But Rafe hadn’t uprooted his life and volunteered for government service because he yearned to chase tax cheats or philanderers. He had no objection to going after hardcore criminals (hello, Mister Pleski) but even that had not been his prime motivation. He had joined because of the death of his brother. His first motive, even in his own mind, was to somehow avenge his brother’s death, but beyond that, Rafe came to realize, was a desire to be like his brother. Not like him in killing terrorists in Afghanistan, which had been his brother’s purpose, but, like his brother, to have a purpose. Things had always come easy for Rafe. He had coasted through college and business school and then into finance, following paths that obligingly laid themselves out in front of him. Some boys want to be basketball players or astronauts; very few dream of growing up to structure leveraged corporate buyouts. Rafe had never had a calling. His brother did. And so, in a horrible funhouse mirror way, did the fanatic who killed his brother, who was willing to die himself (and did, thirty seconds after Rafe’s brother did) in the service of a vision, preposterous as it was. Rafe had read about an academic article about the Koran’s supposed promise of seventy-two virgins awaiting martyrs in paradise. “Virgins,” the article said, was a mistranslation. The author, an expert in the language of the Koran, explained that the word actually meant “raisins.” Or grapes. Thus grape juice. Which, to nomadic Arabs in the seventh century, wandering in a parched desert, would sound paradisiacal, Islam’s version of God enticing Abraham to the Promised Land with a vision of flowing milk and honey. Virgins were probably at hand in the seventh-century desert, refreshing liquids not so much.

Of course the scholar who wrote that paper had had to publish under a pseudonym, so he would not be targeted, like Rafe’s brother, by a suicidal lunatic who sincerely believed that the murder would entitle him to a place in a post-death paradise where he would enjoy the company of seventy-two virgins who were actually grapes. Except, of course, they were actually nothing, because the entire thing made no sense.

Just like Rafe’s working to make millions of dollars for billionaires had made no sense.