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Kyriazis’s report. Do you remember him? Ever heard his name before?”
    â€œForeigners come and go in Ashaara.”
    â€œHe was here for twenty years. The horizontal lines denote water supply needed to support a population, including household use, industrial uses, and agricultural production. Yes, Ashaara’s at the bottom. He predicted what was coming. Massive drought, drop in groundwater levels, then famine. He laid out how you had to change the way you farmed and how you used water, and advised the president to seek aid to do that.
    â€œInstead, the U.S. and the Russians fed in more weapons, playing you off against the Eritreans. You built a useless concrete industry. Now drought’s hit again, and you don’t know what to do, any of you. What
will
you do? Do you have any idea?”
    But the major’s eyes were riveted where her bush shirt gaped, fixed on the claddagh her husband had given her, long ago. “A strange symbol. Is it Christian?”
    She told him about the Galwayman captured by pirates and sold to an Arab goldsmith, and how when he had been released he’d set up his shopin the oldest fishing village in Ireland. Knowing all the while Assad must have something else in mind. Abdiwali had brought stories from the marketplace about growing clan friction. The president had to go. That was perfectly clear, even if no one said so in her presence, and she knew enough never to comment on how badly he’d indebted and looted this nation.
    Assad nodded, looking around again. “What exactly are you doing in our country, Dr. O’Shea?”
    â€œDo I need to repeat everything I’ve just told you? I investigate ground-water resources.”
    â€œWhat do you do with these resources?”
    â€œPrimarily just now we map them.”
    â€œWhy do you map them?”
    She found this line of questioning both tedious and disturbing. Assad seemed to be probing for some deeper motivation. As if he suspected she was hiding some . . . secret. A drop of sweat rolled down her back.
    Could he know?
    Impossible. Not even at the ministry had she dropped the slightest hint. She held his eyes until they slid aside. He was sweating too.
    Someone fired a shot outside. A flat bark that ebbed away over the desert. “Abdiwali,” she muttered. Bolting to the trailer door, shouldering Assad aside, she threw it open.
    To a blaze of light and heat like the flare of a welding machine. The major’s guards stood a few yards off, aiming at stones piled one atop another. Another shot snapped out. It went wide by five feet, and the men laughed, the shooter too. She squinted around. Her assistant was far off down the road, headed toward the village.
    â€œWhy do you map them?” Assad repeated, behind her. She smelled musky sweat and dust and a distinctive scent. Qat, though he wasn’t chewing it at the moment.
    She lost patience. Would she ever understand this country? “I
map
them because that’s my
job.
What’s yours, Major? Why are you here bothering me? You know I can pick up my cell and call the president’s office, don’t you?”
    â€œOh, you can call. Maybe you can call the president himself, yes? But will anyone answer?”
    â€œWhat do you mean? ‘Will anyone answer’—”
    Assad pushed by before she’d assimilated his sentence. “I apologize for ‘bothering’ you. Perhaps the next time we meet I will convince you of my importance.” He stalked toward his vehicle, shouting at the men, who abandoned their game and ambled to join him.
    . . .
    WHEN he was gone she drank down a cup of water, then another. The plastic gave it a musty taste. She stabbed at the air conditioner, but it was already at max. “Feck,” she muttered. She threw the cup across the trailer, then grabbed her bush hat and stomped out.
    Behind the trailer, at the edge of the gorge. Below her vultures pushed and cawed and