Taking my digital camera, I went downstairs to the kitchen and stowed the passports in the freezer, then made my way out into the living room. The television was on, the satellite tuned to CNN, but Graça wasn’t watching it. She had fallen asleep on the couch.

  I moved to turn off the TV but stopped myself, my eyes catching the ticker at the bottom of the screen. The information was frustratingly brief, gone before I had a chance to get a handle on it, leaving me to sports scores, and on the main screen the day’s weather forecast, though the words were clear enough. Punching the remote, I flipped fruitlessly through the other news channels, LCI, EuroNews, and BBC World, then back to CNN, waiting for the ticker to scrawl through its cycle again.

  Too many coincidences, I thought as I read the words for the second time. SABRI KANJ, #4 ON THE INTERNATIONAL TERROR WATCH LIST, KILLED DURING A RAID BY JORDANIAN SECURITY FORCES.

  Valsamis and now Kanj. Beirut’s ghosts. My mother’s ghosts. Of all the people Valsamis could have used to get to Rahim, he’d chosen me. There was something more at stake here than the invoice.

  From up the hill at the Hernots’ came the low, mournful sound of a dog howling. Lucifer, I thought, recognizing the throatiness of his voice immediately. My skin prickling, I turned instinctively from the television to the glass patio doors. Down at the far edge of the garden, a slender shadow moved across the drifts. A pine marten or a stoat sniffing out a meal.

  Old business, I told myself, watching the animal nose its way across the yard. I was finally beginning to understand. Old business, and yet Valsamis had come to me.

  Graça stirred, then lifted her head and blinked sleepily up at me. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Nothing.” I shook my head, then motioned to the camera in my hand. “I need to get a picture.”

  Morrow leaned forward in his seat and peered down at the farmland patchwork of the Jordan River valley far below. To the west, the fortifications of the Israeli border lay like an ugly scar against the Jordan’s banks, miles of concertina wire and electric fence, long, dusty gashes where patrol roads had been hacked into the valley floor. To the south, a dry canal bed, a remnant of good American intentions left to rot, spurred back toward Amman, its concrete sluiceway tinted green with scrub and grass from decades of disuse. Yet another failure, Morrow thought, watching the canal disappear beneath the plane, a physical reminder of all that they had squandered.

  It was nearly dusk, the sun wild and red, plunging toward the horizon of the sea. In the distance, beyond the Judean Hills, the lights of Jerusalem were beginning to wink. Morrow allowed himself a glimpse of the world as it could have been if they had stayed the course. The shanty camps of Gaza and the West Bank gone and Israel restored. The Syrian border stretching across the Bekaa Valley and over Mount Lebanon to the Mediterranean shore. The world as it might still be.

  Not peace but something bigger than peace. The fruit of war. The beginning of the end. This was what Andy Sproul hadn’t been able to understand.

  Twelve years, Morrow told himself, for the chance to finish what they’d started in Iraq. Twelve years, and this time there would be no leaving until things were set right.

  The cockpit door opened, and the copilot ducked out of the cabin to make his way toward Morrow’s seat.

  “Satellite call, sir,” he said, passing Morrow the handset, then starting back toward the front of the plane.

  Morrow pressed the receiver to his ear. “Yes.”

  “I’ve found the sister,” the voice said. “Emilie Delon, deceased.”

  “Any relatives?” Morrow asked. Even if the sister was dead, the letters were somewhere.

  “Husband, Olivier, still living. Two children, Antoine and Marie, also still living. Antoine’s in Paris, and Marie is in London. There’s also a third child, a niece, I believe, raised by the Delons after her mother died. Name’s Nicole Blake. Spent six years in prison in France on forgery charges. Currently living in the French Pyrenees, a little town called Paziols.”

  Morrow felt his heart catch. Valsamis had known, he thought. He must have heard something when Kanj was first apprehended in Pakistan, must have figured Kanj was about to finger him. It was why he’d been so insistent on using Nicole Blake to find Rahim Ali.

  “Sir?” The voice crackled back at him through the static of space.

  “Yes.” Morrow recovered himself. “I’ll need an exact location on the Blake woman.”

  In the twenty-year-old photograph on my computer screen, the destruction looked almost elegant. Where the front of the American embassy had been, there was a waterfall of rubble, the seven floors sheared perfectly away, pancaked onto one another. The picture had been taken at night, and there was an element of theater to it, the bulldozers toiling away beneath the lights like actors on a set.

  Nighttime clearing operations at the American embassy in Beirut, April 1983, the caption read. Sixty-three people were killed in the bombing, seventeen of them Americans. Citizens even in death.

  Working on a hunch, I perused one of the websites turned up by my Internet search for information on the Beirut embassy bombing. The site was a memorial, an online tribute created by one of the victims’ children.

  Just a hunch, and probably a misguided one at that. Still, it had been this act that had convinced my mother it was time to get out.

  I clicked on a link marked FACTS and waited while the new screen loaded. It was crazy to be online, and I knew it, but I was hoping Valsamis’s surveillance extended only to my e-mails. Besides, even if people were listening, I planned to be long gone by the time they traced the computer and found the house.

  A bulleted list appeared, the basics of time and means, another breakdown of the dead by rank and nationality. Seventeen Americans. One marine guard. One journalist. Several army trainers. Three USAID employees. Near the bottom of the list, one piece of information caught my eye.

  The entire U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Middle East contingent was killed in the bombing. But of course this wasn’t quite accurate. John Valsamis was still very much alive.

  Valsamis pulled the Twingo to the side of the road and cut the engine. It was snowing again, winter’s final, flimsy pronouncement skittering down through the trees and into the barrels of the headlights. Ahead, the road curved up and away, the last quarter-mile climb to Nicole’s driveway vanishing into the woods.

  Valsamis turned off the lights, then opened the door and stepped out, his shoes punching through the snow’s thin crust of ice. It was dusk already, and the sky and the snow were the same cool shade of blue, the trees stark and bare.

  Valsamis’s cell phone rang, cutting through the twilight stillness. He jumped at the sound and fumbled the phone from his coat pocket to his ear.

  “Yes?” he answered quietly.

  “John?” It was Kostecky.

  Work hours, Valsamis thought, counting back to D.C. time. “Yes,” he said. Something was wrong.

  “Rumor is, someone else has been asking about your girl.” Kostecky cleared his throat.

  “Who is it?” Valsamis asked. He could tell Kostecky didn’t want to be the one to tell him.

  There was a long pause, and Valsamis thought he had lost the connection. Then Kostecky’s voice came back to him.

  “Morrow,” he said.

  WHEN, BY MIDAFTERNOON, MY MOTHER still had not returned, my grandfather drove down to the city to find her. We were to sail at six, and aside from our suitcases, everything we were taking had already been loaded on board the freighter. It was too hot to sit in the garden, so my grandmother and I waited together in the empty villa, and she paced the hollow rooms.

  It was a forty-kilometer round trip, down the coast and back, but my grandfather was gone for several hours before we heard anything. It was after six when he finally called, and by then my grandmother and I both knew something was terribly wrong and we would not be leaving Jounieh that night. They spoke only briefly, just long enough for my grandfather to tell her what had happened. He did not have it in himself to console her: There was too much to be done still. The business of the body. He would need all his strength.

  It was nearly midnight by the time he returned, the lights of his Mercedes sweeping up the hill, then pulling to a slow stop in the drive while I watched from the veranda. The car sat for some time, the engine softly cooling in the darkness. I could see the silhouette of his head through the window, his shoulders bobbing and shaking. Ten minutes, fifteen, before he steeled himself and climbed out of the car.

  My grandfather was the only one of us to see my mother, to witness what had been done to her. But my grandmother would have her own, weightier burden to bear. It was she who had let my mother go that morning, and she carried the guilt of it until she died, just as my mother had carried her own guilt all those years earlier. Her choice then, to sacrifice everything for me. And later, as if in penance, her choice to stay.

  It was another week until we could leave, until what remained of my mother was buried in the family cemetery in Achrafiye and all the other chores of death were attended to. Kanj was not at the funeral. He could not have come even if he had wanted to. The war had segregated us even in mourning. And yet I could not help but look for him at the church that day. After all, he had been her lover.

  It would be some time before I would learn what had become of him and who he had become. Who he had been even then. It seems somehow fitting, a testament to the utter gracelessness of war, that he should have escaped Beirut while my mother died there.

  I put my flashlight in my mouth and squeezed my hips through the narrow trapdoor above the second-floor landing, ducking low to avoid the attic rafters. It was dark and close in the cramped space, the air thick with centuries of must, the floor littered with other people’s castoffs, most of them mysteries in themselves. A legless doll, a case of empty bottles, a leather suitcase, a box of rations from World War I. And other things, indistinguishable in their dustiness, bits of machinery and mounds of fabric, home now to the mice I shared the house with.

  Pushing aside a cobweb, I reached down, opened the battered footlocker that held the remnants of my life, and ran the flashlight beam across the contents. It was a meager collection. A few stray photographs, my discharge papers from the Maison des Baumettes, some things my aunt had left me before she’d died: a brown paper satchel that held family pictures and a white shoe box with gilt letters that read DIOR, PARIS.

  I lifted the lid and set it aside, then pulled the last letter from the box, put my face to the envelope, and inhaled deeply. Expecting what? Sea air and rosemary and geranium, the rock terraces of Jounieh baking in the afternoon sun. What I smelled was merely the taint of time, mildew and mothballs, the chest’s fading cedar perfume, and the faintest hint of the rose sachets my aunt put in her closets each fall. Someone— my grandmother, I assume— must have hand-carried the letter to France, for there was no postmark, just my aunt’s address and a hastily affixed stamp.

  Carefully, I pulled the paper from its sheath, unfolded its two yellow creases, and held it up to the light.

  Jounieh

  April 20, 1983

  Dear Emilie,

  I have been thinking about that night all those years ago when we went swimming off the beach here and got caught in the undertow. Do you remember how I panicked and you had to keep me from drowning? I thought we were going to die, so I confessed to all sorts of things. How I’d let Marc Nazal kiss me by the tennis courts at the Summerland, even though I knew you liked him. How it was me, and not the housekeeper, who stole the bottle of Chanel that Nana Sophie sent you from France for your sixteenth birthday. I’ve never been good at keeping secrets from you.

  There was so much I wanted to tell you on the phone the other night but couldn’t. I promise to tell you everything when we get to France. Maybe you’ve known all along what was happening. Like you knew about me and Marc Nazal but never said anything. You always were smarter than I am.

  I’m sorry I’ve lied to you. I know it’s a poor excuse, but I’ve meant well. Sabri and I have both meant well.

  I guess I should say it’s for the best that we are leaving Lebanon, but I can’t. It would be a lie on my part. Leaving is the only choice for me now. I have convinced Papa to get Sabri onto one of his ships, and Sabri has agreed to go.

  It’s hard to believe the Americans will protect us if they are willing to destroy themselves. And it seems as if this is what happened, that the bombing was allowed to happen. This makes no sense, of course, but then there isn’t much about this war that does.

  I called the French embassy yesterday to tell them what I knew. Hardly a heroic gesture, but it was the best I could do. There is no getting through to the Americans at this point, and the sad truth is that I trust the French more than I trust the Lebanese.

  Honestly, I think they thought I was insane. I didn’t even have a name to give them, but the man I talked to promised to get my information into the right hands, whatever those might be.

  I have never been so scared in my life. I am afraid of dying in pain or alone. I am afraid of dying for someone else’s cause, for something I don’t believe in. I am afraid of the obscurity of death here. That horrible woman on the Voice of Lebanon each night with her tallies of the dead. Not even names anymore. I am afraid of not dying, of being taken by the Syrians or the Hezbollah instead, whoever this man was working for. I have seen what they do to people.

  I want you to promise to take care of Nicole if I die. She may find out everything one day, but I don’t want you to tell her. Maybe someday I will be able to tell them both the truth, but now, more than ever, I know I made the right decision. The powerful have the advantage in this world. I can only hope Nicole will understand and forgive me. I hope someday Sabri will forgive me, too.

  It’s hard to believe that in a matter of hours we’ll be gone. Maman has driven Nicole to her school to see her friends, and Papa’s men have taken the furniture and boxes and gone. It is strange to think that this place and the war will go on without us.

  I wish you were here. We could walk down to the promenade one last time, or take the car up into the mountains. Maybe I will go myself. There is plenty of time, and it would be better than sitting in this empty house. I will say goodbye for you, too.

  All my love,

  Mina

  Of course, my mother had not gone down to the promenade or driven up into the mountains. Somewhere between the moment when she’d licked the envelope closed and when we’d caught her in the driveway, she’d made other plans. She had gone to see Kanj; of this I had never had any doubt. But what had made her go in spite of her fear was a mystery with which I would have to reconcile myself, since there was no one left to answer that question.

  For an instant I could see her again, her smile blooming up at me. And later, what I could only imagine: that long drive down the coast, her windows open to the sea, the water stretching dark to the horizon. Twenty kilometers to Beirut, twenty kilometers in which she could have pulled the car over, could have turned around and headed back. Twenty kilometers in which to unmake her decision, and yet she hadn’t.

  I tried to concentrate on the puzzle at hand, Valsamis and Kanj and my mother, what she had said about the Americans and the Syrians. But there were other, darker questions clamoring for my attention.

  Forgive her for what? I wondered as I set the letter aside and picked up the next one from the box.

  Beirut

  April 14, 1983

  Emilie,

  There was a massive evacuation in West Beirut today. French soldiers found an unexploded Israeli bomb buried next to an apartment building in Hamra. It took me forever to make the crossing.

  Sabri was very upset. There has been talk of attacking the Americans for some time now. And then, just yesterday, he heard that Hezbollah has prepared two martyrs for a car bombing of the embassy next Monday.

  I’m sure this is all just panic on our part. This city is so full of rumors. But Sabri feels the Americans should be told all the same. It would be a disaster for the country if they were to leave now. Though I’m starting to believe disaster is what some people want.

  I will see our American friend tomorrow if I can. Though I’m sure they already know. According to Sabri, they have their own contact within the new movement.

  Do you remember old Mrs. Wazzan from the first floor? I forgot to tell you in my last letter that she died. Her nephew found her in her apartment with the cats last week. It’s been so long since anyone we knew died of natural causes that everyone is stunned.

  I promised Papa that I will go up to Jounieh this weekend. Sometimes I think they are the crazy ones, living there as if nothing has happened. But I am grateful every day for Nicole’s safety.

  I will write to you next week.

  Mina

  Our American friend. The shadowed eye of my flashlight stuttered back over the three words. It was such a strange thing to have written, as if somehow she and Sabri had shared this person. And then, later, Sabri feels the Americans should be told all the same.

  What else had Kanj told them? It was a strange alliance, Amal and the Americans. Though in Beirut at that time, all sorts of unlikely friendships had flourished.

  A car bomb. I heard Valsamis again, what he’d said to me that first night suddenly clear. He had known, I thought. My mother had gone to him with Sabri’s warnings, and he had done nothing to stop the embassy attack. This was why she had been so afraid in her final letter. And her fear had been well-founded. Valsamis could not have allowed her to live with that kind of information.

  I remembered that first afternoon, how I’d known even then that Valsamis was a con. According to Sabri, my mother had written, they have their own contact within the new movement. My mother hadn’t seen it, and neither had Kanj, but Valsamis had been playing them all.

  With the exception of that night five years earlier at the Piccadilly, when he had first noticed her and Kanj together, Valsamis had never seen Mina LeClerc outside the little bookstore on the rue Achrafiye where they met faithfully every second Monday of the month. So when she came to him that last time, Valsamis almost didn’t recognize her.