"What does all this mean?"
"I wouldn't look for meaning, James."
"They found a man whose initials matched the first letter of each word in a particular place-name. They either led him to this place or waited for him to wander there on his own. Then they killed him."
"Yes. This seems to be what happened."
"Why?"
"The letters matched."
"That's no answer."
"I wouldn't look for answers," he said.
"What would you look for, Owen? You said once you were trying to understand how their minds work. Pattern, order, some sort of unifying light. Is that what we're supposed to come away with?"
He stared up at the unused loft, still tipped in his chair, holding the whiskey glass against his chest.
"What about the other island?" I said. "and there was the woman in Wadi Rum."
"I don't know the details of these crimes. Hammers. This is all I know."
"There was a murder in a Christian village in Syria. Some men lived in caves nearby. One of them tried to speak Aramaic. The initials of the victim were cut into the knife they used to slash him to death. Do you know anything about this?"
"I don't know the victim's name but I think I can tell you that his first and last names begin with the same letter, and it was an M."