The Warlord's Son Read Online Free PDF

playboy. Sometimes he mused that if he lived in one of the Persian Gulf States he’d still have all of them, each living on her own floor in a house that would have grown higher with every marriage. Might as well do it that way, at the rate he was paying the first two. And Janine was already in a pout over this trip. The thought of their late-arriving son, Brian, was like a stab of guilt in Skelly’s chest, not so much because he missed the boy (after four previous children he’d experienced quite enough of the routines of infancy) but because in Brian he recognized yet another face that would grow disaffected and bored with him, no more interested in Skelly’s strange experiences than he would be in the tax code. Brian, like his predecessors, would grow up affixed to MTV and the Internet, saying “like” and “you know” and doing kick flips on a skate-board before he was old enough to wear a helmet. The Nation of Offspring remained the one country Skelly was reluctant to enter, and he now feared he’d waited too late to request a visa.
    Enough of these thoughts of home. The jet lag must be getting to him. Pay this fellow Babar a crisp fifty, plus a tip for the equally useless cousin. Then grab a cab back to the hotel, and with any luck his fixer problems would soon be solved. But first he’d try the number again.
    He punched it. Waited. Finally it began to ring.
    This fellow Najeeb had better be good.

CHAPTER THREE
    Regional Briefs
    By Najeeb Azam
    TWO KILLED: Two women were killed in a clash between factions of the Hafizi tribe at a village near Khairpur yesterday. The warring groups resorted to free use of clubs and axes. The dead were identified as Ms. Akhtar and Ms. Jatoi. Five unidentified were taken to hospital. According to reports, an old enmity existed between the groups over the theft of a cow last year, a dispute that has claimed several lives. Last Wednesday several armed men from one group attacked a rival village with grenade launchers. Police rushed to the fighting today and controlled the situation, but both groups are said to have taken up positions in the area.
    WEDDING MURDER: A man shot his daughter dead on her wedding day in the village of Karwanzai in the Mohmand Tribal Agency yesterday. According to police, Shahid Khan, whose daughter was to marry his daughter-in-law’s brother, was unhappy with the
wata-sata
arrangement, whereby a brother and sister of one family marry the sister and brother of another. Shahid visited his daughter, Sakeena, on the morning of the wedding, then shot her in the chest and fled. She was rushed to hospital, where she succumbed to her injuries.
    THERE WAS SOMETHING WORRISOME about this fellow Skelly. But what, exactly?
    Najeeb took the man’s measure from across a table at the Pearl Continental, after both men had piled their plates with the bounty of the afternoon buffet. At nine dollars a plate it was criminally expensive, enough to support a family of beggars for weeks. But why complain when someone else was picking up the tab? So Najeeb had attacked the steaming silver vats with relish, ladling out chunks of chicken and lamb, drenched in curries and heavy sauces. He moved on to the sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, mounds of steamed vegetables, and big scoops of yellow rice. Lastly he plucked a few samples from what seemed to be every sort of bread from East and West, making a note to leave room for a visit to the dessert table, where honeyed pastries and frosted cakes sat regally on silver platters, barely touched even at this late hour of the afternoon. He wondered if the staff took home the leftovers.
    “Been doing this long?” Skelly asked, mouth full, eyebrows cocked.
    Presumably he meant interpreting, not freeloading, although there was enough of the rake in his expression to suggest both.
    “A month,” Najeeb said. “Strictly Europeans and Americans so far.” Najeeb spoke as precisely as possible when meeting prospective clients. Journalists were