Even in the dimness she can see Idris’s face working, frowning, grimacing, as he struggles to absorb this. People locked into the heart of a religion often have difficulty thinking about God, and so it is with this man. He asks, “And what of the man in black and the quicksand on the way to Muzdalifa?”

“Oh, that. The man in black is death, of course. You said you could not recognize his face, although it seemed familiar. Well, you have faced death many times, but each time you forget what he looks like or you could not live for a minute. The beads represent the Sufi way, which calls to you. Give up violence, practice mercy, contemplate and love only God, and your life will be preserved. I see you don’t believe me. Well, believe this. Yesterday you had a quarrel with the emir, Alakazai. He hates you and is jealous of your fame and authority-”

“Wait! How do you come to know this?”

“Idris, do you think you are the only one to whom God sends dreams? And so I say to you that your death is already arranged and it will come sooner rather than later. Tell me, do you know a man, a small man in a black-striped turban and a Russian jacket, with a scar on his face, who carries a stockless AK? He will be close to the emir.”

“Yes, that is Sarbaz Khalid Khan. What about him?”

“He is the one charged with your death. And you must do nothing against him, because if you were to kill him or send him away, Alakazai would only find another, and that one I might not know. Instead, you must make sure that the next time you require a victim to murder, he is one of the guards as he was before. This is very important.”

“Why is it important? I don’t understand.” He pulls at his beard in frustration, he slams his fist into his palm, a shocking sound in the tiny room. “My God, I must be insane to be listening to a woman teach me how to fight!”

“You are a fool if you believe I am a woman, Idris. Of course a woman could not tell you anything important. But that is only the face and body you see. Who interprets these dreams is not a woman but a man, Ismail Raza Ali, a Sufi of the Naqshbandiyya order, who dwells in me, although he has been in Paradise almost thirty years. I am only the string he plucks. He speaks to you through me.”

She sees the whites of his eyes flash in the lamplight. “That is impossible.”

“Yes,” she says. “We say God can do all things, but we don’t believe it.”

16

I drove the bike back toward Peshawar for a while until I found a place with good cell reception, and then I dug out the card Nisar had given me and called the number. He answered right away and I told him what had happened and what I’d learned from the ISI lieutenant. He assumed I’d shot him too, and there was a silence on the line when I told him I hadn’t.

“Well, in that case,” he said, “you can’t travel by road back to Lahore. I can arrange a helicopter-”

I said, “Thanks, Uncle, but I don’t want to go back to Lahore. I have some business in Afghanistan.”

“Afghanistan! You are mad! The ISI has made an attempt on your life and you’re going to Afghanistan? You will be a marked man from Herat to Kandahar.”

“Nevertheless, I’m going. Can you help me?”

“Let me think.” More silence on the line. “Yes. I do a good deal of business with a security firm with an office in Kabul. Force Eight, it’s called. If you can get to the freight area of Peshawar airport, I can have them put you on a plane. They’re in and out of there all the time.”

“Thank you, Uncle. I think I can manage that. By the way, have you heard anything from Iqbal?”

“Oh, Iqbal! I tell you, Theo, you have revolutionized that boy’s life. His parents were going mad with him spending his entire existence on that damn computer, and at least now he has something useful to do with it. I cannot follow the details, but he has tapped me for a good deal of money and I can only trust that I will get it back.”

This was not a topic I wanted to discuss over a cell phone, so we said good-bye and I headed for the airport. As it happened, I knew something about Force Eight Security Services International, because people in my line of work are prime recruits for their kind of operation, which is providing private armies in nasty places. They mainly do bodyguarding and site security where our own military is either not engaged or stretched too thin and where the local cops are unreliable. I had received a few polite inquiries myself, usually around the time my enlistment was about to run out, and my sense was they had the kind of political connections that would make stop-loss orders go away. I always told them I wasn’t interested.

At the airport I bribed my way into the secure freight area as any regular terrorist might have done and rode my bike right up to a black-painted Caribou with the Force Eight logo painted on it, just like the firm was a regular nation. I had no trouble hitching a ride, because Nisar had cleared it with the higher-ups, and also I happened to know the pilot, a guy named Arnie Havens, who used to be with the 106th, what they call the Night Stalkers, the people who insert Deltas and other special operations troops. Incredible pilots, and I almost asked him what they were paying him, but I found I was sort of embarrassed about it. He seemed a little embarrassed too, to be there.

While I waited, I called Cousin Bacha Khan and told him what had happened to me and he expressed delight at my narrow escape. He seemed sincere over the phone, and I figured that was because he wasn’t up for a bonus if the snatch succeeded. Maybe he hadn’t even set it up. I said I was going to Afghanistan to look for Gul Muhammed and did he have any thoughts on that since I’d seen him last? And he said, “Your father is where you would expect to find him.” So that was all right, because I knew where that was.

We took off and made the short hop to Kabul, and when I got out of the plane I found, not to my complete surprise, Buck Claiborne. He gave me a big bear hug, and I guess he could see I was not that enthusiastic and hoo-ah, and he asked me what was wrong and I told him I thought that at least he could’ve given me a call when he was about to dump the army, and I didn’t appreciate finding out from the first sergeant, and he hemmed and hawed and said he didn’t want to bother me about it, seeing as I was wounded and recovering and all, but I could see he was a little ashamed. Buck is not devious like me.

So we had that out and then he led me into a new Denali, black with the tinted glass. There was some construction going on in Kabul but the place still looked as wrecked as it did the last time I was there; it never really recovered from the Russian war, and I remember my colonel going on about how beautiful and peaceful it was when he was growing up there.

Force Eight had leased a big guesthouse in Shari Haw, near downtown Kabul, and fixed it up with new plumbing, air-conditioning, fresh paint, the works. They had their own generator, you could have pizza and hamburgers delivered if you wanted, and the feel of the place was like you were in a pretty good motel in Arizona. They had a big room downstairs with a fifty-inch plasma TV with a satellite feed, lounge chairs, a pool table, and a bar. When Buck took me in to show me around there was a baseball game on the TV and a few men in black jumpsuits with the Force Eight flash on them sat at the bar or in the chairs. Some funny looks flew around when I walked in with Buck. I got the impression that the only Pashtuns who came through here were servants, and they relaxed when Buck told them I was a regular white guy in disguise. As he thinks.

Buck introduced me to the bartender, an Afghan he called Gus, who spoke English with an American accent. He’d spent six years in Fresno and was pretty much like any suburban bartender in the States. He served us ice-cold Buds.