She laughed at his joke, but also listened to his lecture. So this was how they lived with their history-they assigned meanings to everything that allowed them to see God's hand in everything. Purpose. Even power and hope.

But they also still remembered that Muslims had once ruled the world. And they still regarded democracy as something they adopted in order to placate the West.

I really should read the Q'uran. she thought. To see what lies underneath the façade of western-style sophistication.

This man was sent to meet me, she thought, because this is the face they want visitors to Syria to see. He told me these stories, because this is the attitude they want me to believe that they have.

But this is the pretty version. The one that has been tailored to fit Western ears. The bones of the stories, the blood and the sinews of it, were defeat, humiliation, incomprehension of the will of God, loss of greatness as a people, and a sense of ongoing defeat. These are people with something to prove and with lost status to retrieve. A people who want, not vengeance, but vindication.

Very dangerous people.

Perhaps also very useful people, to a point.

She took her observations to the next step, but couched her words in the same kind of euphemistic story that he had told. "From what you tell me," said Petra, "the Muslim world sees this dangerous time in world history as the moment Allah has prepared you for. You were humbled before, so you would be submissive to Allah and ready for him to lead you to victory."

He said nothing at all for a long time.

"I did not say that."

"Of course you did," said Petra. "It was the premise underlying everything else you said. But you don't seem to realize that you have told this, not to an enemy, but to a friend."

"If you are a friend of God," said Lankowski, "why do you not obey his law?"

"But I did not say I was a friend of God," said Petra. "Only that I was a friend of yours. Some of us cannot live your law, but we can still admire those who do, and wish them well, and help them when we can."

"And come to us for safety because in our world there is safety to be had, while in your world there is none.

"Fair enough," said Petra.

"You are an interesting girl," said Lankowski.

"I've commanded soldiers in war," said Petra, "and I'm married, and I might very well be pregnant. When do I stop being just a girl? Under Islamic law, I mean."

"You are a girl because you are at least forty years younger than I am. It has nothing to do with Islamic law. When you are sixty and I am a hundred, inshallah, you will still be a girl to me."

"Bean is dead, isn't he?" asked Petra.

Lankowski looked startled. "No," he said at once. It was a blurt, unprepared for, and Petra believed him.

"Then something terrible has happened that you can't bear to tell me. My parents-have they been hurt?"

"Why do you think such a thing?"

"Because you're a courteous man. Because your people changed my ticket and brought me here and promised I'd be reunited with my husband. And in all this time we've been walking and riding together, you have never so much as hinted about when or whether I would see Bean."

"I apologize for being remiss," said Lankowski. "Your husband boarded a later flight that came by a different route, but he is coming. And your family is fine, or at least we have no reason to think they're not."

"And yet you are still hesitant," said Petra.

"There was an incident," said Lankowski. "Your husband is safe. Uninjured. But there was an attempt to kill him. We think if you had been the one who got into the first cab, it would not have been a murder attempt. It would have been a kidnapping."

"And why do you think that? The one who wants my husband dead wants me dead as well."

"Ah, but he wants what you have inside you even more," said Lankowski.

It took only a moment for her to make the logical assumption about why he would know that. "They've taken the embryos," she said.

"The security guard received a rise in salary from a third party, and in return he allowed someone to remove your frozen embryos."

Petra had known Volescu was lying about being able to tell which babies had Anton's Key. But now Bean would know it, too. They both knew the value of Bean's babies on the open market, and that the highest price would come if the babies had Anton's Key in their DNA, or the would-be buyers believed they did.

She found herself breathing too rapidly. It would do no good to hyperventilate. She forced herself to calm down.

Lankowski reached out and patted her hand lightly. Yes, he sees that I'm upset. I don't yet have Bean's skill at hiding what I feel. Though of course his skill might be the simple result of not feeling anything.

Bean would know that Volescu had deceived them. For all they knew, the baby in her womb might be afflicted with Bean's condition. And Bean had vowed that he would never have children with Anton's Key.

"Have there been any ransom demands?" she asked Lankowski.

"Alas, no," he replied. "We do not think they wish to trouble themselves with the near impossibility of trying to obtain money from you. The risk of being outsmarted and arrested in the process of trying to exchange items of value is too high, perhaps, when compared with the risk involved in selling your babies to third parties."

"I think the risks involved in that are very nearly zero," said Petra.

"Then we agree on the assessment. Your babies will be safe, if that's any consolation."

"Safe to be raised by monsters," said Petra.

"Perhaps they don't see themselves that way."

"Are you confessing that you people are in the market for one of them to raise to be your boy or girl genius?"

"We do not traffic in stolen flesh," said Lankowski. "We long had a problem with a slave trade that would not die. Now if someone is caught owning or selling or buying or transporting a slave, or being in an official position and tolerating slavery, the penalty is death. And the trials are swift, the appeals never granted. No, Mrs. Delphiki, we are not a good place for someone to bring stolen embryos to try to sell them."

Even in her concern about her children-her potential children- she realized what he had just confessed: That the "we" he spoke of was not Syria, but rather some kind of pan-Islamic shadow government that did not, officially at least, exist. An authority that transcended nations.

That was what Lankowski meant when he said that he worked for the Syrian government "as often as not." Because as often as not he worked for a government higher than that of Syria.

They already have their own rival to the Hegemon.

"Perhaps someday," she said, "my children will be trained and used to help defend some nation from Muslim conquest."

"Since Muslims do not invade other nations anymore, I wonder how such a thing could happen?"

"You have Alai sequestered here somewhere. What is he doing, making baskets or pottery to sell at the fair?"

"Are those the only choices you see? Pottery-making or aggressive war?"

But his denials did not interest her. She knew her analysis was as correct as it could be without more data-his denial was not a disproof, it was more likely to be an inadvertent confirmation.

What interested her now was Bean. Where was he? When would he get to Damascus? What would he do about the missing embryos?

Or at least that was what she tried to pretend to herself that she was interested in.

Because all she could really think, in an undercurrent monologue that kept shouting at her from deep inside her mind, was: He has my babies. Not the Pied Piper, prancing them away from town. Not Baba Yaga, luring them into her house on chicken legs. Not the witch in the gingerbread cottage, keeping them in cages and fattening them up. None of those grey fantasies. Nothing of fog and mist. Only the absolute black of a place where no light shines, where light is not even remembered.