Looking at the red alcoholic’s face, the Scorpion wondered if Braithwaite was beginning to live entirely in the past.

“That was a long time ago,” he said.

“You are a soldier, asayid Shaw?” al-Amir inquired politely. He had trouble with a capital “O” for “Official” written all over him, and the Scorpion felt uncomfortable at his frank interest.

“Was, past tense,” he replied, taking sanctuary in his drink.

“Nasty b-business,” Braithwaite said, apropos of nothing.

“How about yourself? What do you do?” the Scorpion asked the Arab.

“I’m a policeman,” al-Amir said modestly, spreading his fingers as though to refuse food.

“Nonsense, Jassim is too modest. He’s Chief of Police, the local bimbashi as it were,” Braithwaite said, his eyes narrowing as if warning the Scorpion off.

The Scorpion acknowledged Jassim with a raised eyebrow, his senses completely alert. This was no casual meeting. It was a setup. He remembered Koenig, his instructor at the Farm in Virginia, telling them, “There are no coincidences in this business. None. The moment you smell something that even looks like a coincidence, you’ve been blown. Then the only question is, who are they working for … Them or us?” It really came down to a question of trust. Once Sheikh Zaid had told him, “If you don’t know the thing, you must know the man.”

Still, Braithwaite had always worn a white hat, the Scorpion told himself. But it was no longer just a question of the girl. Women simply didn’t matter that much in the Middle East. What had Harris dropped him into this time, he wondered. If he had owned any life insurance, now was the time to start inspecting the policy.

“How is it you speak Arabic so well, asayid Shaw?” al-Amir probed.

“My father was an oilman. He brought me out to Dharan when I was still a boy.”

“Those were the days,” Braithwaite muttered nostalgically.

Braithwaite was taking his own sweet time getting to it, the Scorpion thought. What was the old man afraid of?

“Were they?” the Scorpion said sharply.

“Have a b-bit of the old single malt, habibi,” Braithwaite said, gesturing at the bottle of Glenlivet on the table.

The Scorpion uneasily poured himself a stiff one. All this hail-fellow-well-met was making him nervous. What comes next? he wondered. The Good Conduct Medal and an engraved invitation to Buckingham Palace?

“Prince Abdul Sa’ad’s back in town,” Braithwaite remarked mildly, glancing over at the TV. “He’s been over quite a bit, lately.”

“The prince is an important man,” al-Amir remarked enigmatically. He rubbed his cheek and the Scorpion noticed a thin white trace of a scar there. He’d been making a mistake if he took the smooth, mild-mannered Bahraini for a cream puff, he told himself.