The deputy minister read the name of the protocol aloud as if it were a promise, and Captain Qureshi wrote it in his notebook: Beta-Seven.
He sat at the far end of the long table, the bureau's man, there to say whether any of this was a crime. It was the ninth day. The air conditioning dripped into a plastic bin in the corner, and a clerk changed the bin every hour without being asked. Behind the deputy minister nobody had wiped Monday's whiteboard: road deaths for the week, and under them in the same blue marker, heat deaths, the larger number. Beta-Seven had been written after one pandemic and patched after another. It assumed a pathogen, a test, a contact list and roads that could be closed. Isolate the sick, trace their families, and the curve bends.
Nobody at the table believed it fitted. They used it because nothing else in the ministry's binders fitted better.
It failed inside eighteen hours. The isolation wards had filtered air, double doors and steel windows, and every inch of them assumed the patient would stay where he was put. On the third floor of one hospital a man was in his room at four and in the corridor at five past, and the door between was locked and no one had opened it. On the seventh floor of another, a small elderly woman climbed the wall of her room and stood on the ceiling for about a minute, looking down at the nurse, before she came down the same way.
The third report was why the bureau got the file. In the west of the city a patient had sat in one chair from ten until three without food, water or movement. At three he spoke in a voice his wife said was not his and gave the full names and home addresses of the three nurses who had looked after him. None of them had told him where they lived.
Qureshi went to the ward that evening. The youngest nurse was about twenty-four. She had moved her mother and sisters to an aunt's house that afternoon, and she still had her bag on her shoulder, as if she might need to run.
"He said the colour of our gate," she told him. "We painted it last week. Green. My sister chose it."
He asked whether the patient had said anything else.
"He said he would visit." She shifted the bag strap on her shoulder. "Sir, is that a crime yet? Saying it?"
"Not yet."
"Then what are you for?"
He wrote her aunt's address in his notebook under Beta-Seven and told her to call the bureau, his own line, if anyone came to the gate. It was all he had to give her.
On the eleventh day a constable in the eastern division went to a domestic call. A husband was acting strangely. The constable gave his name, reached for the man, and the man, who weighed about sixty kilograms, took him by the wrist.
Qureshi read the report the next morning and drove out, because it was not written the way constables write. The man had twenty years on the street. He sat in the station canteen with plaster to the elbow and turned his tea glass with his good hand.
"Four of us to get his fingers off me, sir. Four. I've held men on every drug there is. That wasn't a grip. It was like getting your arm shut in a door, and the door was smiling."
Broken in two places. On the canteen board behind him hung the week's guidance from headquarters, pinned over the last week's, which was pinned over the week before. Qureshi read the layers like rock. Standard restraint. Then: do not approach without backup. Then: keep your distance. The newest sheet, still crisp, said to identify the affected person, call medical support, hold a perimeter and wait for the episode to pass.
Some passed. A share of the afflicted came back to themselves on a timetable, after six hours or a day, as if someone had told the thing inside when to leave. Others did not come back.
On his way out he drove past the city's main psychiatric hospital. Tents stood in its courtyard, white ones from the flood relief store, with numbers stencilled on the flaps. A ward built for seventy was holding close to three hundred. Through the open side of one tent he saw a young man lying very straight in canvas restraints, singing in a language Qureshi could not place, and an orderly sitting beside him with his hands over his ears.
He kept three memos in the back of his notebook, from three countries. One called it "acute neurobehavioural dysregulation with anomalous physical sequelae." One suspected "an unknown neurotoxic agent, possibly engineered." The third settled on "a mass psychological event compounded by environmental co-factors."
Clever people had written them. None of their words reached a woman on a ceiling or a gate painted green last week.
Facing them, on a page of its own, he kept Ahmed's account in Ahmed's own careful words: old rules among the jinn, a wronged party, enforcement by parties outside any jurisdiction, and a second hand filling ordinary houses. He had never read that page aloud in a ministry.
Twice that week he drove to Ahmed's office after dark. The reciter's desk was covered in ledgers, and there was a map with numbers pencilled beside cities, which Ahmed turned face down when he came in and then, after a moment, turned back up.
"How many in Karachi?" Qureshi asked.
"I know mine. I know my colleagues'. Nobody knows Karachi."
"Who's doing it?"
"I don't know yet." Ahmed rubbed his left wrist as if it hurt. "I'll tell you the day I do."
"And my twenty-three?"
"Your twenty-three did the kind of work that makes my work." Ahmed looked at the folder on Qureshi's knee and did not reach for it. "Someone is closing their accounts, Captain. I don't grieve them. I'd like to know who keeps the books."
On the fourteenth day the capitals started talking to each other. The cables all said one thing in different accents: everywhere, the same pace, no cause. A working group met under a multilateral health body, epidemiologists and neurologists and psychiatrists, and, at the request of a delegate from a small country, two theologians, "to acknowledge the cultural dimension." The theologians said the event might not be what the room believed it was. The room was polite to them.
The preliminary report reached Qureshi on the eighteenth day. Forty pages. At the bottom of page twenty-three, in type smaller than the page numbers, a footnote recorded that two participants dissented from the consensus framing. It did not say why.
He read it three times, then copied it into his notebook at the foot of Ahmed's page.
On the nineteenth day the children's hospital sent him a photograph.
A girl of eight under observation had found a red marker in her bedside drawer and drawn on the wall by her bed. She had worked slowly, the night nurse wrote, the way a child copies letters, with her tongue between her teeth, and she had screamed when they tried to take the marker. Nobody on the ward knew the shape. They sent it to a university and to the bureau, because the bureau had asked for anything strange.
A circle inside a circle. A band of tiny marks ran between the rings. Three points sat at even spaces on the inner one.
Qureshi took the folder of the twenty-three dead practitioners out of his drawer and went through the scene photographs until he found it. A back room in an ordinary house on an ordinary street, where a man had been found in his own armchair with his coffee still warm. The photographer had stood on a stepladder to shoot the floor. Set into the boards was a circle inside a circle, a band of small marks between them, and three brass points on the inner ring.
He laid the photographs side by side. He put his finger on the girl's first point and then on the dead man's. Same place. He tried the second and the third.
The man had died six weeks before the girl was admitted. She lived on the other side of the city. Nothing in either file joined them.
It was twenty past midnight. He dialled Ahmed's office anyway.
Ahmed answered on the first ring. He sounded wide awake.
"Reciter," Qureshi said. "Do your jinn draw?"