"But you have relationships with people who know a great deal."

"Special Branch would say so."

"And someone thought it might be interesting to look more carefully at the available writers."

George looked up. He wore a wrinkled white shirt with the collar open and the sleeves rolled up, an undershirt visible beneath the sheer material. Bill watched him take a walk around the room and come back to his scotch and soda.

"It was just in the talking stage," he said finally. "One man released in Beirut, another taken in London. Instantaneous worldwide attention. But it was thought the British would be quick to act if they found out where you were being held. Unacceptable danger. For the hostage-takers and for you."

"Don't look so sad," Bill said.

"Your safety was foremost in mind. And your release would have come in a matter of days. These things were discussed at a certain level, hastily. I admit it."

"Then the bomb went off. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes. I didn't expect an explosion. But the second it happened I stood in the blast and it seemed completely logical. It seemed legitimate and well argued. From the beginning there was something in this situation that spoke to me directly. Beyond a poetry reading to lend aid to a fellow writer. When Charlie finished explaining, I felt a recognition. Then again in London.

I knew who you were before we were introduced. I picked that speck of glass out of my hand and I felt it had been there all my life."

"No one knew you would be anywhere near that building."

"Don't look so sad."

"I'm in a very delicate position," George said. "I want it to end here, you see. We gather a few press people, you make a statement supporting the movement, the hostage is freed, we all shake hands. Provided I'm able to convince you that the movement is worth supporting."

"But that's not your major problem, is it?"

"Actually no."

"You're getting pressure from Beirut. They don't want it to end here."

"They may yet come round to my way of thinking. He comes to Athens, meets you, speaks to the press. It appeals to my sense of correspondence, of spiritual kinship. Two underground figures. Men of the same measure in a way."

There was a rattling at the door and George's wife and teenage daughter came in. Bill stood partway up for introductions. There was a moment of nods and shy smiles and then they were gone down the hall.

"He calls himself Abu Rashid. I honestly think you'd be fascinated by the man."

"Isn't it always the case?"

"And I'm still hopeful he'll turn up here."

"But in the meantime."

"We're here to talk."

"To have a dialogue."

"Exactly," George said.

"For some time now I've had the feeling that novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game."

"Interesting. How so?"

"What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shap-ers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous."

"And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art."

"I think the relationship is intimate and precise insofar as such things can be measured."

"Very nice indeed."

"You think so?"

"Completely marvelous."

"Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative."

"And it's difficult when they kill and maim because you see them, honestly now, as the only possible heroes for our time."

"No," Bill said.

"The way they live in the shadows, live willingly with death. The way they hate many of the things you hate. Their discipline and cunning. The coherence of their lives. The way they excite, they excite admiration. In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. There's too much everything, more things and messages and meanings than we can use in ten thousand lifetimes. Inertia-hysteria. Is history possible? Is anyone serious? Who do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed. The artist is absorbed, the madman in the street is absorbed and processed and incorporated. Give him a dollar, put him in a TV commercial. Only the terrorist stands outside. The culture hasn't figured out how to assimilate him. It's confusing when they kill the innocent.

But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands. The way they determine how we see them. The way they dominate the rush of endless streaming images. I said in London, Bill. It's the novelist who understands the secret life, the rage that underlies all obscurity and neglect. You're half murderers, most of you."

He found the thought happy and attractive and he smiled through Bill's hand-wagging and the motion of his shaking head.

"No. It's pure myth, the terrorist as solitary outlaw. These groups are backed by repressive governments. They're perfect little totalitarian states. They carry the old wild-eyed vision, total destruction and total order."

"Terror is the force that begins with a handful of people in a back room. Do they stress discipline? Are they implacable in their will? Of course. I think you have to take sides. Don't comfort yourself with safe arguments. Take up the case of the downtrodden, the spat-upon. Do these people feel a yearning for order? Who will give it to them? Think of Chairman Mao. Order is consistent with permanent revolution."

"Think of fifty million Red Guards."

"Children actually, Bill. It was about faith. Luminous, sometimes stupid, sometimes cruel. Look today. Young boys everywhere posing with assault rifles. The young have a cruelty and unyieldingness that's fully formed. I said in London. The more heartless, the more visible."

"And the harder it becomes to defend a thing, the more you relish your position. Another kind of unyielding."

They had another drink, sitting crouched, face to face, with motorcycles going by in the brassy street.

"Is it a little Maoist band you're speaking for, George?"

"It's an idea. It's a picture of Lebanon without the Syrians, Palestinians and Israelis, without the Iranian volunteers, the religious wars. We need a model that transcends all the bitter history. Something enormous and commanding. A figure of absolute being. This is crucial, Bill. In societies struggling to remake themselves, total politics, total authority, total being."

"Even if I could see the need for absolute authority, my work would draw me away. The experience of my own consciousness tells me how autocracy fails, how total control wrecks the spirit, how my characters deny my efforts to own them completely, how I need internal dissent, self-argument, how the world squashes me the minute I think it's mine."

He shook out a match and held it.

"Do you know why I believe in the novel? It's a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street. I believe this, George. Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it. Something so angelic it makes your jaw hang open. The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints. And this is what you want to destroy."

He found he was angry, unexpectedly.

"And when the novelist loses his talent, he dies democratically, there it is for everyone to see, wide open to the world, the shitpile of hopeless prose."

There was no more medication. Ingested and absorbed. He decided so what, don't need it anymore, and he didn't bother finding out what was available over the counter in the pharmacy near the hotel. He wondered if he could get away with charging hotel and meals to Charlie's conglomerate even though he'd severed connections. It was for the good of mankind after all.