Jihadi by Yusuf Toropov

Bush, by the way, will be re-elected. That’s meant to be, too.’
    ‘How do you know so much about what’s meant to be?’
    ‘It’s our job,’ she said, ‘to know what happens next.’
    He rushed things. She slept with him quite early on, and against her better judgement, she said, but only after assuring him that the next person she went to bed with would, according to her own personal sense of destiny, become her husband. He nodded. But he was not sure what it meant to agree to such a thing.
    Nowadays, Becky does not believe in destiny.

    All the years they were together, Becky never formally diagnosed Thelonius – no one ever did – and she never wrote any prescriptions for him, either. But she had fallen in love with him during Career Day. That was the problem.
    As a result, she pulled strings for him within the Company, got him on the fast track he craved, helped him to talk things through, usually in bed. She pointed him toward the right articles in the right journals. She also begged him to get therapy, and his stubborn refusal to do so drew her closer to him. She knew he needed help. Needed taking care of.

    Nine months into the relationship, six months into his career at the Directorate, he went silent for three brutal days of what was supposed to be their vacation, refusing to speak to her, or look at her, or touch her, sleeping in a separate room of the cottage they’d rented on the Cape. He locked her out of his room and played her mix tapes at top volume.
    When he finally emerged, on the morning of the fourth day, he begged her to forgive him for the terrible things he’d said behind the door. She hadn’t heard any of them, whatever they were, and she wondered whether he had said anything terrible at all. Regardless, he obviously regretted something . So she forgave him.
    She was always forgiving Thelonius.
    xxxiii. always forgiving
    Given the element of surprise, I can kill a man with my right thumb. Where the hell is Clive with my dinner?

    The little man seemed to believe Fatima incapable of error. He pronounced her first day excellent, mentioning the excellence of herfirst day at several points during his five-thirty wrap-up meeting with all his subordinates.
    At this meeting, people were supposed to review what they had accomplished over the course of the day. Fatima’s work had involved listening to recordings of conversations that American military and intelligence officials believed to be private, but weren’t. She took typed notes summarizing these conversations, then forwarded the notes to Murad Murad for review. As instructed, she was careful to transcribe with total accuracy any details identifying individuals operating within the American network of informants.
    xxxiv. believed to be private, but weren’t
    I dedicate this note to those – there are some – who doubt my objectivity in analyzing the more sensational aspects of this case. For their benefit, and for our nation’s, I here openly acknowledge that not every line penned in Liddell’s cell is demonstrably lethal to the security interests of this country. I know for a fact, for instance, that this alarming passage of Jihadi has already led to a top-to-bottom review of security protocols within the Islamic Republic and elsewhere. We may thus credit Thelonius, at least in part, with the (wholly unintentional) identification of hundreds of listening devices in dozens of outposts, with a complete overhaul of our security procedures there, and with the formal, confirmed, post-mortem identification of at least one mole under the simultaneous employ of the BII, ourselves, and Al Qaeda. That this identification took place after the mole’s destruction of both himself and much of our embassy is of course regrettable, and I will let the chorus of my detractors complete the lyrics of the rest of that forgettable little 45, which they are sure to do anyway. I have another album I would much rather listen to. It gleams in the player