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listen.
    ‘Got a lot on,’ McManus said tersely, without lifting his head from the papers he was reading.
    ‘OK,’ said Liz. The rebuff couldn’t have been clearer.
    She gave it a week, then tried again, and received the same short shrift. After that, they ignored each other, which made for a certain tension in the office, though nothing like it had been when she first arrived. She went back to spending the evenings boringly alone, now looking forward to the end of her Liverpool posting. She missed McManus – or she missed the man she had thought he was, though it gave her a sliver of comfort to know that that man did not exist.
    When McManus left Liverpool on promotion to Greater Manchester, she barely noticed, so accustomed by then was she to not having him in her life. She was not invited to his leaving do, and he did not even bother to say goodbye. So she could only imagine his reaction when the drug dealer Pears was convicted and given eight years.
    Then one morning she heard Purvis complaining that he’d paid more than he could afford for a second-hand Audi he’d bought from McManus when he’d left for Manchester. Liz’s car was once again in the garage and suddenly she found herself offering to buy the Audi off Purvis for the same price he’d paid McManus. Purvis accepted with alacrity. Since she was never going to see or hear from McManus again, Liz reckoned this would be the legacy of their affair.

Chapter 7
    The sky was black over the mountains as Miles drove his SUV along the sandy road into the countryside. The Trade Minister, Baakrime, had said that he would have something to tell Miles in a week, and the previous day an invitation had arrived at the US Embassy inviting him to lunch at the Minister’s farm in the hills outside Sana’a.
    Miles’s colleagues in Langley were waiting impatiently for the payback on the cash that Baakrime had been given, information they were sure the Minister was holding about the sources of arms that were getting into the hands of jihadis through Yemen.
    But Miles was uncomfortable, nervous about this ­journey away from comparative safety in the bustle of the town. Minister Baakrime had fallen for his recruitment pitch suspiciously quickly, taking the envelope of cash and promising information. But had he really agreed, or was this invitation a trap either to kill Miles or expose him as a foreign spy? He had consulted Langley overnight but they were keen to get the information and prepared to take a risk, so he was instructed to go to the meeting – and wear a tracking device that would be monitored by a drone far overhead. It wouldn’t help if he was killed but might if he was kidnapped – small consolation.
    Miles glanced uneasily at the darkening sky. The climate in Yemen, normally so hot and dry, could produce sudden short but heavy cloudbursts, and it looked as if that was exactly what was on the way.
    Seconds later it arrived. Rain beat thunderously on the top of the car; the wipers sweeping at top speed from side to side of the windscreen had no effect and the glass ran with a stream of water thick with sand raised by the sudden wind and the force of the rain. Miles could see nothing. The fields of arable crops and fruit orchards that bordered the road disappeared from sight and he stopped the car where he was, in the middle of the single-track road, hoping no vehicle was coming the other way. If there was, he wouldn’t see it and it wouldn’t see him until it was upon him.
    He sat sweating with heat and tension until suddenly the rain stopped, the wipers cleared away the sand and he could see the road again. It was more of a small river now and his wheels threw up a fountain of water on each side of the car as he drove slowly on. As the sun came out again, he saw in the distance the red walls of what he took to be his objective, the Minister’s farm.
    The carved wooden gates of the compound were open as Miles drove up. A young man in a white robe and a