She stared out the heavily tinted window of the car. She had spent several years in Switzerland as a young girl and knew the city reasonably well. These were not the Zurich streets she remembered of her youth. These were the gritty, dark streets of the northern districts and the Industrie-Quartier. Ugly warehouses, blackened brick factories, smoking rail yards. There were no pedestrians on the pavements and no passengers in the streetcars. It seemed she was alone in the world with only the Unimportant One for company. She asked him once more where they were going. He responded with an elbow to Sarah’s abdomen that made her cry out for her mother.

He took a long look over his shoulder, then he forced Sarah to the floor and murmured something in Arabic to the driver. She was lost now in darkness. She pushed the pain to one corner of her mind and tried to concentrate on the movement of the car. A right turn. A left. The thump-thump of rail tracks. An abrupt stop that made the tires scream. The Unimportant One pulled her back onto the seat and opened the door. When she seized hold of the armrest and refused to let go, he engaged in a brief tug of war before losing patience and giving her a knifelike blow to the kidney that sent charges of pain to every corner of her body.

She screamed in agony and released the armrest. The Unimportant One dragged her from the car and let her fall to the ground. It was cold cement. It seemed they were in a parking garage or the loading dock of a warehouse. She lay there writhing in agony, gazing up at her tormentor through the black gauze of the veil. The Saudi woman’s view of the world. A voice told her to rise. She tried but could not.

The driver got out of the car and, together with the Unimportant One, lifted her to her feet. She stood there suspended for a moment, her arms spread wide, her body draped in the abaya, and waited for another hammer blow to her abdomen. Instead she was deposited into the backseat of a second car. The man seated there was familiar to her. She had seen him first in a manor house in Surrey that did not exist, and a second time at a villa in Saint Bart’s that did. “Good evening, Sarah,” said Ahmed bin Shafiq. “It’s so nice to see you again.”

32. Zurich

Zurich

IS YOUR NAME REALLY Sarah, or should I call you something else?”

She tried to answer him but was gasping for breath.

“My—name—is—Sarah.”

“Then Sarah it will be.”

“Why—are—you—doing—this—to—me?”

“Come, come, Sarah.”

“Please—let—me—go!”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”