“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.