Strangers. Danuta Reah

After 9/11, a bad joke went round Riyadh that they used it to train the hijackers. There’s a mall.’ He switched lanes and pulled away as a car drew level with them, almost boxing them in. ‘With a floor for women. You don’t need to wear a veil. A lot of the wives go there.’

      No one spoke for a while. She watched the traffic as they sped along the six-lane highway. The cars were all moving at high speed, and the drivers wove recklessly from lane to lane with little apparent regard for the danger. She looked at O’Neill’s profile, watched the way his hidden eyes observed the traffic, watched the way he anticipated the actions of the other drivers with the coolness of a chess player studying the board. He was a man who would fit in here. He was someone who knew how to become part of the background, who knew how to camouflage himself from the edginess and the tension that she could feel in the air around her.

      He swung the car along the road that ran through the outskirts of the city, further away from the lights and the noise and the bustle. Roisin had seen maps of Saudi–a vast desert that would swallow up western Europe, with cities emerging from the wilderness almost at random, a country created in a brief space of time from disparate groups of nomadic people, a country where the beliefs and alliances were complex and alien to outsiders like her and Joe.

      The road vanished into a hazy distance. It was lined with apartment blocks, stark and ugly after the beauty of the old city and the futuristic spires of the modern. They were on the outskirts now, with car parks, shacks and industrial complexes. Then a fence appeared on the horizon, dancing slightly in the heat haze. Roisin watched it as it emerged from the urban wasteland through which they were driving. It looked high and formidable, like a prison camp or a high-security installation. She found herself looking for the watch towers.

      But she could see trees and buildings behind the fence, and O’Neill was turning the car towards a gate protected by chicanes, towards a kiosk where two uniformed men stood with their guns held ready. ‘Security’s heavy. Got your documents?’

      O’Neill spoke to the guards, his Arabic sounding fluent and easy. There was a quick, unsmiling exchange. Roisin reminded herself that the promiscuous smiles of the West were not universal, that the severe faces did not denote hostility. O’Neill showed a security pass to the first guard, while the other one came round to the passenger side of the car and held his hand out for Joe to pass him their documents. The man didn’t indicate by word or gesture that he was aware of Roisin’s silent presence. She felt suddenly that she had ceased to exist.

      Then the car was waved past. She read the notices that hung on the gates as O’Neill waited for the barrier to lift. They were written in Arabic and English: Checkpoint. Stop at the barrier. Have your documents ready.

      Keep out. Sheer drop. Danger of death.

6

      Damien O’Neill leaned back in the reclining chair and watched the sky. His house was in the old part of the city, a part that had been largely abandoned by the Saudis, who had moved out to the wealthy suburbs. When Damien had first arrived, more years ago than he cared to count, foreign workers were housed here, and he had never joined the exodus to what was seen as more luxurious, more suitable accommodation.

      The house, old and shabby, was traditionally Arabic. There was little furniture. Cupboards were built into the walls, but otherwise the furniture was sparse and portable, designed to be moved to the shadier parts of the house as the seasons progressed. It was far too big for him, but he couldn’t bring himself to abandon the cool, high-ceilinged rooms.

      ‘You have no wife,’ his friend Majid said, by way of excusing Damien’s eccentricity. Majid chided him regularly about the lack of order in his life. He was concerned for his friend’s welfare. ‘You should marry,’ he added with the zeal of the convert. Majid had recently married and he and his young wife were expecting their first child.

      Damien knew too much about marriage. His own, embarked on with the careless optimism of his youth, had come to a catastrophic conclusion. If he let himself, he could still see Catherine’s face twisted with misery and a love that had rotted into hatred. You don’t care about anyone! No one matters to you! But no one could have filled the void that was Catherine’s need, or that was what he told himself. ‘One day,’ he said to Majid, unwilling to explain the complexities of his past, complexities that Majid would not understand anyway.

      ‘When you go home, maybe,’ Majid had said.

      But this was Damien’s home. He had nowhere else he wanted to go.

      He was feeling hungry. He stretched and headed down the stairs. The hallway was dim and cool, and the stone flags felt cold under his feet. It was shadowy down here. At street level, the house had no windows, just air holes to channel the breezes from the narrow streets. The kitchen smelled of coffee and spices.

      There was a pot of stew simmering on the cooker, and bread under a net. His houseboy, Rai, must have been to market, because there was a dish full of fresh, sticky dates. Damien had planned to go to the market himself. He liked to spend time drinking coffee in the cafés, talking to the men, catching up on the local news and gossip. This was part of his work: integrate, blend in, become part of the community.

      He had come to the Kingdom as a civil servant, working for the British government, but realized soon enough that the rigid hierarchies, the red-tape and bureaucracy that tied up the diplomatic service were going to prevent him from doing anything he really wanted to do, and that, if the local people were to trust him, he would have to cut all visible ties with Western government organizations. As soon as he made it known he was available, an agency that recruited professionals to work in the Kingdom had snapped him up.

      He worked at the interface between the ex-pat community and the Saudis, a precarious seesaw of mutual and often wilful miscomprehension. It was a difficult time just now. Ex-pat workers were leaving in droves as the insurgent campaign against them had been stepped up. Things were quieter after a clampdown by the security services, but Damien was still aware of the edginess on the streets, something in the atmosphere that said trouble had not gone but simply changed its face, biding its time until it was ready to strike.

      He’d spent the morning with two new recruits: Joe Massey, who had taken a post at the hospital, and his wife Roisin, who would be working at the university. He thought about the couple as he stood in the kitchen. Joe Massey had worked in the Kingdom before, but he was the one who’d been anxious, who’d been tense and uncommunicative during their brief tour of the city.

      Damien thought about it and corrected his impression. Massey had been tense and edgy from the time that his wife had got separated from them in the crowd. OK, that was fair enough, though Roisin Massey seemed well able to look after herself. She was a small, determined woman whose fair hair would have been a beacon on the streets of Riyadh if she hadn’t had the sense to keep it tucked firmly away under her scarf. He suspected that she was going to have trouble accepting the restrictions of life for a woman in Saudi Arabia.

      Riyadh could be a hard place for new arrivals. It was the centre of the lands known as the Nadj, the crucible of Wahhabi Islam. According to prophecy, the Nadj had been condemned by God as a place of earthquakes and sedition, the place where the devil’s horn would rise up. It was the heart of the deepest and most rigid interpretation of the faith.

      The day had faded, and he could see the city lights sparkling in the distance. He’d been invited to spend the evening with Majid’s family and he’d need to set off soon if he wasn’t going to be late. He had planned to phone and make his apologies–he had reports to complete that he’d left unfinished because of the Masseys, but now he made a snap decision. Work could wait. He wanted to get the feel of the city, take in its mood as he drove through the streets. The talk at Majid’s, leisurely and convoluted though it would be, would tell him something about what was going on. And he would enjoy the hospitality.

      Majid was an officer in the city police force–not the Mutawa’ah, the notorious protectors of virtue and opponents of vice, but the police who dealt with the more secular law breakers, and who were responsible