“You speak good Arabic, asayid. For a Giaour,” the driver added, using the contemptuous term for an infidel foreigner, but there was no offense in the words. All foreigners were infidels.

“Shokran,” the Scorpion thanked him, “but I think you are also a foreigner in Bahrain.”

“I am Palestinian, from Akko, near Haifa,” the driver said, slapping his chest proudly. “I am here only temporarily,” he declared.

“How long have you been in Bahrain?”

“Fifteen years, asayid.”

Along Government Road, new concrete buildings had been thrown up almost overnight. They gleamed white as tombstones in the sodium-bright streetlights, block after block. Once, Bahrain had been a crowded souk of squat mud houses, the Scorpion mused. Now, crowded with skyscrapers and smart shops, it looked like downtown Anywhere. The driver was wrong, he decided. They were all exiles: the driver who wanted a homeland which wasn’t there, the Arabs hunting the extinct houbara, and him. There was no going home for any of them.

“I think I go home pretty soon now,” the driver said.

“Inshallah,” God willing, the Scorpion replied.

The taxi swerved suddenly through a gap in traffic and turned into the driveway of the Gulf Hotel. As the porter took his bag inside, the Scorpion paid the driver, who glanced at him curiously. Then the driver smiled.

“Inshallah, asayid,” he said and with a blast of his horn pulled away, fitting the taxi between two creeping trucks, like a piece in a moving jigsaw puzzle. The Scorpion watched the traffic flow by. There were no tails, but he couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched.

By the time he checked in, changed shirts and had grown accustomed to the asthmatic wheeze of the air-conditioner, night had fallen over the island. He took the elevator down to the long dark bar, where Braithwaite was already holding court.

Everyone in the Arabian Gulf knows the Gulf Hotel bar. It’s an air-conditioned souk where everyone is either buying or selling, or usually both, where deals are made and broken in minutes over outrageously priced cocktails and where contracts worth millions are traded on the flimsy hope of a whispered “connection.” The bar was dense with tobacco smoke and murmurs of “agencies” and “consultants’ fee” in a dozen languages. A TV over the bar showed Sheikh al-Khatifa, resplendent in a gold-trimmed thaub, officially welcoming the airport arrival of Prince Abdul Sa’ad, the Saudi Deputy Defense Minister, on a state visit. No one paid any attention to the TV. As in the rest of the Arab world, all news here was carefully censored. Real information was passed by word of mouth in the souks.

Near the middle of the bar two slim BOAC stewardesses sipped tall rainbow-colored drinks through straws and tried to ignore the perspiring Levantine businessman who kept offering to buy them drinks, leering as he put them through their paces in the X-rated movie of his mind.