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delicate fingers lifted Caleb's wrist and he examined the plastic bracelet. 'Who is Fawzi al-Ateh?'
    'He was a taxi-driver. He is dead.'
    'You took his name?'
    'I did.'
    'You were brought, with his name, to the American camp at Guantanamo.'
    'Yes.'
    'The interrogators at Guantanamo did not break your story, that you were a taxi-driver?'
    'They did not.'
    'That is remarkable.' His laughter fluttered across Caleb's face. 'So, I consider two possibilities. You defeated the best of the interrogators at Guantanamo. You were released to spy. I hang spies, I am a good friend of those who defeat Americans . . . What I immediately like about you, you do not ask questions without invitation. I invite you.'
    'Why were they killed?'

    The voice hardened. 'They were not killed because they were traffickers in narcotics, criminals, they died because they were witnesses. It is a mark of the importance with which you are regarded that they were condemned - I do not know who you are, why you are so valued. They saw your face.'
    'So did the villagers where I stayed for a week.'
    The cigarette was ground out. The officer put back his head and his breath relaxed. Caleb thought that within minutes he would be asleep . .. He thought of the village and the trust of its men.
    Anonymously, the name of the village would be passed by this officer to American agents, and bombers would circle over it and death would rain down from the high skies - because there they had seen his face. He thought of the blind old man and he prayed to his God that the old man, who had been unable to see his face, would live.
    'Where are we going?'
    The officer murmured, 'You are going where you will be of use, if you are not a spy.'
    'I am a fighter.'
    The Mercedes took him far into Iran, and the night was nearly spent when they reached a high-walled villa where heavy gates of steel sheet opened to take him inside.
    He was a bloodstained step closer to his family.
    Night lay on the far-away desert. The moon was up, pitted with stars' patterns, and the quiet was total.
    Two camels, one ridden by a Bedouin, moved on the desert sand, going fast and away from the escarpment and the cave's mouth. A message had been brought and a reply sent.
    Far at the back of the cave, by candlelight because the generator was switched off at night to conserve fuel, a man worked at the interior of a new Samsonite suitcase - described on its sales tag as an Executive Traveller' - that had been purchased seven weeks before at the open market of the Bir Obeid district of San'a, capital city of Yemen; at the frontier roadblocks, the soldiers had laughed raucously when they had found a shiny new suitcase being taken home by a vagrant tribesman from the desert and had let him pass and head away into the Rub' al Khali. The man working on the suitcase, positioning the circuitboard behind the case's lining, ignored the quiet conversations around him. He had the knowledge gained from a university degree in electronic engineering in Prague.
    His eyes ached in the dim interior. He knew nothing of where the suitcase would be taken when his work was finished, but he had been told by the Emir General, who coughed near to him because his chest was inflamed, that the man who would carry the suitcase had begun his journey to reach them. He had also been told that the hazards of that journey, which still lay in front of that man, were huge.
    But time was short - all in the cave knew it. They were hunted, they were in retreat. Time ran like sand through their fingers.
    'Hello - I'm told you're Dr Bartholomew. Is that right?'
    He was standing at the edge of the room, more of a voyeur at the party than a participator. He had not noticed her approach. He seldom joined the spirit of a party, preferring to remain at the edge, listening to conversations but not contributing to them. His glass was close to his hand but set down on a set of bookshelves. He had slopped the Saudi champagne when his arm had been jogged,