3

I WAS APPROACHED BY A young man smelling of soap—he seemed to me to have just had a bath and shaved—and gripping a long-barreled shotgun of local manufacture in his two clean hands. His nails were carefully clipped and filed. I looked like a beggar by comparison: I reeked of sweat, my clothes were filthy, and my hands were smeared with the soil I’d dug up not long before.

For those like me with no papers, the inside of the bridge was the only way to move between Cairo’s two halves, despite the risks. You could lose your money and your possessions. You could lose your life. But crossing over the bridge was impossible. For me, the checkpoints were traps. And the toll down here wasn’t high: just a single pack of cigarettes. Cheap to them and cheap to me. I was going to cross as a regular citizen. They had no idea I was with the resistance, and I couldn’t tell if they were with the resistance or just thugs protecting their source of income. I was carrying nothing of any value and the journey was a very short one, just a kilometer or so through the bridge.

Calmly, the young man said:

“Price of entry is one unopened packet of cigarettes. No weapons here. If you’re carrying a weapon, chuck it down that hole, now. No talking to the pedestrians and no looking at their faces. If you’re carrying a mask, then put it on; otherwise cover your face with a scarf or a sheet of newspaper. If you don’t have those, then here’s a paper bag you can put over your head. This is for your own protection. Don’t reveal your name or identity to any of the pedestrians or vendors, asleep or awake. The inner bridge isn’t just a passage like it used to be—it’s a place where lots of things are bought and sold. I won’t forbid you to buy anything from the vendors, but all purchases are made at your own risk. Don’t come to me complaining that you’ve been robbed or cheated. Now, on your way.”

I placed the cigarettes in his hand. I took the mask from my bag, put it on my face, and fastened it to my head with the leather strap. Now I was ready to cross.

The darkness pressed in on every side. Nothing could be seen ahead. To my rear was the youth and the fading scent of his soap, his comrades clustered around him, watching me. With their clubs and short swords, they looked like real guards. What little pale light came from the hole fell across the lower halves of their bodies. I took a few paces forward and distant sounds reached me from the depths of the tunnel. There were scattered gleams of colored light, the rattle of blades and chains.

The first thing I saw was a woman. She looked to be about sixty years old, her features obscured by a piece of cloth wrapped around her face, like a turban covering her entire head. She wore nothing else, and the sagging flesh of her breasts and shoulders gave away her age. Her appearance was overwhelming. The sudden nakedness and the covered face threw me completely off balance. I’d never before seen a naked woman in a public place. Without thinking, I lifted my hand to my own face, checking that the mask was fixed in place. I felt properly secure now. She was stroking her thigh with her palm, and then she squeezed her right tit and in a hoarse, unruffled voice asked: “Five for five?”

I walked on, expecting the worst.

I wouldn’t have guessed that the bridge had been built with a tunnel like this inside it: two walls, a floor, and a ceiling, all cement. Vast cables and pipes stretched the length of the tunnel along the ground, clearly visible to the passerby through gaps in the long wooden planks that covered them and that had almost certainly been placed there by those using the tunnel to protect against the risk of electric shock should the cables fray, and in order that the pipes wouldn’t spring leaks or break if trodden on. There were a number of shacks on both sides of the passageway, a meter across and two meters high, and over the entrance to each one hung a blackout curtain, blocking what little illumination was given off by the lights that dangled from the tunnel’s ceiling. Some of the curtains were lowered, and some were raised to show what lay inside. Curiosity got the better of me. I hadn’t laid hands on a woman for a long time, and the warmth of the place and the ever-present sense of danger urged me to stop. Outside what I judged to be the most orderly of the shacks, I halted. There were no pedestrians nearby, and a thin girl sat on a raised chair outside the curtain. In the wan light, her legs looked soft and smooth. Her face was small with regular features, and embellished with the dark red of her lipstick. She wore a light robe whose open neck displayed her throat and cleavage. “Five for five,” she said, and though I didn’t understand what she meant, I nodded to seal the deal and followed her inside, and she lowered the curtain behind us.

There were pictures of naked women stuck up on the walls. I was standing, looking around, and trying to avoid the girl’s eyes. Working rapidly, she undid my belt, tugged down my trousers, took my cock in her mouth, and sucked it until it stiffened. Then she sat me on the mattress and rode me. When I tried removing her robe, she checked my hand, gripped the hem herself, and in a single movement pulled it off to leave herself completely naked before me. She clutched her breasts as she bounced wordlessly around on my cock, and I stared hard at her chest and shoulders, in awe of a sinuous grace I’d not sampled for so long. I squeezed her breasts and she bounced faster, trying to escape my grip, but I wouldn’t let go, and lifting my gaze I saw her face clearly for the first time. Her right eye looked wrong, staring off to one side and not moving like the other. She picked up speed and moaned. It was all an act, but because she moved so rapidly, the surface of her dead eye dropped out onto the mattress, revealing a truly damaged orb beneath, and then I realized that it must have been some sort of artificial covering. Stunned, I released her breasts, and she lowered her good eye, then closed it, and now it became clear that the eyelid of her damaged eye was missing or not working; a single gray eye stared out at me, its surface marked by faint crooked lines: a blind eye, unseeing but open wide, its upper lid torn and lashless. She moved closer to hide her face from me and ran her fingers through my hair, and as usual I couldn’t sense that I was nearly there, and at that very instant I came.

She got off my lap, retrieved her eye-cap, and returned it to its socket. Then she took a plastic cup and filled it from a bucket in the corner, splashed water over her vagina a couple of times, put on her robe, lifted the curtain, and went out. I was sitting on the mattress, slowly deflating, the sperm drying on my trousers and thighs. I saw blood smeared thickly over my penis, sticky and starting to dry. I had no idea where it had come from, and adolescent nightmares flashed through my mind: had she stuck a razor up herself? But what had happened was more a cause for disgust than fear. She was menstruating. Someone walked by the shack and paused for a moment to peer in beneath the raised curtain, and I saw his eyes smiling behind his mask. An Ismail Yassin mask. The narrow brow, thick lips, big teeth, and broad grin gave it away. I was still wearing mine. I was safe. I quickly got up, straightened out my clothes without wiping away the sperm or blood, and emerged to find that Ismail Yassin, interested in neither myself nor the girl, had wandered off. Standing outside her shack, she called out to me, “That’s three for three, then,” and I stood there, trying to work out what she meant. I stared at her breasts beneath the robe and grew flustered: I wanted another grope, but the thought of the blood held me back. “Come on!” she said, “Three minutes for three pounds!”

I passed by many whores, none prettier than the menstruating girl. Though one-eyed, she was the most beautiful of the lot. Next time, I’d make sure to wear a condom. She might have some disease, I fretted, AIDS maybe, and I wondered if I’d been infected.

I walked for ages. I heard the sound of cars overhead. On this section of the bridge, the cars could speed along with no checkpoints to stop or slow them down. I thought back to before the occupation, to those endless hours stuck in traffic on the October 6th Bridge. I’d look around at dozens of others waiting just like me, would watch them staring straight ahead with no purpose in mind. There was no waiting now. The number of cars passing between the two halves of Cairo had declined dramatically, and even with the checkpoints holding it up the traffic didn’t grind to a halt as it used to.

Contrary to the dire warnings of the guard by the tunnel’s entrance, the place was perfectly safe, and my mask kept me at a remove from those around me. They were selling all kinds of contraband down here: hash and weed, white pills and colored pills in all shapes and sizes laid out on low tables, bottles of cheap booze, small plastic bags of fermented bouza, imported porn mags. There were no shacks for prostitution in this section. This was the tunnel’s commercial center. Business was more respectable here.

The further I walked, the fewer vendors there were, until I reached a section where there were no vendors and no whores, just pedestrians like myself. All the faces were covered with masks, or paper bags, or the tail of a headscarf. A few, as I did, wore specially made masks, and these people were somehow different, as though their masks were not really hiding who they were. Wearing the same easily recognizable mask all the time is essentially pointless: you swap your face for your mask, and it becomes part of your identity.

My first steps in Cairo for two years. The time I had spent in the tower had left me cut off from the latest developments. When had wearing masks become a normal thing to do? Or was it just because we were walking through the bridge?

Vendors reappeared, this time hawking little pharaonic statues, which were—it goes without saying—forgeries, though they insisted they were authentic. I overheard one man arguing with a potential customer, trying to convince him that a stone head was real.

Toys next: dolls, and cars, and colored balls. I had assumed the tunnel would be a marketplace for contraband, but almost anything could be sold here, it seemed. When I saw white underwear laid out on the ground, I remembered my unwashed cock.

The tunnel narrowed. I heard someone tell his friend that they were very near the exit, and minutes later daylight could be seen filtering palely through a square hole in the floor. It was like the place was upside down, lit by windows in the floor rather than in the walls or ceiling. For a moment, I forgot that I was walking in a tunnel suspended in the air.

I lowered myself down through the square opening and was assailed by the din of cars and crowds, and an overpowering stench of urine. The ladder was attached to a column against which people were wont to empty their bladders, and over the years the urine had formed a vast black stain that reached halfway up the concrete stem and spread further still over the ground. The stain was dry—I didn’t see it glistening as liquid would—but it gave off an intolerable smell. This, together with the various sights of a man eating a round of bread, drool coursing down his chin, a fellow clearing his nose down in the street, and a third guy gripping a short sword and brandishing it threateningly at the passersby, brought the bile into my throat and I puked. I was in Galaa Street, in the neighborhood they call Isaaf.

I walked along slowly, trying to get out from under the bridge to where there was air to breathe. I could see the bright sunlight striking July 26th Street and I wanted to reach the intersection between July 26th and Ramses before I lost consciousness. I had to meet someone there. It was nearly 10 a.m. now. I’d be there in five minutes, no more.

An old man stopped me. He was naked and barefoot, his legs so grimy that his toes could hardly be made out through the blackened filth, and he muttered inaudibly, spittle running down into his beard. He looked at me and whispered in terror, “We are all dead. We are all in torment.” I held his gaze for a while, then went on.

For five minutes I loitered outside the Isaaf Pharmacy and then a woman wearing a niqab approached me and asked, “Otared?” I was silent for a few seconds before I replied. She nodded and walked off, and I followed her, feeling hopeful. I was afraid to look back at what I’d left behind.

She walked down July 26th Street toward Downtown. It was at its most crowded and there was no space to move on the sidewalk, but she made her way through the throng as though she were used to it. I tried getting past people by shoving them or dodging. They divided into those who held you up by dawdling and those who were advancing in the opposite direction. The vendors set up on either side occupied a sizeable chunk of the sidewalk, and the space left for pedestrians had narrowed to less than a meter. I couldn’t see the woman clearly and I trailed her at a distance, forever trying to get closer through the pressing crowd.

Then the sidewalk widened a touch, the crowds thinned out, and I drew up alongside her. I asked where we were going and she didn’t reply. She walked until we came to Ataba Square, went on to al-Azhar Street, and took a side street, then began turning down alleys of diminishing size until, though close behind her, I almost lost my way.

This was my first time out and about in Cairo for a long time. No changes worth mentioning to the apartment blocks and buildings. The cars were the same and the crowds no smaller. But the people were less familiar. Incessant cries rent the air. Squabbles were breaking out in every street, outside every shop, a stream of insults let loose to amuse, to humiliate, to threaten. Fights with fists and knife thrusts. I counted four men puking on the pavement, then stopped counting. I saw someone lying on the ground, blood running out from beneath him. No one went over to cover his body. Back in the day, someone would borrow a newspaper and cover the body with it, holding it down with small stones around the edges, and any blood there was would be enough to stick the paper to the corpse. Now they left the dead body exposed to all and sundry.

The woman climbed the stairs of an old building and opened the door of an apartment on the first floor. In we went. The niqab was removed to reveal a man with a pencil mustache. He lit a cigarette and said, “Won’t you remove your mask?” I’d grown used to looking through the narrow eye slits and to the mask’s weight on my face. I lifted it off, and my sense of security disappeared, and the fear came back, but I didn’t let go of it. I clung to the only protection I had here. Up in the tower, I’d been safe. Now I was out in the open. The man peered into my face for a moment and settled onto a chair. I sat facing him and, seeing no reason not to, put the mask back on. I was a regular civilian now. I’d left the Interior Ministry a while ago and nobody had my back. Everyone I knew there had either left, or died, or joined the resistance, and anyone who’d stayed on as an officer was my enemy, no doubt about it. I was in danger, therefore, and my mask was my only protection. Though I was currently in a safe house belonging to the resistance and sitting with one of their communications officers, the sex change trick he’d played made me wary.

He smiled. “Someone will drop in on you tonight to give you a message and a date. There’s an important meeting taking place and you should be there. People like yourself are thin on the ground these days, and maybe you don’t realize how vital you are. You can leave now if you’d like, but you must be back before midnight. And whatever happens, hide in the crowds if an officer should ask to see your ID. Kill him if you must. Technically speaking, you’re a dead man. After all, you’ve killed a lot of people in the past few months and, who knows, you might be killing more quite soon. Police officers these days are traitors, as you’re aware, so there’s nothing to hold you back.”

I had no idea if the man sitting before me was an officer or not. The era of proud and upright officers was past, and so much brass had been stripped from shoulder boards it was no wonder people’s backs were bowed. Most likely his role in the resistance was to pass on times and dates, to meet people and escort them to safe houses, but he would have no experience with weapons, or explosives, or real police work. He rose, said goodbye, and left.

I was exhausted. Wandering through the apartment, I came across a big, clean bed in one of the rooms, and I stretched out on it and immediately relaxed. In minutes, I had surrendered to sleep. For a brief instant, I thought of the semen and the blood. I wanted to get up and wash after my draining journey, but I was already going under.

I was shaving with an electric razor. I’d used one before—ten years ago perhaps—and hadn’t liked it much. Now I could hear that familiar metallic whine, but I couldn’t feel it buzzing against my skin. Ten years ago, I’d been in a room in a hotel, whose name I couldn’t recall, in Berlin. Well, I wasn’t in Berlin now. Ten years ago, I’d visited the place, bought an electric razor in the street, and when I’d got back to my hotel room and tried it I hadn’t been impressed. Now, though, I was in Cairo, it was 2025, and I was sleeping in a small room in a strange apartment. I was asleep and, if I wanted to be rid of the razor’s whine, I must wake up.

Suspended in midair was the smallest drone I’d ever come across, slightly smaller than an unfurled hand and hovering motionless by the ceiling. Six slender articulated legs hung down from the gleaming black body, and above it two huge black wings spread out—or rather, not wings exactly, but two hard casings under which the wings hummed. I was still sprawled out on the bed, so I sat up and serenely the drone drew closer. Its low whine was what had woken me and I realized how accustomed I had become to the absolute peace and quiet on the top floor of the tower. Accustomed to sleeping undisturbed. The drone landed beside me on the bed. For a few seconds, as the four translucent wings performed a few last upward flicks, the casings stayed raised, then they settled back flush with the body. I picked up the drone. It was very light, under a hundred grams, I guessed, or maybe less. Less than fifty, even. Astonishingly light and precisely engineered, and because it was a beetle—a scarab to be exact—I was instantly fond of it. I have a strange partiality for insects; an appreciation for the way they move and work, perhaps, for their ability to hold their own against humans. I turned it over, searching for a message and considering how I could keep hold of it. But I’d break it for sure if I kept it with me. This was no rugged weapon like my rifle, which could withstand being shunted around, neglected, and abused, and nor was it my mask, which had been scratched and marked in many places but remained solid and robust. This was a fragile toy, quite unsuitable for a man so disorganized and careless as I was. On the drone’s underside, I found a little button. I pressed it and a hatch opened to reveal a small hollow in the belly. In the hollow, I found a sheet of paper. I took the paper, closed the hatch, and placed the drone back on the bed.

The message gave the address of an apartment in Abdeen, a time, and nothing else. I didn’t spend much time worrying over this unanticipated terseness—I’d been waiting for a message and here it was, with all the information I required. I had to be there at 7 p.m. and it was now 4. Three hours were enough to wash and get over to Abdeen.

The drone started moving on the bed, skillfully scaling the rumpled covers. I hemmed it in using my leg, the pillow, and the wrinkles in the bed sheets. With a pair of hair-thin antennae, it felt out the slope of the pillow, tested a wrinkle, then approached my leg. And without any hesitation at all, it climbed up onto my knee, changed direction, and crossed over my knee onto my thigh. There it paused, neatly cocking its head toward my face, and started to dance. Was it aware that I was testing and teasing it? I knew drones were intelligent enough to move and fly, to make it past obstacles and reach their targets, but anything more was beyond the capabilities of a basic model, let alone interacting with its controllers like a pet. And even if this drone could act like a pet, I wasn’t its controller.

Scarabs are amazing insects, I think, and drones are more amazing still: they use hardly any power, they’re minuscule, and all their complexity stays hidden away beneath their metallic shell. In my opinion, mankind’s first truly creative act was to build these drones. My little scarab tapped my thigh with its two back legs, flipped once in the air, then settled back down on my leg. It was showing off to me. It flipped again, spread its wings, and hovered there, perfectly balanced.

A little performance for Mr. Otared.

I went into the bathroom and closed the door. Cold water, and not a trace of soap in the apartment. I stood beneath the shower for a few minutes, then dressed in the same clothes I’d been wearing. Outside, the drone hovered right in front of the bathroom door as though waiting for me, and as I emerged a thought occurred: was it watching me? And just like that, the happy moments I’d spent in its company were wiped out. I was being watched, then, and I couldn’t do a thing about it. Of course, I could smash it, but if I did that, then the meeting would be cancelled and my association with the resistance would be over. I knew there was someone watching me, and the person watching me knew that I knew it. There was nothing to be done. If the watcher was a cop, then he had to know that I’d be suspicious of the drone. Maybe he was some callow operative from the resistance, a new recruit, or maybe he was an experienced officer who just wanted to let me know that he could get to me. Message received, in any case. From now on, I’d adopt the standard wooden expression: no flare-ups of any kind. The drone flipped in midair whenever I looked at it. It wanted to impress me. What irritated me was that I had initially been taken in by its games. My sixth sense had deserted me and I’d only realized what it was long after it had arrived.

Sooner or later, man will construct drones like this one not to serve him, not to cook for him, not to drive his car—nor will they become our masters, for that’s just the naive science fiction of crass filmmaking—but rather to worship us. There will be drones ready-made to be raped to keep the rapists busy, and others configured to resist. Configured with voices that scream and plead. We will beat them, and they will weep, and the drones’ owners will string them up on lampposts to flog and torture them. We’ll set fire to them, perhaps, as punishment for things they didn’t do. We’ll catch the smell of roasting flesh, pumped out of special compartments in their sides, and even better, we’ll be able to program them to beat us and turn us on. To rape us, perhaps, so we can sample the delicious agony of our orifices being violently abused, enjoy the strokes of a whip wielded across our backs by a mechanical arm, and then . . . then, we’ll shower and dress like civilized men and women, and walk the streets, toting our robot rapists in little bags.

6 p.m. The number of people on the street not less but more; likewise the number of occupation army drones in Ataba and Opera squares. The sheer quantity of checkpoints made it impossible to walk through Downtown, and so I crossed Opera Square in the direction of Gumhuriya Street on my way to Abdeen. The statue of Ibrahim Pasha was still disfigured—its head had been stolen at the start of the occupation—and if anything its lower half looked as if it was getting smaller by the day. They said people stole bits by night, would climb a ladder with a saw and cut. Tiring work, but the statue seemed to invite theft. Ibrahim Pasha pointing out at the horizon. We had cut off his head, and hand, and arm, and we wouldn’t stop until we’d done away with the whole thing, down to the horse’s hooves. We wouldn’t leave a single atom on that plinth.

A huge balloon bobbed over the statue, and midway up the rope that anchored it a gigantic advertising board was swaying in the wind. I couldn’t make it out at first, but looking closer I saw it was an advert for a television show. Tomorrow: Hope. Just reading the title told me everything I needed to know. Shows like this one had been common currency for at least twenty years, all of them talking about Hope and Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Hope, the Tomorrow that lies in Hope, or Hope in Tomorrow, and then the cycle would start over and we’d be back to a show about Hope and Tomorrow. Even after the death of Hope’s biggest huckster—the author of hundreds of books on self-help, positivity, and the like—from the inconceivably vicious double-whammy of AIDS and bone cancer, people still looked to Tomorrow with Hope. Which is why rapist drones were the solution.

I walked down Gumhuriya Street, a little calmer than the square behind me and less crowded than Downtown’s interlocking grid. Then, without warning, something flew up behind me, whizzed over my right shoulder, and came to a halt in midair about a meter in front of my face. Another drone? No, it was the same one I’d left at the apartment. Maybe it had followed me all the way, or maybe it had been looking for me and had only just found me. It hovered in front of me as though asking permission to come along. Had drones become sentient? Fine. I had no objection to being watched. I just wanted to go on my way, that was all. I nodded, signaling my consent that it accompany me. Let’s see if it understands. . . . What happened next was genuinely extraordinary: it flipped three times in the air, completed a single circuit around me, and came to rest on my right shoulder. I walked on. It was so light I could hardly feel it was there.

I gave passersby the name of the street and building number, and got directions off several of them. They all described the same route, but I asked more than one to make sure. Three in a row gave me a shortcut. At last, I found myself in a small alley that terminated at a small building; an alley branching off a wider street and containing no shops or large buildings, but squat residential blocks, none more than three stories high. 6.45 p.m. I wouldn’t go up until the exact time. I’d wait in the dark for fifteen minutes. I’m the king of waiting.

The choice of the building at the far end of the narrow alley suggested extreme stupidity. This was a trap, not a safe place to meet. Who was going to escape from a building like that if the police raided? The alley was perfectly still and silent, the ideal setting to sniff glue and inject, a place for streetwalkers.

The scarab flew off my shoulder, made for the streetlight, and hovered beneath it for a moment.

A man was hoisting up a naked leg and pressing its owner against the wall of one of the buildings, pushing her body into the wall, his trousers and underwear slipping down off his bare ass, jabbing her repeatedly with his cock, as she held her face up and away from his panting breath and gazed nervously at the alley’s distant entrance. What they call a quickie. I hunt in places where dirty deeds are done.

He finished up in no time and the whore started adjusting her clothes, taking two steps backward into the circle of light beneath the streetlamp. She had taken off one trouser leg to make it easier for the man, and now she was trying to put it back on again. The man pissed against the wall and shook his cock. But where was the cash? Could you get one for one, as well? Was there new slang for the trade? I don’t know why I was so bothered, so angry. Was prostitution going to put paid to my dreams of a happy future? Was Ahmed Otared rediscovering his high moral principles after one quick tour through the streets of Cairo? The drone returned to my shoulder, but this time did not keep still and crawled slowly across my collarbone. Tell me, dear drone, if you’d be so kind: does my anger come from my Hope in Tomorrow?

So far, the man and woman had been silent—and I had held my tongue, too, hoping to watch undiscovered for as long as possible, if only for the sake of a little entertainment and to kill time. For some reason, she slapped him, the sound of the slap ringing out into the emptiness, and he responded in kind, a violent blow that gave off a muffled report. Suddenly, the drone fell still, as though it were listening or watching, but I was distracted from the drone by what the man and woman were doing. She was scratching his face with her nails, and he began to punch her hard. At last, he managed to get her off him, at which she picked her bag off the ground and started rummaging around inside, searching for something. As she did so, he advanced toward her nervously and jabbed her in the arm with a short-bladed knife. There were no screams. His face was bleeding, and she took the knife thrust in complete silence. He backed off a couple of paces as she took what looked like a small handgun from her bag. At a glance, I could tell it was a weapon made here in Egypt, a basic zip gun, knocked up by a metalworker in his workshop to no blueprint, and untested—conceivably one of just ten that he’d put together and sold to anyone wanting a small, cheap, unlicensed firearm. The barrel being brandished in the man’s face had kinks that were clearly visible even in that wan light. The weapon bucked gently in her hand and little holes spread over the man’s face, and chest, and the wall he’d been pissing against earlier. A shotgun cartridge, then. Usually not fatal, but at such close range it just might be. Would certainly take out an eye if a pellet hit it. The man held himself together, didn’t cry out, and she took another cartridge out of her bag and tried feeding it into the barrel. He came closer, apparently able to see only some of what was taking place in front of him. With his left hand, he grabbed the zip gun and tried to wrench it from her grasp. His right hand was out of my line of sight, but eventually he managed to pull his knife out of the woman’s arm and started stabbing her hysterically in the face. At the fifth or sixth blow, the woman dropped to the ground. She had reloaded by now, and this time she extended her arm and brought the muzzle right up to the man’s body. There were about ten centimeters between the mouth of the barrel and his crotch when she pulled the trigger. The man jerked upright and his trousers caught fire, a pale flame licking up where the shot had gone in. The pellets had clearly hit a major artery, because I could see he was bleeding heavily and hear the sound of the blood splashing onto the asphalt. He kicked her a few times, then brought the knife up to her neck and started cutting. A few moments passed, then a fountain of blood spurted out over her head and hair. The pair of them were now indistinguishable from one another, their features obscured by the blood and wounds that covered their faces. She had loaded the gun a third time and now she lifted it up to the man’s face and inserted the barrel into his mouth. The man didn’t try to move his head away. He could have done, but he was too busy sawing at her neck. For a few seconds, the woman held the pose, arm raised in the air as the man worked away at her throat. Then, finally, she fired.

The drone flew off my shoulder and went over to where the two bodies lay locked together, then returned and, dancing in front of my face, inviting me to follow, made for the door of the building where the meeting was to be held and smoothly passed inside.

It was 7 p.m. I entered the building and calmly climbed the stairs.