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be damaged; a vehicle with closed windows in Dubai would reach oven temperature in barely twenty minutes.
    Born in London to an American father and a French mother, Blake had moved back to the US aged 11 and had to toughen up quickly. Even in the internationally diverse Washington Beltway, a kid with a British accent was a target for bullying. He’d stayed in the US for university, graduated and worked in Virginia. While on a business trip to London he met Cathy.
    Blake smirked as he walked into the office elevator, thinking about his wife.
    Brunette, Irish; she’d captured his heart at a party in Richmond. She changed everything. He quit his government job and became a journalist. He moved back to Britain. Everything was going well until the Journal reposted him to Dubai.
    Blake closed his eyes and blanked his mind. He had to clear his thoughts before he entered the daily battle of the office. If he went in angry, Alice had already won.
    He took a deep breath and walked in.
    Inside, Alice was standing like a meerkat, forward, weight on her hands as she leaned conspiratorially over the fibreboard desk-divides, gossiping. Opposite her Blake’s other journalist colleague – a man from Portland called Duncan – listened intently.
    Duncan laughed loudly. Alice flashed him a warning look as Blake came through the door and she stopped talking.
    Blake said nothing beyond a perfunctory “Good morning” and set his computer out on his desk.
    “Thank you very much for joining us,” Alice said with a sarcastic tone and theatrically bowing.
    The office didn’t really keep normal hours – the nature of reporting dictated that when a story occurred you worked as long as required. Sixteen-hour days were a weekly occurrence. Thirty-six hour runs happened once a month.
    Flexibility was key, particularly given that the Gulf weekend ran from Friday to Saturday, creating a frequent conflict with the Journal’s main editors in New York. They refused to understand that Fridays in the UAE were, for religious reasons, a difficult time to disturb government and business sources.
    Usually, the journalists ended up on the losing side of the ‘flexible time’ arrangement but it was commonly expected that if you put in extra hours, you got a small portion back. The only ‘rule’ was that everyone had to be present by 10am on a Sunday morning for the editorial meeting on how the week’s work would be divided.
    Blake checked his watch.
    “It’s 09:24. I thought we start on Sundays at 10:00? We have done for the last eighteen months,” he said cautiously.
    Alice raised an eyebrow. Her eyelids fluttered vigorously.
    “Well, everyone else is already in – so you figure it out.”

 
    6
     
    Aarez watched the three Somalis at the bottom of the pit shovelling sand up into a small heap. Fine grains were being lifted by the breeze like the softest of early morning English mists.
    England.
    Of all the countries he’d lived in, he both respected and marvelled at it. Everything about her was fascinating: her depth of history, her culture, her green, water-filled valleys and her bustling urban streets. Modernity straddled next to thousand-year-old cathedrals. How had such a tiny island become so powerful?
    And he loved her people!
    They were driven, yet lazy. Cynical, yet optimistic. Patriotic and yet despising of nationalism.
    Seven years, he’d spent there: first Sandhurst, then the London School of Economics and finally an MBA from the London Business School.
    All the time, he’d kept Oassan at his side.
    Let others tailor their dreams for the Middle East from the fabric of the United States. He and Oassan both agreed that was folly. England was the model for their vision. Not the modern nation ashamed of her past; the England of old – the visionary who used private enterprise to control world trade.
    The rumble of the pickup truck’s engine roused him from his thoughts as it briefly overpowered the noise of digging and shuddered to a