"Pistolen?” Keitel asked.

First, eyes swept the street. Then ten cardboard boxes appeared. Keitel pointed to one, and it opened to reveal a Makarov PM. That was a nine-millimeter automatic modeled on the German Walther PP. The Russians, in a gesture of magnanimity, even tossed in five boxes of 9mm-x-18 ball ammunition.

"Ausgezeichnet," Keitel observed, reaching for his money. He counted out ninety-nine hundred-mark bills.

"Thank you," the Russian said. "You need more, you see me, yes?"

"Yes, thank you." Keitel shook his hand and got into the car.

"What has the world become?" the driver said as he headed off. As recently as three years before, those soldiers would have been court-martialed - perhaps even shot - for what they had done.

"We have enriched the Soviet Union to the tune of ten thousand marks."

The driver grunted. "Doch, and that "merchandise" must have cost at least two thousand to manufacture! What is it they call that ?"

"A "volume discount"." Keitel couldn't decide whether to laugh or not. "Our Russian friends learn fast. Or perhaps the muzhik cannot count past ten."

"What we plan to do is dangerous."

"That is true, but we are being well paid."

"You think I do this for money?" the man asked, an edge on his voice.

"No, nor do I. But if we must risk our lives, we might as well be rewarded for it."

"As you say, Colonel."

It never occurred to Keitel that he really did not know what he was doing, that Bock had not told him everything. For all his professionalism, Keitel had neglected to remind himself that he was doing business with a terrorist.

The air was wonderfully still, Ghosn thought. He'd never experienced really heavy snow. The storm was lingering longer than expected, was expected to continue for another hour or so. It had dropped half a meter, which, along with the flakes still in the air, muffled sound to a degree he had never known. It was a silence you could hear, he told himself standing on the porch.

"Like it, eh?" Marvin asked.

"Yes."

"When I was a boy, we got really big storms, not like this one, storms that dropped feet of snow - like a whole meter at once, man - and then it would really get cold, like twenty or thirty below. You go outside, and it's like you're on another planet or something, and you wonder what it was like a hundred years ago, living in a tipi with your woman and your babies and your horses outside, everything clean and pure like it's supposed to be. It must have been something, man, it must have really been something."

The man was poetic, but foolish, Ibrahim thought. So primitive a life, most of your children died before their first year had ended, starving in winter because there was no game to hunt. What fodder was there for the horses, and how did they get to it under the snow? How many people and animals froze to death? Yet he idolized the life. That was foolish. Marvin had courage. He had tenacity, and strength, and devotion, but the fact of the matter was that he didn't understand the world, didn't know God, and lived according to a fantasy. It really was unfortunate. He could have been a valuable asset.