The boy blinked away tears and pressed trembling lips together in an effort to maintain the last of his dignity.

"Are you still willing to fight, Yusuf? Will you take God's message to the heathen who would bar it from this land?" the emir asked.

"Yes," he answered in a small, quavering voice. "Always."

"Then God will judge you worthy of his mercy and indulgence in this life and the next," said the emir. "Go now. Get some rest. Spend this night in my own harem and be sure to tell Sheikh Ozal's men everything of what you learned on Ellis and in the territory of the Slavs. It will be useful. It may even be important."

The boy looked as though he wanted to say more, but in the end he simply put aside the small bowl of dates and apricots he held and reached out to kiss the emir's hand.

Bilal Baumer, sometimes known as al Banna and now the putative emir of the promised lands, rubbed Yusuf's filthy, matted hair with obvious affection and shooed the lad away.

Within an hour the story of the emir's generosity and kindness would spread all the way to the front line. Especially the bit about the harem, a small caravan of captured women he saved for just this sort of thing. Although he would never actually partake of them himself-God only knew what sort of filth a ragamuffin like Yusuf was carrying-the idea that he might share his bedroom slaves with the lowest ranks of the fedayeen would add powerfully to his myth.

London The London Cage occupied one part of a former paper-recycling plant on the river at Creekmouth, an industrial suburb east of the city. Caitlin and Dalby set out along the A13 after overnighting at the Ibis Hotel on Commercial Street in Aldgate. More than half the hotels in London had closed over the previous three years, but the Ibis chain had survived by virtue of a contract with the government to provide discounted accommodations to civil servants traveling for work. Caitlin had stayed there before. She'd been too young to work behind the Iron Curtain, but she imagined that the old Soviet-era tourist hotels had probably been something like this. Clean but drab, with at least one "experience" to be savored in every room. A threadbare towel. A half-empty bar fridge. Flickering lightbulbs. Reused soap. And surly, off-putting security staff, a disconcerting number of whom were forbidding bull dykes seemingly recruited from some underground lesbian wrestling league. They prowled the floors constantly. Her first stay at the Aldgate Ibis, one had knocked on her door three times during the night, to "check that everything was in order," leaving her alone only after Caitlin had jammed the muzzle of a Glock 17 in her face and shouted that apart from her not being a morning person, everything was "just fucking fine."

This trip they checked in well after midnight and left just after dawn, with Dalby brushing aside all the usual demands for travel warrants, internal passports, and itineraries with a brusque refusal to cooperate and an imperious flick of his ID badge into the bleary, sleep-deprived face of the night manager, who was still on duty at six in the morning.

"You know, sometimes I think we should be done with it and just get ourselves Gestapo outfits," Caitlin said. "You know, some really spanking long black leather coats and dark fedoras. Then we wouldn't even have to worry about badging people or waving Glocks in their fucking faces. Everybody would just know to fear us."

Dalby gave her a quizzical look as they rode the elevator down to the car park.

"Sometimes with you Americans it is impossible to know whether you are being funny or simply far too enthusiastic."

"Jeez, Dalby, and they reckon we don't get irony."

"Nobody gets irony anymore, Caitlin. We live in a post-ironic world."

She slung her backpack, a small overnight bag really, into the back of Dalby's precious little car and folded herself into the passenger seat. He turned on the radio after doing up his belt, locking the doors, and keying the ignition-the exact same sequence of actions he performed every time they climbed into the compact Mercedes. Caitlin wondered why he didn't just leave the radio on, but she was coming to understand that Mister Dalby was a man of very particular habits. The only music he ever played in the car was a CD compilation of popular classics. And when he wasn't playing that, he would listen to BBC Radio 4, which was what she would have called a news radio channel.

He flicked that on now as Caitlin ran her fingers through still-damp hair, tying it back with an elastic band. She'd had time for a quick shower this morning but not for much else in the way of personal grooming. At least the water had been reasonably hot this time. On her last extended trip to the Cage the hot water in the hotel had been out for two days, and when it did come back on, it smelled strongly of sulfur. Dalby drove out of the car park as Charlotte Green finished a report on trials of GM wheat and soy in Wiltshire.

"We were part of that," said Caitlin. "Bret was supposed to go to a briefing up in Swindon before Richardson's crew tried to hit him."

Dalby turned onto Whitechapel Road before negotiating the turn onto the A13. Traffic was very light as always, just a few commercial vehicles and a bus coming in from the suburbs. It was three minutes before they saw another private car like their own. Most of the shops along the retail strip were still closed, many of them boarded up for good. Here and there, though, she did see a new cafe, and in one case a knitwear store had opened. So perhaps the chancellor of the Exchequer was not talking entirely through his ass when he spoke about a few "promising green shoots" poking through the ashen wasteland of Britain's post-Wave economy. After all, they had been getting increasing orders for Bret's farmhouse goat cheese these past three months, which was very much a luxury item, something he had begun pottering about with, in the English style, after reading an article on Britnet about artisan cheese making.

"Do you enjoy the farm, Caitlin? It's not in your family history, is it? Farming, I mean. You were an air force child as I recall."

She had never told him that, but she wasn't surprised that he knew. As soon as Dalby had been given her case, he would have called for her personnel file and had probably even spoken to her old controller, Wales Larrison, who worked liaison in Vancouver these days. Thinking of Wales gave her an unexpected pang of homesickness.

"My grandparents on Mom's side scratched at the Dust Bowl for a while in Oklahoma," she said. "But not for long. So no, I wouldn't say we were farming folk. But I do enjoy it, Dalby. It's… peaceful, you know. Even getting out of bed at four in the morning to go fist some poor cow in a freezing barn… it's better than being stuck in the cells at fucking Noisy-le-Sec, let me tell you."

"You don't have to tell me," he said without elaborating.

The six o'clock bulletin came on, read by Alan Smith.

"Fighting continues in New York," he announced, "after a failed attempt on the life of President James Kipper yesterday. U.S. forces press on with their counteroffensive to retake the strategic port against heavy resistance. Prime Minister Howard will call the Cabinet Security Committee together this morning to discuss what help might be offered the U.S. administration."

"Do you really think that business was an assassination attempt on Kipper?" Dalby asked as they passed a small convoy of Ministry of Resources vans heading into town. "I mean, it seems a rather ham-fisted way to have at a chap, I would have thought. It's not as though your Mister Kipper doesn't present himself as a tempting target most days of the week, anyway, with this living among the people rubbish of his."