Morrow shook his head. “Nothing but bluster,” he answered. “A waste of my time and yours.”

  Fairweather shook his head in sympathetic agreement. “They’ll say anything, won’t they?”

  The waiter returned with their drinks, two fishbowl-sized glasses filled with green slush. He set them ceremoniously in front of the two men before retreating to his discreet post near the bar.

  How did they teach the waiters to serve so perfectly? Morrow wondered. Without judgment. Without reason. Without regard for anything other than the needs and comfort of the few privileged men passing through this place.

  Morrow raised his finger just slightly, and the waiter, ever vigilant, hustled across the room.

  “You can take this,” Morrow told him, motioning to his drink. “I’ll have a martini instead. Tanqueray, no ice.”

  A different kind of project, Valsamis could hear Morrow saying, his voice grainy and distant on the battered black telephone in his landlady’s kitchen. Though it was the only call Valsamis had gotten in the six months he’d spent on Crete, he hadn’t been surprised by the predawn knock on his door, the widow’s husky voice in the corridor. A woman who didn’t mind waking people up. “Mr. Valsamis, there’s a phone call for you. Very urgent.” Valsamis hadn’t asked how Morrow had found him.

  Six in the morning in Hania, and in Washington it was still the night before. September 11 and the Pentagon smoldering, the remnants of the towers still in flames. And Morrow himself on the line. “It’s the kind of thing we’ve been trying to get okayed for years. On the high side,” Morrow said. “Our money comes straight from the secretary of defense. Christ, the Agency won’t even know we exist.” Not an apology, not even close, but an acknowledgment that they needed him.

  No matter what they thought, they still needed him.

  Valsamis hunched his shoulders and shuffled north along the Avenida da Liberdade, trying not to think about Nicole. He would find her, he reminded himself. Kostecky’s people were still listening. For now it was just a matter of waiting it out, of trying to keep his nerves in check until the next call came in.

  It was far too early for the real showgirls to be out, but there were a few desperate early birds peddling their wares. On the opposite side of the street, a tall transvestite in a denim miniskirt clung to her doorway, watching the traffic go by. Down the block, a fat woman in a fishnet halter top tottered on eight-inch heels, her arms stippled with dark vines of needle tracks, her scarred stomach stretched like a deflated balloon.

  Valsamis was reminded of the central panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. All the grotesque compulsions of man on display, Valsamis’s very much among them.

  A boy stepped out of a doorway up ahead of Valsamis, and their eyes met briefly. The boy’s head was bare, his slight frame lost beneath the folds of a thick wool coat. A coat that had fit him once, Valsamis told himself. A coat a mother or a grandmother would have bought, a gift of warmth.

  The young man was smoking, the smell of the tobacco heightened by the cold air, the smoke wreathing his face like a mourning veil. He looked slightly unwell. In need of something, of whatever it was that had brought him to this life in the first place.

  Valsamis slowed his pace and angled himself in the boy’s direction. He lifted his head and tried to think of something to say. This was always the hardest part, the stilted attempt at conversation, the meager gestures at fantasy. What was the point? After all, they both understood why they were here.

  The boy smiled uneasily, and at the same moment Valsamis’s phone rang, flooding him with a profound sense of relief. He turned away and picked up his pace again, slipping the phone from his pocket, pressing it to his ear as if for salvation.

  Kostecky, he thought, but the voice on the other end was one he didn’t immediately recognize.

  “You told me to call,” the man said. Then there was a hesitant silence, the caller waiting for Valsamis to understand.

  “She’s there?” Valsamis asked.

  “She left about ten minutes ago,” Ed Blake replied calmly. He didn’t sound like a man who was giving up his own daughter. “She’s on her way home, but she’s coming back here. She asked for money, and I stalled her.”

  “Did she say when?”

  “Tomorrow, I think. She’s not sure.”

  Valsamis thought. “Was she alone?”

  “There was another woman in the car. She didn’t come in, but I saw her when they were leaving. Young. Pretty. Long dark hair.”

  Graça Morais, Valsamis told himself. The two of them heading for Paziols together.

  “It’s good?” Ed asked. “I called, just like you wanted.”

  “Yes,” Valsamis assured him, “it’s good.” Even he was awestruck by the coldness of the man, the ease with which he had betrayed Nicole. “You’ll get your money.”

  Kanj had not been able to bring himself to go to the rue Said Khadige. That last night in Beirut, he’d lain awake sorting through his options, fully aware of what his choice to stay would mean. In the end, he could not accept the help of the man whose pride had kept him from Mina all those years earlier, whose scorn kept them apart still. Kanj had watched dawn come and go from his window overlooking the ravaged southern slums, then finally fallen asleep.

  It was midmorning when he heard the knock on his door. Khalid or one of the others from Amal, Kanj thought. Come to check up on him, for he had been uncharacteristically absent the last few days. But when he opened the door, he saw Mina standing in the hallway.

  She had been to the apartment several times before, in the earlier days, before Valsamis, when their affair was just that, but even then they had been aware of how dangerous it was for her to come. Now it seemed inconceivable that she would have navigated the neighborhood alone.

  “My friends called to say you hadn’t come,” she said as Kanj pulled her inside and shut the door.

  “I can’t,” Kanj told her, but she wasn’t listening.

  “You can still catch the freighter,” she insisted. “It doesn’t leave until three. You can take our old fishing boat. It’s at the yacht club. The Patxi. You’ll find it easily. I can’t imagine there will be anyone there to stop you. The key is under the captain’s chair.”

  Kanj shook his head, but Mina persisted. “Don’t you see? They’re not here to help us. None of them are. This isn’t their country.”

  She was right, of course. They had all known it for some time now. The Americans would leave as soon as their presence in Lebanon no longer suited them, as would the Russians and the Syrians and the Israelis, as the French had done before. Still, Kanj could not bring himself to accept that the sacrifices of the last few years, the deaths and betrayals, had all been in vain.

  Mina ducked her head to avoid his gaze. “I’m scared, Sabri,” she said. “I’ve written my sister. In case something were to happen. I’ve told her everything.”

  Kanj wanted to lie, to tell her that nothing would happen, but he couldn’t. He reached out to touch her, but she turned away.

  “I can’t stay here,” she said, opening the door, stepping into the hallway. “Three o’clock,” she reminded him. “The ship is the Akilina.”

  She moved her hand to her face, as if to adjust her head scarf, but Kanj could see that she was crying, and that the motion was one of camouflage.

  It was this final gesture that Kanj would carry with him for the next twenty years, to Cyprus, Algeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Through war and rage and flight. This gesture and what Mina had said to him. They’re not here to help us.

  This and the knowledge that it was his own indecision that had killed her. That if he had left in the morning, if she had not returned to Beirut to find him, she would not have been stuck in traffic on the rue Huvelin later that morning when a black Mercedes pulled up beside her car and the driver leaped out and sprinted to the far side of the street. Not before triggering the explosion that would kill Mina and five others.

  Kanj took a deep breath and pulled the desert air into his lungs. At least he wouldn’t die in some concrete cell beneath the sand. The moon had not yet risen, and the sky was thick with stars, an endless field reaching back and back toward the moment of creation. It was a sight both beautiful and frightening, and it was all Kanj could do to keep himself from turning away.

  And we have adorned the lower heaven with lamps; and set them to pelt the devils with; and we have prepared for them the torment of the blaze! Kanj repeated the words from the Sixty-seventh Sura to himself in his dream. Blessed be He in whose hand is the kingdom, for He is mighty over all!

  In the distance he could hear the scrape of a key in a lock, the sound of a door clanging wide. When he opened his eyes, the face of his jailer hovered above him in the semidarkness. An Arab face, Kanj thought, so much like his own, his skin the color of goat hide, desert skin, tanned and beaten by centuries of sun. Abraham’s skin, and Isaac’s. The skin of the Prophet. The skin of Kanj’s mother, of his sister.

  “It’s time,” the man said, and Kanj nodded.

  IT HAD SNOWED IN THE MOUNTAINS, a late-season storm, heavy and wet. The road to my house was still unplowed, the snow soft beneath the wheels of the Renault. I didn’t stop at my driveway but drove past it, turning off the road before I reached the Hernots’ driveway, pulling the Renault onto an overgrown fire road. Better, I reasoned, not to advertise our presence.

  “We’ll walk from here,” I told Graça, cutting the engine, stepping out into the snow. It was deeper in the woods than it had been on the road, cold against my ankles.

  We crossed the road on foot and skirted my yard, coming up through the back garden. The sun was out, and the sky was shockingly blue against the bleached valley below, the mountains etched in sharp relief, black crags against white slopes. The house itself was dark and still.

  I unlocked the patio door and stepped inside, waiting for Graça to follow. It was only a matter of days that I’d been in Lisbon, and yet I felt like a traveler returning to a place from which I had been absent for a long time. It was cold in the house, frost on the windows, our breath frosty in the air. I made my way to the kitchen and piled some kindling in the old woodstove, then lit a fire.

  “I’m going to get started on the passports,” I told Graça. I motioned to the wicker basket that hung on the back wall. “There should be eggs in the coop, if you’re hungry. And there’s a spare bedroom upstairs. Second door on the left.”

  Graça nodded. She had asked thankfully little since our last night in Lisbon, and I was grateful for whatever held her back now. The less she knew, the better off she would be.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her, “I’ll wake you if I need you.”

  “I told you they would come,” Andy Sproul said.

  It was a Saturday afternoon in September 1982, the last one either of them would spend in Beirut. Sproul and Valsamis were standing on the roof of the embassy watching the Israeli jets pummeling the Palestinian camps. The entire south of the city seemed to be on fire. Black smoke choked the sky around the airport and the Sports City. The bombings had been going on for some time now, and Valsamis was surprised that there was still anything left to burn.

  Sproul bent down and picked up one of the thousands of yellow leaflets that had descended on West Beirut that morning, a polite warning of annihilation to Colonel Halal and the Syrian forces on the ground from the advancing Israelis: We shall capture the city in a short period…As an experienced general who lacks no wisdom, you surely know that any attempt to throw your forces against the Defense Force would be suicide.

  From the beginning, Andy Sproul had predicted that the Israelis would not stop at the Litani River, as they had promised, but would push north into the heart of the country and on to Beirut. To everyone at the embassy, Valsamis included, Sproul’s prediction had seemed ill informed at best; such aggression on the part of the Israelis could only be construed as political suicide.

  One of the jets dropped its payload, and the entire city shuddered. There was a sound like the violent ripping of fabric, then a giant ball of flame and smoke blossomed from what remained of the Sabra camp.

  “Looks like you were right,” Valsamis said.

  Sproul folded the leaflet into neat quarters and slipped it in his pocket. He didn’t look like a man who had just won an argument.

  Valsamis nudged the dial on his car radio up the band, catching nothing but static. Behind him, the parched land rose and fell toward the horizon, the highway cutting a malignant swath through wheat fields and scrub. Like Montana driving, Valsamis thought. Numb hours along Highway 2, through the northern reservations and the mammoth dryland farms. Wrecked lives and radio silence, the occasional staticky interruption of some local Christian station broadcasting redemption.

  A blast of pop music crackled through the Twingo’s tinny speakers, and Valsamis lingered on the station. Zaragoza coming in, he told himself, moving once more through the band, more slowly this time, hoping to catch a Spanish news station, maybe even the BBC. Hoping for any voice besides the one in his head.

  There was more music, flamenco and bad European pop, and then, out of the broadcast haze, a man’s voice, the news from RNE1. Valsamis stopped to listen.

  The station was broadcasting an excerpt from the secretary of state’s speech to the United Nations Security Council. Valsamis could hear Powell’s voice beneath that of the translator: “The material I will present to you comes from a variety of sources.”

  He sounds so sure of himself, Valsamis thought, so confident in his certainty. “…People who have risked their lives to let the world know what Saddam Hussein is really up to,” the secretary continued.

  Powell was good, though Valsamis knew it was his naïveté that made him so, his ability to be duplicitous without knowing it, so that what he said was never actually a lie.

  “I cannot tell you everything that we know,” Powell went on. “But what I can share with you, when combined with what all of us have learned over the years, is deeply troubling.”

  Valsamis moved to turn down the radio, then caught himself, his finger settling lightly on the knob. The piece on Powell’s speech had ended, and a Spanish commentator had broken in with a critique of American foreign policy.

  “Take this incident in Jordan today,” the woman said, speaking in almost hysterical Spanish. She was making a point about secrecy, but it was her next question that caught Valsamis’s attention. “Are we to believe the official reports that Sabri Kanj was killed while trying to evade arrest?” Valsamis turned up the radio another notch, but the woman had already moved on to her next point.

  So Kanj was dead, Valsamis thought, though he wasn’t quite sure what this meant. If Kanj had managed to find a sympathetic ear, then his death made little sense. The Jordanians certainly wouldn’t have killed him without an American okay. The Americans wouldn’t have killed him without first consulting the Israelis. That was the way things worked with men like Kanj. Beirut or no, Kanj was far more useful alive than he was dead.

  Valsamis fed the Twingo more gas, then glanced quickly over his shoulder and swung out into the passing lane. No, he told himself, something didn’t make sense.

  From our earliest days, we have lived in a world obsessed with identity. Think of Chronicles and the descendants of Israel, or Moses’ numbering of the tribes, our story written back through the blood of all those generations, all the way to the first womb. There were stories then to help us remember. Later, paper and wax, seals ripe for tampering. And the body’s proof, birthmarks and fingerprints and scars, signs of the indisputable, of name and class and country, and all those other immutable truths to which each of us is born.

  Yet, from the beginning, there were also those who tried to invent themselves anew. Fugitives and con men and thieves. People seeking sanctuary from their own existence. And there were those, like me, who learned the alchemy of identity.

  It is not an easy practice. There is so much attached to the individual today, an encumbrance of proof. Paper and ether, the delicate helices of the genome. Our entire being in a single strand of hair or a cluster of cells on a Q-Tip. So much that one can never change, and so I, at least, have learned to concentrate on the possible.

  I had no intention of giving Graça or myself a whole new life. A project like that would have taken weeks, and not all of it would have been work I could do. What I wanted was a quick fix, traveling papers, a passport for each of us. After this, Graça would have to find her own way.

  Graça’s passport would be easy. I’d done some work on the new Brazilian passport just a few months earlier, and I’d been given several documents to tamper with. Most of them were mangled beyond repair, but there was at least one I knew could be modified to work for Graça.

  My own passport was a different matter. There were several possibilities in the collection of castoffs I kept in my filing cabinet. Belgian and Swiss and Canadian, all of which would have worked. But I could not pick any of them.

  I stood there for a good twenty minutes, trying to reason with myself, knowing each moment was one I couldn’t afford to waste. I am a person who has lived my life with very little proof of self, without the comforts of inheritance or parentage, and I simply could not bring myself to forsake the one thing my mother had intended for me. Finally, it was the familiar blue cover that I chose. An American passport.

  Just a document, I told myself, though even I could see this wasn’t true. I had chosen it this time, taken it for myself, not just a name and a place but citizenship and all that went with it.

  The laminate facings on both of the passports were intact; my first priority was to peel them away without mangling the paper beneath. Everyone has his or her own style with laminates, and my preferred method has always been a combination of cold and adhesive remover. In this case, cold would mean an hour or two in my kitchen freezer.