"Man or woman?"

The sergeant was waved into silence by Major Abbas.

"A hippie," said Moz, answering anyway.

Major Abbas sighed. "What's the name of this street?"

"It doesn't have one," said Moz.

The Major nodded. There was nothing unusual about that. A hundred different passages in the Old City made do without names and even the most modern government-produced maps left blank whole areas of the Mellah and much of the inner souk.

"And you," said the policeman, "do you have a name?"

"Al-Turq," Moz said, without thinking.

Major Abbas shrugged, he'd heard stranger. Finishing his mint tea with a single gulp, the Major nodded to the others, half farewell and half to say they could stay where they were. "Show me," he said.

It was sweat and dirt, not heredity, which gave Prisoner Zero's hair its texture. Something the marine specialist cutting it understood because her boyfriend was black, while her Lieutenant and the Pentagon official standing beside him were not.

After three swipes either side, Prisoner Zero was left with a greying Mohican, a fact that raised a half smile so private it never reached his face. And then the Mohican was gone, buzzed away in a clatter of cheap blades. The clippers were local, garishly chromed and came with five attachments, one for each setting. At the moment the blades were naked, resulting in a crop fine enough to draw blood when they caught a mosquito bite on the back of Prisoner Zero's neck.

It was his first morning at Camp Freedom and beyond the Mediterranean headland dawn was transmuting sullen waves to mercury, while a shoal of flying fish turned unseen to slivers of silver. No fishing boats were allowed near the Punta dell'Acqua, and the tiny cove below the headland had been closed with a chain across its entrance, much as might have happened five hundred years earlier.

The mostly German tourists who originally occupied the hotel had been shipped to other resorts on Lampedusa or sent home.

Where once Turkish raiders landed war parties and Sicilian princes banished their enemies the USS Harry S. Truman was now anchored. For the first time in months, pregnant Tunisian clandestini weren't staggering through waves or crawling up narrow beaches, too tired even to beg for asylum. As a local Forza Italia spokesman said, sometimes good came from bad.

"Now the beard."

More clippers, starting on Prisoner Zero's jaw, at a point just below his left ear. Once again the hair came away in coarse strips, greyer than before. The marine wielding the clippers finished the left side and started on the right, leaving the man handcuffed to the chair with a long goatee that was almost a cliché of how a terrorist should look.

Examining her handiwork Marine Stone shrugged, took a fistful of the goatee and switched her clippers back on. The prisoner's face was pale from lack of sunlight and sallow, almost olive. He didn't look like an Arab to her, but what did she know?

She was just there to do what she was told.

Lieutenant Ashcroft and the civilian were arguing security arrangements and it seemed to be the man in the suit who was making most of the complaints, all of them idiotic.

The island of Lampedusa was seven miles long and two miles wide and its nearest land mass was North Africa, a mere seventy-one miles away, whereas Sicily, the island to which Lampedusa belonged in spirit if not geographically, was twice that distance. At its peak, during high summer, nine hundred North African asylum seekers a month washed up on what was Italian soil.

"Body hair," ordered the civilian and Specialist Stone glanced at her lieutenant for confirmation, realizing too late that this was a bad move. "Got a problem with that?" the civilian demanded.

"Yes, sir." Her voice was flat. "I have, sir."

"And your problem is what?"

"He's handcuffed to a chair. And wearing clothes, sir."

They shackled the naked prisoner to a bench in the hotel gym, face up, wrists fixed to the legs at one end and ankles to the legs at the other. "They" being Master Sergeant Saez and the man from the Pentagon. None of the current round of visitors wearing suits and shades had bothered to introduce themselves to Specialist Stone; she was only some lowly peon in marine intelligence.

Maybe it was need to know.

Clicking on her clippers, Specialist Stone took the suit at his word and removed all of Prisoner Zero's body hair, starting with his lower legs. When she got to his genitals she just kept going, moving aside his shrunken prick with casual insouciance before starting on his stomach and then chest, around the nipples and under his arms.

Prisoner Zero stank, there was no doubt about that, the kind of stink she remembered from weekend visits to the Chicago Zoo with her father. Even the suit was close enough to notice it.

"He needs a bath," said the Lieutenant.

"No," the suit said. "What he needs is a shower."

"This is de-licing, right?" the Lieutenant asked, when Master Sergeant Saez had finished hosing Prisoner Zero down with water taken from a fire point.

The suit shook his head.

"Then why shave the body hair?"

"Why?" The suit smiled at Lieutenant Ashcroft as if he were a child and a particularly simple one at that. "I'd have thought that was obvious," he said. "We're making it easier to attach electrodes."

Lieutenant Ashcroft wasn't the only one to hope the man was joking.

The first reference to Lampedusa occurred in a letter from Pope Leon III to Charlemagne, Emperor of the West, informing him of a battle between the Byzantines and an Arab army. In 1436 Alfonso of Aragon presented the island to Giovanni de Caro. In 1661, its owner, Ferdinand Tommasi, received the title of prince from the King of Spain. Seventy-five years later, when the English Earl of Sandwich visited the island, he found only one inhabitant.

None of this the Lieutenant had known the evening before, as he piloted a helicopter across the darkening waters of the Mediterranean, with its cargo of three men in suits, five marines and one manacled prisoner.

He had orders, a flight chart downloaded from the Italians, a map reference and GPS positioning in case he still couldn't find the place. As it was, all he actually needed to do was play spot the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

There'd been a suggestion that the USS Harry S. Truman should be positioned off Lampedusa's south-western tip, between Punta dell' Acqua and the Tunisian coast, but this was felt to be unnecessarily insulting to Tunis, and anyway everyone from the President down knew there was nothing the USS Truman couldn't do equally well from the Sicilian side, thirty miles to the north-east...

"Get to it," the Master Sergeant had told a corporal as Lieutenant Ashcroft released the doors and the corporal had nodded at two marines. Together they'd manoeuvred the blindfolded prisoner into the doorway, down some steps and onto a small patch of withered lawn.

Away to one side, a dozen SLRs whirred and a Fox Network reporter began her spiel to camera. Stating the obvious, as always. No one rushed forward or jostled for position. The rules for journalists had been set out in advance, in triplicate, to be signed by department heads.

They were the chosen, flown by the Pentagon to a tiny island in the Mediterranean owned by Italy. And the Italians had been delighted to loan its western tip to the Pentagon. It said so on the press release.

"Walk," demanded the Master Sergeant and Prisoner Zero did, while two marines on either side gripped his upper arms. The swathe of crepe hiding the man's eyes was held in place by a strip of duct tape that circled his entire skull. Plastic cuffs locked his wrists behind his back and a short length of shackle secured both ankles. His shoes were gone and so was the ring he'd worn on his little finger.