Chapter Four

THE INTERIOR OF the arms dealer’s private jet was so ugly it hurt my feelings as well as my eyeballs. The walls were lined with a purple crushed velvet, the captain’s chairs were upholstered in a deep-red brocade, complete with monograms, and all the fittings were in gold plate that was so highly polished it looked like brass.

But the plane was capable of flying very high – where the turbulence was less and the air thinner – which meant that, in the hands of the two US Air Force pilots, we would make it to Jeddah in record time. The craft also had one other advantage – at the back of the cabin was a door which led into a bedroom with a full-size bed, and a bathroom decorated in a combo of chrome, mirror and leopardskin.

I managed to ignore the decor and, after showering, I changed my clothes and lay down on the bed. I have no idea how long I slept but at some stage I woke up and lifted the blind and was surprised to see that night had fallen and we were flying beneath an endless field of stars.

I turned over and, in the solitude of flight, got to thinking about the huge effort I had made to escape the secret life, what it had been like in Paris for those few wonderful months when I was reaching for normal and how I wished that I had found somebody who loved me as much as I wanted to love them. I would have liked children too but given the circumstances – being swept back into the covert world, even now chasing shadows down dark alleys – the way things had worked out was probably for the best. Maybe later, when the mission was finally done, I thought dreamily …

It was with that thought in mind, somewhere between heaven and the desert, that I must have fallen back to sleep and, once more, seemingly out of nowhere, I saw the vision of myself on the old yacht, sailing across the endless sea, heading into the dying of the light.

In the midst of it I heard a distant voice I didn’t recognize, but then I realized: it wasn’t God, it was the pilot on the PA announcing that we were landing in fifteen minutes.

I swung my legs off the bed and sat in silence for a moment. The vision of death had troubled me even more than before. It was more vivid and more insistent, as if it were drawing closer.