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“Let’s see if they follow us.”

We pulled out of the parking lot and drove in the direction of my house. A white car followed. Samad turned right. The car followed. Samad turned left. The car followed. These guys were hardly sophisticated. Being followed by the ISI in Pakistan felt like being chased by the Keystone Cops, like the Mad magazine cartoon Spy vs. Spy. I would like to say the song from Mission Impossible played in my head, but it was more like “Mahna Mahna” from The Muppet Show. It certainly didn’t feel serious. After one too many turns, I decided I had enough.

“Pull over,” I told Samad.

We stopped on the side of the road. The white car had no choice but to drive slowly past, the two men inside looking out the window at us. Clever. Samad waited and then dropped me at home.

The next morning he showed up, looking mopey. When I opened the door, he stood in his button-up shirt tucked into his hiked-up jeans, staring at the ground like he wished it would open up and swallow him.

“Problem, Kim.”

“What happened?”

“Last night, the ISI come to my home. Because of car, they know my home. They show up, ask about boss. They say they arrest me if I don’t tell them.”

“So you did, right?”

“So sorry, my sister, I did.”

“It’s OK, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

It’s not like it mattered that much—I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Samad seemed like he felt bad. He seemed like he really considered me his sister. But how could I know for sure? The next Sunday, I needed him to drive me to a meeting. I called, once, twice, three times. But Samad didn’t pick up the phone. I started to panic. Could he have run away with the car, after I loaned him money? Could he betray me? I worried that I was being played. That night, Samad called.

“So sorry, Kim, I go to cousin brother’s home,” he said. “I forget phone.”

I soon flew to Afghanistan for some stories, putting the Pakistan spy intrigue and Samad aside for a while.

But after a few days, another intrigue knocked at the back of my mind. I wondered where Sean was. He was supposed to be back in London by Easter—it was May, long past Easter. I hadn’t heard from Sean in weeks. Farouq hadn’t heard from Sami. And no one had seen Sean since the week after I spoke to him—since he told me about his wacky plan to meet a top insurgent in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

“Oh, you know how Sean is. Disappears for weeks at a time,” a friend said. “Don’t worry.”

“Yeah. I don’t know, I’m worried.”

I called Tom, the British journalist and my former housemate at the Fun House.

“He’s probably fine,” Tom said. “But I haven’t heard from him. He was supposed to check in ten days ago.”

“Ten days ago?”

“I know. I’m going to Jalalabad tomorrow to try to talk to him and track down Sami’s family. I’m also in touch with his driver in Pakistan. But you know how he is, Kim. He’s probably fine.”

We hung up. The next night, I had a nightmare that Sean was kidnapped. I woke up convinced that he would be killed. I called Tom.

“It doesn’t look good,” said Tom, who had driven to the eastern city of Jalalabad near the Pakistan border with his fixer, Tahir, who besides Sami was the only Afghan fixer we knew with serious Taliban contacts. “The driver said he’d meet us. But then he turned off his old phone numbers. Tahir had to make a lot of phone calls but finally got a new number for the driver. He said he’d come up to Jalalabad from Peshawar to meet us. But then he switched off his phone.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” I said.

“No. Tahir is still trying. I’ll let you know.”

Days passed. I worked on a story about pornography and soap operas invading Kabul—something easy and light that I could focus on, although Farouq and I shared the uncomfortable task of looking at various DVDs we had bought, making sure they were porn and trying to see if Afghans were involved. Still, almost seven years since this notion of democracy was thrust into Afghanistan, many Afghans, especially the young ones, saw it as a veneer for “anything goes,” for sex, drugs, and booze, and music about