Harris shrugged again and smiled uneasily. This was his “Don’t blame me, I just got here” smile.

“According to the authorities at Muharraq Airport, she never got off the plane. She just vanished into thin air. That’s all we know.”

For a long moment the two men just looked at each other. From outside they could hear the muffled rumble of a car with a bad exhaust roaring like a squadron of bombers as it passed the shop, the sound slowly fading away. Harris slapped irritably at a fly that settled on his neck.

“You like all this don’t you?” Harris said oddly, with a vague hand gesture that somehow took in the entire Middle East.

“I like the desert.”

Harris nodded, looking at him with the kind of polite condescension reserved for madmen, as if the Scorpion had said that his hobby was talking to little green men in flying saucers. The Scorpion looked down again, knowing that Harris would never understand what he was talking about. He studied the girl’s face in the photo. Was there some sadness there, some premonition of her fate, he wondered.

“What have you got from the stations in Manama and Riyadh?” he asked at last.

Harris shifted uncomfortably. This was the sticky part and the Scorpion heard mental alarm bells ringing as Harris mopped his face.

“Things are a little dicey in Arabia right now,” Harris said finally, with the uneasy smile of a corporate vice-president telling the TV camera that there was no proof that tobacco caused cancer. The Scorpion had never seen Harris look so uncomfortable and that really worried him. It was beginning to sound like the worst kind of mission. The one where they collect your dogtags even before you leave.

In fact, now that he thought about it, Harris was a bird of ill omen, a raven in a Brooks Brothers suit. Saying things were dicey in Arabia made Harris sound like a scout admitting to Custer that there might be a few Indians waiting at the Little Big Horn.

“What the hell does that mean, Bob?”

“We can’t use the stations in Arabia. This has to be completely unofficial. Besides, it wouldn’t do any good. You can’t just ask an Arab if somebody’s got a new toy for his harem. You should know that better than anyone.”

The Scorpion’s eyes turned cold and gray as the sea and he stood up, trying to control his temper.

“Look, is this a straight ‘Search and Retrieve’ or has something been fucked up?” he demanded angrily.

Harris looked up sharply, his face flushed. “Nothing is fucked up and nothing better get fucked up,” he said. The two men glared at each other, their mutual dislike finally out in the open.

“The contact has to be somebody I know,” the Scorpion said finally.

“Braithwaite is on it.”