Jon Grimwood: Pashazade

Merde indeed.

A mouthful of now-cold coffee warned Zara that she'd overrun her own safety margin. It was time for her to log off and go pack up her little cubbyhole before Zara's boss realized what she'd been doing with her last day in the department. Breaking every regulation she could find, starting with unauthorized use of a LuxorEon3.

There was only one computer matrix in the city: IOL. Available through subterranean snakes of optic that crawled in conduits beneath the sidewalks to feed everything from cheap edge-of-network devices in local schools to the complex hierarchy of information appliances used in the Library itself.

The network was wired with optic rather than relying on radio because cable withstood EMP and those inconvenient, mujahadeen-inspired charged-particle things that scrambled radio signals elsewhere in North Africa. The wiring of the city had been done in record time, with roads ruthlessly ripped up, rivers drained and inconvenient buildings bulldozed. What Ove Amp had insisted would take twelve months minimum had been finished in six and even then General Koenig Pasha, the city's governor, hadn't been happy: he'd wanted it done in three.

And though the city streets were an open and fluid mass of architectural styles, crammed with all races and religions, the network running beneath those streets was anything but... It was utterly hermetic, completely sealed. Only the room where Zara sat, a cupboard-like alcove of the Library, acted as a node for those with permission to swim in the wider, wilder waters where information apparently wanted to be free but mostly seemed to expect you to buy it.

Zara clicked her way out of a credit-check site that kept demanding an account number for a charge card she no longer owned and shut down the connection.

If she was traced then Zara could undoubtedly count for help on the fact she had no previous record. Besides, the new marble floor of the triangular foyer below came directly out of her father's pocket. Disgrace her, and the director definitely wouldn't get his new roof.

Money was power. Zara was about to add Even dirty money, then amended it in her head to Especially dirty money. Dirty money carried with it the threat of unpredictability. Of course, dirty money eventually turned into new money, with all the scrabble for respectability that the term suggested. And new money lay on its back and opened its legs, or did it by proxy.

Zara shuddered.

Somewhere out of sight, beyond the sweep of the Eastern Harbour and beyond where the peninsula of the old Turko-Arabic quarter jutted into the sea to separate the Eastern Harbour's elegance from the warehouses and squalor of the West, somewhere out there flames lit the approaching evening like dancing devils, signature of the Midas Refinery.

A $1.8 billion complex that processed 100,000 barrels a day.

Out there on the edge of the desert, low-value heavy oil got an upgrade to petroleum gas, naphtha, aviation fuel and diesel for export to Europe. Though the public face of Midas was a minor Napoleonic princeling, her father owned 27.3 per cent through a holding company. It was more than enough.

Reaching into her bag, Zara pulled out a page torn from an American student magazine and began to read it for the fifth time. This was how she had to erase her traces from the network to become a ghost. There was much talk of command lines, Linux and Mozilla which she ignored, skimming down the page until she got to a paragraph for users prepared just to do what they were told.

Zara did exactly what it said. If the article was right she was now in the clear. If not, well, too bad ... Did they want a new roof or didn't they?

When she returned to her job — if her new husband ever allowed her back — it would be to a different department of the Library. None of her male bosses would talk to her, except to give orders or collect information. Most of them would not even look in her direction in case their glance was seen and misinterpreted.

She'd made plenty of mistakes in her nineteen years, but the biggest by far was ever turning up at the airport in New York. Her parents had been right to be worried, whereas she was just naive for not wondering why they wanted her home for the summer. Leaving Columbia for Isk because she was touched they'd been missing her was about as stupid as anyone could get.

Now she was stuck with an arranged marriage and Zara could just imagine to what ... Some spoilt, prissy little coke-head dressed in PaulSmith International. She'd watched enough episodes of Rich & Famous to know what to expect.

First isolated as a pure chemical in 1820 but sourced from shrubs long before that and spread across the littoral a thousand years earlier by the armies of Islam, caffeine was the North African drug of choice and something of a local vice. Which was fine with ZeeZee. He'd spent time at both Scottish and Swiss boarding schools and could think of worse ones ...

Lifting the airport cup to his lips, ZeeZee winced as the scalding black mud burnt his lips. The taste was of sweetened silt and arabica beans that hadn't been gently roasted so much as charred to death in their very own auto-da-fé.

'Best let it cool,' announced an elderly, whipcord-thin man who was sat opposite facing him over a low table.

'Yeah,' said ZeeZee. Thanks for warning me.'

General Saeed Koenig Pasha smiled and sipped from his own cup. Until thirty minutes ago the General had been bored. And then serendipity had seen him arrive at the airport just as all the fools on the scene started to panic about having breached diplomatic protocol.

Now he had the object of their worries in front of him, and the General had to admit he could see their problem. Not that he would ever, under any circumstances admit that to any of them. All the same, in his long and detailed experience as Governor of El Iskandryia, beys came in three types.

Old ones who lived in rambling palaces and wrote to him complaining about the laxity of the young.

Middle-aged ones who were too worried about their expanding bellies and nagging wives to have time to trouble him.

And young ones who drove too fast, lived hard and had acquired bad habits in foreign countries, without acquiring the necessary wisdom to realize that was where their bad habits should have been left — at least, when it came to displaying them in public.

This last type was what he half been expecting to meet. Someone elegant and urbane, if somewhat louche. Instead the young man opposite looked, sounded and smelled like an American hobo. He had ill-fitting clothes, his hair was twisted into ugly locks and his face was hidden by a long, matted beard. Luckily the General had visited West-Coast America enough to know that this was a look often adopted by the children of the very rich.

He hadn't introduced himself to the al-Mansur boy and didn't intend to do so. All the same, it would have been his signature that bounced the boy out of the country, had him sent to jail or even killed; if he'd followed the first instinct of a certain Colonel Gasparin, instead of doing what the idiot Colonel should have done right at the start. Place a call to Lady Nafisa at her madersa.

Besides, if his staff really believed it was coincidence that saw the General arrive at the airport at exactly that point, then they really were fools and he'd be replacing the lot of them. He had his own reasons for being interested in the family of Lady Jalila al-Mansur.

'You could formally complain,' said the General. 'You have that right.' He didn't say anything more, just cocked his head to one side and waited to see which way the boy would play it.