Had anyone on the island decided to take their cut, the job could never have been done. Only no one did, because even the fascists understood that saving Pasquali's chapel was more important than a new fridge, money under the mattress or a stove that lit itself.

This was, of course, a time when cash regularly went missing, ministers turned up in the boots of cars, bankers miraculously tied themselves up and then jumped off bridges and newly elected but unpopular popes suddenly woke up dead. It was a time of exploding railway stations, murdered magistrates and hijacked trains.

Un momento di corruzione.

Italy was different now, respectable again. It was the front line against clandestini, a bastion of Catholic light facing a sea of darkness. Italians knew this, they'd had a prime minister who kept telling them so. Of course, the fact he owned most of the country's TV stations made this easier than it might otherwise have been.

Situated just outside an Area Riserva Naturale which protected a large and rocky swathe of Lampedusa's southern coast from tourist development, Hotel Vallone had its own glass-sided funicular that ran down to a private beach where turtles sometimes stumbled ashore and guests could bathe naked, secure in their exclusivity.

The guests were gone and the funicular was out of commission. It had taken all the manager's tact to persuade a large and seemingly intransigent marine sergeant that he didn't want to wrap plastic explosive around a high-tension wire and cut the lift free, this being what Master Sergeant Saez had been in the process of doing when the manager arrived.

Now the manager was holed up in someone else's hotel, drinking Peroni from the minibar and watching stripping housewives on RTI. He felt safer that way.

Hollow clay blocks lay between upturned T-joists. Of the six surfaces in the weights room the ceiling should have been the most promising and would have been if only marines hadn't been using the room above.

The sound of heavy footsteps overhead had given Prisoner Zero that information.

Without a watch, Prisoner Zero had been reduced to judging time by changes in the slit just about visible under the weights room door. If he was right, the time was somewhere after midnight and before first dawn.

"Now," said the darkness.

Hunting down something sharp took time, so the darkness suggested Prisoner Zero shut his eyes and run his fingers over each side of the cage in turn. Which the prisoner did, plucking silent notes from plastic-coated mesh in his search for a way out.

When this failed, Prisoner Zero swept his hands under the bed and up the corners of his cage, where the sheets of mesh had been soldered together.

Above the lintel of the hatch Prisoner Zero found a vee of mesh not properly welded to the frame and began to twist, counting elephants until he reached forty-nine and the wire came free in his hand, so hot at the fracture point that Prisoner Zero heard his fingers hiss as they touched the break.

Whoever had originally tiled the weights room had smeared a sand and cement mix across the entire floor and then scraped it clean with a plastic blade. And they'd lacked enough cement to get a good mix because most of what Prisoner Zero cut from between his practice tile beneath the mesh was sand, the kind which hadn't been washed before bagging.

He was humming to himself as he worked, a song he hadn't thought of in years; three lines from the three-chord wonder which was "Lost in Mythik Amerika." The three lines leading up to the bridge...

I was watching you smile and seeing you cry,

Lost in Mythik Amerika,

Lost in the lie.

Even after he cut the grouting from around a tile, the wire mesh on which he knelt would prevent him from being able to lift the thing. Prisoner Zero knew this and would wait for the darkness to tell him how to cut his way through the wire.

Two of the half-dozen interchangeable marines woke him at dawn and fed him and told him how many days until he died, which was ten. The Sergeant who'd first punched him was missing or at least busy with other duties, although his absence made little difference.

They still spat in his food, kicked over his slop bucket and did the things all guards had done for centuries and would do for centuries still. And when he was fed and his bucket was righted and the floor wiped clean, the marines unlocked his cage and took him to see Miles Alsdorf, one at each arm.

At the door of the weights room they were met by Sergeant Saez and the small black woman with the scowl. The two with their thumbs dug into Prisoner Zero's upper arms carried Colt 1911s holstered at their sides, as did Specialist Stone, who led the way. Only the Sergeant carried a rifle, its muzzle grinding into Prisoner Zero's neck at the point where his skull met vertebrae.

It was seven paces from his cage to the weights room door, fifty-four paces from the weights room to the door of the health club where his lawyer had been given a room as his office. Fifty-four paces, plus one right turn and then a left.

Originally given over to colonics, Miles Alsdorf's room had been cleared of couches, water tanks and tubes and furnished with a cheap desk and two simple chairs. Iron bars had been set crudely into its only window. One window and one door, the rooms on either side occupied by marines. Prisoner Zero was beginning to see a pattern.

"You're late," Miles Alsdorf said, but his words were aimed at Specialist Stone.

The marine shrugged. Her mother had scrubbed floors for a man like him. So far as she was concerned, Miles Alsdorf could whinge all he wanted, she answered only to those directly above.

After shackling the prisoner's feet together, the marines stood back. "We'll be outside the door," said Master Sergeant Saez, managing to make it sound like a threat.

"Whatever," Miles Alsdorf said.

The door closed with a bang and the lock was turned noisily.

"We need to talk," said the lawyer. "And talk now."

As ever, Prisoner Zero said nothing.

Sipping from a plastic cup, Miles Alsdorf dragged one hand across his immaculately cut hair and dried his fingers discreetly on the leg of a Brooks Brothers summer-weight suit. "You've got ten days," he said. "And that's it... Always assuming you're not going for some dramatic last-second reprieve?"

Again, that blankness.

Miles Alsdorf sighed. "I really do suggest you sign this," he said.

It was a power of attorney and under it rested a second piece of paper, actually two pieces. "And this is our request for a retrial," Miles Alsdorf added. "A civilian trial, you understand? A proper trial." He pulled a pen from his pocket. "All I need," he said, "is your signature."

Taking the platinum Montblanc from Miles Alsdorf's hand, Prisoner Zero unscrewed its top and carefully began to stab his wrist, keeping his back to the lawyer after Miles Alsdorf lunged to retrieve his pen. After the seventh dot, Prisoner Zero stabbed a double to mark the door, then methodically stabbed himself another fifty-four times.

Only then did he return the pen.

"The easiest way to get rid of me," said Katie Petrov, "is to talk to Mr. Alsdorf, your lawyer." She smiled, as if the comment was funny.

Raw scabs ran the length of Prisoner Zero's lower arm. Either an indication of self-hatred, in which case he should be on suicide watch, or a crude attempt, according to Miles Alsdorf, to give himself a prison tattoo.

The lawyer was relying on her to tell him which.

Katie Petrov sighed. Nodding to a bowl of pastries on her desk, she indicated that he should take a piece and tried not to worry when she got no response at all.