"Look," he said after a time, pointing to a fortress atop a hill, and she knew he was trying to make nice. "Skanderbeg's castle. Our national hero. He was a janissary, a viceroy in the sultan's army. But he rebelled in 1569 and led an uprising of the Albanian people against the Ottomans. He was never captured."

At the turnoff, a crowd of ragged boys appeared, bunching their hands in front of open mouths.

"They're hungry," Jane cried, reaching into her backpack for dried fruit, nuts.

Bashkim pressed harder on the accelerator.

"They have become accustomed to begging," he said tersely. "The foreign-aid workers throw out sweets and they scrabble after them like dogs."

The lack of sympathy struck Jane as harsh. When Bashkim got off the highway in Elbassan, a town dominated by a hulking factory that belched out black smoke, delicate tendrils of unease bloomed inside her.

"Why are we stopping?"

Bashkim's voice was light, nonchalant.

"To drop some medicine off with a friend." He grew apologetic. "It's for his sick mother."

He braked for a herd of sheep and something slid from under her seat, hitting her heel. She looked down and saw the barrel of a machine gun. Bashkim saw it, too. He lunged between her legs, grabbed it. His arm slid against her inner thigh. Then he shoved the gun firmly under his own seat.

"Sorry about that," he said, his voice thick.

Jane gripped the leather edge of the Mercedes seat, her palms slick with moisture. She wanted to scream. Had she only imagined that his arm had lingered? And what if the gun had gone off?

When he tapped her, she jumped.

"It's to protect us," he said. "Just in case."

She tried to still the thudding of her heart against her rib cage, convince herself it made sense. This was still a land of brigands. As for the other, it was just a clumsy accident.

Bashkim wheeled the car into a driveway and the gate to a compound swung open. Jane's unease spiked higher. Why hadn't he told her earlier about the stop? What if it was all a ruse? A trap? The car moved forward. She thought about turning the door handle and hopping out. But then what? The streets were filled with tough-looking, idle young men. And she'd be stranded with little money and no way back. She'd heard whispers about what happened to women found alone after dark, especially outside the capital. The gate clanged behind them and three men with hawk faces materialized. This was where it would happen, she thought.

"I'll wait in the car," she said.

"You should use the facilities," Bashkim said firmly. "There will be no other opportunity."

Then a door to the house burst open and a plump lady waddled out. When Bashkim pulled out a container of pills and handed them to the woman, Jane could have cried with relief.

The woman came around to Jane's door, grabbed her arm and tugged her toward the house. Oniony gusts of sweat, overlaid with a yeasty smell, came from her. When Jane glanced back, the men were clustered around the car trunk.

Inside, Jane was plied with tea, orangeade, cookies and raki, a potent and raw grape brandy. When they walked back out half an hour later, she noticed that the car sat higher. The men were examining a stack of boxes, and she thought she saw the glint of sun on metal. Then Bashkim stepped in front of her, blocking the view, and they left. Her mind afloat from drinking raki on an empty stomach, Jane leaned back in her seat. She told herself to stay vigilant, but instead dozed off, waking an hour later with a sour taste in her mouth, acid in her stomach.

They were in the mountains now, the tall, fierce peaks that dominate Albania, leaving only a sliver of arable land. It was afternoon. Just ahead, a bridge spanned a deep chasm. As they shot onto it, Jane looked and saw white water rushing down. She remembered Paul saying that the bridge was near the border. Then for a while the road would skirt Lake Ohrid, a deep body of still water that formed a natural border between Macedonia and Albania. Coming off the bridge, Bashkim executed a sickening curve around a precipice without a guardrail. Hundreds of yards below, Jane saw the rusting skeletons of cars that had misjudged the turn. Jets of saliva shot into her mouth and she thought she might be sick.

They were on a straightaway when Jane saw an accident ahead and a man waving a white shirt tied to a pole. Bashkim swore and slowed. As they drew closer, Jane saw it wasn't an accident but two Albanian army trucks, blocking the road. A pimply-faced soldier with a rifle waved them over to the side. Bashkim stared ahead with a fixed intensity. The car surged forward, and Jane thought he meant to gun the accelerator and try to blast through.

At the last possible second, he hit the brake. The cars behind him careened into a ditch, bumping along on a cloud of dust and then accelerating past the roadblock. Jane wondered if the authorities might give chase, but they seemed supremely uninterested.

A soldier walked up to Bashkim, rifle pointed at his head, barking orders in Albanian. Jane saw the restaurateur's knee tremble but his voice stayed calm. She heard the words Amerikane and Skopje. More soldiers came, ordered them out of the car. Jane felt unreal, stiff and jerky with fear. She'd heard about Albanian bandits who set up roadblocks and robbed Westerners of cars, clothes and even shoes, leaving them stranded in their underwear. In years past, tractor-trailer trucks had convoyed to the Yugoslav border without stopping. Jane thought about offering the soldiers money.

She pulled out the cell phone, thinking she'd call Paul at the U.S. embassy in Tirana. "Help," she'd say. "We've been stopped at a roadblock by Albanian soldiers and I think we're in trouble. Now aren't you sorry you didn't let me ride with the courier?"

The soldiers shoved Bashkim and screamed questions at him, ignoring her. Jane took several steps away. Nobody noticed. She drifted around one truck, moved along the tarp to the other, then froze in disbelief.

In the cab, hunched over a laptop, sat Paul. Another embassy guy with a crew cut that she remembered from a Tirana dinner party leaned against the door, peering intently at Paul's screen, a cell phone pressed to his ear. Jane checked her first impulse to dash over and throw herself, sobbing, into Paul's arms. Instead, she ran through all the possible reasons her lover might be sitting in this desolate mountain pass with a passel of Albanian soldiers, and why he hadn't told her he was coming or offered her a ride himself. The answers she came up with made her shrink back into the shade of the tarp. But it was too late.

Sensing her presence, Paul looked up. "Jane," he said. "Oh my God. What are you doing here?"

Like it was a big surprise. She thought back on the argument at the restaurant. Paul announcing in a loud voice that he couldn't allow the embassy courier to drive her to Macedonia.

His look of near gloating-she now realized-when Bashkim had offered a ride.

"You planned this," Jane said. "You set him up."

"That's ridiculous," Paul said, but his voice was as hollow as his eyes.

He glanced over her shoulder, and grim satisfaction spread across his face. She turned and saw the soldiers unloading boxes from the trunk of Bashkim's car. They had found the machine gun, too. Over to the side of the road, Bashkim lay spread-eagle on the ground. One of the soldiers kicked him as he passed and the prone man gave a strangled cry.

"Stop it, you bastard, we need him for questioning," the crew-cut man called.

Paul cursed and jumped out of the cab. He walked toward the soldier and in the moments that followed, Jane saw a different man than the one she had known. His bearing, even the tenor of his voice, changed. He was self-assured, in charge, bristling with power. The soldier cowered as Paul dressed him down in perfect-sounding Albanian.