As planned, he rested in his tent until three in the morning, then cleared all trace of his presence there and spent the next hour silently, invisibly making his way back down the rocky slopes towards human habitation. His two-day trek had brought him up and up to high altitudes, and even though the village lay in a wide valley it was still some two thousand metres above sea level. The place was smaller than Ghurdak. Its low-roofed clay houses, ochre-coloured in the dim moonlight, were built on sandstone rises that could have been the remnants of some ancient hill fort’s foundations, and maybe were. The encircling adobe wall that must have protected the villagers from tribal raiders and other enemies for a thousand years or more was mostly in ruin, and here and there the settlement had spread out beyond the original perimeter.

It was one of those outlying dwellings that Ben chose to approach rather than venture among the other more closely-clustered buildings. He moved very slowly and cautiously through the darkness, sometimes taking a full minute between steps and listening hard all the way.

The house was all in shadow. Peering over a wall into a dirt yard he saw a glimmer of moonlight reflecting dully off the body of an old pickup truck parked under a tin-roofed lean-to. Everything was basic and utilitarian in the extreme. Life was hard in a place like this. Every minute of the day would be devoted to scratching a basic subsistence out of the arid land, the way things had been done since the beginning of time. In Ben’s experience people who lived that way were proud, and rightly so, but they were unimaginably poor by the lazy, cosseted standards of Joe Westerner and to even own a motor vehicle was a hell of a thing. Yet here he was, contemplating stealing it from them.

That was one of the reasons Ben didn’t care much for this kind of strategy. If he’d had money, he’d have left the truck’s owner a bundle of it in its place. But to do that, even to leave a token exchange like his expensive diver’s watch that was probably worth a year’s food, would be to leave a trace behind that might invite questions.