The phone chirped as the call relayed to the Colonel, the man in charge of Amin’s project section. A silver-haired man with a thick neck who never wore a military uniform, he’d introduced himself the day before Amin turned twenty-six and made his proposal: Use your PhD to help build Pakistan’s missile capability and you’ll be paid more than your peers and work at the highest levels in the best labs. It seemed like a perfect birthday present, even if the trade-off was a profession he couldn’t talk about and a life controlled by Pakistan’s secret intelligence service, the ISI. Not that a government employee could ever ask if they were being overseen by the ISI; persons being controlled by the ISI were not emboldened to ask questions about it. But after working on missile development for six months, some of the engineers told him that his phone and internet were probably monitored, as were his interactions with friends. He considered this a small price to pay. He got to travel, he wore nice suits and expensive watches, and the pay was good—it had taken his father, a senior bureaucrat in the Ministry of Finance, thirty years of service to earn what Amin was making before he was twenty-nine.

It wasn’t until he met Anita that he’d started to question the compromises. Amin had disclosed his relationship with her, as required for classified workers, but the Colonel seemed to know about his new girlfriend already. Amin told his new love that he worked in a university research lab on the outskirts of Rawalpindi, without mentioning what he was actually working on. Anita worked at a classified scientific facility called the MERC, and they came to an unspoken agreement early in their courtship: don’t ask—don’t tell. Perhaps, Amin pondered once after he’d drunk too much wine, the Colonel was relaxed about Anita because he knew they didn’t discuss work? Perhaps he knew, because phone and internet were not all he monitored?

Amin grew increasingly restless with the arrangement. He didn’t like lying to his girlfriend—now wife; he didn’t like it when the Colonel showed him photos of Anita from university, with her Western friends, or when he disclosed that Anita’s father was a secret alcoholic. When Amin tried to push back, the Colonel explained the facts of life: This is not a job you walk away from—but you’d be smart enough to understand this, yes?

Yes, thought Amin as he sat on the hotel bed, waiting for the call to connect with Islamabad. He was smart enough to have worked that out.

‘Amin,’ came the smooth voice of the Colonel, when the call connected. ‘What news?’