She played it coy: “Really? Forgive me, you don’t look old enough to be a graduate.”

“Ah, I’m not—I was only enrolled for about a week.” He looked around. “I didn’t want to miss this.”

“Doing your part for the War on Terror,” Amal said. “Your parents must be very proud.”

He frowned, and she worried she’d been too forward. But then he said: “My dad, you know, he’s not entirely happy with me . . .”

“Oh?”

“He’s a conservative,” Salim explained, loyalty and resentment warring on his face for a moment. “He loves me, but he doesn’t want me to take any risks.”

“And your mother? What does she think?”

This time there was no conflict: He just looked guilty. “She’s scared for me. In her last letter . . .” He trailed off, took a drag on his cigarette. “But I’ve promised her I’ll be OK.”

“Well then,” Amal said, eyeing one of the gunboats on the river. “As long as you promised.”

He laughed. “It’s only a seven-month deployment! In no time I’ll be home again, and bored . . . So what’s it like to work for Homeland Security?”

“Exciting,” she said. “More exciting than I expected, actually. And before this I worked for the Bureau, which was also pretty cool. You get to chase bank robbers. Of course,” Amal added, “for either job you need to finish college.”

“Yeah, I know,” Salim said. “I promised my mother I’d do that, too.”

They tossed their cigarette butts and went back inside the target range, where Zinat and her friend had just finished. “What’s wrong?” Salim asked, seeing their faces. “Don’t tell me you lost!”

“I didn’t,” Zinat said. “But Tamara shot a kid with a soda cup.”

“A fat American child,” Tamara sniffed, handing her rifle back to the gunnery sergeant.

“It’s well-known that soda’s no good for your health,” Salim offered.

“Speaking of unhealthy sweets,” said Amal, “what is that about?” She pointed to a dish of hard candies that sat on the counter in front of the gun storage area. The candy dish, which had been fashioned from a piece of a mortar shell casing, had a steel tab sticking up from its center, to which a crude skull and crossbones had been welded. Just in case this wasn’t clear enough, a little cardboard sign had been taped beneath the skull, reading FORBIDDEN! Amal had noticed a similar candy dish at the sniper range, although that one had contained toffees.

“That,” said the gunnery sergeant, “is an object lesson about the importance of following rules.”

“And of the long-term effects of testosterone on one’s sense of humor,” Zinat added. The gunny scowled at her, but she smiled back sweetly until he turned away.

“They’re not really poisoned, though,” Amal said.

“Oh yes,” Salim said, “with cyanide.” He explained: “There’s a Christian holiday here, called Halloween—the Eve of the Saints—where it’s traditional to give away candy to strangers. Last year, the chow hall got an anonymous gift of Halloween candies.”

“Did anyone die?”

“No Marines did. There was a stray dog that hung around behind the Watergate kitchens, begging for scraps. One of the cooks gave it a sweet, and that’s how they found out about the poison. The candies were supposed to be destroyed, but as you can see, some were kept as souvenirs. And as good luck charms, of course.”

“Good luck charms,” Amal said. “Because no one died.”

“Except the dog,” Salim said. Smiling, he took one of the candies from the dish and gave it to her. “Here. To keep you safe while you’re in America.”

Amal stared at the candy, which was wrapped in a twist of green cellophane. “Thanks,” she said. “I think.”

“Just don’t forget and eat it by mistake,” he told her.

Samir spent the morning trying to hide from Al Qaeda.

Just before leaving Baghdad, he’d gotten a message from Idris saying that a Qaeda agent would contact him in America with instructions. Samir had no idea what he was going to be ordered to do, but he assumed that it would be something dangerous, possibly fatal, almost certainly illegal, and likely a betrayal of both his country and his friends.

He also knew that he couldn’t say no. But during the night a desperate strategy had occurred to him: If he couldn’t refuse the agent’s orders, perhaps he could avoid receiving them. The Green Zone was big enough that it ought to be easy to make himself scarce for the day. In the evening he’d have to return to the Smithsonian, but that was a pretty big place too; maybe he could sleep in a closet, or find a diorama of an empty tomb to curl up in.

All he had to do was make it through the next twenty-four hours. Tomorrow he’d be out in the countryside, and God willing if the insurgents didn’t get him by tomorrow night he’d be on a plane bound for home. Then when Idris asked, “Did you do what my man told you to?” he could say honestly, “What man?”

And Idris would accept that answer. Sure . . . But Samir would worry about that later.

Of more immediate concern was the discovery that it wasn’t just his own countrymen he needed to steer clear of. As he sat with Mustafa in the Watergate’s lobby, waiting for Colonel Yunus to finish up his business, Samir regarded each new black or Arab face that came into view with a mixture of fear and suspicion. When a group of Somali Marines burst through the lobby doors in a cacophony of laughter, he nearly jumped out of his chair.

Mustafa lowered the Washington Post he’d been perusing. “Too much coffee at breakfast, Samir?”

“I’m fine,” Samir replied. His attention shifted to a coal-skinned maintenance man who was up on a ladder replacing some bulbs on the lobby chandelier. To a casual observer he would have seemed completely absorbed by this task, but because he wore a white knit prayer cap, Samir became convinced that the guy was casting sideways glances at him.

“You know what,” Samir said, “I think I’m going to skip the tour of the White House . . .”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’m exhausted, so I think I’ll just hike back to the museum and take a nap.”

“You should at least let the colonel get you a ride,” Mustafa said. “It’s a long walk.”

“Nah, the fresh air will be good for me.”

The maintenance man, done changing bulbs, was coming down the ladder now. Samir stood up quickly, ignoring Mustafa’s perplexed look, and bolted for the nearest exit.

Passing through a set of double doors he found himself in the adjoining office building at the intersection of three hallways. A group of Arab Marines approached along the left-hand passage, and two black men in suits were having a conversation in the hallway straight ahead; to his right he saw only a Hispanic woman vacuuming the carpet. Samir went right, his heart skipping a beat when the woman greeted him with a hearty, “Peace be unto you!”

Two minutes and several multicultural encounters later he was out on the sidewalk. A bus idled beside a sign that read FREE SHUTTLE in both Arabic and English. Samir boarded, not bothering to ask where the bus was headed, and slouched across two seats so that no one could sit next to him.

The doors closed. Just as the bus started moving, someone came running up alongside of it, banging furiously for admittance. Samir tensed, but when the bus driver opened the doors again, the latecomer turned out to be a white man with a silver cross pinned to his lapel.

The bus proceeded along its route, the driver calling out stops: State Department, Department of the Interior, various other agencies of the new American government, some of them still more hoped-for than real. Samir stared dully at the passing scenery while the bus was in motion. When new passengers got on, he lowered his eyelids and pretended to doze. When the driver announced “White House!” Samir slumped down below the level of the windows and remained that way until the executive mansion was far behind him.

He got off at the Hoover Building stop. The bus driver didn’t say what government agency was headquartered there, but from the look of the place—a boxy, concrete structure hinting at kilometers of filing cabinets—Samir assumed it was something stodgy and ultrabureaucratic, the Department of Weights and Measures, maybe. He thought about sneaking inside and finding an empty office to hole up in.