father, and two sisters having died in the rash of Sunni-on-Shia violence that had plagued Pakistan following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Embling had all but adopted the boy, giving him food, board, a small stipend, and, unbeknownst to Mahmood, a steadily growing trust fund he’d inherit when he turned eighteen.
Another mosque burned, another faction leader found murdered, another rumor of rigged elections, another ISI intelligence officer arrested for stealing state secrets, another call for calm from Peshawar. It was a damned shame, all of it. Not that Pakistan had ever been the model of peace, mind you, but there had been some periods of mostly calm, though even that was just a sham, a thin film covering the cauldron of violence always boiling just under the surface. Still and all, Embling knew there was no place else for him on earth, though he’d never quite understood why. Reincarnation, perhaps, but whatever it was, Pakistan had certainly wormed its way into his life, and now, at age sixty-eight, he was firmly and irrevocably rooted in his adopted home.
Embling knew that most men in his position would be, and perhaps should be, afraid—an Anglo-Saxon Christian from England, birthplace of the British Raj, or “rule” in Hindi. For the better part of ninety years, from the mid-1850s to just after World War Two, Great Britain had held sway over what it called the “Indian Subcontinent,” which had at various times during its history included India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somaliland, Singapore, and Lower and Upper Burma, today known as Myanmar, though Embling still and always would call it Burma, political correctness be damned. Though memories of the British Raj in Pakistan had faded with time, its impact had never completely disappeared, and Embling could see it and feel it every day he went out, in the stares from the old-timers in the market and in the whispered conversations between policemen who’d heard the stories from their parents and grandparents. Embling did nothing to hide his heritage, and he couldn’t have if he’d wanted to anyway, what with his perfect but ever-so-slightly accented grasp of Urdu and Pashto. Not to mention his white skin and six-foot-four-inch frame. Not a lot of natives with those traits.
Still, he was mostly shown respect, and that had nothing to do with lingering deference to the Raj but rather his own history. He had, after all, been in Pakistan longer than many of the people you might find in the Khyber Bazar market on any given day. How many years, exactly? he thought. Give or take holidays or brief assignments to Pakistan’s neighbors . . . Say, forty-plus years. Long enough for his former (and sometimes current) compatriots to have long ago labeled him as “gone native.” Not that he minded. For all its shortcomings and all the near misses and dodgy spots he’d seen, there was no place for him but Pakistan, and in his secret heart he took it as a point of pride that they thought him so well integrated that he was “more Paki than Brit.”
Embling, at the tender and naive age of twenty-two, had been one of MI6’s many postwar Oxford recruitments, having been approached by the father of a schoolmate who Embling had thought worked as a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Defence but who was in fact a scout for MI6—one of the few, in fact, who had warned his superiors that the infamous traitor Kim Philby was a less-than-stellar catch who would in time either muck up so badly he would cost lives or be tempted and slip over to the other side, which he did, working as a mole for the Soviets for many years before being exposed.
After surviving the rigors of MI6 training at Fort Monckton on the Hampshire Coast, Embling was assigned Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, or NWFP (or Pakhtunkhwa or Sarhad, depending on who you were talking to), which abutted Afghanistan, at the time just becoming a playground for the Russian KGB. Embling had spent the better part of six years living in the mountains along the border, making inroads with the Pashtun warlords who ruled the gray area of overlap between Pakistan and Afghanistan. If the Soviets put out feelers in Pakistan’s direction, it would likely come over the mountains and through the lands of the Pashtuns.
Save the occasional trip home to the UK, Embling had spent his career in the Central Asian Stans—Turkistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—all of which fell in varying degrees and