by Adam Hall
An assault on the person. Your own person. No one else’s.
Backing and turning and coming in this direction, no longer blocking the road entirely, leaving me enough room to go through if I wanted to. But there wasn’t any point: the Fiat was farther along the avenue with a muzzle poking out of a side window. The lights of the Citroen came on, full heads, and most of the scene was blacked out because of the glare.
‘Shall I shoot at them?’
‘No’
‘Why not? They -‘
‘When you’re outnumbered, the thing is to think, not shoot.’
I turned my head sideways to avoid the glare. She was looking at me, her skin silvered by the brightness of the light, her eyes exaggeratedly blue because of the contracted pupils. She would have made a good photograph.
‘What will they do?’ she asked me.
‘Nothing much. They want some information, that’s all.’
Because if they’d intended to kill, as the other cell had intended, they would simply have sent a marksman to wait for me to leave the clinic or they would have ordered an armed group into the building to do it summarily. And if they’d intended to put mobile surveillance on me they wouldn’t have used four vehicles to set it up: they couldn’t hope to do it without my knowing and in a small town like Kaifra it wasn’t even necessary.
They wanted me for interrogation.
This idea would have worried me in the ordinary way, but not too much. I had twice explored this psychological terrain in earlier missions and I knew roughly what to do: the only possible way is to remove the mind from the body and to look at the situation objectively - the pain is expressed in the nerves and is perfectly natural but it doesn’t have any significance; it’s totally physical and there’s no message; you merely want it to stop and you could say the word but you couldn’t live with yourself afterwards so you might as well die now and if you’re prepared to die then they’ve had it because once you’re dead you’re no more use and they know that.
The worry would have been about the unpleasantness, that was all, not about whether I’d break. And at the moment they wouldn’t have a lot of success because there were bruises everywhere and the effects of the gas were still hanging around and they’d only have to push me a bit too far and I’d flake out and they wouldn’t learn anything.
But there was a new factor involved tonight. I didn’t know how long I’d be able to hold out if they went to work on Diane instead of me.
The Citroen pulled up and someone got out and walked up to us holding a sub-machine-gun. For a moment his shadow grew immense, flitting across the bonnet of the ambulance; then the light blazed again and he came to the side and stood there waiting for something, the muzzle aimed at my head.
I turned to look at him. Except for the man who’d died in the ravine this was the first time I’d seen anyone from an opposition cell because they’d worked covertly for the most part: the bomb in Tunis, the marksman here in Kaifra. This man wasn’t of any interest because he was just a factotum but I looked at him so that I’d know him if I saw him later.
There were footsteps on the loose sand and another man came up from one of the cars behind us and stood looking in at Diane.
‘Get out of the car.’
I noted that he was an Egyptian, with a Cairo dockside accent. I told her ‘You only speak English.’
‘What?’ she called to him through the window.
He jerked his sub-machine-gun.
‘Get out this side,’ I told her, ‘with me.’
‘All right.’
I opened the door and the one who’d come up from the Citroen got worried and jerked his gun at me.
‘Get your hands up!’
‘Oh bollocks.’
He was Egyptian too. I suppose Loman must have known the UAR was involved but hadn’t been allowed to tell me, on the grounds that the less the ferret knows the longer he lives.
Diane followed me out and we stood waiting. Two other men came up, one from the Fiat and one from behind us, and both had guns trained on us. Only one of them wore a fez: the others looked inferior material, capable of subduing or killing but nothing more. By their speech they were all from dockside Cairo and they called the man in the fez by the name of Hassan.
‘Bring the Fiat here,’ he told one of them. Then he turned to me. ‘Give me your gun.’
‘I haven’t one.’
I spoke in Arabic because at least one of the opposition cells had a dossier on me: Loman had warned me about that.
‘Search him! Get his gun!’
Hassan was very nervous and I placed him fairly high up in his cell or even in the network: he had the intelligence to know his responsibilities and to know that if I got out of this trap he’d probably get a chopping.
One of the thugs frisked me and I didn’t make it difficult for him.
‘He has no gun, Hassan.’
‘He must have!’
I was frisked again and they dragged open the doors of the ambulance and ransacked the compartments and then one of them said it was the woman - she had my gun. Hassan looked at me to see my reaction when they tugged the Colt .38 out of her pocket and I looked suitably upset.
‘He gave the woman his gun,’ said a man, ‘but we found it!’
Hassan told him to shut up and turned away and spoke to the man who’d brought the Fiat alongside.
‘Is Ahmed coming?’
‘Yes.’
The transmitting aerial went on waving, slower and slower.
I thought that Ahmed wouldn’t be likely to come alone: he was obviously higher in the cell and would have at least one trigger-man. So far there were only the four of them here, unless there were others who’d stayed in the Mercedes or the 404 and I doubted this because Hassan was nervous and. would have brought every one of his men in to guard me. There was no hope of estimating how long it would take Ahmed to reach here from their radio base but it would need only ten minutes to cross the whole of Kaifra. He could be here within sixty seconds.
Hassan was watching me.
‘Where is the rest of your cell?’
I said I was operating freelance and there wasn’t an actual cell, and he just shook his head and didn’t take me up on it. I think it was just a random question to try me out. He looked like a hardworking field executive, the eyes alert but unimaginative, a man who had reached the position of lieutenant in a small cell operating overseas. I thought he would put the requirements of the operation before everything else, and would work well with Ahmed when the grilling began. I would have given a great deal to know whether either of them would have the intelligence to use Diane as the means of persuasion; I believed they would, because it had two immense advantages over a single interrogation session: a man might easily hold out if the pain was his own but might as easily break if he had to listen to someone else going through it, especially a young, girl; secondly the girl could be brought again and again to the point of mental unbalance while the man was left with a clear head and the ability to answer questions.
It would depend partly on how well Ahmed and Hassan understood the European attitude to things like this: an Arab would entirely ignore the suffering of a mere woman and it wouldn’t be worth touching her.
‘Where is the aeroplane?’
‘I still can’t find it.’
The answers had to be acceptable: it was no good saying what cell, what aeroplane, so forth. He knew I was an agent operating in the local field and he knew I was assigned to the UK Tango Victor mission and if I could give him some answers that would fit in with what he already knew it might get him to think of a few more questions. The more I could persuade him to talk, the more he’d tell me.
‘Do you think the aeroplane is somewhere near Kaifra?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know about near. We certainly thought it was, but it looks as if we were wrong,’
He seemed about to ask me another one and I waited but he shut up and began stamping his feet impat
iently, looking along the perspective of the palm-trees to see if Ahmed were coming. I thought it was interesting to note that this was an Egyptian cell and not the one controlling the marksman; also that one of the other cells was Algerian and working at government level with immediate-category liaison, because Chirac had brought in five squadrons of desert-reconnaissance aircraft just by mooning around up there at dawn this morning.
‘Feeling all right?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
She was looking pale, the gold skin losing colour.
‘Do not talk!’
Hassan had swung round nervously.
‘You mean don’t talk in English?’
‘Yes. Talk in Arabic.’
‘But this woman doesn’t understand Arabic.’
‘Then do not talk.’
His olive-black unimaginative eyes stared at me to make sure I was getting the message; then he turned away and looked for Ahmed again.
He wasn’t trying anything subtle: he was energetic and efficient but not educated and it was almost certain that his henchmen didn’t speak anything but their own crane-hook argot but it’d be too risky to rely on that so I asked her in English: ‘Did you leave the other gun in the ambulance?’
I didn’t expect her to have time to answer: she hadn’t heard about any other gun and anyway she’d be thrown because I’d just been told not to speak in English and here I was doing it.
He came round very fast, Hassan, and his teeth flashed in the light as the animal mouth delivered its speech, the expression more explicit than the words.
If you talk to the woman in English again we will kill you, I will not have my commands disobeyed, if you do it again you will die, so forth.
But I’d got the information I’d wanted because the other three had closed in on me almost by reflex action when they’d seen him swing round, and their sub-machine-guns had come up to the aim. So they didn’t understand English and Hassan didn’t understand it either or he’d have told them to search the ambulance for the ‘other gun’ instead of telling me off.
I just hoped Diane would work things out and make a careful note: I’d told her they wanted to interrogate me and she knew you can’t interrogate a dead man so if we had to talk to each other urgently we could do it in English.
Hassan was still glowering at me and I could see he’d like to shoot me here and now just for disobeying his orders: he was terribly nervous about the whole situation and didn’t really trust in his ability to keep me subdued.
‘Oh come on, Hassan, I bet you talk a bit of English, if it’s only Coca-Cola.’
He spat, not too far from my shoe. We could hear a car somewhere, its exhaust-note muffled by the phalanx of palms, and he jerked his head to listen, watching the end of the avenue. I was worried because there was so little time and because this situation couldn’t be expected to improve. One man and one sub-machine-gun would be enough to keep us immobilized, and this force-already overwhelming - would be augmented as soon as Ahmed arrived.
And I didn’t like the thing about Diane.
I could only save her by getting her away and I didn’t think I could do that. Once they’d got us in the confines of an interrogation chamber she wouldn’t’ have a chance. Nothing very important of course would happen: a fledgling agent seconded from an embassy to an active cell would go into the reports as fatally injured during the course of a mission and the incident would be passed on to those responsible for spreading the blackout. Two young gentlemen with diffident voices and polished nails would call at the flat in Lowndes Square to break the news, bearing the personal sympathy of the Foreign Secretary and hoping it might be a consolation to know that this very courageous civil servant sacrificed her life for the sake of others, adding that since her duties had been of an exceptional kind it would be unfair to her memory if any demand were made for enquiries that could only prove abortive and at the same time undo much of the work she had so assiduously accomplished in the cause of active diplomacy.
We never really found out. It was sort of - hushed up, all very strange. They say there were just some Arabs, and it was night-time, and - well we don’t let ourselves think too much.
The avenue was still empty: the car was moving at right-angles to it, a good mile away, its note rising and falling as the sound was trapped and released among the buildings. Hassan turned back to us and fumbled quickly for a cigarette, breaking the first match before he could light it.
Nothing very important and it happens two or three times a year to experienced executives like O’Brien and Fyson and we never know how many smaller fry are neutralized. It was infinitely more important that when she began sobbing I should remind them that I hadn’t yet been able to locate Tango Victor, that when she first screamed I should repeat that I was only a freelance without a local base, and that when she failed to respond to resuscitation I should tell them they’d been wasting their time simply because they hadn’t believed me, and that they would only waste more time if they put me through the same treatment because if I didn’t know where the freighter had crashed then I couldn’t tell them.
Hassan went and leaned into the Citroen GT and put the headlights down to dipped so that he could watch the road without having to move away from us beyond the glare. The smoke from his Egyptian cigarette drifted on the air, tarry and perfumed. He was smoking it nervously, flicking away the ash before it had time to form more than a millimetre. I watched his cigarette.
Diane was yawning quietly, being afraid. It happens in the trenches and behind the barrera of the bull-ring: the intake of oxygen for the muscles, the release of thyroid secretion for the nerves. I looked at her and nodded and said: ‘Okay?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
Hassan jerked his dark head to look at me but okay was international and that was why I’d used it and he didn’t slam into me this time. I said in Arabic:
‘The woman doesn’t know anything. Why don’t you let her go?’
He shook his head again, taking me seriously. ‘We will find out what she knows.’
I let it go at that and moved my feet around a bit, as he was doing, my hands behind me. The snouts of their guns moved, keeping me lined up. I wished I could help her get through the waiting, saying a word or two; but she wasn’t meant to understand Arabic and if I spoke English again he might tell one of them to go for the face or the diaphragm to make sure I understood and that wouldn’t do any good: I didn’t think I could save her but it wouldn’t make her less frightened if she saw how helpless I was.
I stopped moving about and leaned with my back against the little Fiat, listening to the faint sounds of traffic on the far side of the town where the highway linked the airport with the drilling camps. I couldn’t hear the sound of any particular vehicle nearing. Hassan was listening too and I thought it probably wouldn’t be long before he used the radio to ask his base where Ahmed was.
That was the principle of the thing, anyway: whatever they did to her, I wouldn’t give them information. Whatever they did to me, I wouldn’t talk. They could afford to work on her as far as the point where life ceased and the odd thing was that I was absolutely certain she’d hold out for as long as I did: it hadn’t occurred to me that they’d get anything out of her. I could of course have been wrong but I didn’t think I was.
She was watching me and glanced away but realized I’d seen her and looked at me again, one eye clear and amethyst, the other in deep shadow, the down on her face silvered in the light from the Citroen, her soft hair shining. One day she’d be a beautiful woman, would have been, yes, as you say, a beautiful woman, but there we are and I suppose there aren’t many families without something to grieve for, it’s Angela, really, who felt it the most, they were very close you know, terribly fond of each other, almost like twin sisters, but I mustn’t go on like this the minute you arrive.
A query in the quiet regard: what’s going to happen?
I don’t know.
Cursed them again till the sweat came an
d I looked away from her because I ought to have reassured her but couldn’t manage it, cursed them for bringing in a child just because the machine they’d set up was running too fast, sweating in the cool night air, not wanting to make the effort I would have to make and very soon. Not only her life involved, butterflies are pretty too, you find them flattened in window-jambs and the world goes whistling on, but my own life as well, not that I’ve ever thought of dying in bed, thank you. Two lives and a mission. Made you sweat.
Physical condition not up to standard: the bruising had left me wanting to keep still, every movement making it feel as though something was going to snap, a bone, a tendon. Mentally fed-up of course, the horror still there at the fringe of consciousness, their talons hooking and the farmyard stink of them, quite apart from the worry about what was going to happen. Put it this way, the organism wasn’t in awfully good shape for survival.
‘Hassan.’
I was still leaning against the side of the Fiat and I didn’t straighten up when he came over to me. I was dead beat, he could see that. I said:
‘The woman doesn’t know anything.’
‘You have said this, but we will see.’
‘Let her go and I’ll tell you everything I know.’
He laughed, just a quick flash of his teeth in the brown skin, and turned his head to look at Diane, the cigarette flattened between his fingers as he raised it and drew the smoke out, the glow of its tip reflected like a spark in his eye and then dying.
They would use a cigarette like this one. Probably one of those in the pack he’d pulled out just now. What is the longitude, what is the latitude, or she will not see anything again, the glowing tip against the amethyst, tell us. They would use other things; they would be selective, efficient.
‘You will tell us everything you know,’ he said, ‘in any case.’
