The weeks that followed were a crash course in Western mores that proved as valuable as anything else he learned at Maryland. He took, or was taken by, more lovers, though none knew of the others. They spoke dismissively of their pampered lives, but none of them would ever dream of actually leaving the gilded cage. With half an eye on the bluish glow of the TV screen, the spoiled white bitches would watch the events of the day as they waved their hands to hasten the drying of their nail polish. Nothing ever happened that American television could not reduce to a fifteensecond world-news update: slivers of mayhem between segments on new diet fads and pets in peril and warnings about expensive toys for toddlers that could be hazardous if swallowed. How rich in material things the West was, how poor in spiritual! Was America a beacon unto the nations? If so, it was a beacon leading other vessels into the shoals!

When the twenty-four-year-old graduate student returned to his native land, it was with a sense of even greater urgency. Injustice prolonged was injustice magnified. And—he could not say it enough—the only solution to violence was more violence.

Janson spent the next hour going through the dossiers and listening to brief presentations by Márta Lang’s four associates. Much of the material was familiar; some of the analyses even reflected his own reports from Caligo, submitted more than five years ago. Two nights earlier, the rebels had taken over army bases, surged through checkpoints, and effectively seized control of the province of Kenna. Obviously, it had all been carefully planned in advance, down to the insistence on holding the summit in the province. In its latest communication to its followers, the KLF had officially repudiated the Kagama delegation at the summit, calling them traitors acting without authorization. It was a lie, of course, one of many.

There were a few new details. Ahmad Tabari, the man they called the Caliph, had gained in popular support during the past few years. Some of his food programs, it emerged, had won him sympathizers even among Hindu peasants. They had nicknamed him the Exterminator—not because of his propensity to murder civilians but because of a pest-eradication campaign he had launched. In the areas controlled by the KLF, aggressive measures were invariably taken against the bandicoot rat, an indigenous species of vermin destructive to poultry and grain. In fact, Tabari’s campaign was motivated by an ancient superstition. In Tabari’s clan—the extended family to which his father belonged—the bandicoot rat represented death. It did not matter how many Koran verses Ahmad Tabari had committed to memory: that primal taboo was marked indelibly on his psyche.