‘I’m sorry that your journey has been a wasted one,’ said Hassad, as he slipped the last of the knots into place. ‘I might have talked … but Nasri, and the others, wouldn’t allow it.’

‘I make one last appeal to you,’ said Porter, his eyes rolling upwards so that he could look directly into Hassad’s face. ‘Put me in her place. Leave the girl alone.’

Hassad shook his head. ‘We’ve already discussed it,’ he said. ‘Nothing can change the plan. Unless your government gives us what we want, the execution will go ahead as planned.’

‘I spared your life,’ snapped Porter.

‘And now I’m sparing yours.’

‘She’s sodding bricking herself. She can’t deal with this. I can.’

Hassad shrugged. ‘Everyone can deal with death,’ he said, speaking with a weary sigh. ‘There’s really nothing to it.’

Porter was about to speak, but Hassad had already stood up. He was walking towards the door. He looked exhausted, Porter thought, and he probably wasn’t going to get much kip either. Nobody would, he reflected bitterly. Not in this hellhole, with a young woman’s blood waiting to be spilt.

‘Now, get some sleep, if you want to,’ said Hassad. ‘Tomorrow, after the execution, we will blindfold you so that you won’t know where you’ve been, and we’ll drive you to a safe spot, and we’ll make sure you have directions and enough money to get back to Beirut. You can report to the British Embassy, they’ll take care of you.’

Porter grunted. We’ll both be dead long before then, mate, he decided.

‘I owed you a debt for sparing my life all those years ago,’ Hassad continued. ‘That’s why I agreed that you should come out here. But after tomorrow, that debt is paid in full. We are men on different sides of a war that may last for generations, and there should be no more dealings between us.’

Before Porter could reply, Hassad had already left the room. The door had been slammed tight shut, and he could hear a bolt being slid into place.

Porter lay back. The room was not completely dark: there was the single, small candle burning in a pool of molten wax in the corner. The straw felt damp, and he could feel the dirt within it. There was a drip somewhere in the room where some water was coming through the stone out of which it was carved.

‘Shit,’ he muttered.

He tried to make a mental calculation of the time. It had been midnight locally when they’d watched the news bulletin from London, and at least an hour had passed since then. So it could be one, possibly pushing two in the morning. The dead of night. If there was a rescue attempt coming, his best guess was that the Regiment would strike between three and four in the morning. There was no way of knowing for sure, but he reckoned nobody was coming. All that posturing on TV from Collinson: it suggested to Porter the bastard didn’t have a clue where Katie had been hidden. Hassad’s men were loyal, professional and dedicated, and they were operating in their own country.