‘So tell me,’ she says. ‘What made you come all the way out here without even calling first? You were lucky to run into those guys; you could have been robbed. You know that, right?’

Jacob nods and feels the wound on his back start to ache again. For a while he’d almost forgotten it.

‘So much has happened,’ he begins. ‘I don’t even know where to start.’

Then the dam bursts, finally, and tears start coursing down his face. Everything washes over him: Yassim and Myriam and the gunshots at Hamra. The kidnapping that never was.

He’s expecting Alexa to put her arm around him, try to comfort him, tell him everything will be okay, and that she’ll take care of him. But she just puts her hand on his and stares deeply into his eyes.

‘There, there,’ she says. ‘Pull it together now, Jacob. Men don’t break down around here. Do you understand?’

*

It takes him fifteen minutes to tell his story. Alexa doesn’t say anything, just sits there completely still, listening. Half the time she doesn’t even look at him, just stares at the wall without expression. When he’s done, he takes a deep breath and buries his face in his hands.

‘I don’t know what I got caught up in,’ he whispers.

Alexa turns her face to him and looks at him calmly: ‘Beirut,’ she says. ‘You got caught up in Beirut.’

She stretches out a hand and puts it on his back, runs her hand slowly between his shoulder blades until she finds the little bandage that covers the stitches and the chip.

‘You can almost feel it through the skin and the bandage,’ she says. ‘If you know it’s there.’

Jacob just nods.

‘And what happens now?’ Alexa says. ‘You have something under your skin that you’ve promised to get out of Beirut. You’re being hunted by the Swedish and probably US intelligence services. You can’t exactly buy a ticket and fly home. What are you going to do?’

Jacob removes the thick envelope the bookseller gave him and slides it across the table to Alexa. She opens it and extracts the contents. Flight tickets to Brussels via Istanbul. A MasterCard. And finally, the most shocking thing of all: a Swedish passport, for one Patrik Andersson.

‘Lordy,’ Alexa whispers.

It’s the first time she shows any kind of reaction. Apparently, her limit is at counterfeit passports.

‘They’re quite serious about all this,’ she says, flipping through the passport. ‘This Yassim – I don’t know him. I know he was at my party, but he arrived with someone else. Do you trust him? Or are you so blinded by love that you’ll do anything for him?’

‘I don’t know,’ he whispers. ‘I do think I love him.’