On his disposable phone, Omar called Nawif. “We’re ready.”

“Go, then. And remember that Allah is protecting you.”

Omar wanted to keep talking, to invent a conversation that would end with him telling the other three that the mission had been called off. Instead he hung up. “It’s time,” he said.

They didn’t bother to wipe down the apartment. Nawif had told Omar that it couldn’t be traced to them. Further proof of their essential disposability.

JJ’s was barely five hundred meters away. They trotted through the narrow streets, following the path they had traced the week before. They didn’t speak. No one stopped them, or even noticed them. At this hour the neighborhood was largely deserted, the guest workers who largely populated it home for the night.

They turned a corner, and Fakir saw the bar’s sign shining green and white just a block away. JJ’s Expat. Music filtered through the windows. Fakir took his brother’s hand. “I’m sorry I said you were scared.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m not anymore, though.” A lie.

“That’s good, brother.”

A few meters from the bar, Omar slowed his pace. “Remember, don’t start until you hear us open up,” he said over his shoulder to Amir and Hamoud. He wanted to add something else, but he had nothing left to say.

Covering the last few meters took no time at all. The noise rose. He heard people talking in English, a woman singing. He was dreaming and couldn’t wake. He had two grenades in the front pocket of his windbreaker. He had a sudden urge to blow one now. Only he and his brother would die.

He didn’t.

JJ’s main entrance was inside the building that housed the bar. A corridor connected it to the street. Fakir stepped into the hallway, Omar a step behind. Two bouncers, big men in red T-shirts, stood just outside the entrance. Fakir walked confidently toward them, his chubby body jiggling under his T-shirt. When he was three steps away, he reached behind his waist and pulled the black 9-millimeter pistol.