"He says twenty is his best price."

"That's fine," Celia said.

"No, it's not," Moz said. "Walk away... that way," he added, "towards the other side of the square."

"But I want--"

"Do it," Jake said. He might have been talking to Celia but he was looking at Moz and for the first time there was a smile on his face, albeit sour. "Go on," he told Celia. "Walk away. Isn't that what you do best?"

The stallholder sent a boy after them with the belt. Although he waited until they had actually entered a side alley.

"Fifteen," he told Moz.

"Nine."

"Fifteen."

The boy and Moz looked at each other. The kid was about eleven, Arab rather than Berber, small for his age and worried. Any smiles from his father were reserved for the customers, Moz could see that in the boy's eyes.

"Twelve," Moz suggested. It was an outrageous price for a belt, at least it seemed so to him. Very reluctantly, the boy nodded.

"Sixteen," Moz told the woman. He took the money from a purse she handed him, one note and six coins, counting the dirham carefully into his own palm. While Celia was busy putting the purse back into her satchel, Moz turned to the boy and put the ten and two coins into his hand.

"That's for the belt," he said. Equally quickly, he pocketed two coins for himself and gave the final two to the boy. "Yours," he said. "The price we agreed for the belt was twelve. Those are for you to keep."

"Thank you," said the boy, hand over his own heart.

"Bessalama."

"M'a ssalama." Returning the peace, the boy trotted back to his stall, a hand-me-down jellaba dragging behind him in the dirt.

"What was all that about?" Jake asked.

"All what?"

"The talking."

"We were saying goodbye."

"What?" Jake snorted. "You telling me everyone in Morocco is that polite?"

"I don't know everyone in Morocco," Moz said, reasonably. "But most people in Marrakech have manners."

Celia smiled at the boy still laden with Jake's rucksack. She found it hard to guess his age because everybody in the city seemed so small, but she imagined it was around fourteen, maybe a little older. She had a brother that age, away at school.

"You've insulted him," she said, transferring her gaze to Jake.

"Insulted him?"

"Yeah." Celia nodded. "You know. What you do best. You need to apologize."

For a moment it seemed like Jake might refuse, then he nodded grudgingly. "I can be a prick sometimes," he said.

Celia nodded.

"You know..." Jake Razor looked at the boy, face thoughtful. "Maybe you can help me."

"If I can," said Moz.

"You know where I can get some dope?"

"Kif?"

"Yeah." Jake laughed. "That's the man. You can get me dope?"

The answer was no but Moz nodded. "Of course," he said, making his voice slur like Jake's own. "Give me an hour."

CHAPTER 24

Lampedusa, Tuesday 3 July [Now]

The fact the Colonel could even name Pierre de Fermat surprised Dr. Petrov, that he could recognize proof of the mathematician's last theorem she found so staggering that she banished the thought from her mind. Something to be processed later, along with an unguarded comment he'd made while he was briefing her on their way to the weights room.

"You know why I got this gig?"

He didn't seem like a man who'd use "gig" in that context. But then he didn't seem like someone who'd ask that kind of question.

"Because of your record?" Katie had Googled him before leaving New York. Those ribbons on his dress uniform meant something. Mostly that he'd taken casualties and held his ground in some of the world's worst shitholes while other units were going to pieces.

"I'm black."

She looked at him then. A bull-necked man with cropped hair turning grey at the edges, flat eyes and a hard smile. He scared her and looking at him Katie wondered if he ever scared himself.

"I don't get it," Katie said.

"What's to get?" said the Colonel. "I'm black and so's he."

Katie glanced at Prisoner Zero and then raised her eyebrows. Sure, the prisoner had olive skin but half the men on the island were darker than this.

"He's not--" she began to say.

Colonel Borgenicht held up one hand, cutting dead her protests. "He is to the Pentagon and the Secretary of State."

The only equation Katie had been able to recognize smeared into the shit of Prisoner Zero's cage was E=MC². And if she was honest, Katie only recognized this because a boyfriend had bought her the T-shirt in her first year at Columbia.

"You want to tell me why you're doing this?"

The naked man didn't even bother to shake his head, just glared through the mesh with flat, light-swallowing eyes. Stubble now grew across his jaw and scalp, making him look like an off-colour recruit for the Aryan Brotherhood, all sneer and crudely cut tattoos.

Katie felt like calling for a marine doctor and demanding that Prisoner Zero's blood be tested. Only this would simultaneously compromise her integrity and independence. The first, by relying on a medical opinion she knew to be partisan. The second... Well, the second was obvious. Katie could imagine Colonel Borgenicht's response on being told that Katie Petrov believed the prisoner was being kept drugged.

That she might care what the Colonel thought was an interesting notion.

"Get me a local doctor." Katie tossed the order over her shoulder, then turned back to Prisoner Zero as if it never occurred to her a suit from the Pentagon might not do as he was told.

"We've got a doctor."

"I want a second opinion."

"On what?"

Katie did her own version of flat-eye. "His physical state," she said.

"Major Dutch is very good."

"Are you officially refusing me a second opinion?"

Katie heard the weights room door shut behind her. The suit would have liked to slam it but the door came fitted with one of those restraining springs designed to stop guests from injuring themselves.

"Now we're alone," said Katie, "you want to tell me why...?" She gestured at numbers cut into the shit which now skimmed a sizeable section of mesh. Letters and numbers, flowing equations and broken words, some of which Katie thought she half recognized and hoped she was wrong.

Disgust was a bad emotion to display in situations like this, so Katie tried to keep her face neutral. She'd been breathing through her mouth ever since Colonel Borgenicht had shown her into the cell. And the fact Katie had been notified at all was a miracle. At least one of the comments she'd overheard suggested the simplest solution would be to bring forward the date for the execution.

Mind you, Katie imagined she'd been meant to hear those.

Shit plastered the mesh. Not lumps of the stuff thrown at the sides of the cage in anger or smeared roughly across its floor, expressions of a furious disgust with life, and Katie had seen both in her three years visiting prisons. Nor was it the clumsy excretal smearing mostly found in dirty protests by those who regarded themselves as political prisoners.

This was a thin, almost translucent skim, completely flat and eerily similar in appearance to cloisonné, where a jeweller fills areas between welded wires with coloured enamel. Onto this surface the man had scratched his equations, using a tiny stub of wire that he still held in one hand.

The room stank and with every hour that passed it stank more. At some point the afternoon sun was going to reach the whitewashed window and the smell would get even worse.

A paper plate had been folded to make a float and the stink of urine suggested Prisoner Zero had thinned his coating to get the right consistency. Speaking as someone who'd waited six weeks for a plasterer, only to have the man who turned up botch the job so badly that he left ridges all across her kitchen wall, Katie had to say that Prisoner Zero was achieving a very professional finish.