Forgetting custom, Zwak dropped the shoes on the floor and slid his feet inside. They weren’t a perfect fit, but they were much better than the oversized boots he had been wearing for as long as he could remember.

Zwak tested the shoes by bouncing up and down on his toes. His excitement registered in the smile on his face.

But as he remembered his purpose for coming to the room, his smile faded and Zwak was all business. “Tea,” he said. “Tea now.”

The Russian smiled back and said in Pashtu, “Tell your brother I will be there in a moment.”

Snatching up his rifle, Zwak slung it over his shoulder and headed for the door. As he reached it he turned back around. Simonov assumed a thank you was coming. Instead, Zwak repeated, “Tea now.”

“Soon,” said the Russian, “tea soon,” and he watched as the man left his room and stepped out into the courtyard to show off his new shoes to his brother’s Taliban soldiers.

Walking over to his pack, Simonov withdrew a picture of his son, Sasha. It was the last photo that had been taken of the boy before the accident.

He pinned the picture to the wall above the desk and placing a kiss upon his fingers, pressed them against the photo. “Soon, Sasha. Soon,” he said.

Grabbing a folder full of photographs, the Russian took a deep breath before heading toward the door. Everything depended now on whether Mullah Massoud was still 100 percent committed to his plan.

Stepping into the courtyard, Simonov prayed that the American he had selected would be the right bait for his trap. Time and the new president of the United States would tell.

KANDAHAR PROVINCE

MONDAY (THREE WEEKS LATER)

Dr. Julia Gallo sat on a dusty carpet and eyed the cracked mud bricks and exposed timbers of the tiny room. She didn’t need to look at her interpreter to know that he was watching her. “Ask again,” she said.

Sayed cleared his throat, but the question wouldn’t come. They were in dangerous territory. It was bad enough that the young American doctor dragged him to the most godforsaken villages in the middle of nowhere, but now she was openly trying to get them killed. If the Taliban knew what she was doing, they’d both be dead.

The five-foot-six Afghan with deep brown eyes and black hair had a wife, three children, and a not-so-insignificant extended family that relied on him and the living he made as an interpreter.

For the first time in his twenty-two-year-old life, Sayed had something very few Afghans ever possessed-hope; hope for himself, hope for his family, and hope for the future of his country. And while what he did was dangerous, there was no need to make it any more so by taunting the specter of death. Dr. Gallo, on the other hand, seemed to have a remarkably different set of priorities.

At five-foot-ten, Julia was a tall woman by most standards, but by Afghan standards she was a giant. And although she kept her long red hair covered beneath an Afghan headscarf known as a hijab, she couldn’t hide her remarkable green eyes and the fact that she was a very attractive woman. She was a graduate of the obstetrics and gynecology program at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, and ten years her translator’s senior. And while she might have shared Sayed’s vision for the future of Afghanistan, she had her own opinions of how best to bring it about.

In a country where most parents didn’t name their children until their fifth birthday because infant mortality rates were so high, Dr. Gallo and others like her had made a huge difference. Infant mortality was down more than 18 percent since the Taliban had been ousted. That meant forty thousand to fifty thousand infants who would have died under the old regime were surviving. She should have been thrilled, but for some reason she wasn’t. She was unhappy, and that made her push harder to bring about change.

Gallo knew she wasn’t just rocking the cultural boat on these visits out into the countryside, she was shooting holes in the stern and reloading, but she didn’t care. The Taliban were a bunch of vile, misogynistic bastards who could rot in hell, as far as she was concerned.

“Ask her again,” she demanded.

Sayed knew the answer and was certain Dr. Gallo did too. It was embarrassing for the women to have to answer, yet she pressed her point anyway. It was the setup for a message she had taken to proselytizing on a regular basis. Gallo had become a zealot in her own right, no different from the Taliban, and as much as Sayed admired her, this was going to be their last trip out of Kabul together. He would respectfully ask their NGO, CARE International, not to assign him to her anymore. He wasn’t going to die because of her.

Dr. Gallo had always been complicated. She never spoke about her family or personal life, no matter how many hours they spent driving together or how many opportunities Sayed offered her. She either turned the conversation back to him, asking questions she already knew the answers to, or she simply sat in the passenger seat staring out the window. Sayed had given up trying to connect with her and now was done trying to understand her.

Two pairs of eyes lowered toward the floor as Sayed capitulated and asked the women Dr. Gallo’s question once more. A long silence followed. The translator was tempted to fill the uncomfortable void, but Gallo held up her hand to quiet him. Finally, the elder of the two women responded in Pashtu.

Julia listened, and when they were finished, Sayed translated.

“They traded the girl to pay off her father’s debt,” he said.

“Like some sort of farm animal,” Gallo replied. “Tell them they don’t have to live like this. I don’t care what kind of arrangement the men of this village have with the Taliban, women have rights, even in Afghanistan. But unless they know their rights, they can’t begin to exercise them. The first step is for them to get educated. There is a school less than five kilometers from here. Why aren’t they going to it?”

Sayed shook his head. “You know why.”

Julia fixed him with her intense green eyes. “Because it’s dangerous?”

The interpreter didn’t reply.

“More dangerous than being beaten by your husband or sold off because your father’s opium fields failed to produce?” Julia waited for an answer and when none was offered, she stated, “We need to explain to them that they have options.”

“You say this even though the Taliban ride by on motorbikes and spray children and teachers who dare go to school with acid. It is easy for you to demand that these women exercise their ‘rights,’ as you say. But I’m sorry, Dr. Gallo,” said Sayed as he stood. “I can’t do this anymore.”

“Can’t do what?”

The young man didn’t have the energy to explain. He had told Dr. Gallo repeatedly that what she was doing was dangerous for both of them.

“I’ll wait for you outside at the car.” Turning, he exited the room and closed the door quietly behind him.

Julia felt a stab of regret. Sayed was the best interpreter she had ever worked with. They had spent countless hours together in some of the wildest, most remote regions of the country. She had learned that she could trust him and he was invaluable to her. She had contributed money out of her own pocket to make sure he was paid better than any of the other translators CARE used, and she had also spearheaded the effort to get the organization to pay to send him to medical school. He couldn’t leave her. Not now. She wouldn’t let him. They had a long drive back to Kabul. She would talk to him. She’d promise to relax her rhetoric a bit.

Shifting her attention back to her patients, Julia employed her limited Pashtu medical vocabulary and completed the exam.