I gasped as the fingers caressed my belly. Only it was not a caress, but rather the touch as the belt of my jeans was unbuckled, then the jeans were unbuttoned and unzipped. Hands pulled my jeans down, then my underpants. Obediently, eager to help, wanting these remorseless captors to like me and to stop hurting me, I stepped out of the clothes.
I was naked and I was cold. I was hurting and I was frightened.
Hands touched my throat again. I whimpered softly, then realized that the warm fingers were merely untying the lacing of the bag that shrouded my head. I sensed the person take a backward step, then the bag was whipped off and, though I was instantly dazzled and though my sight was still smeared and my eyes smarting from the ammonia. I could at last see where I was and who was with me.
Facing me was Sarah Sing Tennyson. She was holding my clothes. Standing beside her was a tall and well-built man wearing a black balaclava helmet like those which the IRA favor when they are photographed by journalists. The knitted cap hid all but his eyes and his mouth. I could see he had a moustache, and that his eyes were blue, but otherwise the man’s face was utterly masked. He also wore black leather gloves, a black sweater, black shoes, and black trousers. I sensed that there was at least one other person behind me, but I dared not turn round in case they hit me.
The cellar was stone-walled and completely bare of any furnishings except a coiled garden hose that had been attached to a tap which served a metal sink fixed to one wall. The ceiling was big, suggesting a large house, while its bareness spoke of an abandoned one. The wooden stairs were to my left, climbing steeply to a closed door. The cellar was lit by a single light bulb which, though dim, had been sufficient to dazzle me in those first seconds after the hood had been removed from my eyes. The cellar floor was a screed of bare cement with a single drain in its very center, a feature which, in these circumstances, was as menacing as the garden hose.
Sarah Sing Tennyson had my clothes draped over one arm. She was also holding a pair of shears. They were tailor’s shears with black handles and steel blades a foot long.
She said nothing, but, when she was certain that the sight of the shears had captured my attention, she began to slice my clothes into shreds. She first cut the shirt, then the jersey, then my underpants, then the jeans. She worked slowly, as if to emphasise the destruction, and looked up frequently as though to make sure that I was aware of what she was doing. One by one she reduced my clothes into a pile of frayed patchwork at her feet. The sound of the shear-blades sliding against each other made a sinister metallic sibilance in the echoing cellar. The message of that hiss, and of the dumb show that ruined my clothes, was to emphasize my vulnerability. I was naked, and I had no hope of escaping without the help of my captors. They had reduced me to a shivering, frightened, naked dependant. Each slice of the blades reminded me that I was totally at the questionable mercy of Sarah Tennyson and her companions and, as if to stress that dependence, when she was done with my clothes and the last cut scrap had fluttered down to her feet, she dropped her gaze to my shrunken groin and opened the shear-blades wide so that the light slashed off the steel in a glittering angle. I felt myself shrivel even further. She smiled, my humiliation assured and complete.
“You’re going to answer some questions,” the masked man beside Sarah Sing Tennyson said suddenly, and his voice gave me the first clue as to who my abductors were for he spoke in the sour accent of Northern Ireland, so harsh and ugly compared to the seductive cadence of the southern Irish voice. “Where’s the boat?”
I had to prevaricate. Christ, but I could not just give in! “What boat?” I asked, and then I screamed, because there was not one man behind me, but two, both of them masked like the first man, and both of them had hit me at once. I fell, and this time no one tried to hold me up, but instead the man who had asked the question kicked me, then all three were working me over, using short, sharp blows that pierced and shook and terrorized me with pain. I could control neither my bowels nor my bladder and, when they had finished, I was both weeping and filthy.
Sarah Sing Tennyson had not joined in the beating, but just watched with a half-smile on her face. The three men were all masked, all gloved, and all dressed in black. They were experts at pain and humiliation and I suspected they had not been trained by torturers, but by psychiatrists. I remembered the nameless men who had gone from Belfast to Libya to learn the modern techniques of interrogation, and I knew that I would have no choice but to tell them what they wanted to know. Of course I wanted to be brave. I wanted to emulate those men who claimed to have resisted the interrogations in the cellars of Castlereagh Police Station, but all Belfast had known that such stories were bombastic rot. They had all broken; the only difference being that some had told their secrets in awful pain and some had told them quickly to get the ordeal done.
“Stand up,” the man ordered me. There was no emotion in the voice, nothing but resigned tones suggesting that this was a man doing a routine job.
I staggered to my feet. I was weeping and moaning, because the pain was all over me like a second skin. One of the three men went to the wall and uncoiled the hose. He turned on the tap, then triggered the jet of water at me. The ice-cold soaking was not a part of their brutality, but designed to wash me down.
By the time I was clean, I was also shivering. My teeth chattered and my voice was moaning very softly.
“Be quiet!” the man next to Sarah Sing Tennyson said.
I went very quiet. The cellar stank of feces and urine.
“Let me lay down the rules of this interrogation,” the man said in his quiet, reasonable voice. “You’re going to tell us what we want to know. If you tell us, then you’ll live, and that’s a promise. If you don’t tell us, you’ll die, but you’ll suffer a lot in the dying. None of us enjoys inflicting pain, but pain has its uses. So where is the boat?”
“She’s travelling deck cargo.” My teeth were chattering and I could not finish the sentence.
“Going to Boston?”
“Yes,” I said eagerly, “that’s right, going to Boston.”
“When will it arrive?”
I hesitated, distracted by the small sounds of the two men behind me, but they were merely shifting their feet. “They didn’t give me a date, but they thought the voyage should take about six weeks!” I hurried the last words, not wanting to be hit.
“They?”
“The shippers.”
“Their name?”
“Exportatión Layetano.”
“In Barcelona?”
“Yes.”
A dozen rivulets of water trickled away from my shivering body toward the drain. There was no blood in the water. These men had hurt me, but without breaking my skin. They were experts.
“You arranged for the boat’s shipment?” The Ulster voice was curiously flat and neutral, as though he were a bored bank manager asking tedious details of a customer in order to determine whether or not a loan would be a wise investment for his bank.
“I arranged the shipment.”
“The boat’s name?”
“She used to be called Corsaire. I changed it to Rebel Lady.”
“Describe her.”
I stammered out the description: A forty-four-foot sloop, center cockpit, sugar-scoop stern, with a deep heavy keel, red anti-fouling under her bootline, white gelcoat above.
“How much gold is on board?”
“Five million dollars.”
Was there a second’s hesitation of surprise? Maybe, but then the metronome-like voice resumed. “Describe how the gold is stored aboard the boat.”
So I described the saloon’s false floor, and how the cabin sole lifted to reveal the slightly discolored fiberglass that needed to be chipped away to reveal the mix of sand and gold.