The three jihadists made for quite a study. Two of them, Mahir and Sharif, were native Arabic speakers who, she collected, had gravitated from their home countries (Mahir looked pure Middle Eastern, Sharif had a bit of a North African look about him) to Afghanistan where they had become part of Jones’s organization. The third, Ershut, was some kind of Central Asian who seemed to speak limited Arabic. Ershut was not tall, but he was stocky and powerful and tended to get saddled with grunt work, which he always seemed to accept as his lot in life. It was he who had loaded much of the heavy gear from the fishing vessel onto the smaller boat that they’d taken into Xiamen, and who had loaded it from the boat into the taxi and from the taxi into the plane. He was pious without showing the demented fanaticism of the late Khalid; during one of her lavatory forays on the jet last night, Zula had found him praying in the aisle of the main cabin, having apparently divined the direction to Mecca by looking at the on-screen map displayed on the flat-screen TV. One of his first acts in this place had been to scavenge a carpet scrap from a back room and get it pointed a little bit south of east.