Prisoner Zero had been tried in his absence. The blond CIA man had been careful to explain that international law allowed this to happen. He'd been tried by a military commission, found guilty and condemned to death, which translated as five thousand milligrams of penthanol, followed by a hundred milligrams of pancuronium bromide.

In handing him over, the Moroccan government was merely meeting its legal obligations. A military commission had tried him because his attack on the President was deemed an act of war. And his confession had been accepted as sufficient proof of guilt.

Prisoner Zero knew this. It had already been explained to him by an official from the Interior Ministry, a fat Souari in a crumpled suit who ended his brief visit by asking if Prisoner Zero wished to appeal directly to the King. (On the birth of his son in 2003, Hassan VI had freed 9,459 prisoners and reduced the sentences of another 38,599.)

Taking Prisoner Zero's silence as a negative, the official breathed a sigh of relief, introduced the man beside him as an American agent and hammered on the door, demanding that the guard outside let him out of the cell. He didn't bother to say goodbye to Agent Bilberg or Charlie's new prisoner.

Only when the official was gone did Charlie Bilberg introduce himself. The suit Charlie wore was charcoal, but cut from summer-weight Italian wool, and his white shirt had single cuffs which displayed enamel Langley cufflinks. He looked, he hoped, as the new breed of CIA operative was meant to look.

"Charles Bilberg," Charlie said, his voice tinged with old Boston. "I'll be going with you to the airfield." If he was surprised that the prisoner he'd come to collect was naked and shackled by a length of chain he didn't let it show.

Staying in the fetid cell long enough to explain to Prisoner Zero that he was about to be moved, such explanations being part of Langley's latest policy, Charlie retreated to the governor's office and suggested Prisoner Zero be hosed down and found an old jellaba, shoes and dark glasses. Only then would he be relieving the governor of his burden.

So now Charlie sat on the rear seat of a battered Peugeot 306, seven cars back from a prison van with blackened windows, while a silent Moroccan police officer hunched behind the petite taxi's steering wheel and cast glances at Prisoner Zero in the driver's mirror.

"It's fine," said Charlie, tugging at the handcuffs which attached the prisoner to his left wrist. "Stop worrying."

Getting this job was a good sign. It showed the Agency had faith in his initiative and work skills. The fact Marrakech was a Berber city and he was the only person in the section to speak rudimentary Chleuh, the side effect of a not-so-long-gone summer spent hiking in the High Atlas, was purely coincidental. Charlie Bilberg knew this, he'd been told so by his section head.

Charlie was hot, the petite taxi lacked anything as sophisticated as air-conditioning, his summer-weight suit was beginning to look as if he'd slept in it and the edginess of the small Moroccan at the wheel was making him nervous. "Look," said Charlie, turning to the prisoner shackled to his wrist. "Maybe we can do a deal."

Since Prisoner Zero had already been condemned to death, this seemed less than likely. Anyway, the prisoner was far too busy concentrating on a Yamaha 125 stalled in the traffic to pay the agent's words much attention.

He'd had a dirt bike very like that when he was a kid. An older model, obviously, but not that much older. It seemed there were still sidewalk mechanics in Avenue Houman el Fetouaki who could machine replacement parts for cars and motorbikes most people in the West had forgotten even existed.

What made this bike interesting was its rider, a boy in a black leather jacket and open-faced Shoei despite the blistering heat and the fact that no one, but no one, in Marrakech ever bothered with helmets or protective clothing.

The Yamaha was a two-stroke, single cylinder. One of those sit-up-and-beg bikes with long forks and all-terrain tyres, its exhaust tucked beneath the saddle. Originally shipped as 125cc, some kid from the tanneries had obviously rebored the pot and stripped off the mudguards.

So now, on a good day, the bike whined like a wounded wasp and spat oily smoke. Unfortunately it also overheated, choked and died on a regular basis. Which was how a suicide bomber with enough ex-Soviet C4 wrapped round his waist to take out an armoured van found himself on the approach to a roundabout, frantically trying to kick start a dead engine as his target drove past, police bikes to the front and rear.

"You listening?" Charlie Bilberg said, glancing at his prisoner. Only Prisoner Zero just kept staring after the rider now disappearing behind them.

"Guess not," said the man.

Up ahead the crawling prison van was being beaten with fists like some recalcitrant donkey. A crowd hammered against its slit windows and twisted at the handles on its rear doors, the noise of their fury lost beneath the frustrated howl of sirens from stalled police bikes and the low thud of a helicopter overhead.

"Aren't your people going to do anything about that?"

Charlie didn't know the name of the driver who glanced back at this question and smiled, but he knew the man's rank and it was high enough to have Charlie worried. Brigadiers made for unusual chauffeurs, even at such unusual times.

"Relax," said the small man. "This is for show only. I have my own men in the crowd."

"Where?" Charlie demanded.

The Brigadier grinned. "Who do you think's hammering on that van?" They were now three cars back from the decoy, which actually translated as them, plus another two completely innocent petite taxis, three donkeys and at least five mopeds, a cheap scooter and three cycles: because that was how most people in this overhot and dusty city seemed to travel, on foot or on two wheels. Charlie Bilberg was still trying to work out if private cars were banned inside the walls of the Medina or if no one could afford them.

All he'd seen were grande taxis, which went everywhere, petite taxis that seemed to be local, small flatbed trucks grafted to scooters and more donkeys and mopeds than he knew existed.

Colonel Borgenicht's plan, created in conjunction with the Brigadier, with Charlie Bilberg assisting, was that the decoy took the flak should there be an angry crowd, while an AH-64 overhead ostensibly kept an eye on the black van but actually protected the petite taxi in which the man was held.

Charlie still found it hard to think of the silent figure shackled to his ankle as Prisoner Zero, although this was how news stations across the world were now referring to him, so Charlie thought of him as "him." The man who slotted a fifty-year-old bullet into a hundred-year-old rifle and tried to put a quarter-ounce of copper-jacked lead through the head of the President of the United States over a distance that even a fully trained sniper would have found near impossible.

There had been incumbents of the White House who Charlie Bilberg could understand complete strangers wanting to kill, some of them quite recent, but Gene Newman was different. For a start, this President was honest, intelligent and able to walk, chew gum and talk foreign policy at the same time.

Add a PhD in physics and an MBA from some fancy economics school in London and three languages, two of them fluent, and the guy was a dream ticket. So why, given that President Newman was currently demanding that Tel Aviv get its tanks off the new Palestinian premier's lawn, should some deadbeat Arab want him dead?