She remembered how everything seemed to be moving in slow motion when they took her down the rear exit of the jet. Her legs were wobbly and the blinding light and heat almost knocked her over as they walked across the tarmac to a waiting limousine. It was like walking through boiling water. Inside the limo, a fat middle-aged Arab took her face in his hand and turned her this way and that, inspecting her as if she were a horse, even poking his fingers in her mouth to examine her teeth. They loaded her on a private Lear jet, its interior thick with oriental rugs and painted with intricate arabesques, looking like a flying Moroccan seraglio. The furnishings were covered with velour upholstery and the jet was filled with expensive stereos and electronic gadgets. It was as if Hugh Hefner had employed Sanford the Junkman as an interior decorator.

Once the jet took off, she was taken in tow by two veiled women, who led her behind an ornate screen, chattering away in the language she couldn’t understand. The women bathed her in a solid silver tub, splashed her with enough perfume to float a good-sized ship and dressed her in a black robe and veil. By the time they landed, her mind had finally begun to clear from the effects of the drug, except for the strangeness of everything around her and the sweet reek of the perfume which enveloped her like a cloud. They led her from the plane to a Cadillac parked on the tarmac and drove her through an immense modern city, thronged with Arabs in western clothes, which she later learned was Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.

The Cadillac sped past squat adobe huts on the outskirts of the city and turned on to a modern two-lane asphalt road which led straight into the al Aramah desert. The road was virtually empty and the honey-colored desert lay flat as a table as far as she could see. Through the tinted windows the desert sped by, unpopulated by houses or any living thing. There was only the flat land and sky and the endless highway unrolling before them.

After several hours they turned into a dirt side road that led to a large featureless house surrounded by a thin border of grass and palm trees. It looked like a giant yellow brick on a billiard table. There were barbed-wire fences and soldiers in gun emplacements all around the house. It was a fortress.

The car pulled into a courtyard where two Mercedes and a gold Rolls-Royce were parked. In the center of the courtyard stood a stone fountain that was dry as a bone. A fat eunuch with a hairless face and pendulous female breasts waddled out to the car and led her to the small stone hut, her cell. They left her there for days, apparently to die of thirst, until Abdul Sa’ad came and explained what he wanted.