I climbed the stairs. The first floor gave a view across the grounds. Most of the buildings I used in the Gulf were built with anti-ram walls, barriers, ballistics window film. This wasn’t one of them. It had a defiant lawn, some cacti, date palms and an elaborate sprinkler system. A Ferrari belonging to the man who used to live here remained beside the gates, a white shell of carbonised metal. Silver puddles gleamed in the burnt dust beneath it, which perplexed me until I realised it was the metal of the brake pads, melted and resolidified. That was surreal and beautiful. My own driver leaned against the gatepost, binoculars raised. Two distinct lines of smoke reached up from the suburbs of Abha, the nearest city, 3.4 kilometres away.

‘Eajal!’ Quick, he shouted, turning.

I estimated ten minutes before the men arrived, two more to breach the gates. The Saudi police had vanished, the SAS unit attached to the intelligence services for scenarios such as these was stuck at a vehicle checkpoint on the highway. I was left with three temporarily loyal members of a carjacking gang high on anti-epileptic medication that they consumed by the handful, claiming it gave them courage. Maybe it hadn’t kicked in yet.

One of my current allies, Samir, appeared in the corridor behind me: moustache and paunch, antique pistol, bulging eyes.

‘We go now.’ He was agitated. Beside him stood a cousin or nephew, no older than sixteen, in an FC Barcelona top, barely able to lift his Kalashnikov.

‘Five minutes.’

‘Two minutes.’

I reached into my jacket, gave the boy my handgun, told him to forget the rifle. ‘I’ll be back down before they get here.’

I took a breath, mixed some oxygen in with the fresh adrenalin. Nice and alert; let’s get this done. The room I wanted to find was proving elusive. I opened doors, looking for electronics and paperwork, finding abandoned Kevlar, fine china, leather-bound encyclopaedias.

One minute.

At the end of the second-floor corridor I located the door I needed. I punched a code into its electronic lock, saw inside, and my heart sank.

Seven or eight crates of material filled the small, windowless space: bank statements, shipping documents, loose cash, bills of lading. I counted four laptops, seven concertina files, stacks of invoices for almost everything but the weaponry he was actually funding. No doubt, somewhere within the mess, were identifying details; lives endangered.

Samir appeared behind me, saw the haul, swore.

‘We must leave it,’ he said.

It would take half an hour to remove it all. If we had a van. A call came from downstairs: they could see the dust of the approaching convoy. I threw the rucksack into the pile.

‘Get a can of petrol from the fuel house.’

‘We don’t have time.’

‘We’ve got plenty of time. Go.’