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worst of beasts in Allah’s sight are the ungrateful who will not believe. Those of them with whom thou madest a treaty, and then at every opportunity they break their treaty, and they keep not duty to Allah. If thou comest on them in the war, deal with them so as to strike fear in those who are behind them, that haply they may remember. And if thou fearest treachery from any folk, then throw back to them their treaty fairly. Lo! Allah loveth not the treacherous. And let not those who disbelieve suppose that they can outstrip Allah’s purpose. Lo! They cannot escape. Make ready for them all thou canst of armed force and of horses tethered, that thereby ye may dismay the enemy of Allah and your enemy, and others beside them whom ye know not. Allah knoweth them. Whatsoever ye spend in the way of Allah it will be repaid to you in full, and ye will not be wronged .
    Byron typed these words into his computer. He had developed a habit of typing notes and sending them through the ether by email to himself, so that he had them in both his Sent column and his Old column. He printed out the passage. He planned to take the sheet of paper on his next trip to Miamito read to Ali. He felt it was part of his task to give this man, isolated for so many years from his family, his neighborhood, his surroundings, and his religion, some link to the world he once knew. And Byron believed he could never assess another person’s religion—life had taught him enough about the mysteries of religion that he long ago gave up considering Roman Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, even the Episcopal formalities of his youth, absurd or misguided or useless. They all mattered to billions of people in the world, and sometimes they mattered to him.
    From the privacy of his loft apartment on Laight Street in Tribeca, where the sounds of huge garbage trucks and tractor trailers still rumbled at night on the cobblestone pavements of the old warehouse district, he gazed at the top of the Empire State Building. Shimmering red and blue lights were draped over its heights. He then read again: Lo! Allah loveth not the treacherous. And let not those who disbelieve suppose that they can outstrip Allah’s purpose .
    “What the hell,” he said aloud, “can this mean?”

5

    T OM NASHATKA WAS WELL over six feet tall and, at thirty-nine, still weighed less than two hundred pounds. He was blond and blue-eyed, the son of a Polish immigrant family that had settled in Pittsburgh two years before he was born. He went through the Pittsburgh public school system and graduated from Penn State, where he played football and was the captain of the Greco-Roman varsity wrestling team. He had even contended in the 1996 Olympic trials. Tom enlisted in the Navy after he graduated and trained as a Navy Seal. He spent six years in the Navy and was then accepted for a rare slot as a special agent of the Secret Service. After September 11, he asked for a transfer to the new Department of Homeland Security and got it.
    His head was completely shaven. For years he had worn an earring, a golden circle in his right earlobe. It gave him, he said, deep cover. “I look like Mr. Clean—bald head and earring, ready to take care of the kitchen and bathroom.”
    He was friendly and engaging. After his transfer to New York, he developed many friendships in the upscale, gentrified Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn. He had girlfriends—not one of them knew he was a federal agent—and he enjoyed several nights out each week at the coffee bars and the real bars of his neighborhood. By eleven he was usually in his small, neat apartment on the third floor of a renovated brownstone.His friends thought he worked at a brokerage firm. Although they found it odd for someone in the sales business, Tom let his friends know he didn’t want to take them on as clients because he thought there might be some kind of conflict of interest. There were times, too—and his young friends thought this was strange for