twenty-seven years old. I was in the desert because I had been told of a meteorite site never studied before. I have no satphone and I am out of range of any mobile link. I have left no note of where I am, it would be days before a search was started and then they would not know where to look. There – you know all about me. Now, what about you? You saved me from dehydration and death, or from a rifle and death. At Shaybah there are Arabs of all nationalities, but you I cannot place. Your feet tell me that for the first time in your life you are walking without shoes or sandals.
Why? Because of my debt to you, I have the right to know who you are.'
'You never saw me. The storm missed you. In the morning you go on and you never remember me.'
Sitting close to him and cross-legged, she said, 'Those men with you, because I saw their faces, wanted to kill me, would have. I heard you. Know that I thank you.'
'And you never remember me – I am forgotten.'
No reply.
Her warmth was near to him. He felt the pain loose its hold on his muscles. A great calm came to him. Her breathing was slowed, regular. She slept. Had he moved clumsily he would have woken her.
She knew everything of him. She knew that he wore a plastic bracelet on his wrist as if it were a convict's tag, that he crossed the Sands in secrecy, that his identity was hidden, that his business was worth killing to protect, that his accent separated him from the region, that the scars, blisters and welts on his feet meant he was a stranger and an Outsider. He heard, from the base of the dune, the boy's hacking cough, the sounds of the camels stirring and their grunts as they spat.
If he moved he would break the spell of her sleep. She shifted, without waking, and her head was on his chest, her throat on his shoulder. His hand moved. His fingers touched her throat. They rail on her throat from the windpipe to the back of her neck until they tangled with her hair. She could drive back where she had come from and she could go to a police post or an army post. She could betray him. His fingers were on her throat. She slept and was without defence. He moved his fingers from her throat. She slept because she trusted him.
The first shaft of the sun hit him.
He heard the boy whistle for him.
With great care, with gentleness, Caleb lifted her head and drew his arm clear, then lowered her head back to the sand. Her eyes did not open. He edged back from her, scratched at his face, shivered, then pushed himself up. The boy, expressionless, watched him. He left her and slid away down the dune.
Caleb took the camel's rein. They walked briskly, leaving behind him the woman and the Land Rover. The boy led him. He had gone fifty paces, sixty, and the slight warmth of the sun nestled on his back.
The shout was clear behind him, burst over the sand: 'Thank you.
You saved my life and I thank you. If it is ever possible I will repay you.'
He did not turn but he cupped his hands and yelled, at the plateau of sand around him, 'You never met me, I was never here… You never saw my face.'
They walked on.
The boy said, 'The Iraqi would have cut her throat. My father would have shot her.'
'But he did not.'
'You made a softness in my father. I think it is because you are different from us – my father cannot explain it. None of us knows you.'
'What have you been doing? Lifting too many ammunition boxes?'
Bart stepped back from the couch and peeled off the rubber gloves.
'Not ammunition boxes, no.'
The patient was mid-forties and overweight, a former Logistics Corps man, had risen to warrant officer and had looked for better remuneration than an Army pension would offer. They talked across each other.
'What I'm thinking is a hernia.' Bart's face cracked with his general practitioner's smile, comforting.
'You don't get those SANG guys to lift anything, not if they can wriggle away and get someone else, some other idiot, to do it. It's been CS-gas cartridges mostly, and plastic bullets, more than live stuff.'
'I'm going to pass you on to a consultant specialist, but I'm pretty sure that the pain and the lump mean an inguinal hernia.'
'Most of what we're doing with SANG, these days, is riot control and crowd control.'
'I expect you were worried about prostate cancer, with the swelling and the symptoms. That I can most definitely rule out – so it's not been a bad day for you.'
At the basin, gloves off and binned, Bart scrubbed his hands while the former warrant officer, now on the training programme for the Saudi Arabian National Guard, spilled out the detail of his daily work.
Only when he'd finished saying anything useful, when he'd come off the couch, zipped up and belted his trousers, put his sneakers back on, did Bart start to hurry him.
'Convalescence isn't bad, two weeks till you can drive after the operation. No heavy lifting during that time. Actually, it's the anaesthetic – if you have a full one – that governs recovery time. I'll make all the arrangements, fix an appointment and, please, leave my receptionist with the details of your cover policy… It's been a real pleasure to meet you.'
When the patient had gone, having grinned and pumped Bart's hand in gratitude, he sat at his chair and made his notes. Nothing about an inguinal hernia. Everything about the National Guard's current training schedule, yes: all classified as top secret, all closely guarded by the leaders of the Kingdom. Good stuff, the best he'd had for at least two months. He was a kept man, Wroughton's toy-boy.
He had been a kept man since he had answered the advertisement, had been accepted for employment on the basis of his severely edited curriculum vitae, had flown to Cyprus, paying his own fare, and had taken a taxi that had cost a small fortune to Nicosia. Ann behind him, and the kids, all of them the responsibility of the bastard with the Saab franchise, and the divorce papers signed. Anew start and a new beginning in the sunshine. He hadn't crawled into the water, he had jumped. In the last month before he flew out of the UK, with no forwarding address for the sour-faced detective sergeant in Torquay or the pompous creep of a solicitor from the British Medical Association, he had begun a crash course in the Russian language.
What he'd read, there were more Russian banks on the island of Cyprus than anywhere other than Moscow. There would be Russians with heart problems, liver problems, kidney problems, and there would be British tourists with sunstroke and alcohol poisoning. Piece of cake, on his feet at last.
After a good dinner and an excellent sleep, having shaved carefully, then dressed in his best suit and a sombre tie, he had walked from his hotel to the block where the practice he would join worked from. Kept waiting twenty-five minutes, no coffee and no biscuits. Left to cool his heels before a harassed man, with a face that said death was visiting, had called him in. 'I regret, Dr Bartholomew, that the offer made in writing to you no longer stands. We have a considerable reputation on the island that my colleagues and I will not sacrifice.' A moment of leaden silence while the man looked at the floor and Bart had gaped. A letter was passed to him, headed
'British Medical Association'. It gave close detail of a police investigation into the illegal sale of class A drugs, as yet incomplete, and a BMA inquiry, as yet not concluded. The man shrugged, then almost ran to the door to open it. 'You understand, Dr Bartholomew, that no alternative is open to us.'
He had gone out, dazed, into the sunshine. His head had been bowed, so he had seen the cigarette tossed down on the pavement, then crushed under a polished shoe. A voice had said, in flawless pedigree English, 'What I always say, those days you wake up and the sun shines are those when you go out without an umbrella and the rain starts pissing down. Know what I mean? Raining now, isn't it? Let's go and have a drink and see if we can roll the clouds back. Come on.' He had been led and he had followed, as any kept man would.
When the notes were complete, Bart rang Wroughton to fix a lunchtime meeting, then buzzed for the next patient.
Beth stood where no man or woman had stood before. She should have felt a thrill of exhilaration, should have wanted to jump and cheer and punch the air.
The memories of the night trapped her. She stared around her, then began to walk forward. The crater was in front of her. What she had been told to find was a high wall of sand, the highest in that part of the desert, and four hundred paces from the right side of the wall was the perfect circle of the crater. It should have amazed her that her Bedouin informant could be so exact in his description of the place and, without a GPS, so certain of the route she should follow. She had driven only eleven point three miles from where the storm had caught her, and after four – when doubt was settling – she had seen the wall that towered higher than any others. The crater was a
