I had been to Jeddah on my previous trip, so I knew it well enough. As somebody once said, there was only one thing to recommend it—say you wanted to… - Terry Hayes

"Twenty-five years ago he was executed."
It shocked me. "Executed?" I said. "For what?"
The director scanned a couple of documents and found the one he was looking for. "The usual—corruption on earth."
"I'm sorry, but what exactly does 'corruption on earth' mean?"
He laughed. "Pretty much whatever we want." Nearly all of his team found it funny too. "In this case," he continued, "it meant that he criticized the royal family and advocated its removal."

By this stage I had switched my patronage to AA—as Tolstoy might have said, drug addicts are all alike whereas every alcoholic is crazy in his own way. This led to far more interesting meetings and I had decided that if you were going to spend your life on the wagon, you might as well be entertained.

With each step his desperation grew—maybe every scrap of gossip he had heard, every assumption he had made added up to nothing more than a grand delusion. Like a fool, he had believed what he wanted to believe—