Not that he objected to scantily-dressed females or guns. He served an Islamic cause, but in his own way, on his own terms. He had been just a teenager in Tirana when word came of the civil war in Bosnia and the slaughter of Muslims there. While Albanians, Muslims themselves, had sympathy for the victims, most were too busy mourning their own financial calamity to do much about it. In the aftermath of the collapse of its weird and iconoclastic Communist regime, an investment mania had seized a country with no living memory of capitalism. Companies popped up offering investors returns of 10 percent a month, which seemed credible to the Albanians, who quite reasonably assumed that this was standard operating procedure for the marvelous Western system they’d been deprived of for so long. They were isolated and poor, but pictures and videos had seeped in from the outside world; across the border, Mercedes were apparently as common as goats. When Stavro’s father saw that his idiot brother-in-law was reliably receiving 10 percent a month on an investment he’d made in a “diversified real estate and manufacturing company,” he mortgaged their house and his butcher tools to buy into the same enterprise. What he didn’t realize was that his investment was promptly paid out, pyramid-scheme style, to his brother-in-law, who was higher in the structure than he was. The pyramid collapsed soon after, burying Stavro’s entire family.

Stavro went to work for the only part of the failed enterprise that had ever actually made a profit, the part that smuggled goods into splintering Yugoslavia, which had been embargoed by the United Nations because of the Yugoslav Serbs’ role in oppressing and killing Bosnian Muslims. Well, people had to eat. Stavro’s ruined parents needed his help. If that meant running gasoline and arms to Serbs who were killing Muslims, at least he had the satisfaction of knowing that the Serbs were being overcharged.

So Stavro learned a trade, and he made connections.

Eventually he pivoted to smuggling supplies to his co-religionists (when they had the money to pay). His name was passed around, and when Bosnian Muslims went to fight in Chechnya and, later, some joined the Islamic State, his name went with them as a man who was reliable, could cross borders, could function in the West, and was from a country that was only a semi-red flag in the computer systems of the infidels. Stavro thought ISIS was both extreme and counterproductive, although the individuals he eventually met in their finance section struck him as competent and non-fanatical, actually fairly ordinary. They might have been accountants for a state oil company whose careers had taken an unlikely turn, some kind of mix-up on LinkedIn.