Entering the grounds of the Victoria Falls Hotel feels like walking into the nineteenth century. This elegant relic of colonialism boasts musty hallways, mahogany doors, faded paintings of great British explorers, ancient maps of BOAC air service to Africa, a smoking room walled with books, and high tea service. Even the furniture in Lysander's room looks like something from the set of a Jane Austen movie. His modern Toshiba laptop looks terribly out of place on a rolltop mahogany desk.

Jacob and Veronica wait tensely as Lysander and Lovemore go through the contents of Jacob's CD for the third time, watching the Toshiba's screen intently, as if there might be a hidden message within. Veronica realizes for the first time that actually they have very little evidence. Incomprehensible matrices of telephone and GPS records; some blurry, night-time photos from Jacob's camera; a few more from Prester's Razr phone, and their own testimony - all of which could easily have been faked.

Lysander turns from one of the night shots to Veronica. She braces herself for an interrogation: but instead he says, wonderingly, "He was the one who held you down. I saw it on YouTube."

Veronica blinks and looks more closely. It is the photo of Casimir, the musclebound interahamwe who murdered Derek. She remembers how he pulled her choking to the ground, and held her while the Arab put the machete to her throat. "Yes."

Jacob says, "He killed Derek."

Lysander frowns. "I never saw that. YouTube didn't host that, it was on more prurient sites. Easy enough to find if you wanted, and apparently millions did, but not I."

Veronica doesn't have anything to say to that.

"If what you're telling me is actually true, and please note I'm not saying I'm fully convinced yet, but if it is, then … " Lysander shakes his head, appalled. "Then this is one of the most horrifically stupid ideas in history. I want Mugabe gone as much as the next rational man, but Christ almighty, there's not a lot of happy precedent for shooting down airplanes carrying African presidents. The Rwandan genocide was sparked when President Habyarimana was shot down. That's a million dead. The president of Burundi was with him, and that civil war still hasn't ended. There's another quarter million. Mobutu was supposed to be dead dictator number three on that flight. God knows what would have happened if the paranoid bastard hadn't changed his plans, but we know the wars after he finally did buy the farm killed three million more, and counting. You've seen what happened to eastern Congo. Then there's Mozambique, Samora Machel shot down by the South Africans, deny it though they try. I don't know how many people died, nobody does, but I do know that civil war took them back to the bloody Stone Age, they didn't even have matches or soap by the time it finally ended. You only blow up the big man if you don't have enough support for a proper coup. Because once he's gone all his jackals start fighting for the scraps. There's an old African proverb, when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. Well, I know Zimbabwe a long sight better than any starry-eyed American, and I 'm telling you, never mind trampled, an assassination right now could start off a bushfire that would burn the whole bloody country."

After a moment Jacob says, cautiously, "You sound like you believe us."

"No. I sound like I think I can't afford not to. But this isn't proof, what you have here, it isn't even evidence, it's barely circumstantial. I was wondering why you hadn't gone to the media if you were for real. Now I know. If I take this to my superiors they'll laugh me out of the room."

Veronica says, "I don't mean to pry, but who exactly are your superiors? The British?"

"If you don't mean to," Lysander says curtly, "then don't."

Veronica falls silent, her face reddens, she feels like she's committed some unforgivable faux pas.

"If you're here to mislead me, if you're really part of that smuggling ring like Interpol says, believe me, you have come to the wrong place," he continues. "This has become a country where people disappear. Especially in this last month. Important people, powerful people, have begun to disappear. People have started whispering about death squads working for Mugabe. Make no mistake, you'd do far better to turn yourselves in than to come here and try to deceive me."

Jacob says, "We're not lying, and you know it."

"What I think I know or don't know doesn't matter right now. The question is, what can I prove?"

Jacob looks like he wants to say something, but Veronica, sensing that this is the key moment, shoots him a look, and he shuts up. Lysander looks at Lovemore.

"I certainly understand the appeal of assassination," Lysander mutters. "It's not as if anyone supports Mugabe but his cronies. He's lost the plot, his wife's a hyena, and his government's a kleptocracy. But consider Amin, consider Bokassa, consider Mobutu. Consider the fact that our fine upstanding General Gorokwe is happy to conspire with the likes of Athanase. Then consider what I found out for Derek. That the general was profoundly involved in the Gukurahundi massacres of the early eighties. Zimbabwe's own little micro-genocide, twenty thousand dead. There's no actual surviving proof, but the men who told me are reliable sources. He's a genocidist himself. Gorokwe could easily be ten times worse than Mugabe."

"And that's if it's a bloodless coup," Lovemore says grimly.

Lysander nods. "Exactly. If this does happen, if Gorokwe actually pulls the trigger, then love him or hate him, we'd best all start praying everything goes exactly according to his plan. Because God only knows how big a bloodbath this will set off if it goes wrong."

After a second Veronica asks, "So what do we do?"

Lysander's frown deepens. "We, is it? I suppose it is. Very temporarily. Very well. We go back to Harare tonight. That's the capital, the big city. I'll report from there, ask Vauxhall for assistance, call in all my favours. Mugabe's due to fly back from China in four days. We've got that long to try to find out where they are, what their plan is, and how to stop them." He shakes his head. "Interpol fugitives. Surface to air missiles. Bloody hell. I need a drink."

* * *

"I'm afraid we're going to have to take the train," Lysander says, as they sit in the hotel's gardens, eating scones, sipping Earl Grey, and watching the glorious view of sunset over Victoria Falls. "We can't take the chance of your names on flight records, they might be keeping an eye out for you, and I don't have any friends in the local airport. In Harare or Bulawayo I could get you documents, but not here. No choice but the overnight train."

"That sounds fine," Jacob says. "We took the train from Dar es Salaam to Zambia."

Lysander smiles wryly. "I think you'll find today's Zimbabwe Railways to be considerably less luxurious."

Veronica winces. The Tazara train that took them into Zambia was anything but luxury. "Aren't there any buses?"

"Good heavens, no. Nobody's going to waste petrol on a ten-hour drive, not in this country. You do realize petrol - I'm sorry, gasoline - is not legally available for sale anywhere in this country?"

"Why's that?" Jacob asks, amazed.

"Various reasons. One is that the government has no foreign exchange with which to buy it. Another is that they fix petrol's price so low that stations can't afford to sell it. But the real reason is that there's big money in the black market, and most of it goes to government cronies. Unfortunately their distribution networks are as dubious as they are. Here in Vic Falls we're right near the border, there's plenty of supply. And Harare's black market is apparently inexhaustible. But in much of the country right now there's no petrol available no matter how many US dollars you wave in the air. They simply don't have it."

"So what do they do?" Veronica asks.

Lysander shrugs.

"We use oxcarts as ambulances," Lovemore says unexpectedly. "We travel from Harare to our home village to attend a funeral, and we must remain for weeks because there is no petrol to carry us home. In the countryside now, in the bush, we no longer live in this twenty-first century. We have returned to the nineteenth."

A plump bowtied waiter brings them the bill. At first Veronica thinks it must be some kind of misprint: the total scrawled on the bottom of the slip of paper is more than a million dollars. But Lysander nods absently, digs into his pack, comes up with two wads of pink notes as thick as a deck of cards, each wrapped in a rubber band. He drops one wad on the table and adds a handful from the other. Each note is labelled 20,000.

"What's the exchange rate?" Jacob asks, equally stunned.

Lysander smiles thinly. "At the government rate, which nobody uses, about twenty-five thousand Zim dollars to one US. At the black-market rate, more like a hundred thousand. Seven years ago it was twenty to one."

Jacob whistles.

"In Zimbabwe the last seven years have been very educational," Lovemore says. His voice stilll sounds completely serious, but Veronica sees a hint of a sardonic smile. "Every man on the street has become an economics master. Every housewife can give lectures on the perils of hyperinflation and the importance of foreign exchange. We have become so knowledgeable, and so hardworking. Every day we hustle, we work so hard. We have no choice. Because every day we wake up knowing all the money we have will soon be worth nothing."

"Half the adult population's fled the country," Lysander says. "To South Africa, Botswana, Zambia. The money they send home is the only thing that keeps half this country alive. And the other half is starving, or dying of AIDS, or both. And we used to be the breadbasket of Africa, we used to feed our neighbours."

"What happened?" Veronica asks.

He sighs. "Mugabe went mad, is what happened. He was a perfectly good leader for a long time, by African standards. He was practically enlightened. Then seven years ago he and his thugs, his so-called war vets, most of them weren't even born during the civil war here, they started to invade all the white-owned farms and drive out the whites. That violence erased the tourism industry overnight, the expulsion of most of the good farmers wiped out all the crops, and the Zim dollar collapsed. We've been lurching from crisis to crisis ever since. Bad to worse. AIDS, corruption, drought. This country's like a rock rolling downhill towards a cliff. And if you're right, we're in danger of going into the abyss as soon as this week." Lysander stands. "Come on. Let's get to the station in case tonight is a night of miracles and the train actually departs on time."

* * *

It is fully dark by the time a rusting train wheezes to a halt and its doors open to accept the hundreds of passengers that clog the Victoria Falls railway platform. A few are middle-aged businessmen with enormous amounts of luggage in tow, but most are dressed in ragged clothing and carry very little. There are no other white people: it seems those tourists who dare to enter Zimbabwe at all go no further than Victoria Falls.

Lovemore leads Veronica and Jacob through the crowd and onto the train. Its interior is stained gray linoleum and tarnished metal. Naked wires protrude from holes in walls, and the cracked windows are jammed permanently open or shut. They pass a rusted, filthy bathroom. Their first-class berth has four bunks covered with torn blue upholstery, a rusting fold-out table, and a sink that doesn't work. One of the two fluorescent lights overhead is dead; the other flickers like a strobe light. Cockroaches crawl in the dark corners. Lysander was right, this makes the battered Tazara rolling stock that carried them to Zambia look like the Orient Express.

"Well," Veronica says gamely, "at least it's cheap."

Their tickets cost the equivalent of three US dollars apiece, at the black-market rate. The cramped size of the berth makes her a little uncomfortable, but its window is stuck half-open, that helps, and compared to the five harrowing, endless hours she spent locked in the trunk of a car, on their way to the Ugandan border, this is the Taj Mahal.

"Where's Lysander?" Jacob asks.

"Seeing Innocent," Lovemore says. "The train conductor. He's a friend."

Lysander appears shortly after, along with a middle-aged black man wearing glasses and a cheerful smile. Innocent shakes hands briefly with Veronica and Jacob, then speaks briefly with Lysander and Lovemore in an African language. After another round of handshakes he disappears down the corridor.

"Happy coincidence he's on duty," Lysander says with a satisfied smile. "Foreigners are supposed to show passports to get tickets, and I'd rather not have your names on record. For the purpose of this journey you two are honourary Zimbabwe residents."

"You speak the language," Veronica says. "I'm impressed."

Lysander waves self-deprecatingly. "Not really. I grew up speaking Shona, that's the majority language here, but Innocent speaks Ndebele. Lovemore's fluent but I can barely get by."

She looks at him. "Grew up speaking Shona?"

"Oh, I was born here. Zimbabwe passport, quite useful, I can't be expelled. British passport too, of course. We moved to the UK when I was young, because of the civil war, and I didn't come back until the nineties. To study wild dogs, of all things. Then I started buying and selling art around the country, mostly just as a sideline, to help finance my research. There's wonderful art here. Then when it all started to go wrong the embassy chaps realized I might be useful. A few heartstring-tugging appeals to God and Queen and country, and here I am, on her majesty's secret service, in a very quiet and unofficial way."

Veronica smiles, mostly with relief. Obviously he has decided to trust them.

Lysander looks around. "Back when it was Rhodesian Railways, or even ten years ago, these were proper trains, first class meant wood panels and luxury, they brought you food and bedding, they departed on time. Now you count yourself lucky to leave at all."

"What happens if the train doesn't go?" Jacob asks.

Lysander shrugs. "Usually it eventually does. But if there's a breakdown here tonight, we'll have to try to fly tomorrow. It'll be a big risk, but we'll have to take it, no time for anything else."

They wait anxiously. Almost an hour passes before the train finally lurches into motion. After a bumpy first few minutes the lurching and shuddering smooths into a kind of soothing rattling, and they celebrate departure with beer and cigarettes.

Then Jacob and Lysander climb into their upper bunks. Lovemore simply lies down on the bunk opposite Veronica, closes his eyes, and is asleep in less than a minute; he doesn't seem to even notice the cold breeze from the open window. Veronica puts on three layers of shirts and two of socks, and folds her small pile of remaining clothes into a pillow. Jacob leans down and switches out the light. She takes his outstretched hand for a moment. Then she leans back and closes her eyes. She is very tired, and for the first time in longer than she wants to remember, she feels safe. It takes only moments for the train's rocking motion and white noise to lull her too into deep sleep.

* * *

There is a hard hand on her shoulder, shaking her awake. Veronica comes halfway out of her deep sleep and opens her eyes to flickering fluorescent light. For a bad moment she doesn't know where she is or why, she doesn't recognize the bearded man standing over her, or the two black men flanking him. She pushes his hand away violently. Then her mind's gears stop grinding and begin to mesh. Lysander, the British spy. She is in Zimbabwe, on a train. The other men are Lovemore and Innocent the train conductor. They can't have reached Bulawayo, the train is still moving, and it is still night.

"What's going on?" she asks, in a ragged voice.

"I'm afraid it seems we've got a bit of a problem," Lysander says, but she knows immediately from his voice that it's a great deal worse than that. "There are soldiers on the train. I'm afraid they're looking for you two."