Akil told him, and then had to explain where in Pakistan it was. Briefly, because even now, five years later, awareness of his exile brought him pain.
The older man's eyes were steady on his face. "And now you live in the big city. What do you do here?"
He was grateful that the subject had been changed. It was only later that he realized the man had seen his distress and had changed it for him deliberately.
The man's name, he said when asked, was Ahmad, Ahmad al-Nazal. He was Jordanian, and when asked he said with a self-deprecating smile that he did many things, none of them really well. For a time he had been a journalist. A few years after that he had gone into video rentals, which explained his near total recall of every movie made since Ben-Hur (Ahmad adored Hugh Griffith). Later, he said, he had worked in a computer store, where he had acquired enough skill to introduce Akil to the Internet. It was from Ahmad that Akil learned of the wonders of email, the ease of anonymous communication, and its incredibly infinite reach. Akil was astonished at how much Ahmad knew about online banking, including things that were at this time only possibilities spoken of in executive meetings. Ahmad predicted that soon everyone with a bank account would be able to pay bills without money ever changing hands. Sums of money would be moved from one account to another from one country to another with a pass code and a keystroke. One's banker would never know one's face, a distinct advantage, Ahmad said, in certain professions.
Ahmad was also a student of history, with his own theories as to the causes of the many global conflicts current the world over. Akil's thought had not gone beyond the local, what he could see, what he had experienced. Ahmad took a more global viewpoint, quoted Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, and lectured Akil and a small but ever more devoted group of acolytes on the ability of guerilla warriors to attack not only the enemy's strength but, and what Ahmad said was even more important, the enemy's morale.
There was some politely but inadequately concealed disbelief at this assertion. Ahmad saw it. "No," he said, "I assure you," and hastened to give examples dating from the Scythians attacking Darius to the American war of independence. "A guerilla army has certain significant advantages over a regular standing army," he said. "It's smaller, for one thing, which makes it not only more mobile but easier to conceal, and infinitely easier for its soldiers if escape is necessary. It strikes not on command but when it wills, at dawn, in the middle of a week, on a high holy day, keeping the enemy in a constant state of apprehension over where the next strike will be."
They digested this in silence. Akil, looking around, saw no skepticism.
They were all young men, unmarried, some religious, some not. And indeed Ahmad spoke very little of religion.
"A guerilla army," Ahmad said, "targets the enemy not on its flank but at its heart. A school bus. A government building. A hotel."
"You mean civilian targets," Akil said.
Ahmad shrugged. "A guerilla army has one more attractive facet. It is made up of people who volunteered because they support the same cause. True believers, if you will."
"Freedom fighters," someone suggested.
Ahmad nodded equably, but Akil, watching closely, saw his eyes glitter. With excitement, perhaps. Or was it triumph? How long would conversation have gone before Ahmad himself had introduced the phrase "freedom fighters"? "There are many names. Rebels. Partisans."
Terrorists, Akil thought. At least so far as Western propaganda was concerned.
"Soldiers of God," one excitable young man said.
The others looked startled. Ahmad smiled again but made a shushing movement with his hands, as the excitable young man's words had reached tables other than their own. "Regular armies fight because they are doing their two years of national service," he said, in a lower voice, "or they have been called up in a time of war. Often a war they have little interest in fighting." He smiled and raised an eyebrow. "Like in Platoon," he said.
They laughed, and the conversation shifted so smoothly from talk of real war to talk of war movies that no one but Akil noticed.
Over the next few months there were many other conversations on many other topics in coffeehouses around the city. Occasionally Ahmad would invite a favored few to a simple meal in his apartment.
In October the man at the desk next to Akil's came back from lunch pale and sweating.
"What is it?" Akil said.
"They are arresting Arab militants all over the country."
"And so?" Akil said. "You aren't a militant. You have nothing to fear."
"Ahmad is one of them."
It was a purge of dissidents by the government, under pressure from the West. The dissidents were imprisoned briefly and then expelled from Pakistan.
Ahmad invited a select few to his apartment to say good-bye while he packed. "Come," he said, "no long faces. It could have been much worse."
"Where will you go?" one of them said.
Ahmad closed his valise and straightened. "I was thinking…"
He turned to look at them. "I was thinking I would go to Afghanistan." There was a moment of breathless silence. "You go to join the Taliban," Akil said.
Ahmad lifted his shoulders. "Perhaps." He paused with uncharacteristic hesitation. "I did wonder…"
"What?" Akil said.
Ahmad smiled at him, at the circle of intent, watching faces. "I did wonder if you might like to come with me."
Akil knew then that God had been listening to his prayers after all.
A WEEK LATER, HALFWAY TO THE BORDER, THEY HEARD THAT AL QAEDA had released a video of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who called Zarqawi "a soldier, a hero, an imam, and the prince of martyrs."
Karim snorted. "And it only took them sixteen days after he died to admit it."
A week after that bin Laden himself released an audio recording, which Akil and Karim heard in a cafe in Haditha whose television was tuned to Al Jazeera. "Our Islamic nation was surprised to find its knight, the lion of jihad, the man of determination and will, Zarqawi Musab al-Zarqawi, killed in a shameful American raid. We pray to God to bless him and accept him among the martyrs as he had hoped for."
Karim raised an eyebrow at Akil. "What do you think?"
"A very poor-quality recording," Akil said, and drained his cup.
They heard the broadcast of bin Laden's second audio tape in Abu Ka-mal, barely but safely over the border into Syria. "Our brothers, the mujahedeen in the al Qaeda organization, have chosen their dear brother Zarqawi Hamza al-Muhajer as their leader to succeed the amir Zarqawi Musab al-Zarqawi. I advise him to focus his fighting on the Americans and everyone who supports them and allies himself with them in their war on the people of Islam and Iraq."