Soon there was more gap than mass and finally there was only gap. Not silence, because what had become one with the ground kept quivering and moaning until Ka emptied all of his fat clips of airburst over its head . . .

“And then?” Raf asked, glancing at a low coffee table. A small police-issue recorder sat in the middle, green light lit and numbers counting down what time was left. They were seated in an elegant club room usually reserved for senior officers. The club room was on the third floor of Champollion Precinct, next door to the general canteen. It had a fountain, leather chairs and bombproof windows.

The General, of course, would have put Hamzah in the cells. Raf had decided to do things differently.

“Then?” Hamzah thought about it. “I walked down the slope towards the first half-track.”

“You were looking for survivors?”

“No,” Hamzah shook his head, “I was after water. And then.”

“Then what . . . ?”

Hamzah let himself remember. “The Red Cross came . . .” He nodded towards Hakim, who stood at Raf’s shoulder. “Any chance of someone finding a drink?”

“Check the evidence cupboards,” Raf told his bodyguard. “Whisky if we’ve got any.”

What Hakim found was Spanish brandy, confiscated from an illegal club at Maritime Station, and Raf let Hamzah pour himself a drink, a heavy slug of the Carlos V mixed with Canada Dry.

Instead of drinking it straight down, Hamzah sat in his chair and stared into the glass, watching bubbles break for the surface. He looked, despite his age, exactly like Hani when she watched static on her screen. Intent on imposing meaning onto chaos. Maybe, thought Raf, everyone is trying to find a world behind the world. As if that world might somehow make more sense or, at the very least, be more real . . .

“Tell me about when the Red Cross arrived . . .”

“I was searching among the bodies for Sarah.”

Raf looked at him.

“We changed sides now and then,” Hamzah explained. “We all knew soldiers who’d been raped or mutilated after a battle, but if you could get through that . . .” He picked up his glass and drank from it. “If you could do that. If you were one of the ones left alive at the end . . . Colonel Abad said the field hospital where I left Sarah had been overrun. So I thought . . .”

“Did you find her?”

“No. Though I thought I had. You know, her skin was . . .” Hamzah opened the collar of his shirt to reveal skin the colour of old leather. “Darker than this . . . Purple like the night. Bitter like chocolate. It shone.”

He was crying, slow tears that trickled down jowly cheeks and vanished into stubble. There was no self-pity in his eyes and precious little guilt or fear of what might come next, just grief.

“I thought I would recognize her,” said Hamzah. “But I didn’t, I couldn’t. Some of the bodies were faceless and broken, but it wasn’t that. In the end there were just too many for me to search. When the Red Cross landed their first helicopter I was pulling a Dinka girl from under a pile.”

“What did they say?”

“To me? They said nothing. But then, they didn’t know I spoke their language. To each other . . . ? A thin woman turned to a small man and said, At least one of them survived.”

Hamzah finished his drink in a single gulp and banged down his glass.

“They gave me vitamins, an injection against retrovirus and water in a silver pouch with a thin straw that stopped me drinking it too fast. After that, they photographed me, took my fingerprints, swabbed my mouth for a DNA sample and airlifted me to an American aircraft carrier off Massaua. They gave me a Gap T-shirt, black Levi’s and a pair of silver Nikes. All donations from a charity appeal. They offered to replace my radio and cracked dark glasses, but I said I still liked them. Maybe I should have given them up . . .”

Hamzah shrugged.

“Only, I didn’t, because that wasn’t what Colonel Abad wanted.”

“What the Colonel wanted?” Raf raised his eyebrows. “What happened to Colonel Abad . . . ?”

“Koenig Pasha stole him.”

That was the point Raf turned off the police-issue recorder, thought about his options for all of thirty seconds and hitDELETE /ALL/CONFIRM.

It took another brandy and the rest of that Sunday morning for Raf to get from Hamzah a collection of facts that the drink-sodden industrialist thought obvious. Chief among them was that the Arab-speaking, Ottoman-appointed liaison officer aboard the USS Richmond had been a certain Major Koenig Bey.

So impressed was he by the boy’s tragedy that he insisted on finding a children’s home for the boy and personally escorting him to El Iskandryia, cracked radio, spectacles and all.

“And Sarah,” asked Raf, “you ever find out what happened to her?”

“Oh yes,” said Hamzah. “She died.”

“You eventually traced her records then?”

“No,” said Hamzah. “But her daughter found me . . .” he added bleakly. “Avatar’s mother.”

“I thought Avatar was your son?” Raf said, sounding genuinely puzzled.

Hamzah nodded. “That too.”

Hamzah Effendi came down the precinct steps into a storm of flashguns. Behind him walked Raf with one hand heavy on the industrialist’s shoulder. In that gesture was ownership and authority. That was what the cameras were meant to catch and that was what they reported, streaming the Monday evening press conference live to newsfeeds around the world.

Behind Raf came his bodyguards. And to one side of the front steps, watching them intently, stood Zara, her face a mask of misery.

“Excellency . . .”

Raf spotted the questioner in the middle of the scrum and nodded. “In the red, blonde hair . . .”

“Claire duBois, Television 5. Is Hamzah Effendi under arrest?”

“He has put himself into police custody.”

“Yes, but . . .” The rest of her reply got drowned beneath a wave of competing questions. So Raf waited for the storm to still and pointed to a man from C3N.

“Nick Richardson, C3N. Do you expect to allow Hamzah’s extradition?”

“As you unquestionably know,” said Raf, looking round at the cameras, “PaxForce has issued a warrant for Hamzah Effendi’s arrest on the charge of crimes against humanity . . .” Out of the corner of his eye, Raf spotted the limousine used by Senator Liz slide itself into a parking bay reserved for the Minister of Police.

“Excellency?”

“Wait.” One by one the Ishies and journalists turned to see what His Excellency was watching. Which was why most of the newsfeeds ended up featuring the face of Senator Liz Elsing when the first bomb exploded.

It was nothing spectacular, just a rattling crump and a burst of static that drizzled snow across a dozen different camera screens.

“What was that?” The accent was English, the speaker a crookbacked little man with bad hair and worse dress sense.

Raf shrugged. “Sword of God, I imagine.” His gaze as it took in the journalists was cool, almost amused. He smiled sourly and flicked blond hair back from the shades he wore to keep flashguns at bay. “This is Iskandryia, bombs happen . . .”

“What about the extradition?” The man from C3N refused to let go of his question.

“What about it . . . ?”

Raf was being watched by the Senator, who was being watched by about a third of the press corps, mostly those from American channels. All of them looked anxious, torn between chasing down the distant bomb and sticking with the news happening in front of them.

“You accept the need for a trial?”

“If a Grand Jury so decides,” said Raf.

“And where would this trial be, if the Grand Jury so decides. . .” The speaker was Austrian, the humour heavy.