"The Pakistanis want to be sure that they win the peace, after the Afghans win the war," Ahmed continued for him. "No matter who wins the war for them, they want to be in control of the peace.
If they could do it, they would take all of our weapons and our medicines and our other supplies, and give them to their own..."
"Proxies," Khaled murmured, the New York in his accent exploding in the whispered word. "Hey, you hear that?"
We all listened intently, and heard the sounds of singing and music from somewhere outside the mosque.
"They've started," Khaled said, rising to his feet with athletic grace. "It's time to go."
We stood and followed him out of the mosque to collect our shoes.
Walking around the building in the gathering dark, we approached the sound of the singing.
"I've... I've heard this singing before," I said to Khaled as we walked.
"You know the Blind Singers?" he asked. "Oh sure, of course you do. You were there in Bombay, with Abdel Khader, when they sang for us. That was the first time I ever saw you."
"You were there that night?"
"Sure. We were all there. Ahmed, Mahmoud, Siddiqi-you haven't met him yet. A lot of the others who'll be going with us on this trip. They were all there that night. That was the first big meeting for this run to Afghanistan. That's why we got together.
That's what the meeting was all about. Didn't you know?"
He laughed as he asked the question, and his tone was as honest and ingenuous as it ever was, but still the words stabbed into my mind. Didn't you know? Didn't you know?
Khader was planning the trip all that time ago, I thought, on the first night that I met him. I remembered with perfect clarity the large, smoky room where the Blind Singers sang for their private audience. I remembered the food that we ate, the charras we smoked. I remembered the few well-known faces I'd recognised that night. Were they all involved in the mission! I remembered the young Afghan who'd greeted Khaderbhai with such respect, bending low enough to reveal the pistol held within a fold of his shawl.
I was still thinking of that first night, still worried by the questions I couldn't answer, when Khaled and I came upon a large group of men, hundreds of them, sitting cross-legged on the tiles of a wide forecourt adjacent to the mosque. The Blind Singers finished a song and the men applauded, shouting Allah! Allah!
Subhaan Allah! Khaled led us through the crowd of men to a relatively sheltered alcove where Khader sat with Nazeer and several others. When I caught his eye Khaderbhai raised his hand, signalling for me to join him. As I reached his side he grasped my hand and pulled me down beside him. A number of heads turned in our direction. Conflicting emotions stumbled into one another in my haunted heart: fear, that I was so conspicuously associated with Khader Khan, and a flush of pride that he'd drawn me, over all others, to sit at his side.
"The wheel has moved through one full turn," he whispered to me, placing his hand on my forearm and speaking close to my ear. "We met each other, you and I, with the Blind Singers, and now we hear them again, just as we begin this important task."
He was reading my mind and I was sure, somehow, that it was deliberate: that he was fully aware of the dizzying impact of his words. I was suddenly angry with him, suddenly resentful, even of the touch of his hand on my arm.
"Did you arrange to have the Blind Singers here?" I asked him, staring straight ahead and leaving the razor's edge in my tone.
"You know, just like you arranged everything else the first time we met?"
He remained silent until at last I turned to face him. When my eyes met his I felt the sting of impulsive tears, and I mastered them by grinding my jaws together. It worked, and my burning eyes remained dry, but my mind was in turmoil. The man with the cinnamon-brown skin and the trim, white beard had used and manipulated me and everyone else he knew as if we were his chained slaves. Yet there was such love in his golden eyes that it was, for me, the full measure of something I'd always craved from the innermost coils of my heart. The love in his softly smiling, deeply worried eyes was a father's love: the only father-love I'd ever known.
"From this moment, you stay with us," he whispered, holding my stare. "You cannot return to your hotel. The police have a description of you, and they will keep looking. This is my fault, and I must give you my apology. Someone close to us has betrayed us. It is our good luck, and his bad luck, that we were not captured. He will be punished. His mistake has revealed him to us. We know now who he is, and we know what must be done to him.
