The word anarchy featured heavily in the leader column. Questions were apparently being asked in Geneva, forcing Berlin, however reluctantly, to agree with the position of France and America . . . El Iskandryia had become a liability.

City in chaos, he’d read that one already.

Koenig Pasha rushed to New York hospital. . . That was new. Raf skimmed Tuesday’s Times and grinned. So the old man had got himself out of the country, strapped to a stretcher and wired in to more machines than looked strictly necessary. In the picture his eyes were closed, his face even more sepulchral than usual.

Raf wouldn’t put it past the old bastard to have starved himself for a day or two, just to make it look more convincing.

The General’s arrival at Mount Olive Hospital in New York was as low-key as any arrival that was greeted by a hundred chanting, placard-waving protesters could be. An old man, frail as melting snow, in a borrowed wheelchair, being pushed up a ramp by a young staff nurse.

“Is Koenig Pasha really dying?” Hani asked.

Raf shook his head. “Doubt it,” he said. “I doubt if he’s even really ill.”

“A trick,” she said, smiling. Hani could appreciate that.

Wednesday’s New York Times,Le Monde,Frankfurter,El Pais,Herald Tribune. . . Hani had downloaded the lot and the story they told was the same. The General was ill, El Isk was in chaos, no one knew anything significant about the new governor.

There was, Raf was sorry to say, very little significant to know.

“You had a call from Zara,” said Hani. “And from . . . Kamila.”

It took Raf a moment to pull the name from memory. Kamila was the young coroner he’d told not to go ahead until he was there. That was what, four days ago?

Hani caught up with Raf after he’d shaved and dressed and was preparing to go tour the city. Although the words fiddling,Nero and burns came to his mind.

“I need to show you something,” she said.

“Later.”

“No,” Hani insisted. “Now.”

Her fingers grabbed the pocket of his jacket and held fast. One of the guards by the front door looked as if he didn’t know whether to be amused or appalled. A glance at Raf’s face convinced him to be neither.

“What is it?” said Raf with a sigh.

Hani squinted at the guard, then at Raf. “It’s a secret,” she said. “You’d better come with me.” The room she led Raf to smelled of dust and damp, of rotting wall hangings and ancient books going musty on oak shelves. But the data port in the wall by the window was working.

“Should it be able to do this?” asked Raf, watching figures scroll lightning-fast down the screen of a toy computer shaped like a seashell.

Hani shrugged.

“I made some changes,” she said, then went back to her screen. Figure followed figure, ever faster as Hani’s fingers danced over keys, never quite touching.

“Okay,” she said, “here we go.”

They were in Tiny Tina zone, apparently. Occupying an impossibly frilly bedroom constructed from wavy planes and pastel colours. Stuffed toys sat on the fat bed. In one corner of the virtual room sat a pink chest of drawers, decorated with stuck-on pictures of Hani’s cat Ifritah.

Making some kind of pass over her keyboard, Hani popped out one of the drawers and clicked on the emptiness. Instantly the childish bedroom was gone, replaced by thumbnail pix of five wrecked buildings.

“See,” she said, “they’re not random at all.”

Lines radiated from thumbnails to various logos, from those logos to offshore shells, back to different logos. All the lines eventually ended in the same place, with one logo, that of Hamzah Enterprises GmB.

“They’ve all been burned,” said Raf.

“And every burned building belongs to Effendi,” stressed Hani. “All five.” She was grinning at her own cleverness.

That was when Raf realized something. Usually his ideas came fast, pulled from memory in a flurry of facts, with the connections ready-made; but this came slowly, like a fish rising to the bait, and it came not formed but uncertain. Becoming certain only when he thought about it.

Over and over again, Hamzah’s refinery had also been attacked and each time the harm was minimal. Highly visible, usually photogenic, but not even close to serious damage. Someone badly wanted the Midas Refinery kept in the news but not broken.

That ruled out the Sword of God, who abhorred Hamzah’s links with St. Cloud. One of the ironies of the Midas Refinery was that Europe saw St. Cloud as the refinery’s acceptable face, while the fundamentalists regarded him as degenerate. And if SoG weren’t really behind the attacks on the refinery, then Raf found it hard to believe they’d bothered to burn Hamzah’s other buildings.

On the way out of the first-floor room, Hani dragged Raf over to a long, fly-specked looking glass. “Are you meant to be dressed like that?” she asked.

Raf took a look and saw a pale man in a high-necked suit, wearing Armani shades and carrying a silver-topped Malacca cane in one hand. A bit thinner than before he iced himself, but otherwise not that different. Swept-back blond hair, neat beard, high cheekbones, drop-pearl earring. He saw the person he expected to see, people mostly did; until the day they looked in the mirror and saw somebody else.

“You’re dressed like the General,” Hani said patiently.

“That’s the plan,” said Raf. “If I dress like the General, then maybe people will treat me like the General.”

“Yeah, right,” said Hani. “They’ll probably try to shoot you.”

Next morning, a couple of hours before dawn, Khartoum woke himself and went to fetch Raf. He waited in silence while the surprised bey sat on the edge of his bed and pulled on a pair of trousers, buttoned his shirt and slid into a black coat.

Sitting to dress was ordained. Something the bey had not understood until Khartoum explained this. Dressing in the pitch-dark was the bey’s own choice.

Khartoum had nodded to a Sudanese guard standing outside Raf’s room on his way in, and when he nodded again on his way out, the guard fell into step behind them. Two more soldiers fell into step at the front door. They were five minutes from the sleeping mansion before Khartoum saw Raf realize that not one of his escort carried a weapon.

South through the sodium of Rue Ptolomies, across Faud Premier’s hard neon and into a darkened alley little wider than a shop doorway, one city giving way to another as Khartoum knew it would. Some people thought it was the arrondissements that mattered, because those were what got shown on maps. It was a simple enough mistake to make. The same people divided their lives. This is my job, this is my wife, my friends from the market, my other friends, my family, this is the emptiness that should be occupied by my God.

Life didn’t work like that. It was layered, not separate. Woven together into a hidden script that few knew existed and fewer still ever got to read.

Woodsmoke drifted from mean doorways. There was a whining of sleepy children. A thrown-open wooden shutter swung so hard it bounced off the wall. Someone hawked and spat noisily in a room nearby. The further into the alley they walked, the sourer the air and the more battered the front doors. Until finally beaten-earth walls, stripped of their render by time or rain, framed doorways closed only by blankets.

Beneath Raf’s feet, shattered tarmac scabbed the damp earth like broken skin.

Khartoum was watching him in the near darkness.

“Where are we?” Raf asked.

“Undoubtedly almost here,” said Khartoum and kept walking.

There were others in the darkened alley. Figures slipping from the curtained doorways, their jellabas poor, their faces sunken with hunger. Scars went uncorrected and poor eyesight unimproved. They had the dark skin of those who had migrated from where the rivers met. They were the city’s incomers. The city’s invisibles.