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males or something?’
    ‘No one here is allowed to see me.’ That voice—so cold. She might have been a priestess invoking a ritual sacrifice. Then she shrugged, practical. ‘It’s not a religious thing. We’re Muslims, but we’re not in the Middle Ages. It’s a security measure. The men in this cell have never seen my face. That way, even if they’re caught, there’s no way they can identify me.’
    Ah. No wonder they were scared to death of her.
    She watched me. ‘We’ve decided what to do with you.’
    ‘Who has?’
    ‘Me. And my superiors.’
    ‘So you’re not the boss of all this?’
    ‘Oh no.’ Once more, it sounded like she was smiling. And you know, people have got it wrong. A burqa doesn’t stop a man lusting after a woman, if that’s what the burqa is supposedto do. No—instead it drives a man mad wondering what the hell is under there, so after a while you’re just
itching
to yank the damn thing off and see. But maybe that was the whole idea. Maybe we didn’t understand the Muslim world at all. Maybe it was all about sex for them too.
    ‘No,’ she repeated, as I imagined lips as white and severe as her eyes, ‘I have people above me.’
    ‘And who are they?’
    ‘I couldn’t tell you their names, even if I wanted to. But they’re rather concerned about your capture. It wasn’t planned, as I said. And they don’t like things that aren’t planned. Especially now. These are very delicate times.’
    ‘Why delicate?’
    She didn’t answer.
    ‘Did you guys really nuke Canberra?’
    ‘You don’t believe me?’
    ‘It’s kinda hard.’
    ‘Why? It happened. Someone did it. Why not us?’
    ‘Where the hell did you get the bomb from?’
    ‘Somewhere. A place we can get more, if we want.’
    ‘And how did you get it into the country?’
    ‘In a shipping container.’
    ‘Bullshit. They have detectors for that sort of thing. They have screenings.’
    ‘No one screened this container. From there it was put into a van and driven to Canberra. It was hidden in a house.’
    ‘That’s way too simple. It couldn’t have worked.’
    ‘Obviously it did.’
    ‘Why give the three-day warning then? Your sort have never cared about killing people before. You didn’t even make any ransom demands. So why risk it being discovered in those three days? Why not just detonate it?’
    For the first time since meeting her, I saw the certainty in her eyes go cloudy, the blue fading out of focus. ‘That wasn’t my decision.’
    ‘So you
wanted
to kill three hundred thousand people?’
    No response.
    And it suddenly struck me that her willingness to tell me this—to tell me everything—was a very poor sign indeed for my long-term survival.
    I was all out of conversation. ‘What are you going to do with me?’
    She stood up. ‘We’re taking you for a drive.’ She nodded to one of the men, and he produced a familiar-looking hood, and some ropes.
    A drive? Fuck. I knew what that meant. I should have struggled, I suppose. But there were three of them, and they already didn’t like me much. No doubt they’d have killed me there and then, given any sort of excuse. And maybe a drive didn’t have to mean death. You never knew. I was the Prime Minister’s brother. Surely I had some use to them alive.
    They tied me up and put the hood over my head. Then it was back outside to the van. My senses were heightened now, in the way they are when you think you’re about to die, drinking in every last moment. It was very quiet. No sound of traffic or people nearby, only a bird singing sweetly (at that stage, a crow would have sounded sweet) and, somehow most heart-rendingly of all, the clock of an axe against wood, somewhere far off. And it was hot. I could feel the sun on me, the rain and the cyclone long gone, although there was still the smell of mud about. And damp grass, and gum trees steaming, and old manure. If you want my guess, they’d held me in some sort of farmhouse, one of those little