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.”