They were in the tiny whitewashed hut in the courtyard which had been her cell when they first brought her to this place. The hut was hot as a furnace and her clothes clung wetly to her body like a clammy outer skin. That was in the first phase, what he called her “education.”

“All our laws are also simple, as are the punishments. The only law is the Koran, which is the Word of God and the only court is the ulama, which is the council of religious elders. If a man is a thief, we cut off his hand. If the man commits libel, we cut off his tongue. If a man commits a violent act, we cut off his head. You see, it is very simple,” he explained.

“What if a servant escapes?” Kelly asked, her eyes flashing. She still couldn’t bring herself to say the word “slave.”

“For a male servant, flogging. For repeated escapes, death.”

“What about females?” she prompted.

“Females cannot escape,” Abdul Sa’ad declared, raising an eyebrow to let her know that he knew what she was driving at. “We are well-guarded here, but even if you should manage it, where could you go? If you went into the desert, you would die. If you went into a city, anyone who saw a lone woman would turn her over to the religious police, who are everywhere,” he said.

That was true enough, she thought. She had seen the religious police during her brief ride in the Cadillac through Riyadh. They wore white thaubs and black-checked head-cloths and carried long wands to whip anyone who violated a religious law. The slightest infraction, a woman unveiled or wearing short sleeves, a shopkeeper who didn’t close up the moment the muezzin called to prayer, a man who passed a beggar without dropping a coin, resulted in a few taps from the switch, or worse.

“What would they do?” she asked, licking her dry lips with a tongue that rasped like a file.

“They would return you to me,” he said.

For a long moment they looked at each other. The bright sunlight from the open doorway dazzled her eyes. It reflected off Abdul Sa’ad’s white robe, seeming to clothe him in a nimbus of light.

“Why are you doing this to me?” she asked.

His answer terrified her.

“Because I can,” he said.

And then he was gone. The fat eunuch assigned to guard her locked the door and once again she was alone in the dark oven of her cell.