Bloodmoney

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This is Omar’s last night in Makeen. He will have dinner with his family and then return to his computer laboratory in Islamabad, and his brothers Nazir and Karimullah will go back to their fighting. Arab guests who have taken refuge in Makeen will share their meal this night, and the malik will visit to say goodbye to “Ustad Omar,” as they call him, the wise Omar who has visited places like Dubai and London, which the people of Makeen can barely imagine.

Omar and his youngest brother, Karimullah, have been walking in the high hills above the town before dinner. Omar is nearly forty, and a city man now, whose knees ache as he climbs the rocky escarpment and whose lungs gasp for breath when he stands atop the ridgeline, only the thorny shrubs of acacia for cover. Karimullah is nimble, too much so, his brother thinks, hardened to muscle and bone by the years of war in these mountains. The boy looks like a wolf: narrow-faced, relentless, ravenous for the kill.

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