Or she will be in a few minutes, once her long and sumptuous table is set.

If Choudary and his jihadist kin prowl the lowlands, erupting with self-conscious outrage, Bhutto inhabits the mountain peak, the cloud city.

Today she's puttering around the sprawling apartment, receiving visitors in her bare feet. The line is long. That's because it's now common knowledge that Bhutto's moment--her latest moment--has arrived. She is at the center of a peak-to-peak gamble between the United States and the world's most dangerous country, Pakistan--another test of the current reach of American power.

In the spring of 2006, Bhutto's representatives approached the State Department with an idea about Bhutto possibly returning to Pakistan after seven years of self-exile. But it wasn't until widespread demonstrations the following spring, after Musharraf sacked the country's chief justice, that the White house began to seriously entertain Bhutto's proposal as a way to shore up an embattled Musharraf. The Pakistani strongman might be called a single-issue ally. All the United States really cares about is how well he's using his army and intelligence service to police the de facto capital of violent extremism that has emerged along his border. This would include al Qaeda, now fully reconstituted and growing in the federally administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, a historically lawless region in northern Pakistan; and the Taliban, which moves its forces freely across the meaningless mountain borders between Afghanistan and Pakistan and runs its operations from Quetta, a provincial capital in western Pakistan. Among the added layers of complexity is the fact that both groups have long been supported--were even assisted in their founding--by Islamists inside the same Pakistani military and intelligence services called upon now to lead the counterterrorism fight. . . .

Into this walks Bhutto--as complex a character as any on the world stage--who had her first formal meeting with Musharraf a few months back, in January in the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi. Musharraf was surprisingly friendly, Bhutto later recalled, and they talked through a long list of terms. each knew the landscape well. Bhutto had twice been prime minister--not particularly effective either time--and both were clear on the idea that Musharraf would focus on directing the military and intelligence services in ways that would make the United States happier, while Bhutto would deal with long-neglected issues of social, economic, and diplomatic policy--her strong suits. But form, in this case, is tightly tied to substance. Bhutto, who managed from afar to keep her hold on the Pakistan Peoples Party--the party created by her father, and Pakistan's largest--would finally bring the seal of democracy back to her home country. Yes, the democratic ideal was faltering in Iraq, but it would triumph in Pakistan. That would happen, the United States felt, if the country could just ensure a reasonably fair election--all but guaranteeing Bhutto's electoral success--and get her and Musharraf to work out an arrangement for him to take off his uniform and retain the post of president, a kind of chairman of the board in the Pakistani constitutional system. Hence, the plan. Like most plans the United States has recommended, Musharraf seemed committed to carrying it forward when he was good and ready.

But in the late winter of 2007, Pakistan started to explode from within. Musharraf suspended the independent-minded chief justice of the country's Supreme Court, Iftikhar Chaudhry. The judge defied him--traveling the country behind swelling crowds--and soon became a vessel for Pakistan's growing impatience with dictatorship, especially among the country's burgeoning middle and professional classes. Black-suited lawyers, throwing Molotov cocktails at tanks, became the symbol du jour. Then Musharraf, already battered, woke a week ago to the Red Mosque crisis--a sign of things spinning even further out of control.

And the world's eyes, two by two, seemed to turn to Bhutto. . . .

Is she up to it? her most faithful supporters--people who'd walk through fire for her--say maybe. They've seen what can happen when she's in a tight spot and is given a way out, how swiftly, how effortlessly, she can choose expediency over principle.

But after years in exile, living on the ill-gotten millions that she's told friends is the tribute collected, as a matter of course, by leaders in South Asia, she's trying to finally become the woman her father, in his final days, told her she was destined to be.

It's her last shot. . . .