

“Uh-huh,” he grunts: an unbelieving noise.

She sits on the charpoy. Suddenly, in the afterwash of violent emotion, she is exhausted. She would like to be far away from people now, even people she loves. Especially people she loves. Her son, who has done prodigies to rescue her, now leans against the wall, looking out the window from time to time, like a man waiting for a bus. He doesn’t look at her. She knows he is thinking about Wazir, and what Wazir has done, and how she arranged for him to do it. It is a lot to take in; she sympathizes, she hurts with her boy, but her therapeutic skills do not help her now, the wonderful gearing of her empathic faculty will not turn in the thick gel of familial love. Still, there is the instinct to reach out.

“Theo,” she says, “come sit by me. I want to talk with you.”

He clumps over and sits, sullen.

“What are you thinking about?”

A shrug. He has regressed to sixteen.

“No, really, Theo,” she presses.

“Really? Okay, I was thinking about Hughes.”

“Who?”

“Wally Hughes. You know, from Special Forces. We went through jump school at Benning together and all through SFQC at Bragg. There was me and Buck Claiborne and Billy Olin and Hughes. I think you met him once, at Benning that time you came down, when I graduated.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yeah. Anyway, Hughes had a wife, Laura, and two little girls, one of them three years old and the other just a baby, and he was crazy about them: he had the picture in the helmet, he e-mailed every day when he could, the whole nine yards. This was in the early part of Iraq, the goat fuck. He kept getting extended. They’d give him fifteen-day leaves, but they wouldn’t let him rotate home, because they were so short they were using Special Forces joes as regular line infantry, just to keep the lid on. Well, in the early part of ’05, I think it was, Laura cracked. She wrote him a dear john, sorry and all that, but she’d met someone and she was moving away. She was frightened of him, frightened about the way he was when he came home. She was scared he was turning into one of the guys she’d heard about, who comes home and kills his family and himself. Hughes didn’t say shit to any of us, just kept on trooping, except he started to volunteer for dangerous stuff. He was always on point, always the first one through the door. He got a Silver Star and a DSC.”

“He was trying to commit suicide?”

“I don’t know. I think he was going after the Medal of Honor, because that was the only way they’d let him out of the war. Anyway, we were in the area listening in on some al-Q comm, and we located a command center. This was in Samarra, and they tasked Hughes and his team to get them out of where they were, which was the top floor of a four-story apartment house, full of families, and the insurgents, of course, wouldn’t let anyone out, because they kind of like it when we kill a lot of women and kids; it’s good for their business. I think they were going to call in an air strike, but Hughes just runs in there all by himself with maybe twenty guys blazing away at him and he clears out the whole bunch of them. He must have been hit a dozen times, but he got them all. The damnedest thing you ever saw.”

“Did he get his medal?”

“Posthumously, yes. And the reason I was thinking about him, which is what I know you’re going to ask, is that I finally know how he felt when he lost the pin.”

“The…?”

“The pin that holds the wheel on the axle. Or the spoon on the grenade, whatever. Except for a few guys who are just stone killers, everyone who does war needs a pin: family, your buddies, ambition, honor, or… or something, because regular people aren’t supposed to do what we do or see the stuff we see. Or no, I’m not saying this right: there has to be a place you can hide-what’s the word? Existentially. You need an existential hide. Religion’s a good one, it’s real traditional, what those assholes out there have but we don’t. We have our families, or a sense of the way things are, that defines us as not guys who blow innocent people up. For Hughes it was his family, and for me it was you and Wazir, even though I practically never saw you and I thought Wazir was dead. It was a set of memories that told me who Theo Bailey was. You know? And now I find that the base of my life was like a fantasy, a dream, that those people never existed.”

“That’s not so, Theo. People change.”

“Oh, no kidding? People change! That’s a terrific insight, Mother. Let me write that down so I don’t forget. No, people don’t change, not like that. I don’t change like that, and Gul Muhammed doesn’t, and Farid doesn’t and Nisar doesn’t. The only people who change like that are people who never were what they seemed in the first place. I had a friend, a brother, my brother-in-arms in a just war, and it turns out he was somebody else, because the Wazir I knew was not some crazy half-American nuclear-genius bomb builder; and my mother was a writer and a Sufi mystic and someone who did therapy in a charity clinic, not some fucking rogue CIA mastermind plotting to blow up the world.”

“It must have been a real shock, seeing him again.”

“She says in her calming therapist voice. It didn’t work when I was seventeen and it’s not working now. Because I want to know. I want to know my role in the game, because, you know, I can’t believe that all this-all this plotting-was the result of them giving you help getting me out of Afghanistan. It doesn’t compute, Mother. Because I’m not that important to you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Theo! Don’t you think that, having lost two children, I’d do anything at all to protect you? Even this?”

She means the thing in its silvery casing on the table that neither of them can bear to look at; but now they look at it.

“Didn’t you do what you had to do to find and rescue me?” she asks, in a gentler voice. “We’re the same, we’re mad in the same way, and Wazir makes a third. That’s why you didn’t shoot him and that’s why you’re not going to tell anyone about him being here or what his plans are.”

“I won’t?”

“No. Because your love is only for your family. You’ve already betrayed your country and your army to organize this rescue. The fact that there happens to be a real bomb doesn’t signify. And you’ll do it again, as will I. We do everything for each other, because that’s all there is for people like us, it’s the curse of us primitives, it’s why the bureaucracies lord it over us, why the earth is ruled by people whose loyalties are to abstractions. I had a dream about this on the flight over here, and I just this minute realized what it meant. Would you like to hear it?”

He nods, and she tells him about the warped little boy in the circus yard and about smashing the nests of baby birds or squirrels and the stern woman in spangles and her horrible magic.

“What does it mean?”

“It means that in a world ruled by violence, you can’t protect love without becoming warped and injured in some way. My mother taught me that, which is why she-or rather her introject-is in that dream: it’s the lesson of her glorious but unsuccessful nation. When I was a girl we had a poster in our trailer, one that had appeared all over Eastern Europe, first in Prague during the Soviet suppression and then in Warsaw and Budapest and East Germany. Ours was in Polish, of course, and it said:

“We have not learned anything, we don’t know anything, we don’t have anything, we don’t understand anything, we don’t sell anything, we don’t help, we don’t betray, and we will not forget.

“I was a just a kid, so that even though my mother translated the words, I didn’t understand what they meant. But I think I knew the meaning in some deep way and that it would be a guide for my life; I was to be a resistant, a subversive. And perhaps if my mother had lived I would have been a respectable subversive, like they have in America, educated and in the chattering classes, but this was not my fate, as you know; she died, and my father was weak. Did you know he actually sold me to Guido Armelini for cash? Even I didn’t know it for years; I had completely suppressed it until it came out in therapy, in Zurich, after the girls died. I remembered then how Guido used to feel me up-I was sixteen at the time-and whisper about what he was going to do to me when I was legal. He was very afraid of jail, old Guido, at least he was afraid of jail for statutory rape. For card-sharping not so much. Then I found Farid and made him fall in love with me, and I took the money and made sure Guido’s gangsters would think it was Guido who took it, and they killed him; and I told Farid I had to get out of the country right away, which might even have been true. Yes, well may you stare! All these revelations! Did you ever read a story by Flannery O’Connor called ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’? No, of course you didn’t, you’re not a reader. But there’s a line in it that goes something like She would’ve been a good woman if someone had held a gun to her head her whole life.”

She looks again at Wazir’s shiny case.

“I feel that way now. It’s that bomb, it’s hard to tell lies in its presence; it’s what the West has instead of God; it’s what America really believes in, despite our constant churchgoing.”

She sighs heavily, it turns into a sob, she clutches at her son, and they stay that way for a long time until gradually, without really understanding when it began, they become aware of a sound.

“That’s them,” says Theo, gently breaking her grip. He removes a night-vision scope from his pack, adjusts it over his right eye, slings the AK, and extinguishes the oil lamp. In the darkness she hears him say, “You should get back to that room. It’d be better if they discovered you by accident. You’ll be Sonia Laghari. There’s no reason anyone on the mission should know you’re my mother.”

He takes her back down the hallway, pistol at the ready, but as they pass a door she hears a familiar cough.

“I want to go in here for a minute and check on Dr. Schildkraut.”

“Yes, but make it fast,” he says, and as if to confirm the urgency of the moment they hear shouts and warning gunshots from outside. The mujahideen have also heard the thrumming of massed helicopters.

Sonia goes into the room. It is lightless and she follows her ears to where Karl-Heinz is huddled against the wall.

“Sonia, is that you?” he wheezes.

“Yes. How are you feeling?”

“Wonderful. Sonia, will you do me one last favor? On the next draw of cards, use your tricks so that I am low card. Can you do that, please? Because I wish to use the last gasp of my inhaler now. I wish to feel like a human again and not a pathetic coughing wretch when they cut my head off. I should have demanded it before, but I was a coward.”

It comes into Sonia’s mind, like a reflex, to lie, to pretend she has not fixed the drawing of the cards, but of course Karl-Heinz, the old friend, has known all along.

“There will be no more drawing,” she says. “We are being rescued. You can hear the helicopters. But Karl-Heinz? I would appreciate it if the others were not told.”

He says nothing to this. She feels him move and then hears the hiss of the inhaler and a deep sigh, and then shouts and heavy footsteps. The sound of helicopters also increases.

She feels a motion in the doorway and hears Theo’s voice shouting, “Everyone down on the floor, get down!”

After that, the sound of automatic fire at close range, colossal, penetrating the body like the promise of wounds. By the flash of his weapon she sees for the first time her boy practicing his profession. He is fighting off Wazir’s Arab team. Her ears grow numb, but oddly she can still hear the snap of the return fire, the thud of bullets hitting, and the tinkle of brass falling. Theo is firing the AK now, but in another minute all the sounds of gunfire are drowned in the roar of a he li cop ter directly overhead. Theo stops firing and pulls the door closed, but the gunfire does not cease, it grows, she can see bright flashes come from under the door and through the many bullet holes pierced through it, like red and green lasers in the dark.

The nearby firing fades. The door to the room is kicked open. By the faint ruddy glow of some distant blaze arriving through the window of the room down the hall Sonia sees the shapes of armed men, she hears urgent shouts to lie down and put their hands behind their heads.

So she is captured one final time, now by her fellow countrymen. Theo makes himself known to the Special Forces officer in charge, he tells about the bomb and explains the hostage situation. The officer insists that the hostages be removed immediately; only certain people can stay in the house of the bomb; he has his orders, no exceptions. The former hostages are led out of the building, surrounded by a protective cordon of elite troops. Sonia supports Schildkraut and Annette, who has endured the recent firefight alone and in the dark and is shaking uncontrollably. Theo is not with them.

Outside, there is war. The night sky above Paidara is studded with aircraft of all types, the Americans are not stinting on the Invasion of Pakistan. Sheets of fire rain from above, overwhelming the few feeble green tracers that rise from the guns of the mujahideen. They pass exploded, burning houses; by the light of one of them Sonia sees Amin’s stunned expression, his mouth gapes open.

“What are they doing?” he cries out. “This is insanity. They are killing everything.”

“It is the bomb, Amin,” she says. “There was a nuclear bomb in the village, made with material stolen from Pakistan. It gives them all the excuse they need.” Amin, that strong confident man, bursts into tears.

They are hustled into an intact house some streets away, the door forced open, the terrified family confined to one room, and the hostages are examined by a Special Forces medic, who recommends the immediate evacuation of Dr. Schildkraut. The old man is carried off and flown away.

The others are interrogated by men in jumpsuits without name tags or military insignia. Sonia tells her story to one of these. Not the true story, of course; he is not cleared to hear it. Has she ever told the true story? Probably not. Would she even recognize the true story if she heard it? Probably not. It is, she concludes, like the advice she received when first learning how to ride the circus horses. If the horse bolts, they told her, hang on and ride it out. Eventually the horse will get tired and stop. No matter how frightened you are, never try to jump off. Sonia has been riding this particular runaway for over twenty years, and she detects a slowing in the pace; these last events have an air of sweat and hard breathing. Soon, she thinks, she will step lightly off the steaming back and resume her real life. Her interrogator wonders why she smiles like that.

She passes Annette Cosgrove in the hall of the house of interrogation and offers a friendly look, but Annette stares straight ahead and passes by without a word. Someone not dead must take the blame for all this, Sonia thinks, and Annette has apparently included her in this group. Somewhat later she happens upon Father Shea and Manjit Nara. They are cordial but distant. There will be no joyful hugs among the released, and Sonia accepts this. No one wants to touch the death dealer.

The sounds of battle fade. The dawn comes, a chill one, with a wind that fills the air with the stink of burning and tosses the rich drifts of fresh debris into stinging clouds. Sonia and the other hostages are led out to view the prisoners and the wounded and slain, to identify those who were involved with the mujahideen and the kidnapping. They have placed the corpses in neat military rows in the street in front of the ruined mosque, where Sonia has twice been whipped. Mahmoud is there, and the man who cut Cosgrove’s head off, and the older man with the hennaed beard who wanted Rashida, and many other mujahideen, who were just faces in the crowd to the hostages but obviously had been wicked indeed, deserving of this fate. Rashida, who was not a mujahid, is also there, a little pile of bloodied rags, her wedding bangles gleaming on her thin wrists, and there is her father too, and a woman who may have been her mother or someone else’s mother, lines and lines of collateral damagees lying under a shifting, buzzing scrim of flies.

Idris Ghulam is not there, however; he has survived. He was blown through a window in the first moments of the battle and landed well; he has broken bones and his body is peppered with pieces of metal, many and painful, but he is not dead. She identifies him to her interrogator like a good citizen, and then kneels beside him.

“Peace be with you, Idris, and I am sorry to see you hurt,” she says in Pashto, “but I am happy to see you alive.”

He glares at her for an instant, then looks away. “Did you see this in your dreams?”

“Oh, yes,” she replies, “and if you recall I tried to warn you, but, as Rahman says, Like a child you put your hand in the fire, hoping for something good, unconscious of the pain to come.”

“They did all this, made all this death, just to save you?”

“No, there was another reason, but what does that matter? The dead are still dead, including those you killed yourself. It would have been better not to start the killing.”

“Will they kill me?”

“No, they will confine you, and perhaps you will be tortured in some way, not as badly, however, as what awaits you in Hell, unless you repent and change your life. There is still a lot of time. When I was your age I was a begum in a great house in Lahore, but after that I led a very different kind of life. Trust God and follow His commandments, Idris, and may you have peace.”

Now the interrogator demands to know what they’ve been saying. “We were just discussing religion,” says Sonia, and walks away.