‘Why not use the local operatives?’
‘Client doesn’t trust them, wants someone we’re sure of here, who we can move swiftly to another island as soon as job done, but it also has to be someone who can do the local thing, which, my friend, narrows it down to you. Pronto.’
Gregor watches too many movies, Harper thought. ‘Why the hurry?’
‘I can’t tell you until you’ve said yes.’
He’d been waiting for an overseas assignment ever since he joined the Institute. He had always been curious to visit the country where he spent his first three years, even though, especially though, he had no memory of those years and only his mother’s dubious stories to go on. True, it was something of a backwater, but that would give him more autonomy too.
Gregor was waiting. His patience irritated Harper so much that he was on the verge of saying he wasn’t sure he was ready and didn’t want to be told any more details, just to be difficult, but then Gregor lifted both hands, splaying his fingers in an okay, hands up motion, as if Harper had opened a drawer of his desk and extracted a pistol. ‘Look, there will be bonuses involved. Quite a few of them, in fact. And an opportunity to move sideways, which is presumably what you’ve been waiting for. It’s what all you new young guys want, isn’t it?’
‘Sideways in which direction?’
‘You don’t look all that happy behind a desk.’
Did anyone look happy behind a desk?
The following week, Gregor summoned him to his office and introduced him to a middle-aged American who called himself Johnson. Johnson had dull, pitted skin on his cheeks, the remnant of some childhood disease, and a very bald, very shiny head — it was adulthood that had done that bit. He kept running a hand over his shiny head while he spoke, as if he liked to keep it polished that way.
After things were agreed, Harper shook hands with both men and Johnson said, ‘Gregor here speaks very highly of you. I must admit I was a little concerned you were inexperienced, on paper, I mean, but now I’ve met you I can see why he does.’
Now you’ve seen my skin, Harper thought.
Gregor intervened. ‘I told him you got the Cadet Lion Honourable Mention in your year. And you scored ninety-eight per cent on our induction programme. There’s a few physicals but that won’t take long.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Harper replied.
Later that day, Gregor said, ‘I also told him you spoke all the languages out there. You can get up to speed, can’t you, once you’re on the ground? It’s not going to take you that long to pass.’ He wondered if the Malay he had learned as a child might help with his Indonesian, whether it was buried there somewhere. He was quick at languages, he’d get conversational faster than most, but the sort of fluency Gregor was talking about took years — and Javanese was another thing altogether. Javanese was fiendish. Gregor’s optimism about Harper’s language skills was based on no more than his own colossal ignorance. He pulled a face to indicate it wasn’t that simple and Gregor said, ‘Oh c’mon, you half-castes have a real facility for languages, you’re gifted at it, you guys, you’ll be fluent within weeks, accent and everything.’
Harper felt the drip, drip, drip of all the remarks they made around the office, about how good his sun tan was, how much he must like spicy food. Such remarks were always phrased as compliments. He had been permanently resident in Holland since the age of twelve but people often remarked on the flawlessness of his Dutch.
*
His pain threshold was fairly high but he had a secret weakness: a great and pressing fear of any situation where breathing might be difficult. It wasn’t the same as claustrophobia: lifts and cars were fine. If the situation demanded it, he could have happily spent hours hiding in a wardrobe as long as there were holes in it — but suffocating, drowning, these were the fates he dreaded. It was the totality of them, he sometimes thought. Pain belonged to the location where the pain was situated — a broken arm was a broken arm, however agonising. Even a stomach ache or backache, those most internal of pains, could be ring-fenced from the rest of your body, your consciousness, if only you were strong enough: but being unable to breathe, for whatever reason, was a state that possessed the whole of you.
So when the hood came down over his head, he panicked, sucking in a great breath that pulled the rough fabric into his mouth. The two men holding either arm threw him to the ground and he landed on his back with a thump that made his head snap backwards and expelled what little breath there was left in his lungs out into the hood — he sucked in again, more violently this time. As he rolled to one side, he forced himself to do an inventory: whiplash, perhaps, some bruising to his back no doubt. No broken coccyx at least — he would have felt that immediately. He tucked his chin down and braced himself, expecting one or both of the men to kick him now he was on the floor: with his hands tied behind his back he couldn’t roll into a ball — his head was very vulnerable. But it wasn’t that that was worrying him most, it was his breathing. He had a moment to observe his own efficiency in noting this.
Instead of laying into him, the men left the room. At least, he thought they had left — there were the sounds of their feet scuffing on the dirt floor, the slam of the door.
He lay very still but his own breath was ragged against the cloth and too harsh for him to listen to the room. He was still hyperventilating and each time he did, he sucked the hood back into his mouth, shortening the breath and making him hyperventilate more. It came to him that if he did not control his breathing, then without the men doing anything more, the end would be suffocation. That was what happened. You shortened your own breath millilitre by millilitre, a bit like someone with a rope around their neck struggling so much they pulled the noose tight. Would they use the water trick? He had heard stories of people choking on their own vomit when they did that.
It would be really stupid to suffocate himself when they weren’t even trying to kill him. He lay trying to steady his lungs, interrogating the pain in his shoulders where his arms were pulled back. He found that if he rolled his shoulders back in tiny movements, like a minute version of a limbering-up exercise, it eased the pain.
He managed to slow his breathing a little, but only a little. Each time he inhaled, he still sucked the cloth into his mouth, like a tiny billowing sail, shortening the breath that followed. When he exhaled, he blew the cloth back out with more force than was wise, filling the interior of the hood with his own CO2. I must stop this.
The door opened again, slammed back against the wall. The light in the room changed — he could tell through the hood. Sounds were muffled but he felt sure that several men had entered the room. A pair of hands scrabbled against his neck and the drawstring around the bottom of the hood. For a moment he thought, if they aren’t careful, they’ll asphyxiate me instead of getting me free. The string pulled against his windpipe, released, and the hood was yanked away. As his eyes adjusted he caught the blurred form of a figure in front of him and then another two against a wall, more distant, to one side, but before he had time to configure what he was seeing a hand grabbed a handful of his hair and shook his head from side to side and Joosten’s round face was in his and his voice was booming in his ears, ‘Wakey wakey Nic old man, you’ve passed!’
‘Fuck you, Joosten,’ Harper gasped, his breath still painfully laboured in his chest, ‘fuck you.’
The two trainers, leaning back against the wall of the cell with their arms folded, burst into appreciative laughter; Joosten clapped him on the shoulder; and for a moment or two, as the breath that heaved in his throat still felt as heavy as sand and his chest pressed painfully inwards, it occurred to Harper that when he got out in the field, it would not, after all, be one big game.