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me whenever I go back there.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œIn my family,” said Griffin, “there’s a lot of kids, and not a lot of money.”
    â€œAnd a lot of Muslims?”
    â€œNope. Everybody’s African Methodist Episcopal.”
    â€œSo what happened to you?”
    â€œI was looking for something. Didn’t find it. You know the rest. After the Rangers the Secret Service. Now this. Along the way I got myself a degree in Middle East studies at George Washington.”
    â€œYou got a wife? Kids?”
    â€œTwo little boys. They live with their mother.”
    â€œYou love them.”
    â€œHell yeah.”
    â€œAt some point, the bad guys are going to go after America’s children.”
    â€œBullshit.”
    â€œRead their declarations of war, the way they talk about the children martyred in Palestine, the children martyred in Iraq. You know what? Children are martyred in Palestine and Iraq. They blame us. And it ain’t a big jump from ‘an eye for an eye’ to ‘an innocent for an innocent.’ ”
    â€œYou got anything else to back this up?”
    â€œI hope I’m wrong,” I said. “Here’s an ATM. We’re going to make this a cash transaction, and you can start pulling the money out now, as much as it will give you, as a down payment. I want fifty thousand dollars in my pocket by the end of the day, and then you get Abu Seif’s hard drive.”
    â€œBullshit!” said Griffin. “You’re practically on the payroll. You don’t get bonuses. And we don’t pay murderers for stolen property.”
    â€œI thought I told you, Griffin—just like you told me—I ain’t working for you anymore. You don’t want to pay up now? You will. I’ll call you mid-afternoon.”
    I jogged back into the park through a narrow alley with flowers all around, across the wide green lawns and among the trees toward the Oxford Street hostel where I’d spent the last couple of nights. It was time to take a shower and pack.
    The escalators took me down into memories of wars before I was born. The deepness of the London subway was like nothing I’d ever seen before, the moving stairs so long that you lost your sense of the surface of the earth. There were posters to read for musical shows and for lingerie, all kinds of things to distract you. But by the time you got to the bottom of the stairs, all of that seemed like another world, and I understood now what I read about the British taking refuge in the Underground during the Blitz. No bomb dropped from the sky could blast through to these man-made caves. But here and now at the end of September 2001, the people around me were scared. They had the idea that death could erupt in the tunnels around them, that it could filter through the enclosed air that they breathed, that it could blow apart the subway cars they rode in. When we stopped for a couple of minutes between stations, nobody spoke. The only sound I heard was from the earphones of people wearing Walkmen.
    The newspapers that were lined up on the racks at Paddington Station didn’t have anything that I could see about the death of Abu Seif. They were still running headlines about the number of people who’d died and, mostly, disappeared in the World Trade Center. It was like nobody could believe it. Maybe six thousand dead. Maybe less. Not twenty thousand, like a lot of people thought at the beginning. Not ten thousand. Just eight thousand, or six thousand. Like it might be possible to whittle down the horror by whittling down the numbers. I picked up a copy of The New York Times and stood in the station reading it, waiting for the train. At the bottom of the front page was a story about people making a lot of money speculating in airline and insurance stocks just before September 11. But who the hell would do that? Or could? I never met anybody in the muj who was that smart, or, at least,