Abdul-Ghaffar ("Servant of the Forgiver"—she had remembered that much Arabic by this point)—was a blond, blue-eyed American man of perhaps forty-five, though he might have been ten years older than that and in good shape. He had close-cropped hair, was burly but trim, and appeared to work out a lot. A soccer player or a wrestler—a practitioner of some sport, anyway, that didn’t require height, for he was maybe five seven. His native language was of course English, and he followed the others’ conversations even more poorly than Zula, who could catch perhaps a third of what they were saying. The obvious question that was posed by his choice of name—what was he seeking forgiveness for?—would go unanswered for now. But it seemed clear that he had converted to Islam late in life and was eager to make up for lost time. She got a clue when he turned his head to expose a skin graft on the top of his head, about the size of a postage stamp. She had seen similar damage on her fair-skinned, farm-dwelling relatives. He was under treatment for malignant melanoma, and he probably had less than a year to live. Until she’d seen that, she’d wondered why a man like Jones would look upon this all-American newbie as anything other than an FBI plant.