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“Which brings me to the subject of you,” he admitted with a sigh. He turned slightly, revealing a semiautomatic pistol in his right hand. She flinched, and he immediately raised the weapon to cover her. Zula had been so carefully inculcated in gun range etiquette that to have any weapon pointed her way was far more shocking than it would have been to any person unused to firearms. “It has been a great pleasure knowing you,” Jones said, as if he were seeing her off at the train station. “Really it has. In a perfect world—no—in a better world—I would now say to you something like ‘Zula, will you please accept Islam and become a mujahid and fight alongside us?’ and you would answer ‘Of course, I have seen the light of Islam’ and it would be so. The problem with that scenario being that, not so many hours ago, you made a reasonably sincere-looking commitment to be submissive and cooperative, and then you killed my best man with a DVD.”

She averted her gaze. Did it make any sense to feel guilty?

“Love Actually, of all things—a film for which I have always secretly harbored a soft spot, but that I will never again be able to enjoy in quite the same way. And that is why, as much as I hate to do it, I must now, for the good of the cause—”

“My uncle has six hundred million dollars,” Zula said.

That rocked him back.

“Really,” he said after a while.

“Really. If you don’t believe me, check it out. And if I’m wrong, you can give me the Khalid treatment.”

“Meaning what you did to him, or what he did to the schoolteacher?”

Zula had no answer.

“Because I’m perfectly capable of doing either, or both, with or without your say-so,” Jones pointed out.

“It’s true,” she insisted.

He considered it for a while. Then he caught her looking. “Oh, I believe you,” he assured her. “I’m just trying to work out whether it matters. You’re suggesting some sort of ransom deal? Of course you are. But it’s not clear to me how we would set up such a transaction, or what good the money would do us, even if we could take delivery of it without every police and special forces unit in the world descending upon us. It would be difficult enough in Waziristan. In Canada?” He scoffed.

“My uncle can get you across the U.S. border,” she tried.

Jones grinned.

She realized that Jones genuinely liked her. Was, at some level, looking for an excuse not to kill her. “No, really?” he asked. “The same uncle?”

“The same one.”

“The black sheep,” he said, piecing it together. “The one you went to visit in British Columbia.”

“We’re in British Columbia,” she reminded him.

“I really must meet this chap,” Jones said, switching to his sarcastic-posh accent.

“I’m sure it can be arranged.”

“Then if you don’t mind,” he said, “my four comrades and I are now going to be quite busy for a while, trying not to die. If we are able to string a ­couple of nonfatal days together, we may then return to your proposal.”

“How can I help?” Zula asked.

“Stop killing ­people,” he suggested.

PART II

American Falls

Day 6

Curtis. Peter Curtis. It had taken Richard many hours of devious googling to pin down the surname of Zula’s boyfriend. The lad’s insistence on using a different pseudonym on every system that he accessed had made this maddeningly difficult. If Peter and Zula had checked in to the Schloss as regular guests, Richard would have been able to access Peter’s credit card data. As it had happened, though, they had stayed in Richard’s apartment as personal guests.