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    Thelonius looked at his hands, so as to avoid looking at the milk carton. Then he didn’t want to look at his hands. So he looked at the floor.
    Well. Maybe it would stop that shaking. If he just stopped and looked at it. Like what that wacko back in the Republic promised.
    No, kid. Eyes front. That’s an order. Stick with Sarge.
    Well. Suppose he just tried it. Once. To see whether that would do anything to slow down that freakish rattling noise.
    No.
    Well. He had to do something. The noise hurt his knee now. It was spreading through his body. Why not look? What was the harm in looking?
    Just no.
    The ache broadened. He grabbed his knee. As he did so, he looked at the milk carton. He didn’t know whether he meant to look or not.
    The noise stopped. The milk carton calmed itself to stillness.
    There, on the panel of the plastic jug facing him: a still colour photograph. It was clear, remarkably high in resolution. It showed his peach-and-black bathrobed wife Becky, in their kitchen.
    Becky wearing that robe. Becky in that kitchen. Becky having a conversation on that landline, its actual cord leading to Becky, stretching and bobbing as she spoke. In the photo: Becky’s pale, delicate profile and long, bare neck, exposed. Becky’s massive wave of deep-red hair, slung motionless over one angled, robed shoulder.
    The picture on the carton had to have been taken within the last minute or so. It stopped his breath.
    Look away, kid. Machine.
    Thelonius did not look away, though. He waited for the photo to vanish, as certain elements of dreams vanish upon inspection. It refused. He felt a dark tightening and buzzing in his chest.
    Thud. Then a smaller thud. What the hell?
    Of course: the sound of Becky bumping into something, then recovering.
    Her field of vision was receding.
    When Thelonius looked toward the direction of the noise, he heard the carton begin rattling again. In the kitchen, he saw only that taut, white, trembling phone cord, parallel to the floor. Becky stood, certainly, on the other end of it. She had in fact been wearing that very black-and-peach patterned satin bathrobe, his gift to her on her most recent birthday. Thelonius had seen it flash as she spun past him to answer the kitchen phone. Now he could only hear her.
    He looked back at the carton. The shivering stopped.
    The photographic image of Becky was so clear, so impossible to refute, that it made his mouth go dry. The plastic jug showed Thelonius his own kitchen in high definition, and Becky’s profile playing soft in its shadow against the green, butterfly pattern of the wallpaper, and Becky within it, on the phone, her eyes narrowed in concentration.
    ‘You can count on him,’ Thelonius heard his wife say from the next room. ‘We all know how much the banquet means.’
    Above the photograph was a headline: LOST WOMAN.
    xiii. LOST WOMAN
    Whatever. These crude personal attacks – many more follow – constitute a special category of strategic misdirection, a tactic in which Liddell specialized. We politely decline the invitation to hurl ourselves down such rabbit holes. Every war is a puzzle, an unbroken code, a kind of chaos waiting to be put in order, and this war more than most. In warfare, my distracted colleagues, victory does not come on the battlefield. Not victory that matters, anyway. Real victory comes to the side that creates and sustains the most persuasive solution to the puzzle. I raise a glass of wine. A toast. To victory.

5 In Which the American Embassy Is Very Nearly Stormed by a Mob of Terrorists and Terrorist Sympathizers
    The dead guy writing this story ponders the timeline and concludes that two long, busy days after the passing of her sister Wafa and her unborn, unnamed niece, Fatima attended a big protest at the U.S. Embassy in Islamic City, one she had helped to organize.
    Islamic City was, and may still be, the capital of the Islamic Republic.
    This protest took shape quickly. It had been arranged in less than