Stepping back, Moz yanked hard on his end of the belt, watching the old man stagger, then dig in his heels and yank back.

Moz grinned.

It was this more than anything else that stoked the old man's fury. Bringing up one knee, the soldier aimed for Moz's groin and when that failed he stamped the edge of his boot down the front of the boy's shin. Only Moz's foot was no longer there.

"Missed," said Moz. A very childish thing to say, but he didn't care.

The Corporal, the man who claimed he could reduce hardened prisoners to whimpering obedience with a single pebble and a short length of string, could no longer even knee someone properly. Moz wanted the group standing opposite to understand that.

"You know," Moz said loudly, "I haven't got time for this." Stepping back, he yanked viciously on his bit of the belt and watched the old man stumble, going down on one knee in the dust.

"See you," Moz said, dropping the belt.

And there it might have ended if only Sidi ould Kasim had let Moz leave. But as the boy turned away, already readjusting his shades and sweeping one hand through his hair, the Corporal regained his feet.

"No you don't," he said, swinging the belt harder than ever. The heavy buckle of the belt hit Moz's shoulder, bruising flesh as its metal tang pierced his shirt and lodged in his skin below the collarbone.

Odd, thought Moz.

Without further thought, he pulled the buckle from his chest, watching the underlying flesh pucker beneath cloth as the tang pulled free. The next thing he did was turn round and smash his Perrier bottle hard into the side of Sidi ould Kasim's head.

Two days after this, Major Abbas pulled Moz off the corner of Boulevard Mohammed V. The Major did this by the simple expedient of pulling up next to the teenager in a grande taxi, pushing open a door and ordering Moz to climb inside.

The boy would no sooner have refused than try to make a run for it, both of which were known to be very dangerous options where the Marrakchi police were concerned.

"Leave it," Major Abbas snapped, when Moz leant forward to wind down one window. There was something in the way he said this that scared the boy.

"You seen Malika recently?"

Moz shook his head.

"Anyone looking for her?"

"No." She was a foreigner's brat, Corporal ould Kasim's responsibility. No men from Derb Yassin were out searching through the narrow alleys of the Mellah, fired up on rumours and outrage. She wasn't worth the effort.

"You're Marzaq?" The new voice was sharp, like broken glass and edged with an accent which was new to the boy.

Moz nodded. Anything else would have been pointless.

The elderly nasrani who sat in the back of the grande taxi had improbably black hair and tortoiseshell shades which reflected Moz back on himself. A skinny punk in a torn Ramones T-shirt, his hair cut with kitchen scissors and held erect by a mix of sugar water and Vaseline.

"He doesn't look like an Arab."

The stress the old man placed on this last word was both ugly and contemptuous. On the other hand, he was speaking fluent Arabic, which was impressive in itself.

"Half Turkish," said the Major. "Quarter English, quarter German."

"Merde," said Claude de Greuze, one-time advisor to the old Pasha and still on retainer from Paris. "What a fucking mix." A mirrored gaze slid over Moz's thin face and the boy shifted uneasily in his seat. "Maybe he's got something to be worried about..."

"No. The plastic's hot, that's all." Patting the cracked red vinyl, Moz mimicked snatching his fingers away. "Much too hot."

"You speak French."

"Yeah," said Moz, "and Arabic. You want a guide to the souk I'm the best. I can show you around all the best places. Get you good prices."

Slowly, very casually, Claude de Greuze produced a Browning from the inside of his jacket, pulled back the slide and put the muzzle against the side of Moz's head.

It felt warm.

"You think this is a joke?"

Moz stared back. Not defiant, just puzzled. He was good at doing puzzled. "No," he said finally, when the seconds had stretched too thin. "I don't think this is a joke at all. I was just offering to help."

There followed a rapid-fire discussion between Major Abbas and the stranger, which switched between languages almost every other sentence. This was the first time Moz realized the Major had been learning English and now spoke it better than he did.

Moz understood about a quarter of what was said and this was a quarter more than the Frenchman intended him to understand as the words "Malika," "necessity" and "school" tumbled between the two men.

"If you say so," said the stranger, lowering his gun. He glanced again at Moz. "Maybe I'll take him up on that offer," he said to Major Abbas. "Let him show me round the souk." Claude de Greuze's smile revealed a whole mouthful of nicotine-stained teeth. "He could show me some of his favourite cafés, while he's at it. He'd do that for me, wouldn't he?"

Moz thought about those words on his walk back to Riad al-Razor. Not so much what the Frenchman said as the way he said it. And Moz thought about the man's smell. Garlic, tobacco, sweat and ginger were common in a city where water was rare and most washing was ritual, at least for the people he knew.

The foreigner's smell was different. A sour reek which so completely filled the grande taxi that it was a wonder someone as fastidious as Major Abbas could stand it. That was when Moz realized something which was to change the way he looked at the world.

Major Abbas, the most feared police officer in the whole of the Medina, had no choice but to sit with the windows shut, while trying to breathe through his mouth because, for reasons Moz could barely comprehend, he could not afford to offend the old Frenchman.

It was a terrifying thought.

CHAPTER 33

Washington, Saturday 7 July [Now]

Five things you need to know about Zero Point Energy. A selection of tabloids lay open on Gene Newman's rosewood desk. A New York Post, a copy of the Sun from England, half a dozen others. The President hadn't bothered to check which contained the list, it could have been any or all.

The five points had been posted the previous morning on alt.sf.science by a top-end theorist from NASA, a man with a disgustingly cynical sense of humour. The tabloids had printed them straight.

1. Zero Point Energy is named after its inventor (the soon to be late Prisoner Zero).

2. ZPE uses Quantum Foam, which is so small you can't even see the bubbles.

3. A cup of Quantum Foam would be enough to boil all the seas on Earth.

4. An SUV running on ZPE would run from now until the end of time without ever needing to fill up.

5. With ZPE a spaceship will cost no more to fill than a lawnmower, but go much faster...

Gene Newman had no idea if a practical application for the Casimir force equations really had been scratched into the shit blasted off the mesh of Prisoner Zero's cage. It was impossible to tell, since some idiot had apparently decided to wash the shit, the equations and the scratched sketches away.

Whatever, serious scientists were talking about the possibility that Prisoner Zero had successfully tied a big pink bow around gravity, inertia, heat and electricity, with some throw-in about the shape of time which Gene Newman had given up trying to understand.

All he knew was that Prisoner Zero had gone from Arab terrorist, through psycho killer and ex-punk junkie to tortured American genius in a matter of hours. Which didn't stop the New York Post featuring a tasteful countdown chart to the man's execution.