By Wilson’s reckoning, it was going to take upwards of two hundred drums to package it all. But when they were done, there wasn’t a sniffer-dog in the world who’d bark at it.

That night, he had dinner with Hakim. Though Wilson had been in Lebanon for nearly a week, he had yet to speak to the Arab for more than five minutes at a time. They’d come to Baalbek in separate cars, following the Bekaa Valley as it curved north, arid and blond, between opposing mountain ranges. Once in Baalbek, Wilson was left to himself (and his minders), while Hakim made arrangements about the hash.

The hashish was a recent development, and it was an unpleasant surprise. During their time in Allenwood, Bo had assured him that finding money for Wilson’s project would not be a problem – money was never a problem. At the time, Hakim’s military operations had been subsidized by a prince who occupied a high position in the Ministry of the Interior in Riyadh. In return for the prince’s financial assistance, Hakim had promised to restrict his operations to targets outside the Happy Kingdom. And so he had.

But all that changed after 9/11. The prince was killed in an automobile accident (or so the Saudis claimed), and Hakim’s money supply dried up almost overnight. By the time Wilson was released from prison, operations were being funded with cloned and stolen credit cards, bank robberies, kidnappings, and drugs.

Just as Hakim had once worked with a prince in the Saudi Ministry of the Interior, he now worked with a general in Lebanon’s Ministry of Defense.

The Bekaa Valley was quilted with fields of marijuana grown on large and modern farms. Harvested with tractors and dried in barns, the plants were hand-rubbed through sieves of cloth, creating a resinous dust that was easily compressed into blocks of hashish.

It was up to Hakim to package the product and move it – that’s where Wilson came in. He would have preferred to be given a suitcase full of cash, and sent on his way to carry out his operation. Instead, he found himself having to earn the money the hard way, plunging into a Triangle Trade of drugs and guns and diamonds.

Moral issues didn’t bother him. He was beyond that. What worried Wilson was the fact that he was putting his life in the hands of a man who hated Americans. All he really knew about Hakim was what Bo told him. And Bo was insistent that the less Wilson and Hakim knew about each other, the better it would be for both of them. Still, he’d learned a few things about his dinner companion.

According to Bo, “Aamm Hakim” was a Jordanian. An Islamist, he’d attended universities in Iran and the United States. In the 1980s, he’d fought with the Taliban against the Russians in Afghanistan, and with Hezbollah against the Americans in Beirut. When the Lebanese civil war wound down, he formed his own organization to carry out operations under contract to foreign intelligence agencies and others requiring deniability.

Were Hakim and his group a part of al-Qaeda? Wilson asked. Bo turned the question aside. Al-Qaeda isn’t like that, he told him. There’s a big al-Qaeda, and a little al-Qaeda. The big al-Qaeda is more of a network than an organization. It’s like the Internet, he said, a cloud of constantly changing connections, with no central command, a loose association of people with shared affinities. Some know each other, most don’t.

Does your uncle know bin-Laden? Wilson asked.

Uncomfortable with the question, Bo replied with a non sequitur: “They don’t call him bin-Laden. They call him the Contractor.”

The FBI’s “Most Wanted” website had its own version of Aamm Hakim. According to the Bureau, Wilson’s dinner companion was an Egyptian, né Hakim Abdul-Bakr Mussawi, aka Ali Hussein Musalaam, Ahmed Izz-al-Din, and half a dozen other names.

He had a degree in accounting and was “the alleged military operations chief of the Coalition of the Oppressed of the Earth.”

Wilson had clicked on the FBI link that explicated the ideology of various al-Qaeda splinter groups. The Coalition was composed of Salafi jihadists “who believe that ridding the world of modernity will result in an Islamic Revival, returning Muslim peoples worldwide to Islam’s most righteous path. While not rejecting technology as such, Salafi jihadists do reject Western (and especially U.S.) cultural hegemony. Orbiting the true believers at the center of the Coalition,” Wilson read, “is the usual assortment of mercenaries and foot soldiers.” According to the website, the Coalition was responsible for “attacks on American facilities in West Africa and the Far East.”

Wilson and Hakim sat in the dining room of the Hotel Dumas, a dilapidated relic with high ceilings and dusty chandeliers. If anything, the guest rooms were even more decrepit, with wooden beds little better than pallets. In its heyday, the place had been a destination of considerable glamour, hosting the likes of Josephine Baker and Charles de Gaulle. But that was then; now the Bekaa’s dust had taken hold. Pipes clanked. Doors creaked. Towels and rugs were threadbare.

But the food was delicious.

With the exception of Zero and Khalid, sipping tea at a table near the door, Wilson and Hakim were alone. Their party seemed to be the hotel’s only guests, though whether this was by accident or design was uncertain.

By now Wilson was not shocked by the arrival of the bottle of wine or the pleasure Hakim took in the ritual. Despite the Islamic ban on alcohol, the Arab liked to peruse the label, take a careful sniff of the cork when the waiter presented it, and judiciously taste the small splash of wine poured into his glass.

Hakim smacked his lips, nodded, and dismissed the waiter. He poured a glass for himself, then Wilson.

It was as if Hakim had read Wilson’s mind. Holding his glass up to the light, he sent the liquid into a slow, centrifugal spin. Finally, he took a sip. “I’m Takfiri,” he explained, his voice low and matter-of-fact. “You know this word?”

Wilson shook his head.

“It means that for us, the rules don’t matter. Wine, a girl, even pork – everything is allowed. Nothing is haram.”

“Sweet,” Wilson remarked.

Hakim ignored the sarcasm. “It’s not ‘sweet.’ Everything is different for us. It has to be.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re in a war,” he said, “and because we’re ‘behind the lines.’” Hakim said this as if he were explaining the obvious. “For us, sin is a kind of disguise.”

Wilson nodded.

“It makes me invisible,” Hakim said.

Wilson got it, but he didn’t buy it. After a week in Lebanon, it was obvious that the Arab knew how to enjoy himself, whatever the Koran might say about it. Their second night in Beirut, Hakim had gotten drunk in the bar of the St. Georges Hotel, eventually wandering off with an expensive-looking girl young enough to be his granddaughter. Was that an exercise in cover?

Either way, there was no denying Hakim’s commitment to “the cause,” and even to the plan at hand. However skeptical he may have been of working with an American, however doubtful he may have been that Wilson’s project would work, Hakim had come through on every promise. And why shouldn’t he? Wilson wondered. It wasn’t as if the Arab was doing it for shits and giggles. Once the two of them hooked up in Antwerp, Hakim would walk off with seventy percent of the take. So even if Wilson’s own operation went nowhere, the Arab would make a great deal of money. And Wilson would be taking all the risks.

Hakim drained his glass, then poured another. The waiter came and went in a blaze of smiles, distributing a mezze of small dishes around the table. Hakim swirled his wine, somehow managing to do so without ever seeming to move his hand.

“You haven’t said anything about Belgrade,” Hakim remarked.

Wilson shrugged. “Not much to tell. I did what I went to do. It snowed.”