“I understand.”

“But yes, we think they’ll accept you. We think it’s possible that within a few months you could meet their top men.”

“Bin Laden.” Rashid whispered the name.

“As far as we can tell, only a few people ever see him. Al-Zawahiri’s more likely. You understand, he sets the strategy. He’s the one who decides to use boys like Farhad as martyrs.”

“I know you don’t trust me,” Rashid said, apropos of nothing.

“If I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t be here.”

“It’s all right. I’ll prove myself to you.”

They’d walked the mall twice, end to end, Rashid’s loafers clacking on the polished floors. Along the way they’d stopped at a Polo store, where he tried on a salmon-colored long-sleeved shirt. “Do you like it?”

“It’s very nice.” He’s not a terrorist, Holm thought. Can’t be. Terrorists don’t wear pink Polo shirts.

Now they had looped back to the mall’s signature attraction, its indoor ski hill, an almost criminal waste of energy, considering that the temperature outside was 101 degrees. But Dubai — like Las Vegas, its American twin — pretended to exist outside the laws of nature. Dubai created wants, and then satisfied them at a tidy profit. Put skiing in the desert, and people who’d never seen snow would buy twelve-hundred-dollar Prada jackets to skid down a two-hundred-foot hill. Yet Holm had to admit she enjoyed visiting the place, its glass-and-steel towers so unlike Kabul’s shattered blocks. She’d take endless consumerism over endless war.

Rashid watched the skiers. “Shall we try it?” As if they were on a date. His manners matched his clothes. He was old-fashioned, almost courtly.

“Not me.” She’d grown up in Oregon, snowboarding at Mount Hood. She wasn’t renting a parka for this foolishness. “But you should. Have you ever skied before?”