The Warlord's Son Read Online Free

new talk show. Skelly had never beheld so much prosperity, yet to a man his neighbors complained about money, and their lack of it, or of the faceless bureaucrats who were supposedly “on their backs,” trying to take it all away.
    Then, on a sunny September morning, the dirtier, hungrier world that Skelly knew better shouldered its way back into the public’s view. He was at the Warren Mall doing man-in-the-street interviews about shark phobia when the first jet crashed, and then the second. He watched the twin towers crumble on a TV screen at Radio Shack, staring in rapt disbelief while young clerks from the food court sobbed on either side, his sense of dislocation growing by the minute. An hour later he returned to the office to find that his skills were suddenly back in demand.
    “Help us understand them,” his editors pleaded. “Why do they hate us?”
    So he got a visa, went to a doctor for a few shots, and hopped on a plane. And, barely a month later, here he was—Stanford J. Kelly, if you’re wondering about bylines, a.k.a. Stan Kelly, a.k.a. Skelly to just about everyone in the business except the new foreign editor, who insisted on calling him Stan. He was back in the game in yet another location, parachuted from the heavens after scarcely as much preparation as you might make for a weekend at the beach.
    Still blinking against the glare, he felt rusty and uncertain. And he was downright ashamed of having made a blunder as egregious as hiring the wrong fixer. Because if war journalism in a foreign land is a sort of glorified tourism—overland adventure holiday, as the Brits might say, combined with geopolitical peep show—then the fixer is both travel agent and tout, one part hustler and another part sage. They are the first line of defense against cheaters and ne’er-do-wells, and the best-known weapon (apart from Marlboros and American dollars) against obstructive officials and checkpoint trolls. The best ones know who to talk to and where to find them, and can decipher the Sanskrit of local politics and all its petty grudges. But mostly what a fixer does is keep you alive and functioning, right down to knowing where to buy phone adapter plugs, the cheapest rugs and the cleanest food.
    Skelly had already made up his mind to undo the damage of his current choice as quickly as possible. He would pay off Babar and head back to the hotel, and at four he’d keep the tentative appointment that a colleague had made for him with a fixer who came highly recommended. Najeeb something or other. Perfect English, supposedly, and his Pashto was as good as his Urdu. He even had a dash of Western sophistication in the bargain, it was said. He was pricey—Babar, at least, came cheap at sixty dollars per day—but a good fixer was worth every penny. Let the bean counters worry about the money. This was no place to cut corners.
    For the moment, his more pressing worry was getting out of the demonstration alive. He grabbed hold of Babar, who, God help him, was following in the wake of the photographer, angling deeper into the maelstrom.
    “Not there!” Skelly shouted. “This way.”
    Babar turned, following mutely, stunned livestock on a tether, and Skelly shoved him toward an alley that looked reasonably safe, the noise of the crowd ringing in his ears, a buzz of anger and panic that seemed to ionize the dust. Other bodies jostled his, warm and damp against his shirtfront. People always smelled different in other countries, and their scent now was close and unmistakable. Not unpleasant, just different, a bouquet of sweat, spice and sandalwood that from now on would always remind him of this moment, this street. The wooden stock of a policeman’s carbine bumped his hip bone. Babar’s pale clothing loomed just ahead, flowing like something out of the
Arabian
Nights.
    “Come on,” he shouted, as Babar again threatened to veer astray.
    “But my cousin’s car, it is this way.” Wild-eyed now, in need of a