So much for the legendary Arab hospitality, thought Porter bitterly.
He leant back against the wall. He felt exhausted. As he looked into the darkness, he tried to take stock of what had just happened. He had thought for the last couple of days about what he would do when he got here, about how he would handle the kidnappers, and how he would handle Hassad. But he’d hadn’t expected to be thrown straight into a prison.
Whatever was about to happen next, it wasn’t going to be good. There was no point in kidding himself about that.
Maybe I’ve miscalculated, he thought. Who knows who we killed on that mission all those years ago? A dozen or more Hezbollah guys had been taken out on that job. We weren’t even counting. It could have been somebody’s father or brother. They might well have been looking for revenge all this time. After all, nobody clings on to a grudge like an Arab. And nobody is ever more determined to take their vengeance in blood.
Maybe Hassad just said I could come out here so that he could kill me.
And who could blame him?
There’s unfinished business between us and he probably knows it.
Perhaps this is how it ends. A short, brutal fight in a dark cell. And then a knife to the throat.
Porter sat down on the straw, resting his back against the wall. The clouds had obscured the moon, and the cell was plunged into near total darkness. Up above, Porter could hear a couple of vehicles move around, and then he heard a couple of shouts. One of the commands appeared to be in English, but Porter reckoned he must have misheard. Soon, it fell completely silent. He had no idea what time it was — the Firm hadn’t supplied him with a watch and it was years since he’d owned one himself — but he guessed it must be at least midnight. Friday morning already, he told himself. Tomorrow night Katie Dartmouth will have been executed. And they can toss her into whatever grave they have already dug for me.
Peering into the darkness, Porter decided that he didn’t mind dying that much, just so long as it was quick and painless. If he was being honest with himself, he’d died a long time ago. The moment that Hassad had come back from unconsciousness and shot my mates, my life was over. There was nothing worth living for after that. I was just punching out the hours at the factory, until the foreman called the whistle on my time.
But now at least I’ve done something for Sandy, he thought.
And regrets? Christ, where would you even start? But right at the top of the list would be not killing the Hassad bastard.
He could hear the turning of the key in the lock. Porter’s muscles tensed as soon as he heard the mechanism start to move. He could hear the rusty, scratchy bolt being thrown back. And then the door started to open.
Porter stood up.
A man was walking into the room. He must have weighed at least three hundred pounds, but like a sumo wrestler, it was strong, meaty flesh, as much muscle as flab. He was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt. His face was pudgy and mean, dark-coloured, and with tiny eyes and a small nose like a pig’s.
And in his hand, he was carrying a strip of thick, black hosepipe.
Porter instinctively stepped backwards.
‘Where the hell is Hassad?’ he snapped.
The man said nothing.
‘We had a deal,’ said Porter, the anger evident in every syllable.
The man was cradling the hosepipe in the palm of his fist.
‘I spoke to Hassad, and he told me to meet him here,’ Porter shouted. ‘He gave me his word, soldier to soldier. I saved the bastard’s life once. Doesn’t that mean a sodding thing to you people?’
The man took another step forward. His eyes were staring straight into Porter, and there was something about his expression that made Porter nervous. He’d seen it dozens of times before on drunks tooled up and high on the prospect of violence.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ said Porter.
‘Your worst nightmare,’ replied the man. He spoke in cold, slow English, with a heavy Middle Eastern accent.
He cracked the hosepipe. It lashed through the air, smashing into the side of Porter’s chest. The plastic snapped into his shirt and then into his skin with the force of a hailstorm of bullets. Porter screamed out in pain: a howl of agony that started somewhere deep inside his lungs, and erupted through his mouth with the force of a volcano. As he did so, he was staggering backwards, but his head was cracking against the narrow, sloping ceiling. ‘Get the fuck away from me,’ Porter shouted.
The hosepipe cracked through the air once again. Instinctively, Porter raised his hands to protect himself but it was no good. It smashed past his hands, and laced itself around his chest, neck and throat. The force of the impact rocked him back, crashing his head once more against the low ceiling. He could feel his eyes dancing and his brain spinning. The blows were emptying all the air out of his lungs, and sending a bolt of pain stabbing through him.
Underneath him, Porter could feel his knees buckling. He was reaching out for something to hold on to but there was nothing there.
The whip crashed down once more.
‘Who the fuck …’ mumbled Porter, hardly even able to breathe.
But the words died on his lips.
He had already lost consciousness.
SIXTEEN
Porter opened first one eye, then the other.
He was half awake, half asleep, and in that dreamlike state he could barely remember what had happened to him. His throat was parched dry, and his stomach felt as if it was only slowly recovering from a violent sickness. He could recall the outlines of his mission, arriving in Beirut, travelling halfway across the Lebanon, and then being met by the men who were supposed to take him to meet Hassad.
And then he remembered where it had all gone wrong, and suddenly he woke up completely.
‘Shit,’ he muttered.
He could hear the fear and dread in his own voice.
Porter was strapped to a chair, and the chair itself appeared to be nailed into the floor. There were ropes around his chest, his arms and his legs, making it impossible for him to do more than twitch a few muscles. They must have come in during the night to strap me up, he told himself grimly. To make sure that I couldn’t cause any trouble when I came round from the beating.
But why?
A few pale glimmers of light were sneaking through the tiny window of the cell. It must be morning, Porter told himself, although he had no way of knowing for sure what time it was or even which day.
The door started to creak open. Porter followed it with his eyes, and found it impossible to suppress a glimmer of hope that it might be Hassad. Disappointment, he knew, was inevitable. As the door swung completely open, the same fat bastard who had whipped him into unconsciousness last night stepped slowly into the room. Same black clothes. Same pudgy face. And the same streak of pure violence running through his eyes.
Porter looked straight at him, and he could feel every muscle in his body tensing in anger, but he resolved to remain silent.
The man took two paces forward, so that his imposing bulk was just five feet away from the chair to which Porter was strapped.
‘I haven’t killed any Zionist, imperialist scum for more than a week,’ he said. The words were pronounced in whiny, heavily accented English. ‘So I think I’m going to enjoy this.’
It takes character to listen to your own death sentence in silence, thought Porter. But maybe when you don’t care any more it doesn’t feel so bad.
‘It is ten o’clock now,’ the man continued. ‘The beheading — your beheading — is scheduled for one hour.’
Porter flinched. It was an involuntary instinctive twitching of the muscles, one that he couldn’t control, and he felt instantly ashamed of himself. Take this like a soldier, he told himself. It is the last shred of dignity left to you.