He conceded with only a small nod. “No, not always. But too often it is true. War is a disease and we are all infected. And, like carriers, we pass it along to our children.” He touched the picture. “Sometimes, we even involve our children. That is against God. No matter what faith you are, no matter how devoutly you pray, it is an affront to God.”

“Yes it is,” I said.

He turned to me. “Not everyone in my country’s government is corrupt. Not everyone is in love with war. There are good people here.”

I nodded. “I know that. I can say the same about my government, or any government. There are always heroes and villains. And there are people who do bad things because they think it’s right. Depends on the viewpoint they’ve come to believe in. Some are misled, some come from a tradition of intolerance. Look how long it took my country to free its slaves and give everyone the vote. As far as I know, no one country holds the patent on moral perfection.”

Jamsheed sighed. “This was not the first time my government kidnapped young people and called them spies. Ever since we began our nuclear program, it has become unofficial policy to use these kinds of tactics. It gets into the world press, and even though we are condemned for it, there is just enough room for doubt to stall the process of releasing them. It is…” He fished for a word, waving his hand as if he could snatch it out of the air. The word he came up with was “dishonorable.”

“Yes it damn well is.”

“To use children is…” He wanted another word, a worse word. But what word was really adequate?

We looked into each other’s eyes for a long time. There were all kinds of things being said without either of us having to say another word. Eventually, though, I did say one word.

“Evil.”

He nodded. “Yes,” he said softly. “It is the worst face of evil.”

Chapter Sixty-seven

Chapter Sixty-Seven

The Warehouse

Baltimore, Maryland

June 15, 6:55 a.m. EST

“Hey, docs!” Bug called. Circe and Rudy glanced up and saw him waving to them on the big monitor.

“What have you got?” asked Circe.

“Weird, weird stuff,” he said, tapping the main screen on which were dozens of overlapping windows and text boxes. “I’ve been going through the field notes and even with most of the stuff corrupted there are hundreds of pages of stuff. I had MindReader index the words, and I hit a few I didn’t know. One in particular came up and I tried to translate it from Arabic or Persian, but it’s neither of those languages. Turns out its Russian.”

Rudy bent close to turn and make sense of the data on Bug’s screen, but there was too much that he didn’t know. “What’s the word?”

“Upierczi.”