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“What do you mean by smart?” he asked.

“You know. Smart. Quick. Clever.”

“Oh, clever.” He nodded, thought for a second. “But you do not want cunning. You definitely do not want a cunning friend.”

He looked out the window. It seemed to me that he was thinking of Bhutto’s widower, Zardari, his onetime ally and now rival, a man universally considered cunning at business who many felt had outsmarted Sharif in their recent political tango.

“No. Who wants cunning?”

“Anything else?” he asked. “What about his appearance?”

“I don’t really care. Not fat. Athletic.”

We shook hands, and I left. In all my strange interviews with Sharif, that definitely was the strangest.

Pakistan’s spies soon seemed to kick up their interest in me, maybe because I had written a few controversial stories, maybe because of Sharif. Sitting in my living room, I complained to several friends about a man named Qazi, a former army colonel who worked as part of intelligence over foreigners.

“Qazi,” I said. “That guy. He always calls me and asks me what I’m doing.”

My friend’s phone started ringing. He looked at the screen, then at us.

“It’s Qazi,” he said. “I’m not answering it.”

Then my phone started ringing. Qazi. I felt I had no choice.

“Hey, Qazi.”

“Hello, Kim, how are you, how is everything, your house?”

“Fine. I’m kind of busy.” I rolled my eyes, looked at my friends.

“So did you like Taxila?”

“What?” A friend had recently driven me through Taxila, a town near Islamabad where I had bought a plaster-of-paris disco ball and a five-foot-tall mirrored plaster-of-paris flower vase. But how could Qazi know this?

“Did you like the shopping there?”

My tone grew sharp. “How do you know I was there?”

He started laughing. “Oh, you’d be surprised what I know. I have eyes everywhere.”

“OK, then. I gotta go.” I hung up.

That was creepy, but I didn’t have time to think about it. Zardari was soon elected president, ending his quest for the power that he had repeatedly claimed not to want. As one of his first official moves as president, Zardari would travel to New York and call vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin “gorgeous” and threaten to hug her. Pakistan: Spreading love and good feelings, around the world.

It would soon be Ramadan, the fasting month that made working in an Islamic country almost unbearable, so I decided to leave for a short reporting trip to India. But I still didn’t have my annual Pakistani visa, despite applying more than a month earlier. My current visa was about to expire. I was stuck. Two days after Zardari’s election, a man rang my doorbell in the late afternoon. He said he was from the Interior Ministry and was following up on my visa application, but he was probably a spook. He had a slight brown beard and light gray eyes, and was wearing a button-up plaid shirt and gray pants. He looked gray—how appropriate. He called me “lady,” and not in a nice way.

“Lady, give me your CV,” he insisted.

I didn’t have a curriculum vitae or a résumé.

“What’s your name?” I countered.

“Lady, give me your CV. CV,” he repeated.

“What’s your name—are you ISI?” I asked.

“Interior Ministry. Lady, CV,” he demanded.

“Give me your card.”

He ignored me.

“I don’t have a CV.”

“Lady, you have to have a CV.”

It was like a Jerry Lewis skit.

“Calling me lady like that—it’s rude,” I said.

But he was right—I should have a CV. I should have been looking for a job, now that he mentioned it, but instead I was stuck, hoping desperately to hold on to this one. He was growing upset, standing on my front porch. I knew I needed to handle this, or he’d just keep coming back, so I invited him inside my house, and then inside my office. That’s what he wanted—to check out me and my surroundings. Many Pakistanis believed American journalists were actually American spies—a suspicion only bolstered by past claims of American spies to be working as journalists. My spook stared at the difficult-to-obtain maps of the tribal areas pinned to the walls, the map of Afghanistan, and then walked