‘Aren’t you afraid?’ Jacob asks. ‘I mean… My God.’

Yassim shrugs and leads them further into the city, towards the financial district, where it’s calm and quiet this time of the day. Here there are only glass facades and building cranes, Persian Gulf money and black BMWs.

‘You get used to it,’ he says. ‘Don’t think about it much.’

They’ve arrived at a newly built high-rise that shoots upwards for at least twenty irregular floors, with white terraces and glass windows from floor to ceiling. It doesn’t look like it has any exterior walls, and you can see straight into the apartments on the lower floors wherever they’re lit up. It’s a completely transparent building and Jacob wonders where the bedrooms are, if they too are fully open to the city.

To his surprise Yassim goes to the entrance, where a bored security guard stands smoking, a machine gun leaning against his chair. Yassim greets the guard and walks past him towards the entrance, then turns to Jacob. ‘Are you coming?’

They ride upwards in a sleek elevator of gleaming steel. It’s like travelling through water: silent and almost no resistance. Finally, the elevator stops gently, and Yassim smiles at him and carefully pushes past him out onto the eighth floor. Three doors, three apartments, no names on any of them, only numbers. Yassim goes over to number 801, the left door, holds a small card against the handle and opens it.

‘Like a hotel,’ Jacob says.

It’s the first thing he’s said since they entered the building, but Yassim doesn’t answer, maybe he didn’t even hear, he just goes inside.

The apartment is large – over 100 square metres – and sits in one corner of the building with two glass walls facing the city. Concrete floors, a kitchen island in an open floor plan, it looks completely unused, like a set, like a showroom. In the middle of the floor there’s a large table and a laptop. Two chairs, one on each side. No paper, no clothes, nothing.

Yassim stops and turns to Jacob, his eyes now somewhat nervous and apologetic. ‘I would love to offer you something,’ he says. ‘But I only have water at home.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jacob says. He doesn’t want to drink anything. The images from the protest he was just in the middle of linger, and he can feel his legs start to tremble; a wave of exhaustion rolls over him.

He goes to the window and looks out over the other newly built skyscrapers, the empty lots between them, the cranes and the traffic. You can’t even hear the cars up here.

Yassim walks over to an almost invisible door in the glass wall and opens it. ‘There’s a terrace,’ he says.