He lay on the floor and the concrete was cool. He waited for the pain to start, and wondered how long, in Lubeck, they would need him to resist, and how long he could last. A match was scraped and he smelt cigarette smoke. It came close to him, closer, past his head and over his chest. The agony was on his stomach as the lit cigarette touched. Foxy screamed.
‘He’s switched the damn thing off,’ she said.
‘Well, he would, miss,’ Corky said.
It was the fourth time she had tried, the fourth time she had been answered by a crackle of static. The weight lay on her shoulders. She would carry the glory of success and bear the burden of failure. It was a problem with these wretched deniables that the responsibilities were not shared. There was much that Abigail Jones now regretted. She had agreed that he should stay in place, watch and learn, and not come out. Not shared, because there was no bank of bureaucrats in an open-plan office who all owned a piece of the operation. She had it on her own. She could talk only with her bodyguards – not her mentors or her think-tank: none of them had a degree from Warwick in politics, economics and modern history, or Six’s training on grappling with the ‘consequences of actions’ or ‘cutting and running on the Iran-Iraq border’. Had the problem concerned single-parent fatherhood from a distance, Hamfist might have contributed, and Corky if it had been regeneration of Provo heartlands (West Belfast). Shagger was big on the economics of hill farming, and Harding on trailer-park life.
It had been sharp of Corky, close to insolence.
She was curt, as if her control was ebbing: ‘What does that mean, exactly what?’
They could play dumb, be on the edge. ‘He would switch off, wouldn’t he, miss?’
‘Why? It’s hardly professional.’
They had a fire in the scorched oil drum, and there was enough timber from the buildings to keep it burning. They were sitting around it, and she reckoned that the crowd would be back at the gate in the morning, and that the bribe chucked at the sheikh hadn’t a long life. There was a grunt, almost derision, and she reckoned it was Shagger’s. Was any of it professional? Any of it?
She said, ‘It’s unprofessional to switch off communications. Is that an area of debate?’
Hamfist was quiet, reflective: ‘His partner’s been taken, miss, and if he’d left the radio on, the chance is you’d have ordered him out.’
Shagger had a good voice, might have been to the standard a choir wanted: ‘He’ll go when there’s nothing else he can do. Won’t be before he has to. He’d think, miss, the most unprofessional thing he could do is to turn his back on a mate, go before it’s time.’
From Hamfist: ‘He’d have to live with it the rest of his days. And it would track him every hour of every night.’
She snapped, with bitterness: ‘But there’s nothing he can do.’
From Harding: ‘It’s like keeping a vigil, and it’s what a man owes to another. First light, ma’am, he’ll come. Forget about Badger, think about Foxy. Badger’ll be good, but Foxy’ll have it bad. How much time is needed in that German town? How much is that time going to cost him? The time Foxy buys’ll come expensive. You with me, ma’am?’
She felt small, shrunken. They’d swamped her irritation at a radio being switched off and turned her attention, four-square, to the man with the trimmed moustache and the clipped voice, who was beyond reach and in need of prayers. The flames played on her face, and she shuddered.
Chapter 15
He said nothing.
The questions came in Farsi and Arabic, in halting English and Pashto. English was always the last of the series.
He answered to none.
Who was he? What was his name? When the bedlam of languages had been used, and he’d answered none, he was beaten.
The goon did not use any special weapon: there was no hardwood truncheon, no lead-tipped baton, no leather-coated whip. The instrument was a length of builder’s wood. Nothing refined.
His underpants had been taken off him. They stank. He thought they would be soiled. His boot, also, had been dragged off, but his socks had been left. They, too, stank, and were sodden and tight on his feet. He could see. The blindfold had been removed. The room had no window and a light burned in a ceiling recess, covered by a wire-mesh grille that soaked up some of the bulb’s power so the room was in shadow. Two guards stood by the door. He reckoned they’d have been Basij, conscripted, part-time warriors and the lowest of the low – Home Guard stuff. They had automatic rifles that they held warily. There was a ring on the wall, and a rope was tied to it. The far end was lashed to his right ankle. He was no threat to them, and had no chance of escape. He couldn’t have risen to his feet, bullocked past the goon, incapacitated or disarmed the two guards, opened the door and charged off down the corridor. Even so, the guards were tense, and armed. He couldn’t have done anything because his arms had been pulled behind his back, and his wrists were bound together with farmers’ twine, the knot tight enough to restrict blood flow.
He didn’t answer, and couldn’t protect himself.
When he was beaten, if he tried to wriggle away, get onto his side, face the wall and present his spine, his head or his upper arm was grabbed. He was pulled back and turned, with a boot, onto his back, his privates and lower stomach targets for the wood. Twice more he had been burned.
Who was he? What was his name?
There was blood on his face from the cuts on his cheeks below the eye sockets and from his nose – already broken, he thought – and from the split on his upper lip. He didn’t answer, although he could have done. I am a detective sergeant of the Metropolitan Police Service and currently attached to Box 500. His name was Joseph Foulkes, born 8 April 1960, married first to Liz and second to Ellie, two kids the first time round.
It would have been hard to answer, though: bits of his teeth lay on the concrete floor and his tongue had swollen to double its size. Had he given his name, it was likely that more of his teeth pieces would have worked loose and had to be spat clear.
He said nothing. Defiance was natural to him. So far – cigarettes stubbed on his stomach, blows from the wood and kicks – he could absorb it. Bloody pain was manageable. It wouldn’t last long. The defiance was melded with sheer obstinacy. He was of the age when kids had gone to see black-and-white films, had read close-print books and knew of Odette Hallowes, and Yeo-Thomas, who was the White Rabbit, and of Violette Szabo. He was of the age when he had passed judgement on naval personnel captured in the Shatt al-Arab waterway who had seemed to thank the bastards of the Revolutionary Guard Corps for the humiliations and mock-executions and had almost apologised for navigation cock-ups. The stories of childhood had stayed with him. The memory of news bulletins, and older men’s disgust, was sharp. He told the goon nothing.
There was a table in the room. There had been a moment when the blindfold had been stripped off and he had seen a clean notepad on the table, with two pencils. The top page was blank. The bastard expected to fill it when he, Foxy, did the canary bit. The page stayed blank. It was his target to keep it so.
The goon did not know who he was. The goon moved on. What was his mission? He was asked in Farsi, Arabic and English, then again in Farsi and finally in Pashto. The wood was raised as he was given a second to show willingness to answer. He could see the wood but his eyes were misted and narrowed from the blows. He could have said: A colleague and I are on a deniable mission to observe the home of Rashid Armajan, bomb-maker, and using techniques of surveillance as practised in covert rural observation post procedures, with a shotgun mike. We learned that Armajan and his wife were headed for Lubeck where she has a medical consultation and he has an appointment with. ..