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opportunities.’
    ‘What kind of opportunities?’ Lennard asked.
    ‘Opportunities to resolve the issue,’ Monteith replied.
    Lennard and Jonah exchanged puzzled glances.
    ‘Let me get this straight, you think that we’re going to have a sit-down meeting with Mullah Omar, make some promises you know we can’t keep, and at the end of it he’s going to hand over Bin Laden to us?’ Beech asked.
    ‘Perhaps,’ Monteith snapped. ‘Next question …’
    ‘When do we leave?’ Alex called out.
    It was the kind of question that was more to Monteith’s taste. He clapped his hands together and said, ‘Next plane. Dress warm. It’s going to be cold.’
    Jonah glanced over his shoulder to see that Fisher-King had slipped unnoticed from the room.

The promise of Uncle Sam and the promise of God
    January 1999
    Monteith swept the distant ridge with his binoculars, standing among the broken glass and upturned chairs on the rooftop of the Kabul InterContinental.
    ‘Towards the end, Hekmatyar had his rocket batteries there,’ he said.
    ‘They fell upon us like a plague,’ Yakoob Beg agreed, pulling at his beard thoughtfully.
    ‘And Dostum was there to the east,’ Monteith said, pointing towards the ancient citadel that the Uzbek warlord Dostum had occupied in 1992.
    ‘We were surrounded.’
    The contrast between the two men was stark: Yakoob Beg was large and round in a white robe and turban. He was flat nosed, Chinese-looking, with characteristic Hazara features inherited from thirteenth-century Mogul invaders – the so-called Y chromosome of Genghis Khan
.
Monteith, by contrast, was hunched and squat, with his weight concentrated in his shoulders. His legendary red hair was mostly grey now, but his Celtic ancestry was clear to see in the rash of freckles on his hands and face.
    Jonah joined them at the blown-out window. Looking out at the ruins of Kabul and the barren ridge-lines that surrounded it, you could be forgiven for thinking that an act of God, perhaps an earthquake, had sent the city tumbling down a funnel, leaving nothing but a heap of rubble at the bottom. But it was a man-made cataclysm. A medieval war. He knew. He’d slipped in and out of the city a couple of times to carry messages from Monteith to Yakoob Beg in the mid-nineties, during the siege, when Kabul had been a battleground for competing warlords: Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of the Panjshir; Dostum, the Uzbek butcher; Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Islamist fanatic. They’d slaughtered each other for the right to rape and steal. They’d flattened mud-brick block after mud-brick block. They’d seeded the rubble with thousands of mines and unexploded shells.
    As they watched, a column of red Toyota Hi-Luxes, with armed men crouching in the beds of the trucks, drove up the hill and turned off on the road north to the Salang Pass in the direction of the Northern Alliance lines.
    ‘The Taliban are preparing for a fresh offensive,’ Yakoob Beg observed.
    As a Hazara and a Shiite, Yakoob Beg was a member of an ethnic group that had been declared infidels by the Taliban – more than eight thousand Hazaras had been killed in Mazar only a few months previously. But Yakoob Beg was first and foremost a survivor. Like so many of his fellow residents of Kabul, he had developed a capacity to adapt his behaviour to accommodate whoever was in charge, while keeping a watchful eye out for whoever might come next. He maintained high-level contacts with the Northern Alliance, who were occupying front lines north of the city, and the Taliban, who currently controlled it. Presumably, he paid them both. He lived in Wazir Akbar Khan district, one of the city’s most prestigious neighbourhoods, in a large compound that had remained miraculously untouched by the years of occupation and civil war. Most of the houses that surrounded his were now occupied by the elderly warriors from Kandahar who made up the bulk of the Taliban leadership, and their Arab allies. Jonah knew