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He kicked again, then stood. He looked down on Bartholomew.

From his pocket, Wroughton took a slip of paper. A name was written on it, and an address. 'Go and see her, take the time. Give her a bit of tender and loving care, what you're so good at. And learn something – what she saw, what, if anything, was shouted out, any warning or any denunciation. Then report back – course you will.'

'Where'll you be?' The voice squeaked from between the hands.

'Away for a couple of days, then I'll hear from you… All that perspiration, it makes you look old and revolting. Do something about it… You haven't finished your juice. It's thirty riyals a glass, don't waste it.'

Wroughton smiled sweetly at the concierge who held open the outer door for him. He had no conscience as to dealing out a bully's Mows at Samuel Bartholomew. From his childhood days at the Sunday lunch table he had learned that the relationship between handler and agent should be master and servant: no emotion, no affection, no relationship. Like dogs, they should be at heel and obedient.

*

Lack of engine thrust had grounded First Lady. The four-cylinder Rotax 912 push engine was playing delicate. George wanted time on it, half a day.

They'd already had Carnival Girl up once, but she was back-up – so, George would have his half a day, and Lizzy-Jo could kick her heels.

She had her problem.

It was not a problem to be discussed with Marty, most certainly not with any of the rest of the team. Marty was in the tent beside the Ground Control Station, was by the fan that circulated stinking hot air, had his feet up and was reading back numbers of Flight International.

'I'm going to go find a shop,' she told him, but he was too absorbed with the magazine and last year's articles to respond with anything more than a grunt.

'I need to look for a shop,' she called to George, and he looked up from the engine pieces and nodded.

'I need to do some shopping, won't be long,' she said to the armourer, who sat facing the space left in the barbed wire coiled round their perimeter. He wore a multi-pocket khaki waistcoat that concealed his shoulder holster and the Colt. He had a baseball cap low over his face, and he shrugged.

There must be a shop.

The encampment was at the extreme end of the runway. Beyond their own wire was a single strand fence, then the desert, and set in the sands in the near distance were the landing lights of the strip.

Half-way up the strip, on the far side, was the cluster of buildings that she presumed were the accommodation blocks for the workers: there would be a club, a gym, a clinic – and a shop.

She walked briskly. As a New Yorker, she walked everywhere briskly. The temperature on the thermometer hanging from the support pole of her tent had shown 98° Fahrenheit, in shade. For decorum, local sensibilities and that crap, she had a blouse over her T-shirt and she'd slipped on long loose trousers and had a headscarf over her hair. She skirted the end of the runway, looking up to check there wasn't an incoming flight that might, if the wheels were down, have taken her head off.

Selfishness had brought Lizzy-Jo to Shaybah. The electronics expert was a selfish woman; she had made a career out of selfishness ever since the Air Force had sent her on the sensor operator's course.

She had been with Predator from the start.

At the far side of the strip, she turned and started out on the long tramp to the buildings – she could have taken wheels, but the restrictions on their movements away from the encampment would have meant the fullest of explanations about her problem to the armourer and to George and Marty… Her problem was not theirs.

She'd done Air Force time, then seen the recruitment notice posted by the Agency for UAV personnel. She'd left the Air Force and been taken on by the Agency, and then the selfishness had ruled. Rick had been with her at the Air Force camps, and Clara, but the Agency didn't do married accompanied. Rick sold insurance now in North Carolina, and last year had been his company's Salesman of the Year in the state; his parents looked after Clara. They'd divorced while she was at Taszar, Hungary, doing sensor operator for flying over Kosovo, a long-range divorce that spared her meetings in lawyers' offices. And she was not, it was her justification for selfishness, a natural mother. What Rick wanted out of life was to sell death benefits to customers; what she wanted was to find pictures on First Lady's cameras.

The heat shimmered on the dun-painted buildings ahead, and the sunlight burst back from the buildings' windows, and behind them was the city of pipes and containers, cranes and stacks.

She had seen that Marty had his old Afghan war picture propped against the metal cupboard beside his cot; Lizzy-Jo had a small tent to herself, woman's privilege, and beside her bed a collapsible side table with the picture of Rick and Clara – she assumed that Rick had a picture of her beside his bed. Not that it mattered to her. She wrote to them, not more than a page, every three or four months, birthdays and Christmas, and once a year she wrote to her own people in New York; her own people, she knew, didn't hold with divorce, were fervent Christians, and disapproved of her abandonment of Clara. It was tough shit, for all of them. She wanted to be with the Predator team, and reckoned the eighteen months of Operation Enduring freedom, out of Bagram, had been the best time of her life. She d idn't regard herself as selfish, just as professional. It mattered to her.

She was closer. Lizzy-Jo could make out what she thought was a recreational building, fronted by a veranda. She hit her stride.

There was a sign for a shop, and she followed its arrow.

She walked inside and the air-conditioned cool punched her.

She followed the shelves, wove among men – some in robes, some in slacks and shirts – who carried wire baskets or pushed trolleys.

There was food, frozen trays, vegetables and fruit. Confectionery chocolates and boiled sweets. Clothes, for men. Toiletries, for men, and cosmetics, for men. Juices of every shade and taste. Stationery and software. Music DVDs and compacts… Then she found the chemist's section. Headache pills, sunstroke creams, insect repellents. Eyes were on her. When she met them, they dropped or turned away, but she felt that as soon as the eyes were behind her again they fastened back on to her, clung to her.

But the problem had to be answered.

It was part her own fault, and part the Agency's. The instruction to travel and the take-off from Bagram had given her too little time. Too many of the few hours available between the order and the flight out had been taken up with downloading the computers and checking the loading of the gear; they were her computers, her gear, and she had fussed over them, not permitting the technicians free range over what was hers – and she had not been to the base shop.

She joined the queue to the cash desk. The man in front of her, robed, edged away from her, pushed against the man in front so that a distance might be between her and him. Oh, sweet Jesus… At the cash desk an older man, a dish-towel over his head, a moustache and fat jowls, repeated in a strident voice everything asked of him by his customers.

She was next to the head of the queue. The customer in front of her paid for a bag of fruit and a tube of shaving soap. She said it again, to herself, and she could feel the sweat on her back. The cash-desk man looked up at her, then averted his eyes.

Lizzy-Jo said it out loud, like she would have done in a New York drug store. 'Do you have tampons?'

'Tampons?'

'That's what I said. Tampons. If you have them, I can't see them.'

'Tampons?'

'It's a pretty simple question – what your wife…'

The cash-desk man shook his head, a great rolling movement.