Jacob turns around and sees the men are out on the street now. One of them stops and waves for a taxi, the other stands wide-legged, with his gun in front of him. The rear window of the taxi explodes into a thousand crystals. Jacob throws himself down on the worn vinyl of the back seat, feels glass falling all over him. He hears the driver screaming and turning onto a side street, away from the guns and bullets and violence, and then the car stops. The driver turns around with wild eyes.

‘Leave!’ he screams. ‘Out of my taxi!’

He’s in shock, and Jacob already has the door open, jumping out. The shards of glass clatter around him, cutting him, but he takes out his wallet and throws three twenty-dollar bills into the back seat and runs as fast as he can over the uneven asphalt and gravel.

After twenty metres, he turns around, sees the taxi still there, the driver with a phone to his ear. But he doesn’t see his pursuers.

Another taxi stops beside him. He pulls open the door and jumps in for a moment of protection, security, and the taxi starts to roll forward anonymously, just one among a thousand others.

He feels dozens of tiny pieces of glass making their way under his collar, his hair still covered with dust. When he turns around, he sees nothing but the normal chaos of traffic here. No guns or the men who wield them hunting him down.

‘Just drive,’ he says. ‘Anywhere at all.’

*

Beirut is a city to disappear in. People who are from here have their groups, their ethnicity, their religion; they can fall into Beirut as if it’s a black hole and they will never be found again. But Jacob isn’t from here. He’s blonde and terrified and foreign; he’s exposed, a black swan, impossible not to notice.

Jacob sits on the honeycombed vinyl of the back seat of an ancient Mercedes, and the driver asks where he wants to go. As the taxi rolls eastwards, he turns around and looks out the dirty rear window. Just row after row of cars flowing slowly, slowly through the city. No grey van. Not yet. He has to hide, has to catch his breath, get on his feet.

Suddenly he’s back on the roof that very first night in Beirut. Alexa’s warm eyes. ‘Shatila is a labyrinth.’ He fumbles in his pocket and takes out her business card again. It’s only a small chance, barely even that. But it’s all he has.

‘I want to go to Shatila,’ he says. ‘To a youth centre there.’

He sees the driver shake his head. ‘I don’t drive to the refugee camps,’ he says in heavily accented English. ‘I can drive to the border, but you have to go the rest of the way yourself.’

He turns and looks at Jacob.