The day I left Baku for home, this happened. Of course, if you scroll down, you see that I’m already paranoid. But, you know, sometimes life is like an Eric Ambler novel.

So, a mostly Wahhabi Mosque was bombed. Wahhabis, as we all know, tend to be awfully conservative. And the Azerbaijani government (and most of the society) are overwhelmingly secular. It’s a pretty modern country – they make passable wine, truly awful brandy, couples walk around town hand-in-hand; headscarves are rarer there than in London – but they’re also on the doorstep of an unpredictable Islamic neighbor, a neighbor known to meddle a lot in Azerbaijan's internal affairs.

The Azerbaijani government cracks down on any sign of fundamentalism, Wahhabi-style or Iran-style, and in the run-up to October’s presidential elections, maybe that’s what happened here. Some over-zealous government tool tossed a hand-grenade into a Wahhabi mosque, killed a couple of people, and moved on.

Trouble is, what the Azerbaijanis prize more than anything is what governments in tough spots always prize: stability. It’s simply not in their interests to crack down that hard, in that place. I’m not saying they’re incapable of thuggish behavior – the government is very much a break-a-few-eggs organization -- but the longer I was in that region, the more I began to think like a spy novelist. There’s always something going on underneath the thing that’s going on.

Instability in Azerbaijan serves a certain power to the north. Two weeks ago – before the war in South Ossetia erupted -- the rumor in Baku (and in Tibilisi, and in Ankara) was that the Russians were (secretly) behind the Baku-Tibilisi-Ceyhan pipeline blast, even though it was being unofficially attributed to the Kurdish separatist organization, PKK. Today, a friend in Baku emailed me to say, simply, “It was the Russians. They want to screw us before the elections.”

So, a thought experiment. What if a large, powerful state – a state with huge resources, a history of meddling, fomenting instability, supporting terrorism – that has been saddled with a sluggish, backward economic system suddenly casts off that system and becomes, instead, a sort of enormous, powerful, ruthless gangster-state? What would it be capable of? How would we stop it? Could we stop it?

And with that, I’m home. Back in Los Angeles. Back to work: I’ve got 2 scripts to write. Time to sit down and do the thing that brings in the money that pays the Whole Foods bill. No more international intrigue for me. Unless, you know, I get lucky.