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Mark.
    “Rosten said he wanted the kid out of the region altogether, so that Muhammad could start a completely new life. He didn’t want to take the chance that someone would recognize him and ten, twenty years from now, tell him what happened to his parents.”
    “The kid speaks Arabic. He couldn’t have at least been brought to an Arabic-speaking country?”
    Mark thought of Muhammad and wondered whether the boy would like this amusement park. Probably. Having walkedthrough the park during the summer months, Mark recalled that most kids seemed to. They appeared to like all the cheerful rip-offs of Disney characters, the bouncy music, the candy… Adults might compare it to the real Disneyland and find the place terribly wanting, but young kids didn’t care.
    “I don’t know. Rosten didn’t say anything about that.”
    “And you didn’t ask.”
    “My asking a lot of questions wasn’t part of the contract.”

7

    After eating two bowls of vanilla ice cream and then getting his pull-up diaper changed—Daria had stocked up on food and toddler supplies at a local supermarket—Muhammad appeared to be feeling much better.
    Better enough, at least, that he was comfortable roaming around Daria and Mark’s condo, sucking on his new pacifier, playing peek-a-boo with a felt sheep’s-wool carpet that hung on the wall, playing drums with a kitchen spoon and an assortment of pots, and sitting on Daria’s lap as she paged through a Kyrgyz version of
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
.
    Neither Mark nor Daria had invested much effort into furnishing their place—Mark because he viewed their time there as temporary, and Daria because she had been too busy with her orphanages—so most of what was there was fair game for Muhammad to climb on or play with. After pulling the cushions off an uncomfortable Russian-made couch in the living room, smearing mucus on the bottom half of the television, and bouncing on the queen-sized bed in the bedroom, he toddled into the office Daria and Mark shared and wreaked havoc by pulling many of their books to the floor.
    She did prevent him from chewing on a stack of papers that Mark had been reading and marking up—a former colleague of his had taken a sabbatical year to get his master’s at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and had asked Mark to review the thesis he’d written on the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Muhammad wasn’t happy about havingthe thesis taken from him, so as a consolation prize, Daria let him grab a brass Iranian vase off the coffee table, and when he discovered the narde set Mark had brought with him from Azerbaijan, she let him pull it down from a shelf in the living room.
    She reasoned that the least she could do for Muhammad—a child who had already borne more than any two-year-old should have to bear—was to make him feel comfortable and loved while he was in her home.
    “Careful,” she said in Arabic. “No mouth, OK? Please?”
    Daria’s Arabic was limited. But she had three things going for her: the first was that she’d taken an entry-level language course in Arabic when she’d first joined the CIA; the second was that she spoke fluent Farsi, which helped because even though Farsi and Arabic had different roots, Farsi used the Arabic alphabet and had adopted many Arabic words; and the third was that she’d loaded a translation program onto her smartphone.
    “No mouth,” Muhammad agreed, in Arabic.
    Daria felt a little guilty when Muhammad started banging the circular narde pieces on the board, whacking them down as hard as he could. The narde set was one of the few things Mark had salvaged from Azerbaijan. She felt even more guilty when he threw a couple of pieces across the room, but she figured keeping the boy happy was all that mattered for now. Besides, Mark always smacked the pieces down hard on the board when he played. How much more damage could a two-year-old do?
    She sat down cross-legged on the floor, next