"Abbas." The boy who spoke was thin-faced, his teeth bad and his gaze turned inwards to something dark and lonely. The boy on the bike was his brother, both boys from a family that owed Caid Hammou a serious and hitherto unpayable debt. Glancing uncertainly towards a thickset, rather dapper middle-aged man, he waited for the man to expand on this explanation.

"Brigadier Abbas is driving the taxi himself," said Hammou's nephew. "We didn't know what to--"

"Okay," Hammou said, voice tight. "I understand." He wanted to add, let me think, but to do so would reveal weakness. So instead he told the youngest to make mint tea and began to sort through a tray of Hong Kong replicas, all of them stamped "Swiss Made."

The downing of the helicopter would result in arrests, beatings and probably swift and violent bouts of illegal, unauthorized torture. America would demand results, and even without their demands Sécurité would rip apart the Medina if that was what it took to find answers. This was to be expected.

To kill any member of Sécurité was something else again. Direct challenges were answered by direct action, this was the North African way. And killing the city's Head of Sécurité, to target the Brigadier, was asking for Marrakech to be locked down. It had happened before.

Glancing up from the tray, Hammou realized they were all watching him, their faces expectant but less worried than earlier. His mere presence absolved them of responsibility for what came next.

The choice was his, such as it was...

"This one is automatic," said Caid Hammou. "Look, you can see inside." The old man, who had no need to work in any shop, even one of his own, handed over a replica of a Patek Philippe. The crocodile strap was actually plastic and the view glass at the back was Perspex, but through it could be seen a working mechanism.

"You move it from side to side," Hammou said, matching a gesture to his words, "and the watch winds itself, no batteries needed. And it keeps perfect time. Well..." Hammou paused, as if to think about that. "Almost perfect," he amended. "Maybe you need to adjust it by a few seconds every week or so."

He smiled and nodded as the Englishman examined the dial and then turned the watch over to look at the tiny gilt hairspring, beating like a heart. "Is good, no?"

The man nodded and then the bargaining began, but not before Hammou called to a passing boy for another tray of mint tea.

"Show them your pass," suggested Charlie Bilberg and Brigadier Abbas tried not to sigh. He knew Langley liked the fresh-faced look but still wished the CIA would stop recruiting children.

"If I show them my pass," he said heavily, "then they'll know we're not really a petite taxi... And so will everyone else." His nod took in those crowding a sidewalk, itself something of a novelty in that part of the Medina, where many streets were surfaced with little more than cracked blacktop over beaten earth and passing taxis or donkey carts forced those on foot to retreat into doorways rather than get crushed against crumbling walls.

"Take a look," the Brigadier suggested.

Agent Bilberg did. Seeing old men in jellabas and young men in T-shirts, teenage girls with their hair hidden beneath scarves and a few, better dressed, with their hair tied back and gazes defiantly bare. Small boys stood in a huddle around a slightly larger boy who clutched a radio.

"What do you notice?"

"The lack of small girls...?"

The Brigadier sucked his teeth. Maybe the CIA man was not as stupid as he'd thought. "You're right," he said, "they're at home helping, but that wasn't what I meant. What else?"

Scanning the crowd waiting to pass through a roadblock, Charlie Bilberg thought about it. He'd been trained to look for anxiety and for a certain tightness around the eyes or studied blankness of expression. An otherness, but no one looked out of place. There were a few elderly men standing alone, but none who looked as if he were an outsider to himself or this society.

"Nothing," he told the Brigadier, when the silence stretched too thin. And that was the truth. Charlie Bilberg could see nothing remotely out of the ordinary. It was like finding himself in a killing house where every pop-up was civilian.

"Exactly," said the Brigadier. "Ninety-five per cent of people in Marrakech are happy with the way things are run. Well, their bosses, heads of family and caids are happy, which is the same. The other five per cent look like everyone else... We wait in this queue."

The roadblock was perfunctory. From the top of Bab er Robb a single stork watched two uniforms on the road below halt cars and demand papers. When the taxi containing Prisoner Zero drew close, Charlie Bilberg realized the men weren't even Sécurité. They were traffic cops or maybe gendarmes, bussed in from outside, something local.

A quick glance assessed the suited foreigner, the Arab driver at the wheel and the silent man with a greying beard, a copy of that week's Al Sahifa open on his lap. Only the driver got asked for his papers, which he gave willingly and took back with a respectful nod.

According to these he was a taxi driver called Hamid, who had a room in a house near Place du Moukef on the other side of the Medina.

"Okay."

Slipping the Peugeot into gear, Brigadier Abbas passed through the Agnaou Gate and out of the Old City. A long way behind him a plume of grey still billowed into the hot summer sky and sirens still sounded, though it was hard to tell if these were ambulances or police cars. Maybe they were both.

"Try the radio," Charlie Bilberg suggested.

The death toll was currently thirty-one, including the outrider on the leading police bike and the three occupants of the prison van, two guards and Prisoner Zero. That Prisoner Zero was dead the news flash took for granted.

"Interesting," Charlie Bilberg said.

"Not really." The Brigadier's voice was dismissive, his demand for silence either forgotten or no longer relevant. Steering his vehicle between the edge of the road and a donkey cart turning right, he headed around the walls towards a distant grove of palms and the beginning of a track.

Ornamental shrubs lined both sides of the track, but these were brown and shrunken, victims of a drought that had lasted for five years.

"That's an official station," the Brigadier explained. "It says what we need it to say. You want to find out what's really happening, try this..." Spinning the dial, he located a burst of something hard-edged and thrashy, in pointed contrast to the al-Ala featured on the previous channel. Calculator-cheap beeps took over when the Rai ended, signifying a news flash.

Brigadier Abbas knew the young CIA agent spoke little Arabic but still made the man wait for a translation until the DJ signed off, frenzied words giving way to a thrash of Casablanca nuRai. Even from his seat in the back, Charlie Bilberg could tell that the Brigadier was amused about something.

"What?" he demanded.

"The bomb," said Brigadier Abbas. "You ordered it."

"I ordered--"

"The CIA."

"Believe me," said Charlie Bilberg, "we don't do stuff like that. Not anymore."

"Of course you don't," Brigadier Abbas said smoothly. "It seems you persuaded an elite force from Israeli intelligence to do it for you." The Brigadier's laugh was as sharp as a dog's bark. "This is good," he added, "very good."

"What's good about it?"

"First, it's absurd, so we can dismiss it easily. And second..." A jerk of the Brigadier's head indicated Prisoner Zero sitting silently behind him. "This one is already dead, think about that. No trial, no fuss, no media. You just take him somewhere and extract every last piece of information. With pliers if necessary, and if you don't have the stomach I know people who do."