Taher’s family was Bedouin, and while many of the tribe had moved to the cities, his father had preferred the simple life.

‘Hard, but honest,’ Taher remembered him saying. ‘We scrape in the earth and are rewarded with bounty.’

So it proved. The barren acres his family owned turned out to have rich deposits of monazite, a mineral containing rare-earth metals. The deposits had only come to light after the missile strike, when the cliff behind the house had collapsed and the ore had been exposed. At first the ore had been near worthless, but the rise and ubiquity of the smartphone sent the prices of the rare-earth metals soaring. His uncle might, Taher supposed, have claimed the land for his own. Nobody would have cared: after all Taher had been only twelve years old when his parents had died. But his uncle wasn’t like that. Greed didn’t motivate him. Even now, when Taher had a tidy sum in the bank, his uncle still lived out in the desert with his wife and a few goats. Life, he said, was about worshipping Allah, serving Allah, doing Allah’s will. The fire from the sky had taken Taher’s family, but the fire from the sky had also revealed the treasure that would help Taher avenge their deaths. Infinite wisdom. Infinite justice.

When Taher turned eighteen the money his uncle had put in trust had been released. By Saudi standards it wasn’t a fortune, but it was enough to pay for Taher to go to university in London. When he finished his studies he was offered a post in the Saudi civil service, but he turned it down. He also turned down a lucrative position in Saudi Aramco, the country’s state-owned oil company. There were other things he wanted to do and they didn’t involve sitting behind a desk.

When he asked his uncle’s opinion, the old man said the pursuit of justice was not to be rushed. There was plenty of time.

Plenty of time.