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when she laughed—she had an amazingly sexy laugh—her eyes squeezed shut, radiating a skein of premature laughter lines around their corners. A happy woman, then.
    “She’s Lebanese,” Colin muttered.
    “East of Suez, eh? Lucky coincidence, us running into her like this. Why are we lurking in the undergrowth, incidentally?”
    When Colin made no reply Mark looked at his friend in time to see him blushing furiously. “Ah. Not a coincidence.”
    “She comes here sometimes.” Colin’s tone was sulky. “This is the tearoom car park.”
    “Perfect opportunity: no one about, just barge right up to her and—”
    “Some
people can do that,” Colin hissed. “It’s all right for them.” He clicked his teeth and sighed. “Besides, she comes here with friends.”
    “You’ve been watching her, haven’t you?”
    Colin made as if to hurl Mark a defiant look but narrowly failed to follow through.
    “Well, well,
well.
Anyway, Uncle Mark will ride to the rescue. Watch.”
    Before Colin could stop him he had marched forward, almost to the edge of the copse, when suddenly he came to a dead halt. “Oh, shit.”
    For another car, a black Mercedes-Benz, had silently driven up to the X-shaped barrier and someone was getting out to clear it aside: an Arab-looking man in his thirties, with a square head and thick black wavy hair and something about the hang of his suit to suggest he wasn’t comfortable in it. He pushed the logs away and waved the driver through before replacing them. As he straightened up, his right hand went to the waistband of his trousers, and for an instant the two young men watching from the cover of the trees shared a perception that each was unwilling to articulate for fear of being thought stupid: This Arab packed a gun.
    Without taking his eyes off the scene unfolding in front of them, Colin laid a hand on Mark’s chest and pushed him farther into the protective shadow of the copse. From the instinctive way in which Mark followed his lead, Colin guessed that he, too, was frightened.
    The driver of the Mercedes got out, straightening the jacket of a suit that looked identical to his companion’s, seam for seam, tint for tint. He, however, was an altogether leaner specimen; perhaps richer also, for gold glittered across the insteps of his black leather shoes, on several fingers, even in the smile he flashed at Leila Hanif as he went to kiss her on both cheeks, holding her at arm’s length like a long-lost prodigal daughter.
    The second Arab did not greet the girl. Instead, he donned a pair of dark glasses and began a survey of the rustic parking area. Colin and Mark retreated a few steps farther, although they knew that from the glade they must already be invisible. The second man kept adjusting the lapels of his suit while he wiggled his shoulders. Nervous, uncomfortable, armed: the composite impression forced itself on Colin like a physical assault, lashing his heartbeat up off the scale.
    The driver and the girl talked in low voices. At first the man continued to hold Leila as if she were a close friend. But then he began to draw her in to himself, and she resisted; not powerfully, not with violence, but with a tension that found expression in the rigidity of her shoulders. Suddenly her hands flew up, destroying his grip. The man stepped backward and surveyed her for a moment without ever dropping his golden smile. He spoke a few words; to judge from the look on his face, words of great tenderness and affection.
    He struck her on the side of the face, once.
    She staggered, recovered; for a moment she merely held a hand to the site of the blow, as if in stunned disbelief. Then she raised her own hand to retaliate. But the man was quicker, moving to one side and capturing both her hands in his own. He shouted some words while holding his face very close to hers. Then he transferred both her wrists to his left hand, and Colin knew he did that because he meant to hit her again.
    “I thought I’d