"He's really coming," Petra Mayer promised. "And he really wants to talk to you, but first you have to sign the paper."

"And he'll listen?"

"Gene Newman always listens." Professor Mayer was telling the truth. It was one of the President's trademarks, like his arm around the shoulder of whichever dignitary was walking beside him and his oh-so-sincere double-fisted handshake. Whether he'd pay serious attention to what Prisoner Zero had to say was another matter although chances were he might. Gene Newman could be weird like that.

"This is what you want, right?" said Petra Mayer. "To meet the President?"

Prisoner Zero shook his head. "It's what the darkness wants."

Returning to his drawing, the prisoner quickly sketched a mulberry bush, shaded in some background and added an arch, then a man standing in it. After that, Prisoner Zero began filling in tiles on a temple roof.

"Tell me," he asked suddenly, "why now?"

They all knew the answer to that. With thirty-six hours to go the President had been the one to blink first. The stay of execution was proof of that.

"Because," said Petra Mayer, "now's the right time."

And Katie Petrov found herself wondering if her old tutor even half believed this. There was no correct time for the US President to shake hands with his would-be assassin. A substantial slice of home opinion was still holding firm on this.

"But if you don't sign, then we'll have to call the whole visit off."

Prisoner Zero shrugged.

Either the man was a brilliant actor, Katie Petrov decided, or his demand to see the President was as much a part of his dementia as the self-starvation, earlier filth and his utter refusal to contemplate that his precious darkness might not exist.

"Sign the appeal," Petra Mayer said.

"No."

Neither of them was yet prepared to return to the paragraph at the end in which Jake Razor acknowledged that his attempt on the life of the President had been a mistake. It was so brief that the thirty-seven words could have been written in half a minute at the most. That it apparently took White House staffers a day and a quarter to construct, Prisoner Zero regarded as one of life's lesser ironies.

He wasn't going to plead temporary insanity, any more than he was prepared to throw himself on the President's mercy or allow any one of the eight human rights groups currently demanding a retrial to do so in his name.

Before he signed anything Prisoner Zero needed to meet the President face to face; the darkness was very strict on this. In the meantime it reserved its right to insist on Prisoner Zero's execution. While Petra Mayer considered this latest impasse, the man who wasn't Jake Razor went back to his drawing.

Gene Newman's problem was simple. Given he'd been tried and condemned by a military tribunal, Prisoner Zero had a right to death. This would play badly with everyone except the Secretary of State for Defense, most of the inhabitants of Texas and bits of the Midwest.

The First Lady had convinced Gene that to meet Prisoner Zero before he'd asked for clemency would be political suicide. Prisoner Zero said the darkness refused to allow him to appeal before it had met the President.

Small wonder that Petra Mayer had a headache.

"Interesting," Katie Petrov said, getting up again to take a closer look at Prisoner Zero's drawing.

The prisoner ignored her.

"It's a corner turret from Beijing's Palace Museum," Katie Petrov told the Professor, who glanced up briefly but more or less did the same. "You know," insisted Katie, "part of the UN heritage site."

"No," said Prisoner Zero, "it's not." They were the first words he'd actually addressed directly to Dr. Petrov.

"Triple-roofed, gables on the two highest, carved acroteria on the corner of each, intricate screens..."

"It's not," Prisoner Zero insisted.

"China," Katie Petrov wrote in her notebook. "Beijing..." If nothing else, dropping hints about Beijing would tie up half the upper echelon of the NSA and keep them off Professor Mayer's back for a while.

Prisoner Zero's sketch progressed in shades of grey, the crosshatching made from numbers and words. The words were broken, the numbers near random and he would lose the drawing at the end of the day because, every evening before the overhead bulb went out in Prisoner Zero's cell, Sergeant Saez would come in to search his room.

The darkness thought it only kind to give him something to find.

Sergeant Saez's search was methodical. The mattress was overturned (Prisoner Zero had one of those too) and his new table and chair examined carefully. The laptop recently made available by Petra Mayer was confiscated for the night as was every single piece of paper on which Prisoner Zero had doodled during the course of that day.

Laptop, paper and pencils were returned again the next morning. To get them back Prisoner Zero had to eat at least half his breakfast. No one had explained this to him but empirical testing had confirmed that this was how it worked.

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

"What's to get?" said the Professor. She was used to this. Katie's questions to Prisoner Zero went unanswered. Which meant that if Katie wanted to ask him something she had to ask the Professor, who would ask the prisoner. It was clumsy, arbitrary and time consuming. Petra Mayer assumed that was the point.

"Where does Beijing come into this?"

"So," said Professor Mayer, addressing the prisoner, "where does Beijing come into this?"

"It doesn't."

"That's not Beijing?"

"No," said Prisoner Zero. "That's where the darkness lives." And with that he returned to a small figure climbing the outside of a tower. He gave the figure a short sword in each hand and then scrawled out one of them, turning it into rope.

As a church clock in a distant village struck ten and day turned to night on Lampedusa without bothering to pass through dusk, Colonel Borgenicht arrived to suggest that now might be a good time for his men to be allowed to lock Prisoner Zero down. Petra Mayer could tell by the Colonel's manner that he knew all about the President's planned visit and didn't like the idea one little bit.

"In a minute," she said. "We just want to take him for a walk first... That was a joke," she added, seeing anxiety suddenly flood the Colonel's face.

Colonel Borgenicht nodded weakly.

"You know," Katie Petrov said, as she and the Professor were crunching across gravel on their way back to their quarters, "you probably shouldn't tease him so much."

Petra Mayer glanced round to where the Colonel stood staring after them. "I thought you loathed the man."

"Of course I do," said Katie Petrov hastily. "All the same..."

The Professor raised her eyebrows. "Stockholm Syndrome," she said. "You'll be feeling sorry for him next."

Katie Petrov blushed.

"Can I ask you something?" Katie Petrov had reached the door of her chalet, and was actually feeding her key card into the lock when she stopped and turned back to the older woman.

"Of course."

"What does the President really hope to gain by coming here?"

"He carries the Europeans with him on his refusal to sign the space accord with Beijing until the human rights issues are resolved. America is seen to be magnanimous to someone it could justifiably treat harshly. And Gene gets to prove he's not the previous incumbent."

"But that's not all, is it?"

Professor Mayer shook her head. "No," she said. "He sees Prisoner Zero as an asset for America and a personal challenge."

"And that's it?"

"Mostly," admitted Petra Mayer. "Although we shouldn't forget the photo shoot. Gene Newman and the world's lost genius... Brave move by US President... Newman meets would-be assassin..."

"So where does the challenge come in?"