he’d had the time for her and Mum and Jake, that’s where the faint echo of his New Zealand accent had been picked up.
Still who cares, Danny loves it. Bonus.
On the radio she heard Larry Ferdinand hand over to the newsreader.
Daniel stirred in his sleep, mumbling something that sounded like ‘take my other d-d-dog . . .’
He had the slightest stutter, just very slight. Leona found it charming. It made him seem just a little vulnerable, and when he was cracking a joke, somehow that little hitch in his delivery seemed to make the punch line that much more amusing.
She smiled as she looked down at him. Love seemed too strong a word right now - way too early to be throwing around a word like that. But she certainly felt she was more than just in lust with him. And sure as hell she wasn’t going to let Daniel in on that little secret.
Play it cool, Lee.
Yup, that was what she was going to do, especially after she had let him get his cookies last night.
‘. . . now this could mean a very serious shortfall in oil supplies . . .’
Leona cocked her head and listened to the faint voice coming from the radio.
‘. . . if the situation is allowed to get much worse. As it is, it’s early days, and it’s unclear exactly what has happened over there. But this much is certain: it will have an immediate knock-on effect on oil prices . . .’
She sighed. Oil . . . terrorists . . . bombs - that’s all news seemed to be these days; angry mobs, guns being fired into the sky, faces full of hatred. The news reminded her of the tired old doom ’n’ gloom Dad tended to spout after a glass or two of red wine.
‘It’ll happen quickly when it happens . . . one thing after another, going down like dominoes. And no one will be ready for it, not even us, and Christ, we’re in the minority that know about it . . .’
Shit. Dad could be really wearing when he got going on his pet hobby-horse; rattling on about stuff like Hubbert’s Peak, petro-dollars, hydrocarbon footprints . . . it was his special party piece, the thing he talked about when he couldn’t think of anything else interesting to say. Which, to be honest, was most of the time. God, he just wouldn’t shut up about it when he got going, especially when he thought he had an interested audience.
Leona reached over and snapped the radio off.
She knew Mum was getting to the point where she’d had enough, to put it bluntly; she wondered if Mum was getting bored of Dad. She could feel something brewing at home, there was an atmosphere. Leona was just glad to be away at uni, and glad her little brother, Jacob, was at his prep school. It gave her parents some room and an opportunity to sort out whatever they needed to sort out.
She padded lightly across the floor of her room, stepping over the trail of clothes both she and Daniel had shed behind them as they’d worked their way briskly from first base to last, the night before.
She opened the door of her room and headed into the kitchen where a pile of pots, plates and pans encrusted with beans and ravioli were waiting in vain to be washed up, and a couple of her campus floor-mates were watching Big Brother Live through a haze of cigarette smoke on the TV nestled in the space above the fridge.
CHAPTER 4
11.44 a.m. local time Pump station IT-1B
Ninety-five miles north-east of Al-Bayji, Iraq
Andy Sutherland reached into the back seat of the Toyota Land Cruiser and grabbed hold of a large bottle of water. It had been sitting in the sun back there, and although he had pulled it out of the freezer that morning a solid bottle-shaped block of ice, it was now almost as hot as a freshly brewed cup of tea. He gulped a few mouthfuls and then poured a little across his face, washing away the dust and the mild salt-sting of his own sweat.
He turned around to look at Farid, standing a few feet away from him.
‘You want some?’
Farid smiled and nodded, ‘Thank you.’
He held out the bottle to him and then shot another glance at the burned-out remains of pump station IT-1B.
There was nothing worth salvaging, just a shell of breeze blocks and twisted piping that would need to