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I should have seen it coming. That Farouq, the master operator, would figure out a typical Afghan workaround, a way to get more money out of the Tribune in the last days of a regular paycheck. By my calculations, hiring a driver was now netting Farouq $145 a day, as opposed to the $125 he made when we didn’t have a driver. I tried to look at this from Farouq’s point of view. The driver was driving Farouq’s car, and $5 a day was a lot for most Afghans, most of whom made $1 or $2 a day. And it’s not like he drove much. Essentially, he was being paid to car-sit.

I filed the information away, but considering what was happening with our company, considering how Farouq’s job was under threat, I didn’t confront my old friend about something so comparatively small. I figured everything would work out soon. I just didn’t know how.

CHAPTER 23

EYE OF THE TIGER

I flew to London to meet my brother for Thanksgiving. But just as we stepped out of a cab to meet Sean for dinner, my phone rang. A boss.

“Where are you?” he said.

“London.”

“Damn. That’s right. I’m assuming you know about the Mumbai situation. Any thoughts?”

“What Mumbai situation?”

A situation, as I had learned, was never good.

He sighed. This was the same editor who had years earlier informed me about the tsunami—eleven hours after it hit—because I had taken the day off. He explained something about gunmen storming hotels in Mumbai in a coordinated attack.

“What?”

He told me to check the news and think about getting on a plane. My brother and I walked into a seafood restaurant to meet Sean, the first time I had seen him since our fateful lunch. We hugged, sat down, and ordered a bucket of seafood. I was distracted by Mumbai, and I kept searching the news on my BlackBerry. I knew I should head for the airport. India looked very, very bad. And I could tell who was responsible for it. Someone in Pakistan. Had to be.

But I decided I could wait until after dinner. My brother, a lawyer, asked Sean questions about every second of his kidnapping.

“Is this OK?” I asked Sean.

“It’s fine,” Sean said, and he regaled us with a story told so often it no longer seemed real.

But Sean seemed twitchy and different. He had a ten-o’clock shadow, and he kept leaving the table to smoke outside. He talked about his sons, and how guilty he felt seeing how old his parents looked when he returned from Pakistan. He hadn’t worked much since the kidnapping. He wasn’t sure what he would do in the future. He wanted to be in Mumbai. We finished dinner. My brother and I left.

“Really interesting guy,” my brother said. “I liked him. Pretty damaged, though.”

Indeed, Sean was damaged. I thought about him, and my own life. Since moving overseas, I had seen my brother for only three meals—two dinners and a breakfast. I had missed a family wedding, countless holidays. I had skipped out on helping my mother recover from the death of her husband. I had not been around for my father’s various health problems. Back home, I was the relative no one recognized. And here I was, on my first night of a short visit to my brother, thinking about flying back to Asia. What was I sacrificing everything for? I loved my job, but my job clearly did not love me. The messages from the new overall bosses featured ominous phrases such as “your partner in change” and did not mention foreign coverage. I had never even met the new editor of our newspaper. As the cherry on my sundae of doom, owner Sam Zell had just been interviewed by the editor of Portfolio magazine, in which he again complained about my story on the TV show Afghan Star. He was like my grandmother with my marital status—he wouldn’t let it go. It’s possible he thought I lived in Chicago.

“The entire focus is on becoming an international correspondent,” he complained. “I mean, I know that because our newspaper sent somebody to Kabul to cover the ‘Afghan Idol Show.’ Now, I know Idol is the No. 1 TV program in the world, but do my readers really want a firsthand report on what this broad