He heard her hang up. He didn’t hang up. He sat there, the receiver at his cheek. He wondered if he could just hold it there for a while and not hang up, if the driver would notice. He didn’t want his talking to his wife to end yet. It was over, yes, it was over. But if he didn’t push the end-call button, it wasn’t over for him.

He listened to the phizzing from the phone on his ear.

Maybe it was adjusting to that sound that did it. But he realized in a matter of seconds that the driver was talking. He was also not talking to him.

Hoseyn didn’t move. He nodded and said, noncommittally, “Okay.”

The driver paused. Then he began to talk again. He didn’t have a cell phone to his ear. There were no earbuds. There were no wires. There were no clips. Hoseyn saw at the edge of his just-about-thinking mind an outline of an unknown shape. He struggled to focus. He bore down. He pushed himself. And there it was. This driver’s talking meant someone, either the Americans or the Iranian regime, had discovered that Hoseyn’s death had been faked. A panic almost encircled him. He forced it away and considered. What was the best way to read this particular reality? Here was a driver talking on a phone that was not a visible phone, but something, no doubt, implanted in him, like a veterinarian’s computer chip in the neck of a pet.

Hoseyn decided to say okay again. He made the tone lazy this time. He wanted the driver to think he was still talking to his wife in wistful tones. The driver kept talking. Hoseyn said okay once again, reaching now into his blazer, the same one he’d worn with Will in China. He drew out the kukri.

He jimmied fast to make a fatal wound at the base of the driver’s head.

He dug out a transistor from under the tongue. After he put it in his pocket, he opened the trunk, took out a bucket, and ladled sand over the body. Now he liked the lack of wind.

He drove back to Dubai carefully. He dropped the satellite phone in the creek between a pair of dhows. He boarded a flight on Emirates for Iran. He wasn’t sure anyone, not even Will, would understand what it took for him to leave the Samsonite behind.

6.   FANTASY FIELDS