Taleb feels a stirring of professional pride deep within him. It is disquieting, but also reassuring, as he imagines it would be to rediscover his libido in the wildly improbable event of some sultry temptress attempting to seduce him. Laloul, embezzler of billions from the national oil company, SONATRACH, left his old confederate Zarbi to face the music when he fled the country shortly after Bouteflika’s takeover in 1999, with his stolen fortune already squirrelled away in secret offshore bank accounts. Taleb was part of the team put on the case. Beyond Zarbi, who was handed to them on a plate, their investigations led nowhere but dead ends and walls of silence, as was entirely predictable - and was indeed predicted by most of the officers involved. That was simply the way it was. That was Algeria.

‘We have a lead on Laloul, Director?’ Taleb asks hopefully.

‘Not exactly. We haven’t found Laloul. But we have lost Zarbi.’

‘Lost him?’

‘A condition of his release late last year was that he couldn’t spend a night away from his villa without official permission. But earlier this month … he went missing.’

‘I heard nothing of this.’

‘The DRS kept it to themselves.’ Ah, the DRS: Algeria’s secret intelligence and security organization, viewed by all - including Taleb - with a mixture of fear and suspicion, capable of anything, accountable for nothing. He is unsurprised by their reticence. Zarbi worked for the DRS - and its previous incarnation, the Securité Militaire - for more than thirty years. His complicity in Laloul’s fraud was an embarrassment to the organization and Toufik, its notoriously ruthless director, didn’t hesitate to throw him to the wolves. The episode’s still an embarrassment twenty years later and a serious surveillance failure isn’t something the DRS’s current leadership will have wished to advertise.

But Bouras has overlooked a nicety that might cause him embarrassment in some circles and Taleb decides gently to point it out. ‘That would be the DSS, Director?’ Not long after Toufik’s removal from its helm, the intelligence service rebranded itself with a subtle change of initials and some opaque reorganisation that supposedly rendered it more accountable - though to whom was not entirely clear.

‘Yes, of course.’ Bouras appears annoyed with himself. ‘How could I have forgotten? The DSS.’

‘Do they know where he’s gone?’

‘No. At least, they claim they don’t. But out of the country. That much seems certain. A sea-going launch believed to have been leased on Zarbi’s behalf has vanished from its berth at Sidi Ferdj.’

‘Does he have his passport?’

‘Not his real one, no. But with his background I don’t think he’ll have had too much trouble acquiring one, do you?’

‘All the more reason for the DSS to have kept a close eye on him,’ Taleb grumbles.