Julia pulled the sheet over herself, turning off the brass swan wall-lights. She hugged her chest in the warm darkness; elated, far too alert for sleep to claim her.

Access Surveillance Camera: West Wing, Guest Suite Seven.

CHAPTER THREE

Eleanor had been living with Greg for exactly two weeks to the day when the Rolls-Royce crunched slowly down the dirt track into the Berrybut time-share estate.

It was two o'clock in the afternoon, and the sky was a cloudless turquoise desert. Eleanor and Greg shifted towels, cushions, and drinks out on to the chalet's tiny patio to take advantage of the unseasonable break in the weather. March was usually a regular procession of hot hard downfalls accompanying a punishing humidity. Greg could remember his parents reminiscing about flurries of snow and hail, but his own childhood memories were of miserable damp days stretching into May. Fortunately, typhoons hadn't progressed north of Gibraltar yet. Give it ten years, said the doomsayer meteorologists.

Eleanor stripped down to scarlet polka-dot bikini briefs, a present from Greg when he found she couldn't swim, promising to teach her. He rubbed screening oil over her bare back. Pleasantly erotic, although the heat stopped them from carrying it any further. They settled down to spy on the birds wading along the softly steaming mudflats at the foot of the sloping clearing. Most months saw some new exotic species arriving at the reservoir, fleeing the chaos storms raging ever more violently around the equatorial zones. The year had already seen several spoonbills and purple herons, even a cattle egret had put in a couple of appearances.

Greg lay on the towel, eyes drooping, letting the sun's warmth soak his limbs, slowly banishing the stiffness with a sensuousness that no massage could possibly match. Eleanor stretched out beside him on her belly, and loaded a memox of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings into her cybofax. Every now and then she'd take a sip of orange from a glass filled with crushed ice, and scan the shoreline for any additions.

Usually the girls he went with would drift away after a couple of days, maybe a week, unable to cope with his mood changes. But this time there hadn't been any; he had nothing to get depressed about, her body kept the blues at bay. And her humour, too, he admitted to himself. She rarely found fault. Probably a relic of her claustrophobic kibbutz upbringing, you had to learn tolerance there.

He wasn't quite sure who was corrupting whom. She was sensual and enthusiastic in bed, they screwed like rutty teenagers on speed each night. And he hadn't bothered to see any of his old mates since she moved in, not that he was pushing them out of his life. But her company seemed to be just as satisfying. It would be nice to think—dream really—that he could cut himself loose from the pain and obligations that came out of the past.