Beneath The Diamond Sky By Christopher Wakling

Synopsis:

The balaclava twisted towards Kate, close enough for her to make out
dark lashes and deep brown expressionless eyes.  She held his gaze; the
moment stretched... A sob rose in her throat, threatened to become
audible, but was silenced by the banality of a trickle of sweat which,
while she watched, ran from the man's brow into the corner of his
eye.

Kashmir, the Himalayan foothills.  Seven Westerners on a misguided
trekking expedition are taken hostage by separatist militants.  Kate
Cox and Ethan Hughes, a troubled young English couple, are among their
number.  At the mercy of hardened ideologues they cannot understand,
the captives are pushed into a claustrophobic hell of shifting
allegiances, where love and survival seem destined to collide.

As the hostages struggle to hold themselves together, so those at home
begin to fall apart.  Rachel is tormented by the memory of her cold and
dishonest relationship with her sister, Kate; Ethan's father, unwilling
to confront cruel family truths, is ready to blame everybody but
himself.  Redemption depends upon the hostages' safe return, but as the
prospect of their release fades, so do their hopes of escape and they
already know the penalty for dissent... In the vein of Alex Garland's
The Beach, Beneath the Diamond Sky is an absorbing psychological
exploration of how character fragments under pressure.  It is a
beautifully written, blackly funny and terrifying read.

First published 2004 by Picador an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd

Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London Nl 9RR

Basingstoke and Oxford

Associated companies throughout the world www.panmacmillan.  com

ISBN 0 330 42702 4

Copyright Christopher Wakling 2004

The right of Christopher Wakling to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.

"Too Much of Nothing', p.44.  Words and Music by Bob Dylan.

Dwarf Music.  Sony/ATV Music Publishing Limited.

All rights reserved.  Reprinted by permission.

"Reason to Believe', p.284, by Bruce Springsteen.

Copyright 1982 Bruce Springsteen.

All rights reserved.  Reprinted by permission.

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for
damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.

Typeset by Intype Libra Ltd

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
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circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding
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purchaser.

For my father

PROLOGUE

Wo turning back."

The wing tip bounced as Kate's instructor slammed the cockpit door. But
his hand was steady, pressed against the window.  Pink palm, white
fingertips, spread across the glass.  The hand left a print, which
faded slowly.

"Have fun."

He retreated to the clubhouse, framed in the side window.  The space
he'd left in the cockpit yawned wider with each step.

She checked her watch.  This wasn't scheduled.  The lesson had
finished.  One minute they were taxiing along the gravel strip to park
up, a heaviness already setting into her arms and legs, the next he had
told her to stop short.

"You're too dangerous to fly with, so I'm getting out.  Practise on
your own."  He smiled and squeezed her shoulder.  "I haven't touched
the controls all morning.  You're ready."

For a second, two, three, Kate hesitated.  But he'd spelt it out: no
turning back.  With the engine idling, the propeller was still running.
The longer she sat stationary on the gravel, the greater the risk a
stone might fly up and chip the blade.  She eased the plane forward, up
onto the holding apron.

Once there, the routine took over.  It was reassuring to run through
the series of instrument checks and test the controls.  The sequence
had its own inevitability.  Kate's voice, out loud, drowned her doubts
with comforting jargon.

But when she glanced again through the cockpit side window the truth
stood under her wing, in the shadow cast by the low sun.  The distorted
shape of the little Cessna stretched across the blacktop and up onto
the grass, a darkness cut out of the flaring dew.  On the ground.  This
routine led elsewhere.  She was testing magnetos, making a radio call,
searching the massive, final-approach sky with automatic eyes.  If she
didn't stop now, that would be where she would end up.

Again Kate checked her watch.  Eight six.  Ethan wouldn't yet be out of
bed; Rachel would be in a tube carriage, on her way to work.  She'd
made the radio call now, spread her intentions across the sky.  Her
toes came away from the brakes, dropped to rest on the rudder pedals.

Without an instructor beside her the plane felt lighter.  It bounced
from the run-up bay to the head of the runway, a strip of ragged-edged
asphalt, and turned across the threshold in a measured arc, onto the
topmost tip of the centre line.  The cockpit seemed suddenly hot.  A
decision was happening at a distance: obligation fighting dread.  The
runway stretched away before her, wire-tight, to a dot.  Above,
cloudless, cerulean emptiness.

But that had nothing to do with anything because one of the cardinal
rules was not to loiter on the runway.  Three seconds, two seconds, one
last pause.  She reached for the throttle and pushed it forwards.

"One thousand, two thousand, three ..."  Her voice echoed in her
headset over the whine of the engine.  White lines sucked backwards
beneath the nose.  Again the routine took over.  She gave herself to
the components of control, kept the rushing lines central with her
feet, checked instruments in the green, watched the airspeed increasing
from fifty to fifty-five, to sixty knots.

Take-off speed.

There were precious seconds yet in which to stop.  But her right hand
collapsed all choice.  It pulled back on the column, and the tarmac was
no longer a sensation through her bucket seat.  The feeling had gone
because the white lines were dropping away, just as the nose was rising
over the scrubby trees at the end of the runway, which was coming
faster now: another irrelevance, since she was falling upwards above
it, flying.

The static in her headphones swelled to the sound of each breath.  She
levelled the wings and whispered the words.

"No turning back."

One.

Ethan stared out along the massive wing's trailing edge.  It sliced a
dawn cityscape as the jumbo banked, bisecting a road, a railway line, a
perimeter fence, and finally a blur of scrub as the undercarriage
thumped into concrete.  The seatback tray flopped into his lap.  Then a
roar of engines bit the air backwards, leaving him pleasantly light in
his seat.  And finally the sag of slowing past terminal buildings and
tail planes fuel trucks and a stumpy water tower.

"Check this out."

"What?"

Kate had given him the window seat.  He leaned backwards and pointed
through the porthole.

"People squatting everywhere."

She craned forwards beside him.  Dirt-grey grass ran the length of the
runway.  It was studded with men sitting on their haunches.  The plane
was at walking pace now.  A group of three figures rolled backwards
with the strip, thin arms thrust out across the tops of bony knees,
counterbalanced.  They didn't look up.

"Pretty relaxed," continued Ethan.

"What do you think they're doing?"

"How should I know?"

"Well, they've got to be there for a reason.  Baggage handling.
Grass-cutters.  Something."

He shrugged.  "It looked to me like they were on for doing nothing at
all."

Inside, the terminal was rush-hour full, and yet nobody appeared to be
on their way anywhere.  They waited.  At his elbow in the queue, Kate
took out a pad and began making notes.  Ethan smiled.  "Surely not,
already."

She ignored him and finished her sentence.  When he leaned over to see
what she had written she angled the page away.  He put on his Walkman
and retreated behind its soundtrack.  Eventually she swapped the pad
for a guidebook and held it open.  He waited for the song to finish
before turning the volume down.

"Go on then."

"Don't you want to look?"

He ran a hand across the sharpness of his newly shorn head, then held
it palm up.

"This is what it's all about."  She smiled.  "Planning routes, working
out which way to go."

He allowed his pause to extend before breathing, "What are the
choices?"  Then, more kindly, "Show me.  I bet you've got it all sewn
up."

They stepped forwards into a flurry of taxi and auto-rickshaw drivers.
Although it was still early, a stupefying heat pressed through the open
doors of the terminal building.  Ethan's back was instantly wet beneath
his pack.  The clamour of "Where to, sir?"  was a wall.

"What's the address again, then?"  Ethan asked Kate.  The drivers
seemed to assume he'd be giving the order.

"I know where we're going."

"Well, tell one of them and let's get out of here."

"We're taking a bus."

The porters, horns, taxi touts and fumes rose around them.  "Why?"

"I don't want to be ripped off.  We've only just landed."

An airport bus rolled past as they stood arguing on the pavement.  Its
open door was solid with backs.  Kate strode after it.  Ethan stayed
put.  He hefted his pack to the floor and sat down on it.  Immediately,
four prospective drivers were squatting beside him.  "Where to?  Delhi
centre?  Paharganj?  Going where?  Sir?"  One of them had a growth the
size and colour of a walnut on his upper lip.  If he could have
remembered the name of the place, Ethan would have struck a deal, just
to get out of the heat, but Kate appeared over the nearest man's
head.

"I know where to wait.  The bus costs a tenth of what these guys will
charge."

A collective outburst.  "No way!  Good price!  I take you!  How
much?"

Rather than force the issue he stood into the straps of his rucksack
and set off.  A head taller than the rest of the population, he wove to
the bus stop, following Kate's freckled shoulders.  This was
backpacking, this was a holiday.  No point in an argument.  It wasn't
as if it mattered.

The bus set them down on the intersection of two alleyways.  Black
lines everywhere, a mesh across the sky.  It would be impossible, Ethan
decided, to trace any one of the wires, either back to its source, or
forwards to its destination.  He followed the nearest shop-face down to
street level, where it ended in a pile of shattered fruit crates.  An
elderly man lay across the heap, a hand flung out into the dirt,
snoring.

Kate was struggling back to him, pink-faced, through the throng.

"The guidebook's shite!"  She held it out.  Touts fell away as she
arrived.

"Face it, prices go up.  Let's just choose somewhere, shall we?"  He
pulled a shirtsleeve across his wet forehead.  "Come on.  Where's
near?"

She made the mistake of reading the words "Hotel Bright' out loud.  The
nearest tout exploded in Ethan's ear.  "No good!  Shut!  Noaircon.  My
hotel, short taxi!  Come on, sir!"

"It's this way, back towards the railway station."

They set off back through the Main Bazaar, sidestepping carts,
children, a fallen heap of bicycle wheels, an auto-rickshaw in reverse.
Kate's fair shoulders had already come out in a rash.  Sweat quickened
from Ethan's temples, bloomed across the front of his shirt.  The fifty
yards they backtracked were a mile.

"Look, phone calls."  She pointed into the darkness of a shop front

"You what?"

"The sign says international calls.  I want to let them know we've
arrived."

"We haven't got anywhere yet.  The hotel will have a phone.  Surely it
can wait?"

The sense in this prevailed, but something else had caught Kate's
eye.

"Fine, but I want to buy a newspaper."

A cow nosed between them, swayed into the path of a cyclist, whose back
wheel rose.  The animal swung towards the nearest shade.  Dropping her
bag at Ethan's feet, Kate strode off again.

He shook his head and watched her go, felt the familiar attrition of
affection and irritation with each purposeful flick of her heels.  The
cow was head down amongst a pile of black vegetables.  As he watched,
it let loose a rope of piss.  The place had a rotten, curdled smell.
They should have gone to Nepal instead.

"Nice room.  Aircon.  Breakfast inc."

Back at his side, Kate was saying, "They're out of English-language
papers."  The cow now looked over its shoulder, calmly chewing through
a page of newsprint.  The damp ground beneath it seemed to be steaming.
Ethan began to laugh.

They fought through touts to the guest-house foyer.  Once inside, the
familiarity of backpacker land was comforting.  They waited in
reception while the attendant argued with a tall figure in cotton
trousers, whose head shook with the words, "No way.  I'm checking out.
I've paid.  One night!"

"Eleven thirty sir.  You arrived yesterday."

"Yes, exactly.  ONE night.  I'm gone, out of here.  Now, give me my
passport!"

"It says on sign sir.  Eleven o'clock."

"What sign?"

The hotelier leaned forwards across the counter and, with out looking,
pointed up above the hatch, repeating, "Eleven o'clock."

"Well fuck that.  Thirty minutes!  I am not paying."  The man had an
accent, but his English was fluent.  "Give me my passport!"

The receptionist moved back from the counter, his head wobbling
apologies.  "Not up to me sir.  Check out by eleven."

Ethan, grinning, slumped on the top of his rucksack, waiting to see how
this would play out.  Kate tapped a foot.

The complainant tried another tack.  "Tell you what.  I'll pay for
thirty minutes.  One forty-eighth of the price of one night."  He dug
some coins from a pocket.

"No sir.  Full price."  The receptionist, taking a step forward, wagged
a finger on a level with his thin moustache.  "Read the sign."

He'd strayed within range.  The tall figure suddenly had the
receptionist by the collar, was dragging him up onto the counter,
grabbing at the hand in which his passport was still tightly gripped.
Once he had hold of that hand he twisted it sharply.  The receptionist
yelped.  The passport flipped into the space between Ethan and Kate.
Ethan leaned forward, picked it up, held it out.

"Thank you."  With apparent calm the man turned back to the
receptionist, picked up his bag and flung the handful of coins at him.
"Swindler," he said, on his way out of the door.

Kate muttered something after him, then moved to the counter, behind
which the receptionist was straightening papers, tucking in his shirt.
She paid for an en-suite, air-conditioned room unseen.  Ethan smiled at
this, her apology on behalf of travellers worldwide.

Together they struggled to the top floor of the building,

down a long corridor, into the windowless furnace of their room.  From
a ratty film poster a life-size Bollywood star grinned smugly at the
rickety iron bed, the mattress stained with subcontinents.

Ethan collapsed onto it.  Kate sat down beside him.  The
'air-conditioning unit' - a box full of damp straw with a fan embedded
in one side stood in one corner.  In the other, the en-suite bathroom
was a sodden plaster cubicle with a hole in the floor and a rusty tap
at head height.  He watched Kate take these details in, reached to
stroke the back of her neck as she fought the room into a positive
light.

"Excellent."  She paused, then: "We're here."

Two.

Kate recalled two triangles, of sunlight and of shadow, locked in
competition on a manicured lawn.  The group standing in the brightness
were a Brideshead pastiche.  And on the other, purple side of the lawn,
a knot of boys were kicking a football to one another.  There were
blazers; one of the girls was wearing a hat.  Not a picnic, but a
garden party.  Somebody flipped a switch and the sound of a string
quartet threaded through the small talk.

Turning to go, she saw her sister, Rachel, before her in the
passageway.

"Bo Peep!  You made it!"

"I was on my way, in fact.  Just off."

"What do you mean?  I said be here for five and it's five now and that
means you'll have just got here."

"Yeah, well.  Not my scene really, is it?"

Rachel laughed.  "Aren't journalists supposed to be investigative?
Can't you just hang out and take notes?"

"I can pretty much guess."

"Now that's a cop out!"  Rachel was carrying a Fendi handbag, wearing
lipstick and fake tan.  Her eyes burned despite the make-up, already
wired.  "Besides.  These are what pass for my friends.  You might as
well meet one or two."

Kate allowed herself to be steered towards the melee.

Rachel's mouth was working as their footsteps became inaudible, moving
from stone to grass, but Kate wasn't listening.  Why she had fallen for
the invitation was no longer important, now it was a matter of not
being cowed.  She steeled herself as Rachel propelled her into a group
of boys, saying, "Guys, you've just got to meet my little sister."

Heads nodded; she registered a battlefield of acne, a wet-lipped grin,
an outstretched hand.  The quartet cut out; Kylie began to bounce off
the stone walls.  One face had not looked her way.  Kate saw it come up
from inspecting the ground to scan the space above the group
indifferently.  Calm blue eyes blinked once, slowly, then dropped to
appraise Kate.  She stood before their gaze, affronted yet flattered,
colouring.  Rachel was describing Kate to the others, an estate agent
talking up a dud property, and one of them was handing her a beaker of
warm Pimms, but the figure had turned and begun to walk away.  Before
she could check herself the words fell out.  "Who was that?"

Rachel breathed out smoke through a knife-cut smile.  Deliberately, as
if Kate were hard of hearing, she said, "Ethan Hughes.  Not your type."
Then, with forced jocularity, "Or so I should have thought."

The conversation ricocheted away.  Kate felt leaden, a stone dropped
into a stagnant pond.  The walls of the courtyard seemed to grow about
her.  She looked up at the nearest: arches, ivy, battlements.  In the
middle of it, a sundial.  She stared at the shape, trying to work out
the time from the faded digits and single shadow, then checked her
watch to see if the thing was accurate.  Catching herself at it, she
lifted her face to the sky, drank in the emptiness there, respite from
the cloister.

"On me head."

Something cut the space above her.  Kate followed its arc down to the
face of a boy in a sports jacket and jeans, a can of lager held out at
his side.  The football punched into his grin, which vanished.  People
laughed.  The ball bounced off a wall and came to rest at Ethan's feet.
He put a foot on top of it, rolled it backwards onto his toe, flicked
it up to waist height.  Still holding a glass in each hand he kneed the
ball once upwards, then punted it.  The ball was still going up when it
cleared the crenellations on the far side of the quad.  By then, he had
already turned his back on its course.

A voice groaned.  Someone else was clapping slowly.  Piano music
overran Kylie.  But Kate's immediate concern was that Ethan was walking
straight at her, and she was on the edge of Rachel's group but not in
it, unattended.

"Half-time."

"I'm sorry?"

"You've finished your fruit salad."  He looked at Kate's plastic glass,
in which a debris of rind and pith sat above the low-tide line.  "And
anyway, you shouldn't have to drink out of that, not if you're a
guest."

"I was fine with it."  All of a sudden the beaker's lack of
sophistication appealed.

Ethan shrugged, withdrew the offered glass.  His eyes dropped from
Kate's face to her chest, waist, feet, then rose, looking her over
unselfconsciously again.  She stood spot-welded, staring at the emblem
on his T-shirt: the Coke logo in Cyrillic.  The silence connecting them
grew.  She could snap its thread by walking away, but felt compelled
not to.  Rachel had riled her and, regardless, there was something
captivating in the boy's gaze.  It managed to be both intense and
detached at the same time.  Alternative sentences came to mind, each
more idiotically bland than its predecessor.  But the silence was over
her de fences eroding good sense, and before she could stop herself,
"So, do you like, play football, or something?"  was out.

"No.  Not really."

"Either you do or you don't, surely?"

He raised one of his eyebrows.  "I used to.  I don't now."

"So, did you pick up an injury?  What happened?"  Did it matter to
her?

"I just..  . stopped."  He smiled, amused by the interrogation.  "What
about you?  Football?  Hockey?  Darts?"

Kate allowed a smiled back, but said nothing.  Over her shoulder,
Rachel's voice in conversation.  "I reckon on three years as a gimp,
then whore out for an MBA, then money."

Both Ethan's eyebrows were raised now.  He was staring from beneath
them in Rachel's direction.  Under his breath, he whispered to Kate,
"Oh, for Christ's sake."

"What's that?"

"Listen to her."

"She's my sister."  Kate felt her smile broaden.

"Makes no difference, I'm afraid."  He drained the first glass and
allowed it to flop forwards, the stem slipping through one hundred and
eighty degrees between his fingers, spilling fruit junk onto the lawn.
Midway through raising the second, he thought better of it and extended
the glass in Kate's direction again.  Aping him casually, she emptied
the detritus from her beaker onto the grass and handed it up to him.
She watched as Ethan shared the contents between them, feeling oddly
deferential.  Their fingers touched as he gave the glass back.

Now Rachel was at Kate's side again, a hand upon her shoulder.  "Making
friends?"  she snipped.

"Not friends yet," said Ethan, turned still to Kate.  "You've not told
me who you are."

Kate's impulse was to say that he hadn't introduced himself either, but
she found herself announcing her name, "Kate Cox," awkwardly, as if
unused to its hard consonants.

"Good to meet you.  A relief, in fact."  He nodded now at Rachel, but
did not pause to let her contribute, instead continuing to Kate,
"What's your telephone number?  We could meet up."

The ease with which he assumed her as his ally before her sister was
exhilarating.  Whilst Rachel stood dumbstruck beside her, Kate took a
pen from her pocket and began to write.

Three.

Blaring horns and shouting.  The death rattle of a thousand exhausts.
Bicycle bells and jackhaminers and motorbikes and more horns on top of
horns.

Ethan held a flannel in one hand and a half-empty bottle of mineral
water in the other.  The flannel was wet through, his feet were damp in
their boots.  Kate's face was puce beneath a floppy hat, her eyes
puffy, her back a prickly rash against the cotton of her shirt.  Each
patch of hard light they traversed was a quest for the next shade.  The
heat burnt blisters in the asphalt, raised a stinging white dust,
boiled the air.

An old man staggered past the doorway in which the pair were
sheltering, weighing their next move.  He dragged a pallet piled with
bags of flour, or perhaps cement.  It hurt to watch.  Ethan brushed
against a metal awning strut and flinched.  He offered the water to
Kate.  She returned it after a single sip, and Ethan upended the bottle
to drink the rest.  Blood-warm.  Tilting his head back, sweat ran into
his eyes.

Kate's itinerary for the day a trip to the tourist office on Janpath,
and then out to the Red Fort stretched ahead impossibly.  Already
they'd been driven into the air-conditioned foyers of two banks.
Emerging from the second, a tout had scented them.  He was still at
their side now.  Pressed shirt and trousers, smart polished loafers.
His appearance irritated

Ethan.

"Let me help sir."

"We don't need help, thanks," explained Kate

"You are not understanding.  It is easier with a guide."  He took out a
comb and rescored the sharpness of his parting.

"Listen to her, will you?  Piss off."

The guide's laughter was good-natured.  "Very amusing, sir.  But
seriously, I am arranging this every day, it is my business.  Where do
you want to go?"

A second tout now circled.  He, too, was well turned out.  Apart from
when he smiled, revealing the betel-nut disaster of his teeth.  He
edged closer.  "Do not listen to him, my friend.  Let me help you
today.  Connaught Place.  Main Bazaar.  Kashmir carpet."

"We're OK.  Really."

Now an old lady was tugging at Ethan's free hand, holding one of hers
out at chest level.  Black fingers pea-rolling.  A shawl, in this heat.
Ethan shook her off.

"I have three stars.  Am government approved."

"Quiet place to look at carpets."

"No thanks.  Go away."

"Just looking, no need for buying."

The woman had hold of Kate, pawing at her sleeve.

The first tout.  "These people are a bother.  Let me arrange it.  I am
taxi-guiding for ten years."  As if to prove his worth he said
something fast and incomprehensible to drive the woman back a few
paces.

"Thanks, but no.  No thanks!"  shouted Kate.

The woman was magic king something out of her shawl.

Tout one was still smiling, shaking his head.  "None of this is
necessary.  I am fixing it every day."

Tout two.  "Tea.  Or Coca-Cola.  My brother makes len ga  Cotton pants.
Much cooler on the legs."

The woman had her bundle out, was thrusting it past Ethan, into Kate's
face.  Kate slid against Ethan; he found himself holding her up.  The
shawl fell to the ground and the woman's bundle, which she now offered
to Ethan, was moving.  The second tout was laughing and Kate had
doubled over Ethan's arm, wrenching him to one side.

"Baksheesh."

The baby's head, just inches from Ethan's, was entirely wrong.  It had
melted.  One red eye stood above a single, open hole.  Ethan couldn't
tear his gaze away.  Then his free hand grabbed the first tout's arm.
"Where's this car?  Show me, now!"

"Not a problem sir.  This way."

The guide led them to a parked Hindustan Ambassador, rousing the fat
man asleep at its wheel with a bang on the roof.  He ushered them into
the kiln of the passenger compartment and climbed in beside the
driver.

"Starting at Red Fort today, I think, sir?"

"Whatever."

Kate, pulling herself together, said, "Yes."  Ethan sensed she hadn't
the energy to query the price of a guide and a driver.

"Can we stop to pick up a drink?"  he asked.  "My girlfriend isn't
well."  He offered the flannel to Kate, saying, "Horrorshow eh?"  Her
rapid nod was childish and vulnerable and appealing again; their shared
years were plain in her upturned face.  He reached an arm around her
shoulders.

The car swung abruptly across the path of an auto-rickshaw, which in
turn edged a cyclist to a juddering halt by the side of the street.
Horns.  The guide was leaning out of the open window, gesturing at a
stall holder who emptied the contents of a bottle of something orange
labelled "Gold Spot' into a clear plastic bag.  With a twist the vendor
sealed the bag around a straw.  He repeated the procedure.  Then he put
two samos as in the guide's outstretched hand, taking a note from
between its fingers.

"No packaging," whispered Kate approvingly.  Ethan fought the impulse
to withdraw his hand.

The samos as and drinks came at them between the seat backs.  "Here.
Lunch.  My name is Bulwan."  The tout's parting caught the sun. "Please
feel free to call me Bully."

The sandstone walls either side of Lahori Gate glowered, and despite
the heat Ethan was impressed.  Bulwan turned out to be a good guide. He
steered them through the gift shops of Chatta Chowk, into Diwan-i-Am
and Diwan-i-Khas the halls of public and private audience, describing
the magnificent Peacock Throne ('having solid gold feathers') that once
stood upon the pedestal there.  They lingered in the shade, paused
beside the fountain in the royal baths.  Kate described the marble
floors in her notebook.  Ethan knelt to feel their coolness with a
palm.  Beyond the baths, Kate photographed the pearl mosque, before
Bulwan again propelled them into the calm of the Rang Mahal.  They
doubled back to view the river through the fine trellises of the Khas
Mahal and came to a halt there.  Down by the river kids were kicking a
football in the blinding light.  Kate swayed.  The sun moved in
griddled lines upon her face.

"Very hot," observed Bulwan.  To Ethan: "Forty degrees and up.  Bad
time for Delhi.  Sir should be waiting for later.  For the wet."

"Yeah.  I agree."

"You should be going north.  Kashmir is the place for July, not Delhi.
Come back later.  Agra, Varanasi, Rajasthan, Kerala.  All too hot now
for you.  Go to the mountains."

"Different kind of heat there," said Kate.  "The embassy says it's not
safe."

At this Bulwan grew animated.  "Propaganda!  I am from there.  My
family is in tourist business for thirty years.  Exactly like your
Ireland.  Always it is as safe as everywhere else.  They say it is
unsafe.  Who?  Travel companies from Europe who have never been.  And
bureaucrats.  It is nonsense!  Kashmir is best in July.  It is cool. My
family has a houseboat '

"Not now," said Kate.

"Soon then.  Tomorrow or the day after.  We have glaciers.  You will
see."

Four.

Ethan had surprised himself by asking for Kate's number.  He didn't
normally take the first step, and was bemused by his compulsion to do
so with her at first.  Had he taken note of Kate to gall Rachel, or was
there some deeper attraction?  Did it matter?  No, a complicatedness
between the two sisters pricked the skin of his indifference and that
was enough.  He'd see how far it went.

As he walked Kate down the canal path to the pub on their first date,
though, his ambivalence receded, leaving him oddly nervous.  He slowed
down to look at her.  Pearly skin, at odds with pale freckles.  No
make-up.  She checked her watch with a quick, unmannered movement that
appealed; there was a firmness of purpose in the set of her jaw,
undermined by the softness of her expression.  Where Rachel was all
poise and slenderness, her sister's beauty sat in her face.  There was
an arresting gravity about her, a forewarning of something larger than
the combative tension between himself and Rachel.  And the fact of
their sisterhood was interesting.  Ethan stopped beside an upturned
pram on the towpath, with a black plastic bag tangled round its wheels.
He forced out the question despite the counterpoint of this sordid
backdrop.

"So how close are you to Rachel?"

"She's my sister."

"I know that, but what does it mean?"

Kate shrugged.  "We don't exactly see eye to eye, if that's what you're
asking."

Ethan took a breath.  "Did she talk to you about me?"

Kate paused, a smile on her lips.  "Should she have?"

He breathed out.  "I don't suppose so, no."

"I know you're at the same college.  But I didn't get the impression
she knew much more than that."

"She doesn't know me, you're right.  But what she thinks she knows I
don't think she much likes."

Kate's eyes widened but stayed fixed on his.  Her gaze was dauntless.
He recalled her dogged allegiance to the plastic glass in the
quadrangle, the way she'd copied him in emptying it on the lawn.  She
looked away.  The moment stretched, birdsong ringing in the pause.

"So she didn't warn you off."

"No."  Kate laughed.  "And whether she had or not, who's, saying I'd
have taken any notice?"

"Right."  He paused.  "But you've not seen her since the garden thing?
Not told her about today?"

"I have seen her."

"And what did she say?"

"She didn't say anything.  Just wished me luck, that's all."

He ran a thumb along the line of his chin and smiled.  "Well '

Kate cut him off.  "Whatever it is, forget about it.  She obviously
has."

Ethan laughed.  "Yeah, well, as I say.  All that careerist,
materialistic bullshit.  Curriculum vitae and Calvin Klein.  Not my
type of thing.  She's not my type at all."

"What is your type then?"

Her attempt to mock him was endearing.  Had to hand it to Rachel, she
showed admirable restraint.  Probably expecting him to back off
unbidden.  Which amounted to... a challenge of sorts, almost a dare. He
looked down at Kate again and shrugged.  "Someone more direct, I think.
 Less calculating."

That seemed to strike the right note.  Her face rose, she smiled at him
again.  "I can deal with that."

"I just thought you should discount her ... opinion, from the start."

Her smile widened, showing uneven white teeth.  "The start of what?"

She steered them to the beer garden of a chain pub, besieged by wasps.
He let her order the drinks.  As she paused on the pub's doorstep, he
noticed that she was wearing flip-flops and that she had delicate feet.
She strode across the garden, paying no attention to the glances her
way, if she was even aware of them.  A conversation began.  He rode it
without paying particular attention, intent instead on the expressive
way Kate used her hands, the tiny cuticle moons on her fingernails
flashing, and then they were talking about travelling, which,
apparently, left Rachel cold.

"We see most things differently."

He nodded.

"Right back to the important stuff.  It starts with our dad, I think.
He left and she's never forgiven him."

"But you have?"

"He made one mistake.  Rachel sided with our mum.  I try to see both
points of view."

"What kind of mistake?"

There was a pause.  A wasp landed.  He clipped it with his fingers and
it wove angrily above their table, then returned to the rim of a spent
glass and crawled inside.

"It's not important."

"No?"

"Not in the scheme of things."

"And yet your sister excommunicated him for it.  That sounds about par
for the course."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning she's hardly consistent.  From what I know, she'll do what it
takes to get ahead herself.  She's not one to let a scruple stand in
her way."

Kate seemed to warm to this.  "Yeah, while she berates our father from
the moral high ground, she's all over the place herself.  Combine that
hypocrisy with the studied cool She tailed off.

Ethan stretched out in his chair, put his hands behind his head, looked
up at the sky.  Odd to be sitting here slating Rachel's detachment.  If
anything it was the thing that connected them.

"But she's not at this table," Kate continued.

He looked back at her, smiling inwardly.  "No," he agreed.  "She's
not."  The wasp had inched further down the glass.  In one movement he
turned it over, trapping the insect.  Kate stared at its buzzing. There
was a natural soft line around her lips; unlike her sister, it was hard
not to take her at face value.  She brushed the table top with her
fingertips.  He recalled their cool touch in the garden.  When she
turned the glass back over to set the wasp free he had to hold himself
back from reaching for her hand.

Five.

The monkey sucked expertly on its straw, drinking a Coke.  Ethan and
Kate watched it from beneath a striped awning, seated at a table on the
roof of their hotel, at ease.  There was a breeze this high up, but not
enough to ruffle the monkey's fur.  It paused from its sucking to look
back at them.  Ethan stared at its long tail; Kate noted the chain
around its neck.

From beneath them, in the street, New Delhi clamoured.  But up here
there was relative quiet.  The city was at a comfortable distance.
Other travellers at nearby tables were audible over the top of it. Kate
tuned in to a particular exchange.

'..  . Kashmir?"

"The guy in the room next to ours just got back from up there.  Said it
was the best."

"So he ... experienced ... no trouble then."

"No.  Had an unbelievable time.  They treated him like royalty.  The
two of them had a whole houseboat to themselves, just him and his
girlfriend."

"And they trekked?"

"Yeah, the works.  Five days with a guide, a couple of pony-guys, a
cook.  A hundred and fifty bucks a head.  I mean, they're hurting for
the business."

Kate glanced at the table.  The American wore a cap with a bear's head
on it.  Next to him a slim girl was staring abstractedly across the
rooftops.  The other speaker, whose accent sounded German, or perhaps
Dutch, was young, blond, wispily goa teed  He nodded earnestly at the
American, who continued.  "Which -is why it makes sense to go now.  I
mean, the land of the free is the home of the handgun.  Doesn't stop me
living there."

"Yes.  Exactly.  Last year I was in Guatemala," declared the goatee,
blinking nervously.  "Nobody suggests you go there either.  Or Fiji."

The man in the bear cap nodded back, then looked out over the rooftops
and began to whistle to himself.

Kate drummed her fingers on the table top.  It was annoying to think of
these travellers being so blase, even more irritating to find herself
caring.  She allowed her nails to tap the plastic in time with the
whistled tune.  It wasn't a competition: she had her own reason for
going, forged the previous night.

At four in the morning she had found herself half awake, tangled in the
damp sheet, with the word trussed hissing in her head.  You couldn't
trust the touts who told you where to go because they all had their own
agendas.  Their brother had a ... always.  No, but at the tourist
office the officials were pretty straight.  Proper air-conditioning. It
was a municipal building and yet it smelt of jasmine.

The hissing had become obvious: Ethan, taking another shower.  The room
seemed hotter at night than in the day: the sheet was oily against her
skin.  She joined him, picking her way through the fallout surrounding
the bed.  Her trainers had their tongues out, panting.  Sunscreen,
splayed guide books, flyers.  The top one glowed: Kashmir's Dal Lake
paradise, a real Indian treat.

Yes, but... No buts.  Her head had cleared as she stood beneath the
tap.  Kashmir wasn't the only alternative.  Darjeeling would be out of
the heat too, or they could go to the coast.  Yet Rachel's voice
echoed: 'a journalist..  . The British embassy advised against going
just about everywhere.  It was in their interests to do so.  The local
officials, however, the Indians, they knew better.  And the Kashmiri
touts on Paharganj were wide-eyed, desperate for business in the face
of all the adverse publicity.  It was about trust.  The water made a
veil of her hair.  She leaned forwards, allowing it to cool her neck.
The decision made her happy, for deep down she felt obliged to go.  "A
journalist ... investigates."

Ethan rose and went to where the monkey was sitting.  The animal was
cross-eyed, fixated on its straw, but as he squatted before it the eyes
refocused on his outstretched hand.  He offered the monkey a slice of
papaya, and saw the dilemma working in its face.  Its pupils widened
and then constricted decisively and a miniature, clawed hand dropped
the straw, flashed forwards, scratched the papaya to the ground.  The
chain rippled on the ground as the monkey made off.  Ethan saw a loop
of it about to close around a smart shoe which stepped onto the roof
and away from the noose just before it shut.

"Sir!"

Looking up, Ethan saw Bulwan's flashing teeth and parting.  The
outstretched arms of an old friend.  He appraised the guide's grin from
his haunches.  Persistence personified.  It was tiring just looking at
him.

"I have come to fulfill my promise to you!"

"Great."  Ethan indicated their table, raised an eyebrow at Kate as
Bulwan took his seat, beaming at her.

"You have thought about it.  Yes?  I am arranging everything in this
trip for you, my friends.  We are agreed?"

Kate knew that Ethan would follow her lead.  Her watch said eight
thirty exactly.  The guide had promised to be here then, and it
impressed her that he had turned up a minute ahead of time; it gave her
confidence in him.  She was suddenly happy that the nearby group was
within earshot.  They were talking about going, she and Ethan would
just go.

They haggled.  Kate turned up a fresh page in her notebook and said she
wanted to go through the cost of each component of the trip.  From the
auto-rickshaw to the bus to the houseboat, including meals and drinks
on the way.  Bulwan reeled off a price for each and then waved a hand
over Kate's scribble, addressing Ethan.

"I give you this pricing, but there is no need.  I am organizing a big
discount if you book everything with me.  Including trekking."

Ethan shrugged, looked at Kate, but she shook her head.  "You can get
us as far as Srinagar; I'll even take your houseboat recommendation,
but I want to shop about for a trek, on the ground, in Kashmir."

The monkey was sidling towards the table again now, pulling its chain
into a line.  The words on the ground rung in Ethan's head.  They
reminded him of his father.  Pompous, pseudo-militaristic.  Did she
think she could fool this tout with travel-speak?  He felt a fleeting
urge to intervene, but looked up to see Kate smiling at the guide
despite herself, and softened.  In any case, Bulwan conceded the point
with only minor head-wobbling.  "Better price for the whole thing.
All-inclusive.  One fee.  But my friend, if you are insisting '

"Which I'm afraid I am," Kate cut in.  The whistling had stopped.
Glancing towards the American's table, she saw three faces looking her
way.

"Then that isn't a problem.  I can give you recommendations.  Travel
and houseboat with Bully is fine enough.  I will need your passports
and details for tickets."

"We'll get to that.  First, the price.  What sort of a deal can you
do?"

Ethan fed the monkey another slice of papaya.  This time the animal
didn't run away, but sat beside his chair, han dover-handing the fruit
and nibbling quickly.  When it bent forwards Ethan noticed that a
crescent of fur was missing from behind its neck, rubbed raw by the
metal collar.  As Kate argued over a few dollars, Ethan considered the
length of chain and what it would take to break it.  The trouble was
it'd be hard to crack the shiny collar without snapping the monkey's
neck.  And if it ran off trailing the chain it would just be caught by
someone else.

"Agreed?"

The change of tone was meant for him.  He waited a second, still
studying the problem of the chain, then nodded without looking up.
"Sure."

"That is good, sir.  All done."  Bully took out a folded navy
handkerchief and pressed it to his brow.  Ethan noticed a dark triangle
when he pulled it away, was pleased to see new lines in the man's
ironed shirt, an imprint of the plastic chair as he stood up from it.

"Now, passports.  I will make copies for ticket purposes and return
with them in fifteen minutes."

Kate thought about objecting, about insisting she accompany Bulwan to
the copier, but didn't.  She'd just struck a deal with the man, wanted
to appear trusting.  Ethan pulled his passport from a back pocket,
tossed it onto the table.  Kate drew hers from a money belt.  "Fifteen
minutes."

He beamed at her.  "Yes."  And the smile stayed fixed as he
about-turned towards the American's table, arms extended.

Kate followed the course of his cross-hatched back, saw the nods of
recognition, heard the "Sir!  My friends!"  She forced her gaze past
the group, lifted it to the sky, felt the glare of the sun on her face
as her hat brim rose.

"You have thought about it.  You have your passports too, yes?"

The monkey, up on Bulwan's old seat, had a hand at the bottom of
Ethan's bowl, but was keeping a wary eye on him all the same.  Despite
telling herself it made no difference, Kate found her fingernails
biting the plastic again as, in the blurred periphery of her sky, the
American and his two companions were handing over their documents,
saying, "Sure we do ... like we said .. . bring on the cool."

Then there was just Bulwan, striding past again, passports in one hand,
swinging the other in a feint at the monkey, grinning at everyone in
turn.  "Shoo, shoo, shoo."  He laughed at it.  "Shoo!"

Six.

A cloud of dust boiled forward as the bus came to a halt, brakes
shrieking.  Beside her, Ethan shifted uncomfortably in his vinyl seat.
Though now safely cradled in the lap of the valley, they were still on
the outskirts of town.  Kate levered her filthy window back further,
made out rooftops up ahead.  Nearer by, two cars were drawn up at the
side of the road, noses in the shade of a silver tree.  Three men
leaned on the hoods.  One dropped his cigarette butt, ground it into
the gravel beneath a sandal, sprang lightly up the bus steps.  He
nodded at the driver, turned into the aisle, reached a stapled sheaf of
papers from his back pocket and cleared his throat.

"Some of you are getting off here.  VIPs.  For warm welcoming."  He
unfolded the pages, snapping them theatrically.  "Mr.  Clay, Mrs.
Diane, Mr.  Jan."  He licked a finger, turned the page, continued, "Mr.
Ethan and Mrs.  Kate."

The twenty-four hours behind them had stretched in Kate's head to
forty-eight.  Her decision to take the front two seats (more legroom)
won them the best view of each near miss, each rushing hairpin, each
chasm unfolding bend after bend.  During the night she'd watched the
driver and co-driver switch places at sixty miles an hour, clambering
over one another, a hand each on the enormous wheel.  Horns and
indicators and flashing lights; the windscreen swaying with crucifixes
and beads, ropes of bunting.  A foot-tall brass elephant, planted on
the dashboard, stared back at her throughout.  Six frantic, waving
arms.  It was silhouetted by oncoming trucks as, ploughing through the
blackness, the bus scattered ox-drawn carts, cyclists, rickshaws and
minibuses to the gravel led shoulders of the road.

As soon as the bus had picked up speed on the outskirts of Delhi, Kate
had felt a sickening erosion of control.  She sat acutely awake
throughout the night, staring at the back of the driver's head, willing
herself into it, straining to participate in each rushing decision. Had
he been trained properly?  How many hours could he safely drive,
without stopping?  When was the bus last serviced?  She imagined bald
tyres, shot suspension, a chassis buckling under this ridiculous load.
How old was the bus?  It had a snout, for Christ's sake.  Whilst Ethan
somehow slept, she counted the minute hand round her luminous watch
dial, up off the great plain and into the mountains.

The trio of other Westerners troubled her.  They were seated back in
the middle of the bus, diluting her adventure.  At two in the morning,
during a rest stop, Kate found herself waiting in line for a long drop
immediately behind the slim girl.  She was annoyed by the automatic
sense of allegiance she felt towards the other woman.  As she emerged
from behind the breeze blocks the American threatened to make eye
contact, but Kate let her gaze wander above the corrugated roof, into
the darkness.

Having prayed for the morning to come, its arrival only made matters
worse.  Now she could see how the road edge was unguarded for great
stretches, often on the most dangerous corners.  Eagles wheeled at eye
level, a mile above the bottom of the canyon.  They rounded a
switchback, blared horns at an oncoming military convoy, swerved gamely
out of its path.  The edge of the bus leaned into nothingness, and Kate
made out, next to the flashing river down below, the upturned wheels of
another wrecked truck.  It was tiny, as if seen from a banking cockpit,
there for an instant and then gone as they lurched the other way.

There were signs at intervals along the roadside, many of them in
English.  Aphorisms: It is better to be thirty minutes late in this
life than thirty years early in the next.  Reminders: Your wife and
children are at home.  Even rhymes, to make the point: It is not a
race, nor a rally, drive SLOW, enjoy the valley!  Ethan was awake when
this last sign sped past and laughed under his breath.

And then the road straightened, the canyon and river came up to meet
it, patchwork fields of yellow and green spread out on either side.  In
the distance, through the haze, a wall of enormous grey-blue mountains,
dwarfing those they'd come through, ranged against the skyline.  The
bus ran towards them with the gaining sun, only to pull up here, just
short of their destination.

"Mr.  Clay, Mrs.  Diane, Mr.  Jan, Mr.  Ethan and Mrs.  Kate.  VIPs,
yes!"

The guy had a flip-flop up on Ethan's seat, was leaning down between
them.  "Passports please."

Ethan offered up his passport.  Kate asked, "Who are you?"

"Representative of tour company B&K.  You are all friends of my good
brother Bulwan.  My name is Sunil.  Which of you are you?"  He imitated
Kate's tone, smiling at her.

The American and his group were making their way down the aisle.  Kate
felt another stab of we are not alone in this, equal parts security and
annoyance.  The man's toenails, flexing there on the plastic seat, were
black.  He checked off Ethan's passport against one of the
photocopies.

"Mr.  Ethan!  Welcome to Kashmir!"

The girl's hand passed three more booklets forwards.  "I'm Diane, this
is Clay, this is Yan."

It didn't feel right.  The stop was unannounced.  They were supposed to
be met at the bus station.  But the passports, the copies, looked like
something organized.  And the others, Ethan included, were up and off
the bus, hitching day bags onto shoulders and identifying rucksacks
passed down from the roof.  The American, Clay, was inspecting a
battered guitar for damage, an ironic pose Ethan was apparently
prepared to forgive, for they were shaking hands, Clay laughing at
Ethan's deadpan 'smooth ride'.  The driver, as Kate stepped forward to
the steps, appeared to wink at Sunil.  She looked back down the bus,
registered a mass of indifference faces gazing out of open windows, or
asleep, or staring at their laps.  If there had been a way of saying
something, Kate would have done so, but there wasn't.

As soon as she was clear of the bus it ground forwards in black fumes,
leaving the five Westerners and three Kashmiris in silence.  Kate knelt
beside her pack, spuriously checking its pockets.  Playing cards,
travel alarm, tiger balm.  The man with the toenails, Sunil, was over
by the cars, back to the group, talking inaudibly to the other two
Kashmiris.  One of them pushed himself off the hood of his car, a child
down a slide.  He swaggered round to the driver's door, yanked it open,
spat into the dirt.  The other driver was older, bearded, opening the
trunk of his Ambassador, motioning to Ethan to fill it with his
rucksack.  Sunil, smiling, explained.

"Two of you with me and Driver Ajay, three with Driver Natraj.  We are
not going far to houseboats.  Express route, super quick!"

One of the drivers laughed.

Sunil clapped his hands, geeing the party up.  Kate looked back down
the empty road.  The sky above it was invincibly blue, stamping hard
shadows beneath the trees, but the air was breathable and the black
nylon of her pack was no longer Delhi-hot to touch.  She handed the bag
to Ethan, who in turn swung it into the car.  Sunil threw one of the
others' packs in on top, clumped the boot shut.  "In you get.  Quick
quick."  Again he clapped his hands.

Kate found herself ushered into the sagging front seat of the car
driven by Natraj, who climbed up onto a cushion beside her.  Ethan and
Diane slid into the back.  As soon as they were in, Sunil slammed the
door and hit the biscuit-tin roof twice.  Kate twisted in her seat as
the car dog legged into the road, looking for reassurance from Ethan.
She caught his eyes after they had worked their way over Diane, who was
staring, unconcerned, at the rushing fence posts and brilliant green.
Glossy pink lips.  What was she doing in their car anyway?  Through the
plume of dust filling the rear window, Kate could see the other one
jinking along behind them.  But where were they being taken?  Natraj
could barely see over the hula-hoop steering wheel, despite the
cushion, and yet they were ripping towards the outskirts of Srinagar at
his mercy.  Was nobody else concerned?  Kate scrutinized the driver's
little face.  His eyes were set in an unblinking squint.  And his
miniature knuckles, a row of children's teeth on the wheel, looked
anxious.

"Where are you taking us?"

No answer.  Just a gradual tightening of the squint.

"I asked a question.  Where are we going?"

"I'm not sure the guy speaks English," drawled Diane.

"Where, we, going?"

Eyes still slits against the glare of the road.

"We'll find out.  Relax.  Look at that view."  Ethan pointed at the
scimitar of lake between trees.  In it dove-grey unwavering mountains
bit down on the sky.  A stone wall rubbed the sight out.  The heavy old
car picked up speed even as the road narrowed between buildings.  Kate
felt herself pressed against the door frame, then held back by her seat
belt.

"Jesus.  What's the rush?"

As if in response to this, Natraj hit the breaks and the horn
simultaneously, slowing to negotiate a pile of spilt breeze blocks.
Kate caught sight of a group of men in long white tunics, black beards,
turning to watch their progress.  A slung rifle.  The second car beeped
as it closed in from behind.  Up to their left, through a gap in the
grey-stone buildings, she glimpsed a wall made out of sandbags.  Then,
as the car again picked up speed, they passed a jeep full of soldiers
parked by the road.  Behind it, a military ambulance.  For an age,
pockmarked walls blurring past.  She had a fleeting thought about her
notebook: remember these real details.  Another ambulance.  More
sandbags.  And then they were down towards the pearl lake again,
continuing to skirt through fringing green, the walls and roofs
receding.

Natraj let out an audible breath, then said, "BK houseboats, number
one."  He nodded at the road ahead and then turned to Kate, a dent at
each temple deepening with his smile.  "Prime situations on Nagin Lake.
Mr.  Sunil is saying every visitor top V.I.P."

Seven.

Kate stood in her sister's St.  John's Wood micro-flat, staring at a
photograph in a solid silver frame.  In it, Ethan, shirtless, sat next
to her on a rug in a park somewhere, amidst the fallout from a picnic:
hummus and pitted-olive containers, empty Cava bottles, heels of posh
bread.  She peered more closely.  Muscles laddered the lean curve of
his side, like a boxer.  Staring at the camera with a look of boredom,
while she, on the other hand, squinted off to one side, flushed beneath
a cotton hat.

The frame was pure Rachel, overdone for this snap.  Its contents
intended as a signal of tacit approval, never mind that after all this
time she still rubbished Ethan at every opportunity.  Next to the
photograph stood an Anderson's binder and a perspex block carved with
thanks for a great performance from Boeing.  A corporate tombstone.
Kate looked at the sorry objects, then back at the photo.  Examining it
again, she made out a trace of amusement on Ethan's lips, despite the
deadpan stare.  Since Rachel had started work, he referred to her as
"Spreadsheet Barbie'.  Kate returned the picture to the shelf and
smiled in satisfaction.

She tapped a foot.  Rachel was audible in the other room, on her phone.
She'd answered the door wrapped in a towel, her breath wine-sharp, the
phone pressed to her ear, giving the impression she'd been on it all
day.  No matter what she was doing, her sister could never resist
talking to somebody else at the same time.  It wasn't a pleasant
thought, but Kate suffered it anyway: Rachel pulling away from a
boyfriend midway through the act, in Pavlovian response to her
mobile.

She sat on the white sofa to wait, calculating how many pounds each
square foot of the flat had set Rachel back.  From the couch to the
plasma-screen TV, six feet of cream Wilton.  One alcove of, well,
stuff.  Galley kitchen, matchbox bathroom, and a hall filled with entry
phone  Single bedroom dwarfed by Rachel's stainless-steel-framed double
bed, opposite three precious feet of built-in wardrobe.  When Kate and
Ethan had missed the last tube south a month beforehand, her call
asking for a night's floor space had evinced an acidic "No'. Given the
size of the place, she could almost see why.

Her sister was still speaking in her bedroom.  Kate stepped into the
bathroom on eighteen minutes, widened her eyes at herself and flared
her lips in the mirror.  Crooked front teeth.  Opening the bathroom
cabinet, she saw a tube of toothpaste and pack of flavoured condoms,
designer lipsticks, eye liners and jars of foundation and bronzers.  On
the shelf beneath them, assorted pill jars.  Prescription or otherwise,
Rachel ran on bent fuel.  One label said valium in a scratchy little
font.  Another, paroxetine hydrochloride.  Kate felt a pang of pity:
her sister's success somehow amounted to the contents of this cabinet
set in this ridiculous, overpriced flat.  She turned the bottles so
that their labels faced the rear of the cabinet and shut the bathroom
door firmly behind herself.  Back in the lounge she lifted the sash
window and stuck her head out into the communal cavity, needing air.

"Don't jump."

Turning back into the room: "You're done then."

"I'm sorry.  It's tricky cramming a whole social life into these
occasional weekends."

"Must take it out of you."

"Better busy than not, though."

Kate pushed the point: "No, but really, I don't know how you keep
going."

Rachel shrugged, tossed her hair back.

The hair had connotations.  At school Rachel had gone from fiddling
with it to pulling individual strands out.  Strands became tiny clumps.
During her exams a thin patch began to show pale pink at her crown. She
would sweep her fringe back to mask the imperfection.  Her hair was
back to being thicker than Kate's now, eye-catching strawberry as
compared with black, and yet the gesture remained, a distracting veil
to throw in any given situation.

Rachel moved into the galley kitchen, looked at Kate across the work
surface.  She turned on a tap and let it run.  A hollow drumming
softened as the water covered the bottom of the sink.

"How are you, anyway?  How's the Glencore health -magazine writing
stuff."

"Glencare," said Kate, regretting immediately that she felt it
necessary to correct the mistake.

"Sure."  The same gesture with the hair.

"They've offered me a promotion, I '

"Well that's a start."  Rachel cut her off.  "I just think you've got
to be sure to take it in the right direction."

"Leading where, exactly?"

"Anywhere, so long as it provides you with the wherewithal."

Kate shook her head.  "I don't remember sponging off you."

"I never said you did."

"What were you implying then?"

Rachel continued, determinedly nonchalant.  "It just baffles me.  I
can't believe you accept the man's money.  That you still see him at
all is beyond me."

"And I can't believe that you still hold a grudge."

"My my' A sigh.  "So worthy!"

The two of them stared at one another.  Kate dropped her gaze, saw her
sister's fingers flexing on the marble.  An image, of Ethan in the
photograph, passed across her mind's eye: it made her feel
unaccountably magnanimous.

"Dad's helped with the flying lessons.  No more.  And everything he's
spent on that he's put aside for you too."

Rachel looked around the room.  "I can pretty much manage without his
help."

"Can't you at least give him a ch..."

"One minute."  Rachel cut her off.  "Bear with me, will you?  I'll be
right back."  She picked up her phone and strode from the kitchen to
the bedroom, dialling as she went.  Flirtatious laughter.  She drew the
door shut behind her, continuing inaudibly.

To smother her anger, Kate stared sixty seconds round the dial of her
watch.  She stood up from the sofa.  In fact, looking carefully, it was
a sofa-bed, which cast Rachel's earlier lack of hospitality in a meaner
light.  The tap was still running.  Washing-up froth rolled like lava
onto the work-surface.  She forced herself to turn the tap off on her
way out of the door.

Eight.

The two houseboats were moored back to back, their rear decks a step
apart.  Kate and Ethan had the smaller boat to themselves.  Five Star
de Luxe.  The other one, more than twice its size, was only Luxury Star
C Class, but since the same cook and attendants serviced both boats,
and since both were furnished in the same 1930s' British style, Kate
felt hard done by.  Even the vaunted super-privacy was a joke: when
they turned in to sleep the first evening, Kate lay awake annoyed by a
song Clay a music teacher 'for which read failed songwriter', as he'd
explained was playing on his guitar.  Though he was barely singing,
each word was clear above the whispering of the lake:

"Now, too much of nothing

Can make a man feel ill at ease.

One man's temper might rise

While another man's temper might freeze.

In the day of confession

We cannot mock a soul.

Oh, when there's too much of nothing,

No one has control."

She woke to near silence, though, trod barefoot to the top deck, sat
down with her notebook and wrote:

The floorboards have been polished by thousands of feet.  It's all dark
wood furniture and beautiful threadbare rugs.  I am in the before-dawn
silence.  A line of inky mountains is materializing beneath the sky. It
goes grey, then silver, then pink.  The lake is tight and flat as
cellophane, stretched out from beneath me to the other shore.

She paused, then added: The two of us are here together.

She sensed a presence and turned to see Sunil standing behind her.  His
hair was wet and combed, his cuffs neatly folded back.  Perhaps he was
Bulwan's brother, after all.  He bore a tray draped with a lace cloth;
a silver teapot, milk jug, and pair of china cups stood upon it.  She
shut the notebook.

"Lake morning paradise," he said, setting the tray down.

Kate nodded.

"Since you are an early bird, I am arranging a shikara for you and Mr.
Ethan, for visiting our floating market.  Now.  This is a very nice
morning.  Lilies are on sale, with vegetables.  You can buy a melon."

She considered the offer, which appealed.  Up first, away before the
rest awoke.  Before she'd responded the shikara in question was gliding
into view at the bow of the houseboat.  It was long and thin, a
cushioned seat set in the middle beneath a canvas awning.  At the back
end an old man in a brimless cap wove silent ripples with a wooden
oar.

"Ten minutes for tea, then go," said Sunil.  "Mr.  Ethan must get up
now.  He should not be feeling too much exhaustion."

It took Ethan a quarter of an hour to heave himself through sleep to
the deck, but the valley was still in purple shadow when he surfaced.
He drained his cup of tepid tea in one gulp, allowed himself to be
shepherded by Sunil to the steps and down into the waiting shikara.

"Mr.  Gollam is our chief oar man.  Motor-boat arms!"  said Sunil.

The old man raised his paddle and sang, "Floating market."  He drew the
boat in a circle with languid strokes.  More practised tourist patter:
"All aboard."

The market was a long, glassy paddle away.  Ethan stretched out on the
embroidered cushions, his feet up on the boat's wooden edge.  They
watched a man on the bank, dextrous with a cut-throat razor and shard
of mirror.  Kate took a photograph of Gollam's oar as it stirred the
black water without apparently breaking the surface.  She took out her
notebook and wrote Razor, oar, water like oil, but it gave her little
satisfaction: the point was what you couldn't see.  Allegiances,
alliances, tensions, betrayals, that was what she should find out
about.  She turned from the oar to Gollam himself.

"Is life difficult in Srinagar?"

He smiled, his grey head seeming to shake and nod at the same time.

"With the troubles?  Do, you, find, difficulty?"

Again the subtle equivocation of his head.  He fixed his gaze somewhere
over Kate's.

"Violence?  Conflict?"

"Floating market, up ahead.  Beautiful photography in early morning.
Buying lovely souvenirs."

They crisscrossed between punts piled with pale lily roots, marrows,
marigolds and long green reeds.  Every now and then a shikara drew
alongside and shawls, chess sets,

carved salad bowls were thrust into their laps.  Kate waved them off.
There were floating trays of lotus flowers, pumpkins, tomatoes and
bulrushes.  The morning air was fresh as cut cucumbers, suffused with
chatter and the lapping of wavelets.  Kate lay back against Ethan on
the upholstery, felt the warmth of his chest as it rose and fell
beneath her cheek, heard and felt the beat of his heart.

Soon the sun was up and the market vendors began to float away.  Ethan
saw how Gollam's ears, proud of his skullcap, glowed red as he
pirouetted the boat through backlit glare.  Their return route to Nagin
Lake was different, took them through dark canals, beneath a splayed
wooden bridge and past dilapidated stone buildings which appeared to be
sliding into the waterways.  Before one such house Gollam stopped
paddling.  He paused for a minute, bottom jaw chewing on nothing, then
pointed with an oar at the shattered facade.

"At night-time it is very dangerous here.  New bullet holes.  Look!
Rocket damage too.  Made by bad, dangerous men."  He gripped Ethan's
forearm.  "Your wife asks is it safe?  You and she must remain with Mr.
Sunil and everything will be A OK.  It is not good for you
otherwise."

Ethan patted Gollam's arm in return.

"My wife and I hear where you're coming from.  Rupees to Mr.  Sunil
only.  Loyal customers of BK Travel Associates."

Back at the houseboats, the morning bled into a soporific afternoon.
There was a space on the top deck of each for sun loungers.  Kate
noticed Ethan notice Diane stretched out in a bikini, and was doubly
annoyed by the insults of his stare and her oblivious, bare flesh.

That aside, the view of the lake was breathtaking.  The line of
inverted mountains was rock steady in the mirror.  It seemed to waver
more the right way up, white-tipped in the crystal air.  They ate a
lunch of vegetable curry and roti in the little dining room (the May
1978 edition of Polo International Magazine next to a selection of
Agatha Christies on the carved rosewood table in the corner) and then
Kate spent an hour rowing a leaky canoe up and down the edge of the
lake beneath overhanging willows.  Dabchicks cut across her bow,
scooting over lily pads on stunted wings.  She shipped her paddle and
lay back, watched an electric hummingbird quivering against the
greenness overhead.

One minute the tiny bird was there, though, in the silence, and the
next it had been sucked into a sky split open.  Two jets tore across
the water, chasing their reflected gun-metal bellies.  Kate lurched
sideways in the boat, turning to watch.  Like a pair of skates, the
planes came apart and sliced sideways, seeming to accelerate into the
curve, then disappeared from view, leaving a serrated rumbling in their
wake.  The quiet refolded itself as she sat in a circle of fading
ripples.

Later she lashed the canoe to the back of the houseboat and climbed the
steps to the top deck to find the entire party assembled, drinking
cocktails.  Sunil poured a glass of whatever it was from the pitcher in
his hand and offered it to her, saying, "Sundowner tradition, very
British.  We have kept the good and given you back the bad!"

Kate hesitated a second and Sunil seemed to identify her concern.  "On
the house.  All inclusive."

"Thank you."

"Yes, we take the best care of you."  He smiled at Clay, Diane and Jan
in turn, then at Kate and Ethan, saying, "Cheers."  Everybody raised
their glass, except Sunil, who raised both hands instead.  In the
silence that followed he continued.  "Now, trekking."

Kate let him explain his proposal, but her mind was already made up. It
didn't matter that Sunil was offering a discount for the group, claimed
his guides were 'absolutely the most trustworthy on the whole face of
planet earth, further even', was prepared to add an extra day and
upgrade the supplies to "Luxury A Class' at no extra cost.  Neither did
she care that the others were content to grin and nod and sip in front
of him, or even that she liked Sunil's manner, thought the deal
comprehensive, was prepared in principle to undertake the trip as part
of a larger group.  It was about making her own decision, choosing
between alternatives.  Since meeting Bulwan in Delhi she'd felt as if
she were on a rail.  The day-and-a-half's rest on the lake, in a
climate which allowed her to think, had restored a sense of what this
trip was supposed to be about.

Now Clay was saying, "Can't see the point in re-inventing your wheel.
We're in, yeah, honey?"

Diane nodded, smiling.  Her row of perfect teeth looked naked in their
whiteness.

Jan asked a question about a glacier, stroked his goatee, approved
demonstratively of Sunil's answer.  "Me too.  I am in."

Ethan nodded too, but Kate could sense him tense up as the rest of the
party turned her way.  She glanced down to see him resolutely staring
at the sun, which, impaled on a peak, was bleeding into the lake.  She
pressed on.

"It does sound good, but I'd like to shop around, to make some
comparisons.  No offence, Sunil, but tomorrow I'll go into town and see
what else is available."

Sunil scrutinized the deck, his head on one side.  When he looked back
up at her he appeared worried and offended in equal parts.  "No need. I
am organizing number one trek for you.  BK quality.  Three pony guides.
New tents.  Everything will be good.  Two eggs for breakfast. Fresh
fruit.  Safe."

"I understand that, but I still want to check."

She saw Ethan's toes flex on the deck, his gaze still out across the
water.  There was a pause.

"I think that is fair enough," said Jan.  Kate let out an appreciative
breath.  "We'll make sure yours is the top deal, OK."  He raised a
glass.  "Then everyone will be happy."

Clay shrugged and said, "Delirious."  Diane, smirking, sipped her
drink.  Something a kingfisher perhaps arrowed into Ethan's red lake.

Jan repeated the phrase "OK?"  pleased to have become a diplomat.

Kate searched Sunil's face.  It was reconfiguring, nodding reasonably,
a decision made.  "Fine then.  I understand.  Mr.  Gollam will take you
to town for researching other trekking opportunities.  Morning time is
best."

"I can catch a cab, that's fine."

Now he shook his head emphatically.  "No.  We look after you.  Mr.
Gollam is taking you, no problem.  Be ready at ten a.m."

Nine.

She saw wind lines score the lake, fanning towards the shikara.
Treetops bent suddenly on the distant shore, willow branches slapping
the water.  Gollam was swinging the boat around with strokes that broke
the water.  His blade caught the surface, showering Jan.

"Big problem."

"No, it doesn't matter.  It will dry."

Gollam shook his head.  "No, big knock-down wind, problem."

Other shikaras on the lake were making for the lee shore, as they were.
When the wind hit, Gollam's oar dug stationary holes.  He tweaked the
prow downwind and the canvas awning immediately swelled, threatening to
tip them over.  Kate and Jan instinctively counterbalanced the boat.
Jan smiled, rolling his eyes at Kate.  "Cool," he said.

But Gollam's face was full of apparent concern.  His smile had hardened
to a line.  With the boat at this raked angle his oar worked as a
rudder.  They were being blown along, but not in the direction Kate
needed to go.  She struggled with a doubt was this all part of the
performance?

Jan had offered to come with her, which gave Ethan the excuse not to.
Sunil made a great show of sending them off with Mr.  Gollam.  He would
look after them door to door.

It was a compromise.  A chaperone would perhaps get in the way, make it
harder to strike a separate deal, but Sunil's resolve proved
insurmountable.  "We must look after you," he explained.  "You are our
special guests."

Though she hadn't much felt like it, Jan insisted on a conversation as
they trawled across the lake.  At first, watching him pick at his
goatee self-consciously, she wondered whether there was an ulterior
motive behind his camaraderie, but the getting-to-know-you questions
remained anodyne.  He had a habit of blinking and looking to one side
when he spoke, endearingly under-confident despite his bravado.  For
form's sake, Kate asked her own questions back.  Jan was a student of
international development (she nodded as if in recognition) from
Rotterdam, midway through a four-month trip round India.

"I fried in Rajasthan," he explained, blinking over her shoulder.  "But
I wanted something more extreme.  Kashmir, you know, it has this
forbidden aura, an edge."

She found herself smiling to close the discussion down.

And now they were tucked into the bank, miles from town, and Gollam was
tying the shikara to a tree trunk, explaining "We must wait.  Last week
wind knock down seven boats.  It is summer wind.  People were drowning.
Hot wind very dangerous for shikara."  He patted the awning as he sat
back down.

The three of them waited in silence.  It was impossible to know whether
the danger was real or whether he was making it up.  Should she assert
herself and insist they go on, or trust Gollam and wait?  Kate brooded,
staring at the endless reconfiguration of reflections in the surface of
the water, and suffering the memory of a worse disorientation.

Her first passenger flight.  Ethan, a few paces ahead of her, slowing
as they approached the airfield.  She carried on walking, clicking her
biro.  It was important to project absolute confidence from the outset.
She came to a halt on the grass in front of the row of little planes
and checked her clipboard.

"We're in UGW."

"Right."  Ethan paused.  "What does that mean?"

"The blue one.  With the yellow stripe."

They climbed into the cockpit.  She took in the frayed seat with its
shot springs, the sclerosis of peeling paint around the instruments.
Repeating her instructor, she dismissed these cosmetic imperfections,
explaining how each aircraft was subject to rigorous mechanical
testing, but Ethan was busy figuring out the complication of his
harness and seemed only to notice the flaws as they were pointed out.
His single comment as, finally, he tightened off the straps was "My mum
had a Fiat Panda once."

Despite the cramped configuration of seats and sticks and pedals, he
managed to stretch out and look somehow relaxed.  So at ease, in fact,
that she had begun to feel self-conscious as she went through the
regulation warnings, explaining how he must tell her if he felt
uncomfortable at any point during the flight.  She lowered her
sunglasses and finished up by telling him he mustn't touch the dual
controls, particularly the pedals: "It's an easy mistake if you've got
long legs."

"No problem."  He held his hands up, as if in surrender, and jiggled
his knees.

She checked the sky whilst taxiing to the runway threshold, noted the
bank of umber cloud moving away to the west, saw the windsock by the
clubhouse flick once and then flop flat.  She squared the plane up on
the centre line and, in the moment before shoving in the throttle
lever, checked Ethan again: he was gazing at the end of the runway,
eyes apparently unfocused, as if staring from the window of a
traffic-jammed bus.  The only indication that he was paying attention
was the sound of his voice in her headset as she throttled up: "Chocks
away!"

Once they were airborne, Ethan's obliviousness started to make her
nervous.  It felt as if the wind was much stronger than the forecast
had predicted.  What was he thinking?  The most interesting terrain was
down where the river flushed out into the sea; hills crumpling into
cliff tops, sheer above intermittent strips of yellow and blue.  She
headed in that direction because he would be impressed by the sight
whatever.  But to hold her track over the ground she had to crab
sideways, meaning the wind speed was definitely up, and although the
river was slackening, opening its jaws beneath them, something made her
execute a precautionary turn, one hundred and eighty degrees, to scan
in the direction of the airfield.  Her stomach lurched.  The cloud bank
had doubled back: it was clamping down on the airfield like a garage
door.

Immediately she was on the radio, trying to keep her voice steady as
she spoke.  Glancing sideways she saw Ethan ease the headphones away
from his right ear and scratch his cheek.  The first drops of rain
began to marble the cockpit glass.  She wasn't qualified to fly in
anything less than full visibility.  Surely someone should have warned
her if the weather was this unstable?  Although the plane was
descending rapidly, from four thousand through three, two-five, two, to
a thousand feet, they were making slow progress.  Inching into the
strong wind, the fields scrolling beneath them laboriously.  Up ahead,
the railway line wasn't where it should have been and the river stopped
short of the hills.  The familiar horizon had been stolen and the
ground seemed to be rising in her chest.  She watched the altimeter as
it dropped further, through seven hundred feet, knowing that the
airfield had to be just there, straining to make it out over the
nose.

At five hundred feet she drew blood from the inside of her cheek and
simultaneously saw the road at right angles to where it should have
been, as impossible as the drumming of rain in her headset.  She
reached for the radio volume knob to shut the noise out, but turned it
the wrong way and delivered a shriek of feedback into both headsets.
Ethan flinched beside her.  She said, "Sorry," loading the apology with
much more than she meant.  This wasn't happening.  She couldn't be lost
on her first passenger trip.  And yet she was on the verge of making
the humiliating radio call for help, struggling for the correct
euphemism position uncertain, temporarily disorientated, location
unknown when miraculously, over Ethan's shoulder, she saw the windsock
and clubhouse.  She was bisecting the airfield illegally, at half the
circuit height, and yet still melting with relief to be above the strip
and banking harder left into an unauthorized base turn.  She whispered
"Thank you' into the mouthpiece, the control column shaking like a
drill in her right hand and, to steady herself for landing, began to
tell Ethan how, another time, he'd see what she meant: on a clear day
you were above it all, you could see for miles.

He patted her knee and smiled his best 'thank you' back.

The pale reflection of her face, mouth set, was there in the water
beside the shikara.  She looked away.  The memory tasted metallic.
There were other boats on the lake and although Gollam's concern to
stay put still felt real, Kate was suspicious.

"Can't we take the roof off?"

He wobbled his little head.  Was it a no, or equivocation?

"It's just tied on, isn't it?"

"Not only the top."  Now he tapped the wooden side of the boat.  "The
wind is pushing everywhere."

"But what about them?"  Kate pointed into the distance.  "They're
carrying on."

Gollam shrugged.

"Can we perhaps walk round instead?"  asked Jan.

Gollam said, "Too far," prompting Jan to reminisce about his trek up
Mount Kilamanjaro.  It seemed to Kate that the wind had dropped anyway.
Not just in the shelter of the bank, but across the lake too.

She interrupted Jan.  "We'll be late back."  She tapped her watch face.
"Mr.  Sunil will be worried.  Take the roof off and we'll be OK."

Gollam's mouth bit nothing.  Yet he was untying the awning with slow
fingers.  Kate helped, as did Jan.  He smiled.  "We can always swim if
we fall out."

With the roof stowed Gollam reluctantly eased them back out onto the
lake.  The wind had dragged up little waves which splashed against the
shikara's stern.  They skidded quickly before it.  Gollam worked his
oar in silence, the muscles in his neck and throat stiff with
concentration.  The veins in the man's hands made them look suddenly
old.  Kate felt momentarily guilty, then bolstered herself.  Having
come this far in the right direction, she must not give up.

But the jetty Gollam made for, when they reached the lily strewn town
waterways, belonged to what looked like another houseboat.

"How do we get into town from here?"  asked Jan.

"This is the town.  For trekking.  Good trekking company based here.
Mr.  Sunil has made you an appointment."

Jan was climbing out of the boat, but Kate put a hand on his knee.
Exasperated, she pleaded, "Can't you just take us to the town, Mr.
Gollam?  The ordinary town?"

Gollam again bit nothing.  He looked genuinely worried.  "This is good
company.  Main town is not safe for you.  Talk with this man."  He
nodded at the jetty.  A figure had materialized on it.  He wore a white
tunic and had an impressive ebony beard.  Before she could object,
strong hands were helping Kate to her feet.

She and Jan were ushered into the main room of the houseboat.  Kate
noted with dismay yet more rich carvings, the same sumptuous style.
This wasn't an office, these people were impossible to deal with.  They
were cashing in on the purported danger.  Yet Jan, who, in his board
shorts, looked particularly young and oblivious before this imposing
man, was accepting the offer of a cup of tea, and making a start.

"We have a quotation for trekking from BK, Mr.  Sunil."  He nodded at
Gollam, looked back at the beard and continued, "But we want you to
quote too.  To compare prices."

"Yes.  That I can happily do."

Kate drew breath, but the man continued.

"First though, tell me what price you have been given.  What is the
deal I am to compete with?"

Jan explained.  The man was pouring tea.  Handing a delicate china cup
deferentially to Kate, not even listening to the detail of Jan's
nervous gabbling.  When it was over, he left a theatrical pause, looked
at them both in turn, avuncular.

"Go with Mr.  Sunil," he said, stroking his beard regretfully.  "I am
unable to compete with such a price."

Kate laughed out loud.  "Oh come on!  This is India.  You expect us to
believe you're not working together, in cahoots?"

The man grew before them, thrust out a tank-like chest.  His voice
boomed in the little room.  "This is Kashmir."  He left a pause.  "Mr.
Sunil is a respected businessman.  His is a different company.  It is a
good deal.  You would do well to go with him."

Now it sounded almost like a threat.  Jan was looking out of the
window, scratching his schoolboy chin, regretting having offered to
come, no doubt.  But she would work this out.

"We appreciate your advice.  We're grateful.  But I want to make sure
we're getting the best deal.  You would feel the same way in my
situation."  Her teacup's reflection rose to meet itself in the
polished wood.  Jan let out a sigh.  She gripped his skinny upper arm
and led him through the houseboat, Gollam and the beard in their wake.
On the jetty, she turned back.

"We'll walk into town from here and make our own way home."

The beard shook.  Gollam looked up at it, confused, something like
despair in his upturned palms.  Words were exchanged in another
language, then the man turned back inside and Gollam was trotting
behind them, over the rattling planks.  "Mr.  Sunil said to keep with
you.  Please, I must follow.  It is my duty to help you to get back."

Ten.

Diane lifted her foot up onto the wicker stool and stretched forwards
over a long brown leg to paint her nails.  A cotton sarong parted over
her thigh, revealing a shard of white bikini, stark against the tan.
Though it was still mid-afternoon the sky, in the aftermath of the
wind, was cloud-shot purple.  The same colour as the nail varnish. Kate
enjoyed the feeling of Ethan's hand on the back of her neck as she
leaned against him, but was suspicious, at the same time, of where he
might be looking.

Jan was midway through his account.  If he wanted to take the credit,
that was fine by Kate.  Leaving aside the irritation of Diane's posing,
she was content.  Ethan's tenderness was as comforting as his evident
relief on their return, hours late, from town.

After she and Jan left, the wind had ripped the back end of their
houseboat free of its moorings.  As Ethan worked with Sunil and the
cook to winch it back to the bank, two shikaras, making their frantic
way back across the lake, had been knocked flat by a further gust.
Sunil insisted on Gollam's unparalleled oarsmanship, but ran out of
words in the final hour before their return.  After helping her out of
the boat, Ethan had kissed Kate's brow, cupping her face with (she was
almost sure of it) trembling hands.

"So when we finally get to shore it's only another houseboat, with this
bearded guy that tries to tell us we already have the best deal.  He
didn't even want to give us his own quote.  It was that lame."

Clay, uncoiling the peel of an orange with his Swiss Army knife, was
smiling to himself.

"But we said no way.  And to be fair to Gollam, when he saw we were
serious, he gave up with their scheme.  He even pointed us in the right
direction, towards town, and insisted on coming along for the ride."

Kate thought Jan could have dwelt a little more on Gollam's reluctance
to show them to the Tourist Reception Centre mentioned in the
guidebook, and his apparent unwillingness to interpret her map.  As it
was, they stumbled upon a street full of travel agencies before they
reached Residency Road anyway, and were immediately swamped by the
inevitable waterfall of touts.

"Of course, as soon as we're in the town properly there's hundreds of
guys more than interested.  I mean, how do you say they were?
Persistent?  Like flies on a shit."

Clay laughed.  Ethan's chest rose and fell behind Kate's back.  Diane
had her head on one side, admiring the finished article.

"They were literally fighting to speak to us.  It was intense!"

Diane stood and stretched up onto her toes, pushing her shoulders back
and lifting her long arms above her head.  Even standing, her sarong
revealed thigh.  When she'd done, she settled herself to paint the toes
of her other foot.

"Anyway, one of them had cards and a brochure and we ended up going
along with him.  He seemed like the best for a bet."

Hearing this flat summary, Kate bit her lip.  A map without contours.
She'd already written up the ordeal in more detail, in her journal.

The man's fat hand is clamped around my wrist, reeling me into the
shop.  Bales of rolled rugs and shelves sag under dusty pottery.
There's jars of beads and pickled eggs and one that looks like it
contains teeth.  And an outbuilding smell.  The crowd following us
stops short of the threshold, beaten back by hard words.  Even agitated
Gollam doesn't make it inside.

Once we're in the shop he leaves go, all courteous.  He shows us
through to a windowless office.  There's a Formica-topped desk, a
yellowed phone and some plastic chairs.  More tea appears from
somewhere.  These people are above all polite.  The agent gestures at a
big faded map on the wall behind his desk.  His eyes jump from fan to
me as he explains 'off-beaten track' routes and local' prices fan just
blinks.  The tout dismisses my account of the deal we've been offered
as 'second rate, tourist price, tourist destination'.  (Tell us
something we don't know.) There are concentric tree-stump rings beneath
his pointing arm, and his fingers twitch.  He's that eager for our
business.

"It's always the same in these countries," Jan was continuing.  "I
remember this one time in Laos when I..."  Kate let the tale dissolve
as he told it, stared out across the calm again, green lake, waiting
for him to get back to the point.

But when Jan paused Diane took over, reminiscing about a swindle she
and Clay had avoided in Honduras involving out-of-date currency, bus
tickets and a boy with a plastic snake.  Kate could feel Ethan's
annoyance building in response to such familiar one-upmanship.  His
chest tightened behind her, the rhythm of its in and out slowing.
Diane, mid-story, was flicking between the faces of her audience and
becoming self-conscious: only Jan was showing overt interest and Clay
was focusing intently upon his ribbon of orange peel, evidently
embarrassed.  Diane swung the second finished foot down onto the deck
and cropped the end of her story, reddening.  Clay helped her out.
"Keep going," he encouraged Jan.  "How'd your trip end?  Any rubber
reptile action?"

Before Jan could answer, there was a commotion in one of the
wood-framed houses set back from the shore, where Sunil, the cook, and
the other houseboat attendants lived with their families.  Raised
voices split one another.  Everyone on the boat turned to look at the
noise, through the trees.  A door banged open and a figure stumbled
backwards out of it, knocking over a plastic bucket.  Kate made out a
whiteness of milk turning black in the dirt.  More shouting.  The
figure, Gollam, was pulling on his skullcap, straightening his thin
frame and wagging his head and raised hand vehemently.  And Sunil was
emerging from the house now, his long shirt agape, waving Gollam away
with a dismissive, imperial flicking of his fingers.  Since Gollam
didn't apparently want to go away, Sunil continued to advance, backing
the oarsman down the path towards the bow of the bigger houseboat, to
which his shikara was moored.

Kate stood to keep the pair in view.  Sunil pushed past Gollam and
stepped down to the edge of the lake.  He was still talking fast and
gesturing, oblivious to a foot that had strayed into the water,
following it with the other even, so that he was knee-deep amongst the
mud and reeds, the cotton of his trouser bottoms clinging to his
calves.  He bent to untie the shikara.  While his fingers worked at the
wet rope, Gollam stayed rooted on the bank, his arms crossed, still
shaking his head and gabbling.  Eventually Sunil freed the boat and
hauled it away from the steps, straining against the rope to drag the
back end round through the shallows, a reluctant dog on a leash.  Only
when Sunil was obviously gathering himself to shove the shikara out
into the lake did the old man move, and then too late he was forced to
wade after it, flailing for the rope end, chest deep and cursing.  By
the time he'd pulled it to the bank Sunil was a white shirt-back
between the trees.  Gollam's head-shaking became rueful as he climbed
into his seat at the rear.  With dignified strokes, he eased the
shikara back into the lake.  Throughout the altercation neither of the
pair looked once at the group on top of the houseboat.

There was silence, before a riff of birdsong, over which Diane said,
"Somebody's got a temper."  She let the 'r' stretch sarcastically.

"So you've got us another deal then," said Clay.

Jan was still blinking in the direction of Gollam as he minimized into
the rippled distance, and in any case Kate couldn't resist continuing.
She forced herself to nod nonchalantly.  "If we want it.  We've got six
days instead of five, for twenty-five dollars a head less.  Everything
included, same catering, and a route that takes in some untrodden stuff
round Sonamarg.  Only if you guys are interested, though."

"Twenty-five bucks," breathed Diane.  "I mean, you spent a day of the
trip hassling for '

Ethan cut her off.  "It's a saving of a hundred and twenty-five dollars
between us.  Here that's a fortune.  We get an extra day in a less
visited area.  You can use your saving to buy more of those carved
doilies, or whatever it is they keep flogging you.  I'd say Kate and
Jan did us a favour.  And anyway, they spent a day of their trip
hassling, not yours.  You got to ... tan."

Kate saw Diane's throat colour again and felt a surge of gratitude.
When Ethan wanted to be made his opinion count; it came reinforced by
his indifference to what anyone thought of him as a result.  Diane sat
down and drew her sarong across her legs.  Ethan squeezed Kate's side
gently, settling something larger than this tension.

"We each get to make our own decision."  Kate spoke kindly in Diane's
direction.  "There are two others already signed up for the trek.  If
you prefer to go from here instead, that's up to you."

"No," said Clay.  He'd torn his coil of orange peel into a handful of
chunks, and tossed them now into the darkness of the lake.  "What'd be
the point in paying more for less of an experience?  I'm in."

"Me too."  Diane's teeth caught the light.  "You're right.  Twenty-five
dollars a head is, well, twenty-five bucks.  You guys did well."

Kate smiled at Diane's feet.  Toes smooth as pebbles in a stream bed.
"Good, then.  Because, they're sending a guide round to pick up whoever
wants to come.  A little bloke called Nabbi; he's been mountain guiding
for years.  We just have to be ready to set off, tomorrow morning at
nine."

Eleven.

They hadn't spoken with Sunil since returning from town the previous
afternoon, so Kate crossed to the bank in search of him before checking
out.  The plank drawbridge sagged as she trod in its middle, then
bounced her onto the miniature path which led through trees.  White
half-tyres ran beside the gravel track, pointing the way.

Needless to say, Ethan thought she was being oversensitive.  It wasn't
as if they owed Sunil anything.  The tip they'd agreed on was generous
enough, and he'd had the benefit of their custom this far.  But Kate
didn't want to leave without saying goodbye to his face; it would
somehow be an admission of guilt if they just melted off the houseboats
in silence.

The real houses were nothing like as well built as those floating on
the lake.  The biggest still only had a corrugated tin roof.  An awning
made from joined fertilizer sacks threw a shadow over the plastic
chairs and child's tractor on the dirt front yard.  An open fire pit
smouldered nearby.  Apart from that, there was just a water butt made
out of an old oil drum, positioned to catch the run-off, and some
earthenware jars that, presumably, were used for storing rice.  Kate
took in these details and reminded herself to write them down when she
next had time to make some notes: poverty.

A noise contradicted the impression.  She knocked on the door, trying
to work out what it was.  When it opened there was Sunil's outline
saying hello, and some children were squatting behind him in a room
devoid of furniture, as far as she could see.  But the noise was louder
and the contradiction obvious: Ethan's Tekken soundtrack.  Although the
room was bare it wasn't empty, the children were in fact clustered
round a Play Station before a wide screen TV.

Kate stopped short, suddenly unsure of what to say.  Sunil lowered a
bowl of cereal to his side and drew himself up expectantly.  The spoon
in his other hand made tiny circles in the air.  There was a pause;
even the Tekken seemed to stop.  Then one of the children squeaked.

"Die dead mother."

Kate smiled, but Sunil remained impassive.

"Yes?"

"We wanted to thank you, for your hospitality."

Sunil inclined his head.

"Here."  She held out an envelope containing the group's tip.  Sunil
lifted the flap to see what was inside.  His lips came apart, showing
clenched teeth.  A muscle tightened in his jaw.  He refolded the flap
and again tilted his head again in what looked like gratitude.  But the
envelope was coming back.

"I thank you, but cannot accept.  We have not looked after you so well,
or you would not be leaving with others."

Kate sighed.  Her upturned palms said she would not take the envelope
back.

"Keep it.  We've enjoyed ourselves."

"I cannot."

"Well, give it to Mr.  Gollam then.  He took care of us in the big wind
yester '

"No!  We do not accept it!"  Sunil's eyes had grown.  The envelope was
up in her face, trembling.  It was absurd to have a tip refused in
India.  The Tekken had started up again, body blows and grunting
invaded the stand-off.  An overwhelming desire that he stop this and
take the money swamped Kate.  She took a step backwards, retreating
into the yard, beginning to turn away with her smile still fixed.
"Please."

But his hand was on her shoulder.  She pulled away from it, stumbling
sideways over the toy tractor.  Sunil paused, momentarily deferential
again while she righted herself and regained her composure.  Then his
resolve hardened.

"I am not accepting this baksheesh."

The dirt patch between them grew as she retreated.  Sunil waved the
envelope at her once more, then tossed it into the fire pit.  For a
second it rested flat and white on the coals, then a red eye appeared
and the envelope twisted into smoke.  She looked up to protest but
Sunil was already walking back inside, pulling the door shut behind
himself emphatically, cutting the high kicks and body slams dead.

Technically, of course, she'd handed it over.  What he'd decided to do
with the money was none of their business.  It wasn't a lot anyway. But
there was something unnerving in Sunil's about-face that Kate decided
she'd rather not share.  Unless anybody asked, she wouldn't relay the
detail of the encounter.  The little path of stones wound her back to
the houseboats.  It was all part of the experience.

Twelve.

"I like your shoes."

"Excuse me?"

The rest were with them on the forecourt, busily sorting kit into two
piles as instructed, stuff for taking and stuff to leave.

"You have good shoes.  Very nice for trekking."

Ethan looked down at his North Face boots, then at the guide's feet, in
a tidy pair of Nikes.  "Well, thanks."  He shrugged.

"No, it is important.  Best thing to have for walking is a strong set
of shoes.  I hope for a tremendous pair myself, one day."

Ethan stopped packing and scratched his head.  The guide was standing
too close, needlessly encroaching on his space.  What was he talking
about?  He took a step back, nonplussed.  "But yours aren't bad,
either."

"Too old."  Nabbi twisted one foot sideways, pointed to where a crease
above the sole threatened to become a tear.  "They were a present. From
a good friend.  We walked many miles in the mountains.  He was my
Japanese friend and client.  At the end of trekking he gave them to
me."

"Ah."

"A present," Nabbi repeated, smiling.

Ethan stood up straight, six inches taller than the guide.  "My feet
are a bit bigger than yours, though.  Bad luck."

"No.  Not so much bigger."

Ethan glanced about.  Nobody appeared to be listening to the
conversation.  He placed his foot beside Nabbi's to finish it.

But Nabbi wriggled his toes, looking down at the mismatch.  "These are
too small anyway," he said.  "My Japanese friend had little feet, like
children."  More toe-wriggling, a salesman's winning smile.  "I need
extra room for thicker socks."

Ethan sighed, turned his back on the guide and surveyed the scene.  Jan
was playing Hacky Sack in the sun, but didn't seem able to manage a
sequence of more than five.  The contents of Diane's rucksack could
never have come out of it.  Everybody else had completed the sorting
exercise, but she was still staring down at an apparently insoluble
problem.  Her sponge bag was the size of Kate's bedroll.  Clay offered
to help and she cut him dead.  He retreated, squealing, "Well fuck you,
Cleopatra," in mock affront.

Two figures emerged from the van, speaking with the fat man Kate had
apparently dealt with in town.  The first was familiar, with his
close-cropped dark head and angular frame.  The other was swarthy
enough to pass for one of the guides.  But the fat organizer was
introducing both, to Clay and Diane first (she could, it seemed, turn
both charm and frustration on or off at will), then to Jan and Kate,
Nabbi next, and finally to Ethan, who made the link as he shook the
first man's hand: day one, Delhi, the argument with the check-out
clerk.

"This is Ethan.  Ethan, meet your fellow trekkers, Rafi and George."

No recognition in Rafi's eyes, and George was new.  New and old.
Pushing forty, at least.  He had a pot belly under his T-shirt, greying
hair, weak eyes behind glasses, and a soft-palmed handshake, which
contrasted to Rafi's eager, military grip.  Ethan accommodated both,
gave a brief nod in each direction.

The fat tout's rings flashed as he clapped.  "Off we go now.  Make
progress."

Nabbi had already taken his position in the driver's seat.  He smiled
out of the window, eyes bulging, waving at everyone to climb in behind
him.  Ethan took his seat.  Kate, who waited to see that their packs
were roped down securely on the roof rack, was the last to climb in.
The tout waved them off with a fixed grin.

They swung through the town, Jan, Diane and the newcomers immediately
in an itinerary-swapping conversation which compelled Ethan to stare
out of the window at rushing stalls and shop fronts  A tray of baking
compact discs.  Birds in a wicker cage.  A film poster showing two
swollen men with moustaches and handguns, either side of a rearing
horse.  Nabbi squirrel led the minibus through a maze of little
streets, weaving through cars and bicycles.  He turned some music on,
providing a tinny soundtrack of sitars and synthesizers and nasal
voices which seemed to swerve in time with the van, as if Nabbi were
driving to the beat.  Then the song was suddenly out of time; they came
to an abrupt halt, the van rocking back on its springs, spent.

"Jesus, look at that!"

Ethan leaned across Kate, following the line of her finger as it jabbed
against the window.

"Angry men," said Nabbi.

"Ohmigod!"  yelped Diane.

Nabbi struggled for reverse, crashing the gears, an elbow over his
headrest.  Ethan stretched further to see what they were talking about.
Kate began fumbling in her day bag.  Men in uniform were dragging
something across the pavement.  Ethan saw the form jerk but his view
was, infuriatingly, blocked by Kate's arm as it came up with her
camera.

"No no no!"  sang Nabbi.

"What?"

"Yup.  They're kicking hell out of them," observed Rafl.

"Ouch."  Diane's yelp again.

"Nice stock work," Ran continued, deliberately matter of fact.

"No!  Put that away."  Nabbi's hand flashed down, knocking the camera
into Kate's lap.

"Oil  Why'd you do that?"

"What the fuck is going on?"  muttered Ethan.

Nabbi sawed the van backwards into a three-point turn, rotating Ethan
further away from the action.  Now it was framed through the back
windscreen, and Clay, Jan and George had front seats.

"Christ, what did they do?"

"Fuck .. . fucking hell."

Ethan stood up in the aisle and looked over the backs of three heads.
He caught a glimpse of soldiers bundling two figures around a wall of
sandbags.  A rifle barrel rose, two hands gripping it.  There was a
pause.  Then the hands drove the gun down, butt first.  The blow seemed
to reboot the synthesized drum beat, which flooded the van.  Nabbi was
nearly through with the turn.  As the rifle came up again, this time in
Ethan's side window, he accelerated hard, clouding the scene with white
dust.

"What was that about?"  asked Kate, inspecting her camera.

Nabbi shrugged his shoulders.  The bald spot of his crown shook. "Wrong
turning," he sang.  "We take a different route."

Thirteen.

Three hundred and sixty degrees of sky, bent like a bubble above the
peaks.  Kate spun slowly on her heel in the snow, trying to fix the
view in her head.  There were clumps of dark-green firs in the depths,
grey tongues of scree stretching to the snowline, then a brilliant
glare reaching upwards, overlain here and there with blue shadows,
pocked with dents and boulders, the distant line of their progress
fragmenting to individual tracks, then single footsteps, tracing the
laborious hike all the way up, here.  Silver mountains at eye level in
every direction, an endless disorientation of steepness.  This was what
they had come for; it was magnificent.

And yet if Kate shut her eyes the picture dissolved.  The wind sang in
her ears, overwhelmed the sun on her face, drew a cold veil over her
bare knees and arms.  Why hadn't Nabbi told them to bring something
warm for the summit?  There wasn't an answer, just a moaning drawn from
the slope beneath her feet by a strong gust, and her nose couldn't pick
anything from the wind, just its sharpness.  Nothing to work with
except, perhaps, the faintest tang of sunscreen, reminding her that she
should have brought the tube, that the cold was deceptive, that Nabbi
could have helped out there too.

"How far do you reckon we can see?"  George was asking Clay.

Kate opened her eyes again, managed only a squint at first.  She pulled
out her notebook, thought for a moment and wrote Himalayas at the top
of a page.

"I don't know.  Ten, fifteen miles in that direction."  Clay pointed
back down the slope of their final ascent, coughed, bent forwards to
rest his hands upon his knees and nodded.  "That's one big hill."

"Young guy like you, no excuse to hack your guts up," replied George.
Kate watched as he removed his glasses and inspected the lenses, then
took a fold of his sweatshirt (Solihull Church Youth Project in a happy
typeface, beneath a cartoon cat, thumb raised) and buffed them
methodically with the cat's puckered face.  The detail somehow made it
impossible to concentrate.  She shut her notebook.

Clay, smiling, shook his head and said simply, "Killer view."

Diane, who'd brought a fitted sweater up the mountain, was stretching
into it elegantly, then putting an arm around Clay's shoulder.  She
turned slowly, taking it all in, until her gaze crossed Kate's and
softened into a smile.

The previous afternoon Diane had gone up in Kate's estimation, when
she'd done something about the chickens, which arrived with the
bow-legged pony-man.  Approaching down the track, he at first appeared
to have an enormous pompom hanging from each hand.  Only as he drew
nearer had Kate made out movement which was not the result of his
swinging arms.  Closer still, and she saw a fright of wings and necks
and beaks.  Each clump of orange legs was bound with twine.  The man's
smile remained as he looped the string up under one of the mule packs
and tied it off, leaving all ten chickens to jab and twist upside-down.
Kate stepped towards the pony, itself commuter-bored, then stopped: she
was here to observe.  Or was she frightened of insulting the pony-man,
or embarrassed to appear oversensitive in front of everyone?

There had been no need to answer these questions, because Diane's
"Jesus, don't you have a box or something?"  pulled the pony-man up
short.

"Chicken, for dinner."  He smiled.

"We don't have to torture them first, though, do we?"  Diane, with a
hand on each hip, appeared accustomed to getting her own way.

"Dinner," the man repeated, 'for later."  He looked about in search of
help.

"Yes, I get that."  Diane approached the pony, her head on one side, a
chicken's eye view.  "But I want you to stick them in a box, a bag
even.  Or else kill them now.  You can't string them up like this,
alive.  We're going to be walking all afternoon."

"Fresh," said the pony-man.  He removed his cap and scratched a silver
temple.

Exasperated, Diane strode off to find Nabbi, who fled before her to the
minivan and retrieved from its roof a couple of empty cardboard boxes,
recently emptied of bottled mineral water.  Nabbi stood back and
shrugged while Diane jabbed the sides Himalayan Bliss Gangajal full of
holes with a nail file.

Now Kate, shivering, smiled back.  She could make notes later.  The
landscape would draw everyone close.  She turned to search out Ethan.
Perhaps if she fixed the picture in her head with him they would be
able to remember it better together in the future.

He was with Rafi and Jan.  Yet when she drew nearer it became apparent
that Ethan was there but not there; the talk, veering from altitude
sickness, through RafYs stint in the Israeli army to, laughably, Jan's
nearest equivalent, his personal best over ten kilometres, was for
Ethan's benefit, but he was not taking part in it.  Rafi put a foot
next to Ethan's and began extolling the virtues of his army issue
boots.  Jan agreed wholeheartedly and went on, blinking, "Punishing
exercise is the one thing that helps me concentrate, though.  Endurance
is it.  Otherwise there's just not the time to get focus .. ."

Ethan turned towards Kate as she broke into the circle, and Jan gave
up.  After an embarrassed pause, he continued, "I'm going to get that
Nabbi to explain what is what."  A hand gestured at the endlessness.
"There must be a famous Everest or something in one direction.  At
least he could tell us."  Rafi set off with him to find out.

The silence they left was filled by the wind which grew around Ethan
and Kate.  Again she shivered.  Ethan watched her do so and then turned
his gaze to the view, staring at it without expression.  Kate held her
arms and did the same.  After a while, she saw from the corner of her
eye that he was unbuttoning his second layer and, having slipped it
off, was extending it in her direction.  The shirt flapped in the wind
like a flag.

"Here."

The semaphore meant something, as did his arm around her shoulders once
she'd put the shirt on.  And the view, and the fact of Jan and Rafi
retreating from them, and the staccato progress of two drab, minuscule,
army lorries, way down below, obscured by trees and visible again now,
throwing the shoulder of the mountain into massive relief as they
trickled around its base, they were part of it too.  Kate tried to pin
down the moment for them both.  By pointing out the trucks, so far
away, so small, whose course she felt sure Ethan had to be following
too, the scale of the experience would become obvious, wouldn't it? She
sensed his gaze snag as the vehicles disappeared from view, shared his
relief when they emerged again.  Now was the time to say something. She
would seal the moment, there and then.

When she turned to speak, though, she could not.  An echo of her first
solo flight: just her, alone.  Ethan's arm was still around her
shoulders but he wasn't there.  His face was lifted to the sun and his
eyes were shut.  Like a conductor in his separate spotlight, or a
patient waiting in the dentist's chair.

Fourteen.

There was something the matter with the pony-man.  Ethan sat with the
rest, faces glowing at the fire, absently watching the man's
bandy-legged progress around their circle.  He seemed unwilling to draw
close, yet incapable of going away.  A satellite stuck on its own
trajectory.  Not that it mattered because Clay had spared room in his
pack for a bottle of whisky, which was also now in orbit.

"So have you ever killed anyone?"  Jan asked Rafi.

Diane put her hand to her mouth, anticipating Rafi's nod.

Jan approved: "Intense."

Clay rolled his eyes and breathed, "Vin Diesel, move over."

"It didn't bother you?"  Diane's smile flared wide, excited by the
prospect that it hadn't.

Rafi shrugged, took the bottle from Clay's outstretched hand and lifted
it to his lips, flame lurching in the glass.

"But was it necessary?  Was it justifiable?"  asked Kate.  Shadows
played across the planes of her face as she waited, unblinking, for an
answer.  Ethan was transfixed again by the contradiction of that soft
mouth, so certain of its words, until distracted by a movement over her
shoulder.  At the edge of the clearing, by their separate campfire,
Misbaah the cook sat with Nabbi, flourishing a blade.  The steel edge
flicked on and off in the firelight.  On, and off, mouth and words.
Eventually

Misbaah chopped the knife into a log and rose to pick up one of Diane's
boxes.

Ran was still considering the question.  Eventually he shrugged.
"Either way it wasn't up to me."

George left off scratching his grey stubble to ask, "What do you mean
by that?"

"Means he didn't just go postal on his own," said Clay.

"Orders.  I was a soldier.  I did what I was told."

George pressed on.  "But what did you make of those orders yourself?"

"A macrame noose, a terra cotta grenade."  Clay again.  "What do you
think?"

The Israeli passed the bottle to Ethan, who drank.  A hot fist formed
in his stomach, turning a memory with it, of the last time he'd drunk
scotch straight from a bottle, with Rachel.  He reached a hand out to
stroke Kate's knee, allowing the smoothness of her fingers to close
round his.  Over her head he saw the cook put an arm into the box and
pull a chicken free of the cardboard flaps by its wing.  From behind,
the fire made stained glass of the splayed feathers.  Ethan looked away
before Kate caught up.

George continued.  "I'm not saying you had any choice but to follow
orders.  I'm just curious what you thought about what your superiors
asked of you."

"Nothing, really."

Jan nodded agreement, as if familiar with the problem.

"Because, if it was me, I'd find it difficult to bend that far, to
somebody else's point of view."  George passed the bottle without
drinking.  "Maybe it's because I'm older.  If somebody told me to kill
another man, for whatever reason, that'd be at odds with what I
believe.  I couldn't do it."

"You're a cheek-turner," drawled Clay.  "Me too."

"If you like."  George's smile looked genuine.  He turned back to Ran.
"Seriously, though."

"There are different circumstances."

"Not for me.  It can't depend on the situation.  For me, the rule is
more fundamental.  A line in the sand.  Like the Bible says.  Thou
shalt not kill."

"Oh, please."  Diane smiled.

Clay put a hand out to silence her.

"I respect that," Rafi said.  "Just don't believe it, though.  All
depends on context.  Seems strange to me what I did, now, thinking
about it here.  But back home it was just what happened."  He cupped
his chin in one hand and ground his teeth.

"How did you do it?"  Jan pulled on the bottle, winced and continued.
"A gun.  A knife.  Hand to hand?"

"Give the guy a break," said Clay.  "He's on vacation.  Nobody's asking
you to relive your last... semester."

Jan waved Clay down.  "Of course not, but this is different.  This is
interesting."

"Sure it is."  Clay lay back against Diane, pulled his guitar onto his
lap and began strumming one of his murder ballads.  Ethan drank from
the bottle again and drifted with it.  Only the pony-man's moth-like
fluttering around the fire brought him round.

"What's that little guy up to?"

Ran, glad of the diversion, looked over his shoulder and shrugged. "How
should we know?  Ask him."

"Do we owe him a tip or something?"  Diane curled forwards in an
effortless sit-up.

"Not until the end, surely?"  Kate turned too, bringing the pony-man to
a halt.

Ethan stared at the big diamond pattern splayed across the man's
woollen jumper.  Frayed cuffs flickered in the firelight.  Was it the
flames or his hands shaking?  Two white eyes glanced furtively across
to where Nabbi sat by the other fire.  (Why did Kate care that he kept
his distance?  One less evening fending off veiled shoe compliments
could only be a good thing.) Seeming to have come to a decision, the
pony-man sidestepped away.  Ethan stood up and walked over to where the
man had retreated.

"What's up?"  asked Ethan.  "Is there a problem?"

The pony-man dropped to his haunches and gripped his head in both
hands.  He twisted his skullcap off and screwed it into a ball, as if
to wring out an answer.  His eyes, set in the dark folds of his face,
gleamed.  There was a fire in each.

"Yes, problem."

"Well, what is it?  Money?  Baksheesh?"

The folds knotted.

"No.  Problem!"

Ethan sighed.  There was no logic and you couldn't win: come out with
it straight and they took offence.  He bounced on his heels, waiting
for the man to continue.  Clay's song filled the silence.

"You said you wouldn't run, my friend, You said you'd hold me close,
But when I fell you turned your back, It's you you love the most..."

"Like chicken!"  The pony-man's cuffs gesticulated.  "Chicken in a
box!"

"Ah."  What was he on about?  Did he think they'd dock his tip because
of the chickens?  "Don't worry.  Everybody's very happy.  No problem
with the chickens."  Ethan bent his head lower in conspiracy.  "Very
tasty, I'm sure .. ."

"No!  Yes!  Problem!"

The whisky made it hard to concentrate, numbing the urgency in the
man's words.  Ethan heard

"But it's you, my friend, that's far away, Alone upon the treeless
plain,"

and then the flames in the pony-man's eyes disappeared, cut out by a
shadow.  Ethan turned to see Nabbi striding their way.  He stepped
straight past Ethan and shouted something down at the pony-man, a
string of jabbering that drove the skullcap back onto his little silver
head.  This Nabbi followed with a clumsy toe punt, which sent the
smaller man scrabbling away.  Ethan rose, driven by an instinct to
deliver a proper kick back.

"Stupid man," said Nabbi.  "I am very sorry for him.  He is bad in the
head."  The guide tapped the side of his own head.  Ethan went to
speak, but Nabbi cut him off.  "Tomorrow we will send him home.  A new
pony-man is coming.  I apologize."

The guide did not wait for a response, but retreated with a single
nod.

Fifteen.

Strung out in a line, they worked up towards the pass.  Blinding white
clouds boiled out of nothing near the left-hand peak.  Down to Kate's
right the black stream cut a track through a luminous crust of snow.  A
goat stood knee deep, shaking its head at her.

Kate panted a question to herself: "Why the rush?"  Nabbi was way
ahead, with Jan and Ran competing just behind him.  You could tell from
the way Jan stopped now and then, hands on hips to recover his breath,
that he was feeling the pace.  Ethan had slowed from behind Diane to
stroll just ahead of Kate.  She couldn't decide whether that was
pleasing or bad.  The phrase 'behind Diane' became "Diane's behind' as
they walked.  The unspoken accusation shamed Kate: Ethan dropped
further back until he was definitely accompanying her.  In fact he was
close enough to have overheard her whisper.  He'd half-turned, stopped,
was rolling his eyes.

"God knows.  He's in a hurry, though."

"First enthusiasm he's shown for a mountain all week."

Clay arrived, bringing up the rear with George.  Flushed with effort,
he bent forward, hands on knees, shoulders heaving.  "Maybe he's
testing the Marines."  He nodded up the track.  "Seeing which one of
them will drop back first."

"Hopefully Rafi'll catch up with him and break his neck,"

suggested George.  He drew breath, then stepped forwards again,
prompting the rest to do the same.

Kate's thighs burned.  She put her head down and pushed on up the path
of scree and ice.  Here and there it was dotted with abrupt tufts of
grass; there was even an occasional defiant yellow flower.  She
followed the measured flick of Ethan's heels.  Again they drew away
from George and Clay, following the climbing curve of the track.

Near the brow now.  Clouds still spilling off the spike of a summit to
their left, a draught of cold air dropping down from up there too.
Relief from .. . was it the sun on her back, or the weight of her pack?
The altitude.  More than enough clothes today, and a hat.  You couldn't
trust him, you see.  It was better to be safe than .. . short walk,
little stroll..  . already two hours gone.

Yes, they were drawing to the lip; one last effort would do it.  Nabbi
had pulled up just short.  Perhaps he was going to walk the last yards
with them together, for the view.  That would be thoughtful.  Jan
flopped onto his back, levered himself up again, leaving a snow angel
where he'd lain.  Ran sat doubled over, clutching his shins.  Even
Nabbi looked beaten the closer they got: he was wild-eyed and panting.
Kate drew some solace from the sight of a red-cheeked Diane.  But,
needless to say, Ethan was barely breathing, his eyes were fixed on the
remaining stretch of scree.  The stragglers caught up.  First George,
then Clay, collapsing at the side of the path; one of them hawked
yellow spit into the snow.  Another flower.  Kate's watch face was
blinding at first, but read ten twenty-one angled away from the glare,
and then she looked up from it and saw a silhouetted head appear above
the ridge.

Another two followed.

Then another.

Four cut-out figures now stood on the ridge.  Three of them were
carrying rifles.  The fourth turned sideways and so was he.  In unison
they jogged down from the pass.  Dirt-brown fatigues.  One wore an
olive balaclava.  A second, in an incongruous denim jacket, was
dropping to his knees, bringing his gun up to his shoulder.  Kate tried
to shake the sight out of her head, but he was still there pointing the
rifle.  She looked for Ethan, but he hadn't seen.  Evidently the climb
had tired him more than she'd first thought: he had settled on his hams
and was inspecting a pinch of melting snow.  Her hand reached out for
his arm.

Meanwhile, Nabbi was stepping forward to meet the men.  He held his
arms away from his body, head back, like a welcoming host.  Or was the
gesture imploring?  The man in the balaclava slung his rifle up behind
him on its strap, casually, as if it was a guitar.  Then, still talking
to Nabbi, he stepped around the guide to survey the spent group.  A
balaclava.

Kate's mouth said, "What?"

Clay said, "Fantastic, the border.  Can we go back downhill now?"

Simultaneously, Rafi whispered, "Shut up, sit very still," and Diane
let out an indignant "Jesus!"

Ethan looked up.

There was a pause, in which Jan rolled onto his side.  The snow crust
creaked as it gave beneath his weight.  "Cool.  Even the shepherds have
guns," he said.

Diane stood, ignoring Rafi's repeated, "Sit still."

George, behind Kate, had risen too.  "Nabbi?"  he called.

Nabbi did not turn from his conversation.  Its words ran back down the
hill to Kate, bubbling like a stream.

Very slowly, his voice blurred at the edges with the effort of keeping
his breath steady, Jan said, "Hold on.  Is that man, pointing his
rifle, at me?"

George had taken a step forwards and was now blocking part of Kate's
view.  His hands were on his hips and his head was cocked, as if
scolding a child, saying I've had enough of this without words.

Nabbi was handing something over or was he giving something up?  Kate
found that she was on her feet too.  The moment felt utterly wrong, but
ahead of computation, like a slug of curdled milk before the misery of
its taste hits.  Perhaps there was still time to spit it out.  Like
George before her, Kate said, "Nabbi', into the stillness.  Both he and
the man in the mask turned around.

"The holiday is over now.  Trekking is finished," the balaclava stated.
His eyes were framed slits.

"This is a joke, yes?"  Jan's voice was tight and high.

"No," breathed Clay, 'this feels real."

George laughed.  He took steps towards the guide and said, "What's he
talking about?"  More steps in Nabbi's direction, gathering pace.

As if to answer him, the balaclava shouted and one of the others, the
big one in the denim jacket, ran at George, rifle butt raised.  He
aimed a blow at George's chest and delivered it without hesitating,
sending George staggering backwards, to stumble over Ran, whose head
was still bowed.  George collapsed heavily and stayed down.

"Everybody sit," sang Nabbi.  "These men are very serious."

Diane crouched down in front of Kate, whose legs weren't responding;
they wavered uncertainly beneath her.  The terror simultaneously
stopped everything dead and sped events up.

Everything was shockingly real and, in the same breath, fake.  She
looked down and her feet were comically distant.

"You too."  Nabbi pointed.  George was groaning, clutching his chest.
"Sit down, stay still," repeated Nabbi.  His words were slaps with a
flat hand.  Kate felt Ethan pulling her wrist gently, and gave in.  The
denim guard had skirted the slope above the path and was squatting
casually, his rifle levelled at them across a khaki knee.  Now they
were all huddling on the path like corralled sheep.

It was impossible to hold opposing thoughts and sensations apart.  Kate
crouched heavy as a sodden log but also hot-wired to run away.  She'd
never felt more inert or more alive.  The path curved back down the
mountain seductively, but in full view.  There wasn't so much as a
boulder to make for.  And anyway, she was shocked to find, alongside
her panic, a definite seam of excitement.  Not only was she incapable
of running, but a part of her seemed not to want to try.  This was
interesting.  It would be something for the notebook, something
important to relate.  She focused on the purple shape of her shadow,
but saw, as if superimposed on the snow, a bizarre image of herself
seated beneath the skylight in her old office, writing the story up.
That was ridiculous; this scenario wouldn't fit between the covers of a
Glencare publication.  It would spring her into something much better.
Yet what was she doing staring at the ground?  She should be paying
attention, making a mental note of the detail.

The nearest of the four figures, the one in denim squatting on the
bank, looked almost bored.  He couldn't even be bothered to aim
properly.  With the fingers of his free hand he picked at strands in an
impressive beard.  But the one behind him, a boy of no more than
eighteen, was apparently unable to stand still.  He dropped down to the
path, bouncing on the balls of his feet, cradling his rifle with
twitching fingers.

Meanwhile Nabbi and the balaclava continued to talk.  It didn't sound
like English.  Just indistinct words, murmuring on.  Which was wrong.
Kate asked herself why.  The tone was the problem.  In any language,
Nabbi didn't sound like he was pleading.  It was a conversation about
the weather or a mutual friend.  An unhurried shooting of the breeze.
That, there, was definitely a smile.  Which was baffling and yet made
perfect sense.  Nabbi would be negotiating.  To do that effectively
meant putting the fellow at ease.

Diane had begun to sob.  No, it was Jan.  The muscles in his jaw fought
to end the noise.  And Clay was whispering something.  "Don't panic.
Stay calm.  Stay calm.  Don't panic' He sounded like an air hostess,
his words undercut by the fragility of his voice.

Also in a whisper, someone else was more matter of fact.  It was Rafi,
saying, "We're fucked."  Kate looked across at him, head still bowed,
as if braced for impact.  "Absolutely fucked," he repeated.

The words dropped through Kate like stones through water.  They were
obviously true.  But she thought herself calm again: I must remember
this sensation; it is part of the experience.

George had managed to sit up and was holding himself together, arms
wrapped around his chest.  His stricken face was the colour of an
avocado.  As Kate watched, he drew breath and threw up into the snow.
Diane, who was nearest to him, put a brown forearm across his shoulder.
The arm was alive with goose bumps.

Now Nabbi was sitting down in the snow and the balaclava dropped to his
side, head waggling: an extraordinary gesture here, made worse by the
way he sat at ease on his heels.  While Nabbi sat riddling with
something at his feet in the snow, the three unmasked accomplices
closed in round the group.

The balaclava came forward.  "I am announcing a change of plan.  We are
your tour guides now.  Reasonable men.  But, like Mr.  Nabbi says,
serious."  His English was practised.  He bent over George, who seemed
slowly to be regaining his composure, and continued, "You must do as we
say at all times.  Understand?"

George nodded.  The balaclava twisted towards Kate, close enough for
her to make out dark lashes and deep brown, expressionless eyes.  She
held his gaze; the moment stretched.  She found herself mesmerized by
the fact that the ski mask was knitted from rough wool.  A sob rose in
her throat, threatened to become audible, but was silenced by the
banality of a trickle of sweat which, while she watched, ran from the
man's brow into the corner of his right eye.  He was hot from the climb
too.  A woollen balaclava.  How uncomfortable.  She began to cry.

"Why is this happening?"  asked Diane.  Her voice, snagging on
'happening', stiffened Kate's resolve.

The balaclava broke free of Kate and waggled again.  "No questions.  No
objections.  No problems."  He paused.  "If any one of you makes
trouble, that means trouble for everyone."  He stood up again, folded
his arms.  "Now, you'll come with us."

Jan was saying something absurd about contact lenses, pointing fingers
at his eyes.  And George was adding to the idiocy by asking, "But what
about our stuff, our stuff in camp?"

In answer the balaclava laughed.  "In a war we must all learn to make
do."

The youngest of the unmasked guards now levelled his gun at them from
behind, while the other two stood on the uphill side.  "Up," the bored
beard said.  His hand waved a little circle.  "Let us go."

Tentatively, Kate stood.  It was a surprise to feel that Ethan still
had hold of her wrist.  He did not let it go.  As they began walking
towards the pass she turned to look at him for the first time.  His
lips, a line in the bloodless surround of his face, managed the
briefest smile.

Then he was being pulled away by Nabbi, who had trotted to his side.
The group halted on the brink of the pass.  Kate saw mountain tops
overlain with mountain tops into the blue distance, a mouthful of
needling teeth.  Nabbi's raised voice turned her head.  He was pushing
something white into Ethan's stomach and dancing in the snow beside
him.

"Shoes.  Shoes."

The balaclava stood over Ethan as he took his boots off at gunpoint.
Nabbi stopped them steaming with his own sock-less feet and stood
happily watching Ethan cram himself into the exchanged pair.

"Very nice," Nabbi said.  "Thank you."

He set off back down the mountain.

Sixteen.

"Travelling?"  Rachel bit down on the word as she repeated it.

Kate feigned interest in the contents of her bag, fishing a timetable
from the clutter and setting it down on the steel table top, next to
her dead cappuccino.  The grid of frequencies was a comforting antidote
to Rachel's incredulity, which extended while Kate worked out that the
biggest gap between buses was sixteen minutes, on Sundays and bank
holidays.

"Let me get this right.  They're finally recognizing your talents at
the magazine.  They've told you you're next in line for promotion.  But
you're turning the opportunity down, to take a ... a holiday?"

Two shrink-wrapped men in matching bomber jackets pressed past the
picture window.  One turned to check the Soho cafe for vacant seats,
his yellow hair shining in the lamplight.  Kate looked back down at the
timetable, waited as Rachel took two long pulls on her cigarette. Ethan
had bounced her into the decision, suddenly announcing that he wanted
to go away.  It was hard to imagine him organizing the trip himself,
but since he'd given up his pointless job there was nothing, in theory,
to hold him back.  Unsure whether or not he would wait, she had taken
the first step to make sure.  Briefly she considered explaining this to
her sister, but chose not to.  The man was still scanning the cafe for
a seat.  Catching Kate's eye, he blew her a 'cheer up' kiss.  She
smiled back at him, said nothing.

Rachel sighed.  "Where then?"... a pause ... "When?"  .  "India."

"Right.  Of course."  Rachel stubbed out her cigarette.  "Where's that
beach bit?  Goa?"

Despite herself, Kate explained.  "I want to go all over.  Some areas
more than others ... the north first, I think, the mountains... and
then the desert.  Wherever seems most interesting."

"How commendably thorough.  Off the beaten track and all that, if
anywhere still is."  As Rachel spoke, her manicured fingers patted down
her phone, interrogating it for any freak unmonitored calls.  "Suitably
hot and dusty in the desert, anyway, I imagine.  Lots of refreshing
poverty to gawp at.  I'm sure you'll have a lovely... challenging
time."

It was so tiring.  Every conversation creating a winner and a loser.
The attrition was relentless: time spent with Rachel meant an endless
circumnavigation of one trap after another.  Barbed wire and land mines
Often you couldn't see what was coming for the mud and froth, but hit
an issue direct, respond to it and, bang, you died.

Like now: a lovely, challenging time.  A meanness hidden in a throwaway
comment, too innocuous to make an issue of.  What would come next?
Perhaps an omission, a deliberately avoided compliment, or
congratulations withheld.  Then the cut of a true insult, but delivered
with laughter or a touch to the back of the hand, and followed so fast
by a flattering remark that there wouldn't be a chance to respond.
After that,

perhaps, a truth told unflinchingly.  Come on, we're sisters, after
all.  We can talk straight, can't we?

Resentment surged.  Why allow Rachel to make her feel like this?  Why
take any notice?  To be so galled was itself galling.  She should see
it for what it was, nothing but a familiar assault course of omissions,
insults, compliments, truths.  But they wore you down.  Or rather they
mounted up, a cumulative onslaught, drip by needle prick by knife
wound, finally becoming obvious, as if to say: OK then, you dealt with
that, now ignore this, keep rising above me, I dare you!

A white cuff dropped between them to evacuate casualties.  Kate bit
back her resentment.  She never aired her own misgivings about Rachel's
vacuous existence, did she?  It was to do with tolerance, and
presumption and resp

"What are you doing for ... a ... travelling companion?"  There was an
edge to Rachel's voice.  Kate turned from the reflection in the window
to look at her sister directly, saw that she was fiddling with strands
of hair pulled forward from the top of her head, counting them from one
thumb and finger to the other.

"Well, Ethan, of course."

"Of course."  Rachel's fingers stopped.  "What about his job though?
Surely he's not resigned too?"

"Yeah, he chucked it in."  She continued to stare at Rachel.  The
strands of hair started moving again, but Kate felt sure her sister's
gaze was focused beyond the blonde tips.  She seemed gratifyingly
blunted by this news.

"And when did you say you were going?"

"I didn't.  But next week, since you're interested."

"As in after this weekend?"  Rachel's voice snagged.

Kate raised an eyebrow and drove the point home.  "Yeah, Monday."

At that Rachel excused herself, heading for a ladies' room that didn't
exist in this chain cafe.  Kate watched the reflection in the window
and the view through it: Rachel in a huff before the shrugging waiter,
a cycle-rickshaw (Peddling Towards a Greener London) limping
self-consciously through the Old Compton Street drizzle.  The
conversation had taken a satisfying turn in her direction after all.
Rachel couldn't help being impressed by the intrepid fact of their just
going.  She seemed to be pausing by the paper rack in the window-pane
there, to collect herself, and the bedraggled passengers were climbing
out of the cycle-rickshaw across the road, clearly regretting not
having taken a proper taxi, and now Rachel was sitting back down with
her studied coolness intact again.

"So the two of you are just dropping out and heading off?"

"I'm hoping there may be an article in it."

"Oh, please.  You reckon people will want to read about your
holiday?"

Kate looked away.

"Because unless you find yourself a convenient hot spot, a civil war
perhaps '

"I'll do my research."

Rachel laughed.  "Of course.  Well, you get out there.  Off you go.
Investigate."

Kate winced.  When she searched her sister's face she found it deadpan,
intent upon a cuticle.  There was a pause.

Kate filled it.  "Cheers.  I'll do my best."

Neither of them seemed to know where the conversation went from there.
Both were mesmerized by the crescent of Rachel's nail, until she folded
it into her fist.  Kate watched Rachel's grip tighten.  The hand was
biting itself.  She struggled to think of something to say, but her
sister spoke first.

"Just go carefully.  Mind you don't drink the water."  The brittle tone
lurched in vain towards lightheartedness as she continued, "And make
sure that waster takes care of you."

Seventeen.

Ethan knelt, lacing the trainers.  He could not feel his toes.  Not
because of the cramped shoes: he could not feel his fingers either, and
there they were in front of him, lassoing one another.  And not because
of the cold.  No, his toes were numb because all of him was numb,
overtaken by an obliterating fear.

Now that he had finished doing Nabbi's shoes up, the youngest of the
guards was prodding him tentatively to join the back of the line.  The
others had already begun to falter away, opening a gap of snow in front
of him on the path.

But Ethan continued kneeling over his front foot, reworking the lace
into a better double knot, ignoring another, more impatient pat on the
back.  The numbness meant that he was hovering above the path, a
feeling heightened by the whiteness of both the shoe and the snow.  It
was like being a schoolboy again, bent double for the start of an
important race.  Set in a sprinter's starting crouch, floating above
the track, ready to explode.

Even with his feet cramped like this he could run.  The others,
chaperoned by the three older guards, had drawn ahead some thirty
yards, were all but at the crest.  And this spindly kid was stamping
impatiently at Ethan's shoulder,

within arm's reach.  He could knock the boy over and sprint back down
the mountain.

The path they'd come up stretched away under Ethan's arm, with Nabbi
bobbing jauntily along it, upside-down.  He would catch the guide and
either use him as a shield or fell him on his way through.  Nabbi
didn't have a gun, wouldn't be able to stop him.  And if Ethan upended
this guard properly it'd take him five, ten seconds, to scramble into a
position to shoot.  He might be able to put himself beyond range of all
of them if he took this one chance, now.

But a confusion clouded his mind.  The impulse to run didn't have a
monopoly: it came accompanied.

For a start, this sequence of events simply could not be real.  One
minute there was the annoyance of a shifty tour guide and pointless
mountain hike, set against the pleasure of watching Diane walking up
ahead.  If the problem then had been about subtly showing Kate that he
wasn't paying that part of the view any attention, how could he now be
facing this?  Guns and balaclavas.  Such a shift in scale made no
sense.

Welded there, he stared down at Nabbi's bulging trainers, which
underlined the indignity of having been robbed of his own.  How could
that matter now?  Because it meant something.  A joke had gone wrong
and its implications were unthinkable.  The guide was only visible from
the waist up now, partly obscured by the fall of the slope.  The theft
of his shoes heralded a terrible inversion.

He received a third, more insistent prod from the teenage guard.  The
boy was failing in his allotted task of bringing up the rear; panic
showed in the way he delivered another poke at the shoulders bending
before him.  An exploitable weakness.  Ethan felt something within him
begin to give.

Still, he did not bolt, because of Kate.  A pang of commitment gripped
him.  Or was it guilt?  He could still feel the heat echo of her wrist
in his hand.  There were betrayals and betrayals, and he could not
abandon her here.  If he tried to escape he'd be doing so alone, which
would be unforgivable.

So he found himself starting forwards instead, the urge to run fading
with each step.  Whatever was happening could not last.  Following the
rest did not feel like a conscious decision, merely the progression of
inevitable footsteps.  The initial shock of fear subsided; by the time
they'd reached the crest a comforting heaviness had settled back into
his legs.  It would have been pointless trying to run.  Better to stick
it out.  Why risk a bullet... the idea of such a phrase was laughable
.. . when a little endurance would see them back to safety anyway?

They'd caught up with George now, the last in the line.  On this side
of the mountain the wind was blowing harder, dragging sheets of powder
across the face of the slope at ankle height.  Ethan put his head down
against the sharpness, angling his face back up the mountain.  Behind
him, on the path, their footprints were already blurring.

Eighteen.

Fingers worked behind Kate's head, teasing apart the knot.  She kept
very still, kneeling as instructed, braced against the tugging.  When
the cloth finally gave it was like the miraculous end of a headache.

As soon as she opened her eyes, though, the brightness was too much and
she had no choice but to screw them shut, migraine tight, again.  A
hand on her shoulder seemed to squeeze it reassuringly, prompting Kate,
in the seconds before she was able to blink herself back into the
scene, to suffer the fleeting and absurd hope that it had all been a
terrifying stunt.

"Please, what's going on?"  Clay's voice.

Instead of an answer, Kate heard a muffled slap.  She forced her
surroundings into watery focus despite the glare.

First, she sought out the others, saw that they were all kneeling too.
Behind her the guard with the beard was untying Jan's blindfold. Beyond
him the youngster was attending to Rafi.  He looked like a reluctant
child in the barber's seat, head obediently bent forward. Over her
other shoulder Ethan was shaking his neck loose, next to George and
Clay.  George's whole body was trembling, and he was talking to
himself, or rather he was stuttering a prayer.  At "Thy will be done',
Diane, who was slumped beside him, twitched upright.

Kate tried to take in her surroundings.  The courtyard was strewn with
wood chippings, which accounted for the relative softness beneath her
knees and an oddly sanitary smell pine resin which now registered.  A
block of shadow lay diagonally across the space, cast by a crude stone
wall, prompting the memory of a quadrangle, which she fought with
practical thoughts: that way was west then.  The deduction heartened
her.  She tried another: if the sun was so low, they must have been
travelling for six or seven hours.  It had felt at once an eternity and
no time at all.

The cold walk down to the truck, perversely easy after climbing to the
summit, had seemed to pass in a flash.  They'd been made to kneel like
this, in the snow, facing the back of the vehicle, for blindfolding.
Before they tied hers, Kate had sat staring at the truck's garish rear
axle.  It was yellow, at odds with the green of the rest of the
vehicle.  The middle of the axle bulged into some sort of a sump,
decorated with a painted face, eyebrows drawn upwards in apparent
surprise.  Kate had stared back at the eyes, still too stunned to
think, mesmerized by the stupidity of someone having chosen to paint a
face there.

Once they were all in the truck, one of the guards had spoken.

"Nobody must move.  Nobody must touch eyes.  Nobody must speak.  Sit
still and quiet for the journey."  Then there was the metallic hitching
sound of the tailgate being fastened shut, which became for Kate the
definite cocking of a rifle, even before the gears crashed and the
truck lurched away.

After that time collapsed.  She counted off seconds to steady herself,
but the claustrophobia of the blindfold made concentration impossible
and she kept losing her place.  She tried to sense where Ethan was
sitting, fancied the feet that occasionally brushed her own might be
his, but could not be sure.  Once, a hand was placed on her thigh.  It
did not feel like his touch and she shook it off, repulsed.  Surely her
other senses were supposed to compensate for this blankness?  But her
ears were useless, full of truck noise, which drowned out everything.
Unless that, there, was an exchange between the guards?  And the low
resonance just after it, could that be someone moaning, or was it the
sound of the engine straining?  Diesel fumes overpowered all other
smells, making her nose equally redundant.  At one point a warmer smell
piss perhaps bubbled up to the surface, but it could also have been
sweat or tea, or even some nuance in the fumes that she'd not
previously noticed.

Fright and panic fused as the journey lengthened.  She fought back
waves of nausea.  Why the blindfold?  She had no idea where they'd
started from, anyway, could not even recall the name of the pass Nabbi
had hauled them up.  Nabbi.  It was impossible to think about him.  A
blackness attached to his name.  Her decision, a voice whispered, her
responsibility.  She concentrated on the engine noise again to shut the
unthinkable out.

Now another guard was pushing backwards through the wooden gate to one
side of the little courtyard.  Short and squat, he swayed towards them
with their day bags, carrying two or three in each hand, like shopping.
As he passed Kate, she caught sight of the Trailfinders tag on her own
bag and saw herself scribbling her home address on the label in Earls

Court tube station.  She'd done Ethan's for him too.  A sob fell
through her.

Arriving before the wall, in blue shadow, the guard released his grip
on all of the bags at once, dropping them in a heap.

Jan started babbling in a child's voice behind Kate.  She dared not
turn round.  Half his words were unclear.  "Something something
something, please say when, something something, embassy details,
something something."  The young guard shouted "Shut up," over Kate's
head, but Jan continued.  The incomprehensible words, she realized,
were Flemish.

"Easy, Jan, take it easy," pleaded Clay, his voice a hoarse whisper.

Still he went on.  The guard trotted around Kate and again she heard a
slapping sound.  In response Jan's hysterics just grew louder.

Then a deeper voice shouted.  Kate heard a hollow thump.  She couldn't
stop herself turning to see what was going on, saw Jan on his side
struggling to push himself back up, and the three guards grouped above
him.  The young one's eyes were wide.  The fat guard raised a hand
above Jan's head, but the young one caught his sleeve and held him
back.  An argument flared between the two.  It was cut dead by the
appearance of the balaclava in the entrance to the courtyard.  He'd
clearly just pulled the mask on again because the seam was showing. The
mask was inside out.  When he walked past Kate a little label wagged at
her from the back of his head, like a mocking tongue.

Soon the contents of their bags were heaped before the wall.  All four
men began picking through the jumble.  At first Kate thought they were
looking for something specific, but soon it became apparent, they were
dividing the spoils.  Another argument threatened over someone's
Gore-tex jacket.  Kate saw her torch pocketed by the beard, and it was
easier to be outraged by this theft alone than to consider the fact of
the courtyard and kneeling, hands bound, in fear and silence.  For a
brief moment she even suffered a sliver of hope: was robbery the point?
Then the balaclava faced them and began speaking.

"These things are valuable, and so are you.  You are in the bank, in a
manner of speaking.  And I am the manager.  No good manager loses his
assets.  No good manager lets them spoil.  I will look after you.
Unless' he paused, clasped his hands before him 'you are becoming a
problem."  Another longer pause, lips apart.  They were shockingly red
against the monotone mask.  "But that will not happen."

"At least' Clay's voice was hoarse, but warm, familiar' tell us why you
want us?  What for?  How long are you going '

The balaclava cut him off.  "Currency.  You are part of the big cause
now.  Involved in the real Kashmiri experience."

"Jesus Christ," sobbed Dianne.

The balaclava ignored her.  "Khalid!"  he exclaimed.  The young guard
trotted to his side, walked with him to the wooden courtyard door,
listening to orders issued in an unfamiliar tongue.

Now the denim jacket was squatting next to Kate, nodding.  He smiled
and reached out for her hand.  Close enough for Kate to smell the man's
peppermint breath.  His full beard made the nodding gesture
puppet-like, wiry blackness bouncing on his chest.  Everything inside
Kate wanted to shout or run away, but she couldn't move, caught in the
headlights of his smile.

Very gently, he eased the sleeve of Kate's jacket back, as if helping a
child make ready to wash her hands.  She felt him tap her wrist and
looked down to see a hairy forefinger pointing at her watch.

"Give me," he said, 'now."

Kate unclasped the strap.  A cheap, waterproof Swatch, Rachel's present
for going away.  You wouldn't want to lose your good one.  It left a
flat dent in her wrist.  Lain across the fingers of Kate's right hand,
she inspected the face closely, as if she had never seen anything
similar before.  Then the guard clicked his fingers and she gave the
watch up.

Nineteen.

There were too many voices.  As Kate let Ethan in through the familiar
frosted glass of her mother's back door, the sound of overlapping
conversations grew.  Not the television she'd imagined, but a
gathering: the little kitchen was a ring of figures backed up to the
units and work surfaces.  Kate saw her mother, Rachel, Grandpa, Gay and
Robert from next door, and a dough-faced boy presumably their son.  Six
heads turned towards them and the talking died.  "There you are!"
beamed Mum.  "Both of you.  What a surprise!"

Ethan stiffened beside her as everybody but Rachel took a step
forwards.  Kate had told her mother she'd be dropping in alone,
precisely to avoid a fuss.  And she'd sold the idea to Ethan as a quiet
drink, a chance for her to say goodbye before the trip.  Now this
huddle of faces.  Rachel, for God's sake.  Gay was looking Ethan up and
down as if he were for sale and Grandpa was clutching at his hand,
wheezing a welcome-what-can-I-get-you, delighted to meet young Kate's
man at last, after all this time.

They moved through into the lounge.  It had shrunk; there weren't
enough chairs.  Ethan and Rachel remained upright while everyone else
sat down, giving the room a lopsided feeling.  The nest of tables had
been unpacked; bowls of nuts and crisps stood on top of them,
strategically positioned at intervals across the swirling carpet.  The
pattern was more prominent than Kate remembered.  Gay saw that Jack,
her son, had taken the big armchair, and she shooed him out of it onto
the floor.

-"So, India," Robert was saying.

Rachel left to fetch drinks.  She nodded at Ethan, pink-cheeked,
suggesting he take the vacated seat.  She was blushing.  Embarrassed by
the humiliation of having Ethan scrutinize her humble beginnings, no
doubt.  Kate resolved to feel the opposite.  The row of trinkets on the
mantelpiece stared at her in silent cahoots.

"Never been there myself," conceded Grandpa.

"We have.  Or, rather, near it.  Our cruise took us down the western
edge.  We saw Bombay at sunrise, you know, with that gate."

Kate watched Ethan settle back into the armchair, already apparently
recomposed.  He ran a hand across his newly cropped hair, let it drop
to the velour armrest.  With the other he took a carrot stick from the
bowl Mum was thrusting at him, and two more in response to the bowl's
further insistent jiggling "Go on, take a handful."

Kate felt suddenly sorrowful at the thought of her mother peeling and
slicing the carrots in preparation for this visit.  The feeling
intensified when she followed up with a tub of heartrending Marks &
Spencer's taramasalata.  But Ethan's winning smile helped.  One of his
new orange fingers gouged an eye out of the tub and Kate's mother shone
with appreciation as she turned to her other guests.

"We never docked, but half of the passengers still managed to catch
something."  Robert shook his head; his Milosevic hair wobbled.  "Poor
old Mr.  Sanghvi; it was his fiftieth treat you know."

"Quite," Grandpa acknowledged.

"You make sure to watch what you eat."  Robert nodded wisely at
Ethan.

"Oh, these youngsters can cope, I'm sure."  Gay waved Robert down.  "I
bet you've got a stomach like an ox."  The woman's lipstick clashed
with the carrot it clamped down on.  Was she fluttering her
eyelashes?

"Anyway."  Kate tried to draw their fire.  "It'll be an experience '

But Ethan, slapping his thigh, cut in gamely.  "Absolutely, and once
we've trawled through the obligatory cultural Meccas, fried in the
desert, frozen up a mountain, I may even persuade Kate to sample some
of those beaches you must have sailed past."  He flashed another
charming smile.

"I'm not sure Mecca is in India," Grandpa queried.

"No, I '

"He knows that," sang Mum.  "Don't mind the old man.  He takes things a
bit literarily."

"Literally," corrected Kate.

"Quite," agreed Grandpa, grinning.

Ethan raised his hands in surrender.

Rachel reversed into the room with a tray of drinks, pirouetting
disdainfully amidst the chintz.  Kate caught a sugared watercress whiff
of perfume.  Odd that she'd not noticed it on Rachel's way out.  The
nonchalance with which she handed Ethan his glass of beer was obviously
studied.  Kate watched her sister's eyes, unable to stop themselves,
flicking from the rim of the glass to Ethan's face at the last minute.
Her red lips were a fraction beyond pursed.  In fact, in the instant of
eye contact, they were just about puckered.

How satisfying then, to see Ethan's blank response.  A single nod of
thanks and then his attention immediately refocused on Grandpa, over
Rachel's shoulder.

"Cheers then."

"Good lad."

Ethan aped Grandpa's extravagantly raised glass.  Toasting an absent
queen.  While both their arms were still aloft something hit the French
window next to Grandpa's chair.  Whump!  A slop of ale landed in the
old man's lap as he, along with everyone else, turned with a start
towards the glass.

Jack, who had been sitting against the doors, said, "A pigeon."  He
swivelled back to face everybody and continued, "It looks pretty dead
to me."

They made towards the door.  Even Ethan stood up after Kate had gone
past him to the window.  She looked, haloing the glass, Grandpa's hand
upon her shoulder.  The bird lay on the crazy paving outside with its
head back and its legs akimbo, monumentally still.

"Yup," said Robert.

"It's a dove, not a pigeon," Grandpa corrected.

"How can you tell?"

"Well

While he dredged for a plausible difference, another bird settled on
the patio.  The same blue-grey as the dead dove-pigeon, it bobbed
inquisitively at a safe distance.

"Do you think that's its mate?"  Mum asked, still deferring to
Grandpa.

"Well..."  he repeated, a red hand pressed against the creased map of
his neck.

"I saw this programme," Gay said, 'about birds that pair for life."

"Discovery," Robert agreed.

"And I think doves do so," she said sadly.

"No," corrected Grandpa.

"I think so, like albatrosses ..."

Kate's Mum, beneath her breath: "Good for them."

"No," Grandpa said again, his tone patient, or perhaps uncertain.  Kate
didn't find out because the dead bird twitched.  Its leg kicked.  The
other bird rose away from it and settled on the freshly mown lawn,
where it began pecking with a feigned lack of interest.

"Shall I go and kill it properly?"  Jack asked, standing in their
midst.  The bird flapped weakly, still on its back.  "We shouldn't let
it suffer," he continued hopefully.

"Give it a second," Ethan said, above their heads.  "Look."

Kate, meanwhile, flicked a stainless-steel catch and ground the door
sideways on its runners.  The bird flapped harder at the noise,
managing to right itself jerkily on limp legs.  Its resolve
strengthened at the sight of Kate's outstretched hands.  In a panic it
skittered into the flowerbed.

Turning round, the group was framed in the window.  Grandpa scratching
his bald head, Robert with a for life arm around Gay.  Kate's poor mum
with her palms up: what-can-you-do?  Jack looking disappointed.  Behind
them, in the back row, Rachel was craning forwards next to Ethan,
pressed against his side, steadying herself with a hand on his
shoulder.  Four dark fingernails pressed into Ethan's unmoving yellow
T-shirt.

"There you go," Ethan said.  "Kate's healing hands.  He's coming
round."

The pigeon re-emerged from the bed, joining the other one on the lawn.
Between bobs, it shook its head at Kate.  She stamped and both birds
clapped themselves away.  Looking back at her audience, neither Rachel
nor her paw print remained.

They retook their chairs, Robert and Gay already haranguing Ethan in
tandem, with a port-by-port account of their historic cruise.  His
fixed grin looked natural.  And Grandpa was saying something about the
power of the dollar and slipping her a twenty under the tiny coffee
table that separated their chairs.  Kate took it, saying, "No',
stretching to steady the nut bowl with her other hand.

A dead bird, nests of nuts, a hand upon a shoulder.  It meant nothing.
Spreadsheet Barbie.  When they came to leave, Ethan shook Grandpa's
hand and Robert's, even Jack's.  Both Mum and Gay took a kiss on the
cheek.  Kate enjoyed a surge of gratitude: she'd never seen him this
amenable, so prepared to charm.

Rachel only rejoined them in the confusion of kitchen goodbyes.
Mouthing 'new man' at Kate, she rolled her eyes and tapped her phone.
Better still, and enough to make Kate feel bad, Rachel was handing her
a gift.  Shop-wrapped, but... Kate's guilt burned harder when the paper
came away to reveal... a watch.  Rachel put a hand over the mouthpiece
and explained, "For the trip.  You wouldn't want to lose your good
one."  Ethan was already a shape on the other side of the kitchen
door.

Twenty.

The spoke of light reached bricks, finally, and kinked.  Now it
illuminated the rough concrete floor, Kate's right leg and a few inches
of brick wall.

There were little peaks and valleys in her trouser leg.  Shifting her
position very gradually, Kate accelerated the passage of time in this
mountain range, lengthening the shadows, drawing the leg world towards
her through its distinct day.  By pulling her knee out of the beam
entirely she could imagine the landscape into night.

But there was no way of speeding up the spoke.  It turned at its own
infinitesimal pace, sharp across the grey daylight hours, then dimming
into unholy darkness.  The previous day, she had counted it across
eleven bricks before the light began to fade.  Now she whispered,
"Eleven then," and resolved to repeat the observation again, to make
sure.

On balance the sweep of light was a good thing.  She had examined every
inch of its arc three times now.  The spoke's attention to detail made
the shed seem bigger than it was during the day.  But with the beam's
passing at dusk the space shrank, leaving her to fight the timelessness
and claustrophobia alone.  Its countdown was a constant reminder of the
impending horror of night.

Each morning the light began at the bucket by the door,

revealing khaki plastic.  The bucket didn't have a handle, which meant
the guard either carried it with a thumb inside the rim, or worse,
hugged it to his chest.  Next time he took it away, she would check.

She could not bring herself to use the bucket to begin with: it was an
emblem of the balaclava, an opponent she tried not to give in to.  When
she first needed to go, she called until the boy Khalid came, with a
handgun and twitching fingers.  Showing the whites of his eyes through
a chink of opened door, he made it clear she had no alternative.  One
toilet trip a day, the bucket at all other times.  So far it had not
become an issue: she had passed nothing more than a trickle.  But Kate
feared that they might not be set free before the time came and then
the bucket would be her only remaining option.

After the khaki enemy, then, the beam spent hours trawling across a
dusty swathe of floor, whose chief features were a ridge where the door
scraped and a broken section just short of the front wall.  Kate had
tried to sweep this surface clean with her hand, even flicking at it
with a sock, but both methods drew flakes of dirt and rotten concrete
unendingly.

At least she had the blanket to sit on.  It was her only furniture.  At
daybreak, after the first night in the shed, she'd showed the cloth to
the beam: it was a surprise to see brown and red tartan.  Not very
Kashmiri.  There was a joke in this, to do with notions of authenticity
and knitting, and that ridiculous balaclava, and Clay would have made
Ethan laugh at it she was sure, but without an audience the joke was
meaningless.  Kate grimaced and decided, while she was thinking of it,
to shake the blanket out.  When she did so the spoke acquired a new
dimension: a screen of motes swam above its line on the floor.

Yes, she'd have liked to talk about the tartan with the others, but
they were not within earshot.  The generator, if that's what it was,
blotted out the detail of their noise.  It groaned throughout the day
and night, masking all other sounds in the courtyard.  Kate tuned into
the generator again now and heard a new shape; it sounded, when she put
her ear to the back wall, as if its bricks were growling.

After the initial stretch of kneeling in the wood chips they'd been
taken one by one to separate outbuildings.  The men were led away
first.  Ethan whispered something at the ground on his way past.  It
sounded like, "I'm sorry," but she could have been mistaken.  This
wasn't his doing.  She retreated from the wall and focused instead on
her illuminated slice of brick, fighting to suppress the guilt.  She
must not allow the notion of fault into the frame at all.

When it came to her turn, the young guard had shown Kate through a maze
of stone walls to this cell, steering her through its open door with a
surprisingly gentle hand.  This sympathetic touch prompted a flurry of
questions, yet they came to her as the door shut and remained unasked.
She had to wait for his subsequent visits.  But whether escorting her
to the toilet, or dropping off paper plates of rice and hard-boiled
eggs, Khalid remained stony, refusing to answer her enquiries.  Who was
he?  Where did Nabbi go?  What did the balaclava want with them?  When
she asked, the boy shuffled from foot to foot and said nothing.

She would not give up.  Brick by brick, the day wore on.  When next the
door rattled, and the spoke fanned into a wedge, she was determined to
have another go.  Khalid's extended arm offered a china jug and she
took it.  Water.  The surface was black and silver crescents fighting.
Before she lifted the jug to drink, she caught his eye and smiled.

"Thank you."

He nodded in the pause.

"But please, can't you at least tell me how many days you're going to
keep us like this?"

The nodding became an equivocal waggle, but he was still looking at
her, and with calm eyes.

"Please," she repeated.

"Not long, I think."

She opened her mouth to ask what that meant, but he cut her off,
gesturing at the jug.

"So drink."

Though tempted to press him further, she thought better of it on seeing
his hand rise to take the water away.

Not long was reassurance, however vague.  Kate watched the spoke slide
forwards the entire length of another grey brick.  Staring at the
disintegrating join between the wall and the floor, she even surprised
herself with the realization that, given the choice, she'd extend the
period of captivity to about a week.  It would make for a better story.
Too short a confinement would not do justice to the fear she'd suffered
in her very first hour.  It was like a cut: after suffering the pain,
she deserved a proper scar.

As soon as this rash idea registered, though, her sense of superstition
demanded she unthink it.  The balaclava had to let them go now.  Never
mind that she hadn't managed to find why they were being held or who
was doing the holding, never mind that the article would have gaping
holes: she'd forfeit it all to be back in London, or even Delhi.

She stood up and put her eye to the crack between the door and the
doorpost.  In just these three days the view was already relentlessly
familiar: a strip of dirt some fifteen yards wide and then another
wall.  Once, she'd seen Clay pass across the gap, led by the denim
jacket, and it was a flooding comfort to see what she continually had
to force herself to believe, that she was not alone.

For the hours that she stared at the open space now, though, nobody
crossed it.  She rattled the door, trying to jar a wider view, again
considering the flimsy construction of the hut.  It wouldn't be hard to
knock the door free of its hinges, dig up the shot concrete floor, or
even pick apart a seam of bricks.  But then what?  Even if she managed
to break out she didn't know where Ethan was, or whether she'd be able
to free him and the others.  Anyway, they were in the middle of who
knew where.  The Himalayas.  Guarded by men with guns.  And now the boy
had said it would not be long.  All she had to do was sit out the days
and press through the nights and then, sooner rather than later, it
would be over.  Either they would be released or somebody would come to
free them: it was unbearable to think of any other outcome, so she
would not.  Instead she refocused on practicalities, reasoning that she
might even avoid the bucket, given enough hard-boiled eggs and a little
luck.

Kate sat back down and saw with a shiver that the spoke had reached the
last part of brick nine.  She pulled the blanket out from beneath
herself and refolded it around her shoulders neatly.

The light was failing.  Claustrophobia pressed down again with the
impending darkness, making each breath a conscious effort, each swallow
of spit a deliberate act.  Just to sit there required the constant
exertion of will.  She leaned away from the back wall, not wanting to
touch anything other than the floor, staring at her knees, conspiring
to conjure the illusion of physical space.

But the only likely escape was sleep, and even that held the threat of
unnavigable dreams.  Ten bricks now.  She watched the fading spoke
until it reached the tip of brick eleven.  It would be dark again soon:
a cockpit at night, instruments dead.  To beat the fear, Kate made it
her own.  She curled into a ball and pulled the blanket over her
head.

Twenty-One.

Ethan tiptoed the length of the storeroom, swivelled on his heel in
front of the oil drum, trod minutely back to the other wall.  Each step
was a nibble; he could have bitten the room in two with a proper
stride.  He paused in front of the door and heard the noise again, a
muffled scratching, coming from across the way.

Lying face down, with his cheek pressed sideways into the cement, he
scrutinized the familiar stretch of dirt and chip-pings spread between
his metal door and the one opposite.  The grey paint on the door had
peeled, leaving a negative shape: the outline of a royal head.

One of the others was behind that head.  As with Ethan's cell, an inch
or so of space stood between the bottom of the door and the concrete
floor.  In the last three days he'd seen feet moving in the gap.  After
his whistle that afternoon, he'd even made out the paleness of a face.
Too far away to see clearly, but whoever it belonged to, the face
wasn't Kate's.

When he shut his eyes to picture Kate, though, an image of Rachel swam
before him instead.  He saw her leaning forward, pulling an arm out of
its shirtsleeve, lamplight catching the sharpness of her bare shoulder.
Angles in place of her sister's soft curves.  He let his face rest more
heavily on the floor,

until the pain of grit pressing into his cheek made it impossible to
think of anything else.

The scratching sound happened again, higher pitched than the background
droning.  Ethan turned his ear to the gap and strained to pull the
noises apart.  Not scratching, perhaps, but gouging and chipping.  The
shapes in the slice of space beneath the queen's head had moved when he
next looked.  Somebody was close up to that door, he decided, and they
were scraping at its base.

He wasn't sure what he thought about that.

Now that the fear had subsided, an inertia seemed to have taken its
place.  The uncertainty of those first hours, blindfolded, travelling
who knew where, had not ended where Ethan suspected.  Nobody had been
killed.  In fact, they'd treated him with something like respect, which
had to be a good sign.

Still stretched out on the floor, Ethan kept his eye on the space under
the door opposite, but his mind began working through the rest of the
good signs, yet again.

A man in a balaclava was a good sign because it meant that man wanted
to protect his identity.  He was a professional, unwilling to risk
recognition.  Who did he fear might recognize and identify him?  Them,
of course.  And when?  When they were set free.

Another good sign was that, apart from George's altercation with the
big bearded one, there had been no violence.  Nothing unnecessary.  If
George had just sat still like the rest of them, the guard would not
have hurt him either.  All six of them were assets the balaclava had
said so and the plan was obviously to keep them in good condition.

Which made sense of the food and water and blankets: all good signs
too.

Yes, if he concentrated on the positives, the brutal negative of being
held here faded; Ethan almost managed to ignore it altogether.  But the
fearful truth re-formed around the shifting light and dark beneath that
metal door.  He considered another whistle.  Yet even if he caught the
face's attention, any communication with it would have to be too loud.
He might draw the guards' attention and, above everything else, he did
not want to risk that.  Grey compliance was the tactic for this
situation, the only way he could see of overcoming it, of emerging
unscathed.  Although he knew it was ridiculous, it seemed he did not
want to disturb the guards for their sake as much as his.  The fear in
his chest was held in check by a warm feeling of protectiveness.
Risible, yes, but he wasn't laughing.

Now the day was sliding into moonlit night.  The space between Ethan
and the other building had turned from brown to silver grey.  Still he
lay on his stomach, watching the darkness moving under the door, and
listening for the scratching.  It seemed to have grown louder, and it
now came in frantic bursts.  Once, footsteps cut across the yard, and
Ethan fancied that they paused just out of sight.  Listening.  He shook
his head.  The digger was an idiot; he should stop.

But he was still watching when the door opposite barked.  Once, twice.
Then silence.  Surely everybody else must have heard?  No, the silence
continued.  After long minutes the queen's head, barely visible in the
half-light, began, very gradually, to turn.  A doorpost came with it,
inching away from the rest of the frame.

Ethan did not dare to breathe.  The ground he lay on ran out beneath
his own door, across the space, right up to and under those silent
feet.  A figure, caped in a blanket, a comic-strip hero, paused in the
doorway.  Ethan felt a yell rise within in him, but bit down on the
sound before it came.  His eyes shut in sympathy with his mouth.  When
he opened them again, Rafi's outline had gone.

Twenty-Two.

Before the second tube rocked to a halt at Baker Street, Rachel saw
that it was as full as the one she'd skipped.  Few people disembarked.
She frowned.  There was nothing for it; pressing forwards with the
crowd, she wedged herself into a gap between a suit back and a sheet of
warm plastic.

The trick now was to zone out, like the Dalai Lama.  Later she wondered
whether the newspaper triggered that link, Dalai to Delhi, or if it was
a coincidence.  Either way, her next thought was not about the printed
page, wavering to the track rhythm on the other side of the clear
partition.  Instead she found herself disapproving of the hand that
held it: ragged nails, each one gnawed to its pink quick.

But the page snapped and moved towards her, flopping against the
perspex.  Rachel blinked once and began reading.

Fears Grow for Britons Kidnapped in Kashmir by Paul Frost in New
Delhi

Concern is growing over the fate of three Britons abducted by militants
while on a hill-walking holiday in Kashmir.  Ethan Hughes, 24, Kate
Cox, 25, and George Arnott, 39, were seized along with an American
couple and two others while trekking in the Himalayan foothills near
Sriniagar, the Kashmiri summer capital.

The militants initially abducted the group of seven along with their
Kashmiri tour guide and cook, but later freed the Kashmiris, who raised
the alarm.  Last night British High Commission officials in Delhi were
awaiting news of the hostages.  The young couple, who have no children,
had saved for two years to pay for the trip.  Mr.  Arnott is thought to
have been travelling alone.

Officials have revealed ... The page concertinaed, severing the story.
Rachel let out an involuntary "Wait'.  But her voice was lost in the
wail of train brakes.  Not braced to decelerate, she lurched backwards
into the suit.  When she'd apologized herself upright the paper was out
of sight entirely and the bitten hand was gone, lost in the crowd.
Rachel steadied herself against a metal pole, too stunned to move
before the train took off.

Mistakes in the story were her only hope.  Kate was twenty-three, not
twenty-five, and neither she nor Ethan had saved up for the trip.  They
just went.  Which meant the journalist had the wrong names, there'd
been a mix up, a senseless error.  She would buy the paper at the next
station and prove herself right.

But the train stopped in the tunnel.  She stared at her reflection in
the black window.  It seemed to swim in newsprint.  She shut her eyes,
trying to blank the article out entirely, and succeeded, but relived a
sickening childhood memory instead.

Arriving home from school.  Swinging her book bag onto the kitchen
surface like normal, but the house all strange.  Looking out back, the
line was still strung with washing.  Lots of her dad's shirts hanging
upside-down, waving for help.  Their shadows waved back.

A noise came downstairs and her voice saying "Mum' went to greet it.
There was no answer.  Rachel walked with small steps into the hall.  It
was surprising that her feet wanted to go this way.  Up each carpeted
lip, onto the landing with its pictures of hills and sheep and the
horse.

There was a mess in the entrance to Dad's room.  She couldn't see in
because one of his chutes had been taken out of its case.  It was
puffed to shoulder height and spilling from the doorway into the hall.
Rachel stopped beside it and saw that the yellow silk of the canopy was
full of ragged tears.  The carpet beneath her tiptoes was a spaghetti
of cut strings.

The noise was a sob, and it happened again, coming from the bathroom.
There was something wrong.  The first thing she saw through the crack
was scissors on the floor.  Orange plastic handles wide, steel blades
mid cancan.  Next, the naked soles of her mother's feet, curled and
creased like the newborn puppies next door.  Their wrinkles faded as
Mum rocked forward, squeezed shut when she sat back on her heels.
Something about her back rocking there made Rachel keep quiet.  Instead
of speaking, she eased the door wider hoping Mum would turn around.

There were newspapers everywhere.  The bath was full of open pages;
crumpled cuttings spread across the carpeted floor.  The aftermath of
Christmas in black and white.  Beneath the sink, in fact, there were
still some presents to go.  Two unopened bales crossed with a ribbon of
packing tape, a third on top of them, undone.  Mum rocked forward
again, took a folded newspaper from the top of the pile, spread it on
the bath mat with one hand in a practised movement.  The Stanley knife
she held in her other came forward and sliced out two-thirds of the
open page.  She paused with the cutting, then scrunched it and tossed
the crumpled shape aside.  The rest of the paper she flung on top of
others in the bath.  Again the dry sob.

The bottom of the door snagged on a discarded page.  Mum slowly turned.
It didn't look like crying.  Her face was as blank as a the tiles
behind it.

"Oh, I see.  You're back."

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing, sweetie."  She stood up on stiff knees, pushed a hand through
her perm, emerging from fog.  "You must be hungry.  Is Kate home
yet?"

"No.  I don't think so.  Why are you putting all those newspapers into
the bath?"

"She won't be long, though.  She'll be back soon too.  I ought to start
on supper."

"Mum?"

"Those?"  She pointed at the bath with the Stanley knife, then realized
she was doing so and withdrew the blade with her thumb.  Down by her
feet, the most recently discarded cut-out was unfolding gradually, like
a flower on television.  "I'm not sure, honey."  She paused.

"There's a lot of papers."

"Uhuh."

"Why?"

"I'm not exactly Mum's face crinkled for an instant and then set
again.

"And one of Dad's parachutes is all torn up on the landing."

"Right, darling."  Mum was nodding.  Her funny, cartoonish smile turned
from Rachel to the bath again.  "Actually, that's not quite right.  I
am sure.  I'm cleaning up.  Someone's made an awful mess in those
papers and I'm sorting it out.  Because I tell you one thing, this is
enough papers for a lifetime.  I won't have another one in the house,
ever.  How about that then?"

"OK."  It didn't make much sense, but now wasn't a good time to say so.
All that mattered was getting Mum out of the bathroom and downstairs,
back to normality.  "Shall I put the kettle on for a cup of tea?"

That'd be nice."  Rachel's mum took a step towards her and patted the
top of her head stiffly.  "I can finish up here later."

Rachel continued to look down.  The flower had bloomed as far as it
would ever do now.  She was surprised to see, near its still crumpled
centre, her father's smiling face.

Now the train had finally reached Euston Square.  Rachel had already
fought her way to the door: she must finish the article to make sure.

Yet she froze in front of the kiosk, not knowing which broadsheet to
buy.  The words were black on white, so not the FT, but..  . she bought
the lot and crouched with them on the platform, on a level with trouser
legs and briefcases, coat tails and skirt hems, searching for the only
news.

Officials have revealed that they were contacted by a previously
unknown group calling itself FNR, which is demanding the release of
fellow separatist activists imprisoned by the Indian authorities. Delhi
has rejected all such demands in the past, calling on Pakistan to clamp
down on militant groups, which it accuses of carrying out terrorist
activities.

Authorities in Kashmir have interviewed the tour guide, who was
released by the militants shortly after the group's capture.  Nabbi
Alfan, 42, said, "Eight heavily armed men stopped us as we were
returning to camp shortly before sunset.  There was no violence and
nobody was hurt, but I am fearful for my clients' safety if the
militants' demands are not met.  This is further terrible news for our
tourist industry here.  The government in Delhi must act to end the
wider conflict without delay.  I am praying for a peaceful outcome."

The mountainous region of Kashmir is the subject of a fifty-year
dispute between India and neighbouring Pakistan.  In the wake of recent
violence, the Foreign Office had advised tourists not to go to the
area.

The story stood just above an advertisement for a hair-loss clinic.  A
hand running through a sequence of three increasingly hirsute heads.
Or, the other way around, someone tearing their hair out.  That Rachel
should find out something so distressing, like this, in a newspaper,
underlined the fact that it could not be true.  She gathered a clump of
her own fringe and wound it round a forefinger.  She'd goaded Kate into
going to Kashmir: that much was plain.  Find yourself a hot spot.  The
finger tensed away from her head, pulling tears into her eyes, each of
the twenty or so strands straining at its separate root.  Guilt became
anger and dissolved to sadness, for Ethan, for Kate, for herself.  The
paper must be mistaken.  She stared down at it, weeping.  The first
root gave.  Then the second, intensifying the needle prick of pressure
in each of the other straining follicles until, with a hot crackle, the
rest of the clump came.

Twenty-Three.

Kate sat with her eyes shut against the dark, willing sleep, which
would not come.  She was cold.  She wrapped the blanket more tightly
around her head and shoulders and sat shivering beneath it.  Diamonds
rushed her.  Beautiful and individual and vicious and haranguing.

"Why did you come here?"

"Exactly, what a fucking mess."

"Think you could have avoided it?"

"Hungry?  Cold?  Scared?"

"Well, think of the others."

"And it's all your fault."

"For twenty-five dollars."

"And a story."

"The buck '

"Invest '

"Any regrets?"

"How about another grey egg?"

"Your choice."

"Investigate!"

"It's either that or the buck '

"All of it, your own doing."

"The bucket bucket bucket!"

"No!"  A voice cut through the nonsense.  She opened her eyes, shook
herself free of the blanket.

"No-oh," the voice again.

The real darkness was worse than the diamonds.  Bitumen black, ocean
deep.  She couldn't see the walls, roof or floor.  It felt like
falling, tail first, at terminal velocity: an invisible tear in the
night sky.

She forced herself to keep looking.

A spear of yellow light flicked across her floor.  After a pause it
happened again, accompanied by a noise.  Something heavy dragging
itself across rough ground.  Or being dragged.

"Why?"

It was a man's voice, at least the remnants of one.  Next, a muffled
thud like the sound of an axe stopping dead, in wet wood.  And then the
dragging started up again.

Kate sat up and felt her way to the door, helped by another flash of
the yellow light.  With an eye to the crack, she searched the space in
front of her makeshift cell.  Two figures hauled themselves into view.
Black shapes, occasionally jumping into full colour at the command of a
torch beam, coming from behind.  Each leaned into his walk, as if
hauling a boat ashore.  Both of them pulling on their own rope.  The
torch cut from nowhere to a denim back, and there was a tight line
slung over his shoulders, attached to ... a pair of feet.  For a second
the feet were spotlit and Kate saw that one was bare.  Then the beam
jumped across the inert figure, briefly snagging on the shape of a
shorn head.

"Ethan!"  she screamed.  "Eth '

The beam cut back and it wasn't him.  Black hair.  Her eyes swam with
tears, making it more difficult to see.  And then she was completely
blind.  A voice behind the light spoke.

"He tried to run away, but we have brought him back."  Already the
front two figures were past the door jamb, out of sight.  Rafi's prone
form moved to catch them up in brief bursts.  The torch played over the
scene once again.  A bow wave of dirt and chippings spilling around his
thighs.  Kate saw a snapshot of arms, also tied together, flung back
over the lolling head.  Then it was just the dragging noise and
shadows, sporadic on the far wall.

Ethan woke to his name.  He lay listening, flat on his back, rigid with
cold.  Rolling up onto his elbow was like pr ising a girder from frozen
ground.  For long seconds there was silence.  He began to doubt that
he'd heard the scream at all.  But the memory of Ran fleeing at
nightfall came back to him and he found himself screwed tightly to the
gap under the door, staring out into the darkness, even before the
first footsteps became audible.  There was tramping, and a torch, and a
body on its side.  Rafi's head was hanging so far back Ethan thought he
was dead.  He stared, aghast at the inevitability of such a thing,
absolutely unwilling to turn the corner it represented.  And it worked.
Rafi lunged sideways, definitely alive, grabbing, if somewhat
pathetically, at the torchbearer's feet.  As he did so, he called out.
The noise was a plea beyond language, at once senseless and obvious.

The guard with the torch shone its yellow eye down at Rafi and calmly
kicked free of his feeble grip.  Rafi twisted like a loose hose.
Somebody spoke angrily, though Ethan could not work out who.  The light
skipped away and then returned.  It dwelt on the denim jacket,
apparently kneeling over Rafi now, at the head end.  A hand worried at
Rafi's collar.  From so low an elevation, and in just the torch light,
Ethan couldn't work the picture out.  Could not became would not: he
looked away and shook his head, but was unable to dislodge the sight.
They were dragging Ran into the open door of his cell.  The torch
illuminated the smaller space from within, bouncing from its walls, a
visible echo.  Black figures multiplied around the heap in the doorway.
Somebody was pointing upwards and gesturing with the end of the rope.
It took two goes to toss the knot over the rafter, and all three of
them worked together to raise Rafi, feet first, towards the roof.

Once satisfied that he was secure, the torch looked Rafi up and down
lazily.  A high diver the moment before impact, feet nicely together,
arms extended.  Ethan wished, with every fibre, for movement: a hand,
even a finger.  But the three figures pausing there in front of the
open door seemed reverent before Rafi's inverted statue, and the same
stillness took hold of Ethan as they drifted away.

Twenty-Four.

The generator stopped, unfolding a limitless calm.  For a few seconds
she tried not to open her eyes, as if by leaving them shut she could
keep the fear and the dark at bay.  In the end the urge to look
overcame her, though, and it was a relief to see morning.  No spoke
yet, but four grey walls were better than nothing at all.

Kate's walking boots were paired to one side of the door, laces tucked
into each open mouth.  As a point of principle, she did not sleep in
them.  But now it was a new day and she put them on again, tying the
laces slowly and deliberately, trying to rebuild a sense of normality
by performing this mundane act with special care.  The benefit did not
last; the sight of her laced boots reminded her suddenly of Nabbi.  In
a snap of frustrated rage she kicked the bottom of the door.

The quiet that followed the bang was split by another sound.  Kate left
a pause and then kicked the door again, twice.  Two distant knocks
answered hers.  She repeated the signal, smiled on hearing another
response.  It sounded as if the noise was coming from her left.  Eyeing
the crack again, though, nothing had changed.  It was impossible to
know who was replying, yet enough to be sure that one of them was.  To
have overcome this isolation, even in so meaningless a way, felt like
victory.  It might be Ethan.  Kate kept kicking.

The denim guard stopped her.  He filled the door frame and Kate
instinctively retreated to the back wall.  It looked like he'd just
woken up; one half of his hair was right-angled above a parting.  Bed
hair.

"What?"  he asked.

"Sorry?"

"What is it?"

"I don't understand.  Nothing."

"Why this knocking and knocking?  You have a difficulty?"  He stuck his
little finger in the ear beneath the parting and jiggled it angrily.  A
ring on the finger flashed while Kate weighed the question and fought
to contain her response.

"What have you done with Ran?"

"Ra .. . fi."  The guard experimented with the syllables.

"Where is he?  What did you do to him?"

The finger stopped digging.  The guard took a step further into the
room, looking the walls up and down as if he hoped to find an answer to
the question there.

"Well?"  Kate put her hands on her hips, but the gesture just made her
feel more ineffectual.  She crossed her arms instead.

The denim guard watched her, unimpressed, stroking his beard
thoughtfully.  Eventually he shrugged.  "He made trouble for everyone,
so we have tied him up.  You will see."  The finger pointed at Kate.
"In meantime, shhh!"  He turned and left, slamming the door.

Kate sat in the gloom again.  Rafi was a soldier.  Perhaps he had
managed to alert somebody before the guards recaptured him.  By staring
hard enough at the possibility she could make it seem real.  There
would be people looking for them by now.  Special Forces, almost
certainly.  Faced with such a threat, the idiot balaclava would quickly
give them up.  Or there'd be a rescue operation and they'd be set free
anyway.  Although there wasn't much she could do to speed up their
release, she could prepare for it by keeping vigilant.  She moved away
from the arc of the door and sat at the back of her cell, out of the
way, listening hard.

Later Khalid escorted her to perform.  He did not meet her eye while
they walked, stared intently at his rifle strap as she shut the
toilet-block door.  The long drop again proved impossible, but Kate
washed at the standpipe.  It gurgled and spat icy water into a puddle
on the floor, dirtying her boots and trousers, freezing her fingers
from raw red to white.

The tap shrieked as she turned it off.  Only the shriek was a muffled
yell that continued for too long, nothing to do with the plumbing at
all.  Kate stood transfixed, her heart hammering in her ears.  The
mouth of the long drop mocked her as she tried to convince herself
otherwise, but the shouting came again, driven by an intermittent
thwacking; the beating of wet washing against a wall.  From close by,
within the toilet block.  They must be punishing Rafi.  Kate found
herself paralysed by the noise, her throat dry with fear.  She only
started at the louder crack of a palm on the wooden door.

Outside the washroom the shouting stopped, or she could no longer hear
it.  Khalid fidgeted before her, ominously silent, prevaricating.
Eventually, he steered her away with his gun barrel.  But instead of
turning left, back to her cell, Khalid led her round the other way.
This was unprecedented and she found herself gulping air.  The
windowless room with its spoke was familiar and known and safe, but the
farmstead was a confusing maze of low stone walls, sinister in the
morning light.  In one direction she saw mountains and was shocked to
consider that just days ago they had been the point.

Then there were more outbuildings and a shape Kate understood ahead of
recognition: Raft hanging upside-down in an empty doorway, his mouth
sagging open below the bigger smile of his slit throat.  The sight was
at once real and fake, a pretend body and a corpse, joke-shop blood and
death.  She'd never seen a dead person before, but was not surprised by
this sight in the least, just kneeling down again and looking to Khalid
for an explanation.

"My orders are that you must see.  I am sorry, but this is what happens
if you try to run away."

The boy gestured at the doorway, declining to look himself.  Instead he
pulled at his sleeve and moistened his lips, sucking both in turn.
Kate's gaze returned to the corpse, which was suddenly Ran again,
upside-down, the wrong colour and preternaturally still.  Acid rose in
her throat; she fought back an urge to gag.  His fingertips were just
inches from the floor, as if reaching out to cushion his fall.  Though
crouched on all fours she was weightless, unsteady, tumbling with him.
They were all falling now.

Looking back at Khalid, he appeared ashamed, sheepish even.  The
thought made anger of her horror; she found that she had dug two
handfuls of chippings and dirt, and was lifting one to throw in his
face.

"Kate!"

Ethan's voice, nearby.  The hand dropped as she swung about to find
him.  But there were only blank doors, and the guard was again steering
her forwards.

Ethan's eyes followed her out of view.  He was shaking with fear and
anger.  That Kate had even risked raising a fist, there, in full view
of RafYs body, beggared belief.  He had watched the darkness through to
dawn, seen the corpse materialize in its butcher's shop window.  A
sickening exclamation mark.  How could she put herself at such risk?

He fought to keep himself calm.  An aberration.  Kate wasn't daft.  She
was calm in a crisis, she thought things through.  That trip in her
little plane, for example, with the panic cloud and forced landing. The
cockpit thick with fear.  It had taken everything he had to sit there
silently, to appear unruffled for her sake, yet her own self-control
appeared effortless.  She got them down.  That was capability, it would
see Kate through.  Better that thought than its opposite the image of
her petrified, alone in her cell.  A leaden ness pressed him to the
floor.  How had he not risen to the challenge of thanking her that day,
of acknowledging her .. . competence, at the very least?

Footsteps grew again.  Ethan rolled back from the door when its lock
shot and was struggling to his feet as it opened.  The stumpy guard
hustled him out into the courtyard, walked him across it to the corpse
and stood next to it with his arms emphatically folded across the swell
of his stomach.

"Run," he said.  "Problem."

Ethan tried to keep all expression from his face.  He barely looked.
But when he did it was impossible not to notice how the roof of the
mouth was purple behind grey front teeth.  The lips were swollen and
cracked, the underside of the tongue black in shadow.  At least,
upside-down like that, the shapes had less to do with Ran.  Khalid
returned.  The fat guard said something to the youngster, prompting him
to explain quietly in English.

"We are to take you to Abu, who will teach you why this cannot
happen."

The stumpy guard pushed him sideways.  A stiff-armed palm-off, enough
to make Ethan trip over his feet.  Righting himself, he kept his eyes
on the ground, allowed the guard to prod him further, past more stone
outbuildings and in through another open door, which banged shut behind
him.

This room was empty, but there was a window.  Pale morning fell through
the glass, giving the space a calm at odds with its stark contents,
empty apart from a heap of sacks strewn in the back corner, and an
upended plastic chair, on its side in the middle of the pile.

The sacks were a jumble of shadows at first, but as Ethan's eyes
adjusted he saw that in fact part of the shadow was stain.  He sat down
on the floor, something inside him giving in.  A room full of stains,
Ran with his throat cut, hung from his beam, the life draining out of
him drop by drop.  Was this where he would end?  Ethan stared down at
his blackened fingernails and felt the blood pulsing beneath them and
for the first time in his life feared that it would stop.  What came
afterwards?  He'd never really paused to consider that he would die.
But now he felt a shivery other ness envelop him.  Death was an ending,
and an ending would make a frame.  It meant perspective, judgement.  He
saw Kate walking towards him across a postcard quadrangle, each
hyper-real blade of grass in place, the sunlight angling down over
bombproof battlements.  He saw Rachel raised on one elbow, blowing
smoke at the ceiling.  And then the pictures fell away and the room
came crashing back into focus with its cold light and dirty sackcloth
and single, fiendish chair.

The door swung open again and the denim guard, Abu, swaggered into the
room.  If the walk was a clue, the man's eyes "gave him away entirely.
They said: Because I can.  Ethan had seen the same expression before,
in playgrounds, on sports pitches and in front of nightclubs.  Even, a
long time ago, in the kitchen at home.  The strong in their own thrall,
securely differentiated.

"Your friend has done this," Abu stated.  Behind him, the squat guard
had also sidled into the room.  He shut the door, wandered round to the
chair, righted it: a teacher tidying a classroom.

"Sit."

"He was not my friend."

Abu, ignoring him, continued: "It was all explained.  You are very
valuable.  Assets."  The squat guard had pulled Ethan's unresisting
hands together behind the chair and was tying them with a cord.  Abu
paced in front of the chair, working himself up.  "But you are not
valuable if you run away.  Then you are worth nothing at all."

"I know that, I haven't '

"See what happens if you try?"  He waved a hand at the window.  "You
stop being important people."  With the same hand Abu smoothed his
black beard mechanically.  Then he advanced and slapped Ethan on the
shoulder an incongruously comradely gesture.  "Big man, eh.  No
difference."

Ethan saw that the hand was quivering.

"So we must make you think twice about running."

Now the blindfold.  Ethan kept his head down, supplicant in every
gesture.  But, as his pulse quickened, his mouth couldn't resist a
further plea.  "I didn't '

"For your own goodness.  Yes?"

"I don't '

The first blow was a relief.  It jarred and bloomed, like the first
tackle.  From then on the next one was always coming; Ethan,
blindfolded, was never and always ready for it.  Better they beat him
than Kate.  He excised himself from the scene as far as possible,
jerking unavoidably back to the present in the instant of being hit,
but melting away in the gaps.

It was important to be strong and brave, and not a coward.  The walls
at home said that.  On plaques with insignia of beaks and arrows and
red crosses and Latin, commemorating this Falkland Islands skirmish and
that honourable service in Ireland or Cyprus.  In rows of shorn heads
staring in lines, squared up in front of a field hospital, or hangar,
or barracks.  If you were brave and strong, and not cowardly, you'd get
somewhere, the pictures said; you'd succeed like Dad, there was hope
that you'd make a fine young man.  You could shut your eyes and hear
him saying it, or something similar.  Open them again and there he was,
on the touchline in a deerstalker and sopping overcoat.  "Come on you
reds!"  he cried.

When you went in, you should go in hard.  That was all part of it.  You
went in hard because it was brave to do so and if you were brave you
wouldn't get hurt.  Like Mr.  Phillips said, it was all about
committing, whatever that word meant.  The ball was coming out,
streaked with brown from the cut-up pitch, plopping out of the back of
the scrum like a special turd or maybe a baby being born into
Doherty's hands.  Now Ethan's legs had decided to start running.

Doherty was good, but Ethan was the captain and the star.  Nobody
disagreed with that.  In a race, any race, Ethan won.  The ball was
looping out from Doherty, a slow bullet spinning through the rain,
aimed a few paces in front of Ethan, which was right.  He was already
running on to it.  He saw himself and the pitch from above and the gaps
ahead were obvious.  The squirt at inside-centre was one of them; he'd
never stop Ethan, whose hands reached for the ball without looking and
put it under his arm, gathering momentum in these first few strides,
which was mass times something, applied force greater than its
resistance.  He'd look it up.  Already the inside-centre was
retreating, little red knees pumping in all sorts of wrong
directions.

Maybe she was in the car because of the wet?  Perhaps that was it.  Dad
was up by the opposition's touchline to watch Ethan running in the
tries, as usual, but Mum was parked because of the rain.  Except that
she never normally minded, and as Ethan aimed his next steps at the
retreating little 'un it was obvious really that it had to do with her
eye, like her blue cheek after Christmas.  The eye and the plaques and
courage and cowardice and his mother and father; they didn't add up.

There was a funny look on the inside-centre's face.  You could tell
from it he knew he would be run down.  Mashed.  Ethan would go in hard,
which you should do if you didn't want to get hurt, if you were brave
and strong.  He'd run the short-arse over.  "Go on then!"  yelled Dad.
"Go on!"  The only other big kid on the entire pitch was their number
eight, who had yet to pull his head out of the back of their collapsed
scrum and even then he was big and mean, but ginger and pretty
gormless.  He couldn't have caught Ethan anyway, Ethan who was ten
explosive paces into his angled run, bearing down on the inside-centre
now, shoulder dipping.  "Go on then, go on!"

Which was funny because that was what Mum had cried after Christmas
when she'd slipped in the kitchen on the floor wet from the leak that
went away on its own.  Upstairs Ethan had thought he was dreaming it,
but the Subbuteo pitch was in focus in the middle of his bedroom floor
the second time he heard the words.  You could see the players in the
glow coming from beneath the bedroom door, casting stringy shadows. "Go
on then," she shrieked, her American accent twanging.  "Go on!"

Ethan's knees pumped higher and he gathered himself for the impact,
anticipating the delicious sense of continuation which, once he'd
stomped through the tackle, was guaranteed.  Marcus was outside him
yelling "Pass', but what was the point in that?  The object was to
score points after all, and the scrum was breaking up to his right and
this kid just here was a hole waiting to open; yes, their entire
retreating three-quarter line was a field of bracken just asking to be
trampled flat.

It was lucky Dad was an army doctor because he had all the kit.  Ethan
was padding downstairs in his pyjamas to find out about his mother, but
only got as far as the hall before he met Dad coming the other way. His
face was full of veins and the colour of Christmas ham and he put a
hand on Ethan's shoulder to steer him back upstairs, past the little
shields with their mottos and claws and gloved fists.  "Back to bed
now, Mum's fine, a little slip, an accident, damned dishwasher."

His breath smelt sharp.  "I'm just fetching supplies from the bathroom,
Witch hazel to dress the bruise.  You jump back into bed now.  I'll
kill that moron plumber.  There's a good chap."

Ethan's feet had trodden obediently round the Subbuteo green and into
bed then, like a good fellow, not a plumber, but now they seemed to
have made an odd decision.  Mum was in the car behind layers of perfume
and misted windows and dark glasses.  There with her red eye.  Like
last time, when it was the blue cheek, she didn't want to come out.  As
if sunlight might make the bruising spread.  And Dad was yelling, "Go
on son!"  as if he had any sort of a right to comment or instruct.  The
pitch was minced mud flying from Ethan's heels, which were suddenly
idiots, swerving away at this last minute, changing the angle of his
attack, aiming him back at the heart of the opposition's pack.

Marcus was still outside, yelling "Pass!"  and Doherty thought Ethan
was contriving some complicated reverse angle for him to bisect, but
that wasn't the point at all.  The little inside-centre's chapped knees
were slowing, his eyes were wide in disbelief, and Ethan had caught up
with himself, knew what his heels intended, ignored Doherty's clever
tangent, ploughed the remaining few yards straight at the number eight,
whose first sight on looking up from the disentangling wreckage of the
scrum brought an incredulous smile to his ox face, a split of gum
shield there beneath that wire-wool hair, unable to believe his luck.
The orange head dipped, arms agape.  Ethan tilted lower too.  Something
to do with equal and opposite forces about to collide.

The jarring was like falling out of a tree.  Then a black wave rolled
over Ethan.  He lay beneath it, oddly happy, with the words brave and
strong and coward nipping at his fingers and eyelids and calves like
tiny invisible fish.

And he was oddly relaxed when the wave rolled back.  The beating was
fists and open hands and Ethan hung onto a single idea: it could have
been worse.  Although he was not sure, the grunts that accompanied each
punch and slap seemed to belong to one man.  There was blood in his
mouth, though it tasted like sweat.  Or was that the smell of Abu,
delivering the punishment alone?  Ethan's own gasps became groans, but
he suppressed the urge to yell in retaliation, struggled successfully
not to struggle, tried to imagine Abu tiring quickly in the face of so
immediate and complete a victory.  There was silence.

(In her cell, Kate heard the pause in this further beating.  To be
under lock and key while it went on, powerless either to flee or help,
was its own torture.  The noise was indistinct, she couldn't tell who
the cries belonged to.  Eventually the urge overcame her and she
delivered two further kicks to the bottom of her door, listened
carefully for a reply.  Bang, bang.)

The banging reverberated through Abu's silence, prompting him to turn
back to Ethan and deliver two last blows.  Then the beating stopped and
the blindfold came off.  Ethan felt himself scrutinized, but kept from
meeting Abu's gaze.  His chest was wet and the view from one eye
narrowed as he sat, waiting for the guard to regain his composure.  The
hurt was a mesh, drawn tight around him, and oddly comforting.  I am
here, it said.  Ethan noticed that at some point the guard had taken
his denim jacket off.  Keeping it clean.  Wearing it before, but not
now because now it was folded neatly on the window sill.  Abu picked it
up and draped it over his arm with a forced calmness, at odds with the
sheen across his forehead and the studied indifference of his nod to
the other guard.

Ethan stayed still as the squat one untied him and led him back to his
cell.  Such physical abasement was an alien thing, yet his sense of
outrage was dwarfed by the phrase that kept repeating: it, could, have,
been, much, worse.

In the gloom, he broke the pain down into its component parts.  The
smarting eye, the swollen nose, bruised upper arms, dull aches across
his pummelled back and chest.  At some point Abu had kicked his right
shin.  Running his hand over the lump, Ethan was cast back: this was a
distortion of the familiar post-match stock take his body reclaiming
itself in the aftermath of adrenalin.  Then the pain had felt
pointless, a punishment of success.  Now, though, it was a hideous
affirmation.

And there was something more.  They hadn't taken him to where Ran was
now.  They could have done, but they hadn't.  Despite their absolute
power, the guards had refrained from taking the absolute step.  Some
sense of proportion had prevailed.  Despite his anger, Ethan felt a
spark of gratitude.  In not taking his life the captors had given him a
gift.  Though it shamed him to think it, his tears were grateful, for
generosity deserved thanks.

Twenty-Five.

The harder she tried to hold on to where she was, the more she found
herself thinking about where she was not.  It even became difficult to
concentrate on the turning spoke.  One minute it was just that, a white
line of sun counting down the bricks, the next she was staring along
the leading edge of a wing into the patchwork of fields below.

"It's constant control," her instructor was saying, 'minute adjustments
ahead of the need for big corrections.  Try again."

For a steep turn you banked the plane with ailerons and then pulled
back on the stick to keep from losing height, tightening the curve with
the elevators.  Toeing in a touch of opposite rudder helped keep the
plane balanced, and you throttled up going through thirty degrees, to
maintain airspeed.  It helped avoid that forbidden eyeballing of the
altimeter if you picked a point on the nose cowl to stick on the
horizon right the way round.  And if you got it right, if you pulled
through three hundred and sixty degrees without losing or gaining
height, you'd feel it in the airframe, a satisfying jolt of turbulence
as the plane hit its own slipstream.

Kate wrote the word 'pen' in spit on the cement floor.  Then she stared
at her hand, allowing the line of sun to play across its palm.  Flying
was control, second by second: here time meant nothing and she had no
control at all.  There were shadows in the whorls of her dirty
fingerprints.  But the lines did not hold Kate's attention for their
own sake.  As soon as she focused on the intricate pattern she was
hanging there in the sky, staring down at the lake through the cockpit
side window, at ripples spread by distant boats.

She shut out the image by putting both hands together and for a second
that worked, she was alone, stuck with the reality of her cell.  But
then the sight of her wrists touching reminded her of how Rafi's had
been bound, and the memory of them hanging beneath him in the doorway
was vivid and unavoidable.

She was to blame.  She had created this entire situation, and as such
was responsible for everything that flowed from it.  Yes.  She was
responsible for Rafi's death.

No.  Rafi died because he tried to escape.  If he'd just stayed put
like the others, he'd still be alive.  But that begged the question:
what might happen to the rest of them next?

Negotiations were undoubtedly under way.  Embassy officials were surely
in contact with the militants perhaps even with the balaclava himself.
Release terms would be agreed.  The han dover was no doubt already in
train.  Journalists, local politicians, consular staff, military
personnel, special agents, crisis counsellors: countless people would
have come together to end the horror.  Yet when she shut her eyes she
could not bring a single face into focus, could not imagine where the
officials might be gathered, what maps or charts would hang before them
on the wall.

She veered from the unthinkable future back to the past.  At what point
had they been set up?  Nabbi handed them over without even pretending
to object.  And yet she could not conceive of this being his plan.
Everything about the man lacked initiative.  Which pushed her further
back, to the fat tout in Srinagar.  He was to blame.  But that just
meant she was too.  She had sold them all into the fat tout's hands for
twenty-five dollars a head.

Where was the proof, though?  She struggled further backwards.  Wasn't
their fate sealed before they stepped off the bus?  Wouldn't Sunil have
delivered them into captivity as well?  What was to say that all the
touts weren't working together?  If so and for a moment such a blanket
of deception seemed likely each of their party was equally blameless.
Or at least they were all equally at fault.  But she now recalled the
sight of Sunil throwing the envelope into the fire pit.  She saw it
twist and burn in the cell before her, pressed her palms to her eyes to
block out the sight.

No, to avoid the guilt she had to go right back, to the start.  They
each decided to visit Kashmir, and ultimately their abduction was
Kashmir's fault.  Or theirs, for coming.  All of them had risked
travelling here, prepared to take the gamble either because they had
discounted the danger, had been wilfully blind to it, or even because
they were in its thrall.  She wasn't to blame for that.

Why then did this reasoning leave her unconvinced?  Because she
suspected that not all of them had considered the risk.  Kate felt the
question was Kashmir Ethan's conscious choice?  but could not answer
it.

Instead she said his name out loud, "Ethan," trying to take heart from
its familiarity.  For although this room was absolutely familiar it
managed, at the same time, to be the sum of everything foreign.  She
looked from the bucket to the bricks to the blanket folded in the
corner, traced the join up to the rafters and the corrugated roof,
seeing these things before her eye arrived at them and yet surprised by
their nuances nevertheless: the crudity of that bolt, the burnt
blackness of the beam above the door.

Next to the word 'pen', Kate traced out 'paper' in the dust, but other
words, spoken by her flying instructor, were ringing in her ears.

"Anticipation is the key," he explained.  "Think ahead on every axis.
Get it right and you'll be spinning the horizon around the plane."

She had tried to think of herself as the still point, of the wings
remaining fixed while she turned the sky smoothly about them and,
gradually, she learned to master the manoeuvre.  It was addictive; she
honed her powers of prediction until she felt she could execute a steep
turn with her eyes shut.  Practising alone, she would forget the
horizon and look instead at the lowered wing tip, aiming it at
overlapping fields, cross-haired sheep fences, a flashing edge of
lake.

Remembering the brightness now, in the dark of her cell, was torture.
She was not only her captors' prisoner, but subject to herself as well.
She focused on the leg landscape of her trousers and drew breath.

"Got to keep control," she said out loud.  "Got to keep thinking under
control."

The way to survive was to keep a record; she could tame the past and
make sense of the present by thinking of the account she'd write for
the future.  Already the words written in spit were evaporating.  So
that would be a project, wheedling a pen and paper from one of the
guards.  In the meantime, she must keep her observations fresh by
repeating them over and again.  She watched the letters until they had
all but faded, whispering to herself.

Twenty-Six.

"We were just about to give up on you."

The taller of the two figures, who had risen to brush the creases from
his suit as Rachel approached, stood now and held out both his hands,
welcoming her home.  In the street-lamp glow she made out two lamb-chop
sideburns and a pair of retro glasses.  She stopped short of the stone
pillar and shifted the briefcase to her left hand, freeing the right to
reach inside her overcoat for her mobile phone.

"She's goin' for her gun," drawled the seated figure, from beneath the
brim of a baseball cap.

"Look, we don't want to take up much of your time but '

Rachel tried to cut the man off.  "I don't yet he rode effortlessly
over the interruption.

"I know, it's late, you've had a hard day and all that, and you made
your position abundantly clear when we spoke earlier, but I think you
should reconsider.  If you look at the big picture you'll see that this
is a positive step; this is your chance to help."

The call he referred to had been exquisitely timed.  Earlier that day,
shortly after Rachel had returned from a recuperative trip to the
washroom at work, her boss slid across the floor on his chair.  He
squeezed her upper arm and spilt his suggestion.  "Given the
circumstances, I want to float the possibility of you taking some time
off.  Maybe a stretch of counselling.  Just to help you climb back into
the saddle."

"I wasn't aware that I'd fallen out of it."  Her face overdid its
smile.

"Maybe not, but you have to admit you've not been on top of your game
these past weeks.  Since '

"I'm leaving all that at home.  It's kind of you, but really.  The last
thing I need is time to dwell on it."

"But the work's suffering, Rachel.  We missed last week's deadline and
I just heard from BRS that they received a draft report this morning,
full of blank pages.  It's completely understandable.  Your mind's
elsewhere."

So were his eyes.  Evading her own, they swept Rachel's desk, computer
monitor and cubicle partitions, stopping at her open desk drawer, in
which her compact mirror sat in full view, BA club card lying across
it.  One of his hands worked at the other, cracking its knuckles in
turn.  Rachel swivelled towards him, nudging the drawer shut with her
knee.

"We missed that deadline because the client wouldn't give us enough
detail to report on in the first place, and I haven't sent anything to
BRS it must have been somebody else."  She bit her bottom lip and
allowed her foot to touch his calf.

"Still," he said, 'the .. . pressure, is making you ... erratic.  I
think you could do with some time to recoup."  It wasn't working; he
was staring at the drawer and he'd withdrawn his leg.  "You've too much
on your plate."

She shook her head and was about to reply when her phone rang.  Her
mother's voice, for the third time that morning  Rachel's boss cracked
through the knuckles of his other hand while she spelled out again that
she was fine, and gave more empty reassurances: they were bound to hear
something soon.  In the pause after she returned the handset to its
cradle she could sense him searching for a way to say, "See what I
mean?"  but neither of them had the chance to speak as, again, the
phone cut in.  At least it wasn't her mother's number on the screen.
Rachel punched the speaker button authoritatively.

"Rachel Cox?"

"Speaking."

"My name's David Turner.  I'm calling from the Sunday Telegraph
magazine."

Rachel lifted the handset.  Her boss rolled backwards across the carpet
tiles on his chair, waving goodbye-for-now, a look of triumphant
sympathy on his face.

"What do you want?"

"We're keen to do a piece on your sister's story for this week's
supplement.  A human interest story.  We'd like your comments."

"I'm not interested."  She sniffed and wiped her nose.  Human,
interest, story.

"We just need some detail, some stuff on your sister's background.  The
kind of girl she was.  Is, rather."  He pressed on.  "You know: like,
did she give any indication of why she was going to a war zone for her
holidays?  And we're also after more information about the boyfriend.
Edwin?  The father's pretty much fleshed him out, but we'd appreciate
it if you can add anything extra to that picture as well.  You know '

She'd read an article the week before, in which Ethan's father had
spoken of the need to hold firm against the militants.  He had every
confidence that the Indian security forces,

working with 'our own boys', would secure the release of the hostages,
either through negotiation or by other means.  He knew Ethan would
deplore the thought of causing any democratic government to set a
dangerous precedent by acceding to the demands of a cowboy outfit like
the FRN.  Whatever transpired, his lad had backbone and wouldn't want
to be the thin end of anybody's wedge.  The thought of Ethan's take on
this bluster would have been amusing had it not reduced her to tears.

The reporter's disembodied voice was still buzzing at her down the
phone line.  Somebody's head appeared above the partition, mouthing a
question.  Rachel waved the person away.  The rows and columns on the
screen in front of her seemed to wobble and waver.  The rush had passed
now, leaving her nauseous and faint.  Wiping her forehead with a palm,
she raised her voice.

"No.  Leave me alone.  I don't want to speak to you or anybody else
about what's happened, all right?"

"Sure, but '

Rachel banged the phone down and sat back.  Out of the corner of her
eye she saw pale faces turn away.

Now the tall man with sideburns was coming down her steps, arms still
spread, jabbering like a politician.  The seated figure stirred behind
him, rummaging in a bag.

"Which part of "no" did you not understand?"  "The part that didn't
mean it.  Just think about the opportunity '

Rachel thrust the phone forwards, as if it were a talisman.

She continued, "I'm going to call the police unless you leave me
alone."

The baseball cap stood up now, laughed and said, "Charming."  A
flashgun popped.  It was as if a windscreen between Rachel and the pair
had shattered.  Glittering cobwebs remained.  "One for my wall," the
same voice said, 'looker, like you."

"He didn't mean that."  The cracks melted and the man's sideburns
became clear again.  He was grinning amiably.  "Look, we're prepared to
pay for an interview.  And the publicity can only be a good thing.  I
realize it must be difficult to talk in the circumstances, but don't
you think your sister would want her story verified by someone close to
her; by you?"

In the aftermath of the flash the reporter's face had appeared purple,
his lips madder brown.  His glasses winked orange.  What would Kate
want?  The colours were helpful; they overshadowed the question, which
was a good one, and yet obviously a trick.  They would inevitably draw
her to talk about Ethan, too.  Over the reporter's shoulder she saw the
polished glass of her apartment block door swing open.  She focused on
the photographer, who rose to stand beside his colleague in the
lamplight.  Though pushing thirty, he wore different colour Converse
basketball boots; one was red and the other was sky-blue.  This detail
offended Rachel.  It spoke of a flippancy so at odds with what was at
stake that for long seconds she could not bring herself to speak.

"Come on, love.  We've waited here three hours.  Be a sport."  The
photographer gave her a thumbs up.  The figure emerging from the block
had stopped to watch, turning the confrontation into a performance.

"No.  You've wasted your time."  She started forwards, spelling it out
again as she did so.  "You're wasting your time!"

The reporter stepped sideways and put a hand on the wrought-iron
railing, cutting her off.  The photographer closed ranks, with him, so
that the two of them barred her way.

"Look, we're going to write the piece anyway, with or without your
help."  The reporter dug his forefinger into a side burn and scratched
it abstractedly, underlining the fait accompli.  "You might as well
have your say."

Rachel pushed her hair back and met the man's eye.  She left a pause,
determined not to appear cowed in front of a neighbour.  Shouldering
between the two of them, her bag banged the photographer's slung
camera, which clattered against the wall.  She blotted out his "Whoa
with a hissed, "Piss off," and rounded on the reporter in retreat. "I'm
not about to say anything at all."

Twenty-Seven.

The fat one was to blame.  He delivered Kate's plate of food and he
spilt it.  A crescent of rice slid onto the concrete and the peeled,
hard-boiled egg followed it, picking up a grey stripe of dirt as it
rolled across the floor.

"Breakfast."  The guard nodded and slammed the door.

Khalid, who normally served the meals, did so with a waiter's attention
to detail.  He had a courteous manner which, Kate now saw, implied
something like respect.

This stumpy guard's clumsiness felt like an insult by contrast.  Kate
refused to let it pass.  She gathered up the spillage, using the edge
of the plate and her cupped hand, before dusting off the egg and
setting it carefully beside the rice.  Then she pushed the plate into
the middle of the floor, attaching a significance to it that it
otherwise lacked.  The meal was still there, untouched, when the guard
returned for the plate.  There were equal parts annoyance and concern
on his face.  He pointed at the food, then at his mouth, and made a
question of his word for the day.  "Breakfast?"

Kate shrugged.

Her ambivalence seemed to confuse the guard, who paused with his mouth
open to speak.  He looked worried.  Kate considered shoring up the gap
by signing that she wasn't hungry, but something appealing about the
guard's concern stopped her.  Unable to proceed without words, he left
to fetch the denim one, who took over.

"Mr.  Sadiq says you are not eating.  You are not I think hungry?"

K-ate filed the name.  Repeating the shrug, she said, "Of course I'm
hungry.  But today I've decided not to eat."

"Why?  What is wrong?"

The question was suddenly funny.  Kate's face lit up with a grin.  The
guards' concern vanished; she thought she saw a flash of fear in the
squat one's eyes.  Abu, however, was unimpressed.  He shook his head,
snatched up the plate and shepherded Sadiq from the room.

She felt a perverse warmth after they left, not unlike the glow of
having turned down the Glencare promotion.  Immediate sacrifice for
some unknown future gain.  What, though?  She stood and paced out the
circumference of her cell, considering what she'd done, failing to
understand herself or answer the more immediate question: was the
lightness in her stomach hunger or excitement?

Later, Khalid was back on duty.  Kate heard his fingers on the padlock
and looked up to see his young face thrust in at the door.  He took a
step forwards and lowered another meal to the floor beside Kate's
blanket, then stood back.

"Sadiq says you may be sick.  That you would not eat.  He says not
eating would be a problem."

Kate's eyes adjusted to the brightness behind Khalid's head.  She
watched him suck both his lips in turn, and kept silent.  His smooth
brow broke out in uncharacteristic wrinkles.  That such a simple act
could create this level of interest, this quickly, was intoxicating. If
she had been weighing whether to turn down the next meal for the hunger
was real now Khalid's furrowed forehead made the decision much
easier.

"I'm not sick."

"Good.  Then you will eat now, please."

Kate smelt something new, coming from the plate.  Instead of the plain
boiled egg, a pool of what looked and smelled like vegetable curry swam
in the middle of this helping of rice.  And a red, plastic fork stuck
out of the steaming pile: the first cutlery she'd seen in three weeks,
protruding from a hot meal.  It was tempting to consider the plate a
victory, but she held back from picking it up.  This was just an
attempt to check her revolution before it gained momentum.  In refusing
to eat again she would amplify her protest tenfold.  An exhilaration of
influence pricked her skin, made her smile.

"No thanks.  You might as well give that to one of the others before it
gets cold."

Kate stared at her feet, hoping to see Khalid retrieve the plate.  But
he stayed put.  "This choice meal is for you."  His tone was imploring,
not angry.  "Please reconsider and eat."  Out of the corner of her eye,
Kate saw Khalid drop to his hams in the doorway.  When she turned he
was squatting there, wringing his fingers at her, his head quivering
expectantly.  Was his concern mere self-preservation?  Would he and the
other guards somehow suffer for her refusal?  Despite herself, Kate
found she was reassuring Khalid.

"What are you meaning by this?"  he asked.

"It's nothing personal."  She held her palms up what can you do?

"What will you hope to achieve?"

The hands bounced.

Khalid let out a loud sigh and retrieved the plate, his courtliness
undercut by the vehemence with which he yanked the door shut.

Kate kept her rebellion up for seven days, during which time the hunger
became a spellbinding discomfort.  In flashes the sensation seemed its
own victory, a demonstration of self-control that, she suspected,
impressed the guards even as it annoyed them.  On the surface they each
had their own reaction: Sadiq met her resistance with disdain; denim
Abu ranted; Khalid's wounded consternation deepened day by day.  Kate
knew that if her fasting engendered respect it did so against the
guards' collective will; each response was calculated, above all, to
make her change her mind and eat.

So she did not.

A welcome by-product of not caving in was the sidelining of the bucket.
Unable to perform to order, Kate had been forced to use it.  Now the
bucket was largely obsolete again and she felt she had won a minor
battle.  There was something funny about this triumph; and the first
time Kate went a full twenty-four hours without using it Khalid
unwittingly added to the joke.  He wore a smile of pride on entering
her cell.  From behind his back he produced a plate of fragrant chicken
-with a flourish that implied the playing of a trump card.  Only his
hurt look when she declined stopped her laughter.

Each hour of self-restraint increased her power, yet the opposite was
also true.  She feared the weakness in her limbs and suspected its
numbing effect upon her mind.  Did that matter?  They'd be out of here
soon whatever.  The authorities were already (it was impossible to
think anything else)... on... their..  . way.  She should make a stand
in the meantime, as an apology to the others, a show of will.

Yet how the hunger unpicked her resolve!  When the seventh day passed
it seemed significant, a valid place to draw a line in the sand.  She
would have made her point.  But a moral victory wasn't quite enough.
She needed evidence of a concession to mark her resistance.  The
youngster Khalid offered the most hope.  He, of all the guards, had
tried hardest to convince Kate to change her mind, asking repeatedly
what, other than making herself ill, she hoped to achieve.

On the eighth morning she had an answer for him, but was not hopeful
that anything would come of her request.  His flat, "That is not
possible," confirmed her fear.  Yet later in the day Khalid's careful
fingers undid the padlock once again.

"I am not really allowing this," he whispered, drawing the door shut
behind him.

"Allowing what?"

"But you have promised to eat again if I do, yes?"

"Depends what you're proposing," Kate repeated.  "I'm not sure."

"There is one condition, as well as the eating.  You must not let
anybody see that I gave this to you, OK?"  Khalid took a small square
package, wrapped in newspaper, from within his coat and laid it at
Kate's feet.  He looked almost excited, wide eyed at the thought of his
own initiative.  "You must keep a secret.  We are understanding each
other?"

"I think so."  She hadn't hoped to drive a wedge between her captors,
and felt her blood course at the thought of such an outcome.  Khalid's
fingertips were playing at one another over the newspaper; she feared
he might be having second thoughts, so reached out and took the package
to cement the deal.  Joy and relief fused in the young guard's face.
For a moment his act seemed, to Kate, a transparent kindness.  He had
to struggle for authority again as he stood up to go.

"You will begin eating again with the next food," he ordered through
the open door.

"Sure."  She smiled.  "Whatever you say."

Already the notebook was out of the newspaper wrapping and on Kate's
lap, the single pencil squat and familiar between her fingers and
thumb.

Twenty-Eight.

Ethan took a breath of cold air, held it, and pushed up.  His pulse
thudded in his ears.  He held himself rigid at the top of the movement
until his stomach burned and the veins in his hands bulged.  Then he
lowered himself slowly back down between retreating forearms.  At the
bottom, when only his thumbs and forefingers were in view, he let the
breath go.

The press-up threw him back.  Now his hands were splayed on concrete;
then his palms had sunk into sodden turf.  Here, the movement,
performed alone, had a meditative, monumental quality; there, pushing
up in time with the rest of the squad, something had put him off.

"Come on, lads, put your backs into it.  Give it some welly!"  The
coach's boots halted with a squelch in front of Ethan's head.  "What's
the matter with you?  Why've you stopped?"

Ethan forced out a further press-up in time with the rest.  His arms
complied automatically, a pair of pistons.  But for some new reason his
head was objecting, it was suddenly filled with a plan view of the row
of identical backs jerking up and down in a line between the posts.
Everybody else rose again, in time, but Ethan stayed down.  The wet
grass pressed through his shirt.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes, coach."

"Not pulled anything, I hope?"  Everybody else dropped back down.

"No, coach."

"Worn out then?"  A sarcastic edge.  Again the rest pushed up.

"No."

"Then what are you resting for?"  Down again.

The damp had now seeped through Ethan's shorts.  He pushed up once more
to get away from it, but, to the coach's consternation, followed
through and stood up.  In a quiet voice, he heard himself say, "I think
I've had enough."

Somebody laughed and collapsed onto the grass.

"Carry on you lot.  I didn't say to stop."

The coach removed his Welsh Dragon bobble hat and scratched the
pinkness of his bald head.  Everybody else was up and downing again.
Steam rose from the man's scalp as Ethan stood before him.

"Look, lad, the whole team's got to train together.  It's not just
about scoring points, you know.  Nobody's place is guaranteed."

Points were indeed pointless too.  If the kamikaze swerve at his dad's
"Go on!"  years beforehand had posed the question, this county coach
was now answering it.  Why bother going through the motions?

"I understand that."

"Well, then."  The coach put his hands on his hips and cocked his head
at the ground, then underlined the gesture by thumbing an imaginary
lift.  "Get back down and push."

The squad, in unison, rose.  Ethan shook his head and said, "Sorry'

The coach's confusion barely had time to register; as the row of backs
dropped again, Ethan was already turning away.

Now, though, this first press-up marked a new step.  In the weeks after
the beating, his only aim was to recover.  Enduring captivity, he saw,
would take all his physical strength.  The guards had determined a set
of absolute parameters and Ethan, for once, saw the stark point in
mastering the space those parameters denned.  There were no longer any
paralysing grey areas breeding indifference: this new context was all
about hardship, written in black and white.  Questioning why the
militants had taken them captive was as futile, Ethan saw, as
questioning gravity: the only thing that mattered now was negotiating
the consequences.  Now the word whatever meant something new
entirely.

His ambivalence evaporated.  As the swelling went down and the bruises
faded from black to yellow, he began a routine of stretching and
pacing.  The storeroom was not an easy space to exercise in, but that
was part of the challenge.  He calculated that the round trip from the
wooden door to the rear wall and back was roughly twenty feet.
Two-hundred and fifty laps came to about a mile.  He worked up to ten
miles a day a feat in his weakened state.

The monotonous diet of eggs and rice, he reasoned, was partly to blame
for that.  He suspected it would be more or less futile to ask for
something else, but made the request anyway, and was surprised when,
the following day, Khalid brought a plate of vegetable curry.  He made
sure to express his thanks to the boy, which worked: a few days later a
tepid helping of chicken arrived with the evening meal.  Khalid
squatted in the doorway to watch Ethan eat, with something near
contentment on his face.  Given the circumstance, this gesture seemed a
kindness.  White generosity to the black of Abu's beating.

"You must eat to keep healthy," the guard had said.

"Yes."

"Without eating you would grow too weak."

Ethan paused between mouthfuls and flexed his bicep.  Khalid returned
the gesture straight, as if competing with a salute.  Ethan lowered
himself to the concrete once again, thinking that perhaps, for Khalid,
there had been no joke.  His next words, certainly, had been deadpan.
"And it is important for keeping warm at night.  With no food blood
turns to water and water to ice."

"Something like that."  Ethan had nodded, keeping his smile in check.

He pushed up a third time, his thoughts dissolving with the astonishing
effort this exercise seemed now to entail.  The discomfort was
intoxicating: it helped blank out his worst fears, which, he realized
now, had to do with Kate.  How could she possibly be coping with this?
He paused at the top of his push-up, held square, shut his eyes to meet
the pain, as if it were possible to protect Kate from similar hurt by
embracing it himself.  A moment of transcendence.

The old man's eye.  Rippling in the bottom of his glass, then sharp
into focus as the tumbler came down.

"Nice girl, that Kate of yours."

Ethan said nothing.  The old man repeated the word "Nice," and ran a
veined hand through the remnants of his hair.  "Yes.  Things seem to be
going well for you."  Taking another sip, he congratulated himself.
"Very well."  He scanned the room complacently, adjusted his striped
tie.  "I always thought you'd end up in finance."

"I haven't."

"Investment products sounds pretty financial to me.  Whatever it is,
it's a step in the right direction."

Ethan shrugged.  "Think Avon lady.  Think car salesman.  Down a phone
line."

His father shook his head, pretending to be perplexed, then pulled at
the wattle of his throat.  "Investment products are what it says on
your card, son.  You're just being modest."

Leaning back in his chair, Ethan looked away from his father, let his
gaze travel slowly round the restaurant.  Bombastic portraits.  The
nearest of which depicted a man, astride a huge brown horse rearing on
a rocky bluff.  Sausage rolls of hair above his ears, indifference in
his stare.  Could he be bored by the prospect of falling off a cliff?
Ethan slid forward in his jeans, stretched his trainers out into the
aisle.  The leather back of his chair creaked.

"And what about your sports, then?  Looks like you're in fine shape."
The old man reached out to slap his son's shoulder, but the table span
was a fraction too much and, in any case, his hand seemed to have
second thoughts.  "Very healthy.  Have you signed up with a club here
in London?  You should focus your efforts.  Which are you going to keep
with, the football or rugby?"

"I've not played either in years."

"Nonsense!  You were in that team at college.  An absolute bloody
natural.  I bet you can't wait to get started."

"You think what you want to think."  Ethan held up his palms in
surrender.  "I'm not fussed."

His father reached for the tumbler again.  "I will.  It would have made
your mother proud, to see you ... making something of yourself."

Ethan ran a palm against the grain of his stubble, fixed his stare
again on the heavy-framed horse.  A rolling eye.

The old man's glass was empty.  His wavering arm, thin now in its
double-cuffed sleeve, offered it up into the path of a waiter, who
somehow missed the cue, quick stepping away across the burgundy carpet.
Ethan's tumbler (unordered, untouched) glowed there on the table top.
It took the old man a visible effort not to reach for it.

"Yes, she'd find something to be proud about.  She'd manage to see some
merit in what you've done for yourself.  What you're making of the
opportunities provided."

A poodle was dimly visible in the blackened foreground of the painting.
It, too, was prancing.  Gazing up at the lump of lard immobile on his
horse.  Ethan's stomach hardened with his father's words, but still he
did not reply.

The old man sat mesmerized by the tumbler, as if it were the hub of an
axle driven into the dining room from the chandelier above, through the
table, into the rock of Lancaster Gate.  Everything revolving around
it.  Ethan imagined him reaching for the glass and ripping a hole in
the lace cloth, the oak table, the carpeted flagstone floor.  A tic had
started up beneath the old man's left eye.  He shut it, pressed a palm
to his face.  The whisky burned in his voice.

"No, your mother would have been pleased.  An all-American-style sports
star, just like her.  A whizz-kid of finance.  Bred of an Englishman'
he raised his hands 'fulfilling your potential.  She might even have
made an exception for that little, wassername, Kate."  He paused, the
darkness beneath his eye jumping.  "Despite her idiot sensibilities."

The spat words freed the glass, which the old man lifted to his lips.
Ethan stood, loomed there above the table, a huge physical presence in
the rarefied atmosphere of the restaurant.  His father couldn't look
up.

Anger gripped Ethan.  He felt an urge to defend Kate, to speak up for
her.  But he held back.  Forcing himself to breathe slowly, he gave in
to the inevitable, re surging weariness, which permeated the entire
room: even the waiter, heading back to the kitchen, seemed to be wading
through water.

"If you could leave off from hypothesizing about Mum's feelings, which,
let's face it, were a subject you never really nailed, that'd be good."
He slid the near-empty tumbler six inches closer to his father as he
edged around the table to leave.  "Thanks for lunch.  I'll leave you to
finish up."

Still he held square.  The concrete was sharp beneath his palms, his
forearms burned, his shoulders strained as if lifting a person twice
his weight.  The blood churned in his ears.  Only it wasn't the rhythm
of himself that he heard because when he stopped and knelt back to rest
the sound grew.  The beat was mechanical, a low whup-whup-whup spliced
together with a high-pitched whine.  Ethan rolled over and put his ear
to the crack under the door, his tiredness gone.  Unmistakably, rotor
blades.

The noise swamped forwards in a rush and Ethan instinctively turned his
eye to the crack, despite knowing that the view through it stopped well
short of the sky.  Nevertheless, as the whine grew into a roar and
flared, he was sure that a shadow fled with it between the buildings:
the stretch of chippings in front of his door clicked from yellow to
brown and back again.

Or maybe he had blinked.  If so, he could hang on to the hope that this
was a coincidence, that the chopper had sounded louder and lower than
in fact it was, that it had not over-flown the compound deliberately.
Yes, the whup-whup-whup was fading now, softening into a monotone hum.
In just seconds the fright would be gone.

Ethan sat up, overcome with confusion, and said, "What am I on?"  out
loud.

The helicopter's fly past was a good sign, he knew that.

It might mean that they whoever they were were out looking.

The guards would realize as much and see the pointless risk in
continuing with this hostage plan.  Whatever they had set out to
achieve, it was obviously failing.  The helicopter would make the
balaclava let them go, surely?  If the thought of the chopper was
intimidating to Ethan, think what Abu and the others must be feeling.
The fact that he could still hear the distant drone was a good thing,
wasn't it?

No!  Despite himself, the words Ethan found he was whispering as the
noise, unmistakably now, began to grow again, said just the opposite.

"Please God.  Turn the interfering bastards back."

For although the storeroom was unacceptable, it made sense.  Four walls
to outlast.  The guards would give them up eventually.  Think of Terry
Waite and John McCarthy.  But only if they played by the rules.  Try
changing the game entirely and anything might follow.  Consider Ran,
hanging, upside-down.

Footsteps scattered through the yard and Ethan lay back down to look.
Somebody was yelling.  Another set of feet ran the other way and
halted, at the insistence of further loud words, out of view.  Then a
figure, Abu, wavered into frame.  He shouted a response and stood
listening to the sky.  The droning rotor beat expanded.  At such a
distance Ethan couldn't make out the guard's expression, but panic
filled in the blank.  The same current of alarm arced between captor
and captive, so that for a second Ethan felt for the guard.  Whatever
the intentions of the pilot, this helicopter was simply making matters
worse.

An engine turned over close by, temporarily blotting out the chopper.
The sound became the tense whine of a vehicle reversing.  Doors
slammed.  Ethan kept his eye to the crack, hoping for clues, but for
elastic minutes there were none.  When the engine juddered to a halt it
seemed that the chopper, still audible, had receded, although Ethan now
doubted his memory of how loud it had been beforehand.

Now Khalid came briskly into view, leading another, stumbling figure,
who had something wrong with his head.  There was a bag over it.  As
Ethan watched, the person's feet caught and he fell forwards in a
heap.

"Up up up!"  pleaded Khalid.

The figure levered up onto hands and knees, but could apparently rise
no further.  With the bag hanging down from his head he looked animal,
like a dog or horse.  Khalid leaned over and shouted, "Get up," again,
waving his hands in agitation, and again a spark of panic made Ethan
angry.  Why didn't whoever it was just do as he was told?

The bag ruffled forwards over the dog's lowered head, revealing a twist
of blonde hair, which answered part of Ethan's question at least.
Obstinate Diane.  Across the ten or so yards separating them Ethan
could see that she was shaking uncontrollably, as if the ground were
alive beneath her, and the job of keeping square on all fours required
a special skill.  Khalid leaned down to pull the bag back into place
and said something indistinct more gently.  Then he began helping Diane
to her feet with a hand under each armpit, as if acknowledging her
status as an invalid.

More banging, gunshot loud.  Ethan rolled back from the crack as Abu
reached the door and walloped it.  Trouble with the lock slowed the
guard down, but he overcame the obstacle quickly and kicked the metal
door back with his heel, following through so that he appeared to land
in the room with a giant stride.  In one hand he held a hessian sack,
in the other a knife.  Ethan's fear was momentarily shot through with a
sense of the absurdity of such a sight: a pirate, boarding a ship.  But
that evaporated as Abu crammed the bag over his head and neck.

"What's happening?"  Ethan pleaded.

No response.  The sack smelt of leaf mulch, diesel and mud.  Ethan had
time to realize that he was standing in his socks, but that was his own
stupid fault, he should have crammed the shoes on when he first heard
the helicopter.  Had the chopper noise gone or was that it, there?  A
fading hum obscured Abu's panting.  Ethan suddenly couldn't distinguish
between his own ragged breathing and the guard's.  They were joined
again in their fright.  He felt a jab of sickening complicity, and had
to fight back an urge to retch into the sack.  Nabbi's feet were too
small anyway.  Bravery and commitment were the thing.  He did not
complain as a hand gripped his shoulder and propelled him across the
sharp ground.

Twenty-Nine.

Kate's ears squeaked again, which meant they were descending.  When she
shifted position, to ease the discomfort of sitting cross-legged on the
floor, the notebook bent reassuringly into the hollow of her stomach.
The others, she sensed, were in the back of the truck too, rattling
knee to knee.  Somebody had cried out when bundled in after her, but
since then nobody had dared to speak.  How long had they been bouncing
and jolting into one another now?  Fifteen minutes?  An hour and a
half?  The temptation overcame her.

"Ethan," she whispered.

There was a pause.

"Shhh!"  breathed a voice.  Kate was confused: she was certain it was
him.

"You're OK?"

"No," whimpered Diane, "I'm not."

"Please, God."  George's voice.

"Shhh!"  Ethan whispered again.

"Diane, you're not hurt?"  asked Clay tentatively.

"Me also.  I am here," whimpered Jan.

"Diane?"

"Ethan?"  Kate asked once more.

"All of you," he whispered, 'we've been warned.  Shut up."

But Kate sensed a gap.  Gingerly, she lifted the edge of the sackcloth
from her neck to her chin.  Nobody objected.  The cool air stung her
face.  She stared the dark interior into focus, counting five other
figures in the gloom, all of them bagged.  Clay, Diane, George, Jan and
Ethan.  The truck hit a pothole and slewed against its brakes,
shuffling those at the back forwards.  A floor, a ceiling, and four
walls of clinkered boards.  No windows, no seats.  Some sort of animal
truck.  And, Kate checked again, no guards.  The relief of seeing Ethan
and the others was as exhilarating as the clean air.  She pulled the
bag right off.

"We're on our own."  Kate spoke over crashing gears.

Nobody moved.

"You can take the sacks off.  They've locked us in here on our own."

The figure directly opposite unwrapped himself first.  Clay's face was
covered in grime, which became stubble, which he scratched, gasping.

Next George and Jan removed their hoods.  George was newly gaunt, his
face full of shadows accentuated by the grey of his scraggy beard.  He
crossed himself and his shoulders shook.  Jan was blinking back
tears.

Clay leaned across Jan to lift the bag from Diane's bowed head.  Her
hair fell forwards in a second shroud as he did so.  Kate saw the
contradiction in this veil whatever else happened, these people were
now a part of her, and yet she had no real idea who any of them were.
Diane did not look up, even after Clay had brushed the hair from her
face.

"It's OK, honey.  OK?"  He patted her knee.

Diane flinched at his touch.  Then her head came up and her eyes,
flashing from side to side, fixed on Kate.  "No, no, no," she whined.
"Not you.  Bitch."

"What?"

While Clay tried to quieten her, Kate turned to Ethan, who was still
sitting erect beneath his hessian sack.  Like a Buddha, with a hand on
each folded knee.

"Ethan.  You can take the sack off."

"Shhh," he repeated.

"I've got you.  You're OK, Diane.  It'll be '

Kate scrambled forwards to help Ethan.  She placed a hand against his
shoulder, which was rigid as a gate.  "Ethan' she said again 'it's
me."

The hands felt familiar, but Ethan feared a trick.  Why take the risk?
Best to wait and see what happened next.  Although the gentle touch had
to be Kate, her fingers pulling his head from the earth in which Abu
had buried it, he remained tensed and unsure until the bag came off and
her face swam before him.  Even then the relief was tinged with fear,
resentment even: might she have made a mistake?  Any minute now the
punishment for this disobedience would surely begin.

"That bitch!"  Diane said again, this time more loudly.

"Did you see Ran?"  Jan asked, his eyes wild in his face.

"Calm down, calm down."  Clay was still trying to soothe Diane.

"Beyond repentance, beyond forgiveness," George continued.

Jan: "Did anybody hear that helicopter?  Did they land?"

Ethan, looking from one face to another, concluded that indeed they
were alone.  He slumped back against the side of the truck.

"And does anybody know who these guys are?"  Jan asked.

George: "No.  Nobody would tell me.  No, no, no."

"She knows," Diane hissed.  Her finger trembled up at Kate in the
gloom.  Then the truck hit another hole and Diane's pencil-thin arm
waved madly, her dirty sleeve flapping beneath it.  Clay clambered over
Jan and tried to pull Diane to his chest, but she fought him away.

Everybody seemed to be missing the obvious point, which had nothing to
do with blame or motive.  Ethan stroked Kate's hand in reassurance. But
while the feel of her skin beneath his fingers was a comfort it was
dwarfed by the larger shock of society, which pressed in.  The space
was alive with opinion and conjecture and alternatives, threatening to
clash like the gears.  He found himself struggling against an urge to
yell "Silence!"  Only a sense of how strange it would sound held him
back.

To have his new thoughts jar in this way hurt.  He felt the awkwardness
of a successful man reunited with failed schoolmates, a desire to play
down his achievements, to conceal his insight.  Kate's unbowed, adamant
face was beautiful and impossible all at the same time.  He would have
to help her understand, but gradually, subtly.  Not yet.  She'd resist
if he tried now.  Though he kept stroking her arm, something in Ethan
withdrew for the time being and twisted shut.

Kate saw at once that she had to confront Diane.  The pointing arm and
finger were brittle, which meant they were ready to be snapped.  "Don't
be ridiculous," she told the truck at large.  Glaring at Diane, she
continued, "We're all in this, all of us.  Yes?"  The hostility in her
voice implied an admission; she wished that she had ignored the
accusation.  But, having started, she could not allow a pause.  She
pressed on more softly.  "And the only way out is together."

"Exactly, Diane," Clay coaxed.

Diane's head dropped again, her puppet strings slack, and she allowed
Clay to gather her in, a bundle of elbows and knees.  Clay caught and
held Kate's eye over the top of Diane's bowed shoulders, shaking his
head apologetically.

"But, does nobody know?  What do they want with us?  Where are we going
to now?  What happened to that helicopter?  Did Ran get help?  Who are
these people, that have taken us?  How long do they want us until?
When, why The string of questions rushed from Jan like anchor chain
released, yanking to a stop with the repeated word "Raft?"

Nobody spoke.

The truck was gaining speed, ploughing downhill into the resistance of
its complaining engine, which masked the silence.  The pause then
exploded as the wheels hit another big rut, jarring everybody a foot
from the boards.

"The heartless, murderous George shook his head.  He had scrambled to
the rear of the space and was intent upon the door.  Ethan slid towards
the back too.

"What are you looking for?"

"What do you think?  A way out."  George's fingers worked along the
bottom of the doors, then up the join between them.  Kate saw that his
hands were shaking wildly.

"They'll have locked it."

George gave Ethan a stare.

Kate: "You never know."

Ethan turned back to her now.  "They're professionals."

"In which case let's lobby their fucking regulator," muttered Clay.

"They're half wit heathens," spat George.  His eyes gleamed despite the
murk.

"And Ran?"  countered Ethan.  "A soldier.  He managed to take advantage
of these half wits did he?  And what if they're about to release us
anyway?  You'll jump into '

A further lurch of brakes crashed Ethan and George together, the
physical contact cutting Ethan short.  His anger remained visible
behind a thin mask of self-restraint.  As the truck slowed to shuffle
through another turn, competing noises rose over its engine.  A bell, a
horn.  Clay stood up and put his eye to a crack between the boards,
prompting Kate to do the same.  She saw a deep ravine running along her
side of the road.  The truck ground forwards slowly, goats parting
round it like water, and Kate glimpsed a brown river flashing down
below.  Up ahead, in the shoulder of a slow-moving curve of water,
stood buildings.  An overtaking car tore the town in half and then a
screen of trees cut the scene into cine-film.

"Where are they taking us?"  asked Jan.

Clay answered, "If it's a town, that means other people."

"Which means they're going to give us up, yes?"  Jan's voice was
thin.

"Sure, you're probably right."  Clay didn't believe himself -Kate saw
it as he looked away.  She changed the subject.

"How long have we been going?"

"About forty minutes, I think," replied Jan.

"No way," contradicted Clay.  "A couple of hours at least."

"Longer," George said emphatically.  "More like three."

The futility of trying to guess which town they might be approaching
quickly became clear though, since nobody knew where the journey had
begun.  Kate, George, Jan and Clay each kept their eyes to chinks in
the plank side walls in the hope of glimpsing a signpost, but that
proved pointless too; the truck turned away from the main road before
arriving at the town and then somehow they were in amongst sliced grey
buildings anyway and sloughing to a halt.

"Sit down."  Ethan's voice was oddly urgent.  Kate turned to see him
cross-legged again, hands twisting at one of the sacks.

Nobody took any notice.  Through the chink Kate saw black exhaust fumes
plume forwards as they reversed.  Something walloped the side of the
truck.

"Sit down!"  Ethan shouted.  "What are you lot playing at?"  The engine
shuddered and died.  Kate felt him grab at her wrist and pull her to
the floor beside him.  He shovelled a sack into her lap, and hissed,
"Everyone!  Put the bags back on!"

The anger in his tone was unnerving.  Kate saw Jan cave in to it, and
noticed that George had gathered up one of the sacks too.  Diane
groaned as Clay steered her lowered head into the darkness.  Which was
precisely the point.  Since the sack meant indignity, Kate must find a
way around it.  She clung to the hope of their imminent release,
because all the alternatives were unthinkable.  And if they were about
to be released anyway... But Ethan had opened the mouth of the bag in
her lap and was hastily trying to cram the thing over her head.

She resisted.

Ethan struggled with her comically from beneath his shroud.  His hands
were shaking violently.  Only when Clay, pulling on his own hood,
whispered, "He's right," did she give in.

thirty.

"New rules," said the balaclava, 'but I am still umpire. Understood?"

The rest seemed dumbfounded, slack jawed around him.  It fell to Ethan
to convey their consent.

The balaclava now turned sideways and ambled from left to right, before
the breeze blocks of the front wall.  Above his head brightness fanned
into the room through a small barred window, illuminating fine strands
of his woollen mask from behind: a halo.

"I hope you enjoy your new hotel.  Like a Marriott!"  He smiled at
this, expectant despite the mask.  When nobody smiled back he continued
gravely, "But in this hotel everyone stays together.  Men and women
too, I am afraid.  So we are erecting a partition to keep your privacy.
I am sorry, but it is only cloth.  No looking!"  He laughed again, then
added, "Your very own line of control."

Now the balaclava strode through the seated hostages into the middle of
the room and pointed proudly at the ceiling.  Somebody had tacked a
sheet along two-thirds of the length of one of the rafters, so that it
hung like a curtain across the back part of the room.  The
improvisation was recent, Ethan reasoned, because the sheet was so
white, unquestionably newly laundered.  Its knife creases, which
brought Bulwan fleetingly to mind, had yet to drop out; the grid on the
sheet was as rigid as the room's four walls.  In front of it,
gesturing, the balaclava looked professorial, lecturing before the
white board  Or perhaps prophetic, silhouetted by a blinding sky.  He
was a bigger man than Ethan remembered.

"You men must sleep here."  The balaclava indicated the larger part of
the room.  "And you ladies have the space behind."

Diane, kneeling between Ethan and Clay, began to laugh.  Clay put a
hand out to silence her, but she shrank from it towards Ethan. Somebody
had to take control of the situation, Ethan saw, pulling her into his
side.  She crumpled like empty clothes in his grip; with no effort at
all he squeezed the laugh shut.  He looked down to make sure she
understood, but quickly turned away from her upturned face because its
gaunt pout was breathless and this prompted a sickening stab of desire.
Carefully he withdrew his arm.  Diane slumped without it, but stayed
quiet.

Jan now diverted the balaclava's attention with his refrain, hopeful as
a schoolboy.  "Please, can you tell us why we are here?  What is it you
want from us?"  He peered about shortsightedly, his voice wavering.
"How much longer will '

"It is not about you and it is not about us."  The balaclava cut him
off, shaking determinedly from side to side.  "We are not wanting
anything from you for ourselves.  You cannot give it anyway.  We are
both in mercy of bigger forces, understand?  How much longer is up to
them.  No time if possible, or for as long as they take."

Now Kate's voice made matters worse.  "But who do you represent?  Which
organization?  What does it hope to achieve by terrorizing us?"

There was a clamorous indignation in her tone.  Though Ethan couldn't
see Kate's face, he imagined its expression, her pale brow knitted
above no nonsense eyes, lips drawn into an adamant line.  As if
correcting a restaurant bill or disputing a taxi driver's preferred
route.  Endearingly direct in those contexts, appallingly misjudged
now.

The balaclava walked around Ethan, whose eyes followed him to the end
of the line, where Kate sat cross-legged on the concrete as instructed.
He squatted before her, bouncing on his heels like a backstop. "Believe
me," he explained, 'this is not terrorizing."

Kate looked into each of the man's brown eyes, pools of hostility in
the mask, and saw herself drowning there.  A weakness within her made
her want to look away, but she managed to return his stare.  If he was
in charge, he should be confronted, however meagrely.  There was no
point resisting Abu, Sadiq and Khalid if the real battle was with this
man.  Her steady gaze back was a front of opposition.

Behind it, though, she was still reeling.  When the truck doors opened
she had allowed herself too much hope.  At that point anything was
possible, good or bad, and her only means of keeping calm in the
claustrophobia of her hood had been to ignore the unthinkable and
envisage instead their release, which would surely now come.  Why else
had they been brought down from the mountains?  Why else the secrecy of
these terrible sacks?

A calloused hand helped her to the ground and guided her, still blind,
into this room, where she was made to kneel along with the others
amidst a blur of audible activity.  A

hammer striking nails was bad, but the sweeping might have been good.
Perhaps they were smartening the room for somebody important.  That was
the sound of a car pulling up, its doors slamming, which was surely the
diplomats arriving to take them away.  She was even convinced that
Khalid had whispered, "Do not worry, he will be here to free you soon,"
but had to concede now, still holding the balaclava's stare, that it
had sounded more like 'to see you soon' instead.

By the time they'd been ordered to uncover their heads, though, Kate
had just about persuaded herself it was over.  The sight of the olive
balaclava leaning against the wall was almost too much.  She dug her
nails into her thighs and bit down on the inside of her mouth in those
first moments, and thought she'd succeeded in holding firm, except that
now her face was wet.

Abruptly the shape of the mask changed, woollen cheeks gathering
beneath widening eyes, lifting the material across the bridge of the
man's nose.  His pink lips stretched, then showed pearly teeth.  A kind
smile.

"We are continuing to look after you best we are able," he said
lightly.  "Food and blankets and soap for washing.  And now you have
company for relieving boredom."  He gestured from Kate to the others,
then looked back to her.  The apparent smile had faded, leaving empty
gun-barrel eyes.  "Be patient and nobody need suffer hurt."

"Nobody elseY

The balaclava, still suspended there in front of Kate, absorbed her
words without flinching, then shook in sympathy.  "If you like.  But
Mr.  Rafi hurt himself.  If he did not try to run away, he would not
have paid price for failure."  He stood to address them as a group,
hands spread, a magnanimous host.  "His punishment fitted crime. Nobody
else will receive punishment without a reason."

Kate snorted derisively.  The balaclava was just a man, waving his arms
about in front of them, puffed up with his own power and vanity.  The
mask was frightening, but it also showed that its wearer needed to
hide, which was a weakness.

There was a pause.  Ethan concentrated on the floor, following it to
the man's feet as they stepped backwards into a patch of sunlight.
Shadows beneath his leather sandals underlined their incongruity. There
was dirt between the man's toes.  Far from revolting Ethan, this dust
added to the picture's religious significance.  He held his breath and
willed Kate to join with him and keep silent.  That prayer worked, but
he hadn't considered George.

"What do you mean without reason?  Tell that to Abu!  I didn't try to
escape, but he beat the shit out of me!"

"With reason!"  Though Ethan tried to pin the sandals down with his
gaze, the right one tapped out each syllable as the balaclava went on,
"There must be punishment for everybody if one person gives a good
reason!"

These words contradicted the man's last, and yet they didn't because he
wore a balaclava, which bypassed all logic.  How could George not see
that?  Why did he have to continue?  But he did, spreading his retort
out triumphantly, emphatic as a drunk.

"Well, make your mind up.  Either you're going to beat us up for things
beyond our control, or you're not.  You're a joke."

The fool only had himself to blame.  Ethan tensed up for the response
to this disrespect, hoping against hope that by keeping his back
straight and his eyes lowered the balaclava would register his
dignified separation.

No response came.  The balaclava allowed George's words to ripen and
then wither.  The man's power lay in his self-restraint, which stood in
contrast to his prisoners' in discipline  One after the other, his feet
paced a circle around the kneeling hostages.  Their course was as
inexorable as marching: left, right, left.  Ethan saw in the man's
orbit a self-belief which encompassed bravery and cowardice and going
in hard, and yet transcended these qualities at the same time.  He had
a real purpose.  The feet came back into view again, halting before the
hostages.  Ethan stared at them, planted squarely.  For a heartbeat the
dirt looked real and Ethan felt ridiculous, his sympathy for the
balaclava obvious idiocy.  But the moment passed and again the solution
came clear.  He must emulate this man's discipline.  That would win
respect, which in turn would break down his captors' resolve.

The sandals began their monastic pacing again.  Blinking in time with
each footfall, Ethan followed their course.

Thirty-One.

The screen, which had been on all night, shed a filmic blue light in
the living room.  Rachel flipped the kettle switch as she passed but
did not wait for the water to boil, pressed straight on to jiggle the
mouse instead.  The seascape Screensaver drained.  She typed "Kashmir'
into the search field and paused with her little finger hovering over
the enter key for long enough to think a prayer.

Headings fell down the results page.  Rachel shut her eyes because the
first entry was new and unreadable:

Kashmir kidnap crisis escalates as hostage is executed

By Paul Frost in New Delhi and Samantha Hurst in London

The body of one of seven hostages taken captive by militants in Kashmir
has been discovered by the Indian Security Forces.

Rachel's eyes clung to the full stop, unwilling to risk the next
paragraphs.  An air of inevitability descended.  For long seconds she
sat in a trance, staring at the square blur of the screen before her,
until eventually the kettle boiled and clicked off, starting her
forwards again, word by reluctant word.

The victim's body was found hanging in a derelict farmstead near the
village of Anantang, 35 miles from Kashmir's summer capital, Srinagar.
Reports suggest that the walls of the building in which the body was
found had been daubed with the initials of the separatist militia
group, FRN.

Did they know, or not?  The reporter's insensitivity seemed almost
personal.

The man's body is thought to be that of... Rachel stood and turned from
the screen.  Not her.  She had glimpsed the next words and dared not
look at them directly for fear that she was wrong.  It wasn't him.  She
steadied herself, fighting back giddiness.  Once composed, she returned
to the kettle, reboiled it, and poured boiling water into a cafetiere.
This she placed next to her cup on the stainless-steel tray, which,
returning to the computer, she set down: a sacrificial offering of
thanks.  Mr.  Raft Kolatch (26), an Israeli national who disappeared
over three weeks ago while on a trekking excursion in the region.  The
whereabouts and condition of Mr.  Kolatch's six fellow travellers, who
included Britons Ethan Hughes (24), Kate Cox (22) and George Arnott
(39), together with a Dutch student and an American couple in their
late twenties, remain unknown.

Conflicting reports surround the circumstances in which Mr.  Kolatch's
body was found.  Official sources say a local farmer reported the
discovery to police; however, there have been unconfirmed suggestions
that the Indian military stumbled upon the body following a failed bid
to rescue the hostages in the early hours of yesterday morning.  It is
not yet known when Mr.  Kolatch was killed.

Now Rachel was over the worst she read the rest of the article rapidly,
searching in vain for a reason to hope, beset by a growing sense of
indignation.  Did the reporters have nothing concrete to say about the
wider situation?  Nothing new?  No: they soon reverted to speculation
and a rehearsal of background details.

The discovery is a setback to negotiations which, until yesterday, the
Foreign Office had suggested were progressing.  Mr.  Hughes's father, a
retired army doctor, reacted angrily to the news: "There simply can't
be any truth to the suggestion that the Indians botched a rescue
mission.  I'm waiting for official news to the contrary."  Ms Cox's
family have so far declined to comment.

Friends of Birmingham-based youth-group worker, Mr.  Arnott, have
collected more than 2,200 signatures on a petition asking the Foreign
Secretary to intervene personally in the negotiations to free the
hostages.  His wife, Michelle, said, "We are obviously extremely
concerned for his safety.  But he's a level-headed, intelligent guy and
will stick this out.  His faith will see him through.  I wouldn't be
surprised if he's befriended the men holding him."

Last week a spokesman for FRN gave assurances that the hostages would
not be harmed, provided the Indian government met the group's demands,
which include the release of some forty-five named militants held in
Indian prisons.  The discovery of

Mr.  Kolatch's body will undermine the credibility of such
statements.

According to Rajesh Rani, the Internal Security Minister, speaking
three days ago, "The Indian government has created a working party to
consider ways to secure the hostages' release.  In consultation with
representatives from the embassies of the countries concerned, we have
decided to restrain ourselves from taking any direct action."

Since 1989 some 40,000 Kashmiris have died in the separatist war.  In
1995 a group of Western tourists were kidnapped by separatists while
trekking in the area, but since then there have been few reported
assaults on travellers.  Local leaders have expressed dismay at the
news of this killing, which represents a further setback for the
crippled tourist industry, on which the region has historically relied.
New Delhi dismisses the suggestion that official Indian tourist offices
have been advising travellers that the area is a safe destination
despite the conflict.

FRN is a new addition to the many known militant organizations seeking
Kashmiri independence.  New Delhi claims that such groups receive
funding and support from Pakistan.  Islamabad has denied such
accusations since before 9/11/01: claiming that in fact India itself
creates groups like FRN to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment in the region
and further abroad.  FRN has so far claimed no religious affiliation.

Rachel poured the coffee.  The ordinariness of doing so threatened. She
tried to fill the cup to its brim, but stopped short and added a
restorative inch of vodka to the mix instead.  The drink helped, and
for a time she was distracted.  Eventually, though, there was no
alternative but to give in to the screen again and, as she had done on
each morning of her 'compassionate' leave, trawl through all the major
news sites.  By the time she reached the American and Indian versions
of the story, the sun had risen and the screen no longer glowed.  She
persisted.  The quest was to uncover a more telling detail, anything to
breathe life into the difficulty of the account so far.  Yet each
variation of the story simply cast the same bare facts in a different
light, deepening a sense of strangeness.  The repetition of reading
familiar names, dates and quotations, was compounded by the encroaching
numbness.  She gave in to it.  Not Kate, not Ethan, just words.

By mid-morning, once she'd exhausted even the most provincial of
accounts, the only remaining solace lay in the prospect of an update.
Here was the chance to break the pattern that had overtaken her recent
days.

She carried the tray back to the kitchenette, stared for a minute at
the take away cartons spilling from the silver bin.

Then she returned to the keyboard.  For spinning through the sites in
search of something new was part of the addiction.  Pornography for the
pious.  And, very infrequently, the search bore fruit.  Rachel's tired
mental image of a shape called Rafi, suspended in an outbuilding,
somersaulted into focus with the Hindustan Times's jewel: "The body was
found hanging, locals report, from the feet."

Thirty-Two.

Kate looked down and read the words again: Armitage Shanks.  She turned
to the basin and ran the tap, then pulled the notebook from her
waistband and flicked through its pages, pausing on an entry titled
Marriott.

Must have been some sort of public office.  A courthouse even, perhaps.
Two of the three windows are bricked up.  The one that's left is a
slit, above head height, no glass, but barred.  Day one, we all climb
up to look out.  There's a slope of boulders falling away from the rear
wall down to the river below.  Shines in the morning, glowers in shadow
in the afternoons.

Our room had two doors, but one's covered now.  Sheet metal and bolts,
encased in fists of cement.  A buttress sticks out halfway along one
wall, next to the hanging sheet.  There's a hole in the plaster beside
it, no wires, a mouth without a tongue.  And a blind ceiling rose up
above.  So no light at night.  At the far end of the room there's a
single black radiator on the wall.  Never on.  Makes the cold worse.

They come each morning to escort us one after the other down the long
corridor, past blank notice boards and more closed doors, to the
bathroom, with its chipped basin and English toilet, where I sit to
write.

Beneath this she'd drawn a map of the building, with their one window
at its centre and an arrow indicating north.  Her handwriting was tiny,
more precise than before, regular as type, oddly pleasing.  She'd not
told any of the others about the diary, which remained a secret even
from Ethan.  It had been her only companion during the stretch of
solitary confinement, and now relieved the unending ... company.  Her
own pilot's logbook.  Although she'd found a hiding place near her
blanket where the floorboards subsided half an inch below the skirting
board she could only risk sliding the notebook in there when sure that
nobody else was watching, which made it impossible some days.  The
front cover had rubbed grey against her skin.  She opened another page
at random.

Diane fares worst.  Something's collapsed inside her, destroying all
proportion.  It's like cause no longer meets effect.  Instead there's
this schism of vitriol and softness.  Blank fear of the guards runs
parallel with a bizarre flirtatious ness  Yesterday Clay saw her stroke
Khalid's arm as he took her to wash.  Poor bloke.  He sits head in
hands till she returns, then snaps.

"What the fuck's that all about?"

Wide eyed and innocent.  "All what?"

"You can't risk ... that... with them, Diane.  Think it through."

"Same old paranoia, even here."  Pouts.  "Christ, I mean, why'd I
bother coming?"

In a whisper.  "Oh please."

We're all staring at our feet.  But she goes on.  "This trip was always
such a lame idea.  We weren't working out anyway.  You can't save a
relationship by running away from it'

Clay's on his knees beside her now.  She's got a look like she's going
to tear his eyes out, but as he gathers her in it just... dissolves.
Unreadable, at least to me.  One minute she's telling me about her
childhood pets, all, "Come on Kate, us girls together, we should start
ourselves a sorority," and the next she just blanks me entirely. She'll
refuse to get up all day, even to wash or eat, and then start pacing
the floorboards like they're a catwalk, deranged yet glamorous, all
heroin chic.

Another page read:

Poor fan is sick.  First four days after we arrive he spends crouching
over the communal bucket behind the hanging sheet.  The noise bounces
round the room.  He's aghast at the indignity to begin with, then gets
too low to care.  All the macho marathon stuff right out the window,
leaving him weak as water: his face wet with sweat, yellow as new-cut
pine.  Without contacts he can't see much beyond arm's length, which
makes him all the more... helpless.  His gums bleed, these white sores
appear inside his mouth.  Never mind the goatee, he's a skinny little
boy now, and his nervous blinking is constant.  He's all unrealistic
hopes and fears.  A car engine cuts out nearby and his face sparks up
... he's sure it means we're about to be released.  Then the fat guard
brings us a load more blankets 'to help with bigger cold' and he's
inconsolable, convinced that means they're planning to keep us here
right through the winter.

Outside the sky is all slashed greys and whites.

White like the streaks in George's beard and hair.  He sits alone most
of the time, whispering to himself.  Scripture, I think.  Yesterday it
was, "A man shall not be established by wickedness: but the root of the
righteous shall not be moved."  Over and over again, all calm, like
some feral monk.  He's like that the whole time until you disturb him,
and then he rages against Nabbi, the guards, Kashmir, India, everyone.
It's everybody's fault except his.  I can see him fraying Ethan's
nerves, but... Whenever Kate thought about Ethan she somehow couldn't
write much.  What notes she did make were invariably painful.

The confusing part, when she managed to pin it down, was that this
version of him was the one she had craved: focused and motivated and
taking control.  And yet now she wanted the old Ethan back.  Today she
paused to think and then wrote a single word after his name: blanket.

Though Sadiq had left an extra blanket for each of them, Ethan refused
his.  Instead he insisted on giving it to her, curled by his side. This
kindness hurt.  It recalled their first night back together, when he
had suggested that they go along with the balaclava's proposal and
divide the sleeping quarters: men on one side of the divide, women on
the other.  Diane, oblivious, said nothing.  Kate was too stunned to
speak, leaving Clay to intervene.  "Yeah, right, tempting.  But I'll
sleep with Diane all the same."

"That goes against our orders."

"Orders?"

"We're to split either side, men and women.  Why provoke them by doing
otherwise?"

"It was just a suggestion.  Why would he care?  If they insist, we'll
deal with that then."

Ethan stood in silence, head lowered, gazing at the foot of the
suspended sheet.  Clay looked imploringly at Kate.

"Ethan," she sobbed.

That broke through, but although Ethan had lain next to Kate and held
her as she went to sleep, she woke to find their blankets disentangled
and a floorboard, hand-span wide, between them.  He had moved to her
other side during the night, so that he lay nearer the sheet, as if
straining towards his prescribed sector.

Since then she had found the same gap between them each morning.  Not
wanting to spell her fear out directly, she complained of the cold.
Ethan's insistence now that she take his extra blanket therefore cut
both ways.

There were a number of things she couldn't speak directly about with
the others, the most obvious of these being Rafi.  Kate said his name
during their first evening back together because nobody else did.  The
ensuing pause made her wish she had not.

"He won't have been butchered in vain," George said eventually.

Jan turned his face to the wall.

"What do you mean?"  asked Ethan.

"I mean they'll pay for it," muttered George.  "At the final reckoning,
or before.  One way or another, they'll pay."

Ethan now shook his head dismissively.  George stiffened, but was
diverted by the disturbance of Diane, who had broken free from beneath
Clay's wing and was pulling at her own sides, hugging herself
violently, mouth open, as if struggling for breath.  When Clay tried to
soothe her, Diane fought him off.

"If you ask me, it was an idiotic thing for a bloke like him, an
ex-serviceman, to try," Ethan now continued.  "You'd think he'd have
known better."

Diane's breathing now became a noise.

"You can't say that.  You have no idea what he was planning."  Jan
turned back to the conversation.  "He may have understood what was
coming next for him.  Or he might have been hoping to bring help.  Who
knows, he might have made the alarm before he was caught.  He might
have alerted people, who are coming to rescue us.  He was definitely
trying to bring help."

"Yeah, well, he did the opposite, didn't he?"  Ethan replied.

"What do you mean he did the opposite?"  Jan's voice was a whimper.

"They shifted us, crammed us all in here.  No rescue.  All that
happened is that Ran made himself the first casualty."

"At least he had the bollocks to do something," George growled. "Unlike
the rest of us."

Diane's breathing sawed louder.  In, a hollow pause, out.

"If you say so."  Ethan shrugged.

"And I'm going to see that Abu, and the lot of them, stand before their
'

At this, Kate was sure of it, Ethan began to laugh.  Everyone but Kate
missed his amusement, though, because Diane chose that moment to hack
out an incomprehensible syllable which cut George off.  In his place,
Diane receded into a moan.  Clay was at last able to gather her up.

"Cheerleaders like you two," he said.  "Real heartening."

Other subjects were as hard.  Jan was superstitious.  Although he
craved reassurance that they'd be home soon, too much talk of freedom
or rescue made him fearful they'd jinx the chance of either.  So they
rarely discussed the practicalities of how their captivity would end,
instead referring only to 'afterwards', their voices heavy with
conviction.

And if the future hurt to guess at, so did the immediate past.  That
way lay fault and, save for George's mutterings, blame was also
off-limits by unspoken accord.  Since Diane's outburst in the truck she
had brought the subject up only once.  Just after nightfall, she spoke
into the darkness.

"I saw you, Kate."

"Shhh," Clay hushed her.

"No.  I saw.  I saw her with Sunil, plotting."

Kate, fearing protestation might backfire again, feigned sleep.

"Don't be ridiculous," said Clay.

"I did.  Sunil threw our money on the fire.  Kate let him.  She must
have known he was angry with us."

Kate shifted beneath her blanket, wringing her hands.  The sliver of
truth in what Diane was saying made her palms sticky.

"Shh," Clay repeated, though less forcefully.

"So what if he did throw the tip away?"  Ethan spoke up.

"It shows something was wrong," said Diane.  "She must have known."

"Well, if you saw it too, so must you."

Silence.

"And anyway, if there were signs of a problem, it was up to all of us
to notice them."

Kate reached out for Ethan gratefully as he continued.

"Like the pony-guy.  The night before Nabbi took us up to the pass, I'm
sure that he was trying to warn me.  But I didn't pay any attention."
He paused.  "So I'm to blame too."

"He tried to tell me something too," whispered Jan.  "It wasn't just
you."

In the pause that followed, George breathed in through his teeth.

"There's no point in this," said Clay quickly.  "The only thing that's
certain is that Nabbi betrayed us.  Beyond that, we each made our own
mistake.  Right, Diane?"

Silence.

"Right."  Ethan turned away.  "Enough said."

Since then, all outward anger about the han dover ran as far as the
guide, and landed at his feet.  "Admire the man's commitment at least,"
said Clay.  "The ultimate sneaker pimp.  Seven hostages to upgrade his
Nikes."

Kate, still perched on the toilet, flicked through her notebook again.
With thoughts of rescue and blame held back, conversation mostly
focused on the minutiae of their day-today existence: the intolerably
repetitive meals, the bone-deep cold at night, the sounds a cow bell
the snap of distant gunfire (shocking at first, quickly mundane),
children's high-pitched voices, a jet overhead which occasionally split
the quiet of their room.

Beyond this, they discussed the guards.  Why did Sadiq take such
childish pleasure in trying to steal in upon them without warning? What
made Abu prod and goad the men on their trips to the washroom? Was
Khalid suggestible?  Might they hope that he would outgrow his zeal in
time?

And every now and then somebody would steel themselves to talk about
family.  Yesterday, for example, was the day of Jan's sister's wedding.
They held a celebration in her honour and Clay made a dry toast.

Only occasionally did they speculate about the precise agenda behind
their captivity, since none of the guards would be drawn further than
the simple explanation "Kashmir' on the subject, and it hurt to sit
staring at the unanswerable question.  Kate saw that her notebook
reflected this skewing of attention; the pages contained a journal, not
journalism.

The entry she read now, for example.

Clay has a watch.  An old wind-up model on an elastitized metal strap.
He managed to slide it up his arm during our first, blindfolded ride in
the back of the truck, and Abu missed it when he searched us in the
yard.  After Clay tells me about it

I need to know the time, all the time.  Knowing breaks the days down,
which helps make sense of... everything.  At first I try rationing
myself, just asking when I absolutely have to know.  But the question
is persistent as rust.  Even the act of predicting Clay's answer makes
this confinement more bearable.  Eventually, faking anger, he snaps.

"Come on!  You'll have me wear the glass out if you make me look at the
damn thing again."

"Sure.  Sorry."  I do my best to look unconcerned.

"Seriously, keep mentioning the time and sooner or later one of them
will walk in on me checking.  We'll lose the watch entirely."

I nod.  "You're right'

Clay's sitting next to me before the pocked end wall.  He draws his
knees to his chest and folds his arms across them.  I just can't help
it... my eyes flick to his left wrist.  Still looking at me, he reaches
under that sleeve and pulls the watch forward, from its hiding place
high on his forearm, up to his fingers.  Once there, he brandishes the
face at me like a knuckleduster, then slides it from his fingers
entirely.  "Here, take it.  Kind of makes more sense if I ask you."

"I can't accept that," I tell him.  If they spot it '

"Sure you can.  If they take it, then it's gone," He waggles the watch
at me, as if it were a trifle.  I'm hypnotized.  He's whistling another
of his damned I-don't-care tunes.  So I take the watch, stare at it
till the song stops, then finally look up.  He shrugs and says, "You'll
be as careful as I am, anyway."  And that's that.

Kate felt the bump above her elbow now, then folded the notebook shut
and tucked it into her waistband.  Time was running out.  She turned
off the tap and angled the tip of her pencil into the plug hole Working
carefully, she scraped the lead on the plug hole metal edge, shaving a
new point.  Once sharpened, the pencil readied itself for writing
again, secure between thumb and fingertip.  Kate stood back from the
sink and inspected the lead tip, mesmerized by its ordinariness, then
switched her grip and held the pencil up at arm's length, a conductor's
baton.  Where had this pencil started out?  HPP Ltd Nataraj Metallic
HB.  Did that mean that the wood was Indian, and the lead?  Which
factory made it?  Which workers?  When?  Of the countless pencils no
doubt turned out that day, could any other have acquired this
significance?  The pencil changed as Kate looked at it: suddenly it was
no longer mundane, but totemic.  Six bevelled yellow sides, a sharpened
black tip trembling at the ceiling.

Footsteps expanded in the hall.

As alien and familiar as Armitage Shanks.

The door, behind the pencil, seemed to bounce in its frame.  Kate
started.  Then she ran the tap, making sure the water swirled the
evidence from the basin, each shaving a stalled wing spiralling into
the vortex.

"Finish!"

She tucked the pencil stub into her sock and pulled the chain.

Thirty-three.

Stars lit the slab of night sky, visible through the barred window.
Ethan lay still for a long while watching them rotate.  He listened to
the ensemble's breathing.  Beside him, Kate's sigh extended into
silence, which continued and continued, until finally he turned to
check, in time with her next drawn breath.

Lumps stood out of the floorboards, barely discernible in the darkness.
The biggest shape was Clay and Diane in the far corner.  George lay by
the buttress just this side of the hanging sheet, which meant that was
Jan against the other wall.

With everyone else fast asleep Ethan was more at ease.  He turned back
to watch Kate, her lips slightly apart, and felt a surge of tenderness.
If only he could convince her it was in all their interests to be more
patient with the guards, more understanding.  But when, to cheer her
up, he'd suggested they list the ways the Marriott was an improvement
over the farmstead, she'd thought he was joking and her laughter was
venomous.  In sleep all anger relaxed from her face: the hope he felt
looking at her became guilt, which made him turn away.  In this new
world of absolutes the old ambivalence rang hollow.  It was easier to
concentrate instead on the flat floor pressing up at his back,
comfortingly forceful.  Yes, if he lay for long enough without moving,
the points of contact grew so numb he couldn't tell where his body
ended and the wood began.

Turning back to the visible sector of sky, Ethan still couldn't
identify any constellations; there was no recognizable pattern, no
shapes, just stars.  A shred of cloud moved across the gap, too thin to
blot out the brightness behind, appearing to weave between the dots.

As he watched the cloud pass, a new noise joined the breathing.  Metal
on metal, the slow turning of a key in the door.  He turned his head to
face the sound, fear needling at him through the numbness of the
floor.

A grey rectangle of door parted from its frame, and a figure moved
through the crack.  Ethan lay still as tree roots, yet his skin
crawled.  Leaving the door ajar, the figure trod noiselessly to the
centre of the room and paused, hands on hips.  As Ethan watched, a
burning sensation mounted in his chest.  Witnessing this was wrong. The
figure took more tentative steps across the room, drawing nearer to
Ethan, apparently surveying the scene.  Now he could make the man out.
Heavy shoulders, a thickness through the trunk, fingers twitching at
the ends of gorilla arms.  The head turned in the starlight.  A
balaclava.  But not the balaclava.  Ethan was sure of that.  This man
moved differently, less assuredly.  Though he were forced to act this
clandestine role, the balaclava would never skulk.

From in front of the sheet George coughed out a blunt breath, rooting
through his dream.  The figure stiffened, seeming to blend into the
darkness until satisfied that George had settled.  Then he walked over
to Ethan and knelt down.

Ethan's eyes tried to shut, but couldn't.  Squinting through a veil of
lashes, he made out the man's square head, the blankness of his mask,
the pale whites of his eyes.  The hulked figure, bouncing minutely on
his heels, seemed to grow in the obscurity, even as his identity became
obvious.  Complete power puffed the man up.  He raised an arm above his
head, closed his hand into a dog-head fist.  The ring on his little
finger caught the moonlight.  Ethan dared not blink: waiting for the
blow he smelled Abu's peppermint breath.

The fist didn't fall.  For minutes nothing happened.  Would he look
more realistically asleep if he rolled over?  No, Kate had not stirred
next to him.  Copy her, stay put.  Abu's arm dropped.  He scratched his
head.  The immediate fear receded, seeping between the floorboards.  A
crazed numbness remained.  More minutes, another clashing memory: this
was as wrong as his mum sitting on the end of his bed, before she left.
The stalemate of watching and being watched.  Ethan sighed as subtly as
he could.  She'd always said she could tell whether he was asleep or
just pretending.

Menace made the time elastic, but Abu eventually moved away.  He
tracked around Kate and moved to the darker end of the room, where he
sat observing Clay and Diane.  Though heavy, he moved through the
darkness noiselessly, as if underwater.  By the time he'd finished at
the far end and had moved on to hover over Jan, Ethan's skin no longer
merely crawled but swam with imagined tics.  He allowed himself to drag
his hand an inch across the floor: the relief of a new sensation in
that arm made the prickly rest of him almost unbearable.

Finally Abu stalked towards George.  The granite square of sheet behind
him meant that what followed was played out as if on the dimmest of
screens.  Abu bent forward over George's sleeping form, as he had done
over Ethan.  Again one long arm reached away from his hunched body,
fist poised aloft, except that now to Ethan the hand had grown
abstract; reaching for attention, or to pull a rope.

George rolled over and coughed again.  Abu started sideways.  Perhaps
his heel caught on the boards; a big hand lunged out to steady his
fall.

George's second wheeze became a startled "Huh!"  He jerked upwards as
if beneath an opening parachute.

Already Abu was rising to his feet.  Ethan, still nailed to the
floorboards, saw the brutal outline of Abu's shoulders changing shape
as the guard lashed out with a backhand swipe, through George, who
slumped back, canopy strings cut.  A wave of invective rolled upright
with him, in slow motion, as he flailed to react: "Huugghhh?"

Woefully late.  Abu was already through the door.

Thirty-Four.

The first "Huh!"  was part of Kate's dream, an involuntary exclamation
mark.  She pretended not to hear it and instead pulled back harder on
the control column.  Rachel tensed beside her, but said nothing more.
Kate, suppressing a smile, stared straight ahead.  The nose cowl came
through the horizon and the little plane scooped upwards, from shallow
dive to steep climb, momentum slewing into a crisp September sky.

Stalling was simply exceeding the critical angle of attack.  The smooth
airflow over the wing broke into useless turbulence: an end to lift,
the beginning of free fall.  "When the plane stalls the nose will want
to slide one way or the other," her instructor had explained, 'and if
you try to correct the turn with the stick you'll do the opposite.
Imagine you're driving a car, and when you turn the steering wheel left
to avoid an obstacle the car swerves right, into it.  Unnerving, so '

"So I'll stamp with the rudder to turn, and use the stick to shove the
nose down."

"Right.  Then, when the wings are flying again, you can use the
elevators to bank and turn all you like."

As the nose aimed further skywards the engine pitch dropped, straining
under the weight of so sheer a climb.  No matter how many times she
went through the routine, Kate's stomach tightened in anticipation of
the plane dropping.

With Rachel in the passenger seat beside her, no doubt a league of fear
ahead, such anticipation was delicious.  She decided to stretch the
moment further and jerked level before the first squeak.

"Was that it?"  Rachel's voice was scratchy in the headset.

"What?"

"Is that stalling, then?"

"No.  That's climbing.  You'll know when we stall.  The plane falls out
of the sky.  You'll be hanging in your straps."

Headset silence.  Rachel had only to ask and she'd stop.  It wasn't as
if she wanted to scare her for no reason.  The obstinate pause
extended, though, and Kate's resolve hardened.  Puncturing that veneer
of cool was a good reason.  There was something deeply irritating about
her sister's rigidity in the passenger seat, a self-containment that
was really just self-satisfaction, a bubble of superiority cultivated
for as long as Kate could remember, and just asking to be pricked.

"You OK?"  Kate gave her another chance to call a halt.  The plane was
steady at three thousand feet now, on a ruled line through the still
morning air.  Kate sensed Rachel fighting the temptation to say
something, and losing.  An intake of breath echoed in her headphones.
Just say the word.  Crack.

"So you've flown Ethan."  Another deliberate breath.  "What did he make
of the ... experience?"

Though she couldn't know, it felt like Rachel was jabbing at this nerve
deliberately.  Kate made a spurious radio call to avoid responding, and
flicked the plane left-right to check the airspace beneath the nose.
With a sidelong look to her left she saw that Rachel had blanched
behind her designer sunglasses.

"Check your harness."

Rachel was fumbling for the correct strap.  Kate leaned over and tugged
on the end for her; a gesture that felt intimate and sisterly and
wrong.  To compensate for it, she yanked out the carburettor heat
control, cut the throttle any pulled back on the stick.  The little
plane ballooned.  Without power, it slowed much faster in the climb.
She hauled harder On the stick, felt the seat compress beneath her as
their trajectory bent further upwards.  She'd aimed them into the sun
on purpose; a matter of seconds into the manoeuvre the canopy turned a
searing white.  Somebody underlined the moment with a garbled radio
announcement, and then the stall-warning indicator overrode the noise
with its brief harmonica shriek.  The seat began to give Kate up to the
harness.  She dragged the controls back harder still, braced for the
buffet of turbulence that would signify the stall itself.  A guttural
noise drowned the static in her headphones as the plane bucket once and
began to drop.  The nose, which had started to slide right, began
dipping into the incipient turn.  With automatic sureness, Kate stamped
her left foot to check the slide.

The pedal didn't give.  Her foot pushed down again, but met a
brick-like resistance.  The plane continued sliding further right, and
somehow she was a beat behjnd the required response, unnerved by the
panic which had filled the cockpit.  The thought caught up with her
She's interfering with the dual controls but too late to say anything.
Kate had already begun wrestling her sister's knee-jerk reaction, her
foot straining on the left-hand rudder pedal, and both hands bushing
the control column forwards against the equal and opposite force of
Rachel's instinctive pulling back.  The canopy blinked blind again.

"Off!"  Kate yelled.

The plane fell faster, yawing sideways, beginning to rotate like a spun
knife.  Kate pushed, Rachel pulled.  Their hands and feet and control
and panic cancelled one another out.

"Leave go!"

Out of the corner of her eye, Kate saw Rachel's hands jolt back from
the column, fingers rigid.

"Feet!"

The pedal beneath Kate's left foot gave abruptly, as if a wire had
snapped.  As the nose dipped and steadied she throttled up, tilting
into a powered dive.  The engine whine fed back into her headset,
reassuring as the next breath.  She levelled the wings.

As glibly as she could muster, she said, "That helped."

Silence.

The plane was chugging along smoothly again.  Kate glanced right, to
see Rachel still shaking in the seat beside her.

"Huugghhh?"

The noise filled Kate's headset as her sister strained against her
harness and was sick into cupped hands.

thirty-Five.

She fought the blanket and clutched at Ethan, fingers digging into his
forearm.  "Rachel!"  she said.

George's bellow ended in words as he swam finally to his hands and
knees.  "What the ?"

"Poor Rachel."

In the pause Ethan heard, or imagined he could hear, Abu's footsteps
receding.  He breathed out.

"My face."  George lurched upright, a grey shape.

Ethan risked movement himself now, first pr ising Kate's nails free.
Their bite burned as she struggled beside him.  "Shhhh," he said.
"You're dreaming."

"It's not a fucking dream," George shouted back.  He was stumbling
towards the door.  "He was just in here.  The bastard hit me.  I'm
bleeding."

"I shouldn't have done that," Kate whispered.  "Not to Rachel."

Clay had disentangled himself from Diane at the far end of the room. He
came forwards into the half-light as George reached the door and yanked
at its handle, then banged the drum of its flat surface with a balled
hand.

"He cut me.  I think he had a knife."

Clay caught George's wrist, halting the next thump before it landed.
"Calm down, calm down," he urged.  "What's the matter?  What's going
on?"

Ethan saw Kate's eyes open, bluish in the starlight, and told her
again.  "It was just a dream.  You were only dreaming."  George
continued yelling about a cut and a blade.  Clay pulled him back from
the door, saying, "Let's have a look," and it was hard for Ethan not to
explain that there hadn't been a knife, but doing so would mean
revealing that he had seen Abu in the room, and he didn't want to do
that.

Over by the barred window, Clay angled George's face to the night sky.
Ethan saw that the shadows above George's black beard were wrong even
before Clay's sleeve smeared them.  "Your eyebrow's split, but it
doesn't look deep.  Jesus, how'd you manage that?"

George recoiled, as if from an insult.  "I didn't manage anything.  I
woke up and the one in the ski mask was just standing there waiting to
attack me.  He cut me and then he legged it.  The fucker ran away.  You
must have heard the door slam?"

At that, a door shut down the hall.

"There!  Someone's there.  And a minute ago he was here."  Now George
rounded upon Ethan.  "Look, mate, I'm bleeding."  He jabbed at his
forehead, as if accusing Ethan of idiocy.  "It was no dream.  The
bastard had some sort of knife."

Now there were more misunderstandings to put right.  Not a knife.  Not
the ski mask.  "I didn't mean you; I was talking to Kate."  He nodded
at her in the half-light, as if there was some doubt who he was
referring to.

"What time is it?"  Jan asked, his voice bleary.  "What's with you
guys?"

"Nothing," said Clay.  "Go back to sleep."

"There fucking is!  They're torturing us now, and I'm not going to let
it lie."  George bristled, his fists opening and shutting impotently at
his sides.

Ethan looked back down at Kate, the boundaries of his own confusion
blurring as Kate's face woke up properly.  Her vulnerability in this
half-state instilled an overwhelming sense of responsibility.  He
should tell them what he had seen because they included Kate.  He
became conscious of a muscle flicking in his otherwise frozen face.

"What's wrong?"  she asked.

The corridor light fanned into the room.  Kate screwed her eyes shut
against its brightness, then burrowed into Ethan's shoulder.  There was
silence; a stillness swamped the room with the shock of yellow which
bounced from its peeling walls.  Ethan felt Kate uncoiling from his
side as George rushed towards the open door.  He held on to her; she
was a child whom he must keep safe.  Clay rose to cut George off,
steering him to one side of Jan, who had also risen to face the
noise.

Abu filled the empty door frame.  A slice of his black hair stood out
from the side of his head at right angles, like a broken wing.  Was
that a deliberate touch, Ethan wondered, or just the result of having
pulled off the balaclava?

"No drama, nothing to see."  Clay grinned at Abu.  "George here sleep
walked himself into a wall.  But everything's cool again.  We're all
back off to bed now."

Abu ignored him.  "What is this?  Why are you waking up to make noise?"
He scratched his beard, staring blearily from face to face.  The act
was convincing.

"It's nothing," Clay kept the smile up, 'a mi sunder '

"Bollocks it is!  Where the fuck's your boss?  Where's the main man?
The deviant in the mask?  See what he's done to me?"  George, tapping
the side of his head, tried to approach

Abu, but Clay held him back.  Now that Kate had settled, Ethan rose and
clamped a hand on George's other shoulder, which trembled in his
grip.

Abu now leaned against the door frame, staring down at Clay.  He hid
the beginning of his own smile, Ethan was sure of it, in a
demonstrative frown and then, talking over the top of George's ragged
breathing, tapped his own forehead and said plainly, "He is a mad
man."

The words prompted a moment of clarity.  Ethan saw that they were true.
Madness meant inappropriate and unpredictable and George was definitely
those; his shivering forewarned an explosion.  The twitching below
Ethan's left eye worsened as his own bottled panic grew.  Somehow it
was not Abu's fault, but George's.  What might this man's lack of
control provoke?  Ethan's grip on George's shoulder tightened.

Behind him, Kate spoke softly, "George, best leave it be."

"No!"  With a violent shrug George jerked free of Clay and Ethan, and
stamped towards the open door.  Abu drew himself up to meet his
advance, stood unflinching as the smaller man stopped just short,
continued looming over him impassively, as if daring further action.
Toe to toe with the guard, George swayed, panting up into his face.

"Tell the coward to come here himself," George shouted, 'instead of
sending you."

"Coward?"  Abu smiled.

"Hiding behind his fucking ski mask."  He flapped his arms, a
flightless bird.

Now Abu stifled a laugh.  This was understandable and yet provocative.
George's arms stiffened mid wing-beat.  If Ethan pulled him back now
he'd run the risk of involving himself, yet George's posturing
threatened a fragile balance.  He could not bear to watch, instead
turned to the window, which was now black and sucked empty of stars by
the electric light.  He hadn't time to focus on the bars before Abu's
laughter broke derisively and George snapped.  Two thin hands gripped
the guard's denim collar, pulling him a step into the room.  Beard to
beard the two figures pirouetted, momentarily off balance.  Then Abu's
arms drove up between George's and somehow George was on his back with
Abu kneeling over him, the thumb of one hand pressed hard into the
whiteness of George's throat.  Though covered in bristles his neck was
skinny as an old man's.  His lips were open, and the thin noise coming
from behind them was pathetic.

Clay took a step forwards, then halted when Abu looked up.

"This man is not making sense.  He makes noise like a dog."

"Leave him al Kate, too, was cut short by the glare.

"I do not think you should be putting up with such nonsense," Abu
continued, rising to his feet.  George clawed his way up with him, a
contradiction of stiff limbs and loose joints, like a puppet.  "He is a
dog and will be better in the kennel," Abu explained, smiling.  His
teeth were luminous beneath his beard.  "Yes?"  The question was aimed
at George, who did not respond as Abu pulled him from the room.

thirty-Six.

Kate's breath was visible in the corridor.  It lingered like the
conversation coming through the open door to the guard's quarters.  She
halted to listen.  Not a conversation, the tone was wrong.  Radio, in
English.  The back end of an unbelievable news story.  She waited for
more detail, ignoring Khalid's gentle tap on the shoulder, but the
announcer moved on to the sports report.  More familiar names echoed in
the hallway, entirely out of place, news from the Premier League.
Khalid moved past her and shut the door, muffling the sense from the
words.  A further cloud of breath hung in front of her as she gave in
to a more insistent prod and continued towards the bathroom.

In the little room a tremendous shiver overtook Kate.  She steadied
herself, gripping the dirty basin with both hands, and staring at the
discoloured bruise of paint which remained in place of a mirror.  Her
throat felt raw and tight; she opened her mouth and whispered "Ahhh,"
at the spot where her reflection should have been.  The noise was both
amazement and sorrow.

This was the first she'd heard of the world beyond their captivity. The
story hurt to recall, so she repeated the football result instead:
Newcastle United 0 Aston Villa 2. Villa were Ethan's team he'd taken
her to a match once, on a biting January afternoon.  Beneath a low sky
she'd endured the boredom of a nil-nil draw, marooned in the middle of
a jeering crowd.  The sublimation of supporting baffled Kate.  Yet
Ethan seemed to draw pleasure from precisely that.  Following the
fortunes of a team he'd picked at random as a schoolboy mattered.
Watching him sing taunts at the opposition fans, she couldn't decide
whether she found this aspect of his character endearing or an affront.
The singing showed hidden fervour, but did it count?

She turned on the tap and listened to the water cough its way up the
pipe.  How far had the radio waves travelled?  That depended: was it
long wave, medium wave or FM?  The plane's radio was VHF, which was
good for about ninety miles if you were up high, but only sixty if you
were lower down.  How high?  Why, when she'd known the exact numbers by
heart so recently, could she not remember them now?  She stared at the
water running into her cupped hands, but felt nothing.  The faucet
spat; she heard only the fractured static of a signal moving out of
range.  Her fingers went slack and water ran from between them in icy
tendrils.  Then she shut them again and, as the pool re-formed,
concentrated on recalling more detail.  VHF only worked if the
transmitter had a clear view of the receiver; a mountain in the way
made communication impossible.  Such obstacles would block the range of
the other frequencies as well.  She understood that there were ways
around the problem a signal could bounce off a satellite relay station
to reach down into a valley such as this.  Yes, a satellite could
increase the signal's range, but what were the limits of such trickery?
She didn't know.  Steeling herself, she stripped and prepared to wash
herself methodically.  Like taking off her shoes at night, the routine
was vital protection against the threat of falling apart.  The coldness
Kate splashed into her face was hard as grit and made her gasp.

She would pass on the football result to Ethan.  Perhaps he'd connect
with that news.  She felt a stab of longing.  What would she now give
to have the old Ethan back?  In past weeks he seemed to have hardened.
Nothing she said got through.  The night before she'd heard him
muttering and reached for his hand.

"Say again?"  she whispered.

"Say what again?"

"I thought '

"You must see, Kate."

"See what?"

"The importance of it.  How crucial... not to react."  He was hard to
make out.  "We have to work with them, together... survive."

"Together."  She repeated the only important word.  "Ethan, I '

"Shh.  Whisper."

She swallowed once, put her lips to his ear.

He squeezed her hand, but said nothing.  You couldn't expect to
continue the private language of a couple without privacy.  He was
never much of a talker at the best of times a fact Rachel enjoyed
pointing out.  His reticence now was just more of the same, surely. And
in unspoken ways this pressing of her hand in the middle of black
night, the gentleness with which he passed her a helping of watery rice
he was if anything more attentive than normal.  She finished washing
and turned off the tap, found solace in the silence that replaced its
sputtering.

They'd kept George in the kennel for over a week.  When Sadiq returned
him yesterday (again the fat guard played his tiresome joke of
attempting to steal unannounced into their midst), he appeared to have
shrunk.  Everything about him was smaller: it was as if he was
crouching within a compressed version of himself.  Between his matted
hair and beard a crust of scab straddled the concave bridge of his
nose.  His black eyes had sunk further into their shadowed sockets; the
grey in his beard and hair was now echoed in the pallor of his skin. He
sat clutching his shoulders, arms hooked over bony knees, terminally
quiet: even his anger appeared to have eaten itself up.

Still, their relief at seeing him again had been a high point.  Kate
licked the tip of her pencil and recorded how Clay's pat on the back
had turned into a full, if un reciprocated hug.  Jan rose to join in
before coughing himself back into his mound of blankets.  Even Diane
had sensed an occasion, seen that George's suffering topped her own,
and stepped beyond the perimeter of her self-pity to plant a kiss on
his cheek.  "Like, welcome back.  Into the fold."  She curtsied and
gestured at the corners of the room with an upturned palm, part sales
girl, part lady-in-waiting.  "Let me reacquaint you with the five-star
facilities of our suite."

George did not smile.  "We must get away from here," he said, his voice
flat.

"Of course," said Clay.  "We will.  We just have to hold together and
they're bound to let us go in time."

"No.  If we don't escape, they'll kill us."

Clay tried to laugh.  "It's like the man said, we're valuable.  They'll
work out a trade eventually, and we'll '

"I mean it.  We have to get out," George continued deliberately.  "We
must prepare."

"Either they'll let us go, or ... somebody will come to get us,"
reasoned Clay.

George's silence was caustic.

"Maybe he is right, no?"  continued Jan.  "They've kept us like an'
animal for over two months now.  Maybe we must make something
happen."

Ethan was staring balefully at George.

"If the opportunity arises, then ... perhaps.  But think of the danger.
Think of Rafi.  Patience is what Clay's soothing voice was again cut
off.

"There'll be a sign."  George began muttering to himself again.  "We
must prepare through prayer and then we'll be shown the way."

Clay squeezed the older man's shoulder again and said, "Sure thing, no
harm in that, pray away."

George rolled over to face the wall.

Beside her, Ethan's fist had pumped the map of his forearm into
definition; the cabling of his athlete's neck stood rigid, collarbone
to ear, for a split second.  Kate saw incredulity in his eyes harden to
hostility, and watched him bite down, clamping his mouth shut.  Finally
he doused his anger with indifference and slumped back against the
wall.  The performance was a familiar echo of how he responded to his
father's goading, by shutting it out.  When she smoothed the knee of
his trousers reassuringly he shook her hand off.

Now the guards' door opened and closed in the corridor, allowing the
radio voice to swell and die again.  Yesterday evening, picking her
moment carefully, she'd asked Ethan: wasn't George's return a good
sign?

A pause, in which her fingers worried at one another.  Ethan's eyes
wandered over the opposite wall.  "The bloke's a liability, Kate.  He's
not all there.  I'm just surprised.  They know that; I can't see how
they think they'll benefit from '

"What's their benefit got to do with anything?"

His face said it was obvious, yet this only deepened her concern.  Her
fingers continued twisting, struggling to wring a drop of logic from
his words.  "You mean what's good for them is good for us in the long
run?"

More silence.  His eyes stopped still, lapsed into an unfocused stare.
"Something like that."

There was no way Ethan, or any of the others, could take more bad news.
She'd keep it to herself.  Kate's pencil wrote News and drew a box
around the word.  She should record the radio story she'd overheard
here, even if she had decided to keep it from them.  She checked her
watch, then wrote, At approx 0745 on 12 September I overheard a radio
news story fearing us dead.

Thirty-Seven.

"It's just a matter of time."

Rachel heard her mother's mantra over the grinding of the dishwasher,
but the words had long since lost their meaning.  Through the
rain-spotted window she watched the clothes line whip at the sky.

"Sooner or later they'll see sense.  We've enough names now."

Her mother continued scouring at the sink-surround, the top of her head
bobbing at Rachel across the breakfast bar.  Rachel noted the new
blonde highlights cut into a recently tightened perm.  She stayed put
on her stool as her mother assembled another pot of tea, warming the
pot, measuring out the tea leaves, stirring to infinity.  Slow hands
placed the ensemble of cups, milk jug and sugar bowl on a tray with the
precision of a theatre nurse, and carried them through to the lounge as
if leading a church procession.

The optimism was terrifying.  The house smelt odd, too clean.  Rachel
found it suddenly hard to breathe.  She took her usual seat in the
lounge and sat staring at the sideboard.  The familiarity of the group
of objects displayed there made them collectively invisible at first,
but while Rachel's mum continued with the ritual of the tea the lump of
the thing broke into its constituent parts, and she found herself
before a shrine.

Framed photographs, of Kate and herself for the most part, stood in
clusters on shelves crammed full of figurines and vases and home-made
ornaments.  On either side of a pair of shell boats, painted with nail
varnish, stood twin primary-school head shots.  Kate wore an Alice
band; her tentative smile beneath it was as much gap as teeth.  Rachel
was flawless by comparison, beaming at her sister like a weather girl,
through lollipop-stick masts.

Those photographs pre-dated the scandal, but the one on the shelf
above, of the pair with their mother astride New Forest ponies, came
from just afterwards.  It brought the memory of that unfolding cutting
back.  His face beneath the indelible words: Schoolgirl Pregnant by
Deputy Head.  Rachel shut her eyes, then opened them and fixed her
stare on the photo again, saw the straining togetherness of the holiday
displayed in her mother's stoical grin.  How determined she had been to
take part in the group lesson.  Neither Rachel nor Kate had tried to
stop her then, both awed by her brittle hopefulness, fearful, in the
wake of their father's departure, of the consequences of its failure.

By the time the picture above that was taken, though, fifteen-year-old
Kate had begun resisting on every front.  No matter what their mum did
or said, Kate found a hole in it and tore the thing apart, leaving
Rachel to patch and mend.  Kate even started seeing their dad again,
indulging him in his failure, despite the prick's lack of contrition.
The photo looked anodyne enough, Christmas dinner, paper hats, yet the
battle lines were evident even there: Kate's nut roast obstinately
opposing the lavish turkey at the top of the table.

"We've just short of five thousand names now and George's wife,
Michelle, is planning to re-present the petition to the Foreign Office
when we reach the magic number.  She thinks that should be on Tuesday
or Wednesday.  Really, she's a brick.  You've never seen someone work
so hard.  Five thousand!  They'll have to intervene now, Rachel, you'll
see."

"Sure."  Carpet cleaner.  That's what smelt so strong.

"All that pressure.  It's marvelous."  A gaunt smile at her lap.
"You'll come with us to hand over the signatures, won't you?

Rachel bit her lip.  "Of course."

"Good girl.  The public pressure is everything."

Her mother's teaspoon pl inked around the cup.  Outside, the garden was
a silent frenzy: the apple tree, bare of fruit, shook its stunted limbs
at the sky, while next door's willow thrashed at the top of the hedge.
She'd even managed to normalize this.  Reduced it to numbers and a new
friend called Michelle; the two of them stiff backed against the same
wall.  Ignoring entirely the ugly speculation in some of the more
recent news stories.  It was almost as if she enjoyed battling to stay
unruffled.  The teaspoon tapped its cup lip twice before settling into
the saucer.  Not calm, becalmed.  Stagnating behind her double-glazing
in a mire of false optimism.

And in all of this, what about him?  Rachel's gaze returned to the
sideboard, submerged beneath its memorabilia.  Their father built the
thing, after all.  Or assembled the flat-pack, at least.  A last stab
at domesticity before he bailed out for good.

What right had he to crawl back now?

Her mother had been out fetching unnecessary groceries when he showed.
Rachel, steadying herself against the door frame, refused to meet his
eye.  The pink shapes of his baldness and pleading hands were reflected
in the frosted glass of the door, until she shut it.  He stood in the
driveway for twenty minutes.  The thought of him waiting flooded Rachel
with a bitterness she could not swallow.

On top of that, they'd received calls from Ethan's dad.  Since the news
about the Israeli had come through, his bullish front had apparently
dissolved.  The press ran a story intimating that he thought Ethan had
been landed in this mess by his girlfriend.  The irony of it.  He was
adamant that Ethan had 'only gone with her out of a sense of duty to
keep her safe'.

A day later he woke their mother in the middle of the night, ringing
through a drunken message that made her, in turn, call Rachel for
advice.  "Ignore him' hadn't worked.  Rachel hadn't yet returned to bed
before the phone had gone off again and she'd failed to follow her own
advice.

"Piece of work, your sister, little Kate."

"Pardon?"

"Head full of BS, and planted right up her own backside.  With her
claws in my boy, too.  Two and a half years of dragging him down. Blind
to it, he was ... is.  But I saw."

"I'm sorry?"  She felt no anger; in fact the old man's slurring brought
something like relief.  Ethan lived in it.  She forced herself to ask
the unnecessary, "Who is this?"

"I'm the father.  His dad.  And we're thick as thieves.  They have to
send my boy back."

"Please, it's two in the morning.  I appreciate what you're going
through, believe me, but '

"Two in the morning here maybe."  A longer pause.  "But his tone became
triumphant 'not there, young lady, not there."

"Whatever you say.  I'm hanging up."  She placed a finger on the
disconnect button, but held back.

"Such a sweet boy.  Courageous, brave and good-natured.  Not one to
desert her in the thick of it.  She's used him."  His voice was poured
mud.

"She's not used anybody."

Despite herself Rachel began arguing with the old man.  It had taken
her ten minutes to draw the conversation to a close.

Outside, water lilies slapped at the fish pond full of fallen leaves;
inside, perched on the edge of her floral armchair, Rachel's mother
babbled on about lights at the end of the tunnel.

In vain.  There'd been no proper news for weeks.  Rachel's days before
her computer screen her compassionate leave had been ominously extended
were a seamless frustration.  The only recent articles described the
mainstream Kashmiri politicians' unanimous condemnation of FRN's
tactics, one leader after another urging the militants to give up the
hostages for the sake of the state.  In this way hard news had become
conjecture and opinion and was drying up entirely.  All that was left
was Ethan's father's slander, together with the repeated "Ms Cox's
family have so far declined to comment."

She watched her mother picking invisible specks of lint from her navy
skirt.  Scrubbing sinks, stirring tea, pecking at her lap: her fingers
would not stay still.  Behind the calm front she was all twisted
nerves.

So was Rachel.  Nothing could numb or divert the viciousness of what
she, at her darkest, truly felt.  Kate and Ethan's stupidity warranted
this punishment.  Ethan should never have gone with her to Kashmir. And
Kate shouldn't have risen to Rachel's idiot challenge in the first
place.  Investigate.  Come on!

She focused again on one of the photos of Kate, wanting both to tear it
up and to hold it to her chest.  Shame engulfed her.  The punishment
was rightly hers and Ethan's, not Kate's.  Her eyes stung when she
wiped them.

An immense silence, seeming to emanate from the fitted carpet, bounced
back off the patio doors.  A new smell of polish, sickly as custard,
rose above the carpet cleaner.  She stood and walked to the window and
pressed her forehead against it.  They had breathed up all the air.

Thirty-Eight

Ethan leaned back against his patch of warm wall, pressing his
shoulders flat to the breeze blocks, and looked about.  Mid-afternoon.
George lay curled opposite in his familiar stupor, a hip bone jutting
at the beams above.  Diane dozed on in her heap.  One pink foot nosed
out from under her blanket, then retreated.  The only activity was in
front of the big square of greying sheet, where, to the tune of one of
Clay's unending songs, Kate knelt next to Jan, playing the stone game.
Five pebbles thrown, caught and shuffled in a Byzantine sequence that
Ethan hadn't bothered to learn.  When cajoled to play, he accepted
instructions at each turn, and did his best not to win.

An engine died outside.  Down the corridor, doors slammed.  Nobody paid
any attention.  Unseen people came and went from the building once or
twice a week, but it made no difference.  For all Kate and Clay's
speculation, what went on in headquarters couldn't be any of their
business.  Nevertheless, Ethan found it somehow reassuring to imagine
the strategies planned and orders given on the guards' side, where the
bigger picture was surely pinned to a cork board or projected upon a
whitewashed wall.

Now, though, a set of feet halted before their door.  Ethan leaned
forward from the wall expectantly and said, "Guys."  They oughtn't to
be caught playing like children.

Inexpert fingers worked the key for seconds before the lock gave.  The
door creaked open and the balaclava stepped into their midst.  He
glided across the dirty floor and stood considering the scene.  Kate,
Jan and Clay swivelled to face him in unison.  Diane sat up and rubbed
her eyes.  When the man's gaze met Ethan's he nodded, barely
perceptibly, but Ethan was sure of it all the same.

"Everything is satisfactory?"

Ethan, willing the pause to last, heard his heart in his throat.  He
dreaded that Kate would contradict the man, whose words were as much
statement as question.  When the eye holes turned back to him he
ventured his own minimal nod in return.

The balaclava continued forcefully: "Nobody is ill."  A telltale head
wobble compounded the emphatic negative, but the mouth hole kept
moving, disputing itself.  "You see I am hearing the opposite.  I am
hearing there is trouble with sickness."

Jan replied with a gravel led cough.  The balaclava turned to face the
noise and quick stepped to the group in front of the hanging sheet.
But he knelt next to Clay.  An easy mistake, Ethan considered, for they
all looked as ragged as each other.  Even he had had to scale down his
training to conserve energy in recent weeks.  At least this visit
showed that the twin chains of command and intelligence were working;
the guards had taken note of Jan's condition and alerted their
superiors.

"Are you needing medicine?"  the balaclava asked gently.

Out of the corner of his eye Ethan registered the configuration of
shapes directly opposite him move and settle as George stirred.

"Not me."  Clay mustered a charming smile.  "Junior here.

He needs a check-up.  Antibiotics.  The works."  He turned the smile on
Jan.  "Don't you?"

"He's worst," Kate added.  "But we all need to see a doctor.
Everybody's been sick.  What do you expect?"

Ethan bit harder on his lower lip.  She meant well.  But the balaclava
only nodded, rising above the insult.  "And you are eating good food.
With enough blankets.  There is enough warmth in the night."

Ethan nodded again.  Of course the food was rank, repetitive slush, and
the nights had grown achingly bitter, but what else could they expect?
There were circumstances to consider.  What they had was adequate.

"We freeze half to death and I wouldn't make my dog eat that shit."
Diane rapped out the insult.  The balaclava twisted to look at her.
Ethan concentrated on the back of the man's neck, watched the woollen
ribbing corkscrew slowly.  Diane met the eye holes with a peal of silly
giggling and Ethan felt a part of himself shut down inside. Improbably,
however, the man's shoulders shook with reciprocating laughter.

"Thank you.  This is honest, which is good.  I see what we can do,

OK?"

Now Diane batted her eyelids.  Ethan withered.

"But I am serious."  The man's knees cracked as he bounced up from his
heels and moved towards Diane.  "My men are looking after you OK?  They
are treating you with due courtesy?"  He paused in the centre of the
room with his hands on his hips, proprietarily.  "No complaints?"

Silence.

Then a roar so loud it seemed to come from all directions at once.
George flew up with the noise.  Ethan turned to see him suspended mid
lunge.  There was no continuity; one minute he was a shape hanging in
the air, the next he had crossed the gap and was on the balaclava's
back.  The balaclava staggered beneath the weight and Ethan found
himself leaping into the fray.  But the air seemed viscous he had to
heave through its resistance to reach the pair.  George's face wheeled
around on the balaclava's shoulder, mouth open, eyes two blank discs,
its own mask.  One stringy arm was pinned across the balaclava's upper
chest, fingers digging into the man's fatigues.  As the composite
figure tipped off balance towards Ethan, he saw George's other hand
flashing up to the leader's throat.

The roar broke into syllables: "Spine-less-coward-fuck."  Somehow Ethan
managed to right the falling mass for a second.  He reeled with them in
a confusion of flailing limbs, his face pressing into George's hair,
which smelt of earth.  Looking down, he saw George's feet clear of the
floor, pedalling air.  Ethan grabbed at the sharpness of his shoulder
to rip the two men apart but, when he pulled, both figures lurched off
balance with him again.  Together they fell in exaggerated strides,
Ethan sliding round the knot of George's back until his nose was inches
from the fingers still digging at the balaclava's hidden throat.
Working blindly, he drove his own hand between George's chest and the
balaclava's back, but still couldn't separate the two men.  As they
stumbled, Ethan saw George's nails disappear into olive wool and yank
it upwards.  He realized what was happening and began to fight
properly.  They spun.  Ethan's "No!"  rose above the balaclava's yell
for help.  The room ran round them and he saw that the door was open
and something was moving through it and then the view was just an arc
of shaven chin growing as the mask slid upwards.  George's nails took
lumps of the man's face with them as he hauled, leaving gouged lines
yet to fill with blood.

A charge went through Ethan.  Something fundamental and awful was
happening and he was their only hope.  The balaclava dug in vain at his
waistband.  Sadiq had a stick and was coming to the rescue, but not
fast enough.  George had already torn the edge of mask above a black
moustache.  Ethan's legs began pumping; both the smaller men were
enveloped and overcome by his panic.  He bundled them all towards the
sheet, which flapped theatrically as Ethan drove straight beyond it,
into touch.  He took a trailing leg out with one of his, upending the
lot of them into the dark rear of the room.  Out of sight.

"Who-the-fuck?"

George's growled words were barely audible over Diane's screaming.  He
had the woollen hem rumpled up beyond the bridge of the leader's nose,
revealing frightened brown eyes.  The mask came off in a rush, like a
peeled sock.  Ethan felt a stripe of heat across his shoulders but was
already rolling away so as not to see.  Instead the view became Sadiq
wielding his length of wood.  George buckled as the pole broke across
his lower back and immediately afterwards Ethan saw his own fist
connect with the side of George's face, which was surprising and yet
made sense at the same time.  George fell away.  There was just the
shape of him sprawled on the floor, and the balaclava was crouching in
the corner scrabbling for the mask.  Before Sadiq managed to drag him
off Ethan's bare foot stamped twice on George's head.

thirty-Nine.

Kate cowered as Ethan launched the balaclava and George past her and
through the curtain.  She tried to get up, but the larger force of
Diane's band saw shriek pressed her down into a terrified huddle with
Jan and Clay.  One of the guards charged past into the obscured end of
the room.  The saw hit a nail and died.  Kate wobbled to her feet. From
behind the curtain came the sound of blows and snorting breath, a horse
panicking in its box.  She took steps further forwards, towards the
edge of the sheet, but before she arrived the centre of the square
bulged and slid upwards, giving birth to Sadiq.  He dragged George into
the bigger part of the room by one leg.

Ethan followed, his hands raised in a protestation of innocence, and
the balaclava came last.  Ethan said, "Please understand, I but the
rest was drowned by Diane.  Her wailing started again at the sight of
the balaclava's extended hand, which held a pistol.  The barrel waved
wildly from Ethan's back to George on the floor and then in the vague
direction of the scream, which again stopped dead.  In the silence that
followed the balaclava walked round George and aimed at his head. Blood
ran down the side of George's face and blackened the dust.

"He's hurt," pleaded Jan in a whisper.

The balaclava's shoulders heaved.  His gun barrel shivered, tracing
minute circles.  With his spare hand he pulled the bottom of the ski
mask straight on his head.  The gesture looked childish, petulant.  An
open mouth appeared in the main hole and panted something foreign.
Sadiq dropped George's foot and scratched his bearded chin and Kate's
Swatch peeped at her over his cuff.  Indignation gave her back her
voice.

"He didn't mean it.  He's unwell.  Your damned kennel made him mad.
Still currency, yes?  You have to keep him healthy, help him, take him
to a doctor."

A bubble of snot and blood appeared in George's open mouth.  It grew,
then popped.

"The punishment will fit," the balaclava panted.  Then more foreign.
Sadiq lifted George into a sitting position.  His head lolled.  The
guard began dragging him towards the door.  Meanwhile, the balaclava
pointed the gun at each of them in turn, as if picking out faces with a
torch beam.  It lingered longest on Ethan, whose head was bowed.  A
statue.  "You are next," the balaclava said.

At first they sat in silence, trying not to listen.  The thread of time
came apart in Kate's head.  She hitched her sleeve to her elbow above
the simple face of Clay's watch and sat staring at the second hand's
measured sweep, trying to keep calm.  Nobody spoke, yet in each face
Kate saw her own dread reflected.  The quiet was intolerable and seemed
unending.  When, finally, George's voice first rang down the corridor,
relief was immediately overtaken: his shout became a bellow, climbing
in pitch.  What were they doing to him?  Only Ethan moved.  He paced up
and down, wide-eyed, his stare leaping from his hands to the floor and
ceiling, to her and back again.  He began to mutter to himself.

"How did I let this happen?  What have I done?"

"It wasn't your fault.  You tried to stop him.  Of all of us, only you
had the guts to intervene."

"No.  No.  You don't understand.  That's not true."

"It is true," Clay contradicted.  "He went off so quickly.  You did
your best.  You couldn't have done any more."

"I should have stopped him.  I should have prevented it entirely.  I
let him attack the main man.  My fault."

"Nonsense.  Calm down."

Down the corridor the wave of George's wailing rose and crashed,
retreated in sobs, regathered and broke again.  The noise drew them in
each of their faces a study in shared pain.

Ethan was still muttering to himself.  "Weak, weak, weak."

"They'll see you were meaning to help, that you tried to hold George
back," Kate urged.  "They won't do anything to you."

"No, no, no," Ethan muttered, "You don't understand.  I should have
finished the stupid bastard off myself."

"No way, no way," said Jan.

"You're better off having left the guy alone," Clay agreed.  Kate
watched him scrape a handful of dirty hair back from his forehead and
continue in a measured, reassuring tone.  "First up, how were you to
know he had that gun?  Even if you'd managed to stop him from using it,
there would still have been Sadiq and the others to get past.  Trust
your instincts -they told you to drag George off because it was the
right thing to do."

Ethan's stare had fixed on his bare feet, a world apart.  With these
last words, Kate saw his face awaken; the change was as abrupt as if it
had emerged from a shadow.

"Sure.  You're right."  His nod at Clay was an act, almost eager.  Clay
was smiling back, but she had caught a glimpse of something and knew
better: a strange gap within Ethan was opening up.  He continued, "I
hope they leave him '

The sound that stopped Ethan short was sudden and otherworldly.  Kate
started, looked involuntarily at the door, felt her insides twist.  A
deeper silence filled the room, quelling them all.  Diane began to hum.
Three notes, descending, again and again.

Sadiq and Abu returned George at dusk.  In the half light Kate couldn't
immediately interpret the strange whiteness of his face; as the two
guards lowered him to the floor it became a crepe bandage, wound
tightly, blanking out his eyes, nose and ears.  The dressing was clean
and sterile and repellent in its contrast to everything else.  His
beard and hair and shirt were caked in blood and dirt.  In their midst
George sat cross-legged, shivering.

"What did they do?"  asked Jan.

No response.

"You're all right now," Jan continued, his voice hollow.  "You're back
with us again.  Think if they took you for longer.  This is much more
positive."

"Want us to take a look at you?"  Clay asked.  Though his voice was
calm, Kate noticed his hands trembling.  "What's going on under that
bandage then?"

One by one they had drawn closer to George and were now, with the
exception of Ethan, squatting in a ring around him.  Diane reached out
and touched his hair with electric fingers; he jolted from her and made
them all flinch.

"George, this is me, Clay.  Can you hear?"

The question was immediately pointless, since George's silence was
enormous and impenetrable, underlined by the hated in and out of Jan's
breathing.  Kate found herself ahead of its rhythm, her heart racing.
The bandage was mesmerizing.  George's grey cheek bulged below its
wire-hard edge, exaggerated by the swell of his beard.  Kate felt the
claustrophobia of the sacks, tenfold.

"Let me unwrap you.  That thing looks way too tight.  We can always do
it back up again.  OK?  I'm going to untie this knot above your ear
here, all right?"

Still he did not respond.

"You think that's a good idea?"  asked Ethan.

Kate turned to see him standing above them, hands on hips.
Authoritative, impatient almost.

"Unless he says otherwise, yes, I do."

"Looks to me like they've done a pretty competent job."  Ethan
shrugged.  Then, on seeing Kate's slack-jawed disbelief, he added,
"They've no doubt bandaged him up for a good reason."

"Nevertheless, we should check."  Clay agreed with Kate.  "We can't
trust them.  Who knows what '

Kate reached out for the knot.  George started, then began to mouth a
silent prayer to himself as she persisted.  Clay tried to reassure him
by patting his shoulder, but his own hand trembled.  Her fingers were
grey against the whiteness of the bandage.  Yet she had to free him
from the darkness, had to unstop his ears.  Pinpricks of blood became
rosebuds,

blossomed with each unravelling layer.  The front of his face.  Two.  A
tattered parachute unwinding, a tumble of spilt silk.  Clay's hand
shrank back.  Kate knew in her heart what she'd uncover when the last
round of cloth fell away.

Forty They came for Ethan first thing the following morning, as he'd
known they would.  He'd spent the night waiting, stretched flat on his
planks, staring into the darkness in anticipation, his fear insistent
as the drumming rain.  Would they do to him what they'd done to George?
He couldn't, or wouldn't, believe in that possibility.  The balaclava
wasn't an idiot.  He knew Ethan had done his best to help.  They'd been
true to their words so far: a punishment to fit the crime.  So ... no
crime, no punishment, surely.

He allowed Sadiq to lead him down the corridor and through an open door
on the right.  The guards' quarters.  Ethan froze for a minute,
startled by the fluorescent strip light overhead.  Peeling walls,
sticks of black-wood furniture, a battered couch, a thinning rug
underfoot.  In one corner was a table made from a tea chest.  On top of
it, still boxed, sat a Polaroid camera.  The bright blue packaging
caught Ethan's eye before he was distracted by movement.  In the
opposing corner, trailing wires to an ancient socket, stood a
television and video.  On screen Jean-Claude Van Damme knelt before a
child, delivering what looked like a passionate plea, in silence.  A
photograph of a politician with a moustache hung in a frame on one
wall; magazine pages depicting unknown cricketers and Michael Jordan
and the old Arsenal squad were pasted onto another.  The sight of them
was as odd as the warmth of the room, which took a while to register.
Ethan just had time to take in the fire burning in the stove before
Sadiq steered him on past the posters towards a door in the far
corner.

Now he found himself alone in a further cold room that smelt of piss,
acrid and at odds with the wooden desk, upholstered chairs and
mantelpiece, which gave the room a formal air echoing the houseboat or
his father's London club.  Ethan stood still.  Specific details of the
old man's club came back -ancient leather chairs, a rack of magazines,
the painting of that fat general smug on his horse but not enough to
make the memory whole: the Old World landmarks had rotated beyond his
new horizon.

A mirror hung on the wall above the mantelpiece.  His reflection
wavered within its frame.  He stared at himself.  In place of his khaki
combats and blue shirt was a uniform of stains.  The crop had become a
rough pelt, beneath which his face was grey.  Drawing himself up, Ethan
squared his shoulders at his reflection, tensed every muscle, heel to
jaw.  No use, still a shambles.  Even the whites of his eyes looked
dirty.

That Diane still wanted him, looking like this, confirmed she wasn't
all there.  The flirting had tailed off for the most part.  Yet not a
week ago, while Kate had talked with Clay and Jan behind the buttress
and sheet, he'd woken from dozing to find Diane's hand in his fly, a
veil of fair hair descending with her face.  Stiffening in her grip,
he'd gaped into her eyes, unsure what was happening at first, then
incredulous, and then not knowing how to stop her without risking a
scene.  Only when Diane's lips parted above his did he wrench her wrist
free to roll away.  "My, my," was her whispered, smiling response.  As
unpredictable and dangerous, in her way, as George.

The whites of his eyes.  Ethan advanced to the mirror and stared at
their bloodshot circuitry.  He refused to blink, allowed the smarting
sensation to build instead.  Wriy, when the last of the bandage fell
away into George's lap, hsd he felt so little?  No real pity, no
remorse, not even disgust.  Just curiosity satisfied.  Save for a
smiling cut above the eyebrow, the left side of George's face was
closed up entirely, swollen shut, but in the other there was still a
hole.  It looked ILIke they'd smeared the wound with charcoal, which
showed professionalism: hadn't he read somewhere that it worked a s an
antiseptic?  As Ethan considered this, Clay had broken the silence.

"What have they done to you?"

"George, tell me."  Kate's ordinarily pale face was now translucent.
"Is it both eyes?  Can you see out of your left?"

But George just knelt there, calm as a stone prophet, quelled.

Ethan backed away from himself and sat down in the recess of a window
casement, which shoixld have been flat, but was not.  Standing again,
he checked, saw that he'd sat on the only other object in the room, a
steel-shafted claw hammer.

The hammer brought Rafi and George and the four walls crashing
together, and something in Etham gave.  But there were voices in the
corridor and the hammer, in his hand, demanded attention.  He had to
make a decision about it now.

Surely it was an oversight?  Left there, n_ext to the glass.  A voice
reached him, as if from across the sea_ The hammer was a weapon; an
opportunity; think what damage he might do with it!  But the voice was
tiny and immediately drowned out by the yell of a much bigger fear.
This had to be a deliberate trap.  Pick it up!..  . Give us the excuse!
Ethan put the tool down.  And yet he couldn't just leave it there, in
full view.  A hammer, in this room of piss and stains.  Two silver
fangs curving away from the fist end, trembling in Ethan's grip as he
turned to find somewhere, anywhere, that would do for a hiding place.
The voices were closer.  He stretched to where the pitched roof ran
angled from the wall and slid the hammer, handle first, into a gap
between beams, then stood back.  The tip of its metal head poked out
inquisitively, yet there wasn't time to find a better spot.  The voices
had stopped on the other side of the door, replaced by shuffling
footsteps.

With his hands behind his back, in the middle of the rug, Ethan stood
upright, waiting.  The mirror opposite reflected a big square of the
room, but the silver tongue in the rafters was all that he saw.  Should
he have left it where he found it?  Was that the test?  Each ten-second
chance that slipped by was a wasted opportunity either to return the
hammer to the window sill or hide it properly.  An eternity of
indecision passed, in which he fought to avoid the worst of all
possible outcomes, that of being caught red-handed.  The gaps stretched
like so many sprung traps.  He stood firm.  Eventually the door swung
open, ending debate.

The balaclava walked into the room, followed by Abu.  While the leader
gestured for Ethan to take a seat at the desk, and did so himself, Abu
ambled to the window casement and sat down.  Just out of Ethan's view,
but surely he was looking for it.  A confession welled; Ethan felt his
hand ready to point.

"Very shameful, your Mr.  George," the balaclava said.

"Yes."

"And he is regretting so now, of course."

Ethan nodded.  Behind him, Abu shifted and sighed.

"And you a strong man are throwing everybody around which is also
bad."

"I '

"Please do not interrupt.  I am not a stupid man.  None of us wish to
cause this hurt, but we are in charge and if it is necessary must use
all means.  Everyone is realizing this now, I hope?"

Again Ethan nodded.  Which way was the man going?  His tone was
unreadable, equal parts threat and reassurance.

"You people understand an eye for the eye, yes?  If you are striking
me, I must strike you back."

"I didn't mean to hit you.  I swear.  I was trying to help."

"Yes yes yes, but that is not the point now, is it?"

"I don't understand."

"You do.  If I ask you why I wear this' a finger pulled the neck of the
ski mask away from the man's Adam's apple and let it snap back "I am
betting you do understand."

"Of course.  It's a precaution."

"A caution.  Yes."  The balaclava smiled.  "In my position I must be a
careful man."  He drew a palm the length of his face, like a mimic. "No
looking."

"No."

"No.  But, my friend, you saw."

"No!"  The thing crystallized.

Quietly, the pink mouth said, "Yes."

"I didn't look.  I stopped the others from seeing."

The balaclava shook.

A hopelessness descended.  Ethan tried to sit up straight beneath its
weight, imagined his spine a brave stake driven into the seat, but felt
himself wavering.  His voice sounded childlike.  "I didn't see
anything, I promise."

A pause.  Abu shifted again with impatience in the space behind him.

"You are not telling the truth."

Ethan looked at his cupped hands, in which the imprint of his only lie
the cold hammer head burned.  If he came clean about that, would they
see then that he was telling the whole truth?

"But I can make things plain beyond a doubt," the leader continued.  He
ran a thumb around the neck of his collarless shirt, twisting his head
sideways.  The thumb scooped upwards and began to drag the back of the
mask with it.  Ethan saw a woollen edge snag on the bottom of a
skin-tone plaster and screwed his eyes tight shut.  He bent his head
further forwards, clasped his hands beneath the table, pious.  A longer
pause.

"Look at me."

"I can't."

"Yes, you can.  Look at me."

"I must not."

Out of nowhere Abu planted an open hand on the top of Ethan's skull and
gripped it like a basketball.  Five points of pressure, edging towards
pain, before which Ethan's straining neck disobeyed and allowed his
face to be tilted upwards.

"Look."

No words.  Eyelids fused shut.  Patterns of purplish brightness,
encompassing every fearful possibility, swimming pink inside his head
and then reverberating to the laughter, which wasn't a fabrication, but
real, coming at him across the desk.  Ethan felt numb with fear, which
welled in his chest and threatened to break.  Nails dug into his scalp,
pressing a thought home.  He deserved this punishment.  It was the
price of his betrayal, just retribution for the lies he'd told Kate.

The fingers relaxed their hold and became a palm, cuffing the back of
Ethan's head, gentle as a parent.  Turning his face down to his lap,
Ethan allowed his eyes to open, but kept his focus fixed on the seam of
his flies.  The leader was moving across the table, standing up, still
laughing.  Next the figure was squatting beside the desk and from the
corner of his eye Ethan registered the olive mask, back in place.  He
turned.  In the mouth hole, a smile.

"OK.  I am a reasonable man," the leader said.  One eye winked.  "I
believe your sorrow.  You make your point and earn another chance."

Forty-One.

"What's with the Buddha routine?"

To help steady herself, Kate's new tactic was to fly circuits in her
head.  Sitting cross-legged, in line with the runway boards, she would
shut her eyes and think herself through the whole sequence, from
pre-take-off checks to touchdown.  Each time she flew, the exercise
became more real, alive with newly remembered details.  Now she
imagined herself releasing her harness after parking up, felt the
frayed edge of strap where it passed through the buckle, heard the
catch clatter against the door frame as she cast it aside.

"Seriously, it's disturbing."  Clay's hand gripped her arm.  She looked
up.  "I can take incoherent muttering from George, but not this
meditation shit from you.  What's going on?"

"I'm flying."

"Sure you are."  Clay smiled nervously.

"No, I am.  I'm remembering how to fly."

He took a deep breath, squeezed her arm again.  "Come on, Kate, don't
you fry on me."

She tried to smile back, touched by his concern.  "It's just an
exercise.  I'm only practising."

"We're better off practising staying sane.  Coming undone doesn't look
like much of challenge.  It seems anyone can do that."

"Exactly.  That's why I'm flying.  I'm practising, to keep from going
mad.  It's just circuits, round and round the airfield.  A drill.
Take-off to landing.  The more I can remember, the longer it takes. And
the repetition is helpful, it stops the thinking about... anything
else."

"You're a pilot?"

"Yes.  I learnt to fly.  When we get out of here, I'm going to train
again."

"For real?"

"I have a licence.  But I have to keep it current.  I have to fly so
many hours to keep from having to start again.  Which is another reason
for practising."

He breathed out, relieved.  "I didn't think of you as having that sort
of money, in the real world."

"I don't."

"Come on.  Only rich kids get to fly planes.  Kids with loaded dads."

Kate shrugged.  "Mum wouldn't take his maintenance money, so he put it
aside for me and Rachel.  She won't touch it either."

"Your sister?"

"Right.  We fight.  When I think of her, pretty much all I remember is
pointless fighting."

"Why?"

Kate paused, then muttered, "No good reasons at all."

"Now, maybe, but there must have been at the time."

"Sure there were.  But they seem irrelevant from here.  For a start we
both hate what our father did to Mum, but why'd I let Rachel's decision
not to see him get between the two of ms so badly?  It's daft.  He hurt
us enough; why use him as an excuse to hurt ourselves?  How pointless
is that?"

Clay shook his head.  Kate's laughter was flat.  "Anyway, he persuaded
me to spend my share on something I really wanted."

"But why flying?  What's wrong with a horse?  All the rich girls' I
knew '

"I never wanted a horse.  My father encouraged the flying.  At first I
thought I wanted to skydive, like he does, to help find out what he's
about.  But he convinced me otherwise.  He said I could do better than
fall out of a plane, thought I'd get more out of learning to pilot
one."

"Right."

"And I'm sitting here now remembering."

He nodded with her.

"Except that at times it feels almost real."

Clay's eyes were bright in his face now.  He laughed under his breath.
"Whole thing feels fake to me.  I keep having this sensation that it's
all made up.  Like we're on some Survivor-type show, with the public
watching.  There's probably a greasy host cruising the wings, one eye
on the ratings, getting ready to organize a vote.  Which one of us the
guards is going to bump off next."

Kate smiled with him.  He went on.  "I have to fight to remember it's
real.  That's what it is with the songs.  If I can remember how the
song goes, that's proof of some sort of reality.  It's protection from
being just..  . here.  Here doesn't make sense on its own; it's getting
less and less real."  He lowered his voice.  "Take Diane."

"What about her?"

"The more I look at her the less like Diane she seems to be.  The girl
I fell for had this flirty sense of humour, but it's gone.  Or it's
twisted into something unrecognizable.  There's just venom in place of
her attitude; she's turning vampish; she's going mean."

Kate whispered, "No," but wished she hadn't since the protestation
sounded weak.

"It's true.  And the change is making it hard to remember exactly how
she used to be.  I look at her, I see her now, but the Diane I knew
won't come back to me.  The songs are different, though.  They come
back word for word.  The same now as they were before; they form a sort
of bridge, bringing me back home.  Just for a little while, but still,
it means I'm not stuck here, and that's crucial because I'm scared that
being stuck here means going crazy.  It's a constant fight against
that."

He began to laugh.  While Kate watched, the laughter turned silent and
took him over.  It bent him forward, made him clutch at his sides,
shook his shoulders noiselessly.

"What's so funny?"

"I mean, what isn't?"  He fought for breath.  "The whole thing is
hilarious.  I just refuse to take it seriously.  The floorboards are
ridiculous, the bars are a scream, the guards are fucking clowns.  I
hate myself for laughing, but I can't help it, it's a joke a fucking
minute."

His shoulders kept shaking.  Kate's smile back was equally desperate.

"Hate them for it, not yourself."

"Them why?  I can't.  I've tried, but it's too much effort.  I truly
can't be bothered with hating them.  Beyond "Kashmir" we don't even
know why they're doing this to us.  You can bet, somewhere down the
line, it's my fault.  Or, more likely," he paused 'yours."  Kate
shifted on the planks, unable to speak.  Clay went on.  "America or
Britain.  It always is.  You guys carved up India, we've failed to
solve its problems.  Or we're probably exploiting them.  That makes it
our fault, almost certainly.  There'll be people out there saying as
much already.  I'd be reading their columns back home, agreeing.  I'm
American.  So it's my fault.  I asked for it, me, me!  Which in turn
makes it that much easier to hate myself for what's happening."  He
spoke in staccato bursts.  Kate still didn't know how to respond, so
stayed silent.  His eyes refocused on her.  He gathered himself
apologetically.  "Don't mind me.  Like I say, it's a constant fight..."
he trailed off.

Kate looked around the room, at George whispering his prayers, at
Ethan, feet to the skirting board, doing sit-ups, at Diane braiding
Jan's hair.  Her eyes returned to Clay.  "Madness is relative."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence."  His voice was light-hearted, his
own again.  "That must count for something.  I'll forget it comes from
a hostage who thinks she has wings."

Forty-Two.

Kate's notebook was soft as cloth now, concave in the hollow of her
waistband.  Her tiny handwriting had advanced through the pages at the
front and back, crinkled borders encroaching upon the virgin territory
in the middle.  What would happen when the invasion was complete?
They'd be free by then.  There could be nothing beyond the last page.
Her hand move tenderly down the front of her grey sweatshirt.

"Another round?"  Clay asked the room at large.

Ethan's eyes stayed shut.  Diane rolled onto her side and sat up.  She
yawned, while poking one long fingernail into the mat of her hair.  Jan
propped himself up against the buttress, blinking.

"Yes.  I have one," he said, 'if you want it."

"Definitely."  Clay smiled.  "Anything to keep the excitement at
bay."

Kate stood and stamped her feet, shook the stiffness from her arms and
settled back down.  Since the guards were still refusing to give them
anything to read, Clay had begun a daily round of storytelling to help
speed up the glacially slow days.  "Create enough hot air and we may
forget the cold a while."

Jan cleared his throat.

"I am sorry, but this is about my father again.  You see, we own a
small yacht.  She is moored in Ijmuiden.  When I was thirteen years old
my father and I were sailing her off the coast near Holland.  The sea
was quite swollen, and the wind was "big too.  My father was thrown
over the rail by a heavy wave.  We have a "man overboard" drill, which
my father has taught me.  I should throw a life belt float at him in
the sea immediately and let the boat carry on sailing straight for
about fifty metres.  Then I am supposed to throw one more life belt
into the sea.  This gives two points in the water, which provide a line
to aim at when I am able to turn the boat around and come back.  My
father should be at the end of the line.  Of course the technique is
not perfect, but it is supposed to give a bigger chance of finding the
man at sea."

Describing this manoeuvre, Jan's pale hands first undulated with the
waves and then became two buoys fixed in the floor.

"But I panicked.  My first thinking was that my dad was hurt.  I was
very close I nearly jumped in after him to help.  Then I was unable to
untie the life belt  The knots were similar to metal.  Instead I undid
things, pieces of rope, and threw that in.  It sank like heavy chains.
All this time the yacht was going forwards in leaps, with nobody at the
helm to keep it straight.  She began to swing around into the wind.  I
could not see my father in the sea for minutes and minutes until I saw
his white head way away, looking like foam in the top of a wave.  I was
yelling and throwing in life jackets and plastic containers and I even
untied the fender floats.  Finally I was so frightened I just released
the anchor, in full, in full."

The room was dim in the late afternoon.  Leaning back, Kate saw a bank
of asphalt cloud through the barred window.

Diane, pacing now, crossed the gloom.  Jan coughed painfully.  His eyes
flicked left and right as he gathered himself to go on.

"After that the boat was not organized, turning and pulling at the sea
and I became lost.  I was disorientated.  I did not know whether my
father was to the land side or further out to sea.  I did not know if
the anchor cable was long enough or if we were dragging or what.  I
loosed off the big sail, but this just helped it to crack backwards and
forwards over the deck, with a noise going off like bombs."

He paused, wiping his face with an open palm.  "I thought by then that
maybe my father was drowned."  Kate watched him shiver, looking to Clay
for the encouragement to go on.

"I was sick in the cabin and could not think and took off my jacket,
thinking again I should jump overboard to look.  But instead I saw a
little sense finally and took down the sails properly.  And just as I
was finishing doing this my father appeared at the stern end of our
boat and with much effort pulled himself up the ladder onto deck."

Reliving this, Jan began to tremble.  Opposite Kate, Ethan blew out
through his mouth.  The noise wasn't sympathetic.

"He was too tired to speak at first, he was exhausted, just held me
until neither of us cried any more.  And then he started shouting and
shouting about the drill, the man-overboard drill.  He had jumped into
the sea on purpose, taking hold of a fixed rope with him' Jan held the
imaginary rope end up high 'but I let it loose.  I cast him adrift!"

Ethan laughed.  Jan joined in silently.

"Jesus.  That's one way to give a lesson," said Kate.

Another pause.  Diane knelt next to Jan and stroked his upper arm as if
it were a cat.

"Yes.  My father and I still sail the boat every summer.  We will have
the chance to do so again, yes?"  He blinked again at Clay, who smiled
weakly.

"Of course.  What about you?"  Clay now caught Diane's eye.  He went on
imploringly.  "Do you have a tale for us today?"

"No."  The stroking stopped.  Her lips formed a pout as she sat back
against the wall.

"Nothing?"

Diane shrugged her shoulders.  As fast as the poor bloke tried to reel
her in, she seemed to slip away.  That he still bothered to try was
testimony to something.  She looked across at Ethan, who was staring
fixedly at a patch of wall.

"OK then.  I do," Kate found herself saying.  "You'll remember this,
Ethan.  That time you took me gambling."

Ethan's smile of recognition was a start.  Kate looked to the rest of
the room for their attention.

"Ethan wanted to go high-rolling.  I thought you had to look the part
for a casino, so I borrowed a proper dress and a pair of my sister's
flashy shoes.  Only I'd got the wrong end of the stick.  Ethan met me
in his jeans, and we wound up at Walthamstow dog track."

"Dog track?"  repeated Jan.

"Greyhounds.  Chasing a mechanical rabbit.  Racing."  As she explained,
Kate heard herself from afar.  The self-deprecating point in the
anecdote up ahead wavered even as she pressed on.

"So I tottered around in the dirt after him, trying to fit in.  But I
was determined not to seem a complete fool.  I studied the little book
of statistics they give you and made strategic bets according to the
length of the race and which dogs were supposed to be in form.  And I
just about broke even, which was good enough."

Clay agreed in silence.  Diane had her eyes shut, could even have been
asleep.  Kate felt a peculiar rising panic.

"Meanwhile Ethan was just putting money on at random.  Two quid on any
dog that took a leak before the race began; a fiver if it shat.  He'd
won about twenty quid by the time of the last race, and put it all on
the red dog."

"Black," said Ethan.

"Whichever.  Just picked a dog at random.  And of course it came in
first and that trebled his total winnings to more than fifty pounds."

Ethan was still smiling, but fixedly.  Kate found herself lost,
directing the remainder of the story at him, trying to get through.

"You were very generous and spent about half the winnings on lager in
plastic glasses.  I was legless by the time we stopped drinking, and
we'd missed the last tube south.  You remember what you did next?"

A brittle nod.

"We were by some taxi rank, waiting for a cab to the nearest bed for
the night.  You remember, I said we could stay at my sister's.  You bet
me the rest of the winnings that you could walk the length of the
pavement on your hands.  I was barely able to stand up straight so that
seemed a safe gamble.  The colour of your face when you finished!  But,
of course, you did it, you won."

Kate could no longer hold Ethan's gaze.  She tried to smile, but the
result felt wooden.  She pressed on.  "But, like a gentleman, you
refused the money."

"Not quite.  I invited you to sleep at mine instead."  His voice was
mechanical, his attempt at a joke humiliating.  "Twenty quid for a
whole night.  I thought that pretty cheap, considering."

This wasn't how it happened.  They'd gone to his after Rachel refused
Kate's request for somewhere to crash.  She'd told the story against
herself: the inappropriate dress, failure with the form sheet,
underestimation of Ethan's talent.  More than that, she'd told it to
his credit.  How could the reminiscence not warm him?  She stared at
the palms of her upturned hands.

For a while nobody spoke.  In the distance a mule brayed.  George
rolled over in his corner, drawing Kate's attention away finally.  The
bandage, which he still wore, was now as grey as the floorboards.  He
was merging into them, his prayers fading to a whisper.  The black
lines between the planks were another set of bars.  Ever since they'd
moved to the Marriott she'd clung to the possibility of a way out
beneath the wooden floor, allowing herself to hope in spite of Ethan,
who remained dismissive of Clay's nightly, finger-shredding battle with
the nail heads.  A few days ago Clay had finally managed to work one of
the boards loose.  Together they had looked beneath it while Ethan
stood reluctant guard.

Clay's voice started up again.  Kate tuned in: '..  . then Ethan?  You
have another MGM production?"

He didn't answer immediately.  She shuddered, thinking of her
anticipation as the plank had groaned upwards.  For nothing:
honeycombed joists, a mere four-inch gap separating the boards from
cement foundations.  Ethan did not gloat.  Yet it took Clay's laughter
to stem her tears.  No bigger than a hand span, full of dust.

Forty-Three.

A lake spread out beneath their upturned umbrellas, despite the
ornamental stand.  They waited.  Rachel watched water seep across the
grid of cheque red tiles.  Beside her, on the bullet-hard leather
Chesterfield, her mother sat stoically, hands folded into a plaid lap.
Striped wallpaper rose up on all sides to a distant ceiling, bordered
by cornicing at least two feet deep.  A chandelier hung high above
their heads, like a portcullis ready to drop.  For all its gilt and
grandeur, the room felt wrong.  The window was cut in half by one of
the walls.  They were in a segment, annexed, partitioned off.

Petition, partition.  The words rolled idiotically inside Rachel's
head.  She glanced at her mother, who seemed small and fragile in this
new context.  Rachel took and patted a mottled hand, enveloped it in
hers.  The older women had been shrinking all morning as the
surroundings became less and less familiar.  On the underground Rachel
had taken over, organizing the tickets, shepherding her mum and
Michelle through the crowd, as if in charge of the expedition, rather
than the reluctant third party.  In the tube carriage the strip light
stamped cruel bags beneath Michelle's eyes, and cut through her
mother's foundation to the truth of her papery face, dry as a moth's
wing.

An aide arrived noiselessly on the rug in front of them, offering
coffee.

"Oh, thank you.  Thank you."  Rachel's mum squeaked forward on her
seat.  Was she about to help pour?

Rachel lit a cigarette and asked, "How long are we going to have to
wait?"

"I'm afraid I don't know exactly.  Somebody will be down shortly, I'm
sure.  But can I help you to this, or maybe a glass of water, in the
meantime?"

"Parliamentary Under-Secretary Westerby," Michelle said loudly.  "We
expected to wait.  He's a busy man, after all!"  She laughed like a
schoolgirl and hid behind her hand.  Which was worse?  Her mother's
appalling meekness or Michelle's embarrassment?

The aide nodded kindly.  "I'm sure somebody will be with you before
long," he reiterated.  "The situation is in hand.  In the meantime
..."

Unbeknown to Rachel, Michelle had organized for a photographer to meet
them in King Charles Street to document the han dover  By the time they
arrived he'd become an inevitable knot of journalists, bedraggled in
the rain.  Mercifully, the ensemble was turned away when the three
women were greeted by another aide at the security desk.  Yet
Michelle's triumphant, "He wants to meet us alone," did not necessarily
follow.  They'd been warned that the parliamentary under-secretary
would not be able to meet them in person: Michelle's optimism in the
face of this advice was unhinged.

Now her mum was holding a cup up to the light, complimenting the fine
china as if this were an antiques' fair.  Rachel flicked ash into her
saucer in retaliation.  Across the rug Michelle touched the little
crucifix she wore, for reassurance.

Then she lifted her new, vinyl briefcase to her lap, and began to
fiddle with the combination locks.  All those names held fast inside.
Rachel saw the shape of this endeavour plainly: the countless
unconnected people whom these two women had, by will alone, woven
together, stitching signatures across page after page, in a hopeless
attempt to do something.

Her father had used the same phrase when last he phoned.  Let me do
something.  Rachel told him about the petition.  If he wanted to join
in with its pointlessness, so be it.  "No," he had made himself clear,
"I mean let me do something to help you."  Rachel breathed, "It's a bit
late for that," but inaudibly.  When he said he hadn't heard her, she
read out Michelle's number and hung up.

Both locks pinged open simultaneously now and Michelle, eyebrows
furrowed, peeped inside the case.  Her stone washed knees bounced in
anticipation.  She held the lid ajar for a second, as if fearing the
petition would escape, given the chance, and then she shut the case
again, spinning the locks emphatically.  What must it be like for Kate,
Ethan and the rest, incarcerated?  Rachel found she had to close her
eyes to remember the detail of her sister's face; the impossibility of
understanding what Kate and Ethan were enduring blotted the image out
entirely.  She couldn't even pretend to know how Michelle felt,
clutching her plastic briefcase to her anorak in the chair opposite, or
what her mother was thinking as she smoothed the creases from her
skirt.  The separateness was insulting, underlined by the incongruity
of the three of them sitting in such an imposing room, waiting for a
miracle.

Now Michelle was bouncing to her feet and her mother had risen too.  A
small man with gelled hair and a pink tie strode into their midst.  The
sheen of his suit rippled as he turned beneath the chandelier.

"So sorry to keep you waiting."

Michelle's mouth opened and closed.  The man rattled out his name and
title, but all Rachel heard, as she stubbed out her cigarette, was the
word "Unit'.  Beside her, her mother took a little step forward.  To
prevent the disaster of a curtsy, Rachel found herself moving towards
the man, with her hand outstretched.  She became immediately conscious
of her own business suit, shaking hands with this young man in his.

"As was made clear, the parliamentary under-secretary is unable to
receive you in person today, but I'm delighted to accept your petition
on his behalf, and of course to answer any questions you might wish to
put to us."  The salesman's smile he flashed was full of
self-confidence, said that a reception with him was one up on anything
they might have been expecting.

Rachel realized he was looking to her to hand the document over, and
was surprised to find herself turning to Michelle and gesturing at the
briefcase, as if summoning secretarial assistance.

"You realize, of course, that we're doing everything we can, in close
cooperation with the Indian, Kashmiri and Pakistani authorities, to
negotiate an expedited end to your relatives' ordeal," the man was
saying.  "Everything we can."

Michelle was staring at her thumbs, rubbing the combination dials
Rachel fought back a wave of impatience.  Her mother's voice said, "Of
course."

"Whilst at the same time remaining mindful of the ... wider context of
the Kashmir .. . situation.  There are obvious sensitivities ... as you
know... terrific difficulties to over come ... the balance .. . fragile
... delicate."  Rachel found herself unable to latch on to the precise
sense of what the man was saying, heard only occasional up-jutting
words as he slowed to negotiate them, and tumbling phrases as the flow
of what he was saying sped up again.  "But you must rest assured that
despite this .. . tricky context..  . we're exploring every avenue open
to us ... using our best efforts to resolve the crisis."

It being impossible to look at the man while he made this speech,
Rachel remained fixated upon Michelle's stuttering fingers, which
sprung the case open finally, emptying its contents onto the rug.  The
document looked unfamiliar: Michelle had stapled its pages together and
fixed them inside a Manila wallet, on which she'd stencilled the
letters PETITION in red felt-tip.  Rachel saw this without taking it in
as she stooped to pick the thing up, because beneath the lettering
Michelle had also glued three photographs: George with a pint of beer,
Kate graduating, Ethan sitting on the bonnet of a car.  The front cover
of a family album.  Even here, in this tiny image, Ethan's smile looked
seductively bombproof, beyond recrimination.  She turned with the
binder in her hand to see that the little man was making himself
comfortable in the throne-sized armchair on the opposite side of the
coffee table.  The words ordeal, tricky context, rest assured, every
avenue, crisis, rang in her ears.  She stumbled backwards and sat down
heavily on the Chesterfield, waving the petition at arms' length
nevertheless.

"What are you on about?"

Rachel's mum whispered, "Rachel!"  in her ear, but her complaint was
already spilling out.

"Do you think we're fools?  Nobody's lifted a finger in two months. Not
since the kidnappers made contact again after that botched army raid.
Doing all we can!  They executed the Israeli and escaped with the
others.  My sister!  Ethan!  And ever since then you've done nothing.
Nothing at all!"

The aide didn't blink.  He smiled calmly, allowing an ameliorating
silence to descend.  Michelle laughed nervously as she took the
petition from Rachel and crabbed sideways to hand it over.

"That's George.  Ethan and Kate are the young pair there.  We're beside
ourselves," she explained.

Beside ourselves.  Although slumped on the couch, Rachel could not feel
the seat beneath the back of her legs.  The room's staginess seemed
accentuated; the enormous velvet curtains and oversized furniture
reduced the four of them to actors in an amateur scene.  She felt
superimposed.  Her suit, unused for months, no longer fitted properly;
the trousers sat too low on her hips.  Never mind.  She had no job to
return to now, anyway.  And no comeback either though she'd sputtered
'unfair dismissal' down the telephone, her boss had replied calmly,
beginning at "If you want a passable reference' and finishing on 'bad
habits'.  She broke her phone, slamming it down on the kitchen work
surface, but her fury petered out quickly in the aftermath of his call.
Such a pathetic hardship, set against Kate and Ethan's plight,
warranted no attention.  Like the couch supporting her now, she simply
couldn't feel it.  If she let her hands drop down beside her, they
might equally stop at the plush armrest or continue through the sofa
entirely.  The man's non-response to her outburst further confirmed her
ineffectuality.  He had begun talking again, reiterating his
'condolences' to Michelle, his benign smile aimed at each of them in
turn.

"I'll make sure that the petition is shown to the Foreign

Secretary himself," he said.  "This sort of statement has its
effects."

"We're trying everything to keep the pressure on through the press. You
know, making sure they're in the public eye, but it's not easy."
Michelle wrung her hands.

"Everyone seems to have lost interest," Mum was agreeing.

"The newspapers aren't bothered any more."

"No.  Unless there are new angles, they don't see a story worth
reporting."  The young man glanced sympathetically at Rachel.  He
couldn't have been more than thirty and yet his manner suggested that
he, along with any number of his own family, had been held hostage at
one time or another.  Now he was continuing, "I can assure you that we
aren't as fickle.  Things may look to have quietened, but beneath the
surface there's always a welter of activity.  And this' he rapped the
petition with the back of his hand 'is an effective means of doing your
bit."

Her mother nodded enthusiastically at this platitude and took hold of
one of Rachel's hands, but although she watched fingers close round her
own and squeeze, the appropriate sensation seemed to take for ever to
travel up her arm.  She ached for a drink.  How on earth would she ever
begin to feel what they were going through?  It would weld the pair of
them together, for good.  Repulsed by her own anger, Rachel slumped
forwards.  Now the man had bounced to his feet.  His polished toe caps
were advancing across the rug.  A crisp handkerchief snapped wide in
surrender and pressed itself into her open palm.

Forty-Four.

"What about you then, Ethan?"  Clay was saying.  "You have another MGM
production?"

"Yeah, another matinee!"  Diane lit up.

Ethan didn't tell stories about himself, yet he knew he had little
choice but to contribute to the entertainment.  His tactic, therefore,
was to describe plots.  Films, television shows, novels whatever came
to him.  Westerns and war movies mostly.  How he'd built up such a
store of hardwired precis was a mystery.  He'd watched enough afternoon
television in the real world, but hadn't the point then been the not
paying attention?  He did not volunteer, but as now, when pushed, the
next victory of right over wrong was always ready to play.

Diane had jittered into the space in front of him and sat down in one
movement, fluent as a ballerina.

"OK."  Ethan sighed.  The trick was to concede defeat without giving an
inch.  "Rio Bravo, then.  One of Howard Hawks's best, a real epic' He
paused, gathering himself, then went on.  "John Wayne's this sheriff,
right, called John T. Chance.  Pretty early on in the film he's
involved in a three-way brawl with his drunken deputy, Dean Martin, and
a local rancher."

Diane now edged closer to Ethan, sat staring at him, hugging her knees,
a child in front of the TV.  Only Clay's songs, which he whistled or
sang to himself in the evenings, had the same enrapturing effect. Ethan
looked over her head at the others, avoiding eye contact.

"The fight gets out of hand and the rancher ends up gunning down a
bystander.  The Iron Duke pulls himself together, tracks down the
murderer and slings him into the local jail."

Ethan continued looking around the room, but without really seeing it.
The walls held frames from the film.  Town-scapes and interiors, a
water trough and saloon doors.  No big Western vistas at all.  He heard
himself talk for a while about the low lighting and the cramped camera
angles and then the room was coming back into focus, with the real
walls looming darker than before.

"But the rancher has a big-shot brother, who heads up this outlaw clan.
They're set to ride into town and storm the jail.  Old John Wayne needs
to hold on to the prisoner until the state magistrate arrives to take
him away, but he's way outnumbered and the help on offer from his
comrades is pretty paltry."

He paused again here.  It wasn't that he didn't know what came next,
just that the sound of the word 'paltry', left hanging there, felt
right.

"Yeah, there's just Deputy Martin, who's a perpetual drunk, an old
hanger-on with a gammy leg, called Stumpy (ha ha), a child gunslinger
whose name I forget, and a female gambler called Feathers, who doubles
up as the love interest, as you'd guess."

"What is a girl named Feathers like?"  asked Jan.

Ethan leaned back against the wall and took his time describing the way
the woman and the rest of the characters looked and how the grouchy old
jailer stole each of his scenes.  He talked up Dean Martin's drunken
self-loathing and hinted,

as the film did, at Feathers's call-girl past.  It felt good to hold
the story at arm's length, assured as a critic, and as detached.

"To begin with the Iron Duke tries to make do alone.  His pride gets in
the way of accepting help from a bunch of losers.  But the losers shape
up eventually and there's this famous exchange at the heart of the
film: the bad rancher finds out who's helping John Wayne and asks, "Is
that all you got?"  and Wayne dead pans back, "That's WHAT I got."

Ethan paused again, searched each puzzled face in turn.  Exasperated,
he spelt it out.  "He's resourceful.  He'll make do with what's
available."

Jan chewed his lower lip, still perplexed.  "So what happens then?  Do
they manage to keep hold of the prisoner?"

"Jan, this is John Wayne we're talking about here."

"Right.  These people help him and he succeeds.  Despite his un hopeful
friends."

"Hopeless friends," Ethan corrected him.  "Yes," he continued, but
distracted now, the words arriving more tentatively, the point of the
story seeming to have snaked away from him.  He felt a flicker of
confusion play in his face and looked down to hide it.  On his lap his
broad fingers knitted themselves into a miniature ribcage, and he found
himself inspecting each upturned nail in turn.  Wrap the thing up.
"John Wayne saves the day," he said.  "The end."

Diane began to applaud.  Looking up, Ethan saw Clay rolling his eyes at
Kate over the top of Diane's head.  Kate smiled back conspiratorially,
then dropped her gaze, but too late: the applause had stopped.  Ethan
glanced at Diane to see her face aghast in a caught you stare. Outside,
the distant pock-pocking of gunfire came and went, accentuating the
silence.

"Let me tell you about my sister," Clay said eventually.

Jan said quietly, "I didn't know you had one."

"Yeah, Clara."  Clay carried on, talking to fill the gap.  "She's a
year older than me, but until recently I never really knew her.  She
was always so secretive and removed when we were growing up, the sort
of kid who kept her bedroom door padlocked and spoke pig Latin with her
best friend."  He set down these words slowly, laying bricks in a wall.
"She was really bright too.  Won the interstate math championship at
sixteen, but didn't bother to tell us.  We found out about it in the
local paper."

"You never told me about the paper."  Diane still looked offended.

"Well, it's true," Clay said equably.  Turning back to the others, he
continued.  "She went away to college on the east coast and wound up
working in New York, doing something nebulous called "information
management", which I could never quite figure out.  She didn't offer
any detail.  For years I hardly saw her.  She'd turn up at family
get-tog ethers from time to time and the two of us would try to talk,
but to tell the truth I never really knew where to begin.  Our shared
experience ended with the home-made pickle on the table.  Every time we
met up was like starting from scratch.  I'd forget the name of her
current boyfriend or worse, mention an ex.  She couldn't remember which
school I taught at."

"Teach at," said Diane.

A pause.  "Right.  The school I teach at.  We were strangers, brother
and sister in name alone, talking to one another through inch-thick
glass."

Here he paused again, pushed his fringe back from his face.  His chin
looked stronger now his face had thinned.

"A couple of years ago, at Thanksgiving, I offered her a ride to San
Francisco airport.  We stopped for gas.  She went to use the restroom.
While she was gone I noticed her bag had tipped across the back seat
and started gathering up the spilt stuff.  Microfiche and the papers,
"Confidential" stamped everywhere.  I was curious, but didn't have time
to find out more.  She arrived back at the car with me halfway through
the job and went totally ape.  I didn't ask why.  I drew my own
conclusions, imagined she must be working for the government.  But as
it turned out I was wrong.  She was an industrial spy."

"Sounds pretty glamorous."

"Dangerous too."  He nodded at Kate.  "The last case she worked on
involved a crooked lawyer.  She had to tail him and recover some stolen
documents.  The job went wrong.  First, she somehow fell for the
lawyer, then he beat her up.  Put her in a coma.  For two days she was
as much dead as alive."

"My God."

"She recovered all right in the end.  And at first she agreed with the
police that she'd help them press charges against the guy.  By then
he'd turned himself in."

"Of course."

Ethan saw that the story had become a conversation; Clay was explaining
what happened to Kate, rather than to the room at large.  Something in
the tilt of her head made it obvious that at that moment nobody else
existed.  He felt an odd sense of relief.

"Well, you'd think.  But she changed her mind.  We managed to persuade
her to come back to the family home out west, to convalesce, and by the
time she'd arrived she'd was adamant she wouldn't testify against the
lawyer.  Even though he'd confessed.  She insisted she was as much to
blame for him as the accident, said she'd provoked what happened."

Ethan held back from venturing that she probably knew, allowing Kate's
"No way," to fill the pause instead.

Kate thought for a minute, resolution hardening in her eyes, and went
on, "But it's strange, isn't it, the surprises that even those closest
to you can spring.  Like with my own sister.  I know her, as in I think
I know what she spends her time doing for the most part, but I can't
really understand what drives her.  I can guess, but I'll never be
certain, and she can't know for sure about me.  Whether or not we want
to keep secrets from one another, they happen.  It's not about privacy
or openness.  No matter how close two people think they are, there's
always a hidden part.  You see the whiteness of teeth in a smile, but
not the roots, buried in bone.  There's always an unknowable element,
making it impossible to predict how a person will react in any given
situation."

Ethan's face felt like a wooden mask.

"You're right," Clay said.  "Clara's refusal to press charges was just
the beginning.  She left her job in New York and decided to stay on in
San Francisco.  Joined some not-for-profit IT think tank, does
volunteer work at my school.  Just before we decided to make this trip
she'd leased an apartment in our block.  Isn't that right, Diane?"

Ethan turned with Clay for Diane's reaction.

"That is right.  A true story."

"Honey?"

"And what's more' Diane's words were clipped "I've finally remembered
one of my own to tell."  She yawned wide: pink tongue, blanched lips.
"How about this for a tale?  It's certificate X: "My First Kiss"."

Clay laughed, his eyes blinking double time.  "Ouch," he said, as Ethan
again inspected the tips of his fingers.  "OK, slay me."

"I was eleven years old, pretty inexperienced."

"Pretty and inexperienced," Clay corrected.  A lame compliment and
apparently defensive; it sounded as if, by cutting in, he was testing
the brakes.

"Whatever."  Diane pouted at everyone in turn, turning longest towards
Ethan.  Whichever way you looked in a room this size, imminent disaster
threatened.

She went on.  "Fourth of July.  Mom and Dad were having this barbecue,
with a ton of friends around.  Everybody with watermelons ear to ear,
like those enormous cartoon grins."  Her demonstration was a grimace.
"All the adults knocking back Buds, us kids sipping the dregs, all of
us in and out of the pool.  I was drying off in the garage when this
guy Bruce came in and asked me for a kiss."

She stopped here for a long while.  It seemed to Ethan that this
fragment might, disappointingly, have been all she was going to offer.
Clay let out a slow breath.  But the sigh reinflated Diane.

"Yeah, he came swaying around the ping-pong table with this yellow
towel around his waist and let it drop.  The tops of his legs, above
his shorts' line, were thin as poles and an odd sort of putty colour.
Ew."  Another grimace.  '"What do I have to do to get a kiss out of
you, kiddo?"  he asked, bold as brass.  I remember looking up at him
'

"Up?"  said Ethan, driving in the nail.

"Yeah, this guy was forty at '

"Sure, sure," Clay cut in.  "Some things are best... why don't we leave
this for now?"

"Because we're all friends here," beamed Diane, continuing.  "I just
stand there staring.  I'd never seen one before, and this had wait for
it grey hairs!"  She giggled into the back of her hand with mock
coyness.

"We won't bite," he said.  "And neither should you!"  He took a step
towards me, staggered really, flapping in my face, and steadied himself
on the lawnmower.  I didn't know what to say.  Bruce got my dad a good
deal on the sprinkler system and his wife coached tennis and he had a
hand on my arm pulling me towards it, so I couldn't go anywhere
anyway."

"Please, Diane."  Even in the gloom Clay's face was white, his voice
papery.

"Sure," Diane went on, smiling cheerfully, "I knew what he was asking
was wrong, but '

"Please."

The smile broke into more laughter, but her words dried up.  Ethan ran
his tongue round the inside of his teeth and allowed himself to survey
Diane's aftermath.  Clay had his head in his hands.  Kate and Jan were
staring uncomfortably at different patches of wall.  George rolled over
again and settled.  A snowdrift of silence blotted out the room.

Forty-Five

Kate brushed the hair from Jan's face, which lay upturned in her lap. A
sliver of each eyeball, yellow as old fingernail, flickered
occasionally beneath half-shut lids.  His forehead was waxy to touch.
Encased in blankets, huddled with her beside the radiator, he clutched
at his sides and shivered and moaned, struggling against himself.  As
he'd weakened, and in flat contrast to George, Jan had become more
dependent on the others.  He seemed to have grown younger.  Where
beforehand he had been superstitious of talk about their release, he
now asked Clay to describe how it would happen and hung on to the
detail of his imaginings like a child.  As Kate looked down at him now,
a snatch of undecipherable speech escaped from his lips.

In the last fortnight the weather had worsened.  Gusts of powdery snow
blew through the window gap from time to time; ice formed on the black
bars.  Sounds filtering in from outside were muffled and flat.  The
gunfire no longer echoed.  They asked for more blankets, which were
refused.  Instead the single iron radiator in the games corner at the
rear of the room gurgled itself alive one morning.  As unlikely as any
other of Diane's comments at first, her announcement that they'd
switched the heating on turned out to be true: the blackened pipes
gradually, miraculously, warmed.  For an hour or so, while the radiator
bubbled along at blood temperature, they'd sat in a row with their
backs pressed to the iron, trying to convince one another that the heat
was still rising.  And later, when the metal was definitely cooling
again, nobody would admit as much.  Clay called Khalid to the door. The
guard proudly explained that the concession would be repeated for an
hour each morning throughout cold, which made Diane weep.  So feeble a
privilege served purely to underline their discomfort.  Ethan, Kate
noticed, let the others warm themselves, preferring to keep up his
routine of exercise during the morning instead, an act of generosity
that impressed and annoyed her at the same time.

Now, while Kate comforted Jan, curled with him against the dying pipes,
Ethan pushed out squat thrusts at the other end of the room.  Clay
still made his point of joining in every now and then, though Kate
suspected this was more for Ethan's benefit than his own.  Clay gasped
in time, jerking awkwardly on the boards, while Ethan moved fluently
beside him.  The muscles in his shoulders showed through his T-shirt as
his knees drove implacably forwards; by contrast Clay looked bony,
uncoordinated and ill-knit.  She felt a confusing pang of tenderness
watching him.  Ethan's set came to an end.  He stood up.  Clay flopped
onto his stomach mid thrust and lay spreadeagled for a moment, playing
dead.

"How is he today?"

"I haven't a clue.  Worse, I think.  We have to make them fetch him a
doctor.  He needs medicine."

Clay sat up stiffly, nodding agreement.  "And they should bring
somebody to have another look at George too."

"They've made it clear that's not going to happen."  Ethan began pacing
his circuit beneath the window, width by width.

"Abu would refuse us permission to piss if he could."  Clay followed
the footsteps back and forward, which made it look like he was slowly
shaking his head.  "Sadiq's not much better he's incapable of thinking,
just does what Abu says.  The only hope is that Khalid sees sense, or,
better still, that we get the chance to persuade the main man
himself."

"They've said a doctor is out of the question," Ethan repeated.

"It's not just a doctor and medicine for those two."  Diane sighed
crossly.  Her next sentence ramped in volume, so that the final words
made Jan shift in Kate's lap.  "We're all going to freeze to death
unless they sort out proper heating and give us something decent to
eat."

"They've already refused that too."  Ethan spoke calmly.

"Yeah," agreed Clay, 'but they're not beyond having their opinions
changed.  We can apply pressure."

"What have we got to bargain with?  You really are full of shit." Diane
spread her fingers across her lowered face, disconsolate.

"Maybe, but Clay tailed off.

Ethan spun on his heel, shrugged his shoulders, paced out the fifteen
feet to the opposite wall.

Kate shut her eyes to minimize the impending conflict.  Yet even closed
down some extra awareness, sharpened by captivity, told her what was
going on.  The steady beat of Ethan's footfalls, reassuring as a
metronome; the grinding of sandy dirt upon the boards as he turned
before each wall.  The pressure of Jan's skull against her upper thigh;
a ripple of discomfort that shivered through him, prompting her to
another futile stroke of his forehead.  That was the sound of Diane
drumming claw-like nails; Kate did not have to see pouting lips to
experience the weight of their sulky effect.  Even George's silence
became a physical presence inside her head, a negative shape,
persistent as hunger, around which all else configured.

In her diary Kate kept a tally of the days of their captivity, each
entry recorded with the precision she'd learnt in flying training as a
row of numbers: month, day, hour, minute.  There was something
irrefutable about such accuracy.  Today's entry, which she'd recorded
just an hour ago, was already safely stowed in the space beneath the
skirting board: 11191028.  It was if by nailing down the exact moment
she could somehow claim it for her own and stem the loss that each
further minute represented.  Yet the futility of trying made itself
clear with Ethan's continuing footsteps.  They'd been held in the
Marriott for longer now than their stretch at the farmstead, and no
numerical symmetry, key date or other imagined prediction would mean
the end of the ordeal.  Soon four more digits would be necessary, to
mark the changing year.  The darkness behind her shut eyes deepened as
Kate took this possibility to heart, truly, for the first time.  Time
would just go on and on, for longer than they could; the numbers would
never run out; they would extend beyond the end of her notebook.

Two thoughts joined in her head, coupling with the slow yet inexorable
momentum of rolling stock.  The beat of Ethan's walking marked out one
dimension, George's implacability confirmed another.  His attack might
have been futile, but the act of resisting wasn't.  Ethan pivoted and
carried on: endlessness.  George loomed: persistence.

"You're right."  Her eyes blinked open, fixed automatically upon
Clay.

"About what?"

"There is something that we can do.  Something we have to do in
fact."

"What's that?"

"We're nothing to these men and yet we're everything, right?  It's like
they keep saying: we're currency, we're a kind of investment.
Individually we're expendable, but they need to keep the majority of us
healthy if their plan is to work.  When one of us has tried to run away
or fought back they've done their worst, but they just see that as
stamping down hard to protect the rest of their investment.  What we've
got to do is show we can devalue that investment en masse.  That way we
threaten their whole plan."  The idea became clear as she spoke, yet
something made her shy away from explaining how, at the farmstead,
she'd won ground through refusing to eat.  The struggle then had been
private and its reward, the notebook, was a secret.  Still reluctant to
give that privacy up, she presented her suggestion as if considering it
for the first time.  "So say we refuse food.  If all of us threaten not
to eat, they'll have to take us seriously.  If we're demanding improved
conditions a doctor for Jan, more heating, better food and promising to
starve ourselves worthless unless they give in, they'll soon start
making concessions."

Ethan's pace slowed.  On reaching the wall he stopped and leaned his
forehead against a patch of plaster.  Kate felt herself hanging on his
response, and turned in irritation to Diane and Clay for theirs
instead.

"You mean a hunger strike?"  Diane made a double-take face, eyes agog.
Next came a smile.  "There must be an easier way than that!"

The rectangle of window slot lit up momentarily as the sun emerged from
behind a cloud, making a pale parallelogram on the floor in the middle
of the room.  If Jan pulled through his delirium he would doubtless
follow their lead, but would it be right to weaken him further by
imposing such a decision?  Would George have an opinion at all?  Even
if Diane agreed in principle, she would as like as not change her mind
tomorrow.  Kate broke from the patch of fading sunlight to see Clay
still gazing at the space where it had been.  Surely he would see the
logic in her argument: the triumph inherent in any act of will; above
all, the worth in such a sacrifice, if it worked.  Ethan was still
leaning against his island of plaster when she checked, inscrutable as
the wall itself.  She sat mesmerized by the back of his neck angling
forwards into the curve at the base of his skull; the composure of his
face in profile, nose touching the wall; the stillness of his hanging
arm.  Why, if she believed that the key was communal consent, had her
breathing turned shallow waiting for him, in particular, to respond?

Forty-Six.

Up this close it was impossible to focus immediately ahead; the cracked
plaster work remained a comforting blur.  Ethan let the weight of his
body press him forwards into the wall and tried to block the decision.
No use.  Kate needed his answer.  He didn't have to turn and check, her
gaze felt hot on his back.  While it was still obvious that dissent
could only provoke the guards, that obedience and loyalty would be
rewarded eventually, an old dilemma confused matters: with his eyes
shut he could hear his father explaining how strength of mind and body
would always win respect.  Perhaps she had a point despite herself.

At han dover the day before Abu had interrupted Ethan again, this time
in the middle of his sit-ups.  Clay, who was at least capable of
effort, had long since fallen by the wayside, but Ethan finished his
set.  The guard was obviously impressed: when later he escorted Ethan
to the toilet he clapped his hands upon Ethan's shoulders in the
corridor.  No blow came.  After the shock subsided, Ethan turned to see
admiration written in the guard's face.  Within the bristling beard,
Abu's lips were set in appreciation: he puffed out his chest, made the
denim bulge.

Important as physical prowess was, brute strength could only go so far.
The muscles in Ethan's back locked; he rose from his heels to the balls
of his feet, levering pain into the numb centre of his forehead. A
demonstration of mental toughness, of will power, might raise him still
further in the guards' eyes.  Abstinence was part of a universal
language.  He dropped back down to flat feet again and pushed off from
the wall.  Turning to agree with Kate, he saw the transparent
expectation in her face.  Dauntless eyes fractionally wider than usual,
lips parted as if about to speak.

The hopefulness of her expression stopped him short.  Shouldn't mental
toughness start closer to home?  Wasn't honesty its cornerstone?  He
should explain his infidelity, how it meant nothing, sprang from an
ambivalence that no longer made sense, and now caused him regret.  Why
not take the risk and explain further how he now understood what was
going on?  As in understood.  Obligation, bravery, honesty: of late
he'd found himself dwelling on these terms.  They sat in his mouth,
alien and yet remotely familiar, as if his tongue were tracing the
long-gone outline of milk teeth.

Before he could speak, the lock rattled in its metal housing and Ethan
turned to face the door as it swung inwards.  Sadiq reversed towards
him through the empty frame, carrying his tray.  Today he wore a long
grey shirt beneath his fatigues.  Its tails hung down to his knees,
giving him the look of a waiter in an apron, or a priest.  The tray
bore their daily helping of cold rice, served in an orange Tupperware
bowl.  A portion of vegetable slop, in a similar container, sat next to
it, on top of a pile of greasy, plastic plates.  As usual, there was no
cutlery, and no hard-boiled eggs this morning either.  They all watched
in silence as Sadiq lowered the tray to the floor and stood back.

"No thanks."

Sadiq looked quizzically at Clay, who was advancing towards him.

"Not today," Clay reiterated.

Ethan glanced at Kate, still cradling Jan in her lap.  Gratitude hit
her from within.  Her pale eyes shone, unable to conceal a sense of
triumph as they followed Clay's progress forwards.  Ethan dropped to
his haunches.  He felt usurped and oddly disappointed.

"Not eat?"  Sadiq asked.

"No."  Clay waved his hands, palms down, back and forth at waist
height.  "We no eat.  Nobody eating.  Protest.  Problems here.  Tell
the boss."  His smile was as reassuring as it was patronizing.  "This
man," he gestured at the black shape of George, walled inside his
soiled bandage, 'and this man," he motioned at Jan, 'both need a
doctor.  We won't eat until the doctor comes."

"And we need some heating.  We're freezing to death."  Diane spelt out
the words slowly, rubbing her sides, a children's TV presenter.

"Something to read as well."  Kate, continuing the act, made a book of
her hands and turned its imaginary pages.  His English wasn't good, but
there was no need to humiliate Sadiq with this play acting.  Ethan
therefore intervened, rephrasing their requests without the
petulance.

"When you give us a doctor, more heat, food and books, then we will
eat."

The guard nodded in time doctor, heat, food, books -and then, as if in
clarification, repeated, "No eat today?"  while gesturing vaguely at
the tray.

"That's right, you're getting there," said Clay.  He shrugged, as if to
say the decision was out of their hands.

Sadiq scratched the bridge of his nose, resting his other hand on his
hip, and returned Clay's shrug.  Not my problem, the gesture said, do
as you will.  Ethan pulled his shoulders back and lifted his chin.
Then, with deliberate care, he stepped forwards, scooped up the tray
and handed it to the guard, bowing his head as he did so, as if
presenting him with a ceremonial flag.  It was vital to make their
point without arrogance.  Sadiq nodded once, in silence, and backed out
of the room.  He might not have been the brightest of the guards, but
he understood about dignity.

Forty-Seven.

"I thought a carrot might help."

Kate sat in the precious solitude of the bathroom, notebook spread
across her thighs, stub of pencil hovering over her Diane notes.  The
back of her hand was grey in the watery light; its freckles had long
since faded.  Her fingers trembled as she continued recording what
Diane had said.

"You know, to go with the stick."

The phrases were difficult on their own, but what of the physical
signs?  Two raw wrists and a flame-red cheek meant nothing at first.
She could easily have inflicted those harms upon herself.  And her coy,
self-satisfied smile was at odds with what she was saying.  She might
well have wanted to tell Kate, a woman, and not the others, but words
whispered girlishly at the floor lacked weight.  They evaporated as
they were uttered, along with Diane's breath in the cold morning air.

Kate groaned and ran a hand through her hair.  Loose strands came out
between her fingers, reminding her of Rachel.  Their bickering, from
this distance, was unfathomable.  It made her want to weep.  She looked
down at her nails, flecked and broken.

They'd not eaten for eight days now, and this time it was taking a
worse toll.  When she'd refused food before the stand had been hers
alone.  It had been painful, but in a strangely abstract way.  There
was nobody to complain to and somehow that had helped.  Sharing the
experience was much harder.  Diane's whingeing strengthened Kate's
resolve to continue with their protest, but at the same time it struck
a chord.  When Clay claimed the rules should allow them to 'draw straws
and cut jerky from the loser', she barely smiled.

Now this from Diane.  She had spoken with the confiding air of a
playground ally, murmuring conspiracy from behind her hand.  Kate's
instinct, never mind the fact that it was Diane making an overture,
would always have been to take a step away.  She did not go in for best
friends of that sort, considering such relationships one of her
sister's weaknesses.  There was always something combustible and
short-lived about Rachel's pacts; one minute she and another girl were
an infatuated tangle of secrets, the next they were enemies.  Betrayal
seemed par for the course.  The point, even before the alliance
stalled, seemed as much about excluding others as friendship.

She had seen enough of Diane to be wary.  One kind word could equally
be followed with another or a cruel stare.  Yet the confines of the
Marriott necessitated a relationship of sorts.  They tore rags from the
same sheet, after all, sharing some hardships the men did not.  Her
tone this morning had suggested something of a similarly personal
nature, but what she was saying made no sense.

Diane goes on.  She says, "Thought it would be a worthwhile swap."  Her
eyes gleam, deep in their sockets, above those cheekbone shards.  "My
little sacrifice for all of our benefit."

She's just returned from a twenty-two minute stint in the washroom. I'm
waiting my turn, hoping for as generous an allowance.  A slender hand
grips my forearm, another cups further whisperings into my ear, even as
I try to pull away.  Then the smile threatens to become a pout.

"Might as well use it before it starves away."  Bizarrely, she follows
this with a dance step.

My normal voice sounds weirdly loud.  "Use what?"

Diane taps her nose.  This breezy indifference suddenly plays across
her face as she glances in Ethan's direction, like she's checking for
his uninterrupted disinterest.  When she turns back to me, though, her
bottom lip's all shivery.

"But he took advantage," she whispers.  "Check this out'

She offers up her palms, cocked forward to expose red wrists.  The soft
skin of her left forearm is raised in this painful welt.

"And She turns the red stripe of her jaw up to me, rolling her eyes as
she does so.  "Animal.  But hey."  She tries another smile.  "That's to
be expected.  It doesn't alter our deal."

"Who did this to you, Diane?"  Poor girl's hand is light and hot in
mine.  It twists away out of sight, hides with the other behind her
slim back.

It's a fair price to pay."  Her face is ashen, yet she musters one
blithe wink back at me.  "You wait.  Fuck not eating.  We'll see some
proper progress round here now."

Now, calm in the washroom, Kate made herself write those words down,
quote by quote.  Despite the stubby pencil, her handwriting was minute.
With her head on one side, the page looked beautiful and abstract, as
precise as code and somehow ancient.  Faintness overtook her.  She
turned to watch one viscous drop of water follow another from the tap,
each taking an aeon to form and fall, then looked back down for the
sense of what she'd written.  The description allowed room for
ambiguity.  That was the thing about the diary: no matter how bad
things were in reality, the written account of them allowed more hope.
Hunger helped too, it made even the smallest doubt elastic.  The
cramped fist of her stomach and lightness in her head somehow muddied
what Diane had been explaining.  Kate balanced the notebook on the
porcelain cistern and steadied herself with the ceremony of her
scrupulous washing.  She splashed a handful of water into her face,
hoping for a shock of clarity, but the icy water was simply numbing. It
ran down her chin bent forwards over the basin, fusing both: a
stalactite.

She picked up the pencil to continue.

"It's like I say.  There's always an easier way."  Diane now has her
hands on her hips.  She looks arch.  In profile the flame of her cheek
is blusher.

None of the guards had ever harassed Kate with anything more than a
corralling prod in the back.  The likelihood of such interference had
preyed upon her for the first few days of their captivity, but since
then, and particularly since their transfer to the Marriott, it seemed
to have grown more and more remote.  There had been no lasciviousness
on the part of the guards.  No innuendo even.  Khalid was too polite.
Sadiq's indifference was compounded by his lack of English.  Only in
Abu's rolling, predatory gait, did Kate sense any kind of threat, and
even that was just the echo of his physical hostility towards the men.
He'd never so much as raised his hand against her.

Is she making it up to curry sympathy?  A diversionary tactic, to
distract us from the fast?  She stands before me, chewing a fleshy lip,
which seems to have grown bigger still in her pinched face.  As I stare
at it the lip crumples, and suddenly Diane is sniffing back teary
snot.

"But I never said he could have a trophy.  A photo!  He took a fucking
The whispered sentence breaks into a full-blooded sob.  Ethan veers
from the trodden path of his floorboard towards us.

"What's up?"

I look at him over the top of Diane's head and manage a shrug: who
knows?  Her shoulders begin to shudder.  Those beautiful fingers cover
her down-turned face.  In the background George's muttering starts
up.

"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending... which is, and
which was, and which is to come '

This seems to tip Diane off balance.  Ethan puts out an arm to steady
her, then stands firm as she presses herself extravagantly into his
chest.  A matinee swoon.  I can't help narrowing my eyes at this, but
Ethan doesn't catch the expression; he's staring at the crown of
Diane's head.

She's skeletal and clinging to Ethan for support, yet her embrace
somehow manages to be voluptuous all the same.  There's this
familiarity, this ownership, in the way she tilts her cheek into
Ethan's throat, both hands clasping the back of his neck, one long leg
raised against his thigh.

He could have pushed her away more definitely.

This touching embrace is cut short when the metal bottom of the door
scrapes open behind us.  Diane's sobbing cuts out.  When she looks up
it's hard to say whether her expression is distraught or ecstatic.  Is
the whole episode a deliberate ploy for Ethan's attention?  I'm
standing there rigid as Clay breaks into the circle and says quietly,
"Your turn."

Her turn.  She carried the shield of her scepticism high when led by
Khalid down the yellow corridor.  He seemed intent on keeping his head
bowed even lower than normal, cloyingly pious.  The patchwork of
rectangles running the length of the corridor made the blanked-out
feeling worse,

there was no knowing what long-gone messages had once adorned the ratty
cork board.  Yet those hard-edged shades of brown confirmed a fact.
There had, once, been posters.  As Kate continued past this evidence,
Diane's flimsy tale grew a similar backbone.  The door to the guards'
room stood ajar.  She instinctively slowed to glance inside.  In the
pause before Khalid nudged her forward, she caught sight of Abu, with
his back to the door, laughing at Sadiq.  Long shirt tails flapped down
beneath his denim jacket.  With an up-stretched hand he was waving
something at the fat man, whose grin was unmistakably nervous.  Khalid
stepped around her to obstruct the view with his own face.

She'd misread his piety.  It had morphed to shame.  She held her ground
for a moment longer, craning round him to see what was going on.

Abu was a referee, issuing the red card.  The card was glossy, and
waved in triumph.  In the bathroom Kate's handwriting wobbled
describing how the Polaroid had flashed yellow as it caught the
electric light.

Forty-Eight.

The window bars were useful for pull-ups.  Ethan looked up at them,
contemplating his last set of the day.  Raising his chin above the
cement lip grew exponentially harder with each missed meal.  Only a
miracle of will would push him to his paltry target of five.  On
tiptoes he reached for the bottom of his two preferred bars,
shoulder-width apart, braced himself for the effort.  The cold sucked
his palms to the metalwork.  He took a deep breath, held it, and drew
himself up the wall.  One.

He held himself square in the window frame for a second, then relaxed
back down and tuned into Clay, who was singing to himself.

"Seen a man standin' over a dead dog lyin' by the highway in a ditch

He's lookin' down kinda puzzled pokin' that dog with a stick Got his
car door flung open he's standin' out on highway 31 Like if he stood
there long enough that dog'd get up and run Struck me kinda funny seem
kinda funny sir to me Still at the end of every hard earned day people
find some reason to believe."

The head shots were like that a reason to believe.  Ethan prepared to
pull himself up the wall again, remembering how one by one they'd been
escorted to the guards' room the day before, and made to stand against
a blank wall, whilst Abu took photos.  There was something inherently
light-hearted about a Polaroid camera despite the big man's furrowed
brow: Ethan associated the instantaneous results with childhood
parties.  He made sure to lift his chin and, looking directly into the
lens, smiled determinedly.  An after-flash persisted though he looked
away, blurring Freddie Ljungberg amongst the wall of Arsenal faces over
Abu's shoulder.  The ramifications of being photographed began to sink
in, outweighing the fear that had pressed down as Sadiq steered him out
of the familiar corridor.  Why else but to prove that they were staying
the course?

"Go the Gunners," Ethan said.

Sadiq, who had been standing to one side, roared with laughter.
"Gunners!"

"You like football?"

"Football.  Yes."  The fat guard pretended to kick a ball.

"I am a football fan too," Ethan explained, speaking slowly.  "My team
is Aston Villa."

"Villa Park.  Football man!  Villa Park!"  Sadiq, still beaming, said
something to Khalid.  The youngster trotted from the room.  Abu, Ethan
noticed, remained unimpressed, fixed on his point-and-shoot with a
professional's concentration.  Sadiq babbled on, pointing at the
posters.

"Highbury best.  David Seaman.  FA Cup.  Double double.  Premium
League."

Chin over the lip again: two.

Khalid reappeared, dribbling a plastic football through the doorway and
around imaginary opposition before passing it across the rug to Sadiq.
The fat man gathered the ball inexpertly,

took a step backwards, aimed his coast-to-coast grin at Ethan, and
skewed a pass in his direction.  Ethan squared the ball deferentially,
with one touch, back to Khalid.  The youngster trapped it and once
again began dribbling around the room, pride and glee mixed in his
face, any pretence of authority long gone.  He pirouetted immediately
in front of Ethan, taunting him with a schoolyard drag-back.  The
manoeuvre was so signposted Ethan had to check an impulse to ruin it
with a tackle.  Instead he nodded appreciatively, toes flexing in grimy
socks.  After a further one-two with Sadiq, whose inane grin persisted,
Khalid chipped the ball into the air and tried to keep it up.  He
managed to bounce it on his knee twice, then lost control, clipping a
ricochet towards Ethan, who let it roll onto the bridge of his right
foot.  Lighter than a proper football, but completely predictable
nevertheless, effortlessly his, and quite suddenly the most important
football ever, bouncing from his toe to his knee to his left instep,
back to the knee, again, again, up to the forehead, dropping to the
knee, again, again, again.

Khalid moved in.  Sadiq was laughing.  Even Abu smiled as Ethan trapped
the ball, offered it to Khalid, then spun away from him with it at the
last moment.  Khalid came at him again.  Ethan played a give-and-go off
the wall, collecting the ball behind the guard.  Now Sadiq lumbered
forward to check him and Ethan stopped dead, man and ball, to let the
guard drift past.  Despite the confines of the room there was all the
space in the world to jink left and right and leave everyone rooted,
and it felt right because Abu was laughing now, joining in, shouldering
Ethan out of the way, but forgetting to take the ball, which Ethan had
already back-heeled to safety.  All three of the guards now came at him
and it was as simple as breathing to lift the ball over the couch and
fall through the gap between it and Khalid, whose laughter was
breathless and infectious, and buoyed Ethan on again to stub the ball
through Sadiq's planted legs, re-collect and spin past Abu and finally
to drag the ball up onto the heel of his flicking left foot with the
toe of his running right, lifting it over all three of the guards as
they came, line abreast, to stop him.  The trajectory was perfect and
the defence wooden, woefully slow.  They were children in a park and
Ethan was an uncle or elder brother, turning to receive his own pass,
trapping the ball once again, halting only because laughter had
combined with weakness to rob him of his breath entirely.  Abu
clattered into the couch.  Ethan kicked the ball away, leaned forwards,
hands on knees.  Everybody stopped.

Three.

A palpable confusion registered.  Ethan kept his eyes fixed on his feet
as they slowly stopped swimming.  The big toe of his left foot was
poking through its threadbare sock.  His fingers pinched the wool and
dragged the hole sideways, tucking the toe back inside.  When he looked
up Abu's face was unreadable once again.  The big man turned away and
ambled past the stove to the table in the corner.  Sadiq's smile had
yet to fade.  And little Khalid, bouncing on the balls of his feet, was
still abandoned.

"You are a fine foot balling man!"  he laughed.  "A very good player,
yes!"

"No."

"Yes!  David Beckham!"

A strange sensation flooded Ethan's limbs, acute as pain, intoxicating
as laughter.  His heart was beating wildly.  The wall was full of
pointless heroes and yet these three men and the hierarchy above them
and its absolute, unfathomable cause gave everything a relevance, even
the now inert plastic ball and the cruelty of an endless grey bandage
and the horror of a corpse hung up by the feet, and even the stupid
hole in his grey sock, just there, imbuing them and him and everybody
not too blind to see, with a point.

"Patrick Viera," said Sadiq, and thumped his chest.

Four.

Abu had turned back to face him and was giving him a plastic carrier
bag, with something heavy inside.  Ethan took the bag in silence,
opened its mouth, made out a pair of army issue boots.

"Try these," said Abu.  The granite composure of his face looked
suddenly forced, threatened by his own generosity.  "For the cold," he
added, in explanation.

With exaggerated care Ethan loosened the laces of each boot.  He
stepped into the left first, and rethreaded its eyelets one after
another until they reached the top.  The others looked on as he
repeated the process with the right.  Once the boots were done up, he
flexed forwards, rocked backwards and announced, "Perfect fit.  Thank
you.  Thank you very much."

He tried to pull himself up to the window again now, hanging flat
against the wall.  His back and shoulders were dead, his biceps and
forearms burned, his stomach felt as though it had been torn in two.
Yet what threatened the last pull-up entirely was his tongue, so
swollen through thirst that it filled his throat, big as a fist and dry
as dirt.  Never mind swallowing, it was a fight to breathe.  The wall
loomed.  He fought the temptation to scrabble upwards with his toe caps
and hauled.

The boots were a kindness, which Ethan appreciated.  Yet you had to
respect the balaclava's masterstroke more.  It confirmed the old adage:
to defend, attack.  The first sign was Khalid's appearance in the
doorway that morning without the customary tray.

"You will eat again today?  I should bring breakfast?"

Weary yet patient, Clay explained not.

Khalid eyed them each in turn, hoping perhaps for dissent.  He nodded
in the direction of George.  "He is suffering enough.  Please?"

"Is that a fact?"  Clay raised his eyebrows.  "We're all suffering."

"But '

"No buts, pal.  We've explained what we want."

"This is very regrettable."

"Fetch us a doctor if you're so concerned," Kate suggested bitterly.

Khalid's exasperation shrivelled.  He turned to go.  When he reappeared
a few moments later he carried a pistol and accompanied the balaclava,
who leaned in the open doorway to ask his question.

"Who is in charge here?"

Ethan's lips parted, but a hint of something rhetorical in the man's
voice stopped him from speaking up.

His suspicion was confirmed as the balaclava continued.

"Me.  I told you before.  I am making rules for you.  Your special task
is obeying."  He came forwards into their midst and looked around.  An
outstretched finger pointed at George.  "Already we see what happens if
you make problems.  Hurtful things.  I am keeping control like this,
not the other way around.  If you are needing something, you can ask.
It may be possible to help.  But' he paused 'if you make unreasonable
demands, if you are giving more difficulty, I must show again how I am
in charge."

The man's tone was unequivocal, his words clear and hard.  Ethan felt
admonished.  He lowered his eyes and followed the balaclava's boots as
they crossed the room to where their plastic water jugs stood side by
side against the wall.  Two hands reached down.  Ethan understood the
man's thinking in that moment with a gratifying completeness, even
before the balaclava had lifted the first jug clear.  He sat in awe as
the water uncoiled from first one spout and then the next, forming a
stream fast enough to snake across and between the boards, towards the
buttress and under George, who sat impassive as a boulder in its
path.

"If you will not eat you are not needing drink to wash it down. Without
food and water there is no need for toilet.  Everyone will be very
comfortable here in this room only, I am sure."

A parental smile formed in the mouth-hole, underlining a logic that
came from a higher vantage point.  The protest was over.  With any luck
their stand might have fulfilled its objective of winning a little
respect.  Ethan had proven himself capable of abstinence, which would
not have gone unnoticed.  Either way, with one bold stroke, this man's
will had now overcome theirs.  Water pooled beneath George.  In the
quiet it was audible, trickling through gaps in the floorboards.  A
master class.

"When you have finished with threats and nonsense I will give you back
food and water and toilet, but not before.  You have the choice."

The balaclava made a start for the door.  Khalid drew himself aside to
let him past.

"It makes no difference."

The balaclava's khaki trouser leg flapped as his foot hit the floor and
stopped.  Kate had risen before him.  Her face was ghostly.  She swayed
like seaweed underwater, but spoke firmly.

"We did make requests, but you ignored them.  So we don't have a
choice.  If you won't give us water, the end will come faster.  We need
'

Ethan gripped his forehead with interlocked hands, his thumbs stopping
up his ears.  Yet despite pressing hard he could only block out the
precise sense of Kate's words, the tone of her voice would not go away
entirely.  There was something almost appealing again in her bolshy
naivety.  Ethan had a sudden memory of her clutching the plastic beaker
full of fruit rind in the quadrangle and felt an urge to reach out for
her, to protect her from herself.  But before he could his chest
constricted with a burst of suppressed laughter which came from nowhere
and wound up in a cough.  The balaclava was smiling again when he
looked; he too could see the funny side of Kate's front, puny as a
baby's fist.  On she went, turning for support to Jan, Clay, Diane and
finally Ethan himself.  Though she was just there in front of him, she
seemed impossibly distant.

Now Ethan struggled to pull himself up the last inches of wall.  As the
thought of making the target became a reality his body grew numb.  He
was beyond himself.  One of the others would crack first.  Diane
complained constantly and Clay, too, was clearly having his doubts. The
tip of Ethan's nose was over the lip now.  The bristles on his chin
made a satisfying sound as they brushed the cement edge.  Outside, in
the half light,

the river was dull as a sweep of tarmac at the bottom of the slope.

Five.

He held himself there, rigid as the bars he clung to, the toe caps of
his new boots nudging at the plaster work with the picture outside
swimming in and out of focus.  Beyond hunger, beyond thirst, stronger
than ever.

Forty-Nine.

There was no horizon.  Instead, a dark visor curved down in front of
her face.  The visor, she recognized, was for instrument training: it
blotted out the canopy glass, leaving only a crescent of cockpit
interior visible, a slice of dials set in familiar rows.  For a moment
the six main instruments were obvious, and then they were an unreadable
assortment of needles, numbers and letters once again.

"So what heading are you going to hold for take-off?"

Kate heard her instructor's voice, but he wasn't in the cockpit with
her.  When she turned to check, she found herself staring at a familiar
peeling wall.

"It's not a trick question."

She knew the answer, but could not speak.

"I'll give you a clue.  We're on runway two zero, right..."

She turned beneath the visor again, to check, and this time saw the
seat empty.  Even given the answer, she was unwilling to repeat the
words to nobody.  Unwilling or unable.  He wasn't there and, anyway,
she wasn't qualified.

"You're having me on.  Two hundred should do it.  Relax.  Let go of
that lottery ticket.  I've put us on the centre line.  All you have to
do is hold the course and pull back when the airspeed reaches sixty,
just like normal.  OK?"

The front of the visor bobbed once.  Infuriating!  She tried to pull it
off, but the thing was clamped too tightly on her head.

"Right then.  Power up."

The dials reconfigured briefly, requiring concentration: there was the
heading indicator in the middle of the bottom row, pointing just past
due south.  And above it, to the left, the airspeed indicator read
zero.  Her mouth was dry, struggling for the word 'no', because this
wasn't happening.  She wasn't instrument rated, which meant she wasn't
in control.  Ahead of deciding not to push the power lever in, though,
she had already done so; the propeller tone rose and they were bouncing
blindly forward down the hard runway floorboards.  The airspeed needle
climbed through twenty, thirty, forty knots.  Her throat was swollen
and plugged with dust.  Forty-five, fifty.  They were definitely
rushing forwards now, yet there wasn't space in the room.  There was
nothing she could do, all her influence had dried up.  All she had to
go on were the instrument readings, which were suspect: the giro could
be out of kilter or the dial uncalibrated, she might be veering to the
left or right, was undoubtedly about to leave the runway and plough
into a fuel truck or hangar or the guards' quarters.  A yell formed,
but her tongue had died, swollen and split.  The direction needle
threatened to wobble towards one-ninety and Kate over corrected with
right rudder.

"Steady."

Clay's voice sounded in her headset, cool as water.  He had eyes she
could fall into, but something always held her back.  Since he wasn't
in the cockpit either, his voice was just another distraction.  All she
wanted was to cut the power and call a halt, but she was beyond speech,
accelerating.  With each passing second she knew she was drifting
further off course,

the probability of a collision becoming a certainty, her
inef-fectuality more and more terrifying.

As the airspeed nudged sixty knots she sensed the nose wheel lifting
clear of the strip.  If she forced the stick forward, she might yet
keep the plane on the ground.  But by now the perimeter fence at the
end of the runway would be rushing to meet her, with the hawthorn scrub
beyond it yawning, and that left her no choice but to pull up.  She
hurtled at the window bars, her lips cracking as they stretched wide to
accommodate the panic.

"Attagirl."

Now the other dials jumped, the artificial horizon bobbed and the
vertical speed indicator showed a climb.  Her eyes skipped from them to
the airspeed to the altimeter, as its dial cranked through two hundred
and fifty feet.  For a second she managed to hold the picture in her
head, saw the plane situated in all dimensions, even thought to check
the oil pressure and the fuel gauge, but immediately regretted doing
so.  Empty!  No fuel.  No oil.  Everything about to grind to a halt.
Though she mouthed the word "Help' it only tore her lips further.

"You're OK, you're OK."  His voice was soothing.  He cared for her, she
could tell.  Yet she could not reach for him.  "Don't panic," he
whispered.

Exactly.  Clay was nothing if not pragmatic.  She forced the circles
back into their rows by clamping her mouth shut, and found that her
teeth were furry, coated with something metallic, iron filings.  She
was caught in a magnetic field, and the dials were a rack of little
mirrors, flashing on and off as she turned through the sun.  Out of
nowhere a sequence of instructions sounded.

First, scan the instruments to glean the necessary information:
attitude, altitude, heading, speed.

Second, visualize the desired new flight path.

Third, select the new attitude and power.

Fourth, hold them.

Finally, trim.

She started to follow orders and once again the read-out made a certain
sort of sense.  But the picture didn't tally it was at odds with what
her body knew was happening.  An untrained pilot attempting instrument
flight will mistrust the readout, fatally, within minutes.  And she
wasn't qualified for this because nobody was.  She scanned the dials
again, determined not to give in to her instincts, but the taste of
blood in her mouth was overwhelming, and although she could visualize
the plane at twelve hundred feet, still climbing gently, banked to the
left and turning through one hundred and thirty-eight degrees, she was
light in her straps, suspended in a corkscrew dive, upside-down and
inside-out and pulling back on the hand in hers.

Her pulse hammered in time with the propeller.  The dials became
meaningless again and then began to fade entirely.  Which made no
difference really, because she was utterly impotent.  No amount of
hauling or pushing on the control column mattered; there was just the
sensation of a bunch of hot fingers squeezing back, and she was
definitely falling, tail first, down a bottomless hole.  The cockpit
air boiled, searing her nose, throat and lungs.  Or else she was
breathing flames.  She tried to tear the visor off again, but found
that it was no longer there.  And then there was no visor at all and no
dials, just blackness.  It didn't matter whether her eyes were open or
shut, there was nothing to see.  Only darkness, closing in.

Fifty.

Rachel rattled the cocktail stirrer amongst ice cubes and wiped a smear
of lip gloss from her straw.  She'd chosen the restaurant for its scale
and pace, but now found the din overwhelming.  Looking back down the
bar, she watched the revolving door until a figure coming through it
looked likely.  She stubbed out her cigarette.  Shorter than the head
shot suggested, younger, but definitely her, and looking confusedly
about.

"Julia Fulford?"  Rachel sounded eager despite herself.  A hostess.

The woman's face lit up.  "Jules," she exclaimed.  ""Please!"  She
disentangled her arm from the loops of a woolly bag and offered her
hand up to Rachel.  Next to her byline she wore dark hair scraped back
behind her head; now it stuck out in country-girl ringlets.  She pushed
her glasses back up her nose and peered over Rachel's shoulder at the
cavernous restaurant interior.  "Cosy!"

A waiter arrived, intent upon showing them to a table.  Rachel feigned
reserve by ignoring him, but Jules scuttled off in his tracks, fighting
free of her cardigan as she went, all elbows.  Rachel's kitten heels
felt suddenly wrong.  She dismantled the tepee of her napkin as they
sat down, and surreptitiously dabbed the make-up from her lips.

When she looked back up, she found Jules open-mouthed,

about to speak.  But the waiter cut her off, thrusting two menus across
the table with a matador's flourish, defying them not to order a drink.
The noise of a thousand diners rose like surf.  Out of the corner of
her eye, she was aware of other white shirts weaving back and forth
between the tables, trays held high.  They seemed choreographed. Rachel
ordered another vodka and tonic to slow the place down, heard her
choice echo back conspiratorially across the table.

"Can I just say, on behalf of all of us at the paper, how sorry we are
that your sister is in this... situation.  I was vaguely aware of the
story, but not the detail.  Since you called though, I've gone back
over the archived articles and' the ringlets shook from side to side "I
have a sister myself.  You must be going spare."

"Of course."  Rachel shrugged.  "But everyone seems to have lost
interest."

The table next to theirs erupted with laughter.  When Rachel looked, it
took a few seconds for the paper hats to register.  An office Christmas
party, the tablecloth thick with spent bottles and plates.  One bald
man stood out, laughing himself purple, struggling to speak.  "So she's
bent over and the post boy's ... going at her ..."  He dissolved again;
the rest of the room surged louder.

"Well, I'm here."  Jules smiled and shrugged and looked from side to
side to emphasize the fact.

"I haven't wanted to talk to journalists until now," Rachel tried to
explain, but competing smells rose up to overpower her: aftershave,
duck, cigarette smoke.  She fought on.  "It goes back to my father. You
made a spectacle of his private life when I was a girl, and he took off
for good."

"OK."  Jules now looked nonplussed.  "But I'm pretty sure that wasn't
me."

On the next table voices rose with competing puns.  "Special delivery!"
"Registered male!"  Somebody knocked a bottle over and waiters
descended.  Rachel continued.

"The point was they got the details of the story wrong.  They said he
got the girl pregnant, which wasn't true.  And she was seventeen, not
sixteen."  The woman before her nodded vacantly, apparently unable to
keep up.  She tried to spell it out.  "But the damage was done.  It
killed our family.  You print lies, they stick.  So my instinct was to
say "no" when the reporters came asking for background.  Whatever I
said would just wind up distorted and do no good.  Leave it to the
diplomats was what I thought."

A different waiter arrived to prompt their order.  He pulled a pad from
his belt, suave as a conjurer, and hovered while Jules read the menu
with her forefinger.  When finally she made her choice he scribbled
shorthand pointedly and took off at a pace.

"But they're doing nothing.  Since the petition, nothing at all.  And
before that Ethan's father Colonel Hughes was coming out with lies.
Virtually saying it was Kate's fault.  I mean, what's that got to do
with anything at all?"

Jules shrugged.  "People always want to find out why.  It's only
natural to want someone to blame."

"Yeah, well."  Rachel curled strands from her fringe around a finger
and pulled, continuing quietly: "I want to put her side of the story
and raise awareness again.  There's nothing else I can think of to
do."

Again the other table.  "Rowe walked right in on them.  The personnel
director getting personal.  Pants down for the postie.  Brilliant!
She'll never live it down."

"Well, I'm honoured.  That you chose to speak to me, of all people. I'm
sure you know but I'm not really news.  It's more opinion in my
column."  She dug in her bag, as if searching for an example, but
pulled a handkerchief free instead.

"Yes, but your column has heart."

Jules smiled, then blew her nose loudly in the direction of the office
party.  "You said you had an angle, a way of breathing new life into
the story?"

The restaurant noise surged loud again.  Why did they pack the tables
so tightly?  The waiters had to sidestep between chair backs.  That's
what gave the impression of dancing.  Left two-three, right two-three.
Rachel's hand trembled picking up her glass.

"I take it you meant a more personal account.  Something along the
lines of what the last six months have been like for the family, for
you."

"Something like that."

A team of waiters converged upon their table, as if to make an arrest.
Plates landed.  A stack of sausage and mash sat opposite, seared mullet
swam on a bed of bok choy down below.  The fussy presentation sparked a
different sort of nervousness.  Now she'd committed to giving this
woman a story she began to doubt whether what she had to say would be
sufficiently interesting.  It was only background, after all.  Which
somehow needled.  A counter-current of envy gripped Rachel, absurd, yet
tangible all the same.  The restaurant spun around the table.  She
shuddered, took a long pull on her straw.

"Anything ever happen to you to make everything that went before it
meaningless?"

Jules looked quizzical.

"You know, say you're involved with a person, or people, on one level,
and you're fine with it, and then something happens, and suddenly what
went on before makes no sense any more.  No sense at all.  You're just
sorry backwards, for everything that..  . happened."

"You mean you regret something you did?"

Rachel drained the rest of her glass.  "Yes, because you can't undo it,
and you can't apologize for it either."

"Because you missed your chance?"

"Even worse than that.  There never was a chance.  You didn't even know
you wanted to apologize until it was too late.  Like hearing about some
fantastic event that's already over.  The regret lands right after the
opportunity to express it has gone."

Jules thought a moment and then said, "Are you saying you want to
apologize to Kate for something you did before she was taken
hostage?"

Rachel nodded, but her mouth started talking, intent on a change of
subject.  "You know, Kate wants to be a journalist," she began. "Always
has."

Jules raised an eyebrow.  "Common affliction, but '

"She'd want me to speak to you."

"I'm glad to hear that.  I'm sure she'll thank you when she gets back."
The reporter leaned forward and laid her fingers across Rachel's. "And
I'm sure the two of you will have a chance to clear up past differences
then, too."

The woman's optimism rolled forward with the drink, opening Rachel up.
A picture of Kate spilt out.  Unpretentious and organized and
principled.  Hard-working and loyal and adventurous.  The stubbornness
and gullibility and moralizing were nowhere to be seen: all Rachel had
to do was hold the gate wide and allow the positives to pile past.
Jules didn't even need to take notes.  She just sat opposite, framed by
that big hair, chomping through her sausages in a workmanlike way, one
eye fixed on the food and the other on Rachel, who felt she could talk
more freely the more freely she talked.  Pointless anecdotes helped.
Having explained Kate's vegetarianism, she found herself recounting a
story about a hedgehog, a baby hedgehog, which her sister had 'rescued'
and fed for a month with a stolen science-block pipette.  Even aged
twelve, Rachel knew the exercise was futile.  She told Kate so and,
indeed, she'd been right the animal died eventually.  But that wasn't
the point now, so she left it out.  Instead she chose to take a
replenishing gulp of wine, and was immediately in the middle of a
description of patio doors.  Her mother's.  It was relevant to describe
how the poor woman now kept them dangerously clean, insisting on
soaping them down daily as part of the maniacal routine of housework
which she employed to keep the real world at bay.

"It's not like they were ever dirty before," Rachel explained.  "I
mean, that last day, with the pigeon.  Wham!"  She jabbed her glass
forward to illustrate, never mind the spillage.  "Stupid thing flew
bang into them.  I thought it was dead.  But Kate went out to it and
brought it back to life."

Julia leaned back from the table again.  Gently she explained, "I feel
for you.  I really do.  If I'm to make an article of this, though,
there has to be a point to it.  Something revelatory, something new."

"Yes, but the pigeon.  That impressed everyone.  Healing hands, Ethan
said, healing hands."

"Ethan's the boyfriend, right?"

Rachel nodded and bit the inside of her bottom lip.

The reporter's eyes narrowed.  "And the ... disagreement... between you
and Kate, did that have to do with him?"

The wineglass was an ally.  A final slug from it helped.  "Sort of, but
it goes back way before then.  The root of it starts with our
father."

"And was he there with this pigeon?  Did he come back to see them
off?"

Words were stones rattling around Rachel's head, and each sentence
spoken meant less to carry.  This woman, Jules, was all right.  She
showed her teeth when she smiled.  Rachel's head was light; she looked
up to the ceiling and saw a million panes of glass suspended, end on,
above the dining space.  An installation or a modern chandelier.
Hundreds of guillotine blades, poised to drop.  Looking back down,
Jules's mouth was shiny and mesmerizing and her crooked smile was
reassuring.  Rachel found herself nodding back at the reporter,
agreeing with her.  Of course she'd make contact with him, if it would
help.  A reunion, repentance, forgiveness she'd do whatever was
necessary now.

Fifty-One

Jan was breathing too fast.  The sound broke in upon Kate's stupor as
she sat staring at the grain of the floorboards, contours on a
hatefully familiar map.  She stood stiffly and moved to his side, knelt
down and asked, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," he said.  His eyes were rapid-blinking and wet.  It looked
like he'd been crying, but as she studied his face it split into a
false smile.  Still panting shallow breaths, he began to laugh.  She
put a hand on his forearm and squeezed.  There was nothing soft beneath
his shirtsleeve, just the sharpness of bone.

"He asks me every day, on our way to the bathroom.  Khalid.  How are
you?  he says.  Fine, I tell him.  I am fine."  He shook his head,
still laughing.  "That is the only answer for the question.  What more
can I say in this circumstance?  We are all of us fine, thank you very
much."

Kate looked over her shoulder, at George sitting alone, Ethan stretched
out on his back sleeping, Diane hugging her knees.  She caught Clay's
eye and he rose to join them.

"But I am not OK," Jan whispered.  "I am anything except."

Kate still had hold of the arm.  Jan looked down at her hand.  "Ever
since the first day I have not tasted food," he said.  "Something went
wrong in my mouth.  My tongue does not work.  I can see an egg, I can
see rice, I can feel them in my fingers, but they do not taste.  Even
when we eat curry I taste nothing at all."

Now Clay tried to calm him, whispering reassurances.  Jan looked up at
them in turn, apparently amazed.  "I am too afraid for any more of
this," he said simply.

"I know," Clay agreed.  "But don't you see that they're afraid too?
They've locked us in here, but in doing so they've locked themselves in
too.  Without us they're nothing.  They have to look after us and
that's what they're doing."

Jan shook his head.  "George was talking last night.  He said he would
make a way out."

"In which case he was dreaming."

"He said he would fight."

Clay turned to look at George.  "Think about it, Jan.  George can't
fight.  And if he could, it wouldn't do any good.  He'd make matters
worse, if anything."

"But something has to finish it," Jan said.  "It can't just go on."

Clay opened his mouth, then shut it without speaking.

"This morning I had a chance for an end," Jan went on.  "Somebody left
help in the bathroom.  A bag made out of plastic, in the sink.  In our
circumstance it was a weapon.  I wanted to use it.  I got as far as
putting the bag over my head.  It went inside my lips when I breathed
in.  In and out, in and out it went, the bag without air against my
teeth, against my tongue.  Still I did not taste anything.  I tried to
breathe up all the air.  I wanted to, I honestly did, but I failed.  I
lost my nerves."

"No, you didn't," said Clay.  "You kept your nerve."

"I bit a hole in the bag.  I ruined the chance because I was weak."

Kate saw Jan's eyes close, deep in their sockets.  His Adam's apple
threatened to poke through the skin of his throat.  She stared at his
face, which looked suddenly old.  And yet in recent weeks he had become
more and more childlike, asking Clay to sing his songs at night,
laughing himself weak at the American's lamest jokes.  When the guards
issued new clothes he was inconsolable for days, convinced that it
meant their captivity would never end.  And now this panic breathing,
contagious in so confined a space.  As Kate again squeezed Jan's arm,
the shape of her selfishness became clear.  She wanted to steady him
for her own sake.

She looked at Clay.  He was still reasoning with Jan, trying to
convince him that patience was their best tactic, that the balaclava
would surely trade them soon.  Kate stopped hearing the words,
concentrated instead on the music of his voice, on his apparently
limitless calm.  How he had wound up with Diane in the first place?
Like Clay said the past was harder and harder to dig back to.  She
could no longer recall what Diane had been like before they were taken.
Or any of the others.  It was even hard to remember the old Ethan
clearly.  There were memories, yes, but they were abstract, she could
no longer feel them.  A shocking thought came to her, that she couldn't
recall the sensation of her old self.  When she tried she suffered
emptiness instead.  The present had obliterated the past and now
stretched into an impossible future.  Just as there was no before,
there could be no after this.

But Clay was still murmuring the opposite, urging Jan to think about
home, of how he'd soon get the chance to keelhaul his dad again.  He
traced the shape of a boat on the floor, made Jan shut his eyes and
think of the light in a yacht's wake.  Once he'd started on this
picture, he asked the boy to help fill in the details and kept him
talking.

Keeping up their morale like this was Clay's way of enduring the
crucifying impotence, his form of resistance.  He used laughter to
unnerve the guards.  Abu in particular hated to see evidence of a joke
he could not understand; the senselessness of their finding anything
funny at all, given the situation, made him bristle.  When the big
guard checked in on them before han dover Clay would blow him a kiss
goodnight, then face down Abu's indignation with a vapid grin.

Jan blinked more slowly now.  His breathing had quietened, his smile
was no longer at odds with the rest of his face.  In place of his
whispered reassurances Clay had begun, quietly, to whistle.  Low,
growling laughter came from the far corner of the room.

"For sure.  It'll all turn out right in the end.  Ha ha ha."  George
sat up.  A grin split the grey stubble below his bandages.  Since he so
seldom spoke, except to mutter his incoherent prayers, everyone turned
to look at him.  "It'll all end happily ever after if we can just hang
on.  Roger fucking Whittaker there will save us, Jan.  It's a
certainty."

Kate's heartbeat quickened.  She sneered.  "No, your God is bound to
beat him to it, George.  We should pin our hopes on that."

George laughed again, shook his head and lay back down.  Kate felt
Clay's hand brush her knee.  As the colour in her cheeks subsided she
glanced at Ethan, to find that he was watching her.  Or at least his
head was propped up on his hands, and he was looking their way.  In the
dirty half-light it was impossible to make out the expression on his
face.

Fifty-Two.

Ethan sat staring at another set of contours, the whorls of his
fingertips, stained with ink.  Raised voices filtered into the room
from down the corridor.  The guards debating strategy, no doubt.  He
began to turn back through the pamphlet's pages once again.  Though
he'd had the booklet less than a day, words and phrases, when
whispered, already sounded familiar.

"We are with vision of state with no divisions, only itself, free from
long struggle against the prejudicial approach inherent in occupied
Kashmir and in others."

Khalid's face, when he handed the typed pages over!  Proud as a
schoolboy, showing off cult comics.  "Now everyone is eating," he said,
"I have discovered the solution for your reading request!  This will
help with long hours.  In the English language!"  He bounced on the
balls of his feet, buoyed with initiative, and sidestepped round the
room dropping a booklet into each lap.  "Conditions are better now. You
have two hours of morning heat.  Sadiq and Abu are agreeing with
that."

"Imprisonment of our leaders and comrades is anti the point of view,
not expressing the general will of our people, who are above all
forgiving."

They'd sat in silence for an hour or so after he left.  George never
even raised his head.  But Clay, Kate, and Diane,

still pressed against the dying radiator, were each intent on their
copy, commuters on the evening train, with Jan, too weak to take any
notice, the drunk slumped in their midst.  Ethan read while pacing the
floorboards, until giddiness lowered him back to his dark patch against
the window wall.

"Belief in the one way of going will prevail as History shows that in
both past and future the rights of people here are not in alignment
with the leadership currently in provision."

Diane tossed her copy aside with an uncomprehending sneer.  Over her
head.  Predictably, Kate spoke first, indignant.  "Christ.  It's
completely incoherent."

"Yup.  Ikea flat-pack manual meets undergrad ethnic studies tract,"
said Clay.

Diane muttered something then, but Ethan was back amongst the words on
the page, swimming through them stroke by stroke, in time with the
pulse in his neck.  It was depressing, but no real surprise to see that
nobody else had a clue.

'1947 is gone but still it speaks.  The situation from India since then
is unattained and contrary to all our will."

Then, as now, Ethan felt flushed.  Since they'd begun eating again in
the end Clay cracked first, convincing Kate with remarkable ease that
'even Gandhi had a weakness for water' his insides had liquefied.  All
of them fell to the same sickness.  But the guards were doing their
best to help.  They'd seen fit to provide more water and emptied the
necrotic bucket in the corner of the room at more frequent intervals
through the day.  Now these further concessions.  An extra hour of
heat.  And not just any reading material, a glimpse of something
relevant, something heartfelt.  Though it took concentration to keep
the newsprint still those voices in the corridor now threatened to
prick through the page the effort paid off.

"This young group has new blood flowing with righteous pace for freedom
and we will prevail.  We have belief in the exact boundary laid down by
authority.  There is no bigger purpose, just the arm around our land
for its true people."

Love letters.  Hard to stomach if you're not the intended recipient.
Mawkish and overblown, incoherent even, at times.  But these words made
sense despite themselves.  He'd read of 'passion defying eloquence' at
school, this was proof of what it meant.  The more intense a feeling
the harder it is to put into words.  As Ethan's stained fingertips
continued to turn the pages, he felt again the enormity of such a
compliment: that Khalid had seen fit to allow them this privilege was
the surest sign yet.

"Our fists speak louder than the mouth in certain situations and this
makes for regrettable actions necessary at some time."

In a way the mistakes were charming.  Sloppy expression could be tidied
up.  What mattered was that you spoke the truth unequivocally.  That
was to be admired.  The phrases tasted potent as Ethan sat repeating
them below his breath.

"Ethan?"  Kate's face bounced on a level with his.  She looked
hopeful.

"Government of India let loosed a reign of terror and showered bullets
on innocents whereby thousands of thousands have been killed or worse.
In such circumstances the arm must be iron with will as every person
involved will see."

"Sure.  Daft, isn't it?  But how about giving it a rest.  You must have
had enough of reading that shite now?"

Skin pale as egg white, lips yolk grey.  Her resistance was a fragile
shell.  He could see through it now and felt suddenly sorry.  Her hand,
stroking his knee, was brittle to touch.  If the point was being
truthful, no matter how difficult the words were to speak, he had a
duty to try.  Lying no longer made sense; the inconsistencies had
begun, in his dreams, to show their teeth.  She was still smiling at
him.  Yet he held back: it was too hard to know where to begin.  She'd
resist, think him mad.  Perhaps he could start with the booklet first,
explain that she must look beneath the surface to appreciate what its
pages meant.  Even that seemed too hard.  In the end it was as much as
he could do to nod back reassuringly.  He stared down at the paper
again for guidance, letting the words sound noiselessly in his head.

"Only through struggle with sacrifice can our rewards be expected.
Without that strength there is nothing.  So peaceful meanings are the
best, which is our absolute aim, but in order to overcome and army
defeated there are sometimes contradictions."

"You're still burning up."

"No, I'm fine."

"A brave face is one thing, but you can admit you're sick to me."

"This' he wagged the booklet like a fan 'means more '

"With any luck, you're right.  Maybe they'll give in on the medic too.
Though if that' now she gripped the other end of the pamphlet 'is
anything to go by, the best we can expect is some sort of witch
doctor

"No.  It means more in itself."  He eased her fingers free of the
booklet and smoothed it flat.  "I'll share it with you.  I'll help you
understand."

She grinned at him nervously, warily almost, opening an unbridgeable
gap.  He felt the threat of tears prick his own eyes and, since such
weakness was unthinkable, simply smiled back.  He didn't have to see
the page to recall what it said.

"Suppression through the drama of state-held elections is not the way.
State terrorism also is killing innocents throughout this region and is
ultimately responsible.  With one true way it shall finally be possible
to overcome difficulties for all individuals and parties involved, but
there must be this pressure."

Necessary pressure.  Though he shut his eyes, the obligation would not
go away.  The sooner she too knew the truth of their role, their place
in the bigger scheme, the sooner they would both be safe.  Yet with her
face gone for just a second the voices in the corridor grew louder.
They weren't speaking English, but it didn't matter, the gist was
obvious, admonishment, not debate.  Discipline in action, a dressing
down.  Another random gobbet of text sprang, word for word, to mind.

"Mother is a Mir Hamdani Kashmiri presently living in Lahore, Pakistan.
She has never been to Kashmir, but perhaps feel unexplainably hurt and
helpless every time I come across Kashmiri news, and the terrible
doings."

An unexplainable hurt was the problem.  Truth was indeed a terrible
doing.  But the voices had grown louder still.  The door shot inwards
with a final barked expletive, and Abu thrust Khalid into the room. The
balaclava stormed in behind them.  He took a moment to compose himself,
then spoke again in Khalid's direction through clenched teeth. The
young guard shook his head furiously, intent on making amends.

"I have made a bad mistake.  The literature is not necessary.  It is
not authorized, not allowed.  I am not permitted to give it away to
you."  He looked distraught, a failure before the boss, neutered before
his captives, unable to meet anybody's eye.

More quietly, he continued, "You must give back every copy to me
now."

"Man," sighed Clay, 'and I was so into it, too.  You're talented,
Khalid, know that?"

"Definitely."  Kate nodded.

Ethan found the contradictions too knotted to unpick.  On the one hand
he felt for Khalid.  Such insults were enraging.  On the other his
ultimate allegiance was up the chain of command, to the balaclava.
There had to be a reason for his intervention, yet none would come.  It
was easiest to stare back at the pamphlet and drink in more of the
incantation.

"There is ample literature in the public domain about Israeli-Indian
collaboration in many areas for everyone to see that they are swine.
Against such a force we are in struggle to overcome without the same
might.  We rely instead on the bigger heart'

Khalid was scuttling about the room now, retrieving copies.  George's
lay unopened beside him, where it had fallen.  Clay handed his back
with a weary smile.  Picking up the others, the young guard became a
prefect, collecting tests.  Shame coloured his cheeks above the line of
his thin beard, and Ethan recognized this as humility.  Kate inevitably
made matters worse.  She looked away in disdain, refusing to help by
offering her copy up.  Khalid had to pull it out from under her leg.
Pearls before ... that was the point, Ethan saw.  They'd been offered a
glimpse through the curtain, a chance, and collectively they'd blown
it.  Why else would the balaclava have ordered this retraction?  He
felt torn; handing his own thumbed copy back was like giving up his
passport all over again, and yet, since he was among the undeserving,
he could expect no different treatment.

"If not our supporter, then the person is an enemy.  They are
committing ineffable crimes against all of humanity.  Everybody is a
part.  We have no choice except the fight."

Taking the bundle of booklets back from Khalid, the balaclava's stare
seemed to bore straight through him.  He clipped the boy across the top
of the head and shoved him through the open door, then turned to glare
at each of them in turn.  Ethan could not be sure whether or not his
nod of understanding was answered in the leader's narrowed eyes.

Fifty-three.

"Rip it, if you have to.  Pull it out!"

That made no sense.  Though he had more than his fair share, they'd
never get him to give up any of his blankets.  At least they had each
other's warmth.  Kate and Diane lay on either side of Jan; Ethan and
Clay framed the triumvirate.  Only George stayed apart, shut inside his
blackened head cloths.  Coming to, Kate felt vaguely resentful.  The
bitterness latched onto those bandages as she awoke.  Why did he refuse
to take them off, even now?  Though she tried, she could not picture
the outline of his face.

"Get it out of me!"

Kate opened an eye and fought her hands free to roll up a sleeve. There
was just enough grey light to check Clay's watch.  Six twelve. Movement
along the row distracted her from its face.  She sat up to see Diane
the spat words were hers -struggling with a nightmare beneath the
sheet.

"Cut!  Cut!"

There wasn't much point in waking her wherever she was, here wasn't
better.  Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, Kate looked down at the slab
of Ethan's turned back.  Though he'd conceded that it made sense to
sleep close, away from his perverse daytime position beneath the
window, he remained a rigid bookend throughout each night.  On her
other side, Jan lay curled tight as a fist.  Despite the flat dawn
light and his wispy beard, shadows hollowed the planes of his face.  In
the last few days his delirium had become more constant, and he'd begun
to breathe through the permanent "O' of an open mouth.  Each new in and
out seemed a shallower sip than the last.

"The head's stuck!  Cut!  Tear it out!"

Now the disturbance was annoying, but since Diane lay beyond Kate's
reach, she could not shake her awake.  Or preferred not to.  Lately the
girl had grown yet harder to read, liable to outbursts aiming her
animosity at Clay mostly -through sharpened teeth.  Kate feared their
bite.  Sensing her own cowardice now, she rebelled against it and made
herself say, "Shh!"

Diane threw back her blanket and sprang to her feet.  The whites of her
eyes flashed around the full circumference of dilated pupils.  Her
shrunken chest heaved.  "Shut the fuck up yourself.  I'm the one it
happened to.  I'm the one that needs the knife."

Kate flinched, startled to see Diane awake.

"The head needs cutting off.  Stuck up, where that bastard '

"Calm down, Diane.  It's OK."  The sleep was thick in Clay's voice.  He
reached a hand in her vague direction.

"Nothing's OK.  You know nothing any more!  They know.  They have the
picture."  Her voice was at a shriek now, wavering madly.  Ethan
stirred behind Kate as Diane kicked Clay's hand away.  "You!"  She
glowered at Kate.  "You of all people should understand.  For all
anybody knows a bearded head needs cutting out of you, too!"

Kate saw Clay's expression as he woke to take in this out burst.  The
affable front had yet to form.  Instead a slackness in his mouth
combined with something beyond dismay in his eyes, a torpor aimed at
Diane which said: I give up.  Broken free.  The sight was gratifying a
brief warmth flooded Kate.  She felt the shape of Jan slump sideways
like tipped ballast as Clay, a mask of composure configuring, rose
stiffly to his knees.

"Come on, calm down."  Again he reached out to take Diane's hand.  She
wrenched away from his grip.

Tuck off!"

Beside Kate, Jan summoned enough breath to groan.  Diane thrashed
harder against Clay's weight, all elbows and wiry limbs.  He lurched
woodenly after her.  Both of them passed in front of the window and
gained the middle of the floor, ballroom dancing.  Kate felt the
blankets shift behind her: Ethan turning.  Though Clay tried to placate
Diane, she was possessed.  The mat of her hair stuck out from either
side of her face, rigid as a hat brim, accentuating the brittle jerking
of her head.

"All of you.  Cut them out!  Cut '

Clay's shouted over her, patience shot.  "Cut?  Cut?  What are you
talking about?  You're out of your mind.  Hear me?  Out of your mind!
Cut it out, yourself!"

At this Diane strained backwards, dragging him across the room, her
neck and head whipping with each frantic stride.  Clay fell towards
her.  They collided and stuck together, he clutching her for support
and she pushing against him with her nose pressed into his right ear.
Clay yowled and then Ethan was upon them, trying to separate the pair,
twisting and yanking, and it was obvious as they spun again through the
light that Diane was fixed to Clay, locked to his neck with clenched
teeth.  Kate yelled, "Stop!"  but panic made her unable to get up, let
alone help.  Clay let fists fly and kicked out and stumbled again with
Diane and then without her, Ethan the referee now embroiled in the
fight, the three of them falling in all directions.  Ethan tripped
backwards to stamp, heavy booted, into Jan's hollow stomach.

Kate saw: the twin horseshoes of Diane's raw bite mark below Clay's ear
as his hand rose to meet the shape; Diane on all fours, head down,
mid-pant; Ethan, still off balance, trampling Jan and beginning to
fall; Jan's eyes full of fright as he folded further to clutch at his
groin through Ethan's legs; and lastly the impossible sight of George's
bandaged face following Ethan's course as he tripped backwards and
slammed into the boards.

"Boots," gasped Jan.

Diane hissed.  "Your fault, Clay.  It was done to me because of you."

Kate was still staring at George.  Blank once more.  He rolled slowly
to face the wall again, a whale disappearing back into the deep.  She
turned back through Clay, saw him lift his hand gingerly away from his
neck to inspect the blood at his fingertips.  He caught her eye shook
his head, bewildered.  "It's OK.  But, Jesus.  The bitch bit me!"  His
wince faded into silent, hopeless laughter.  "As in chewed me, with her
teeth!"

Stretched out, felled timber, Ethan groaned, lifted his head, let it
drop to the boards again with a wooden thump.  "Fucking unbelievable,"
he whispered.  The out thrust V of his boot soles wagged once, just
inches from Jan's face.

"Ran.  Kicking.  Why Ethan?  On me."  Jan rambled, found the thread
and, as the lock rattled in the metal door, sewed a sentence.  Barely
audible, but it sounded like a question.  "Why is he wearing Rafi's old
boots?"

Fifty-Four.

As Ethan suspected, all he had to do was watch Kate closely before her
turn.  Though it felt cruel, the cruelty was mitigated because it had a
point.  Everyone would benefit from his vigilance and firmness in the
long run.  Loyalty is its own reward.  And, anyway, indulging Kate's
weakness wasn't a serious option.  So he sat close to the spot and kept
his eyes fixed and unblinking on her face, rising above her
frustration, until eventually she gave up and time ran out and she had
to set off to the bathroom empty-handed.

Funny how you could learn a lesson at such a long distance.  For years
he'd blanked the memory of his silence before the doctor but, looking
back, it was obvious he'd been right to keep quiet all along.  The GP
was bald and the skin on his head was blotchy beneath the strip light,
giving him the look of a diseased apple, yet he had a kind smile.  He
made Ethan's mother sit in the waiting room behind her dark glasses,
saying, "You're a big enough boy; let's have you in on your own, shall
we?"

The little gloved fists and shields and bayonets said you should be
brave and they were right there when Ethan, seeing his mother stiffen
as he stepped past her with the doctor, shut his eyes.  "OK," he said
in a firm voice, yet wilting inside.

Happily, the day before he'd not fallen to the temptation of a
confrontation on the spot when, suspicions confirmed, he'd spied Kate
slipping the exercise book out from under her sweatshirt.  Furtive as a
pickpocket, she stooped to slide it in one practised movement into the
gap beneath the skirting board.  Indignation swamped Ethan immediately,
but the idiocy of Kate taking such a risk stunned him silent.  How the
hell had she got hold of a notebook in the first place?  Now, though
the anger had gone, there was still the question of what to do with the
evidence.  The next step should have been obvious, but Ethan found it
hard to cross the room and act.  He sat, mesmerized by a song Clay was
whistling, which somehow held him back.

The doctor had been like the balaclava, in charge.  He'd told Ethan to
take off his shirt for the injection and then turned his bare arm
between moist fingers.  The bruises were a map yellow desert, purple
sea, brown earth.  "Hmm," he'd said.  "What have we here?"

Here, we had a simple decision to make.  If he left the pad in its
hiding place he'd have to stop Kate taking it again the next day.
Though he could probably manage that, she might retrieve it in the
night or when he was next gone from the room.  And if that happened one
of the guards might catch her red-handed.  An untenable risk.  He could
try to take her aside and talk her round, but what if she refused to
give the thing up?  There'd be another scene.  Best to act now, take
the evidence with him during his trip to the washroom, flush it page by
page down the toilet, and head the problem off entirely.  That was
leadership, after all, being decisive.  Taking responsibility in a
crisis, making the covering tackle, being the safe pair of hands.  What
was his problem then?  Why not do it now?

"Looks like somebody's been in the wars."  The doctor's glasses went
blank, reflecting his angle poise lamp, and then his cheerful eyes were
back again.  "You've not much shoulder left for me to aim at."

"Dead arms at school," Ethan had explained.

"Really?  A big lad like you?"

"Uhuh."

"Want to give me the other arm then?"

Ethan complied.  He looked down too, saw more of the same, heard the
doctor breathe in through his teeth.

That the notebook meant something truly significant to Kate, Ethan did
not doubt.  But he had to overcome that hurdle.  It was just further
evidence of her dangerous insistence on living in the old world.
Different rules applied there.  Later he'd explain.  You could want to
be a journalist and keep a notebook and fill it with little
observations in a time before the balaclava, but to do so now was
unhinged.  This new world wouldn't fit on the pages.  The propaganda
had been proof of that.  Poor old Khalid!  If you taunted the boss with
written words, anything might happen.  Which made Ethan's decision yet
more obvious: in destroying the evidence he'd be doing Kate a favour, a
cruel kindness.  One day, she'd see and thank him.  Yet still he found
himself hanging back.

The doctor fiddled with his wrappers on the little tray of capsules,
wipes and medical instruments.  His hands looked too big.  Ethan stared
at the ensemble and saw an in-flight meal.  A fork instead of a
syringe, a mini UHT milk instead of the vial of drugs.  This was
probably a test.  The doctor would report back.  It was therefore very
important not to flinch.  Ethan puffed his white chest out and sat up
straight like a soldier, yet the plastic seat cover stuck to the backs
of his legs.

"My dad's a doctor too," he said.

"Oh yes?"

"In the forces.  He's a colonel."

"That sounds grand."

Now there was a new problem: Clay's tune was over, which meant the
minutes were slipping by.  How long had he sat prevaricating?  Unless
he retrieved the notebook immediately, the opportunity might be lost.
Propelled by this fear, Ethan marched Rafi's unlaced boots across the
room, left right left, steeling himself with the thought that,
sometimes, you have to hurt those you love to protect them.  Those were
the doctor's orders after all.

"I think we'd better try a leg."

Obediently, Ethan dropped his boxer shorts to reveal a chunky white
thigh.

The doctor said, "That's better," then started an unconvincing
conversation about football while he twisted off caps, drew the syringe
full and flicked the needle.  He needn't have bothered with the
diversion.  Ethan was determined to be brave regardless, and barely
registered the scratch when it came.  The swab afterwards was hot then
immediately cold.  "Done," smiled the doctor, 'but before you go, why
don't we have a chat about those arms with your mum?"

"No!"

The big man sat back down in his swivel chair, his piebald head
dropping to Ethan's level.  Man to man.  "OK, OK.  But maybe you can
help her by telling me about what's going on behind those
sunglasses?"

On his haunches, Ethan rocked forwards to inspect the crack, made out
the grey spine of the notebook shadowed in the recess.  His blunt
forefinger was too big.  Fearing he might prod the book further back,
out of reach, he lowered himself to his chest and stomach for a better
look, poked a pinkie into the crevice and pressed down.

"What are you up to?"

With the gap at eye level, it was straightforward enough to drag the
notebook forward an inch until a corner of its cardboard cover stuck
out into the room.  Pulling the book out the way was easy after that.
Having made his mind up to intervene, the practical act felt less like
a violation.  It was simply necessary.

"Ethan.  What are you trying to do?"

Rocking back up onto one knee, Ethan turned to see Clay standing above
him.  "Nothing.  It's not important."

"To you, maybe not."  A cartoon-like look of concern wide eyes, mouth
open had taken hold of Clay's face.  "But have a heart.  Put the thing
back."

Ethan was computing.  So this guy knew.  He understood what the
notebook was, despite Ethan's cramming it, bent double, down the front
of his shin, into the top of Rafi's army boot.  Which put Clay in
Kate's league of stupidity and signalled a faltering of the last likely
ally.  George gone, Diane mad, Jan sinking.  Kate..  . Kate.  Clay was
still reasonable, except that now he clearly wasn't.  He didn't have a
clue.  This wasn't about rights for God's sake.  The American's jaw was
working furiously, the scraggy blond beard around his mouth bristling
in apparent consternation, yet whatever he was saying was just so much
noise.  No, it wasn't about rights, not rights at all: obligation was
the thing.

The doctor had been trying to explain something similar.  He unhooked
his glasses from one ear, then another, revealing tired little grooves
on either side of his nose, and wiped each lens on his tie.  His eyes,
naked, were bigger and softer still.

"You really should speak up if you know something, son.  Otherwise
it'll just get worse.  Really, you should."

Though the memory had pained him ever since, it was pleasing to look
back now and know his instinctive loyalty had been right, he'd done a
good thing.

"I'm not your son," was all he said.

Now Clay knelt too.  The thin line of his lips was almost blue with
cold, though the blood crept back into them with his attempt at a
reassuring smile.  He took a long time to speak.

"Think about this, Ethan.  You don't need to take that away from her."
He pointed at the edge of notebook sticking out of Ethan's boot.
"You're not playing fair."

Clay's teacherly tone was infuriating in its condescension, but the
balance remained tipped in favour of pity.  The poor guy didn't
understand.  Playing fair!  Sometimes you had to forfeit a point in the
interest of the wider championship.  Ethan folded his arms across his
chest, resting thick wrists on his raised knee and, as if to underline
the implacability of his position, said nothing.  Later he was ashamed
of his complacency, which allowed Clay to make such an audacious play,
but at the time he was simply astonished by Clay's sleight of hand: one
minute he was smiling calmly, the next his fingers whipped out for the
notebook, grabbing the cover and, luckily for Ethan, landing a fistful
of military leather tongue, too.  He pulled hard enough to drag Ethan's
foot a few inches across floor and then Ethan had hold of his forearm
with one hand and a bunch of crumpling pages in the other.  He shouted,
"No!"  and thought the follow-up "Help .. . protect..  . herself (the
doctor, glasses slotted back into position, had explained such a
concept long ago) but it was too late.  The staples popped and a flock
of double spreads, dense with feathery scrawl, fell limply to the
floor.

"Jesus, Ethan!"  Clay scrabbled for the pages.  "What the fuck did you
do that for?"

"Me?  Me!"

Then the worst of all possible worlds.  One of Sadiq's grey trainers
landed out of nowhere with a soft but emphatic thud on a sheaf of
splayed paper.

"Give."

Diane burst out laughing.  "Got you!  Ha ha."

The guard seemed to be trying to contain himself in his triumph.  He
puffed himself up and demanded, "Who is this?"

The question was of course whose and Ethan understood precisely that
Sadiq had to ask it and, now that he'd done so, must receive an answer.
Nobody said anything, but no answer would not do.  The trainer tapped
out an impatient beat and Ethan's anger at Clay ground into the wall of
a new dilemma.  For Kate had stepped into the room and was sinking to
her knees, tilting further forward now onto two splayed palms, each
planted on its separate dirty floorboard.  Turning back, Clay's face
was short-circuiting inches from his own, and once again the train of
allegiance and loyalty and leadership and bravery had skipped the
tracks and was jackknifing in his chest.  This wasn't his notebook or
his fault.  Yet the chain of command made him responsible all the same.
He'd been blind to the crime for too long and once he'd discovered it
he'd not dealt with the problem adequately, which made him to blame.
Clay let go of his half of the notebook.  Ethan gathered up the pages
and stood to hand them over.

"Me," he said, tapping his chest.  "Mine."

Fifty-Five.

Kate didn't notice Sadiq lead Ethan from the room.  One minute he was
there, picking up the pages of her journal, and then the floor was
empty.  Her head was cold.  She regretted having tried to wash her hair
in the basin.  Shutting her eyes, she saw the water uncurling from the
tap again, oily as iced vodka.  While she sat, not looking, not taking
in the fact of what she'd witnessed, a dribble leaked from the root of
her improvised ponytail, ran down the back of her neck, and drew a
frozen line between her shoulder blades.

Deep down, a part of her had always suspected they would catch her out
with the journal eventually.  Yet to have it happen was crushing.  When
she turned towards Clay she found him shaking Diane by the shoulders.
Diane's blonde hair was flicking back and forth on either side of her
upturned chin, lips apart, giggling in his face.  It almost looked as
if he was rattling the laughter into existence until he raised an open
hand and abruptly the noise stopped.

The same hand was on Kate's shoulder now, drawing her close.  V

"Come on.  In the scheme of things Clay was saying.

It was strange to have her head stroked and to hear such soothing
words, but to begin with they had no effect.  She felt numb.  The
hunger and cold, weakness and fear, were suddenly overwhelming, too
much to take in.  Now the journal was gone there was no evidence to
refer to, no scale to measure the misery against.  And yet to be held
this way a hand on the back of the neck, lips pressed to the forehead
was old and new at once, and comforting.  More words broke in.

"It was an accident," Clay pleaded.  "He didn't mean it."

Which was sweet, really, and ironic because until that moment the loss
had been more than enough to concentrate on.  She hadn't got around to
apportioning blame.  In trying to excuse Ethan, though, Clay in fact
helped her to the opposite conclusion.  Ethan had handed her journal to
Sadiq.  In doing so he had wilfully betrayed her.  That much was
plain.

Down the corridor somebody switched on a radio and ran the volume up
until the song began to fragment.  Still, the tune was recognizable, a
snatch of something sickly, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, from Cats.  Clay's
face, inches from her own, saying, "Fuck, real torture," made her
laugh, which was entirely inappropriate, and yet irrelevant all the
same because a shout of pain broke through the din.

She recoiled, appalled by her own reaction, for the yell made sense.
Ethan deserved to suffer and she felt better for hearing him in pain.
He owed her, not just for the journal, but for having walled himself in
behind the plane of his turned back, night after night.  The scream was
the sound of those debts being repaid.

As soon as this malevolence registered, however, she was engulfed by
guilt and sought a way to disown herself.  Since Clay's face hovering
before hers represented a betrayal as wrong as the thought itself, she
jerked back from its lips.  Jumping to her feet, she ran at the metal
door and began hammering upon it with clenched fists.

"It's not his!  Stop!  The report is mine!"

Reaching the song's finale, the speakers gave up.  The corridor became
a cacophony of snare drums, drowning out Kate's accompaniment entirely
as Clay hauled her back from the door.

Fifty-Six.

Ethan allowed Sadiq to march him the length of the corridor.  He'd
taken an irreversible step; there would be time enough later to
reconsider why.  For now there were more immediate questions to
consider, like how square to hold his shoulders as he walked ahead of
the guard, while keeping his eyes respectfully low.

Throwing open the door to the guards' quarters, Sadiq revealed Khalid,
belly down on the rug, and Abu, sprawled in his socks on the couch,
both of them watching TV.  A cheerful fire glowed in the stove.  The
scene looked very Sunday afternoon.  As Abu rose in annoyance to shut
the screen off, Ethan felt guilty of some social blunder.  He tried to
take a step backwards to acknowledge the interruption, but Sadiq
stiff-armed him onwards, gabbling excitedly all the while.  On reaching
the middle of the room he forced Ethan to kneel down, then waved the
pages of manuscript in his face before handing them triumphantly to
Abu.  A pace or two in front of Ethan, the guards conversed.  Since
they were not speaking English, he focused on faces.  Abu, stroking his
beard, scrutinized one page and then another, yet holding them
upside-down.  Clearly he could not read Kate's scrawl.  Khalid was
initially keen to inspect a few pages but, having turned up the cover
of the exercise book, handed the lot back to Abu, as if fearful that
their contents might be infectious.  His sad face said Ethan's failing
was a personal slight; Ethan wished he could tell him the truth.

"Where are you getting this from?"  Abu rolled the exercise book into a
baton and slapped Ethan across the face with it.

The question was a good one.  Ethan had no convincing answer and found
himself shrugging.

Abu repeated both the question and the slap.

"I don't know."  Nothing else came to mind.  Abu laughed and smacked
him left and right again.  Though his face stung, the real hurt was in
having to lie like this to the guards.  They'd never been anything
other than straight with him and this was how he repaid their
leadership.  The paradox became startlingly clear in the gap between
the next two blows: past wrongs meant that Ethan owed it to Kate to
take the blame, yet until these men had shown him the meaning of
loyalty, sacrifice, love, he'd never have bothered.  More blows rained
down, and all clear thought evaporated, leaving simple shame.  The
indignity was crushing and it was Kate's fault.  Abu tossed the
battered roll of paper aside and, warming to the task, delivered a
series of harder slaps with the flat of his open hand.  Though the
repeated question kept coming, Ethan couldn't think of a better
response.  In a way it was the truth.  Jarred left and right, his wits
clouding, it was as much as he could do to stick to the original
answer.  "I don't know."

There was a pause, in which the room stopped spinning.

"I am sorry," Ethan said.  "Honestly, I apologize."

"Too late for that," replied Abu, turning to confer with Sadiq, who
stood with his arms folded proudly across his belly.  He'd done a good
job.  In the balaclava's absence the next step seemed to be his and
Abu's decision.  Before them,

Khalid deferred.  He bent to retrieve the journal from where Abu had
thrown it.  The two older guards boomed at one another in heated
discussion, but Khalid, looking furtive, edged away.  Ethan watched in
astonishment as he sidled across the rug and, with an eye on Abu and
Sadiq all the while, tossed the roll of paper into the open stove.  For
the long seconds before the journal caught alight Ethan could do
nothing but stare at the shape of it lying amongst the flames and then,
when it was too late, he saw the facts plainly.  The diary was proof of
a crime that must be paid for and Khalid was destroying the evidence
because he was implicated.  Ethan shouted, "No!"  and, as the plume of
smoke above the papers became flame, he found himself lunging past Abu
towards the stove.  It was the right thing to do.  Yet the big guard
was too quick for him.  Ethan felt the shock a proper punch across the
side of his head and fell in a heap.

He was a long way from the action now.  There was an argument and he
was in the middle of it, but somehow he'd become unimportant at the
same time.  The diary was ashes and smoke, and flames were coming out
of Abu's ears, yet Khalid appeared to be holding his own.  Not
important, his shrugging shoulders seemed to say.  Better for all of us
if the thing is burned.  And though Ethan knew beyond doubt that Khalid
had given Kate the exercise book, there seemed no point in saying so;
the failing was obviously disappointing and yet Khalid's youth made it
inevitable that he'd commit the odd blunder.  He was a kind,
intelligent kid, learning the rules.  Like a younger brother, really.
Which made it up to Ethan to help show him the way.  No point at all in
making an enemy.  The balaclava was a strict father, and would want

Sadiq to place a paw under each of Ethan's arms and drag him upright
and haul him through into the far room.

The bulge of the guard's stomach pressed comfortingly into the small of
Ethan's back and then it wasn't there and Ethan was swaying in his
boots which were a present.

Far room.  Hammer.

The word made you want to flinch, but by staying stoical, in fact, you
could enforce the special link.  It was most important not to sit down.
Khalid was nowhere to be seen and Abu was rolling up his sleeves and
the silver teeth were still poking from the rafters in the mirror,
there, but as the blows began they were just soft fists and more
slapping.  If only Kate could see his sacrifice now.  The same
question, over and over again.  Which made it easier and easier to keep
on repeating the same answer.  Poor old Abu: his heart wasn't in it.
One two three.  His face was wet.  A pause for breath.  Four five
six.

The youngster would know that Ethan was taking the rap for Kate.  That
had to be a good thing.  Already he was trying to help.  He'd started
some music playing, to take Ethan's mind off the hardship.  Between
blows, Rachel sprang to mind, and that made a sense of sorts.  Was this
his punishment?  Might it help with the guilt?  The song was all
wailing.  It made it easier to cry out.  Yes, there'd be time enough
later to prove again his allegiance to the cause.  Abu and Khalid and
Sadiq under the balaclava's command and Ethan, he was part of the squad
too.  As Abu worked him over, pummelling his chest, raining down blows
on his head, neck and shoulders, the connection grew stronger.  Nobody
wanted this, but for now it was everybody's job to knuckle down.  Ethan
doubled up, winded, and consequently more intimately involved. Enduring
this would make him stronger.  A bib of sweat stuck Abu's shirt to the
barrel of his chest.  In the mirror, drawing himself straight, Ethan's
front was dark red.  They'd forgive him for sinking to his knees now.
All part of the display of rigour and self-sacrifice, which was
necessary and bearable and over.

Sweat shone in the big man's beard.  One thought blotted out all
others, dwarfing pain.  This was a let-off, a tacit kindness, and by
not retaliating Ethan had proven himself grateful; he had passed a
test.  With any luck the balaclava would hear of his bravery.  The
discussion now was probably about that.

Sadiq yanked Ethan to his feet once again, and escorted him back
through the guard's room and along the corridor.  Patchwork cork boards
scrolled by.  For an odd moment, he was leading Ethan by the ear
towards a school detention, which made sense because the punishment was
for a greater good, the rough hand twisting his ear was in fact loving
and on his shoulder, helping him to a better version of himself.
Approaching the threshold, Ethan swayed to one side to allow Sadiq to
work the lock, dimly aware of an impending hero's welcome.  It had all
turned out for the best.  He'd shown courage to Abu, obedience to
Sadiq, self-sacrifice to Khalid.  Threads in a tapestry of love.  And
to his fellow captives he'd demonstrated leadership and a willingness
to take responsibility.  The bloody nose and swollen eyes would look
good.  He drew himself to attention as the door came open and was
preparing to march when Sadiq grabbed him by the arm and slung him
roughly forward, too fast for his feet, to crash headlong across the
boards.  That was surprising and uncalled for and then obviously all
part of the bigger picture, a dramatic entrance to drive the point
home.  It was important to overcome the indignity swiftly, but daft
that a single press-up, from the knees, could be so un feasibly hard.

"You," a voice was saying, 'all of you."

Ethan managed to twist round and saw that Abu had followed them into
the room.  Despite the grey half light, his eyes gleamed.  He was still
breathing hard.  An outstretched finger swept round the four walls,
taking them all in, returning to Ethan last.  It was a convincing
portrayal of unhinged menace which, for reason's momentarily beyond
Ethan, the big guard seemed determined to prolong.

"This man tells lies.  He did a crime.  Means everybody must have a
punishment."

He strode across to George, who, as usual, was lying with his face to
the wall, and kicked him hard in the small of the back.

"Up Mr.  George," he panted.  "Starting with you."

Fifty-Seven.

Kate was kneeling before him.  Her voice started up.  He tried to
listen, but the pain drowned everything else out.  Shards of wet black
hair fell forwards to frame her anger, and her beautiful soft mouth was
working to express it, yet he couldn't understand her.  He smiled
anyway, but that was not what she wanted.

"Why did you do it?  Why, why?"

He managed to stand, let her corral him beyond the buttress.  She was
still going on.  "What could my diary possibly matter to you?"

Where should he begin?  It was about the balaclava, not her.  Obedience
and rank, loyalty and leadership.  He steadied himself, holding her by
the wrists.  An overwhelming urge to speak plainly pressed in on him.
It would be a relief, frankly, finally to have done with the charade.
And yet the old laws still stood.  Think of the doctor with his blotchy
head.  It was necessary to keep things from people, even if you wanted
to let them know.

Rachel had tried to break the rule.  A glass in one hand, naked but for
the towel around her chest, she wove back into the bedroom after
answering the buzzer.

"Never guess who it is.  Your boring little girlfriend.

Unannounced, on a Sunday afternoon.  Surely she should still be in
church?"

He crossed the hall to stare at the intercom screen.  Then, as now,
Kate was right there and so far away.  A black and white astronaut,
seen from ground control.

"Get back here and tell her you'll call her later.  You're not up yet.
Put her off."

"Really, you think I should?"

"If you don't, I'm gone.  It'll be the last you see of me."

"My, my.  A threat.  Maybe I'm bored with you.  I bet she will be too
when she finds out."

He took the glass from her hand and put it down.  Forcing a smile in
spite of himself, he whispered, "You're not going to do that."

"Do what?  I didn't say I was going to do anything."

"We had an ... understanding."

"Ha!  Is that what you call it?  Suddenly so formal, and I thought we
were just messing around."

He kept his voice flat with feigned boredom.  "You know what I mean."

"Do I?  You're sure about that?"

"You said you could cope with this.  If it turns out you can't '

"No.  That was your boast.  I was high and willing.  I just agreed to
spread my legs."

"And now you really want to tell her that?"

Rachel rolled her eyes and shrugged.  "She'll find out sooner or later.
Bound to, somehow."

Though he doubted it was real, her voice rang with a metallic
conviction, and the sound of it made everything suddenly clear.  The
perverse thrill of encompassing both Kate and Rachel dried up inside
him as she spoke.  Although, at the time, he had felt no guilt at
having deceived Kate with her sister, he now realized that, of the two
of them, only she mattered.  Rachel pirouetting in her towel became
irrelevant again: the act had always been transparent but the seductive
ness had bled from it; now she was tiresome not titillating. Still, he
had to force himself to keep calm.  He sighed and said, "We both agreed
she didn't have to know."

Rachel fell towards him, her breath hot and sharp.  "Did we, Ethan?
Well, everything changes."  She righted herself and spun away towards
the buzzer, stretching theatrically.

"Don't you fucking '

"A dare!  That settles it."  She pressed the switch.

The building had just one set of stairs.  In the time it took Kate to
climb them, Ethan made a decision.  He threw himself and his clothes
into the wardrobe.  That he'd so abase himself for this farcical, last
hope, was a revelation, and in this way Rachel's stunt proved something
he'd never otherwise have known.

He waited, crushed amongst designer suits, while Rachel, suddenly
sober, strung the agony out, pretending her way through two telephone
conversations, and engineering a pointless argument with Kate.  At one
point it sounded like the pair of them were entering the bedroom.  When
her sister left, Rachel flung back the wardrobe door, dropped the towel
to the floor, and fell laughing onto the bed.

"Your face!"

Kate's anger had burned out.  He gathered himself, reaching for the
utter calmness with which he'd dressed before Rachel that day.  Back
then it had spoken for him.  Rachel raised herself on one elbow, her
laughter fading.  She pulled the duvet across her bare chest with a
defensiveness echoed by Kate now, slumped on the boards behind folded
arms.  He stared down at her, righteousness and truth singing in his
ears, making it so tempting to explain how the old duplicity had begun
to fade even before he discovered this new regime.  But that was the
thing about Kate, her charm almost.  Though she thought otherwise, she
couldn't bear much reality.  You had to dull its edges for her.  She
was repeating Rachel now, but crying, not laughing.

"Your face, Ethan.  Your face."

Fifty-Eight.

Sometime during the night Kate woke to feel Jan cold beside her.  When
she tried to move his arm the rest of him turned too, pressing his
stone cheek into her neck.  She was unable to break the silence, and
instead lay as still as he was, stricken with fear and guilt, until
dawn.  Only then, when Clay stirred at the other end of the line, could
she find the courage to speak.  And when she did it turned out that
Diane was awake and listening and immediately became hysterical: the
band-saw began again and did not stop until Khalid poked his head
around the door to ask, "What?"

After the day of the beatings, Jan's death was inevitable.  He never
regained consciousness to eat.  What rice she and Clay pushed into his
mouth either fell out immediately or was coughed clear later.  Most of
the water seemed to dribble back out too.  The thin shape of his hand,
pressed between hers, felt as brittle as slate.

Sadiq and Khalid were back in the room, unfolding a new pink sheet.
Ethan stopped his pacing to watch, looking almost as if he'd like to
help.  Clay had his head in his hands.  He was moaning, "No, no, no,"
which was understandable and annoying at the same time.  What did he
expect to happen?  Jan was eager and harmless and petrified and
therefore dead.  They'd killed him.  His eyes weren't quite shut, yet
the delicate rim of their parted lids was blue.  Kate felt her own eyes
fill with tears as she tried to think of something, anything,
reassuring to say.  In a way he was lucky, wasn't he?  No longer here,
no longer battling this.  But he was dead and she couldn't bring
herself to speak, and was instead distracted by the young guard
spreading his end of the cloth out on the floor.  His fingers shook
hard enough to send ripples back along its edge.  He knelt beside Kate
and began trying to ease Jan's hand out of her own.

"Fuck you," she whispered.

Now Khalid would not meet her eye at all, but when, finally, it had
been her turn to face the guards about the notebook, he'd ridden
blithely over her accusation.

"Khalid knows," she pleaded.  "He gave it to me."

"Not true.  Another story," was all the young guard had said.

"First Mr.  Ethan, then Mr.  Clay, now you!  Everybody lying."  Abu
laughed at her.

"No," she had tried to explain.  "Him.  He knows the truth."

Though Khalid tried to look nonchalant, even attempting a yawn, his
eyes flicking left and right and up and down would have given him away,
if only anybody had been interested.  As it was, they were either tired
out by the exertion of beating the men, or else squeamish about
assaulting her and intent on getting the punishment over with.  She had
spent the previous two hours spellbound with fear, trying to block the
memory of Diane's Polaroid, and saw sense now in not provoking a change
in the guards' outlook.  The notebook was her anchor and now it was
gone and she must try to carry on untethered.  The first slap across
the face stung.  By the sixth

Abu was yawning too.  And in under fifteen minutes she was back in the
room with the others again.

Ethan's smashed face looked much worse on her return.  One eye had
swollen to a black slit, jammed tight beside the pulped bridge of his
nose.  A beard of dried blood hung beneath his split cheek.  She
offered to clean his face, said, "Sorry," as he flinched from her first
touch.

"I accept the apology."

"What?"  She tipped more water onto a strip of sheet and paused with it
an inch from his face.

"Perhaps now we can start again with a clean slate."

"Clean slate?"

"You must see; they've kept their end of the bargain.  If the
punishments fit, so will the rewards.  You'll start complying now,
yes?"

The urgency in his tone made her bite down on the inside of her mouth.
She dabbed again at the cut on Ethan's cheek, hoping to snap him out of
it, but this time he didn't flinch.

"All I see is the mess they made of your face, Ethan.  I'm sorry it was
because of my journal, but they have to take the blame."  This was only
part of what she felt.  It wasn't, after all, as if she'd been caught
he'd betrayed her and must therefore shoulder at least some of the
responsibility for the hurt he'd brought upon them all.  She dabbed
again at the cut, but it did no good, didn't shift the bitterness
behind her own clenched teeth.

"But, you see, they had no choice.  Did they?"  He sounded exasperated.
"The rules say as much: a punishment to fit '

She interrupted.  "To fit what, Ethan?  Nothing fits.  That's the
point.  Please tell me you agree."  It was as though she were
whispering at him down an impossibly long corridor: she could see he
hadn't heard.  "What's the point of this?"  She pressed the open cut
hard, so that he had to draw away.  He raised his fingers to his face,
as if appreciating the wound for the first time.

"I-deserved it.  It's like I was trying to say.  A punishment for past
sins.  It redresses the balance between us.  It's my sentence for '

"Sentence?  Punishment?  What are you talking about Ethan?  They beat
everybody.  They beat you for nothing.  You need stitches.  This is
going to scar."

He smiled to himself, thinking something through.  "Well, exactly. Like
a tattoo.  A scar is all part of the uniform.  To mark an occasion.
Like a memory, or a vow.  A scar is for life."

She shrank from him at that; the glow in his eyes belonged to someone
else.  In the days that followed, as Jan sank beneath his mask of
bruises, it had increasingly to be Ethan's fault.  Yet he would show no
sorrow for what he'd done; if anything, he seemed almost to grow more
proud of it.  His only further comment, when confronted by Clay, was a
slurred phrase which included the words 'my initiative'.

The sheet before her was an improbably neat square of pink penicillin,
poured too late.  It couldn't help him now.  Khalid freed Jan's hands
and Sadiq took his feet, or rather hooked the backs of his knees.  With
some effort they levered and lifted and sidestepped and placed the body
squarely in the middle of the cloth.  Ethan had paced off to the far
end of the room and now stood in the winter sunlight, with his hands on
his hips, as the two guards began folding.  Kate looked up at his face
with tears rolling down her own and could be forgiven for thinking he
was overseeing the burial of a family pet.  Only George cared less.
Diane's head remained bowed, but Kate could still make out the shape of
her lips, furious behind a waterfall of hair: "Get it out of here," she
mouthed, over and over again.  Clay was kneeling down beside Kate and
drawing her to his side, which was fine because in this moment nothing
could be considered inappropriate.

Time passed.  It seemed the guards were wrapping a present.  Their
attempt to look respectful, folding the sheet in a neat corner around
Jan's feet, came out comically, though.  Any minute now Abu would
appear with ribbon.  Yes, they were wrapping up a present, never mind
that it was a week late.

Diane had been determined to celebrate Christmas; she was so adamant
that the guards would make some concessions in honour of the day that
Kate herself had almost been convinced.  Of course, she knew the date
was meaningless to them, yet each time the door opened it promised
anything from freedom to news from home to a hot meal, and delivered
nothing.  That one day made everything worse.  The guards couldn't have
crushed her expectations had Diane not raised them first.  A season of
ill will.  Christmas brought memories of home crowding forward, yet in
doing so it managed to push the reality further away.  The thought of
lying bloated on the couch in her mother's overheated little house,
inoculated from the grey afternoon with its frozen, leafless trees
waving at her through the double glazing, made the hunger and the
floorboards and the pinprick-hard snow gusting through the bars even
less bearable.  An odd thing happened: as the memory of normality made
that normality recede, it so accentuated the stark coldness of where
Kate was now that she grew numb.  Christmas day turned into Christmas
night and both the here and now and the there and then wavered,

threatening to cancel one another out entirely.  In the darkness,
cradling Jan's head in her lap, with Ethan less than twenty feet and a
million miles away, and Clay somehow out of bounds, she sat in a
trance, doubting everything.

The journal had helped to keep things real.  It was like her instructor
said: "You haven't flown the flight until it's written in your logbook.
Unrecorded time doesn't count."  Now the logbook was gone, there was no
proof that she had the flying hours, no testament to what had passed,
no space to record what was still to come.  The feeling was suddenly
claustrophobic.  Bringing the room back into focus, she saw that there
was a ribbon, Khalid had taken out a big needle and was sewing the
length of folded sheet shut.  His fingers were still shaking.  Watching
their progress, Sadiq clasped his hands beneath his belly and lowered
his head piously.  Rage burned in Kate's chest. Khalid's black thread
somehow made it up to Jan's chin and Sadiq now stooped to fold the
boyish face away.

Except that they should not be allowed to cover up Jan's face.  She
crawled forwards on all fours to intervene and, surprisingly, Khalid
stepped back.  Holding her hair in place with one hand she bent down
over Jan like a mother.  The skin beneath his eyes was purple, close
up.  She failed to stop the questions forming.  Would his beard
continue to grow?  Might it prosper finally, now that he was dead?  She
pressed her lips against his forehead.  Dry leaves against marble; the
combination felt real.  By the time she'd sat back up her own hands
were already tucking him in.

Fifty-Nine.

The window bars stood grey against the black sky like a set of shoulder
stripes.  Left, right, left, tramped the boots down below, marching him
back and forth at the head of the column, before row upon row of
floorboard troops.  If only his own squad weren't such a shambles. Even
after all this time and attention, they just got worse.  No wonder
headquarters appeared to be losing interest.  They were an
undisciplined riot.  About turn: left, right, left.

No use blaming the others entirely: their failings had to reflect his
leadership.  After all, rot spreads.  Hardly a day went by now when he
didn't try to take her aside and explain how he felt, but somehow he
always wound up giving a team talk instead.  She didn't make the
confession easy, staring at him like that as if he had two heads. There
was a hint of accusation in her eyes, which froze the important truths
before he had a chance to speak them, and yet until he confessed and
made her see his new love he'd only have himself to blame.

The balaclava had made just one trip to see them in the last couple of
weeks, but when he came, what a visit!  Uproar in the corridor, a real
setting to.  Ethan sat quietly to listen at the door crack, surmising
that the leader was angry to have lost a man.  No!  his shouting said,
he didn't like it, not one bit.  And of course How the fuck had they
let this happen?  he held the contingent of guards responsible.  You
had to feel sorry for Abu and his men.  Jan's weakness wasn't all their
fault.

Godlike, the balaclava intervened, and summoned a doctor to give the
rest a check-up.  The little medic was so old the hairs on the back of
his fingers were white, yet he had a leather bag, just like Dad, and
prescribed injections confidently.  It was tempting to tell the man
about the anger of his broken teeth and the sharpness just beneath his
ribs, but the balaclava and Sadiq were presiding so Ethan stripped to
the waist instead and stood straight, left hand gripping right wrist
behind his back.  When asked how he felt he dropped his gaze down his
chest and stomach.  The subcutaneous camouflage had faded, but was
still clearly visible, a precious uniform.  He focused on his boots.

Since then conditions had improved, in the form of doubled rations,
more clean water, extra blankets and near-constant heat.  But although
there was so much less to complain about, Kate's insubordinate streak
grew wider day by day.  Even Clay had his job cut out soothing her
round the clock.  The American had pared down well over time, a wiry
tenacity emerging as the remnants of his complacency fell away; the
diary incident and his girlish singing aside, he might make a competent
officer yet.  You had, after all, to look to a man's strengths.  Clay
was undoubtedly a calming influence upon Kate, and still did his best
with what remained of Diane.  In that way he was a foil.  Though Ethan
occasionally found his teeth grinding as he observed Clay pandering to
Kate, the American's methods were reconcilable to the greater good if
you thought about them in this way.

For there were more important matters to attend to and Ethan had to
tackle them alone.  His liaison role was delicate.

In view of the balaclava's concessions, it was up to him to express the
group's thanks, and not just in platitudes: such generosity
necessitated a similar act in return.  After much thought, Ethan made
his offer when escorted back from washroom detail, pausing in the
corridor with Khalid.

"I've been meaning to ask," he began.  "The literature you distributed
'

"Please, don't stop.  Keep moving."  The young guard looked nervous. He
pointed down the corridor, as if Ethan might have forgotten the way.

"I understand."  Ethan took a step forward, found himself pulling up
again despite the risk.  "But if you'd give me just a minute of your
time, I'd be grateful.  I want to make you an offer.  Think of it as a
grass-roots initiative.  Listening to the ranks."

Now the youngster just looked confused.  A knot moved in his throat and
his fingers pecked at one another.  He was equal parts authority and
kid brother again, and Ethan's deference was suddenly shot through with
tenderness.  He simply had to demonstrate his good will.

"You see, I get it, Khalid.  I appreciate what you were trying to do."
Ethan reached out to clasp the guard's khaki shoulder, which
stiffened.

"Please!  Move!"  The youngster spoke through bared white teeth.  He
looked unsettled, afraid almost, and his arm twitched beneath Ethan's
hand, which withdrew, fingers spread to placate.  A couple more steps
onwards were unavoidable, yet he would not allow himself to give up.
That was the point about taking the initiative it took courage.  As
Khalid yanked the key chain up from his belt and began jabbing at the
lock, Ethan tried again.

"Sure, it was an early draft.  A bit ragged at the edges.  In need of
attention.  But I saw past that.  Do you hear what I'm saying, Khalid?
I know what it meant for you to hand those copies out.  I
understood."

The guard opened the door with apparent relief.  Or perhaps his smile
was an invitation to go on.

"In."

Ethan, emboldened, chose not to respond immediately.  The poor guy was
embarrassed by the reference to his generosity.  There was something
bashful in his downcast eyes, which made Ethan press on.

"I'm offering to help, Khalid.  It was an easy mistake to make.  The
boss didn't want an early draft sent out, for obvious reasons.  He was
right about the others they weren't ready for the material in such a
raw state.  I get all that.  But think how pleased he'll be with the
improved version!  I'll go through the pamphlet for you.  Or, if you
like, we can tidy it up together.  Between us we'll prepare the thing
for redistribution."

The guard's hands paddled and pointed, directing traffic.  Again the
gesture suggested Ethan might not recognize the route home, which was
amusing, so Ethan smiled.  Khalid's bafflement in response was
definitely a front, though.  Ethan glanced right, through the door, and
got the point straight away.  Kate and Clay were sitting directly
opposite and, having paused mid stone game (how unbelievably
embarrassing), were staring at him like a pair of gargoyles.  Even
George had rolled over to face the door, his mouth open below the
bandages.  Which made it impossible for the youngster to respond to the
offer.  Ethan kicked himself for having made himself clear too late.
Khalid's understated in-you-go nod made sense

as did his demonstrative slamming of the door.  They would have to
continue the conversation in private at a later date.

"Tell me I didn't hear that right."  Kate's face was so pale with rage
that it seemed almost green.

Clay, head in hands, began to laugh.

"I'm not sure what you heard.  It was a private conversation."

"A what?"

"I was talking to Khalid."

"Yeah, I know.  You were offering to help translate the crap he handed
out.  What in God's name do you think that will achieve?"

She couldn't be expected to understand why he'd made the offer, but
this knee-jerk anger was disconcerting.  To himself, George was
growling, "And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise
up ... and the beast which I saw was like unto the leopard."  Ethan
opened his mouth to reply to Kate, then shut it again without saying
anything.

"You're trying to drive a wedge between them, right?"  offered Clay.
"Get Khalid to dish up more of his dissertation and maybe the
balaclava'll fire him or something."

He couldn't stop himself this time.  "I'm doing no such thing."

Clay seemed not to have heard.  His hopeless laughter started up again,
then stopped abruptly.  "All well and good, but you'd be better off
getting rid of one of the other two.  Khalid's harmless.  He's their
least offensive player."

George: "And they worshipped the beast, saying who is like unto the
beast?  Who is able to make war with him?"

Kate cut in.  "Were you, or weren't you, trying to trick him into
something ... advantageous, for all of us?"

"Exactly that."

"Then what was it?"

Ethan could feel the pulse in his neck hammering with excitement.
Perhaps there was hope in explaining after all.  He struggled to think
of the right way forward.

Kate continued.  "Because we ought to talk it through first.  You can't
just start making unilateral decisions, taking action that might affect
all of us."

"Yes, yes, yes.  Every one of us.  Khalid included the whole unit.
There's a chain of command, see.  We have to work with '

Ethan trailed off.  George was still muttering his madness.  "He that
leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with
the sword must be killed with the sword.  Here is the patience and the
faith of the saints ..."  but Ethan's eyes were on Kate.  Her head was
in her hands and she was groaning.  Looking down at her sucked
something out of his chest, so that for long moments he found it hard
to breathe.

"You'll understand one day," he found himself saying.  "One day, I
promise, I'll get clearance to explain."  But she was shaking, not
listening, and a hot coal of sorrow burnt in his stomach for fear she'd
never see.  It was dismaying, her lack of foresight, his inability to
confide.  Yet he could not risk a scene and was instead forced to focus
on the basics.  He retreated to his post and, with a torn strip of
shirt tail (it didn't notice, tucked in), sat spit-polishing the mirror
he'd managed, over the weeks, to raise, in the toecap of each boot.

Remembering this now, Ethan stopped his pacing and undid his laces.
Stars had risen.  He sat beneath them listening for the sound of the
evening patrol.  Though the night watch had been reduced to just two
guards (one of the three left at dusk these days, no doubt to report to
the balaclava), discipline held.  Somebody always poked a head around
their door before extinguishing the corridor light.  It was a
comforting gesture, encouraging to know that they would be watched over
through the small hours.

The only noise at the moment, though, was George whispering to himself
as he sat cemented to the buttress.  After the diary beatings,
attending the doctor's surgery, he'd screamed bone-split loud and
returned with a new set of bandages for his trouble.  Since he couldn't
need them now, the episode was further evidence of the balaclava's
tolerance, giving away medical supplies to comfort a deluded invalid.

When Ethan had considered the embarrassment of having George in his
command, he'd made one last effort to help the guy shape up.  Braving
the stench, he'd offered to accompany him wall to wall on exercise.
"I'll be accompanying you up that fucker's arse hole soon enough," was
all the thanks he received for his efforts.  The man was a casualty of
the cause, awaiting evacuation.  Best to let him rot until then.

The fist felt strong bunched inside its leather house.  Ethan's other
hand returned to work, drawing out his oily reflection.

sixty.

Kate's hand ran across the stubble of a shorn head.  She burrowed
closer.  Warm breath blew into her ear.  She pressed her cheek against
a smooth jaw, comforted to have such a dream of the old Ethan, clean
shaven and comprehensible, and then it wasn't a dream because the
warmth came again and it was real.  Pulling through the last layers of
sleep, she felt the exhilaration of their early days, when the
tenderness he showed her was all the more intense for his apparent
coolness beforehand.  But there was a problem.  The arm around her was
slight and all wrong.  She opened an eye, confused, too close to the
face to make it out, and then the logic of its features overtook her.
Unlike Ethan, Clay had accepted the recent offer of a haircut and a
shave, and now looked the younger of the two.  She drifted again,
recalling how Clay had joked with Ethan.

"Like Samson, eh?  Hanging on to it for strength."

"True to form," was Ethan's nonsensical, mumbled reply.

Kate ran the words together.  Unshorn.  Uniform.  She brought the face
into focus again.  Chop logic.  Not Ethan, therefore wrong; Clay,
therefore not right.

Since Jan's death, the gap he'd left had shored itself up.  Bracketed
by Ethan and Diane, she and Clay slept close.  Kate suffered a familiar
contradiction of guilt and longing now, easing herself away from Clay,
careful not to disturb his sleep.

When she reached out for Ethan behind her, though, her cast hand just
found space.

She levered herself upright stiffly, the landing strip of floorboards
beneath her creaking in sympathy.  At the far end of the runway Ethan
sat cross-legged, fiddling with his boots.  Nevertheless, Kate made out
the fullness of his bearded face as it bobbed upon his chest.  For a
moment, as everything became clear, she was overcome with sorrow and
then the fact that he felt able to leave her in Clay's embrace pricked.
Still in her socks, she padded through the gloom and dropped down on
her haunches beside him.

"What are you up to so early?"  she whispered.

His hands stopped working.  "Keeping... you know ... in shape."

"Keeping what in shape for what?"

The whites of his eyes were ultraviolet.  They narrowed.

"We're shafted, Ethan.  They're going to keep us here until we die,
like Jan.  You realize that?"

He shook his head, whispering to himself, "Must take care of the
kit."

"And you're pandering to the bastards.  You've given in."

"No, no."  He laughed softly.  "There's a structure in place.  A battle
plan.  The chief's got it all worked out.  Have faith."

"What chief?  What are you on about?  Faith in what?"

Again his silhouetted head shook.  His tone was almost patronizing.
"You're not the pilot now, Kate.  Not captain.  Different ranks apply.
Try to understand that."

"Nobody's a fucking pilot.  These are terrorists, Ethan.  They have an
agenda, which is nothing to do with you, or me.  We're incidental.
We're hostages.  We're victims get it?"

Despite the gloom, she sensed that he was smiling, which was
infuriating.  It felt as if she was attempting to talk to him on the
seabed: spoken words just bubbled upwards out of reach.  So she sat in
silence for what seemed an age and then changed tack.

"Is-it Clay?"  she whispered.  "Because '

"No, it's not.  He's very able.  Bags of potential.  Yes, he's a decent
soldier.  And, in the circumstances.  Given history.  My broken ranks.
You have every right.  It's my duty, my duty to help you see." Pausing,
the tip of his tongue worked invisibly to moisten his lower lip, which
glistened wet.  "The incident was regrettable.  With the notebook.  You
were not entirely to blame.  I understand.  It was a lack of
discipline, that's all.  An infringement, an unfortunate slip. But only
a momentary breach of the code.  Going forward, there's a new MO.  I
promise.  I'll show you the way.  Strategies are in place '

Phrases ran into one another like water.  A stream of militaristic
prattle.  Kate's sadness was heavy as chain mail.  She became
claustrophobic and found herself fighting back.

"Because Clay makes sense.  Without him I could not bear this.  I'd
have given up long ago.  In adversity, you see what people are made
of."  She paused, reached for his hand, stroked its marble knuckles,
let the hand drop.  "What are you made of, Ethan?  You're comp licit It
feels like treachery and it makes me sick."

At the word treachery, Kate sensed Ethan stiffen.  For a second, the
thought of him looming rocklike beside her was frightening.  Yet before
she could change the subject he went on in earnest explanation.

"Treachery, disloyalty, you're absolutely right.  But can't you see I'm
making amends?"

"Making amends for what?"

"I betrayed you.  Stuck a knife in your back.  I took advantage and I
don't know why now.  It makes no sense here.  I can only think that I
did it because ... I could."

"Did what?  What are you talking about?"

His eyes gleamed yellow in the moonlight.  "Rachel.  I was with Rachel
too, Rachel and you.  It's all nonsense now, I know.  But back then
there was something... appealing in having you both.  Her all sassy and
pointless, you so beguilingly straight."  He shook his head, continued
jabbering.  "She hated me at college.  And I ignored her.  We kept a
mile clear.  But as soon as I met you, boom!  Everything changed.  It
started out as just interesting to me, amusing almost, that she should
be so keen.  I had no idea what was making her engage all of a sudden,
except that I'd found you.  But there you go, that was enough for her,
that alone.  She wanted covert action.  Nothing mattered.  She's
attractive.  I gave in to the temptation.  I mean, it had to do with
wanting you both.  If she could cope with it, I certainly could.
Nothing echoed then.  There were no repercussions.  Keeping things that
way amounted to a challenge.  Laughable now, of course.  She wanted to
take me on, head to head.  Shameful, pathetic.  But I rolled with
it."

He'd gone mad.  He was making up this idiocy to torment her.  But why?
Her shoulders shook.  This would pass.  It was just turbulence.  She
wiped a sleeve across her face, yet the horizon didn't clear.

"But I was changing, you see, taking hits left and right, incurring
casualties.  You were helping me to change.  My mercenary status was
compromised: clandestine operations were decreasingly effective, so I
suspended them.  I started to feel for you and it led me to make a
choice.  I saw off your sister.  She threatened to wreck my cover as I
disengaged, but doing so would have wrecked hers too.  I called her
bluff."

Still no picture.  She'd have to trust to instruments.  "Sure, Ethan,"
she said, her voice echoing in the headset.  "Whatever you say."

"And then I came with you on this trip, on exercise, so to speak.  I
see why now.  The trip was a way of making up.  It's worked so well!
It's brought us to this point, here, now, where I'm able to give you
the truth straight.  With the balaclava's help we'll go further still.
There are no half measures.  Now that I've let you in I just know
you'll understand."

More static.  "You're telling me you had an affair with my sister."
Though she spoke the words, they meant nothing.

"I'm confessing that, yes."  He waved the point aside, as if it were
old news, and went on.  "But in the past.  Now we're here and I'm
talking about the future.  Now that it's all cleared up between us
there's nothing to prevent you from coming with me, from grasping .. .
higher certainties.  Think of it!"

"I don't know what you're talking about.  I can't believe you.  I
refuse to believe what you say."

"No!"  He had hold of her wrist, handcuff tight.  "You're making a
mistake.  I'm on the inside.  Everything is under control now.  I'm
making up for all of us.  I'm going to prove myself, I swear '

The rant continued, but Kate didn't hear it because the pressure of his
grip cut everything else out.  In a way, the pain was a blessing.  She
felt the bones in her forearm flexing as he pulled her towards him, his
fingers tightening all the time, and in the instant of her acquiescing,
before his grip slackened, there was just the blissful possibility that
he might snap her wrist entirely.  A distance opened up.  Though he
still had hold of her and was whispering frantically in her ear, about
loyalty and fidelity and truth, she didn't allow him inside her head.

Instead she heard Clay's reassurance, superimposed again: "No diary can
make sense of this, Kate.  We'll have to tackle that one together."

He was right.  Losing the journal hurt, but without it everything just
carried on.  It was no less and no more real for not being written
down.  You didn't have to hold up a mirror in order to exist: no
article she or anybody else might write would affect the truth of
events.  The guards were still guilty; Jan was no less dead.  And Ethan
still made no sense.  Time ground forwards whether you kept a record of
its passing or not.  She could not visualize the notebook any more, had
forgotten its shade of grey, no longer felt for it in her waistband in
the night.  She used her bathroom time to think instead.  What use were
words she never shared, anyway, compared with those Clay offered?

"I'm bound to miss this place when we get out.  I mean, I'll definitely
want to relive it.  Buy me a set of Dictaphone batteries then and you
can have my memories too."

His kindness was worth a thousand pages of notes and the voice in her
ear now had faded and stopped, leaving nothing but warm breath against
her cheek.  As when she had woken next to Clay, Ethan's proximity now
was wrong, which left her stranded.  She realized that he had let her
hand go and crossed her arms.  The hot echo of his grip remained.

sixty-One.

The door swung inwards and Rachel found herself staring at a woman with
a child on her hip.  Tracksuit bottoms, a bare midriff.  Her father's
girlfriend was still young.  At first the woman was distracted,
untangling her son's fingers from her hair.

"Yes?"  she said.

When Rachel didn't answer the woman focused for the first time and her
lips parted in apparent recognition.  She set the child down.

"I'm sorry to come without warning," Rachel mumbled.  "Is he here?"

"He'll be back soon.  Come in."  The woman smiled.  "He's out
running."

Rachel followed her down a corridor and into a cluttered room which
smelled of stale incense.  The woman swept children's books from a sofa
covered with an ethnic throw and invited Rachel to sit.  Rachel sank
into soft cushions, then perched forward to wait.

With his mother making tea, the boy approached to show Rachel a plastic
harmonica.  A half-brother she had never met.  Not knowing how to talk
to him, she took the toy and blew into it.  Six notes up, and then down
again, at once a question What am-I doing here?  and a call for help.

The door banged.  Rachel handed the harmonica back and her father was
in the room before her, the boy hugging his legs.  Red knees turned to
face her and stopped moving.

Rachel looked up.  "I've come to talk," she said.

"Apparently!"  Her father smiled, ran a palm over the sheen of his
forehead.  "One moment while I fetch a towel.  Jacob'll look after
you."

The lack of ceremony was unsettling; this wasn't how it was supposed to
start.  Despite the double vodka she'd sunk en route her nerves sang.
She stared at the boy, who backed away.  He had Kate's full mouth. From
down the hall Rachel heard voices and laughter.  Although she knew of
her father's situation, she hadn't imagined such domesticity, for his
life to appear so complete.

"I signed the petition as you suggested."  He had returned, and now
settled into a chair opposite.  "And I got your message about the
journalist.  Of course I'll help.  But what I really wanted was to talk
with you.  So I'm pleased you've come."

"Of course."  This sounded presumptuous, but he appeared not to
notice.

"It seemed even more important that we find a way to get along," he
continued, 'at a time like this."

Rachel gathered herself to say her piece, but her father's attention
shifted to Jacob, who was pulling compact discs from a pile and posting
them behind the radiator.  She pressed on regardless.

"I realized that I've been wrong.  It's pointless holding this grudge.
I've come to accept your apology."

He turned back to her, surprised.  "Apology?"

"For what you did.  To Mum, to me, to Kate."

"What I did."  He repeated the phrase slowly, as if tasting the
words.

"She always wanted me to take this step, to ... to let you back in."

"And I'm grateful to her for that.  But forgiveness, as you put it?" He
paused, put his palms together, an oddly priestly gesture.  "What
happened was unfortunate, in that it hurt us all.  The most lasting
damage has been that you and I don't know one another as well as we
should.  I'm sorry for that, believe me, and yet I don't see it as a
matter of apologies.  Some things just happen.  They are beyond
blame."

Again he became distracted by Jacob, who was now pulling the laces from
one of his trainers.  Rachel remained silent.  She looked around the
room, at the tired furniture, at a map of Africa in a clip frame, at an
ancient, dusty computer poking from behind a beanbag.  On one wall was
a collage of skydiving photographs.  She fixed upon the hexagon of
falling bodies at its centre, felt their weightlessness.

"And you say Kate wanted us to make up, but you're not quite right." He
ruffled the boy's hair and retied his shoe, then looked back at her.
"She still wants it.  You have to believe in that, Rachel.  You mustn't
give up."

"I haven't."

"Yes, but I know you better than you'd imagine.  If you're not in
control of a situation you panic.  Just like Kate.  Neither of you is
much good at trusting to fate."

Rachel dug her fingers into the arm of the couch, but held her
tongue.

"That's what I thought I'd be able to help with."  He smiled.  "Faith,
and acceptance.  I thought that together we'd stand a better chance of
seeing this thing through."

Saucepans clattered down the hall.  Jacob rolled on his back at the
foot of his father's chair, offering his stomach up like a dog.  Rachel
felt herself sinking beneath this triteness.  She wanted to stand up
and go, yet continued gripping the sofa, forcing herself to stay
still.

"You say Kate and I are the same," she said, 'but we're not.  We're
quite different.  If I lack hope, it's not because I can't control the
situation, it's because I'm a realist."

"That's negative thinking, Rachel."  He made another sanctimonious
temple of his fingers and continued.  "Denial is very destructive."

"Maybe.  But there are other, worse character traits."  She felt a
flush of anger colour her throat.  "I seem to have inherited one of
them from you."

He looked up from his son and, for a second, gave her his whole
attention.

"Meaning?"

"I may not be like Kate, but that hasn't stopped me wanting what she
has and being prepared to cheat her to get it."

There was a pause, in which he wiped his face with the towel again,
worrying an answer from it.  "I know, I know.  You feel guilty that
it's her out there instead of you.  That's natural, I've felt it
myself.  But you don't have to want to swap."

Rachel stifled an urge to laugh.  The thread of what she wanted to say
threatened to unravel.  She ran a hand through her hair, turned a knot
of strands around her index finger and pulled it taut as she went on.

"No.  I'm talking about something less .. . worthy than that.  I'm on
about betrayal, deceit.  Never mind that I could have had Ethan before
Kate met him.  It was only once they were together that I cared, only
when I had to hurt her to get him."

Her father shook his head and opened his mouth to speak, but was
diverted once again by the boy, who had wedged himself between the
television and the wall.  He said, "Watch the wires," matter of factly,
before switching back to Rachel.

"Ethan?  You're not serious.  Kate's boyfriend."

Rachel bowed her head, felt the first follicle give.

"Well, that's ... unfortunate, but..  . you can't always account for
passion.  At times it takes over and' he paused, held his palms up, as
if what he was talking about was evident on the walls 'at times you
have to follow your heart."

Her mouth set, lips drawn back in distaste.  "No, it wasn't real
passion.  I may have confused it with that for a time, but I was
fooling myself.  I see now that I had to have Ethan because of Kate,
not despite her."

"I'm sure that's not true.  You're just beating yourself up."

"It is true.  And, what's more, it was because of you too.  She let you
get away with cheating on us all, so why not really test her?  Why not
up the ante, show her what it was like for Mum, bring the thing closer
to home?  Let her forgive that' He shook his head benignly and the
thread of her thinking threatened to fray again.  She pressed on.
"That's at least part of why I started it.  I mean, to begin with I
didn't even like the guy.  Cute, but a complete waster.  Couldn't see
why all those girls in college queued up for him.  It was only when
Kate joined them that I bothered.  And at first I just did it out of
something like plain .. . spite."

"I still don't believe you.  Jealousy, maybe, but not vindictiveness.
You must have seen something in him."

"Only afterwards.  At first I was just going to leave it at one ...
night.  Proof enough for Kate that betrayal hurts, that such blind
trust is pathetic, that she was an accident already happening."  She
paused, chewing her bottom lip.

"But '

"Exactly, but.  Somehow he found a way in.  The fact that he could be
so ... impassive disarmed me.  He just didn't seem to care one way or
another.  He treated it as a game and gradually that sucked me in. What
started out as plain infuriating, became necessary to me and finally
turned into a perverted sort of love.  I wound up desperate for him to
pick me.  I was sure he would.  Couldn't see how I could lose, really.
After all, he and I were the same.  Like you, we were capable of doing
the cheating.  All I had to do was tell Kate and, bang, they'd be over.
 I'd be the one coping, I'd be the sister doing the rising above."

"All's fair in '

"Christ!  Don't start!  There was nothing fair about it at all.  Can't
you see?  Something in me just wanted to pull them apart.  I got that
close to doing it, but in the end I couldn't.  He knew I wouldn't go
through with it.  And even if I had, he'd have left us both if he
couldn't have Kate.  He preferred her.  She won."  Rachel paused,
looking about wildly.  "Why do you think they went to Kashmir in the
first place?"

Again the priestly gesture with his hands, demonstrably accommodating,
but finally he seemed at a loss for words.

"Because of me.  When I heard Kate was going to India with Ethan, when
I realized he meant what he said and had finished with me for good, I
goaded her into it.  Don't you see, I must have wanted this to happen.
Go find yourself a war zone.  That's what I said; that's what she's
gone and done."

"Not true."  There was no anger in his voice.  "Kate sets her own
course.  Never mind what you said to her, she's been on about Kashmir
for years."  He was still nodding at her, crushingly understanding. If
anything there was a hint of a smile in his eyes.  "I'm sure that's
what you feel now, but you mustn't.  It's just another example of
deferred guilt.  You've got to realize that Kate's .. . situation .. .
now has nothing whatsoever to do with you."

She drew breath, determined to try again, to make him see the plain
fact of her shame and his own reflection in it, but Jacob had climbed
up on the arm of his chair and now fell into his lap.  Her father
laughed with the boy and rolled his eyes at her.

She breathed out and looked away, saw the parachutists again,
plummeting on the wall.  As she watched a slash of winter sun angling
low through the window sliced the picture in half.  Something changed,
she felt herself giving in.  She suffered the sudden vision of Kate's
face, full of remorse, after their disastrous flight together.  The
smell of sick in the car returning to London, Kate's unspoken apology
as she loaned Rachel her clean sweater, its disproportionate
significance -hanging limp in her wardrobe now.

She watched her father rolling Jacob on his lap and forced back her
resentment.  There was, perversely, something almost satisfying in his
blitheness.  She would make peace with him despite it.

She stood and heard herself say, "I'd like to come around again, to
spend some time with you, if that's all right."

"Of course."  He turned his palms upwards and smiled serenely.  "Our
place is your place.  Come and go as you please."

Sixty-Two.

"You can't count on any warning."

"No."  She tensed up.

"Because, wham!"  He cut the power.  "The engine can fail at any
time."

Kate was daydreaming.  In place of the darkening ceiling she'd
substituted an infinite blue sky.  With her eyes shut there was a
cockpit and she could tilt the horizon left and right and pull the nose
through each point of the compass, unreeling turns at will, free to
head off in any direction.  Shadows lay between the rolling hills and
wind lines fanned out on the lake below, which flashed silver and grey
as she turned through the early morning sun.

"And when it does you've got to be ready.  The response has to be
instantaneous.  There's no time to think."

Already, Kate imagined, she'd responded, instinctively pushing the nose
down to establish a glide.  But her mind was racing to work out the
next step.  Should she look below for a suitable landing site?  Or run
through the checks to try and revive the engine?  The gap between the
alternatives grew, mocking her inaction.

Meanwhile, the corridor light had definitely angled into the room.
There stood Abu in silhouette, and now he was performing his pointless
tour, pacing past each of them in turn,

yawning with boredom.  Another lights out.  Kate thought about the
cockpit again.  How could she have forgotten the drill?  It was as much
as she could do to remember that the optimum glide range was just two
miles for every thousand feet of height lost.  No distance at all.  She
steadied herself: this was, after all, only a simulated emergency.
There was nothing wrong with the engine, and even if there had been,
the instructor was in charge.

"Every wasted second counts."

That was true and yet it didn't matter, for the sky had darkened again,
revealing Abu as he turned past Ethan beneath the window slot and
tracked back towards the door, passing the curtain on the way.  Kate's
eyes followed him, absently willing the guard out of the room, and then
she found that she'd fallen behind his footsteps, her gaze having
snagged on George.  In the gloom it took a second for the strangeness
of his appearance to become clear.  The bandages were now a scarf. Even
as she understood this change, however, it was overtaken by a sequence
of events which took place outside time, at once in slow motion and on
fast-forward, so that what happened seemed both unending and to be over
before it began.

One moment Abu was moving beyond George and heading for the door,
inspection complete; the next, George had risen through the collapsing
tepee of his blankets and begun to move after him.  The covers fell
noiselessly to the ground, revealing George's arms, one of which
appeared longer than the other, because something was hanging down from
that hand.  Whatever it was glinted maliciously as George swung it at
the back of Abu's head.  The guard saw nothing coming.  He staggered
sideways with a grunt, passing through the wedge of corridor light at
an odd angle, half falling, half dodging the next blow, which George
hacked down from on high, as if to drive in a stake.  The hammer
glanced clumsily off the top of the guard's head.  He sank
deferentially to one knee.

Kate tried to shout.  Yet when she opened her mouth for air her lungs
filled with fear instead.

George stepped back to admire his work.  Then he advanced again,
growling, "The beast that thou saw est was, and is not' and around him
the space came alive.  She was dimly aware that Ethan had also sprung
up at the far end of the room.  George's voice rose: 'and shall ascend
out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition," and Kate found that
she, too, was clawing her way upright, but once standing she did not
know what to do.  Time slowed down further.  George yelled, "They that
dwell on the earth shall wonder!"  He closed in on Abu with the steel
hammer raised again, his one eye black and enraged and fixed upon the
guard's face.  Kate heard everything distinctly George's broken scream,
'for he is the Lord of lords," Abu's left hand scrabbling over the
boards as he steadied himself from toppling further sideways, and the
thump of Ethan's boots as he launched himself forward into the fray.
Still down on one knee, Abu dug in the pocket of his combats, a
prospective bridegroom fumbling for the ring.  He looked confusedly
down at his hands.  The slick of blood on his forehead shone as it
caught the light.  Then George was above him again, lashing out.  The
hammer came down in a graceful arc to meet Abu's curls.

Time now stopped: a second nailed in place.  As the steel teeth caught
in the top of Abu's head, his lap exploded.  A white flame lit George's
chest.  Ethan, who must have thrown himself in the half-beat before
George struck, crashed headlong into him as the gun went off.

Kate screamed but heard nothing.  The crunch of metal into bone, the
horror of a gunshot at close quarters, the recklessness- of Ethan's
intervention; it all happened right there in front of her, but she
wasn't part of it.  There were just confusing details.  George's shirt
was undone.  The optimum glide speed was seventy knots.  His chest and
stomach were revolting, black with dirt despite the lightning.  Of
course, you worked out where to land before fiddling with the engine.
No part of Ethan touched the ground as he arrived, an all-star making
his tackle.  Look for a field without power cables, preferably away
from roads or houses.  Diane, crouched by the wall, had her hands over
her ears and her eyes squeezed shut.  George's face, by contrast, was
split in two, closed half, open half: both jerked back with the flash,
as if in consternation.  No, there weren't parachutes in a mono-prop
trainer.  The blast knocked George backwards and Ethan drove him
sideways and Abu followed, dragged forward by the claw hammer, which
was still embedded in his head.

Ethan rolled sideways and George struggled out from beneath him, his
fist still white on the shaft.  Abu was stretched forward, his arms
flung out before him, prostrate in prayer.  He appeared to nod in
agreement as George yanked the hammer head clear.  Then the guard
mumbled something, slumped sideways and reached for his knees in an
attempt to curl up.  Kate realized she was standing over him,
inspecting a flap of forehead that had torn forward.  It made his
fringe unnaturally long, obscuring his eyes.  She would have liked to
lift the flap clear so as to see his expression, but felt herself
pulled roughly back by Clay before she had a chance.

"Traitor," Ethan hissed at George.  He crouched over the guard's feet,
on all fours.

George laughed.  Or at least he tried to.  The sound began dry and
turned wet, becoming a shapeless gargle.  With his free hand he clawed
at the scarf of bandages, now black instead of grey, intent on
scratching an itch, then held bloody fingers up to his eye and
squinted.  The sight seemed to distract him for a moment.

"Jesus fucking Christ."  Clay's laughter was manic.  "This isn't
happening, please, no, no, pleaseV He still had hold of Kate's arm and
was pulling her towards Diane, further from the action.

Each breath George took sounded like the suck of an emptying sink.  He
continued to stare incredulously at his hand until his attention was
caught by one of Abu's feet, which twitched.  He was curled tightly on
his side now and the twitching movement was not his own, but caused by
Ethan, who had begun heaving the guard over by his fatigues, presumably
to get at his gun.

George seemed to recognize that the moving foot had sinister
implications.  He advanced on rubber legs, shaking his head.  Kate was
no more than a couple of yards away and yet the feeling of separation
had worsened; she might as well have been watching actors on a screen.
She was paralysed by panic, her powerlessness now intoxicatingly
complete.  She felt no impulse to try to warn Ethan, or stop him
digging for Abu's pistol, but watched dispassionately as George
staggered forwards and Ethan looked up and George swatted at him with
the hammer, landing a single blow between his eyes.

Ethan keeled over, falling on top of Abu.  George sat back on his
haunches.  His chest was sodden.  Blood ran down his arm and hand and
dripped from the hammer head.  He looked at it, wiped the silver shaft
on his trousers, then tossed the tool into the corner of the room.  His
mouth fell open.  He sank backwards without saying anything and lay
still.

Sixty-three.

A voice fought the jackhammer heartbeat in Kate's head.

If the engine dies, what do you do first?

Laughable.  She wasn't flying.  She'd lost control.

So, the voice persisted, take it back.  Keep flying nobody else will.

"Oh Christ.  Oh fuck."  Clay's words were flat.

Each second of inaction eroded the likelihood of success.  She
struggled to steady herself, biting down on the inside of her mouth. As
her teeth met through the skin of her lower lip, a spark of pain
illuminated the obvious: panic was part of the problem, she must work
despite it.  She must shake free of Clay, who was still gasping wildly,
and make herself go forward to grab Ethan's collar.  He was heavy.  His
shirt tore as she hauled, but he came with it, sliding off Abu.  He
rolled onto his back and didn't move.

"Check his pulse," she told Clay.  "Quick."

Galvanized by Kate's tone, Clay hesitated forwards, his laughter
hollowing out.  He bent over Ethan and put a hand to his neck, then
started back when Ethan coughed.  Diane was fluttering round Kate,
looking from George to Abu, treading barefoot in the pool of blood that
now connected them.  She began to moan, turning Kate's head.

"Don't you fucking start!"

Clay seemed to have caught on.  He worked in silence with Kate to lever
Abu onto his back.  The bite of skull flapped into place as the guard
rolled over, which was better, but now the light revealed that one side
of his face had been hollowed by the hammer.  She forced herself to
lean over his mouth, listening.  Nothing.

Point the nose down and level the wings.

The gun was still tight in Abu's grip.  She unclasped his fingers, one
by one, and then the thing was in her hand, astonishingly heavy.  Clay
had returned to Ethan and began shaking him, urging him to open his
eyes.  Then he was hissing at Diane, whose moaning had ramped up again
to a low wail.

"Shut up.  You'll fetch the other one."

That made no difference, the scream just got louder, so Kate turned to
help.  She waved Diane up out of the puddle and steered her tenderly to
the door, amazed at how compliant and quiet the girl instantly became,
until she realized she was still holding the gun and directing her with
its barrel.  Diane's face was white as bone.  Kate raised both hands,
palms forward, so that the gun barrel waved at the ceiling.  Now she
found herself in the film too, the good cop reassuring a victim she
meant no harm.  The sensation was ridiculous; adrenalin made her want
to laugh.  She dropped her arms and held them behind her back, with the
gun out of sight.

"Come on, look at me," Clay urged.  "Open your eyes.  Open your
eyes!"

Ethan sighed in apparent response.  Kate turned to see Clay slap him
roughly about the face.  Ethan's eyelids flickered for a second and
then shut.

"No!  Wake up!  We've got to get out of here."

The eyes blinked open again and Ethan rolled to his side, planted a
hand, pushed himself up.  He came to.  As he took in the scene, a look
of anguish overran his expression.  He seemed to want to say something,
but although his lips were moving no words came out.  While Kate
watched, a line of blood ran from his forehead down the side of his
nose and into the darkness of his stubble.  He was staring at her and
then he was staring past her.  His consternation melted into apparent
relief.  The arm supporting him gave at the elbow and he sank sideways.
From the floor his contented gaze drifted from Kate's face to the space
over her shoulder again.  He nodded and smiled, this time managing a
whisper.  The words were barely intelligible, but sounded like, "Kate
... too Kate."  She mouthed his name back.

Once you've set up the glide, find a safe way down.

She broke from staring at Ethan and turned to Clay for help, but found
that he too was looking past her in the direction of the door.  She
swivelled further to follow his gaze, and there was Khalid, holding
Diane by the hair, a pistol pressed against her temple.  Both of them
had their mouths open in shared panic.  Khalid's voice cracked when he
spoke.

"Stop now."

There was no decision, no words with which to make one, no pictures
spelling out consequences.  Just a split second and one route out. Kate
felt an extraordinary pulse of fear shoot from the soles of her feet to
her scalp.  She brought the gun up and fired without aiming. As she did
so, Khalid pulled his own trigger.  Kate's hand kicked upwards with the
recoil.  She was a conductor, whipping with her baton, and Khalid was a
dancer, in step.  He pirouetted, flinging Diane away. In unison the
pair fell apart and crashed to the floor.

Sixty-Four.

The same order, over and over again.  "Open, your, eyes."

He tried to obey, but couldn't do so for long.  Open or shut, it made
no difference anyway.  There was just the memory of a flat hammer head
swinging to meet him.  A single coin, flung in payment.  When it hit,
the pain had nothing to do with his forehead, but came from everywhere
else at once.  It tasted of rust and smelt of ammonia and split the air
like a jet overhead.  You had to hand it to mad old George.  For a
cripple with one eye, he was a good shot.

Then the smell was cordite and blood had run into his mouth and the
memory of a real sound registered, a gunshot.  Abu had managed to get
off a round.  That meant an emergency, a combat situation.  Ethan
struggled again to comply with the order and found himself staring up
at Clay, which was instantly reassuring.  The American could deputize
until reinforcements arrived.  He let himself sink back beneath the
surface and allowed Clay to deal with the specifics of who had shot
who.  The art of delegation was, after all, the cornerstone of good
leadership.

"No, wake up, we've got to get out of here."  Not real orders, just
nagging.  Yap yap yap.  It took a while for the sense of Kate's words
to catch up with her insistent tone.  She was probably right, though,
best if he fell in with the rest of the troops.  All hands on deck, a
full complement for the parade.  Yet re-engaging took real effort; he
seemed to be pushing the building up off its foundations in levering
himself upright, and once there had to struggle to stop the scene
pulsing in and out of focus.

The horror registered.  One man down in a lake of blood.  The hostile
down too.  Kate, standing straight, her hands behind her back.  And
behind her, Diane, edging towards the open door.

It seemed he would have to find the strength to intervene after all,
but then he saw Khalid appear over Kate's shoulder.  Though he was just
a kid, he had the training.  Ethan was fully confident of his
abilities.  And rightly: the lad was swift to understand their
predicament, he devised a solution there and then, and showed great
foresight in having brought the proper hardware for the job.  In two
quick steps he was at Diane's side, a handful of her hair in one hand,
his revolver pressed against her head with the other.  His eyes were as
wide as hers, but in acting decisively he had taken control.

Poor old Kate!  Ethan felt sorry for her but could not help smiling as
the hinge of his elbow begin to give and he allowed himself to subside.
"Late," he whispered.  "Too late."

Khalid gave them the order to "Stop now', his voice admirably calm.
Considering the mess before him, he was coping well.  The first half of
a thought, involving Abu and George and wrongs and rights and
retribution, began to form, and then there was more lightning and the
room cracked in two.

Either he blacked out again in the firefight or he simply couldn't keep
up.  It seemed to take Ethan ages to work out what was happening and as
long again to infer why.  Diane was on her side with an arm twisted up
behind her back and Clay was kneeling beside her, saying, "No," between
gulps of fearful laughter, and Kate was stepping over Abu towards
Khalid, who was also stretched out on the floor.  He clearly wasn't
going anywhere, yet Kate was pointing at him as if he might disappear
at any moment.  Not pointing, Ethan realized, but aiming.  She
retreated a few steps, an eye fixed on Khalid all the time, and knelt
down next to George.  As Ethan clambered to his feet, Kate pulled a
sheet from the pile that George had discarded and began to tear it into
strips.  Quietly she pleaded, "Come on, Ethan, you have to help me."

He was already at her side, bending over Khalid, staring down into the
young guard's eyes, which relaxed.  Or at least the pupils grew.
"Please, mercy," Khalid whispered, and again, "Mercy, please."  To have
seen the hurt done to Abu's face was bad enough.  A fist rose in
Ethan's throat as he swept the lad's fringe out of his eyes.

Clay's laughter subsided to sobs.  Then it stopped entirely and he
said, "Half her face is gone.  The whole side of her head."  There was
a matter-of-fact, pre-recorded ring to his voice.

Kate was working with a strip of bandage, sorting out a tourniquet for
the young guard's legs which, writhing down below, must also have been
injured.  Ethan cradled his head.  The youngster's eyes looked lost and
the inside of his lips were blue.  He gasped, as if cold.  Ethan
loosened the boy's jacket at the throat to reveal a white T-shirt, now
turning red.  When he pulled the coat further apart he saw a hole below
the right shoulder, and then the intolerable redness welled through it
again, bleeding across more white chest.  Arsenal colours.  Ethan
pressed the jacket back down with his palm against the hole and ordered
"More bandages."  Below, Kate's tourniquet had stilled Khalid's legs.
Ethan felt an unexpected rush of gratitude towards her; ever practical,
she knew what she was doing.  She rolled Khalid over to stop him
choking.  As Ethan continued to stare down at the lad's furrowed brow,
she was busy fastening strips of sheet behind his back.  And after that
she was off again, checking on Abu, before gliding over to Clay and
Diane.  The boy went slack, then frowned in confusion as tears fell
from Ethan's nose into his face.

"Have mercy."

Clay's voice: "No, no.  She can't end like this."

"It's OK, Khalid.  You're going to be fine."

"Spare me."

"You're all right.  Hang in there, son."

"She's gone, Clay."

"Forgive me," Khalid whispered.

"Dead."

"There's really nothing to forgive."  Ethan smiled.

"Her beautiful face."

Ethan glanced across to Clay, who was still bent shivering over Diane.
Beside him Kate was staring at that watch, insistently tapping its
face.  The sight was incredibly tiring, as was her voice saying, "We
have to go now!  We must get as far away as possible before the morning
changeover.  Clay.  Ethan.  Now.  Now!"

Ethan looked back down at Khalid.

"Never meant for this harm."

"You've done very well.  Leave the rest to me.  Don't worry.  I'll run
things until Sadiq shows.  We'll call in medics."

"Besides which, anybody might have heard the shots."

"They'll decorate you for this.  Both of us."

"We've no idea how far away they are."  Never mind her first-aid help,
Kate's insistent voice was becoming maddening.  "Every -second counts,"
she was yelling now.  "Every second counts!"

Clay's shivering turned into silent hysterics again, visible across the
room.  Then he stood, put one hand on his hip and ran the other across
his shaven head, staring down at Diane as if she were a hard problem he
had to solve.  Meanwhile, Kate gathered up a blanket and began to
swaddle the girl's corpse.

Ethan looked back at Khalid, labouring there in his lap.  He stared
down at him a long while, head bowed, overcome with feeling.  Fearing
that the boy's face was turning grey, he tried shifting him into a more
comfortable position.  The lad's arm would not come forward.  It was
tied behind his back.  Aghast, Ethan saw that the bandages where
shackles.  The treachery dawned on him; Kate had bound his hands and
feet.

Now Clay was trying to prise Ethan out from under the boy.  He'd stuck
his head under Ethan's arm and was straining upwards in vain.

"Come on," Clay said.  "She's right.  We have to go now."

He nodded at Kate in the doorway.  The scale of her betrayal suddenly
loomed.  Ethan laid Khalid's head gently on the boards.  Feigning
weakness, he allowed himself to be pulled up straight, an arm around
Clay's wiry shoulders, his chin pressing heavily into the top of the
smaller man's head, which smelt oddly clean in the instant before
Ethan's forearm became a bar pinned across his throat.  From there it
was straightforward to rip Clay's other hand up behind his back into a
half-nelson, and a necessary demonstration of authority, strength and
commitment to push that hand up until the shoulder cracked and the
American made a noise, albeit muffled by the knot of his clamped
windpipe.

"Nobody's going anywhere," Ethan explained.

Kate took a couple of steps towards them, then stopped short.  Her
mouth, twisting for words, was the only movement in a blank face. "What
are you talking about?"

Clay sounded trapped inside himself.  Since any noise was bad, Ethan
tightened his grip.  A speech about loyalty and fidelity would have
been appropriate, but this wasn't the time for explanations and,
anyway, the others had proven themselves incapable of comprehending the
new world order.  One man down, one badly wounded, two hostiles
quelled.  Clay, despite his childish struggling, under control.  Only
Kate remained.  He'd soon have the situation in hand, and then it would
just be a matter of waiting until the balaclava showed.  Given time, he
would understand.  He was the medium through which to atone.

The back of Ethan's forearm was wet with drool.  Clay seemed to have
slackened.  Ethan released his grip minutely, but long enough to allow
Clay to cough a word.

"Gun."

Clay's foot stubbed the pistol from Khalid's side, sending it across
the floor.  A track faded in the wetness.  Kate stared down at the gun,
then demonstrated why she didn't need it, by raising both hands.  One
still held Abu's revolver; two clumps of keys hung on different lengths
of chain from the other.

That presented a tactical problem, but not one that Ethan couldn't
overcome.  Kate's allegiance had shifted too, after all.  That was a
weakness he could exploit.  Ethan had already tightened his hold on
Clay again; now he crunched Clay's neck harder and lifted him, by the
ripped arm, a few inches from the floor.

"No," Ethan repeated.  "You can't leave now, Kate.  Not alone."

Her soft lips hardened to a blue line.  She levelled the pistol at
Ethan, shut one eye comical really and said gently, "Ethan, you must
let Clay go."

In response Ethan leaned further back.  There was nothing to Clay, just
skin, hair and bone, all jiggling to the rhythm of his feet.  Ethan's
right arm was rigid with veins, but, in the scheme of things, still
relaxed.  He might easily have dug for more strength and broken Clay's
neck.  Indeed, the barrel, waving in his direction just feet away, so
angered Ethan that he was tempted.  If it had not been for Khalid's
plaintive whimpering there at his feet, he would have risked the
sacrifice.  But the boy was vulnerable and in pain and Ethan felt the
responsibility welling up.  True valour meant taking that
responsibility, by putting unit before self.  And Kate seemed so
placid, taking aim.  Her one open eye was bottomless.  She had drawn a
bead on Ethan's forehead and, in the calm other ness of her expression,
he saw that she was capable of pulling the trigger again.  Who knew
what she might go on to do after that?  Khalid moaned again.  All for
one.  Esprit de corps.  There was no way Ethan could sacrifice a
comrade.  He stepped back from Clay, letting him fall.  The American
sank to his hands and knees.

Still, the accusatory finger of Kate's gun did not waver.  Clay half
crawled, half clambered to her side, picking up

Khalid's pistol on his way.  Four eyes held Ethan in place as the pair
backed from the room, and then it was as much as he could do to stand
to attention as they closed the door.  After some fumbling, the lock
chopped shut.

Sixty-Five.

Ethan dragged the boy clear of the lake.  Then he untied him, tore
fresh strips of sheet and sat him up to bind his shoulder, over and
under, round and round: a field dressing the old man would have been
proud of.  Working methodically, he made a bed of the cleanest
remaining blankets, rolled one into a pillow.  In time the boy's eyes
closed and tear tracks dried across his cheeks, yet he stayed warm.

Though Ethan beat the drum of the door periodically, nobody answered.
At first this was a terrible frustration, but, after a while, with
Khalid mumbling reassurances from deep within his dream, he made a
blessing of the delay and turned to address other tasks.

There was much to do.

First, he mopped the floor as best he could, using George's mound of
blankets to soak up the spilt blood.  His footprints dried in the
smear.  Never mind; they would see he had made an effort.  Next, he
drew the three bodies into an orderly line.  That looked right to begin
with, and even better when he afforded Abu a few feet of decorous
privacy, drawing him away from the other two.  As big as a bear, even
in death.  The poor man's forehead.  Ethan pressed the torn scalp back
into place and, after deliberating, pulled the cover from Diane (it was
almost unstained) and laid it solemnly across Abu.  Two bloody rags
were enough to mask the dead hostages' faces.

A cow bell sounded in the distance, so Ethan pulled himself up to the
window and shouted.  Down below, the river ran black beneath the
diamond sky.  He called out again, but still nobody answered.

On watch he grew cold and, fearing Khalid would feel the same, drew the
boy up onto his knees, hugged him close to his chest.  The young guard
breathed through cracked lips; his eyelashes were black against the
grey half-tone of his cheeks.  Transfixed by the stillness of the boy's
face, Ethan joined him in sleep.

Religious music.  A coffin sitting on a conveyor belt.  The vicar's
voice intoning and the coffin starting forward in a shudder of petals.
His father's hand squeezing his own as two screens slid inward and a
curtain began to drop.  That's all, folks.  Despite the incantation,
the mechanics of all this rolling and sliding and lowering were dimly
audible.  Why could he not imagine where his mother had gone?  Was he
even trying?  No.  Because she could have chosen not to leave.
Likewise, it was enough that Kate and Clay were elsewhere, and that he
had chosen to stay behind.  They no longer mattered.  A decision had
never felt so right.  He'd proven himself through it, done something
absolute for once, taken a stand.  The screens ran into and past one
another endlessly, growing noisier, until the sound was that of an
engine, recognizable as it shuddered to a halt.

The balaclava was already in the room, shouting.  Ethan smiled up at
him.

"They rushed us, sir.  They gained the upper hand."

More shouting.  A mist of spit in the early sun.  Though
understandable, the boss's rage was unnerving.

"One of them had that hammer.  From the rafters.  You can't blame Mr.
Abu.  I apologize unreservedly.  It was a terrible oversight on my
part."

Sadiq had arrived too.  At the balaclava's request, the fat guard
uncovered the three bodies and bent to feel each for a pulse.
Understandable but, as Ethan explained, futile.  He tried to give a
proper report of what had happened, then talked of the necessary
improvements the operation should make for next time, but nobody seemed
to listen.  Instead Sadiq began trying to wrest Khalid from Ethan's
grasp, with such brutality that Ethan objected.

"No!  Sir.  Tell him.  Gently!"

The balaclava drew a revolver from inside his jacket and fired it once,
aiming at Ethan's knee.  At first Ethan did not know for sure that he
had been hit.  He felt only a tremendous shock, a jolting of every
fibre, which, since there was no pain, could equally have been caused
by the impact of a bullet or the revelation that the leader was
prepared to fire one at him.  Next he was buried, chest deep, in
weakness as thick as snow.  His hands lost the power to grip.  Sadiq
yanked poor Khalid from his heavy, useless arms and dragged him clear.
And then the numbness retreated, from everywhere but his injured leg.
He seemed suddenly hot.  Ethan looked down to see the dark edge of a
wound, beneath singed trousers, black cloth livid with blood.

Sadiq began yelling at Khalid, evidently distraught.  When he got no
response, he started shaking the boy roughly by the shoulders, knocking
his head against the boards.  Ethan wished he could intervene, but
found himself unable to get up.  A shocking lassitude left him
powerless.  Mercifully, the balaclava stepped in to help.  He muttered
something at Sadiq, stopping him instantly, then watched him waddle
from the room.  Once alone with Ethan, the balaclava paused and his
eyes turned glassy, deep in thought.

Ethan had a reassuring idea of his own, and said it out loud, "Kneecap,
sir.  Yes.  The knee is my punishment."

"Eh?"

"I accept it."

"You accept what?"

Ethan didn't press the point because the balaclava appeared distracted.
He turned and went to the middle of the room and stood looking down at
Khalid and across at Abu and in the direction of the other two bodies
and finally back at Ethan, and then he scratched his head, as if unsure
of who was missing.

The numbness retreated further, became a shrinking no-go zone around
the wound itself.  Imagine the scar!  Ethan pushed himself back against
the wall, so that he was at least sitting up straight.  Of course the
leader would need some time to take all this in.

"Where are they?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Where have your friends gone?"

"Oh, right.  A.W.O.L..  They didn't say."

The balaclava snorted.

"I ask again.  Where?"

"Really," Ethan explained, "I don't know.  As I say, I tried to stop
them.  I'll take my share of the blame."

The balaclava dropped to his heels, so that he was at

Ethan's level, which was kind.  He looked suddenly Indian again,
squatting there, head wobbling.

"I want to know when my hostages escaped and where they think they are
going.  You must tell me, now."

In earnest Ethan replied "I'd say they set off at about nineteen
hundred hours.  Abu came in about then, sir, at the start of the night
watch."  Dishonour... "But as to their plans, I truly don't know where
they're headed."  Deserter ... "I'm sure they can't have got far in one
night.  Both are weak, neither have any training."  Indiscipline... "If
I can help with the recovery exercise, you must let me ..."  He paused,
unsure of what he'd said or thought.  "We did our best to detain them.
Khalid, in particular, deserves praise."  Betray... "Again, I'm
sorry."

"I will count to three."

"Sir.  Honestly."

"One."

The balaclava lifted his pistol and aimed it at Ethan's head.  The
simplicity of the gesture.  Its power to teach.  Of course, Ethan's
knee was not punishment enough.  Look at the place.  Captives lost. Men
dead.  The whole operation blown.  And that cursed hammer!  All of it
was his fault.  Way up behind the steady gun barrel two eyes blinked,
then shone.

"Two."

If he'd had an answer, Ethan would so gladly have given it, but since
he didn't have one answering couldn't be the point.  The point was
accepting what those brown eyes meant.  They were sure enough to
encompass Ethan's failure, unequivocal enough to act upon it, deep
enough to return his love.

The balaclava took a breath.

Was there anything more noble than martyrdom?

The gun barrel bobbed and the leader stood up and pressed it against
Ethan's upturned forehead to deliver his blessing.

Anointment: an act of consecration.

The giving of a new life.

Ethan closed his eyes on "Three."

Sixty-Six.

They broke through cloud well below a thousand feet, the fields and
villages surrounding Lyneham abstract behind swathes of rain.  She felt
no sense of homecoming, this could have been anywhere.  Though her
mother sat beside her, Kate had never felt so alone.  The R.A.F crew's
attentiveness somehow made the separateness worse: she was the hole at
the centre of everyone's attention.

The publicity had begun ahead of their arrival in Delhi.  She knew it
had yet to peak.  But the more words she read describing their escape,
the less it seemed to be her and Clay the reporters were writing about.
The reality came in little flurries; nothing was yet in perspective.
The smell of polish in the hotel lobby was more astonishing than her
first hot drink; the sight of clouds from above more transfixing than
her mother's face.  Of course, it was a miracle, all the more piquant
for the tragic fate of the others, and yet those words could not
illuminate what had happened.  Though terror, hardship and loss painted
a picture from afar, they conveyed nothing of a raised hammer, or the
iron boards, or a boy going cold in your arms.

"Love, there'll be a crowd.  Photographers.  You might want to freshen
up."

Her mother's make-up bag settled gently in her lap.  Seeing that smile,
she had no alternative but to beam back.  Immediately, though, any
outward happiness was again inappropriate.  Since the news about Ethan
had come through, grief was required.  Resetting her expression in the
pop-up mirror, Kate mollified her mother with mascara as she would
never have done before.

She and Clay had, separately and together, given the army officers and
Foreign Office officials and embassy representatives numerous accounts
of their flight.  Though at the time there had only been fear, she'd
since relived the detail of their route downstream, following the
starlit river through the night.  Wherever the stream went, they
reasoned, it would eventually run through people.  When dawn arrived
they stopped in a culvert full of snow between the river bank and the
road, intending to hold out for nightfall again.  Clay was certain the
sporadic rumble of dark green trucks meant Indian military.  Kate
feared more militants: for all they knew the river ran through
Pakistan.  In the end they grew so numb with cold that the dilemma
solved itself.  The first truck, wary of vagrants perhaps, spattered
them with gritty slush.  The next pulled over.  Its albino driver
startled Kate, and Clay had to hold her from running, yet the officer
was courteous and believing; he made an immediate three-point turn and
radioed ahead to Srinagar.

"Kate," her mother now began.

They were taxiing now, across slick tarmac.  She handed the sponge bag
back.

"Remember, Rachel will be here to meet you."

So much was strange she'd stopped trying to make sense of it. Captivity
made a mockery of past tensions.  Rachel was her sister and Ethan was
gone.  The sight of him standing there, wooden faced, his madness as
frightening as it was pitiful, pinprick pupils resolute even as Clay
shut the door.  How could she explain to Rachel the steps that had led
Ethan there?  The six months of captivity might equally be summarized
in a column of text or remain untenable for a lifetime. She'd already
been inundated with offers from newspapers wanting her exclusive
account, yet right now could not imagine where she would begin.  The
journal would not have helped: if anything she now felt pleased to have
left it behind.  Her past ambitions seemed as insignificant as the
bickering that had accompanied them.  She had turned all the reporters
down.  It was all that she and Clay could do to convince people of the
circumstances surrounding the end, and even then, no matter how she
tried to explain it, their having left him dwarfed Ethan's own
betrayals.

But every second had counted.  There had been no turning back.

Following their instructions, the army had found the village and the
deserted compound, but too late.

One, two, three ... four bodies.

From the cursory description there had been the hope, for a morning,
that he'd come to his senses and somehow followed.  The 'youth' could
have been Khalid.  By the time of the first Delhi interviews, though,
photographic evidence confirmed otherwise.

"You say you locked him in the cell?"  The consular official clicked
his pen nervously, not wanting to commit the fact to paper.  "Why?"

"Otherwise' she spread the glossy photographs out' there would have
been six."

The plane had stopped.  Crew members busied themselves by the door.
Through her window, Kate saw men in uniform struggling with a triangle
of metal steps, trying to manoeuvre it into place.  An expectant
semicircle of people stood a little way off beneath the shifting roof
of their umbrellas.  The captain, all epaulettes, had come back down
the plane to wish her well in person, and her mother was thanking him
for that.  In the brief pause that followed, she took Kate's hand and
continued speaking.

"The waiting turned Rachel inside out.  It changed her."  Here she
tailed off, before picking up another thread.  "We have to stick
together.  You understand what I'm saying?"

"Of course."

Her mother's eyes were watery behind her glasses as Kate helped her up.
She took them off and dabbed her face with a handkerchief, suddenly
very old.  Their roles of the last few days inverted briefly: Kate
paused to let her mother collect herself, led her to the door.

At the top of the steps, though, Kate faltered.  Her fingers felt for
the reassurance of Clay's watch, still high on her forearm.  She had
tried to give it back to him when they parted in Delhi for the final
time, but he insisted she keep it.  There had followed an awkward
moment, in which his kindness threatened to spill over into something
more.  Despite herself, she had turned away.  The flat light of
aftermath altered everything.  Seated in the finery of Kate's hotel
lobby, the new clothes and frosted glass coffee table with its marble
chess set and matching ashtray made her feel overwhelmingly present in
a place and time where, above all, Ethan was not.  He belonged to a
past that would always overshadow her and Clay.

The hand cupping her face had fallen to her shoulder.

Clay's laughter was already wry again.  "Just keep the watch to
remember me by," he said.

Flash bulbs popped pathetically as she descended, swamped by the
falling rain.  The semicircle broke apart to meet their advance, but
nobody seemed to be speaking, which gave the scene a mimed quality,
making her descent down the metal steps stagier still.  Apart from her
sister, Kate recognized nobody to begin with.  She reached for her
mother's hand, feeling a sudden closeness to her.  Then the umbrella
above Rachel wavered and the man holding it was her father.  He had his
arm around Rachel's shoulders.  The red and white triangles of the
umbrella revolved as the pair advanced beneath it, squeezing past the
reporters.  At the sight of the two of them Kate stopped, opened her
arms wide.

EPILOGUE

One circuit of the airfield.  Less than five minutes from take-off to
landing.  She'd flown the same pattern countless times before, and yet
the intervening time made everything unfamiliar.  The stretch upwind
seemed to take an eternity.  She banked a little early, staring back
down the glassy wing in a climbing turn, and wobbled level at an odd
angle to the runway.  Now she was heading straight at the sun.

She corrected her course, yelling instructions like a novice: "Power,
attitude, trim."  These words readied the plane for the easy, downwind
leg.  She called out the pre-landing checks and all of a sudden there,
before her, stood thirty seconds of doing, well, nothing.

She tried to take in the silver lake, the pale green of the hills
below, darker dots of trees, their long shadows cast by the morning
glare.  But the incredible sense of space dwarfed all detail: before
the view had really registered she was calling out more checks,
watching the landing point track backwards down to her distant left,
thinking about the penultimate, descending turn.

"Uniform Golf Whisky turning base."

The end of the runway inched up the side window.  She forced herself to
relax the stranglehold of her hand on the control column, banked to
thirty degrees, leaning forward to see the runway come into view ahead
of the propeller.  As the knots dropped, and the treeline flashed
below, and the little black shadow racing and hopping in the dirt grew,
she felt her heartbeat quicken.  Low sun flashed off a car windscreen
as it turned into the car park, down to her left.  Distracted, she
caught a glimpse of her sister leaning on the railings, a mug of tea in
her hand.

Since Rachel's confession they had come a long way.  Her contrition was
shot through with its own grief for Ethan, which cut to Kate's heart.
She had time for just one thought as the plane descended: how
unexpected it was of Rachel to have risen so early in this show of
support.

Every minute detail of the scene was alive and scrolling up to meet
her.  It was vital to keep the nose inched into wind until the last
instant, and then to kick it right with the rudder as she rounded out
to hold the plane steady for the last foot or two before it sank, to
settle gently on the strip.

Yet she was rusty, over-eager.  Perhaps too keen to impress.  She
stamped right and pulled the nose up early, with the plane still a
fraction too fast, and felt it balloon and drift.  Overcompensating,
she dropped the nose, knowing as she did so that she'd missed the
aiming point and would thump ignominiously into the black-top a hundred
yards too late.  The airframe shuddered with the first bounce.  Sinking
back down seemed to take an age: it was as if she were landing in a
hole.  Finally, though, her seat was thrumming to the asphalt again:
she was driving, not flying, taxiing along the gravel track to park up
before the clubhouse.

Undoing the harness, her reflection swam in the perspex.  No longer
alone.  Through the cockpit side window she watched Rachel wave once,
push off the rail and walk towards her, an outline against the sun.

Christopher Wakling was born in 1970.  He has worked as a teacher and a
lawyer.  He lives in London.

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