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PAKISTAN
    MARCH 18

    K amran Khan was devoted to the mission. It was the single most important thing in his life after his love of Allah. He had sacrificed so much already and he was prepared, he knew in his heart, to sacrifice so much more. There were days, however, that tried his patience. Since giving himself over to jihad, Khan had spent most of his time in menial and uninspiring duties: cooking, cleaning, keeping watch, delivering the occasional package or letter to a particular person at a particular address. E-mail, cell phones, radio. All of these were dangerous. The Indians or the Americans with their computers the size of houses would find you and take for themselves that which you had hoped to keep hidden. That was why the Pakistani leadership of Haath-e-Mohammed, for all of their ambitions to liberate Kashmir from the Hindu yoke, communicated almost exclusively by courier. The couriers themselves knew nothing of what they carried. That was not their concern.
    Haath-e-Mohammed meant the Hand of the Prophet. HeM, as it was called in the newspapers, or the Hand, as they called themselves, was not as well known as Lashkar-e-Taiba or some of the other top-tier jihadi groups. But the fighters as well as the leaders in HeM were righteous and committed. They would make their mark.
    Kamran Khan played his part, and so far he had played it patiently. He was, however, running out of patience.
    He had once asked his friend Ali, the one real friend he had made in his first five months in the Hand, why his role in the organization was so circumscribed. Ali had already been sent for training to one of the camps in Afghanistan. He had been gone for more than a month, and when he returned, he was stronger and more confident. He had already been on three missions inside occupied Kashmir. Khan was envious of his friend’s success and embarrassed by that envy.
    â€œIt is simple,” Ali had told him. “They don’t trust you.”
    â€œWho doesn’t trust me?”
    â€œMasood Dar and the people around him.” Dar was the number two person in the Hand, operations commander, and deputy to the organization’s spiritual leader, Hafiz Muhammad Said.
    â€œWhy would they distrust me?” Khan asked.
    â€œYou have been to school,” Ali explained. “You speak languages. You are not the usual quality of recruit we see straight out of the madras whose passion for jihad burns in the veins. Your relationship with jihad is more a matter of the head than the heart. You are smart, Khan, maybe too smart. The HeM leaders prefer their foot soldiers to be a little on the slow side. That is why I am successful.”
    Khan had bowed his head at that, for he knew that Masood Dar was not wrong. He was guilty of the sin of pride, like Iblis, the devil, who had refused to prostrate himself before Adam as Allah had ordered because, as a jinn, he had been made by Allah from smokeless fire while Adam was a mere creature of clay. Iblis had been cast out for his arrogance. Masood had been merciful in letting Khan remain, even if only to sweep the floors. In the three months since that conversation, Khan had endeavored to be humble in all that he did. His time would come.
    Khan was working in the garden of the villa in the city of Lahore that the Hand used as a kind of informal headquarters. He was on his hands and knees, weeding around the grapevines, when Masood’s secretary tapped him on the back.
    â€œYou have been summoned,” he announced.
    â€œCan I at least wash my hands?”
    The secretary looked with some distaste at Khan’s dirt-stained clothes.
    â€œI think that would be a good idea.”
    Masood received Khan in his library. Khan looked with wonder at the walls of books with their spines labeled in Urdu and Arabic. There were even a couple of books in Russian. For a moment, Khan was struck by how much he missed books. Here, the Quran was the only book he read. It was the most important