Big Daddy shrugged. He glanced back at the militia leader. “Once in a while, you have to go through with it.”

* * *

“I knew the boy, yes. The one you think of as Ahmet the Turk.”

The militia leader Abu Kamal sat at a table in another room.

Luke watched from the corner. He had taken part in a lot of interrogations, and it had made him a skeptic. These guys always knew the subject in question.

They always knew the location of a secret hideout. They had incredible imaginations. They could spin fantastic stories with the when and the where and the why. They could describe high-level meetings that took place in cave complexes under inaccessible mountains, or at multimillion-dollar townhouses in London. And when you pursued the leads they gave you, it turned out to be smoke and mirrors.

Kamal’s hands were still manacled, but the chain had been loosened. It looped under the table, and the table was also bolted to the cement floor. The effect was that it gave his hands much more freedom of movement than before. He used this freedom to smoke a home-rolled cigarette.

His legs were completely free, and his clothes were back on. His legs were folded. He seemed completely calm now. He spoke in a conversational tone.

“You think him a boy, probably, but he is older than he appears. He is from the village of Hajin, in Syria, just over the western border from Iraq. He is not a fighter. He is not strong, and he is not courageous. When he was in the camp, he failed most of the physical tests demanded of him. He was useless with weapons. I’m not even sure that he has been called by Allah.”

“What good was he, then?” Big Daddy said.

Luke had watched Big Daddy work before, too. He was still trying to decipher the man’s approach. Sometimes he instantly rejected what the interviewee was saying. Sometimes he played along like he believed it, then suddenly jumped on an inconsistency. Sometimes he just listened and drew the interviewee out, completely trusting, like he didn’t have any strategy at all.

There was a method to Big Daddy’s madness, but Luke had no idea what it was.

Kamal shrugged and took a deep drag of his cigarette.

“Everyone brings their own gifts. Ahmet is thin and handsome, almost womanly in his way—he is a temptation to women. He is very intelligent. He is an engineer and a scientist, and he is very good at languages. He learned Turkish and French as hobbies when he was a teenager. I believe he had hoped to move to Europe one day, though the war dashed those hopes.”

To Luke’s ears, it sounded like a romantic story. The war dashed the man’s hopes.

“Why would the war dash his hopes, if he is Syrian?” Big Daddy said. “Syria is not at war.”