For the better part of two days, he had kept to himself, waiting. He ate well, exercised, used the sunlamp in the bathroom for vitamin D, and slept as much as he could manage. He was determined to build his strength. The opportunity to escape might at any minute present itself. When he was not meditating, he prayed to Allah using the prayer rug and beautiful copy of the Koran Bacon had supplied, while at the same time forcing thoughts of escape from his mind.

After his afternoon prayer, and after seeking Allah’s guidance, Kazimi had summoned Harris to his room.

“I want to meet with Bacon,” he said.

Red Cliff was vast, and the butler was slow. It had taken ten minutes to reach the Great Room. Most of the trip was down—both straight and spiral staircases. At the head of the first flight, Bacon’s two buffalos met them and took over as Kazimi’s guides. There were no windows along the way, and even had the guards not been there, he had no sense that escape was possible. The stone passageways, lit by gas lanterns, were dank, smelling increasingly of mold and, surprisingly, of the sea.

The sea … Where was this place?

He had been unconscious from the moment Alexander Burke injected him until he awoke in his bedroom prison. Where in Allah’s name was he? How long had it taken to get there? Fortunately, there was some comfort in his resignation to whatever fate was determined for him. Still, he had decided, any action he could take that would return him to his laboratory, he would take. Many times each day he had recited the hadith attributed to Imam Tirmidhi:

If you put your whole trust in Allah, as you ought, He most certainly will satisfy your needs, as He satisfies those of the birds. They come out hungry in the morning, but return full to their nests.

After a long walk, the guards guided him past a pair of French doors through which, for the first time, Kazimi got a glimpse of where he was. Beyond the doors was a narrow gravel path, bordered by a fringe of lawn, and just beyond that, and far below, was the ocean, stretching to the horizon. Before he could ask any questions, the huge men motioned him through an arched opening, and into a cavernous stone room. The scientist’s mouth fell open. To his right was an enormous bank of windows, at least twenty feet high and, in total, perhaps fifty feet across.