“You know what I think?” Linda asked Heather.

Linda! April had to intervene again.

“I’m handling this,” Linda said, affronted.

“Handling?” Heather sounded confused.

“I think Rafik is a terrorist,” Linda declared.

Melhaney looked at April with disdain. They had told her this would happen. Heather would come home; say, Gee whiz, Mourad, Linda thinks Rafik is a terrorist; case down the tube.

“I think he has bombs in that storage unit,” Linda said with satisfaction. “I think he’s planning to blow up Boston.”

“Because he’s Muslim?” Heather asked. “That’s—”

“He’s Arab, isn’t he?”

“Yeah. He’s both. I mean, do you know the difference?”

“Arab, Muslim—however you slice it, trouble.”

“The French taught us to torture,” Aziz was telling Ghazi. “Now we do what our grandfathers died fighting to stop. The generals torture us for being terrorists. The terrorists kill us for not being terrorists. What are we?”

It was a simplification. But one Aziz thought Ghazi might get. It was true, in some ways.

“That is why Afghanistan for me,” Ghazi said. “Not the home country. The CIA is behind all this.”

“Says who?” Aziz felt himself getting mad again.

“Dhakir. Trust me, cousin. He knows people in London.”

“Dhakir? Ghazi, think of who he is! With his overlong dick and his brain no bigger than a berry.”

“But maybe the ones in London, they know.”

“Who in London would tell Dhakir in Montreal about anything? Who?”

“It is complicated.”

“And the Qur’an. What are you doing with the Qur’an?”

“Reading it.”

“So you believe this garden with rivers under it?” Aziz asked, angry all over again. “You think, ‘I go to Afghanistan, I kill kafir and get killed doing it—to the virgins in the garden I fly?’ ”

“It is an idea of a garden,” Ghazi said. “The virgins are for people who cannot understand the idea of an idea.”

“And you want what they want?”

“I don’t know what I want.” Ghazi said this flatly, as if it were self-evident. Ghazi’s father was right, thought Aziz. Ghazi was an idiot. A gecko with wings.

“So Dhakir is the answer; the CIA is the problem; the Qur’an is the guided missile? Let me tell you something. The CIA has no one in Algeria. If they did, how would they tell who is who? I am Algerian, and I could not tell.

“The CIA lives in this place, Virginia, where Heather’s father lives. You have seen pictures she has. Look on her dresser. It is green and velvet and everywhere forests and houses like French castles. No one from the CIA wants to sleep on dirt and eat sand to make a mule out of a man in a country no one in America ever heard of, except maybe when they mistake it for Nigeria.