The man gazed diplomatically into the distance. “I do not speak of your woman, of course, but when ours stray from the path, it is in the cities that we find them.”

Malik already had agents in Van, where Mr. and Mrs. Rochon had stayed briefly in a hotel, but the man’s wording confirmed a fear he had harbored from the first: Ali was hunting Amira, too, and his operatives were painting her as a runaway wife. Even if Malik could match the royal billions bribe for bribe, no good Muslim would help him in the face of a husband’s rightful demands. And if Ali were to find her first …

But no one found her. Malik’s and Ali’s men crisscrossed eastern Anatolia—Kars, Van, Agri, every town of any size—bribing, cajoling, intimidating airport personnel, bus drivers, cabbies, private citizens who owned automobiles, anyone who might have helped a woman and child leave the area. There were countless false trails, but even with the full cooperation of the police and the army, who were being bountifully paid by both sides, nothing concrete led beyond the hotel in Van or the wrecked Land Rover.

It was as if Amira had disappeared from the face of the earth.

Eventually, even Malik had to give up. On the plane back to Paris, he remembered the icy chill of the snow-fed river. Was that where Amira and Karim slept? If not for his inexplicable certainty that his sister was alive, he would have despaired. But surely, that feeling was true, he told himself. Surely, he would see her again.

O

Ali had no parapsychological intuition concerning his wife. His feelings were simple: rage and fear. Rage at her betrayal—if she turned up alive, he would certainly kill her. Fear that if she were dead, so must be his son.

It had been nearly noon on the day following her escape when he awoke, half-poisoned, to learn of it. His first instinct had been the same as Malik’s: the local airport. Much time was wasted in trying to find a woman of Arab descent and child who left Tabriz on an early-morning flight to Teheran. Nothing came of the effort, and when a steward from the flight was found and questioned in Basra, he swore that the woman had had no child with her. More time was spent investigating a European-looking man and his Arab wife and child who had flown from Teheran to Istanbul. They turned out to be a Belgian businessman and his family on vacation.