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Hamzah’s nod was approving. “It’s not easy, an unmarried woman living alone. You’ll need an apartment, a driver. I can supply those.”

“Let’s talk about that later,” said Zara, in a voice Hamzah knew meant she would do anything but. “Right now I want to talk about Ashraf Bey.”

Hamzah thought about mentioning his daughter’s face had suddenly gone red and decided against it. The picture of her on the news in that idiotic coat was too clear in his head. Instead, he glanced out of a window, then reached for his cup. The coffee was too hot but he drank it anyway, chasing away its mudlike bitterness with a piece of Turkish delight. “Eat your croissant,” he said, “or Olga will be upset…”

They were negotiating, silently and without words: he knew that. Even in El Iskandryia the gap between what could and what couldn’t be said was vast, and Isk was the most relaxed of the Ottoman cities. A free port and a micro-state. The personal fief of its owner the Khedive—unlike Cairo, which the Khedive held in trust for the Sultan in Stambul.

But freedom was relative. And the gap between father, and daughter still wide. In many families it was unbridgeable. The woman he sat opposite knew less about him than he actually knew about her, which was almost nothing.

He feared she’d taken at least one lover while in New York. But the only real thing he knew about her was what she’d told him the night before she flew, when they were talking obliquely about the three months she’d just spent in a Swiss clinic. Which was that she wasn’t proud of everything she’d done, but she was ashamed of very little.

“I can give him money,” Hamzah said simply. “A route out of Iskandryia if that will help. But I can’t protect him…” He wanted to say more, to ask obvious questions, but for Zara the only question that mattered was the one she asked.

“Why do the police insist he killed his aunt?”

“Maybe he did,” said Hamzah, chewing the edges off a cube of Turkish Delight. He smiled sadly when Zara handed him her napkin. “Have you thought of that?”

“He swears he didn’t.”

“And you believe him?”

Zara bit her lip and nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

“Olga.” He punched a button on his desk. “Tell legal to call me.” Seconds later a screen beeped and the face of a small bald man squinted out at Hamzah. “Excellency?” The voice was reedy, the accent cut-glass Cairene.

“Beys,” said Hamzah. “They have complete
carte blanche.
I’m right, aren’t I…they can’t be arrested?”

The elderly lawyer hesitated. “Up to a point, Excellency…”

A small smile lit Hamzah’s face and he jerked his chin towards the screen to indicate to Zara that she should listen carefully. “What are the exceptions?”

“Two types of murder—of a mullah or a family member—gross blasphemy before two reputable witnesses, and gross outrage of a minor, witnesses ditto.”

“So Ashraf al-Mansur can be arrested?”

“Given that he murdered his aunt, yes…”

Hamzah held up his hand to still Zara’s protest and she suddenly realized she was out of the screen’s line of sight. The lawyer couldn’t see her and so didn’t know she was there.

“Thank you.” Hamzah blanked the screen. “My first question,” he said to Zara, “is why do they
really
want Ashraf al-Mansur? And my second is, who exactly is
they…
any ideas?”

He sat back in his chair. “No? Then I suggest you find out or I suggest your friend does…”

The meeting was over, Zara realized. And what was more staggering than her father treating her as an adult was him treating her as an equal. She’d asked him a question and he’d given her two relevant questions in reply. Either one of which might be the key. Going to America had been a good move, whatever work friends might say. And returning had been the right move too, whatever Zara might sometimes think herself.

“What do I tell your mother about why you’re not coming home?” Hamzah’s voice was neutral. But his eyes widened as Zara pulled off her silk scarf, to reveal that she wore no shirt beneath her Dior jacket, and began to undo her jacket’s black glass buttons. At the last minute, she turned her back on her father and slid the silk jacket down over her shoulders, revealing the marks.

“Tell her what you like.” Ten minutes after Zara left her father’s office and headed on foot towards the General’s mansion, Hani crawled out of her bed, looked round and went to shake Raf. “Zara’s gone,” she said.

“Has she?” Raf sat up, groaned and slid his legs over the edge of the couch. He did his best to sound unconcerned but he needn’t have bothered. Hani was too busy pointing at his feet.

“You’re wearing shoes,” she said.

Yeah, he was. Both of them fully dressed was one of Zara’s conditions for sharing the VSV’s narrow bed, though even being dressed wouldn’t make a difference if Hani told someone he and Zara had shared a mattress. Zara was under twenty-one and behaviour likely to corrupt a minor would be the least of it.

“After I went to sleep,” asked Hani, “did you argue?”

“No,” said Raf, “we talked.”
And got nowhere,
he added silently. At least he didn’t think they’d got anywhere. It was hard to remember with his mind full of Zara’s breasts and the taste of her in his mouth. Maybe she’d believed Nafisa’s death really wasn’t his responsibility. Maybe not. He’d try to work it out when his hangover took a holiday.

Where Zara had gone was solved by a brisk call from Hamzah. “Zara dropped by,” he said, sounding amused. “She said I should give you this.” Hamzah reeled off a string of numbers that became letters towards the end. “Your aunt’s bank details,” he added, seeing the blank look on Raf’s face, “From when I paid Nafisa’s commission…”

“Where’s Zara now?”

“I don’t know,” said Hamzah, “not officially. But unofficially I gather she’s headed in the direction of Shallalat Gardens and the General’s house.” He clicked his fingers and the screen went blank.

Raf groaned. “Coffee,” he begged Hani.

“Tastes horrible,” she replied. But she went hunting all the same until she found tins of cappuccino stacked in a locker at the stern. Peeling back the lid on a tin, Hani took a mouthful and spat it at her feet. “If that’s what you want.” With a shrug and a sigh, she tipped the remains of the can into a saucepan and lit a small ring in the pull-down galley. When the sweet liquid was hot she poured it carefully back into the can.

“Here,” she said.

Raf drank it while she watched, her eyes alert for any hesitation. “Perfect…” He sat back and put his hand behind his aching head, thinking about his aunt’s bank details. “You had a computer at the madersa, didn’t you?”

“LuxorEON,” she said. “Broadband access, running Linux.” Her voice was a dry imitation of Nafisa’s at its most patronizing. Then she shrugged, bony shoulders hunching beneath her tee-shirt. “Why?” Hani asked. “What do you need…?”

Numbers rolled up the screen so fast they made Raf feel even more hungover than he already was. These were dead accounts at Banque de Lesseps. And he had Lady Nafisa’s account details scrawled on a scrap of paper but Hani wasn’t interested in that. The numbers on the VSV’s screen were scrambled and she had an animated on-screen helper doing something with algorithms at lightning speed as she searched for Lady Nafisa’s old account.

The computer aboard the VSV was an old stand-alone, the kind that used a satellite modem and made up in sheer memory what it lacked in speed or connectivity. It had taken Hani all of two minutes to junk every default setting and come up with a configuration she actually liked. But then, as she pointed out with a surprising lack of bitterness, if you’ve spent nine years trapped in the same house with only a computer for company, you get good at it or you get bored.

“That one,” said Hani as a 28-digit number lit red and the screen froze. Everything else on the screen disappeared and the number shuffled itself until Hani was left with the same 8-digit/3-letter sequence Raf had scrawled in front of him. She made a couple of passes with the cursor, her thumb moving lazily over a trackball, and the number disappeared. “Don’t worry,” she told Raf, just as he started to do exactly that. “It’s checking we’re legal.”

She smiled and Raf tried to smile back. He’d no idea what Hani had just done.

“Here we go,” said the child as a bank logo began to animate on screen and the account went live again. There was quiet pride in her voice and an air of competence about her that would have looked impressive on someone three times her age.

“You’re good.”

Hani nodded, taking Raf’s compliment as a statement of fact. Fingers dancing and thumb rolling her trackball, Hani opened and shut screens at the speed of thought, collecting passwords and opening and closing trapdoors. She rode a rhythm that drummed inside her own head until her fingers suddenly faltered and Raf could almost feel the child’s confidence vanish. When Raf looked round, a photograph of Lady Nafisa stared at him from the screen, arrogant and imperious.

“I’m going to use the—”

Hani slipped out of her seat before Raf could say anything and so he sat there, trying not to listen to the child throw up her breakfast. The water in the heads ran, then ran again and she came out wiping her mouth. Neither of them said anything but the first thing Hani did when she climbed back into her seat was to make Lady Nafisa disappear.

“She said she was living on her savings,” Hani said, nodding at a seemingly endless list of red figures. “She always did lie.”

Nothing in Nafisa’s accounts made obvious sense, but Raf expected that. And he was beginning to see the pattern. His sense of self might be fucked, but he could knit connections from nothing and call it logic. Just as the madersa had rich public rooms and the private rooms had been bare even of furniture, so ran Nafisa’s accounts. Money had been spent lavishly on clothes but almost nothing on food. No payments at all for Khartoum or Donna. Very little on electricity, none on Hani’s broadband connection, which meant it was either illegal or someone else was footing the bill.

So far, so predictable.

The surprise was in the brackets that ran like a sour river along the bottom line. Picking 1 January as a date and flicking back year on year showed that her account had been overdrawn for at least ten years, which was as far back as Raf bothered to check. Not huge amounts in someone like Hu San’s terms, but getting larger and literally in the red. Until this April.

“Shit.” Raf was talking to himself but Hani squinted at the screen as he highlighted a figure. Hamzah had lied. She hadn’t taken him for $2,500,000: her commission had been double that. $5,000,000 from Banque Leventine in Cyprus. Straight in and straight out again, almost immediately, only this time in two amounts. $4,500,000 to an account in El Iskandryia and $500,000 to Havana.

“Let me…” Small fingers flicked over the keyboard, numbers resolving. The name that came up meant nothing to Raf.

Caja de Cuba.

“Want me to chase it?” Hani’s voice was neutral.

“If you can.” Raf had no intention of asking when she’d learned to crack files—or how. He was far too worried she might stop.

“Okay.” And with that Hani squared up to the screen, smiled slightly and let her fingers loose, chasing one link after another, running searches and routines she seemed to pull out of the air. Beside her sat the rag dog, a mechanical
whirr
coming from its guts like a low growl.

“What…”

“Back up,” said Hani. “The screen talks to him and Ali-Din remembers.” She sucked at her teeth to signal that Raf shouldn’t ask any more questions and went back to work.

“Got it,” Hani said finally. “Started here/ended Seattle. You want to know everywhere the $500,000 went in between?”

Raf didn’t, so Hani cross-referenced the new account number to a customer bank database, which took almost no time at all because—unlike with Banque de Lesseps—the data at the Seattle end wasn’t double-encrypted. This time the name meant something. Clem Burke, lately of Huntsville, registered as sole owner of Seattle’s newest detective agency.

“Now the next one,” Raf told Hani. But she was already on it, leaning in close as if trying to crawl right inside the screen. Raf was forgotten, he realized. The world outside did not exist. There was a hunger to the child’s face, a intensity that reflected pure concentration. Her brows were knit, her lips clamped tight. This was the other thing in her life over which she’d had control. What she ate and what she did on screen were ring-fenced for her alone. A thin slice of a life that everybody else was parcelling up and deciding for her own good.

Ali-Din was a side issue.

“Got it,” said Hani. Numbers resolved as the screen on the VSV talked via uplink to a datacore at Banque de Lesseps and data fed back, anonymous and cold, nothing but presence and absence of electrical charge until on the other side of the screen to Hani an electron beam rastered down the glass and Hani swore.

H.E. Saeed Koenig Pasha. The General’s own personal bank account. Shit indeed. Fear played inside Raf’s head like a whistle off the walls of an empty courtyard, heard every day without really hearing, until one stumbled over oneself, sat cross-legged in the dust. Hani broke the connection without being asked.

Next they looked at payments that had come in. And the first and most obvious point was that until the $5,000,000 from Hamzah there had been nothing for at least nine months. Before that, going back five or six years, there had been regular payments, spaced maybe four or five months apart, starting big and getting less and less.

To Raf it looked like someone selling off the family silver and waking up one morning to find it was all gone. Maybe her outgoings would be more use.

“Try that,” he suggested, pointing to a small, fairly regular debit in Nafisa’s account. The last time it had been paid was the day he’d arrived in Iskandryia.

Hani went back to her screen.

1st August

“You must be Zara bint-Hamzah,” said the boy who
opened the door to her. Before she could ask how he knew, the boy had stepped back and was ushering her through the front door of the General’s palatial mansion on Rue Riyad Pasha.