Quetta was the hardest place to work in Pakistan, a city of shadows and secrets that yielded easily to nobody. Militants skulked in its streets, plotting their next atrocity. Drug kingpins lorded it up in glitzy mansions while heroin addicts squatted in a storm drain that snaked through the city centre. A heavy military presence overlaid everything. Foreigners were discouraged from visiting Quetta, and those who made it were generally presumed to be spies.
