‘Where are we?’ said Porter.
‘Stay quiet,’ barked the man.
His tone was harsh and cruel, but there was a hint of amusement in it as well.
Then, a silence.
Porter could sense there were people around him. He couldn’t see anyone because of the blindfold. He couldn’t hear anyone any more either: if they were there, they were keeping quiet. But he could sense them all the same. There was a body heat in the air all around him. There was a charged, tense atmosphere that you could smell in the air. There are plenty of guys here, he told himself. And probably all of them want to kill me.
‘Why won’t you answer me?’ he said.
‘Just move,’ hissed the taller man.
‘I can’t bloody see anything.’
Suddenly a hand was gripping his shoulder. It squeezed tight, and he could feel the muscled fingers digging hard into his flesh. ‘Just move.’
‘Not until you take my blindfold off.’
Porter dug his heels into the ground. The man was still holding on to his shoulder. Stand my ground, Porter thought. We have to start this right. Once they start treating me like a prisoner rather than a negotiator, then I’m done for.
The grip on his shoulder started to relax.
‘You’re not allowed to see the outside of the building,’ said the taller man. ‘It is too dangerous for us. You must understand this. Now, allow me to take you inside. Then we can remove the blindfold.’
‘And bring Hassad to see me?’
‘You will meet the man you have come to see, yes.’
Porter started walking. The taller man was guiding him. Underneath, he could tell the ground was soft and sandy. Maybe they were out in the Syrian Desert somewhere. He could sense men all around him, and caught a couple of whispers, but no one was talking out loud. Within a few seconds, they had gone inside some kind of doorway. It was warm — he could sense the temperature change instantly — and he was being led along a corridor. He tried counting the paces: without being able to see anything, it was the only way of getting a sense of the size of the place. Thirty, he reckoned, which made the corridor only about twenty metres long. He started to be steered down a staircase. Ten, fifteen, twenty steps, he counted. That meant they were only one floor down, probably in a basement. Another corridor. This time they walked only about five metres. Then they stopped, and the man let go of his shoulder.
‘Can we lose the bloody blindfold now?’ snapped Porter.
He could hear his voice echoing around the cramped corridor: from the time it took his voice to bounce back from the walls, he reckoned it was just a short corridor, and at most a couple of rooms.
There was no reply.
Porter could hear the sound of a key being turned in a lock. Then a bolt being shifted back. Next, there was a sudden shove against him, and he was bundled into the room.
‘Getting your fucking hands off me,’ he snarled.
Another shove. This time Porter could feel four pairs of hands pushing him forwards. They were strong: the skin on the hands was gnarled and tough, like the sole of an old boot, and the muscles behind them were toned and fit. The force of the blow took Porter by surprise and he stumbled. His hands were flailing out desperately — the blindfold meant he still couldn’t see anything — and that made it even harder for him to regain his balance. His feet were already wobbling beneath him as the next thump hit him in the middle of the spine. A ripple of pain tore through him. A boot was crashing into his ankles. He could feel himself starting to fall. His arms reached out to grab hold of something, but there was nothing there apart from thin air. He was hurtling towards the ground. There was a moment of sheer terror as he realised he had no idea what he was falling towards: it could be hard stone, it might be shards of glass, they could have tossed him into a well to drown him. In a brief instant, he could remember his instructors in the Regiment telling him that one of the ways the Iraqis tortured their prisoners was to blindfold them, then push them downstairs, because the terror of falling without knowing where you were going was more than most men could bear. I can see their point, he thought grimly. He had thrown his arms around his face to protect it. In the next instant, his body was crashing into the ground. There was something soft and damp on the surface of the floor. Straw, maybe. And beneath that stone. He could feel some bruising on his knees and around his ribs where he had taken the worst impact of the fall, but apart from that he was intact. Nothing broken: he’d have felt the pain by now if a bone had snapped. He felt around. Whether the two men were still standing in the doorway, he had no idea.
‘Where the fuck is Hassad?’ he growled.
Silence.
He could hear one of the men breathing. And he could hear his own voice echoing around the tiny room.
‘I’m supposed to be his bloody guest,’ shouted Porter. ‘Why the fuck are you treating me like this?’
Porter started to lift himself up from the floor. His hands were reaching up to the back of his head to untie the blindfold. But the knots were strong, and it was taking a moment to unpick them. He started to stand up — and as he did so, the door slammed shut. He could hear the turning of the key in the lock. And then he could hear the sound of metal scratching against metal as the bolt was pushed into place.
He pushed himself up against the door, slamming his fists against it. ‘Take me to see Hassad,’ he shouted.
The words echoed around the room, taunting him like a hundred different mocking voices.
But the only response was the tread of four sets of boots walking away along the corridor. And then a laugh.
‘Fuck it,’ he muttered.
For a moment, Porter just rested against the side of the door. He was catching his breath. And, more importantly, trying to catch his thoughts as well.
What the hell have they done to me?
Why have they brought me here?
He started to unpick the knots on the blindfold. It was slow and frustrating, but at least it gave him something to do. It stopped the questions raging through his head: Where have they brought me? Why are they treating me like this? Has it all gone wrong already? Slowly the blindfold came free. He unwrapped the black cloth from his face, and threw it to the floor.
‘Shit,’ he said. Maybe I was better off not being able to see anything.
The cell measured ten feet by fifteen. Up by the doorway, there was enough room for Porter to stand up, but the ceiling sloped away fast, so that by the other end it was no more than four feet high. There was a slit window at the far end of the room, measuring no more than a foot across, to a depth of six inches. It looked out onto a wall, and had bars across it. Outside, it was dark already, but the moon was shining, and a few weak glimmers of light were managing to trickle through the tiny window. It took Porter a few seconds to adjust his eyes. For what? he wondered. There was some straw tossed across the rough stone floor, but it must have been here for at least a year, Porter reckoned, because it was damp and sodden with dirt. He knelt down to where he had fallen from the doorway. There was some smeared blood on the floor, but he could tell it wasn’t his: it was caked crimson and dry, so it must have been at least a day or two old. Next to it there was a human tooth, with some dried blood caked around its torn root, which looked if it had fallen from a man’s mouth during a beating. Porter kicked it away with the toe of his boot, then explored the rest of the cell. There was some writing on the wall but all of it was in Arabic: some of the letters looked like they had been scratched into the walls with a man’s fingernails. In one corner was the only object of any sort in the room, a metal bucket with a vile, putrid smell rising out of it. The bucket was half filled with water, and there was a human turd floating on its scummy surface.