Once Adam was awake, Derek let go of him.

“What?” Adam mumbled. “What time is it?”

I thought we wanted to get up early to catch our flight?

He repeated his thoughts out loud for Derek’s benefit.

Derek shook his head. “I don’t know. I think we were drugged last night. All of us overslept. Baldwin’s in the bathroom -- he came to wake me up.”

“Drugged?”

“I checked our bags. They stole the gun.”

“What?”

“They must have known what they were looking for, because everything else is still around.”

In an attempt to shake off the fog that was still wafting through his brain, Adam shook his head. A clear mistake, as the sudden motion woke up a headache that immediately preyed on him. He groaned.

“Headache?” Derek asked.

Adam nodded, but carefully this time.

“Yeah, me too. Must be a side-effect of the drug. I bet it was the tea.”

“Why would anyone drug us?”

“That agent we met in Rabat spoke of enemies, right? Looks like her enemies have become ours.”

“It doesn’t make any sense.” Adam took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “The gun was for self-defense, I’m sure we wouldn’t have needed it.”

The door opened without a knock and Baldwin slinked into the room like a fugitive. His face was unevenly shaven, his hair wet, and his shirt was draped around his neck like a wet towel.

“We’re in trouble,” he announced. “We need to get out of here ten minutes ago.”

Derek, quicker on the uptake than his husband, who was having trouble defying gravity and getting out of bed, was already making for the satchel that contained the few things they still possessed, “What happened?”

“Food Stall Lady is downstairs saying we stole her cow.”

“Ridiculous!”

“Oh yeah? Have a look.”

Baldwin opened the adjoining door to his room. There, in a corner, calm but confused, stood the elegant cow that Adam had admired last night. It was chewing on a sock.

“We were drugged,” Adam said slowly, “but we weren’t that drugged, were we?” After a little pause he added, “How did anyone get a cow up here?”

Baldwin’s words, spoken with urgency and impatience, cleared both Adam’s headache and the fog of his mind: “Get dressed, man, or we’ll have plenty of time to ponder how we got into this situation from the confines of a Moroccan prison cell! Stealing a cow is a big deal here!”

To underline this, Baldwin hurled pants and underpants at him.

“Out the window,” Derek suggested, “and onto the roof. The garden is walled in and the police will be waiting downstairs no doubt. The only way out is up.”

It was not the right time for inconvenient truths, but it seldom was. Adam had kept quiet for the last few days, but there came a point in a man’s life when truth must be spoken without fear. And so Adam help up his pants and declared, “I can’t wear these anymore.” His belly had grown into a sizeable bump now. His thighs had swollen up. There was no way he could still squeeze himself into his old jeans.

Baldwin started to laugh -- the unhelpful, hysterical laughter of a man who was still roaming the realms of insanity.

Derek grabbed Adam by the shoulders. “Don’t panic, darling,” he said. “I’ll get you something more comfortable to wear.”

Adam nodded gratefully. He knew he could always rely on his husband.

“But first we have to get out of here. Can you do that?”

“What, without pants?”

“They’re coming!” Baldwin hissed. “Run away!” It was impossible to say whether he meant the police were coming down the corridor or whether he was reliving the trauma from his past.

Adam let the two others all but shove him into his clothes, minus pants. Even as they were clambering out of the window and up onto the flat roof Adam heard the door to their room bang open as the police and the hotel owner came looking for them.