Ahmad dislikes the truck at first sight; the vehicle has a furtive anonymity, a generic blankness. It has a hard-used, slummy look. At the side of the New Jersey Turnpike he has often seen ancient sedans from the 'sixties and 'seventies, bloated and two-tone and chrome-laden, broken down, with some hapless family of color clustered waiting for the state police to come and rescue them and tow away their shabby bargain. This bone-white truck savors of such poverty, such pathetic attempts to keep up in America, to join the easy seventy-miles-per-hour mainstream. His mother's maroon Subaru, with its Bondo-patched fender and its red enamel abraded by years of acid New Jersey air, was another pathetic attempt. Whereas bright-orange Excellency, its letters gold-edged, has a spruce jolliness to it-as Charlie said, a circus air.

The older, shorter of the two operatives, who is fractionally more friendly, beckons Ahmad to come look witii him into the cab's open door. His hands, the fingertips stained with oil, flow toward an unusual element between the seats-a metal box the size of a cigar box, its metal painted a military drab, with two terminal knobs on the top and insulated wires trailing from these back into the body of the truck. Since the space between the driver's and passenger's seats is deep and awkward to reach down into, the device rests not on the floor but on an inverted plastic milk crate, duct-taped to the crate's bottom for security. On one side of the detonator-for such it must be-there is a yellow contact lever, and in the center, sunk a half-inch in a little well where a thumb would fit, a glossy red button. The color-coding smacks of military simplicity, of ignorant young men being trained along the simplest possible lines, the sunken button guarding against accidental detonation. The man explains to Ahmad, "This switch safety switch. Move to right"-snap-"like this, device armed. Then push button down and hold-boom. Four thousand kilos ammonium nitrate in back. Twice what McVeigh had. That much needed to break steel tunnel sheath." His black-tipped hands shape a circle, demonstrating.

"Tunnel," Ahmad repeats, stupidly, nobody having spoken to him before now of a tunnel. "What tunnel?"

"Lincoln," the man answers, with slight surprise but no more emotion than a thrown switch. "No trucks allowed in Holland."

Ahmad silently absorbs this. The man turns to Charlie. "He knows?"

"He does now," Charlie says.

The man gives Ahmad a gap-toothed smile, his friendliness growing. His flowing hands describe a larger circle. "Morning rush," he explains. "From Jersey side. Right-hand tunnel only one for trucks. Newest built of three, nineteen fifty-one. Newest but not strongest. Older construction better. Two-thirds through, weak place, where tunnel makes turn. Even if outer sheatJi hold and keep out water, air system destroyed and all suffocate. Smoke, pressure. For you, no pain, not even panic moment. Instead, happiness of success and God's warm welcome."

Ahmad recalls a name dropped weeks ago. "Are you Mr. Karini?"

"No, no," he says. "No no no. Not even friend. Friend of friend-all fight for God against America."

The younger operative, not much older than Ahmad, hears the word " America " and utters a heated long Arabic sentence that Ahmad does not understand. Ahmad asks Charlie, "What did he say?"

Charlie shrugs. "The usual."

"You sure this will work?"

"It'll do a ton of damage, minimum. It'll deliver a statement. It'll make headlines all over the world. They'll be dancing in the streets of Damascus and Karachi, because of you, Madman."

The older unidentified man adds, " Cairo, too." He smiles that engaging smile of square, spaced, tobacco-stained teeth and strikes his chest with his fist and tells Ahmad, "Egyptian."

"So was my father!" Ahmad exclaims, yet in exploration of the bond can only think to ask, "How do you like Mubarak?"

The smile fades. "Tool of America."

Charlie, as if joining in a game, asks, "The Saudi princes?"

"Tools."

"How about Muammar al-Qadaffi?"

"Now, too. Tool. Very sad."

Ahmad resents Charlie intruding in the conversation between what are, after all, the key players, the technician and the martyr; it is as if, his martyrdom assured, he can be brushed aside. A tool. He asserts himself, asking, "Osama bin Laden?"

"Great hero," the man with oil-blackened fingers answers. "Cannot be caught. Like Arafat. A fox." He smiles, but has not forgotten the point of this meeting. He says to Ahmad in his most careful English, "Show me what you will do."

The boy is beset by a freezing sensation, as if reality has shed a layer of its bulky disguise. He overcomes his distaste for the ugly plain truck, dispensable like him. He reaches toward the detonator, his face stretched into a question.

The stocky technician smiles and reassures him, "Is O.K. Not connected. Show me."

The small yellow lever, L-shaped in cross-section, touches his hand, it seems, rather than his hand touching it. "I turn this switch to the right"-it stiffly resists, and then sucks, as if magnetized, into its off position, ninety degrees away- "and push this button down in here down." Involuntarily he closes his eyes, feeling it sink half an inch.

"And hold down," his teacher repeats, "until-"

"Boom," Ahmad supplies.

"Yes," the man agrees; the word hangs in the air like a mist.

"You are very brave," the younger, taller, and thinner of the two strangers says, in an English virtually accent-free.

"He is a faithful son of Islam," Charlie tells him. "We all envy him, right?" Again Ahmad feels irritation with Charlie, for acting proprietorial where he has no ownership. Only the doer owns this deed. Something preoccupied and bossy in Charlie's approach casts doubt on the absolute nature of istishhdd and the exalted, dread-filled condition of the istishhddi.

Perhaps the technician feels this slight failure of accord among the warriors, for he rests a paternal hand on Ahmad's shoulder, soiling the boy's white shirt with oily fingerprints, and explains to the others, "His way is good. To be hero for Allah."

Back in the cheerfully orange truck, Charlie confides to Ahmad, "Interesting to see their minds work. Tools, hero: no shades in between. As if Mubarak and Arafat and the Saudis don't all have tlieir special situations and their own intricate games to play."

Again, Charlie strikes a note that feels, to Ahmad in his newly elevated and simplified sense of himself, slightly false. Relativism seems cynical. "Perhaps," he offers in polite contradiction, "God Himself is simple, and employs simple men to shape the world."

"Tools," Charlie says, staring humorlessly ahead through the windshield, which Ahmad wipes every morning but which becomes dirty anyway by the end of the day. "We're all tools. God bless brainless tools-right, Madman?"

A certain simplicity does lay hold of Ahmad in the troughs between surges of terror and then of exaltation, collapsing back into an impatience to be done with it. To have it behind him, whatever "him" will then be. He exists as a close neighbor to the unimaginable. The world in its sunstruck details, the minute scintillations of its interlocked workings, yawns all about him, a glistening bowl of busy emptiness, while within him a sodden black certainty weighs. He cannot forget the transformation awaiting him, behind, as it were, the snapped camera's shutter, even as his senses still receive their familiar bombardment of sights and sounds, scents and tastes. The luster of Paradise leaks backward into his daily life. Things will feel big there, on a cosmic scale; in his childhood, only a few years into this life, falling asleep, he would experience a sensation of hugeness, every cell a world, and this demonstrated to his childish mind religion's truth.