The other message was from a watcher along the route: SARACENS ON PIKE @ FALLS CHURCH. EXECUTING DIVERSION.

“Excellent,” Bar Abbas said, and sent a text of his own: SARACENS INBOUND. ALL MAKE READY.

Samir was trying to hypnotize himself.

He’d recalled all that he had ever heard about how suicide bombers prepared themselves mentally—the ritual prayers and recitations of faith, the visions of heavenly reward waiting beyond the pearly gates—but none of it was any use to him. He didn’t know the words of the Nicene Creed and didn’t believe in Saint Peter. Maybe if he’d had a ball of hashish to eat, like one of Hassan Sabbah’s assassins—or better yet, a good stiff drink.

He concentrated on the drone of the Humvee’s motor, hoping that combined with his exhaustion it would put him in a headspace where he could push two buttons without thinking. It worked too well: His head drooped until his chin touched his chest, and then the sound of an unmufflered motorcycle passing on the other side of the road made him jolt upright again, saying, “Where are we? Where are we? Did I miss it?”

“Easy,” Private Dimashqi said, chuckling along with the other Marines. “We aren’t there yet.”

“How long was I asleep?”

“A minute or two at most. You didn’t miss anything, I promise you.”

They were passing through another burned-out urban pocket. Samir pressed his face against his door window and tried to look back, to see if there were any billboards on the road shoulder behind them, but it was no use. Fretting, he dropped a hand to his thigh and felt for the cell phone in his pocket. As he touched it, an explosion thundered in the distance.

“What was that?” Samir looked out the window again and saw black smoke rising to the north. “What the hell was that?”

In the lead Humvee, Lieutenant Fahd was asking the same question in more measured tones. “Looks like a truck bomb,” the helicopter pilot radioed down. “Somewhere in McLean . . . Yeah, citizen’s band is reporting an insurgent attack on the main fire station.”

The lieutenant hissed in disgust. “You see?” he said, looking over his shoulder at Mustafa. “This is what these fucking people are like. They kill their own first responders, and then they blame us when their neighborhoods go up in smoke.”

The radio crackled. It was the helicopter again: “Insurgents are hitting the McLean police headquarters now. The attackers have a mortar and the cops are asking for help taking it out.”

“Yeah, yeah, go,” Lieutenant Fahd said. “We’ll call if we need you.”

Samir watched the helicopter fly away and understood. He hadn’t missed anything. The sign he’d been commanded to watch for was still ahead, but now that their escort had been lured off, he wouldn’t have long to wait. He abandoned his attempts at mesmerism and fell back on fatherhood, taking the snapshot from his other pocket and cupping it in his hands. Malik, he thought, Jibril, I’m sorry I couldn’t be the dad you deserved. But now I’ll do this thing, for you, and pray Idris keeps his part of the bargain.

“Are those your sons?” Private Dimashqi said.

Samir gritted his teeth. “Yes,” he said.

“Handsome boys.” The private held out a snapshot of his own. “These are my daughters. That’s Faiza and Basilah, and the baby is Aisha.”

“Adorable.” Shut up. Please shut up.

“Yeah . . . I haven’t actually met Aisha yet. But my tour’s up in a month, so I’ll finally get to hold her . . .”

OK, God, Samir thought. I get it. I’m a sinner and I’m going to hell. Well, to hell with you too. Pressing the photo of Malik and Jibril to his chest, he stared at the roadside in grim silence while Private Dimashqi prattled on about his daughters.

This seemed to be the last of the devastated zones. They drove under a crumbling highway overpass, passed a sign that read LEAVING TYSONS CORNER, and entered a green suburb of mostly intact housing developments. There was still plenty of evidence that battles had been fought here—a roadside church missing its steeple; a pair of American tanks, sans turrets, sitting in a field overgrown with brambles—but no more scorched earth.

“We’re close,” Lieutenant Fahd said, consulting the electronic map on his dashboard. “Another five kilometers.”

A moment later, hearing approaching sirens, he called a halt a hundred meters from a road junction. A line of emergency vehicles—two fire engines, an ambulance, another fire engine—came racing along the crossroad, bound for McLean or some other trouble spot. The gunner on the lead Humvee tracked each vehicle in turn. After the last of them had passed by, the convoy continued to sit, while Lieutenant Fahd scanned the terrain ahead with a pair of binoculars.

Beyond the junction, the land to the left of the pike rose up to form a wooded ridge. The land on the right was flat woods, the trees serving as a screen for a cluster of houses. The pike itself—four lanes, two on either side of a broad grassy median—ran straight and level for about a kilometer before turning sharply to the right.

“Do you see something?” Mustafa asked.

“No,” Lieutenant Fahd said. “Just a funny feeling . . .”

While the lieutenant scanned the woods again, Samir stared at the billboard that stood at the southwest corner of the junction at the base of the ridge. The ad, which showed a bare-chested Oded Fehr caressing an Uzi while Natalie Hershlag pouted beneath silk sheets, was for an Israeli action film Samir knew he had seen—twice—but whose Arabic title he could not, just now, recall. Vandals had given Fehr a yarmulke and horns, and put a swastika on Hershlag’s forehead. These additions, like the ad itself, were weathered and faded, but the white cross spray-painted on the billboard’s lower right corner was fresh and unmistakable.

“All right,” the lieutenant said, still uneasy, and regretting his decision to let the helicopter go. “Proceed.”

As the convoy started forward, Samir slipped his hand into his pants pocket, struggling a bit because of the flak jacket, and also because of the numbness that flooded his body. In grasping the phone he pushed the first button without meaning to. Then dread paralyzed him.

The lead Humvee rolled past the marked billboard. The second Humvee. The third. Samir closed his eyes.

He forced them open again. He turned his left hand palm upward, looked down at the faces of his sons. Malik, he thought, Jibril. God help me.

He pressed SEND.

A final text message had alerted Bar Abbas to the convoy’s arrival at the junction. He picked up the remote-control box and pressed the test button. The green lamp flashed reassuringly. Then, as he lifted the safety catch on the detonator button and looked out at the kill zone, the red lamp came on.

“Good for you, Samir,” Bar Abbas said. “I guess Idris and I were wrong about you.”

He crouched to shield himself from the coming blast and the sound of music filled the foxhole. Bar Abbas had had Green Desert on the brain for several days now, so it was a moment before he realized that the tune wasn’t in his head. He looked down at the wooden planks that lined the foxhole’s floor. He’d assumed there was nothing beneath them but dirt, but apparently someone had hidden a CD player under there and queued up track 17 from Son of Cush, “Good Riddance (Enjoy the Virgins)”—a catchy, sarcastic ballad about a suicide bomber.

The ballad was almost to the end of its first verse, counterpointed by the sound of the approaching Humvees, when Bar Abbas figured out it wasn’t a CD track he was listening to.

It was a ringtone.

On the morning of 11/9, Mustafa and Samir had rushed to Ground Zero along with every other cop, firefighter, and EMT in Baghdad. But because they were Halal and not true first responders, there was never any chance they’d be ordered into the towers, something that Samir had always been secretly grateful for—and secretly ashamed of. He sometimes wondered, if he had gotten such an order, whether he would have been able to obey it.