The doctor came halfway into the room. “There’s a delay. This heat. I’m afraid she’s not here yet.”

Will stood up. “Then we have to go.”

“If you could just wait a few more minutes.”

Mary and Baz were standing too.

“This makes everything so difficult,” the doctor said.

“It does,” Will said. “But it can’t be helped.”

She and Baz followed Will through the door and down the hallway.

Halfway through, the maid appeared. She was a teenager, Mary saw through her own wilting. At home she would have been a creature of long hair and stretch jeans, cell phones and iPods, texting and downloading, but here she was dignified, mysteriously fresh in long sleeves, navy jumper, matching veil.

She came at them with fast bubbles of Farsi, bursting to tell and tell. Baz through all of it was saying, “Bale, bale, bale”—Okay, okay, okay. Will tried to stop her outpouring but it was a cascade. As she got to the end, she took both Mary’s hands and kissed her on each cheek twice. She kept holding her hands and smiling, tilting her head to Will, beaming into his eyes as only a person who didn’t know him at all would do.

So much for second-guessing and elaborated precautions, Mary thought. All the preparing for this moment had redounded to flawless clarity. This girl was no trap.

“She says that your friend is alive,” Baz translated. “She says that he waits for you always. She says he is at a place, where she knows. She says he wants you to visit. She says you are a good man. She says there is a good way to go. You must help her—to, to … to go there. Can you do this thing?”

Will took the girl by the hand, and they walked a little farther down the hall, away from Baz and Mary. To her surprise, she saw them talking. Yet Will’s Farsi—it wasn’t good enough for such a conversation. She strained to see.

After a while, the girl slipped a paper to Will, and he had it hidden so quickly, Mary questioned what she’d just seen. Had she imagined the paper?

In the next moment, the girl’s back was all Mary saw, and Will was walking toward her and Baz. She had never seen him look this way. He was—there was no other word for it—lightened. He didn’t smile. That would have been too much. But he was unclouded, clean almost.

“Let’s go,” Will said to Baz. “We need to meet at this place.” He had a piece of paper with a map; surrounding the grid, the rest of the page was covered in numbers.

They sped from the maid to the Caspian Air service hangar. The maid’s missive, perhaps her words, seemed to have made Will accept that Hoseyn was still on the American side, his loyalty extant.