They travelled to Pakistan in a battered green minibus. The journey through Afghanistan had been mortally slow, since the road from Kandahar to Kabul was full of potholes. There were also many checkpoints, but Zayn had all the correct papers and passwords to satisfy the Talibs. Having skirted the capital itself and crossed the Kabul river in the dark, they spent a night at Khost, where the Sheikh had a complex of camps. It was there they were shown Ahmed the German’s videotape surveillance of the target.

The following day, after winding through fields of scree along a narrow road packed with lorries belching black smoke and piled high with produce, they crossed the border without incident. There was nothing in their baggage to arouse the suspicions of the Pakistani authorities. The ordnance for the task had followed a different route: from Italy and the Czech Republic to Oman, using the services of a Russian freight company called Air Yazikov, with which al-Qaida had connections. Then across the Gulf by boat down to the East African coast, trade routes that had been used for centuries.

Loads carried to far-off lands … Ships whose cargoes bring pleasure to peoples … The holy words jostled with the thoughts in Khaled’s head as he looked out of the window of the minibus at the rocky hilltops of northern Pakistan. He told himself to be strong. Was it not true that only God knows what lies before people? Human beings can only understand those parts of His truth that He chooses them to understand.

In Peshawar, they booked into a hotel owned by the Sheikh. It was known as the Bait al Ansar, the House of Support, and many people from al-Qaida and other Islamic groups stayed there as they passed through, before and after operations. Zayn had told them to keep a low profile, but Khaled managed to slip out – after a breakfast of bitter coffee, dates and yogurt – to wander round the streets, which were thick with people and traffic and dirt.

The crumbling yellow walls of many of the buildings were covered with brightly coloured posters of Pakistani film stars. There was a large garrison of soldiers and, testament to what years of war can do to a region, a large army of limbless beggars. Those who had lost legs scooted about through the black clouds of exhaust fumes on low wooden boards fixed with wheels, pushing themselves along on fists wrapped in bundles of filthy cloth.

The bazaars were full of all manner of goods, including a fearsome array of weaponry. He saw one stall where grenades were piled up like pomegranates. Peshawar was said to be full of smugglers. He suspected that these people were mostly ordinary traders, but it was certainly true that besides the local Pashtuns, the streets were busy with men from all over Central Asia: Uzbeks with florid whiskers, Turcomans in black woollen hats that looked like wigs, Nuristanis with blond hair and pale blue eyes …

He bought a glass of black tea and sat watching the faces passing by the tea-house window. The variety of countenances pleased him. For although there is no God but God Himself, are not the most glorious places under Allah’s sky those that are like this? Places where it is not one thing or the other that counts, as the Talibs would have it, but the great thronging mixture itself. His homeland was like that. Zanzibar, Pemba, Lamu … The whole coastline, Kilwa, Mombasa and Malindi, all the way down to Sofala in Mozambique, the port which the old men said was once the gateway to a fabulously wealthy African kingdom, long before white men came.

Home. Soon he would be there. The plan was that they would fly to Dubai. There, in the transit lounge, they would switch passports covertly with al-Qaida members inbound to Pakistan. Some of the passports were false, some were real. There was a facility within al-Qaida, a man who forged the documents. From Dubai they would fly on to Muscat to catch the Gulf Air plane that flew directly between the Omani capital and Zanzibar. This flight served those Arab families that divided their time between the island and the desert – subject, as always since the Revolution, to the residence laws that prevented Arabs from living on Zanzibar for longer than one month in four.

This aspect had been one of Khaled’s own contributions to the operation. He liked to put a braver gloss on it, but sometimes he suspected he had been brought on board simply because he had the correct passport and visa, and the local knowledge. His documents had all been copied by al-Qaida’s forgers. Zayn, a Palestinian by birth, and Yousef the Syrian were now fellow Zanzibaris of Omani extraction. Together with Khaled they could pass through the minimal controls at Zanzibar’s tiny airport without hindrance. No one ever checked properly, Khaled had explained. By taking the direct Gulf flight they avoided having to go through immigration on the Tanzanian mainland.

This was important. In keeping with the semi-fiction that Zanzibar was a separate state in federation with the mainland, the authorities on the island had their own immigration service. But it was underfunded. Most important of all, it had no computers. Paper records of exit and entry to the island were rarely made either. Effectively, the representatives of al-Qaida would be entering the country invisibly.

Zayn was angry when Khaled returned from his wander round Peshawar.

He shouted. ‘You are a young fool! What if a Pakistani policeman had stopped and questioned you?’

Khaled simply bowed his head miserably and waited for the stinging blow which the flat of Zayn’s hand delivered on such occasions. There had been many.

After lunch, Zayn sent him into town to buy more units for the satellite phone that they would use in the course of the operation. It struck Khaled as something of a contradiction: surely he was far more likely to be noticed at the satellite agency than sitting in the window of a tea-house?

Later in the afternoon, feeling wronged, he went up on to the flat roof of the hotel. As he walked out onto the squared concrete, he saw a small figure. It was a boy flying a kite – one of the hundreds of little paper triangles that fluttered above the city every afternoon. Most were made of green or red tissue. Some of them were covered in pictures, though these could hardly be seen from the ground. Khaled stood watching. Kite-flying was a craze in this part of the world. The boys glued ground glass to the strings of their kites and engaged in fights, sawing away at the string of the other.

He sat down on the low, rough-plastered parapet of the roof wall and continued watching, to the boy’s great pride and pleasure. Along with satellite television, videos, football and chess, the Taliban had banned kite-flying over the border. Khaled could not begin to fathom the reason. Perhaps they thought kites were in some way idolatrous. But kite-flying seemed such a harmless pastime.

As he studied the boy skilfully swerving his craft through the air, deft movements of the hand producing corresponding swirls and flourishes in the sky, Khaled felt happy again. Breaking through the clouds above the hills round the city, sunlight was bathing the whole place, making the yellow-brick town reflect upwards with a golden glow, in the midst of which danced the red and green dabs of the kites. It gave – he had to confess his thoughts took this shape – what could only be described as the impression of a painting.

The feeling soon passed however. Later Khaled could again feel Zayn’s hot eyes upon him when, as dusk fell, they inaugurated their evening prayers in the hotel room. Khaled knelt and lowered his head. A fan whirred above. He heard Yousef’s whispering voice beside him, and joined in the recitation.

‘Praise be to Allah, Lord of the two worlds …’

High above the three men, higher than the ceiling, higher than the flat roof and the forest of kites over Peshawar, higher and knowing and seeing – but not omniscient – spun the machinery of satellite reconnaissance of the United States government. A few days previously, before the battered green minibus had left the camp, a long-range camera had taken a digital photograph of the vehicle. It had just taken another picture of the vehicle, outside the hotel in Peshawar, and this had provoked a reaction.

Passing the information through various critical filters, the computer that controlled the camera determined whether it was worth forwarding to intelligence analysts. Since one of the filters tested the movement of vehicles, the program for forwarding began to run. An encrypted message flashed its way from a joint NSA/CIA data-collection facility to the desks of a number of US officials.

These included Jack Queller. As part of the consultancy package he had hammered out with the CIA when he retired, he had the full complement of communications equipment installed in his home office in the cabin on Aquinnah. For all that, he still communicated in more traditional ways as well. The island was in the south-west corner of the Vineyard, near enough to the Haven for him to pick up his mail every morning in his modest speedboat. There was rarely much – statements from his broker, occasional copies of the journals to which he subscribed. But he liked to make the trip, just to prevent himself from getting too solitary.

There were two fishermen he drank with, Lanford Bourne and Todd Stubens, but otherwise he didn’t mix. Especially not with all the people who were coming in from New York and building houses in the area. There had lately been some trouble between a real-estate developer and the local Native American lobby, which was Wampanoag and fairly militant.

Half Wampanoag himself, Todd had an old Navy lighter from which he ran lobster lines. Queller loved this boat and sometimes the two of them would go out together to check no one had been messing with the trap lines. Todd liked to do this in the early morning. Then, when the place was quiet, you got a real sense of what the Haven must have been like in the old days, when it was full of tall ships – whalers and slavers, traders from Europe and the East. Todd had given Queller an old harpoon point he had found in a cove. It took pride of place on the window sill in his lounge, next to a photograph of Lucy.

That was where he was now, surrounded by bookshelves and wearing only his boxer shorts. As the ‘incoming message’ tone sounded on his computer and the corresponding dialogue box appeared on the screen – ‘You have new mail, open mail?’ – he was lying on the sofa reading, as he did every morning, a verse from Omar or one of the other great Persian poets.

Putting down the book, Queller went over to the computer and affirmed the dialogue prompt. With his hand on the back of the swivel chair, he read the message, taking notice of the co-respondents. These changed according to the status and subject area of the message.

Frowning when he saw the last part of the message, Queller spun the chair round and went through to the kitchen to fix himself some breakfast. It made him feel low to have to file his reports to a younger man. Altenburg had a mere fraction of his experience of terrorism and hostage-taking, yet supposed himself an expert. He put some bread in the toaster and turned on the kettle. Whatever was in the message, it could wait. He felt his stump twitch with pain, as if the glowing bars of the toaster had been pressed against it. The cut nerves hurt like this from time to time; the cause was partly physiological, partly psychosomatic – but the pain, that was always the same.

He had, he felt, good reason to be down on Altenburg. The FBI man had recently vetoed an operation he had half set up and wanted to run ‘dark’ through the Counter-Terrorism Group. He had persuaded the representatives of two oil companies (both former agency men, as so many in the oil business were) to put up $500,000 each for a speculative unofficial project. Queller would fix them up with 30,000 square kilometres of concessions through a contact of his in Sudan. He planned to use the money to set up an unofficial operation to kill Osama bin Laden. But – even though the money was sitting in an escrow account in London and things were ready to roll – Altenburg had blocked the plan. Furious, Queller was sorely tempted to run the operation privately. He was an adept of dark ops, however, and knew that they tended to go wrong without covert official backing. Only agencies had the resources, deniable and undeniable, to run such things in a proper fashion.

Queller had another reason to dislike Altenburg. He suspected him of scheming to terminate his consultancy contract. Officially, they both came under the aegis of the recently established Counter-Terrorism Group, whose inter-agency team of officers produced tactical intelligence with the aim of thwarting terrorist attacks. The CTG itself came under the direction of Secretary of State Albright – with whom Queller was on familiar terms – but she couldn’t be drawn into a dispute of this nature, a dispute that wasn’t even supposed to exist. It was a fiction that State took the lead in the CTG anyway. There was the usual power vacuum of an inter-agency function, and this gave guys like Altenburg a chance to extend their influence.

Balancing a slice of toast with raspberry jam on top of his mug of coffee, Queller went back through to the office and sat down at his desk, rereading the message. He had thought, when he began the consultancy, of keeping up his apartment in Washington or the house outside Langley – but these days, with intelligence gathering and analysis totally coherent with the electronic revolution, it wasn’t necessary. So he had let out the apartment and sold the house. The place was full of ghosts, anyway. He glanced over at the silver-framed photograph of Lucy – smiling outside the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, their final vacation together – and felt the familiar stab of grief.

Now he spent nearly all his time on Aquinnah. He left the Cape only to attend meetings in Washington and Langley, and to give lectures to students at the FBI’s Quantico and the training centres of other government agencies – such as, lately, that of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

He thought about the bright young woman he had met there – the one with the deep green eyes to whom he’d denied any such operation as the one that had recently fallen through. The woman heading for Dar. What was her name?

He noticed a scribble on the notepad next to his computer. Termite dust. He would buy some next time he went into Vineyard Haven. A few days ago he had noticed that some of the wooden cladding on the old part of the cabin (he had built an extension) was bulging. He had reached up to touch it and the whole thing had fallen off, baring a long thin nest of insects. Hundreds of the little creatures had fallen onto his face and hair.

Queller sipped his coffee and read the glowing screen. He once tried to use his prosthesis to type, moving a single latex-covered finger by stimulating sensor pads in the socket which responded to the flexing of muscles in the stump – but it was laborious and painful.

So today the arm dangled from its straps over the back of one of the lounge chairs next door. The flesh-coloured hand, which could be removed, lay on the chair in front. He hated the prosthetic. However much the socket was repadded (and he saw a specialist every six months), it rubbed against the stump. He hardly wore it these days, except when he went up to Washington. He told himself he did this for the sake of appearances, but suspected it might be that he enjoyed the shocked expression on people’s faces when, reaching to shake his hand, they realised it wasn’t real. Like the young woman whose name he had forgotten. He called it the revenge of the unhanded.

Miranda Powers! The name came back, like a tiny charge going off in the brain.

Queller actually had quite a few hands, a whole drawer full of the damn things, all of various capabilities and textures. They had been given him by the hospital and he had put them in the drawer and left them there. The prosthetics did not feel part of him in any way, each one being a ready-to-hand – as he liked to think of it – reminder of absence. Not just of the physical existence of what had been taken from him, but of the actions he could no longer do, like tying shoelaces, for example – he had to wear slip-ons – or the many ways in which having two hands assisted one to express oneself.

He had also been given a couple of metal hooks, but he never wore them. There was too much of the cartoon about them.

As a matter of fact, everything seemed cartoon to him now, the whole gamut of life – comedy, tragedy and everything in between. It was the condition to which things tended these days: colour without tone, a flattening of dimensions, the false dynamism of something that was actually fixed, storyboarded.

Bin Laden’s adoption of a singular perspective, the stuff he had covered in the lecture, that was part of the same thing, the same caricature. And so, perhaps, were people like Altenburg and Kirby … There was no room for grain and texture in it all, not like the lichen on the boulders of Aquinnah. Yet somehow the cartoons touched on, were part of, the rawness of existence. That was the mystery: how the inauthentic clicked into the authentic as easily as the prongs on his various hooks and hands picked up the ratchet of the main limb.

Queller enjoyed musing on the material aspects of his affliction, turning them ever to the abstract. It filled the absence for him: by treating his condition in this way, he reduced its power over him. This was something that only those who were ‘differently abled’, as the PC police insisted, could fully understand: a way of bending the otherwise abled world to one’s own needs.

For all that, right then and there, naked except for his boxers, it was with his live hand that Queller pointed the cursor at the hypertext link in the middle of the email:

Meaning, what? The message, which had come over the CIA’s secure, proprietary system rather than a commercial link, was instructing him to log on to Langley’s direct feed and view the satellite images. It took a few seconds once he had clicked. Then the picture popped up. It showed a green minibus parked outside a building with a flat roof. On the bottom left of the screen, superimposed on the image, text was flashing with hypnotic vigour:

Queller sipped his coffee and looked at the green minibus for a while. Then he began typing, with one finger:

The email flashed up on Altenburg’s screen in Washington almost immediately: the CIA net was much more efficient than its commercial counterparts. This also meant that the reply came back quickly, and it wasn’t one calculated to make Queller happy:

Queller stood up. That ever-vigilant sentinel of stress, his stump, began to throb agonisingly again. He walked out of the room, leaving Altenburg’s message on the screen. Passing through the lounge with its cane chairs and cushions, he stepped out onto the porch. He was still just wearing his boxer shorts, and even though it was summer there was a morning chill. But he didn’t care. Who was there to see him? To see him walk down the steps and out into the clearing in the pine wood that surrounded his cabin – the cabin on which, when she was alive, as Lucy grilled trout inside, he had used a soldering iron to burn the word Zanzibar into a plank next to the door. Because? Because being by the sea reminded him of his childhood in East Africa. Albeit most of the time it was a hell of a lot colder here on the Cape.

As he walked, he was conscious of the breeze on his chest and the pine needles under the soles of his feet. He came to a fork in the declining path and made for the shore, his feet like little ploughs for pine needles now, pushing up a green river round his ankles. Once he was out of the pitch pines there was a pretty piece of upland where gorse and broom and juniper grew on the edge of some pasture. He could see the remains of some old stone walls marking a former division. He walked on, enjoying the springy turf and the calls of the greenfinches that nested in the juniper. Far away, on a hill on a spur of mainland, he could see an old church, a narrow road winding up to it. It was Catholic, Portuguese, an old mission station. No one went there to worship now. The only visitors were tourists who passed it on the way to some strange cliffs nearby, famous for the multicoloured striations in their clay.

A verse from the Koran, which he knew intimately, came into his head. Do you not see that Allah sends down from the clouds water, then brings forth with it fruits of different kinds or colours? And in the mountains there are streaks, white and red, of different colours, and others intensely black. And of people and animals and cattle there are different colours likewise. Only those of His servants fear Allah who possess knowledge … It was a plea for equality, except for the crucial distinction between believers and non-believers, and it was an unveiling. Colour was nothing but an illusion in man’s mind, even the many shades of white suggested by the use of the plural form in the original.

He walked on. There was another little piece of wood – maples, more locust trees, a venerable oak. Then sudden sand and a widening: the amazing way the sky opened up. He was in the dunes now, which usually made him feel better, but the bad feelings were still there, his fist was still clenched. His only fist. On his other side, he felt a dull ache. The stump hurting … below, ghost limbs. All that was missing: the hand itself, the hand it would hold were it there. Lucy’s.

Queller looked out over the rolling sea. The wind was heavier here, and there was spray. That was why the bad feelings would go at last, beaten out of his chest by that wind and that spray and by each incoming wave as, marvellous, they came to see him. Each seemed like proof, as it rolled in, that just because a man was lonely and one-armed, had grey hairs on his chest and was standing in his underwear on an ocean beach, it didn’t mean he was past his prime.

He eased himself down, sitting cross-legged in the sand, and began his meditations.