There’s nothing like a gun to get people’s attention, and Valsamis’s Ruger, though not flashy, commanded definite respect. As he made his way toward the back of the café, Valsamis listened with satisfaction to the numbed silence, the perfection of it broken only by the girl’s sobs. By the time he reached the second row of tables, even those had begun to fade. The door whooshed open behind him, and Valsamis swung around in time to see a trio of figures escaping into the night. Three potential heroes, Valsamis thought, watching the boys disappear. He would have to work quickly.

  Valsamis swept forward again, scanning the hunched forms on the floor. A young man with jet-black hair. A blond girl in a dark velvet cape, her incisors capped with two long fangs. And then, at the far end of the very last row, Valsamis caught a glimpse of cropped brown hair, a woman’s long lean back, her knees bent tight against her chest, her face buried between them.

  Valsamis skirted the tables and came up behind the woman. She was crying, not sobbing like the girl at the front, but just quietly weeping, her whole body racked by the force of her fear.

  “Get up,” Valsamis told her, setting the Ruger’s barrel against the back of her neck. “Get up now.”

  “Please,” she whispered, unfolding slowly toward him, arms and head and face. Not Nicole, not even close. “Please,” she repeated, but Valsamis was already turning from her, his eyes scanning the café, lighting on the stairwell that led down to the restrooms.

  None of us spoke. From time to time I could hear the counter girl choking back a sob, a rat scrambling by, cockroaches rustling. But mostly there was silence, the sound of my own heart, the blood hammering in my ears.

  Graça went first and we followed behind, groping our way along the wall, feeling the old pipes and stones with our fingertips, stumbling over hazards whose real shapes we could only guess at, loose mortar and piles of rags, bits of metal that rang against the soles of our shoes. Or worse, what we wouldn’t let ourselves imagine. The detritus of some three thousand years of fear and occupations. The Romans and the Visigoths, the Moors and the Spaniards. And later, the assassination of Don Carlos and the rise of Salazar. Centuries of siege and plague and inquisition. The whole violent history of a continent borne by the ghosts of thousands of fleeing souls huddled around us.

  It wasn’t far to the Largo Trindade Coelho, a five-minute walk aboveground. It couldn’t have taken us over thirty minutes to navigate the tunnel, but it seemed like hours. Near the end there was a rancid odor, the unmistakable stench of death, and I thought I might be sick. Then the walls opened up, and I could smell the rain.

  Graça stumbled, and I heard her catch herself. “Stairs,” she warned, her voice moving upward.

  My foot found the first step and the second, and then I could see Graça’s shadow above me, her head and shoulders silhouetted against the night sky.

  Nicole was here, Valsamis thought, contemplating the landing, the two empty restrooms, and the closet. No windows and no way out. He turned and started back up the stairs, then stopped himself. He should have had her, and yet somehow she was gone.

  He stepped back toward the closet and paused in the doorway, his gaze moving across the little room, taking in the cluttered shelves, the boxes stacked slightly askew. Nothing, he told himself. Or something? He moved forward and then froze. From somewhere far in the distance came the tinny wail of sirens, the sound moving louder and closer.

  No, he told himself, he’d been right the first time. There was nothing to see, no way out. And no way out for him if he stayed. He glanced at the boxes again, the dark shadow where the ceiling met the wall. Then he turned and headed back up the stairs, back through the café, and out onto the rua Diário de Notícias.

  WARM WATER AND WHITE SAND and a sky so blue you could have dived into it. My first bikini, two canary-yellow swatches of fabric sent from France by my aunt. The saltwater smell of my skin after a day at the beach. This is what I remember of Jounieh. Among my friends there was an adolescent cynicism bred from the combination of privilege and war. A sense that everything was cheap and that nothing much mattered.

  Our life continued much as it had in Beirut, my grandfather fighting to keep his shipping business alive, my grandmother determined to salvage the tattered remnants of Beirut society, each believing that the war would end sometime soon. There were dinner parties and ladies’ lunches, polished silver and crystal, and the same bone china that had traveled with me from Beirut.

  My mother came on the weekends when she could, and we would take the téléphérique to Harissa or drive up the coast to Byblos and have lunch on the beach. For the first few months, she and my grandfather argued, but as the war dragged on and it became clear that my mother would not join us, even he gave in.

  Nothing is simple in the Middle East, especially not war, and the Lebanese civil war was no exception. The roots of the conflict reached far beyond the country’s borders, into neighboring Syria and Israel, and further, even, toward the Western colonial powers upon whose shoulders the shaky dream of a unified Lebanon had been built.

  The Syrians, fearful of a Christian-Israeli alliance, had involved themselves directly almost from the beginning, while the Israelis, alarmed at the prospect of a Palestinian stronghold to the north, had chosen a more covert path. After their attack on Palestinian bases in southern Lebanon in the spring of 1978 drew the ire of the United Nations Security Council, the Israelis withdrew from Lebanon, but not before establishing the pro-Israel South Lebanon Army to take their place. It was a well-managed alliance, and for the first few years, the SLA partnership, coupled with the Israelis’ Phalange allies in the north, were enough to satisfy Israeli interests. But in the spring of 1982, all that would change when the Israeli army marched into Lebanon, sweeping through the Bekaa Valley and northward until they reached Beirut.

  Even then my mother stayed. Through the worst of it, we thought at the time: the Israeli siege of West Beirut and the bombing that left some twenty thousand dead in its wake; the horrific events at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps; the assassination of the young Phalange leader, Bachir Gemayel, and the chaos that followed.

  Later, much later, I would come to better understand what had happened during those years. But at the time, what I knew was only what I heard from those around me, snippets of dinner conversation, the sound of Gemayel’s voice on the radio while my grandmother and her friends played 41 in the living room. Another crisis in the south. Another massacre by the Palestinians. These people, these terrorists, who had already taken too much and would take our country if we didn’t stop them.

  Beirut was only twenty-one kilometers away, but from my bedroom in Jounieh, with its crisp sheets and lemon-yellow walls, its posters of adolescent longing, the war seemed a faint and hollow thing. What I remember most clearly from that time is neither fear nor grief but my own shameless anger. Hating neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians, nor the outsiders who had taken our country hostage, but my mother for having chosen to stay, for having chosen him instead of me.

  By then I knew his name, had heard it through the walls of my bedroom after my grandparents thought I had gone to sleep. Sabri Kanj. And my grandmother’s voice, an angry whisper now: She will wind up dead because of this man.

  “How did he know where to find us?” Graça asked.

  I exhaled, long and slow, and looked out through the smeared windows of the dockside café at the ferry sliding toward us across the Tagus, the black gap of the river laced with twin wings of foam.

  I shook my head, thinking of Sergei’s messages, always some bait to come back for. And yet my heart and my gut told me without doubt that the Russian would not have set me up, that if anything, Sergei was in danger now because of me. “Valsamis must have been tapping into my e-mails.”

  “But how—” She started and stopped herself, alarm registering on her face as she answered her own question. Not only had Valsamis been reading the e-mails, he’d known where they were coming from.

  A gust of wind slammed the windows and knocked free a few stray drops of rain. A storm was pushing inland, Adamastor and his furies. We had lost the girl from the cybercafé not long after emerging from the tunnel. Now it was just me and Graça and a few night-owl stragglers waiting for the late ferry. A man in a janitor’s outfit. A drunk sleeping uncomfortably in his seat. A young couple kissing desperately, bodies interlocked beneath their coats. And on the bar, the day’s flotsam of discarded newspapers. The ubiquitous A Bola and Correio da Manhã, respective authorities on sports and gossip, and the relatively staid headlines of Diário de Notícias and Público.

  On the front page of the latter was a photograph of a beleaguered United Nations weapons inspector, a tired Swede whose face betrayed his own inevitable defeat. One of Amadeo’s mongrels, I thought sadly, glancing at the headline: YES OR NO? All at once the wrongness of the shipping invoice made perfect sense, the poorly disguised missiles and their destination. The question so simple I’d overlooked it all this time.

  No, I thought, there were no rockets. The Americans had arranged the forgery through al-Rashidi to make it look as if the Iraqis were buying the Alazans from Trans-Dniester. In fact there were no Alazans, no dirty bombs headed for Basra. It was the invoice itself that mattered, the invoice that would provide the proof the weapons inspectors had failed to find, the proof the Americans needed to go to war.

  The forgery had to be done in such a way that the cargo’s dimensions would be a red flag to anyone who knew better, so it would seem obvious that the cargo wasn’t really steel cables but Alazans. But the forger himself couldn’t know or the lie would be blown. That was why Valsamis had asked for an amateur when he went to Vitor Gomes. That was why he’d hired Graça Morais. He hadn’t counted on her bringing in Rahim.

  All of it was part of whatever deal al-Rashidi had made with the Americans, with his old friend Valsamis. His loyalty in return for a new country for his son. And more, no doubt, once Saddam was defeated.

  Shivering, I slid my hand into my pocket and fingered the FEG. Though if I was right about the invoice, the gun could do little to protect us now.

  “What is it?” Graça asked.

  Her face was drawn, her eyes hollowed by the café’s fluorescent lights. So delicate, I thought, as Rahim must have seen her, here in this same place, perhaps, in this same shadow. So vulnerable, as we all were.

  I shook my head, wishing I didn’t know. “We have to get out of here,” I said, pulling a handful of coins from my pocket, piling them onto the bar.

  Graça nodded out the windows toward the river. “The ferry’s got a good ten minutes, at least.”

  “No,” I told her. I grabbed her arm and pulled her off her stool. “We’ve got to get out of Lisbon.”

  A goddamned wasteland, Richard Morrow thought as the Gulfstream banked into its final turn and the lights of Amman rolled into view beneath them, the crooked cross of the runway, and the city’s minarets piercing the night sky. All those years in Near East, and he still preferred the landscape of his childhood, green hills, trees and more trees, a smudge of mist on a wet spring morning, the forest laced with dogwoods. There was something so utterly vulnerable about the desert, the land naked and scarred, like a scalp freshly shaved. Exposed, even under the cover of darkness.

  The engines whined, and the Gulfstream eased its belly down onto the runway, then rolled to a stop on the outskirts of the airfield, near an empty hangar. In the distance, Morrow could see the orange lights of the Queen Alia Airport, the low-slung terminal building with its humped windows and hulking control tower. Closer, near the open mouth of the hangar, a single black SUV was parked on the tarmac: Morrow’s welcoming committee.

  The SUV’s driver door opened, and a figure emerged from behind the tinted windows, a young man in light pants and a white oxford shirt. It was Charlie Fairweather, but for a moment, seeing his blond hair and easy gait, his quarterback’s physicality, Morrow was again reminded of Andy Sproul and of his father’s words: They’re all here.

  The copilot emerged from the cabin and opened the hatch. Warm night air filled the plane, the smells of jet fuel and baked asphalt. Morrow gathered his briefcase and bag and made his way through the cabin and down the folding stairs to where Fairweather was waiting to meet him.

  “Welcome to Amman, sir,” the young man said, extending his hand for Morrow’s overnight bag, hefting it easily. “There’s a room ready for you at the InterContinental, if you’d like to get some rest.”

  But Morrow shook his head. “I want to see Kanj.”

  “What’s going on?” Graça asked as we ducked out of the rain and into the underground parking garage on the southern edge of the Praça dos Restauradores. The concrete steps were slick beneath our feet, the landing off the square flooded with a good inch of rainwater.

  I stopped beneath the lip of the garage’s first level and caught my breath. “Is there somewhere you can go?” I asked. “Somewhere safe?”

  Graça thought. “I have an aunt and uncle,” she said, “on Madeira.”

  I shook my head. “No relatives. Somewhere no one would think to look.”

  “What’s going on?” she asked again, scared now. She was shivering slightly, her long hair soaked, her coat steaming in the sudden warmth of the garage.

  “You’re going to have to disappear for a while,” I said. “We’re both going to have to disappear. We’ll go to France first, to my house. I can make us documents there. Passports. Papers. Do you understand?”

  She hesitated, then nodded.

  “Good. Now, do you have a place?”

  “Yes—”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “It’s better that way.”

  She nodded again.

  “And money?” I asked. “You’re going to need money.”

  “In my grandfather’s safe. Back at the house.”

  I shook my head. We wouldn’t be going back to Morais’s. “I’ll take care of it,” I told her. I started forward into the garage, heading down toward where I’d left the Renault.

  YOU KNOW,” CHARLIE FAIRWEATHER REMARKED, motioning tour-guide fashion to the claustrophobic darkness outside the windows of the SUV, “Lawrence holed up out here during the Arab revolt.”

  They’d been driving for a good two hours. East through the steppe, with its sad, stunted attempts at flora, toward the black basalt desert and the Saudi Arabian border. There was nothing to see but what their headlights illuminated— the road before them and a relentless hail of bugs swirling toward their deaths.

  Morrow had been here once before, years earlier, on a bizarre courtesy trip to which he’d been subjected for unknown reasons. A pair of obsequious Jordanians from the ministry of culture had taken him to the Azraq Oasis, which had been nothing but mud and stink at the time, and then to the crumbling basalt fortress Fairweather had alluded to, the one made famous by Lawrence of Arabia. But this was not where they were headed tonight.

  As if out of nowhere, a dirt road appeared on their left. Fairweather slowed the giant SUV, then turned onto the pocked and rutted track. In the distance— it was impossible to tell how far— Morrow could see a single yellow light.

  “We’ll go in together, sir,” Fairweather said. “He should be pretty talkative by now.” The qualities that made the young man handsome, cut jaw and square features, deep-set eyes, were ugly in the unearthly light of the dash, exaggerated so that they verged on macabre.

  “No,” Morrow told him. “I’ll talk to Kanj alone.”

  Fairweather paused, and Morrow could tell he was torn, wondering whether to contradict him or not. In the end, he didn’t object.

  It took them a good twenty minutes to reach the light. For some time it seemed to grow no closer, but then they were upon it, the headlights washing in through the walls of a courtyard, across a squat and windowless building. Fairweather cut the engine and drew his key from the ignition, then popped the door and climbed out, his city shoes raising clouds of powdery dust.

  Lunar, Morrow thought, climbing out himself, taking a breath of the dry air, its odor not even a smell but an utter absence of smell. No trees, no grass, just the desert stretching for miles around them. Morrow felt a desperate and primal urge to stay with the SUV, as if leaving it would mean relinquishing his one thin connection to the living world. But Fairweather was ahead of him, already halfway across the courtyard, and Morrow forced himself to follow.

  There was no one there to greet them. They entered the building through a single steel door, then descended a narrow concrete staircase into the desert earth. Underground, the interior seemed boundless, a dizzying, bunkerlike maze of subterranean corridors and empty rooms.

  In a big, open room off one of the hallways, a half-dozen men in plain clothes were playing cards around a rickety folding table. Mukhabarat, Morrow thought as he followed Fairweather inside. The men looked up, bored Jordanian secret police. They were unshaven and dirty, the arms of their shirts discolored by old sweat stains. In the far corner was an old propane stove, the remnants of a meal. Half-eaten flatbread and something that looked like meat stew. Grimy glasses with the dregs of mint tea.

  “We’re here to see Kanj,” Fairweather announced ridiculously. As if there could be some other purpose for their visit.

  One of the men grunted and said something in Arabic. Fairweather nodded and turned back into the corridor, motioning for Morrow to follow.

  They continued on for a few yards, then stopped in front of a windowless door. Morrow knocked, and eventually a man cracked the door and glared out at them. He was dressed like the others, yet Morrow could tell at once that he was in charge. After a moment of appraisal, he ushered them inside, where a second, shirtless man was seated in a metal chair, smoking.

  There was a famous picture of Sabri Kanj, taken in Afghanistan, during his time with the mujahideen. By all accounts, it was the last picture made of Kanj, and it was this image that Morrow had harbored all these years. Kanj in a flak jacket and bandolier, like a modern-day Zapata, his beard nearly obscuring his dark face, his eyes staring angrily at the camera.