‘Leave us,’ the man said in English to the other two. Bernard blinked and looked over his shoulder at his captors. One wore jeans, the other three-quarter length cargo pants. Their shirts were plain cotton, one blue, one white. Both had ski masks on, but from their hands, and the ankles of the one in the shorter trousers, he could see they were black Africans. The men, who each had a mini version of an AK 47 slung over his shoulder, departed without a word.
‘Hello, Bernard.’
Joyce said nothing. From his brief training he recalled that he should give only what was known as the ‘big four’, and nothing more. The big four were name, rank, date of birth and service number. As he was no longer a serving naval officer, he decided to limit it to two — name and date of birth. For now, though, he said nothing.
‘Cigarette?’
He was about to say he didn’t smoke, then realised that would be breaking the first rule. ‘My name is Bernard Joyce and I was born on the sixteenth of November, nineteen seventy-four.’
The man laughed, and the noise echoed off the bare walls. ‘I don’t care, Bernard. And that’s the truth.’ He picked up the cigarette and drew deeply on it, blowing the smoke towards the ceiling. ‘Filthy habit, I know.’
‘My name is Bernard Joyce and I was born on the sixteenth of November, nineteen seventy — ’
The man held up a hand. ‘I need nothing from you, Bernard. I don’t need to know about your job as policy advisor to Robert Greeves. I don’t need to know about the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines, and I don’t need to know about your future plans for troop deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else for that matter. I don’t even need to know that you are homosexual, save for the fact that it is a useful detail — a good way of breaking a man down is to anally rape him, but perhaps that wouldn’t work on you. In fact, Bernard Joyce, born nineteen seventy-four, I don’t really need you at all.’
Bernard shifted in the chair. He felt sick to his stomach. The man wouldn’t have revealed his face if he had any intention at all of letting him live.
‘So here is my dilemma. What do I do with you, and can you be of any further use to me? You see, Bernard, you were insurance. In the unlikely event that Robert Greeves was killed in the abduction phase, you were to be my back-up hostage. But Robert, for the time being, is very much alive, if not too well at the moment.’ He smiled at his own cruel joke. ‘So you, my friend, are redundant.’
Bernard felt like he was going to shit himself. He wondered if this talk would end with a bullet in his head, or a slower, more barbarous fate. He needed to stay alive if he was to fulfil his duty as a former officer — to try to escape. He was as good as dead already, so he would not go peacefully.
‘What thoughts, I wonder, are going through your head now?’ The man waved the lighted cigarette in the air, as though punctuating his words with a question mark. ‘Will you become my Scheherazade, talking and talking now to keep yourself alive, trying to think of something to say that will keep me from killing you? Or will you try to escape, risk your life on a futile gesture, but go out fighting, as the Americans would say?’
Bernard said nothing. The man leaned across the table and flipped open the screen of the portable disc player. ‘There are many ways to fight a war, Bernard, as I’m sure you know. My people, the people oppressed by the Israelis, the British, the Americans and their puppets in Pakistan and the House of Saud, do not have nuclear submarines or jet fighters or B-52 bombers. My people are good at making the most of what they have. This little device — and the video camera in the next room — are what military people call force multipliers. Do you know what that means?’
Bernard did, but he was sticking, for the time being, with his say-nothing strategy.
The man sighed. ‘It means that I can inflict disproportionate damage on my opponent by using a tool which will enhance my meagre military resources. The media, Bernard, is a force multiplier, and one that my people are very good at using. As good as your submarines and jets and bombs are, your people are hopelessly inept at using the world’s press, radio and television to your advantage.’
If the conversation were being held over drinks in the Naval and Military Club, Bernard would probably agree with the man.
‘Now, Bernard, allow me to multiply the power of my words with some home videos.’
Bernard took a deep breath, then closed his eyes.
‘Open them, Bernard, or I’ll get one of my men to slice your eyelids off.’
Bernard blinked, looked at him again and swallowed. There was no smile on his face, just a deadpan look that said he had every intention of carrying out his last threat and would think no more of it than if he had just stepped on an ant. He leaned over and turned the player so than Bernard could see the small screen.
The screaming started as soon as the image appeared. Robert Greeves was lying naked on a steel bed, the same type that Bernard had been tied to when they had beaten the soles of his feet, except that the masked man was not beating Robert. The camera had been placed at an obscene angle, facing between Greeves’s legs, at about bed level. Greeves shrieked then raised his head. The man with the ski mask moved from between the politician’s legs and Bernard could see a hand-cranked generator on the floor, which the man knelt behind. Wires ran from the dynamo to clips which were attached to Robert’s testicles. The man started to crank and Bernard winced and screwed his eyes shut again at the terrible, piercing scream.
‘Never!’ Greeves screamed on the recording. Bernard realised it was a recording of the torture session he had heard earlier.
‘Why? You are asking yourself why we are doing that,’ the man said as he pressed stop. Bernard looked at him with pure loathing, fantasising at that moment about freeing himself and killing the man. ‘Do you think I want him to cower on camera, to plead with his leader, with the British people, to release the inmates from Guantanamo Bay, or pull out your mercenary troops from Iraq?’
Bernard had assumed the message would be something like that.
‘Well, between you and me, Bernard, I don’t want him to say anything. And no, in case you’re thinking my friends and I are mere criminals, no, this is not about obtaining a monetary ransom.’ He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray.
Bernard was genuinely confused now.
‘I’ll explain then, if you won’t guess. If things go as I plan, I won’t be inflicting much more pain at all on your master. I want Robert Greeves to be brave when I film him and release the video to the Western world via a friendly television network. I don’t want him crying and betraying his ideals by begging for the detainees to be released or the troops pulled out of Iraq. I don’t want the people of Britain to think of him as weak, because then, secretly, many of them won’t care if he is beheaded on TV. However, someone has to deliver the message…’
Bernard felt the bile rising in his throat and swallowed hard.
‘Having a spare hostage — you, Bernard — allows me more air time, as simple as that. I can show a video to the world of my men standing behind Robert Greeves, the sword resting on his shoulder, and one of us can make our demands, in Arabic, and that will play for two or three days in a row. If, however, I release a second video, this time with someone pleading for Greeves’s life — saying, perhaps, that the men who are holding you hostage have threatened to cut off one of Greeves’s fingers and toes each day that the UK government delays making a decision, then the effect will be enhanced, don’t you agree?’
Bernard stared into those cold, calculating eyes and a tiny part of him marvelled at the fact that a human being could be so resolute, so cruel, so pitiless.