She was watching me as I climbed up the hill. She said, “You must have scared the living shit out of that guy.”

“I realized that, then I tried to turn it into a joke. Hopefully he bought it.”

“Looks like he got over the scare.”

The guy was now sitting out on a chair reading a paperback. We started eating croissants and sipping coffee. The croissants were crunchy and flakey on the outside and soft, warm, and chewy on the inside. Just about perfect. After I’d finished one of them, I was able to breathe again. I said, “Let’s call the Iraqi.”

She looked her phone. She said, “Right now?”

“Right now.”

She tapped on the screen for a while and brought up the ‘Office’ contact, then tapped for speaker phone. I recognized the French dial tone, long bursts separated by silence. Then the phone gurgled, like it was swallowing something. Then, as before, another kind of dial tone came out of the little speakers. Like the audio equivalent of braille, five dots and then a blank space, then another five dots.

Then there was a click. Unlike the previous time, it was a living person. The atmosphere changed then, between me and Nazari. We stopped chewing and all of our attention got sucked into that little screen. The voice was female again, and in English. “Allo.” Which might not have been English exactly, it might have been an international code word for answering the telephone. I leaned forward and spoke into the phone. “It’s Keeler. I called before.”

There was a short silence, filled with some static from the distant connection. I heard the sound of breathing, and looked at Nazari. The voice said, “I need to call you back. Two minutes.”

The phone clicked off.

I handed Nazari another croissant from the bag. We ate in silence, looking out across the landscape. It was pretty out there. A fertile land with fields divided by areas of forest and bush. Well watered and rich. I finished the second croissant about the same time as Nazari.

We both looked at the phone.

It was flat, rectangular and glossy, with a bright screen that showed small squares for each of the applications on it. It looked like an object with special powers, something that people stare at expectantly, as if it could do surprising things. Which it could, depending upon the application loaded on to it. Then it rang, almost silently because Nazari had turned off the ringer, but not quite silently because she’d turned on the buzzer.

The phone’s screen had changed. Before, it had displayed the time and date. Now it showed the word ‘Office’, and below it was a green button for accepting and a red button for rejecting. Nazari touched the green button with the pad of her index finger.

Chapter Fifty-Five

“My name is Leila.”