After they pulled up to the gate of the police station in Khairpur they were directed around to the car park at the back of the building, and the prisoner was brought out to them in a blindfold and handcuffs by two policemen. He did look as if he might be Burmese, but Martin could still hardly believe that this was the man that Lacebark had gone to all this effort to scoop up. You wouldn’t need three trained security men to hold him captive, you’d just need a length of fishing twine knotted around his ankle. He might have been as young as twenty-five, but he was as shrunken as the Indus, with a rime of red sores on his lips, and he stumbled along as if he were on the point of dropping to his hands and knees. Even so, Martin’s bodyguards jumped down out of the van, took the man from the policemen after a short parley, and loaded him into the back. Then they drove to a hotel around the corner, where Martin, improvising as best he could, pretending it was a creative leadership exercise, dismissed the Pakistani driver and told his bodyguards to organise themselves into eight-hour shifts until Bezant arrived: one resting, one in the hotel keeping Martin safe, and one guarding the magical mystery bus and tending occasionally to the prisoner. It wasn’t until Martin had sat down on the bed that he had a chance to think about how strange it was that at dinner parties he often refused to explain his job to people because he found it so boring and now here he was, apparently participating in some sort of covert operation. Had the scrofulous Burmese guy really committed a crime, he wondered? And if he had, how might its contribution to the net total of human misery compare to Dylan’s porn site if you could analyse them on a spreadsheet? It was probably much worse, Martin guessed, but of course he couldn’t be certain.
For nearly two days they heard nothing from Lacebark. Martin fell asleep around lunchtime on the first afternoon, which didn’t make sense even according to GMT, and woke up at dusk, if you could really call it waking up, to the sound of the fifth call to prayer. He’d read once that some Muslims got over jet lag faster because they were used to going to bed at odd times during Ramadan, but he didn’t find it plausible that a religion with circadian rhythms built into its compulsory schedule of worship could loosen you up in that respect. After sending his current sentry out for kebabs and bottled water, he called his wife and she told him that Dylan had come home with her from the police station, but, predictably, was refusing to get on the phone. She wasn’t crying so much any more but he still felt monstrous when he had to tell her that he didn’t know yet when he’d be back. For the rest of the night he worked on his laptop and napped at random, and the next morning he was so sick of the room that he went out, accompanied, to get a shave from one of the barbers who worked in the square at the end of the street. As he was being towelled off he watched a donkey cart trundle past with a huge cumulus cloud of empty plastic milk jugs lashed behind the driver, but then one cartwheel slotted into a pothole, the cart tipped, a rope broke, and the avalanche buried the donkey up to his cartoonishly perky ears.
Finally, as the bodyguards were starting their sixth uneventful shift, he got a call from his boss. ‘Bezant’s landing in Sukkur in half an hour. Drive back up there and meet him for the handover.’
Before they left, Martin opened the back of the van to check on the Burmese guy, which he regretted at once: the prisoner lay there on his side in the shadows, warm debris, twitching a little, smelling of piss, and Martin knew he’d never be able to tell his wife what had happened on this trip. But what would a good man, that notional creature, have done? Or an upright stepfather? Just let the guy walk free — limp free — having no idea who he was? Even if he’d tried, the Lacebark bodyguards wouldn’t have let him, and if he’d defied them he would have been imperilling not only his job but also his only means of safe transport back to Europe. Perhaps in other circumstances he might still have been capable of taking a moral stand. But not submerged in his jet lag. So instead he just told the bodyguards to put the handcuffs back on the prisoner and lock up the back of the van.
They met Bezant at a dusty margin of vacant land between the Airport Road and the canal, shaded on one side by palm trees. Above, the sky was lithium white; the naked sun hadn’t shown itself since Martin landed in Sukkur. The Australian arrived in a dented tan rental car but he showed no bemusement at the lurid van. Even compared to the three big bodyguards this man was a pillar of tungsten and steaks, and he would have made any normal product of the human genotype feel like a fiddly new model that had been miniaturised by some clever Japanese company to fit better into the handbags of teenage girls.
‘Let’s have a look, then.’
Martin took the keys from one of the bodyguards. He unlocked the van, swung open the doors, and braced himself for his third sight of the prisoner.
But there was no one in the back of the van. The prisoner was gone.
‘Right, so where have you put him?’ said Bezant. Then he saw the horrified expression on Martin’s face. ‘Are you telling me he was in here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is this a joke?’
‘No.’
A puff of small pinkish pigeons leaped up from a telephone wire beside the canal. ‘When did you last set eyes on the cunt?’ said Bezant.
‘Before we set off from Khairpur.’
‘Have you stopped since?’
‘No. Not even in traffic.’
‘There was nothing in the back of the van? No tools? No handy set of screwdrivers?’
‘No,’ said Martin. He’d seen that for himself.
‘I assume someone had the common dog fuck to give him a cavity search?’
One of the bodyguards nodded. ‘They tell us they give him one at the police station. We give him another one anyhow.’
Bezant turned back to Martin. ‘How long were they alone with him at a stretch?’
‘Eight hours.’
‘I was looking for something along the lines of “six minutes”. Eight hours at a stretch? Whose brilliant idea was that?’
‘He looked so frail, I didn’t think. .’
‘Didn’t anyone bother to warn you who this wanker was?’
‘No.’
‘Right. Of course they didn’t.’ Bezant ran a hand over his shaven scalp and spat contemplatively on the ground. ‘What has happened here, to the best of my estimation, is that our man in the van talked one of these oxygen thieves into slipping him some sort of widget, and on your drive over here he used it to get out of his handcuffs and then out of the door. The reason I say this is because it’s happened before. He’s got a very special tongue on him.’