revenge, but they were dead now, too. This was a land of ghosts, said the host. The people were all gone; the ones like him who pretended to live, they were ghosts, too.
Cousin Najib put on his glasses. He studied the face of his visitor-short-haired, beardless, his face seemingly unmarked by this harsh world.
“I know you,” said the bearded man. “You are Omar. We played together when we were boys. Your brothers were Karimullah and Nazir. Your father was Haji Mohammed. I know you.”
“You are mistaken,” answered the visitor. “Omar is dead. He died with his family in the drone attack. I am another.”
When he returned to Islamabad, the professor went to the head of his department and asked for a few weeks’ leave. He said that he had a promising research project on which he needed to concentrate. He didn’t trust the security of the computers at the university, so he bought a new one, into which he could plug his flash drive and parse the names and numbers that he had assembled so painstakingly. It was a jigsaw puzzle of vengeance. You had to fit the pieces together just so, and then you glimpsed the pattern and the picture was revealed.
In the culture from which Dr. Omar had emerged, there were rules as precise in their way as the symbolic logic of computers. There was itbar, which meant trust, and was the bond between equal men and the foundation of dignified life. There was nang, which was honor, and badal, which was the personal code that required that a blow to that honor to be answered by an equal blow, bloodshed by bloodshed. Without this reciprocal balance, the world would have no order and life would be meaningless.
A special obligation for revenge was applied in the case of meerata, which was the annihilation of the male members of a family. In such cases, the tribe would set the houses of the culprits afire and drive them from the country and kill them, one by one, until the score was settled. The tor, the black of shame, could only be converted to spin, or white, by death. The cycle was one of purification, and it would end with the peace known as melmastia, the generous spirit in which the just man was able to forgive the wrong done to him. But not until the balance of honor had been restored.
The professor knew very well who had killed his family and ravaged the other clans that made up his world. It was the Central Intelligence Agency. They had devised this means of assassination from the sky; they did it in secret, so they claimed, though they boasted about it all the while. The worst of it was that they took these actions from the safety and security of great distance. They were cowardly: They never looked their victims in the eye; they never heard the screams. This was inhuman, the professor thought; it required a calculated response.
And so the professor had pondered how he might make these assassins feel the same fear that the people of his valley had felt for all these years. He was not at war with the world. He was a Muslim, but he was not passionate about his faith. He did not want to be like the jihadists who boasted of their violent deeds in videos and on the Internet. They were no better than the Americans; they thought they were God’s chosen ones. They talked about the virgin girls who awaited them in heaven, how they would be “rocketed to paradise.” When they looked at pornography, they said they were getting ready for the joys of martyrdom. The professor might use these jihadists because he had no choice, but he did not admire them. They did not understand the balance of honor, the gundi, which makes civilized life possible even in the terrible wilderness of the Tribal Areas.
The professor had begun his work, but it was not finished. He understood that when he kissed the ground on which his family had died. There was more saz, more blood money, still to be paid. He knew that it would have to end someday, just as it had started, but he didn’t know how. When was the saz enough? He wished his father were still alive to explain it to him.
He traveled to Europe once more, to contact a friend in Belgium. It was a short trip, only two nights. He stopped in Paris on the way back and spent a day consulting for a French bank that had invested in a large agricultural project in the Sindh and was having difficulty repatriating its profits. He even gave a thought to visiting the American Embassy, off the Place de la Concorde, just to look into the eyes of the employees. But they might see him, too, and photograph him, and that would reopen a file somewhere. So he sat on a park bench off the Avenue Gabriel, a hundred yards from the embassy entrance, and watched the people come and go through the heavy metal door.
22
Thomas Perkins invited his new energy analyst to the morning meeting where he planned each day’s trading strategy with his lieutenants. Through his windows, the London morning sky was royal blue, accented by the few thin clouds that scuttled west to east across the expanse of glass. The south end of Mayfair was arrayed below, with the shops of St. James’s Street to the east and the silky lawns of Green Park to the west. It was like inhabiting a cocoon spun of gold thread, this penthouse office. To remain atop this fine building, a person would consider any reasonable offer of assistance, especially if he were assured that his actions would be legal and, more than that, a service to his country.
Perkins was at his desk. Facing him were four big screens, mounted two-by-two on the wall, chronicling the U.S., British, Japanese and European markets. Bloomberg trading screens surrounded his desk on three sides: the left screen displayed Alphabet Capital’s order flow for that day’s trading; the middle one showed graphical information about securities and markets of special interest; the right screen displayed a half dozen instant- message chats, with securities dealers who handled the firm’s business and with other useful informants.
The “system” that Perkins had constructed with the man he knew as Anthony Cronin was invisible, though it most assuredly was in place. It would have been impossible for an outsider to distinguish any special bits of information from the torrent that flowed in from the multiplicity of screens. That was why it was so lucrative. A slight advantage at the margin could produce a very large difference in outcome. If you knew for a certainty, say, that the Bank of China would be raising interest rates later in the next trading day, you could make a great deal of money. But most people assumed that sort of trading advantage was impossible: You would need to have your own spy within the Chinese bank, or a hidden microphone, or a code break that allowed you to read their encrypted communications. No private trader could hope to do any of that; but someone who had government help…that was a different matter.
Perkins rose from his desk and moved to the conference table. He introduced his team of analysts to the new tryout on the energy desk, Sophie Marx. She was appropriately nervous. She had spent a day preparing for the meeting, tutored by Jeffrey Gertz, who wanted her to make a splash her first day. She still wasn’t sure she could pull it off; mercifully, she didn’t have to go first.
Marx looked at her notes. Gertz had arranged for her to do some quick “energy research” with Janko Spellman, a Serbian with a shaved head and big ears who had been a CIA asset during the Kosovo War. He traveled Eastern Europe now, picking up information for Gertz as if it were so much lint on a blue serge suit. He had just returned from a particularly useful trip to Ukraine.
“Talk to Janko,” Gertz had said. “He has the goodies.”
“I don’t like this,” Marx had answered.
“Too late for that. Second-guessing is for losers.”
And he was right. If you wanted a job where you only did things you knew were right, you should look for another line of work.
Perkins clanged his water glass with his pen as if it were the opening bell on Wall Street; it was time to make some money.
“What’s happening in the debt markets?” he began. “It feels like time to sell anything French. Banks are weak, GDP growth is weak. Their bonds haven’t been downgraded yet, but I bet they will be soon. Sell France. Am I right, Fiona?”
Perkins turned to a British woman in her mid-thirties, who was one of his banking analysts. Fiona was wearing thick glasses, and her hair was in a bun. She looked ferocious.
“ La chute,” she said. “The spread between LIBOR and the French interbank rate has been widening for a week. But the market is confused. The spread was forty basis points as of this morning, down five basis points from yesterday.”
