He took the shells and, one by one, loaded them into the Accuracy International ten-shot magazine. As the box filled, the spring tightened and fought him more urgently. He squeezed the last one in only by applying the full pressure of his thumb against the shaft of the brass, after sliding it between the flanges of the mag and urging it back flat against its rear plate.

There! Again, something about a magazine fully loaded. You held it, feeling its density, feeling the pressure of its compressed spring, feeling its urgency to offer its cargo up to the slide of the bolt, which would pluck them, one by one, into the chamber, like a burnt offering of some kind.

He rocked the magazine into place, felt it catch, rotated it upward, felt it lock in place with a satisfying reverberant click. He had only to ram the bolt home, to insert the first of the ten into the chamber, and wait until at last his target came into view, a small human speck in the lens from so far away, who, as he would have to, would go to stillness, not knowing he was setting himself for the shot that would kill him.

Juba checked his watch.

More than an hour to go.

Now to relax, perhaps pray again, perhaps let serenity and will roll through his body, until he became one with the rifle, one with the ammunition, one with the mission.

Something moved in front of him. But it was only a helicopter, a speck in the sky miles away, vectoring in for some kind of rooftop landing in the far, magnificent city across the river.

1350

She tried. You could see her trying. She gave it her all, her belief, her imagination, the intelligence leveraged into her brain by the weight of a mother’s endless grief, all the pain of back alley beatings and rapes, all the subsequent pain in the recovery, all the willed forgetting. She tried.

Still, the message was clear: no sale.

“You don’t have to say a thing,” said Mr. Gold. “I can read your face.”

“It’s magnificent,” she said. “You’re so brilliant, each of you. I sense your intellect in every stroke, in every inference, in every leap. And it makes sense. It follows so logically, one point to another, one clue to the next, all of it coheres, makes policy sense, makes world-historical sense, makes religious sense, even by their standards. As a Moslem, it makes sense to me. As a tourist in Baghdad, it makes sense. As an amateur spy, it makes sense. As a rape victim, as a pauper who’s spent a fortune on the same goal—on all of that—it makes sense. I applaud you.”

“But,” said Mr. Gold, “you do not buy it?”