He apologized on the drive back to the governor’s mansion. A drive so short that he and Zara could have walked it in the time it took Hakim and Ahmed to safety-check the Bentley.

Of course, before he apologized he had to get his breath back.

“Columbia,” she had told him. “Power-punching exercises.”

She’d been reluctant to get into the Bentley until Raf explained that her alternative was to wait for a horse-drawn calèche to take her out to Villa Hamzah to be with her mother. Whatever her decision, Hamzah Effendi would remain under guard at the precinct.

Hakim and Ahmed he’d made walk back to the gubernatorial mansion. Punishment for grinning when she sucker punched him in the stomach.

“Why all the playacting?” she’d asked.

“Because that’s my job,” said Raf. “And the best way to fake something, is to pretend to be what you already are . . .” Catching Zara’s appalled glance, he shrugged and yanked at the wheel, suddenly dragging the Bentley round a bend into a side street. The car had no power steering, and Raf strongly suspected the absence was intentional.

He wouldn’t put it past Koenig Pasha to drive a telemetrics-free vehicle precisely because it lacked assisted steering, voice-activated starting, electronic locks or air-conditioning, not to mention adaptive cruise control. Even the engine could be hand-cranked, though it was hard to know if that was special or had once come as standard.

The point was, while almost every other vehicle in the city had seen its electronics go belly-up in the blasts, the governor’s Bentley still functioned. Which was how Raf ended up with a dusty square to himself. And it was obvious from the way pedestrians turned to watch the unlit Bentley slide slowly round Place al-Mansur, its pennant fluttering in the darkness, that they expected no less.

The city had a confidence in its new governor that Raf had never had in himself, that no one on the right side of sanity could ever have.

“Remember that lunch?” Raf asked. “When we met officially? Your father told me you never cried.”

“That was then,” said Zara crossly. “Things change.”

“Either that, or we change them,” Raf replied. “Sometimes surviving is all it takes.”

“And that’s what you do, is it? Survive . . .”

Raf nodded.

Sitting there beside him, her hands clasped tight between stockinged knees and her shoulders hunched forward like a frightened child, Zara took a deep breath and slowly willed herself back under control as a familiar street slipped by and the dark gateposts of the mansion came forward to meet her.

The fact Raf was right didn’t make her like him any more.

“I took a detour,” Raf told Hakim, seeing him standing by the gate, and with that Raf edged the Bentley into a courtyard lit by coal-filled oil drums.

“The master arrives . . .” Khartoum was no longer dressed in his ornate livery. Instead, the old man wore a pale grey souf so long its rough edges dragged on damp cobbles. Around him stood soldiers, plus a thin clerk in a flapping suit. The old man looked amused.

“Your office is worried.” The Sufi practically had to push the clerk towards the car window. “Tell him then.”

“Excellency . . . Ambassador Graf von Bismarck demands an immediate audience.”

Did he now?

“And the one from Paris?”

The man nodded.

“London, Washington, Vienna?”

A quick nod greeted each capital in its turn.

“And Stambul?”

“The red phone . . .” The man was embarrassed. “It rang, Excellency, but when I finally answered it the line was dead. Perhaps the main exchange . . .”

“It’s been fried,” said Raf. “Along with the relay stations. Please tell the Graf that I’ll see him for ten minutes, an hour from now, in the council chamber.”

“Your Excellency . . . The ambassador was hoping . . .”

“That I’d go there. Too bad.” Raf watched the clerk debate with himself which it would be most dangerous to offend, the Germans or Iskandryia’s new governor. His decision quickly became clear when the man snapped off a smart salute and stepped back from the car.

“You scare them, don’t you?” Zara’s smile was thin.

“It’s the aftertaste of the General.”

Zara shook her head. “It’s you,” she said. “Take a good look at yourself in the mirror.”

“I don’t do mirrors,” said Raf.

“That’s what I mean.”

There didn’t seem to be much to say after that so, once Khartoum had opened Raf’s door, Raf walked round to the other side of the car and opened the door for Zara.

“And I wish you’d stop that,” Zara said with a scowl. “All this heel-clicking shit.” Her scowl lasted until she reached the mansion’s steps, at which point Hani came bundling out of the big front door.

“Zara!”

“Hello, honey.”

Hani grinned. “How are you?” she added as an afterthought; visibly remembering her manners.

“Okay, I suppose. And you?”

“Terrific.” Hani suddenly opened both arms to embrace the ink-black sky. “Someone’s killed the lights. All of them. You can see what’s happened better from the roof.” Hani turned to go, then swung back, remembering something. “You and I,” said the child, looking serious. “We need to talk . . .”

“You know Colonel Abad stole someone else’s face?”

Zara didn’t.

“On the badges,” said Hani. “It’s not him. The face belongs to someone who died years and years ago. You know what that means? It means he kept himself to himself, or people would have noticed he wasn’t the same as his picture . . .”

Hani nodded. “I’m right, aren’t I?” She looked at the older girl, then frowned. “Don’t you like clues?”

Zara stared round at the governor’s study, her face doubtful. Official papers were piled in untidy heaps, encyclopedias, old history books, ancient maps of the Sudan. A bookcase along one wall had half the volumes pulled out and dumped on the floor. It looked like a whirlwind had hit the place. And the whirlwind was about four paces away, laying a fire and asking riddles.

“Honey, we really shouldn’t be in here.”

“You want to save your father?”

Do I . . . ? Zara stared at the child, throat tight.

“Thought so.” Hani walked over to Zara, gave her a quick hug and went back to work, crunching old financial reports into tight balls and pushing them under kindling.

“Clues,” Hani said firmly, putting a match to a computer printout. “Crosswords, logic puzzles, number grids, those stupid MENSA things in the papers . . . Do you like them?”

“Sometimes.”

Hani sighed. It was late. Raf was still furious about something, and Zara was so busy trying not to get upset in front of her that she wasn’t really listening to a thing Hani said. Even Khartoum was useless. She’d tried to talk to him but he’d just excused himself, then come back later with matches and a jug of water from the kitchens.

Which was less than no help.

It was hard being the only one who could think properly. Especially if you were nine. Or maybe ten, there was some doubt about that.

“In a moment,” said Hani, “I’ll make you some cocoa.” She blew on the flames until the kindling caught, added a couple of wooden candleholders from the mantelpiece and all the pencils from the General’s desk tidy.

Uncle Ashraf’s desk tidy, Hani corrected herself. Taking a half-eaten bar of Fry’s chocolate from her pocket—it was possible for a human to last a week on a single bar, she’d read it in some magazine—Hani broke cubes off the chocolate and dropped five or six into the water jug. She should probably have heated the water first, she realized, looking at the lumps lying there at the bottom.

Still, it was a bit late to decide that now. Pushing the copper jug into the middle of the flames, Hani sucked her fingers where they’d got singed and went back to the real problem.