He said, “I can see their point. I’ve never seen a nuclear weapon. Have you?”

“Sure. They’re pointy at one end and have a little screen with red numbers on it counting the seconds down.”

“Uh-huh, and they have the spooky girl’s voice, This device will detonate in… forty-three seconds… forty-two seconds. Well, apparently not, so they started this course. Be here at oh-six-thirty tomorrow, BDUs, bag for three days.”

“Where’s it at?”

“They didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. It’s local because we got ground transport.”

The next day we drove off into the Virginia woods to some no-name facility. They had us in pretty nice quarters, a campus kind of arrangement, with maybe fifty people taking the course, three-quarters military and the rest various kinds of civilians. I had the sense it was a CIA site, but I could be wrong on that. Stolz went off to a higher-level course with the officers, and I went to what I guess was the dumbed-down version for the NCOs.

Basically it was all about nukes, a little history with some films the general public doesn’t get to see: some background about how they work, how an amateur would go about making one, some sketchy stuff about how, if we found one, to make sure it didn’t detonate, various means of sensing the radiation they give off from a distance, and some information about the government operations devoted to preventing bad guys from getting nukes and what would happen if they did get one and we had to go in and take it away from them.

They had a guy named Morgan come down from the National Security Agency to talk about communications intel-he ran a special section at NSA that did nothing but listen to intercepts and filter them for any sign that nuclear materials had gone missing-and a woman from something called the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, which was responsible for recovering lost or stolen nuclear material, and which I’d never heard of, and she went on about the various forms of nuclear material and how hard or easy it was to make something that would explode from the various types. A man from Langley gave a briefing about al-Q capabilities in this area, and about the ease and difficulty of stealing nuclear material, and how the bad guys would handle it, and there was a special mention of terrorists who were supposedly nuclear experts, and there were pictures, in case we ever ran into one of them at the mall. The main one I recall was named Abu Lais, but they didn’t have a picture of him yet.

It was pretty interesting in a not very real way, and the impression I got was that a terrorist nuke was not all that likely, but if it happened then all bets were off; it would immediately become the only thing on the agenda of the U.S. government, balls to the wall, and so on. On the trip home me and Stoltz were in the back of a van with some SEALs and other guys we didn’t know and they were all sacked out and he turned to me and said, “What was the NCO course like?”

And I told him, and he said the officers’ course was like that but also they talked about the tactical aspects; if you knew some terrorists had a bomb, how would you go in there and get it out? It was an impossible problem, really, and they were still working on the doctrine.

“You see why,” he said.

“Oh, sure,” I said. “If the bad guys hear you coming they’ll flip a switch and take out everything within a couple of miles, including all your guys and the whole civilian population.”

“Right. So you’d have to have totally accurate pinpoint intel about where the bomb was, and you’d have to get a team on that spot without anyone raising an alarm. It would have to be perfect, no do-overs, first time right. I mean, you’ve been on enough missions-when did anything ever go perfect? I mean, we can do tactical surprise, fire superiority, sure, but that wouldn’t be enough. We would have to be on the bomb before they knew we were there. I don’t think it can be done.”

“It can be done,” I said.

“How?”

“You’d need a guy on the inside, to pinpoint the device and keep the bad guys away until the good guys got there.”

“Right. And how are you going to infiltrate a nuclear terror cell?”

“I don’t know, sir,” I said, “but at least it’s doable in theory. For that matter, we pass as bad guys all the time. But any other way is instant mushroom cloud, game over.”

He thought about that for a while and then he said it was above his pay grade, and we starting talking about sports and shit.

Now, checking through the little boxes that rated how valuable you thought the course had been, I recalled it pretty well, and especially that conversation with Captain Stolz. By the time I got back to my folks’ place I had the sketch of a plan that might get my mother out of where she was with her head still on her neck.

I was anxious to talk to my father about it, not so much because I wanted his advice or because I thought he’d encourage me, but because it was the kind of thing I couldn’t pull off alone. Or maybe I wanted him to talk me out of it. I’m not much of a planner.

When I walked in he was sitting in the living room with Mohammed Afridi. My father said, “Oh, good, Theo, you’re back. Come sit down and listen to what Mo has to say.”

Afridi is about the same age as my father, wears his hair long, and has a short graying beard. He’s a Pashtun of the intellectual class, a fairly rare bird in America, and he teaches at Georgetown. He’s supposed to be one of the big academic experts on Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier Province. My father thinks he worked for the CIA during the Russian jihad, but he doesn’t talk about it to us. Which is fair because we don’t talk about my own involvement in that war either.

Afridi was talking about the situation around where my mother had been taken, and he rolled back a little to bring me up to speed. He confirmed what we already suspected, which was that the group involved, al-Faran, was pretty much a creation of the Pakistani ISI, and that up until now they had been operating in Indian-occupied Kashmir. Why they had suddenly decided to kidnap a group of foreigners was something of a mystery, but Mo thought that they never would have done it without a wink from the ISI.

“So why did ISI wink?” I asked.

He shrugged and spread his hands. “Well, that would depend on who in ISI you mean. Like all of Pakistani society it’s riven by factions, some more aggressive than others, some religious, some out for the main chance. That they have kidnapped a billionaire suggests a ransom is in the offing, although, as you know, kidnap for ransom has never been a Pashtun specialty. Hostages, yes, but taking people and exchanging them for money is a little…” He sniffed and touched his nose.

“Punjabi?” my father said, and the two of them laughed.

“You have said it, my friend, not me. No, ransom is not a Pashtun thing; it goes against the idea of hospitality. It is hard for a Pashtun to give someone food and shelter and then sell him. There is a price of twenty-five million dollars on bin Laden’s head but no one has collected it, and the same rule applies, in general, to this kind of kidnapping. It is different from stealing women for wives, which was practically the Pashtun national sport in the old days. On the other hand, Alakazai is a peculiar man.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Bahram Alakazai, the leader of al-Faran. I knew him during the war. His mother was Punjabi, so perhaps that explains it.”

My father said, “Explains what?”

Afridi was silent for a moment, stroking his beard. “He was not a man at peace with himself. You know, the Pashtuns have many vices but one vice they have avoided, and that is the divided heart. You cannot, of course, trust a Pashtun, but you can trust a Pashtun to be himself, to do the things demanded by the Pashtun code, to seek revenge, to offer hospitality, and so on. Alakazai was not like that. We could never quite understand his goals. He seemed to enjoy playing with people just for the sake of the game. And he was good at it, a master manipulator, far more subtle than the Pashtuns, Pakistanis, and Americans with whom he typically dealt. An educated man, naturally, he studied in both Pakistan and the U.K., and I believe he was in America for a time, in the eighties.”