by Zoe Sharp
I made a snap decision, without thought to risk or consequences, knowing it might easily be the worst – or the last – I ever made. What had Sagar said of Thomas Witney? ‘He’d suffered enough.’
If Bane was looking for damaged souls to twist to his own design, I could give him twisted. In fact, sometimes it was more of a stretch to pretend not to be. To keep the anger penned up inside and to pretend to be just like everybody else, every day.
Now, I needed that rage. I took a breath and called on every ounce and shard of it, felt it come howling up out of the depths of my psyche in visceral response, all teeth and claws like a monstrous predator too long denied the kill.
The taste of it was sour in my mouth, flooding my senses, deafening me, and for once, instead of battling for control and subjugation, I gave it free rein to savage and destroy in wanton rampage.
Suddenly, I was blind with it, sick with it, in the grip of a madness long since denied its true potential and glorying in vicious release. And if, as the first blows began to fall, there was an inner voice, somewhere deep at the back of my mind, that recoiled, keening at this final breach, it was a small voice, and quickly silenced.
I was vaguely aware of Bane himself stepping back, an observer, of more bodies pouring through the doorway, of raised voices and broken furniture. Of fearfulness and, before the end, screaming.
But I don’t fully remember what I did in that room. I don’t know how long it went on for.
When I came round, nauseous and bruised and aching, I found they’d taken away my belt and my boots – and, yes, my watch – and I was locked up alone in the dark.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The door to my cell opened. I half-expected Bane again, come for the next round, but it was the Brit ex-Para with the slightly regal Eurasian features who stood there. Parker had identified him as John Nu, I recalled. He was wearing neatly pressed desert camouflage, his combat boots bulled to a workmanlike shine, and he was carrying a tray.
I didn’t remember him taking part in the altercation in Bane’s study, but then he turned his head slightly and I saw a line of Steri-Strip dressings closing a small cut across his eyebrow.
Oh yeah, sunshine. You were there.
Someone held the door and he stepped through, checking both ways as well as up, cautious as any good soldier. Behind him, the door was pushed to, but not latched. I guessed he wanted a quick escape route, just in case.
Nu put the tray down on the end of the bed furthest from me, moved back to lean against the wall near the doorway.
I glanced at his offering. A sandwich of what looked like cheese and salad, wrapped in a paper napkin, an oversize muffin, and a banana. All finger food that could be eaten without the potential weaponry of a knife and fork. The irony wasn’t lost on me.
‘How you doing?’ Nu asked, without apparent resentment for whatever injuries I might have caused. From the distinctive vowel sounds, his accent was West Midlands. The area around Wolverhampton known as the Black Country because of the coal.
‘So-so,’ I said, cautious myself. I flapped a languid hand. ‘Don’t think much of the rooms at this hotel, though.’
He half-smiled. ‘Yeah, well, we get a lot of junkies, don’t we? Got to have somewhere safe and sound to put ’em while they dry out.’
‘Speaking of dry,’ I said, ‘did you bring anything to drink?’
He reached into the front pocket of his tunic and handed across a can of full-fat Coke. I normally drank Diet, but I reckoned I could probably do with the sugar hit.
The can was still reasonably cold, enough for the dampness of condensation to have formed on the outside. I held it to the inflamed area around my eye, letting it soothe for a moment, then picked up the sandwich. I wasn’t hungry, but it was fuel, and voluntary starvation gained me nothing.
Nu watched me bite into the thick bread. Chewing made the side of my face ache, but I hadn’t taken a sock in the mouth, so at least my teeth were still solid.
‘Can always tell a squaddie,’ he said after a moment. ‘Never pass up the chance to get some scran down your neck, eh?’
‘You should know,’ I said. ‘Miss it?’
‘Nah.’ He grinned at me. ‘Who’d want to be on stag all night in bloody Baghdad when they could be living it up in California?’
‘I would have thought, by the time you got out, you’d have had enough of taking orders to last a lifetime,’ I said. ‘Why join this lot?’
‘Depends what you mean by “join”, love,’ he said, still smiling. ‘Me and the lads, we was hired to take care of security and training. Don’t mean we’re followers.’ He touched a rueful finger to the cut above his eye. ‘Not that you need much training, eh?’
I finished the sandwich, wiped my fingers carefully on the napkin and took a slug of Coke. ‘Yeah, well, I learnt the hard way.’
‘You did at that,’ he murmured, and for the first time, the humour was wiped clean from his voice. When I looked up, it was gone from his face, too. I lowered the Coke slowly but kept the can in my hand, gauged the distance between us, and waited.
‘I remember you, Charlie,’ he said quietly. ‘How could I not? Made a right splash in all the papers, didn’t you?’
I said, ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read,’ but caught the frozen note in my voice, and knew he’d heard it, too.
Nu nodded. ‘I was on the next intake. Fancied myself in Special Forces, just like you did, working undercover in Belfast – better than patrolling the Falls Road as a grunt with the Paras, getting rocks chucked at me by five-year-old kiddies.’
I couldn’t bring myself to ask what he’d heard, what lies the Powers That Be had told those who followed the disastrous training course I’d been on. Instead, I tilted my head back and forced myself to bring the can up to my lips, even if I couldn’t stomach actually taking a drink once it was there.
‘So,’ I asked, ‘did it turn out to be all you were hoping for?’
He shrugged. ‘Nah. Chucked it in, didn’t I?’
Roughly translated, that meant he hadn’t made the grade – had been Returned To Unit. The majority of those who started the training were RTU’d, I’d been warned at the outset, with the clear implication that’s what they expected would happen to me and, hey, no hard feelings. Certainly, the instructors seemed to make it their mission in life to keep the odds stacked against us. Like Epps, most hadn’t believed the few women trainees had what it took.
But I’d been good enough, I knew. I’d thought that making it through the selection process was the hard part, that the training itself was going to be a breeze by comparison.
I’d been wrong.
I looked up, found Nu watching me again. Something flickered in his face.
‘I served with one of them, you know,’ he said then, suddenly. ‘Couple of years after – in Bosnia. Lad called Hackett.’
Donalson, Hackett, Morton and Clay.
The names of my four attackers danced inside my head, the faces parading behind my eyes, vivid, vicious, causing a physical response I struggled to confine. I wondered if there’d ever be a time when I could hear their names and genuinely feel nothing. When the memory alone no longer sent that burst of pure anger scalding through my hands.
‘I don’t suppose,’ I managed dryly, ‘there’s any chance he died horribly in the line of duty?’
‘There was one or two who wouldn’t have minded if he’d stepped on a landmine, love, that was for sure,’ Nu said. ‘Nasty bugger. Not the sort of bloke you’d want behind you if it all went bad, know what I mean?’
Oh, yeah. Been there, done that…
‘Anyway, he got pissed one night, and he talked about it – what him and the others did to you,’ Nu went on, his gaze as measured as his tone. ‘Said you didn’t put up much of a fight, all things considered. Reckoned you must have enjoyed it, on the quiet.’
Sure. That’s why they had to beat me half to death to get me to lie still long enough…
I swallowed, bu
t held my peace. Nu shrugged as if I’d spoken anyway.
‘Hackett reckoned they done you a favour. Said what they gave you was only a taster of what them Provo bastards would have done, if you’d gone and got yourself caught after they sent you across the water.’
‘If you should ever happen to see him again,’ I said, aware that some vaguely human quality was missing from my voice, ‘you can tell him I’ve acquired a whole new skill set since those days. One I’d be delighted to demonstrate to him, first hand.’
Nu’s mouth twitched. He straightened and picked up the tray, sliding the untouched muffin and the banana onto the bed, held out his hand for the can. I finished the last few mouthfuls and handed it over.
He moved for the door, then paused. ‘There was a sergeant on that course, one of the instructors. A bloke called Meyer, known for being one of the hardest bastards in the army,’ Nu said casually. ‘I found out later that you’d been shagging him while you was there, and I remembered something else Hackett said about you – that you liked a bit of pain.’ His gaze flicked over me, lingering on the expanding bruise around my eye. ‘Might be some truth in that, eh?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The next time the door opened, it was the ex-Marine, Yancy, who stood there.
I was on the floor of my cell, braced on my toes and the palms of my hands, running through my third set of press-ups. The back of my shoulder – the same place I’d been shot – burned at the exertion. Somebody, I reckoned, had probably put the boot in during the struggle and it was taking a while to come back to me.
Still, it could have been a lot worse.
I looked up sharply when I heard the bolts go back, blinking as a ribbon of sweat rolled into my eyes. By the time the door cracked fully, I’d jacked to my feet.
‘Your turn, is it?’ I asked dryly.
Yancy didn’t rise to that, just eyed me from the corridor, unwilling to venture into my cell now I was upright and obviously mobile, but my attention was grabbed by the object clutched in his fist.
‘Found something belongs to you,’ he said, and threw it at my feet.
The rucksack landed in a shimmer of dust. I recognised it instantly, could tell by the way it had fallen that it was empty. It crumpled sulkily onto the concrete, like it was embarrassed at being so easily unearthed. I knew I’d buried it in a hurry, but how the hell had they found it so fast?
I shifted my weight, noted Yancy’s twitch of reaction.
‘So,’ I said at last, ‘what happens now?’
‘You come with me,’ he said with a jerk of his head. ‘Bring that with you.’
I glanced down at my bare feet. ‘Some boots would be good.’
He nudged something just outside the doorway with his foot, kicking my boots across the floor towards me with more force than was strictly necessary. I stamped on them before they clouted my ankles, and sat on the edge of the bed to put them on. Yancy watched me in impervious silence.
I picked the rucksack up, slapped it a couple of times to knock the worst off it, then stepped out of my little cell with a certain trepidation.
Yancy stood to one side, indicating I was to walk ahead of him, taking no chances. I slung the rucksack onto my shoulder. It weighed almost nothing.
‘You might have left me the chocolate,’ I said in mock reproach, but received not a flicker by way of reply. There were no obvious marks on him and I wondered about that. His scowl was enough to tell me I must have injured something, if only his pride.
I didn’t remember the area outside my cell from the way in, so took the opportunity to scan the wide, windowless corridor. The rough wall to my left was solid-block cool when I brushed my hand against it, and slightly damp to the touch. There’d been no indication of a basement level on the plans Parker had pulled, but this had a subterranean feel.
To my right was a line of three other doors, leading to what I assumed were more cells. I’d heard no sign of company during my incarceration, but that didn’t mean they were empty. I remembered Nu’s comment about junkies. Was making them go cold turkey down here all part of Bane’s much-vaunted programme of breakdown and reconstruction?
As soon as we started moving, one of the doors opened abruptly ahead of us and Nu came out, cradling an M4 carbine.
Just for a second, it flashed through my mind that, having found my main emergency kit, the two men had set this up as a shot-during-escape-attempt, during which I could be conveniently dealt with.
Nu had his right hand draped across the stock of the rifle, his index finger hooked almost casually inside the trigger guard, but his upper body was betrayingly stiff.
As soon as I saw the gun I tensed in reflex, started to drop. The M4 shared many parts with its larger M16 brother, and was a superb close-quarter weapon, particularly compact with the stock folded. At anything over twenty-five metres, an M4 carbine would put a standard 5.56 mm NATO round through a blockwork wall like butter. But at this kind of ultraclose range, the high-velocity round was more likely to ricochet and fragment rather than penetrate.
Then I realised that Nu had not shifted his stance. With Yancy directly behind me, he would not risk a shot anyway. I straightened slowly and Nu grinned at my overreaction.
‘Still sharp, aren’t you, love?’ His eyes slid past me. ‘Sharper than you, eh, mate?’
Yancy glowered again and waved me forwards. He did not, I noted, make the mistake of grabbing me again.
Nu began to close the door to the cell he’d just vacated, and I glanced inside as we passed, another automatic response, an inbuilt desire to be minutely aware of my surroundings. The first thing that hit me was that the cramped space was almost entirely filled with boxes, draped in dust sheets. And in that instant I knew it was more than just a storeroom.
There was nothing sinister about dust sheets. Bare concrete, unless it’s been treated with sealant, creates a gritty dust that’s corrosive to precision equipment or electronics. But one of the sheets was hooked up a little at the corner, and I caught a triangular glimpse of the casing underneath.
I kept my face blank, my breathing steady, while my mind stepped up into overdrive.
During our surveillance of Fourth Day, we’d worked out that Bane had an eight-man security force, split into four teams of two on a standard rotating shift pattern. On the sparse side, but adequate and efficient.
Eight men. That meant a primary weapon each, plus sidearms. Even allowing for replacements and breakages and spares, maybe two dozen suitable weapons overall. The outside patrols we’d observed had all been carrying M16s. That was a logical choice, a decent weapon, with the advantage that anyone with military experience could handle one in their sleep.
As a Para, Nu would have carried the standard British Army assault rifle, the SA80. Or, if he’d joined early, the old faithful 7.62 mm SLR. During his Special Forces training, he would have been familiarised with a whole range of different firearms, including the M16.
So, why did Bane feel the need to supplement his men with M4 carbines, RPGs and hand grenades, unless he was preparing them for all-out urban warfare?
And why did he need a storeroom filled to the rafters with gun cases – unless he was training every man, woman and child in the place for combat?
‘We can’t afford another Waco,’ Epps had said.
I thought again of his initial reluctance for me to enter Fourth Day, how quickly he’d allowed himself to be talked round. Too quickly, I realised now. He’d lost two men. There was no way a man like Epps would take that lying down…
So, I’d been played.
Yancy drew level with Nu, swept his gaze over the gun in his hands. ‘No need,’ he said, almost disdainfully. ‘Put it away.’
Nu grinned at him, but ducked back inside the storeroom, reappearing empty-handed a moment later, closing and locking the door behind him. ‘Happy now?’ he asked.
Yancy grunted and Nu moved ahead of us, giving me a wink as he passed.
‘Them Marines don’t half tak
e themselves seriously, eh?’
We went through another door and up a short flight of steps. I’d been right about the building being partially underground. I squinted as we stepped out into sunlight, shaded my eyes and glanced up. The sun was reaching its noon zenith, but I couldn’t be sure of the day. In high-stress situations, people in captivity invariably imagine they’ve been held longer than they actually have. Time has a habit of slowing down when you have no accurate way to measure it.
So, while I knew it felt like I’d been in that little cell for days, it was probably only one or two at the most. The random light pattern had further served to disorientate me, as it was supposed to.
I glanced around, saw a group of people unloading groceries out of a dusty 4x4, others hanging out washing. All very ordinary and domestic – on the surface, at least. They paused in their labours and watched us pass, faces carefully expressionless. I looked for Maria, but she wasn’t among them.
I wondered if Sean was watching somewhere out there in the undergrowth, just as we’d watched Thomas Witney. The only difference was, he would no doubt be tracking us through the sights of a long gun. And, if he was, the first we’d know about it would be the two men alongside me dropping lifeless in their tracks.
Part of me hoped he wasn’t watching.
‘No chains?’ I asked Nu over my shoulder, keeping my movements fluid, trying not to look as though I was hurting, or under duress. ‘You are trusting.’
‘I don’t think you’re the type to cut and run, are you, love?’ he said, and the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. ‘Not after all the trouble you took to get yourself in, eh?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The study looked much as I remembered it. The little side table and one of the wingback chairs had gone, and the rug had been thoroughly cleaned.
Randall Bane was behind his desk this time, hands loosely resting on the satin polished wood.
Laid out on a sheet of cloth to protect the surface was my gun and the box of hollow points that went with it, one of the two mobile phones I’d buried, the distress beacon, the first-aid kit, and my chocolate bars. The contents, in other words, of only one of the plastic boxes I’d brought in with me.
