worse.”
The comment hurt her. She lowered her eyes. “We don’t choose to stay here.”
“If you could leave Afghanistan where would you like to go? Riyadh? You have family there.”
“London,” she said without hesitation. “I’d like to go to school there. My English is good enough, I think.”
“Your English is very good.”
“I would like to study in school in London, and in the evenings I would go out to see plays, and attend grand openings, and eat in restaurants with my friends. On the weekends we might go driving in the country, maybe go swimming where it’s permitted. I would like to see the ocean, and the English Channel. Maybe we could go to Paris through the tunnel on a very fast train.” She half closed her eyes happy for that moment. “We wouldn’t always eat at McDonald’s, there are other places. Places where I might be able to wear a dress, makeup, nylons. And there would be magazines, and television.” She smiled. “And movies.” She gave McGarvey an excited look. “Does your daughter do all of that?”
“That and more,” McGarvey said.
“Does she obey everything you tell her?”
This time McGarvey did laugh. “No. She’s a lot like you.”
Sarah’s face fell and she averted her eyes. McGarvey had said the wrong thing again. “It’s against the Qoran for a daughter to disobey her father. It brings great shame to the house.”
“It’s the same in America, but we’re just a little more tolerant of our children,” McGarvey said gently. “What would you study in school?”
“Construction engineering and economics so I could continue my father’s businesses.”
There it was again, McGarvey thought. “You don’t have any brothers to take over?”
“They’re all too young, and besides I already know more about the business than they do.”
“School takes time, maybe four years.”
Sarah shook her head adamantly. “I could learn everything I need to know in one year. Maybe less if I studied hard.”
McGarvey felt like a heel manipulating her that way, but they needed hard information. If bin Laden was dying, and didn’t have much time left — which apparently he didn’t from the things Sarah was saying — then he was getting desperate now. He’d gotten hold of a nuclear weapon and he meant to use it as a lever to assure his family’s safety.
“Then what, after you finish school?” he asked. “Would you make your headquarters in Riyadh?”
“Maybe,” she said breezily. “Maybe Yemen, or the Sudan. Of course my family has interests in a lot of places. Germany, Brazil, Japan.”
“The United States,” McGarvey suggested.
Her moods were mercurial. “Did you know that the original McDonald’s is in Downey, California?”
He had to smile. “No, I didn’t.”
“It is. I’d like to go there to see it.”
Western culture was infectious. A lot of people, her father included, thought it was a disease to be stamped out, or at the very least, to be contained. He didn’t think she spoke like this with him.
“But first there has to be peace,” McGarvey said. “The killing has to stop.”
She gave him a sharp, shrewd look. “To you my father is a terrorist. To us he is a warrior for justice, just like you claim you were in Kosovo.”
“Helping Muslims.”
“Yes, that surprised us at first,” she admitted. “But it was just a matter of influence. Washington over the rest of the world.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“What else can we believe?” she shot back. “The list of people you have dominated either with your military or with your economics goes on and on, and there’s no end in sight.”
“Do you think that your father has the answers by killing innocent people?”
“There are no innocents in the world.”
It was the same circular argument used by terrorists around the world. On the one hand they claimed to hate the United States government, but not the people. Yet their mission was to kill those people. What they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — understand, they attacked; what they couldn’t build, they destroyed. And they had no tolerance for any view but their own. The author Salman Rushdie had to go into hiding for years because of something he’d written.
Two hundred years ago Voltaire wrote that more than half the habitable world was still peopled with two- footed animals who lived in the horrible state approaching pure nature, existing with difficulty, scarcely enjoying the gift of speech, scarcely perceiving that they were unfortunate, and living and dying almost without knowing it. Nothing much had changed since then, McGarvey thought. The real problem was that the United States had the audacity to live well and to show the rest of the world what it was missing.
They fell into a troubled silence as they continued up to the saddle in the mountains that formed a pass. They’d crossed over it on the way up here, and it was the highest point on the trip. From there it would be downhill to the resting place at the stream, and below that the long valley leading down to the village where the Rover was parked.
McGarvey could see that Sarah was puzzled. She was trying to reconcile the things he had come here to represent with what her father had taught her. On the one hand she wanted to go to the West to see with her own eyes what it was all about. While on the other hand she wanted to believe that everything in the West was bad. But it was hard for her to understand how music, and fashion, and light and life were evil, while the mountains of Afghanistan and what they were doing from here was good. She was mature enough to understand that what she was being told wasn’t necessarily all true, but she was still young enough so that she couldn’t make up her own mind. Part of that was the culture into which she’d been born, repressive to women, but a large part of it was that she was still just a kid.
There was some snow on the path for the last hundred yards or so, but the wind was blowing strongly enough that their footprints from earlier were already gone. A long, ragged plume of snow was blowing from the top of a distant mountain, lit by the bright moon so that it looked as if there was a forest fire raging up there. The scene from the top, looking both ways toward the valleys on either side was primordial. There were no lights, no roads, nothing to suggest that people lived up here, or ever had come this way except for the snow-covered path they stood on.
Sarah took Mohammed a few yards farther along the path and they had a long conference while McGarvey smoked a cigarette.
When she was finished she came back, leaving Mohammed looking even more sullen than before.
“Mohammed understands that you are bringing a very important message back to your President from my father,” she said. “No harm will come to you. He knows that he would have to answer to all of us if it did.”
“Thank you,” McGarvey said.
A faint smile creased her lips. “But don’t provoke him, Mr. McGarvey. Men such as Mohammed are creatures of-passion.”
It was an odd thing for her to say, but then she was a young woman of very great contrasts because of her un bringing.
“I’ll behave myself.” McGarvey returned the smile. He put out his hand.
She hesitated, but then she shook his hand, hers tiny and cool in his. “Goodbye,” she said. “Allah go with you.”
“And with you,” McGarvey said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The beam of a flashlight bounced off the narrowing walls of the cave, and a moment later Osama bin Laden,
