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They had never spoken of it since.

She struggled to remember the last time someone fell in love with her. Of course she recalled her romance with Gerry, but that had been a slowly growing friendship rather than a grand passion. That was usually the way with her. She had never tried to be alluring or flirtatious – there was too much else to do. Men did not fall for her at first sight, although she was nice-looking. No, people who became fond of her did so gradually, as they got to know her. Nevertheless, there had been men who eventually threw themselves at her feet – and one woman, come to think of it. She had dated some of them and gone to bed with a few, but she had never been able to feel as they did, overwhelmed, helpless with love, desperate for intimacy. She had never experienced a passion that had changed her life, unless it had been the drive to make the world a better place.

And now Gus had made a declaration.

Nothing could possibly come of it, obviously. An affair between the two of them could not be kept secret, and when it came out the story would wreck his career and hers. It would also destroy her little family. In fact, it would ruin her life. It was not even to be considered. No decision was required: there was no choice.

That said, how did she feel, theoretically, about a romance with Gus?

She liked him a lot. He was compassionate and tough, a difficult trick to pull off. He had mastered the art of giving advice without insisting on his point of view. And he was sexy. She found herself imagining the first exploratory touches, the loving kisses, the stroking of hair, the closeness of warm bodies.

You’d look ridiculous, she told herself: he’s taller than you by a foot.

But it was not ridiculous. It was something else. It made her warm inside. Just thinking about it felt pleasant.

She tried to dismiss all such thoughts. She was the president: she could not fall in love. It would be a hurricane, a train crash, a nuclear bomb.

Thank God it could never happen.

CHAPTER 18

The bus drove north-west from Faya into a zone known as the Aouzou Strip. Here the travellers faced a new danger: landmines.

The Aouzou Strip, sixty miles wide, had been the issue in a border war in which Chad had beaten back its northern neighbour, Libya. After the fighting was over, thousands of landmines were left behind in the territory Chad had won. In some places there were warnings: rows of roadside stones painted red and white. But many remained hidden.

Hakim claimed to know where they all were, but he looked more and more scared as the bus advanced, and he slowed down nervously, checking and double-checking that he was following the road, which was not always clearly distinguishable from the surrounding desert.

They were now in the burning heart of the Sahara. Even the air had a singed taste. No one could get comfortable. Little Naji was naked and grizzly; Kiah kept giving him sips of water, to make sure he did not become dehydrated. Mountains loomed in the far distance, their heights offering a false promise of cooler weather; false, because the mountains were impassable to wheeled vehicles and would have to be skirted, so the bus could not escape from the baking oven of the desert floor.

Abdul reflected that the Arabs of earlier times would not have travelled all day. They would have awakened the camels before dawn, and strapped on the baskets of ivory and gold by starlight, and roped the naked slaves together in long, miserable lines, so that they could set off at first light, and rest during the scorching middle of the day. Their modern descendants, with their gasoline-fuelled vehicles and their cargoes of costly cocaine and desperate migrants, were not so smart.

As the bus drew nearer to the border with Libya, Abdul wondered how Hakim would deal with frontier controls. Most of the migrants had no passports, let alone visas or other travel permits. Many Chadians lived their whole lives without being issued with any kind of identity document. How would they get through immigration and customs? Clearly Hakim had some system, presumably involving bribery; but that could be hazardous. The man who took a backhander last time might double his price. Or his supervisor might be present, watching every move. Or he might have been replaced by a zealot who refused to be corrupted. These things were not predictable.

The last village before the border was the most primitive place Abdul had ever seen. The main building material consisted of thin tree branches, as bleached and dry as the sun-whitened bones of animals that had died of thirst in the desert. The sticks – for that was all they were – were fixed to crosspieces to form walls that stood precariously upright. Ragged lengths of cotton and canvas formed the roofs. There were half a dozen or so better dwellings, tiny one-room buildings made of cinder blocks.

Hakim stopped the bus, turned off the engine, and announced: ‘Here we meet our Toubou guide.’

Abdul knew about the Toubou. They were nomadic herdsmen living around the borders between Chad, Libya and Niger, ceaselessly moving their flocks and cattle in search of scarce pasture. They had long been regarded as primitive savages by the governments of all three countries. The Toubou returned that contempt: they recognized no government, obeyed no laws, and respected no borders. Many of them had discovered that smuggling people and drugs was easier and more lucrative than raising livestock. National governments found it impossible to police people who never stopped moving – especially when their habitat was hundreds of desert miles from the nearest administrative building.

However, their Toubou guide was not here.

‘He will come,’ said Hakim.

In the centre of the village was a well that gave clear, cold water, and everyone drank their fill.

Meanwhile, Hakim had a long conversation with a resident, an older man with a look of intelligence, probably an informal village head man. Abdul could not hear what was said.

The travellers were shown into a compound with lean-to shelters around the sides. Abdul guessed by the smell that it had been used for sheep, probably to protect the beasts from the sun in the middle of the day. It was now late afternoon: clearly the bus passengers were to spend the night here.

Hakim called for everyone’s attention. ‘Fouad has given me a message,’ he said, and Abdul assumed Fouad was the man who looked like the village leader. ‘Our guide has doubled his price, and he will not come until he is paid the extra. It will cost twenty dollars per person.’

There was an outburst of protest. The passengers said they could not afford it, and Hakim said he was not going to pay it for them. What followed was a more intense repeat of an argument that had raged several times already on the trip, as Hakim tried to extort extra money. In the end people had to pay.

Abdul got up and left the compound.

Looking around the village, he decided that no one here was involved in smuggling either drugs or people: they were all too poor. At earlier stops he had usually been able to figure out who the local criminals were because they had money and guns, as well as the stressed-out air of men who lived on the violent fringes, always ready to run away. He had carefully noted names and descriptions and relationships, and had sent a long report to Tamara from Faya. There seemed to be no such men in this pathetic settlement. However, the mention of the Toubou people had given him the explanation: in this area the smuggling must be run by them.

He sat on the ground near the well, his back up against an acacia tree that gave him shade. From here he could see much of the village, but a spreading thicket of tamarisk hid him from people who came to the well: he wanted to observe, not to talk. He wondered where the guide was, if not in the village. There were no other settlements for many miles around. Was the mysterious Toubou tribesman just beyond the hill, in a tent, waiting to be told that the migrants had found the extra money? It was quite possible that he had not even asked for more money; that could be just another extortion ploy by Hakim. The guide might be in one of these village huts, eating stewed goat with couscous, resting up before tomorrow’s journey.