“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.