He was on a lookout from under a tree, under whose shelter local villagers had been stopping to rest for three hundred years.  He was alongside a brutalized aid worker whose release he had moments ago negotiated from a militant group.  They were waiting for an embassy car to be permitted to pick them up.  This gave them time to count trees within sight, he saying eight and the aid worker eleven.  They went back and forth, sometimes with a little vehemence, knowing, the both of them, that a death escaped leads one directly back into unremitting life.