by J. S. Monroe
‘How did we miss this?’ Carl asks.
‘The comments were hidden,’ Jar says. ‘It took a while to find them.’ Carl raises his eyebrows, impressed. ‘And see here.’ Jar points again at the screen. ‘The comment below: “This reads like a Le Carré spy thriller. Or maybe Len Deighton. I wouldn’t put it past the Americans to do this kind of thing, with or without the cooperation of Britain’s intelligence services.” It’s posted by someone calling themselves Laika57.’
‘How are you spelling that?’ Carl asks, going back to his desk.
Jar spells it out – there’s something about the name that sounds familiar – and continues to scroll through other comments on the story.
‘Laika57 shows up in one or two other places, nothing on the surface web,’ Carl says, five minutes later. ‘He’s posted a few times in some batshit Guantánamo torture forum.’
‘About what?’
‘Rectal feeding,’ Carl says, sounding distracted. Jar’s beginning to wish he hadn’t asked. ‘And something called “learned helplessness”.’
‘Which is…?’
There’s a pause as Carl reads. ‘They did it to dogs in the 1960s – subjected them to so much pain that they no longer tried to avoid it.’
‘And they did that to prisoners in Guantánamo?’
‘That’s what it says here. Seems like the prisoners were more compliant if they felt they had no control over their environment. The idea is to “breed passivity in the face of traumatic events”. Not sure why, but it somehow feels a whole lot worse doing that kind of thing to animals.’
Jar looks up at his friend for an explanation.
‘I mean, in Guantánamo, they were enemy combatants, right?’ Carl says. ‘The bad dudes.’
‘Some of them.’
‘But with the dogs, one minute they’re minding their own business, being dogs, sniffing each other’s patooties, the next they’re banged up in a lab and being tortured. What did they do to deserve that?’
‘Anything sounds better than rectal feeding,’ Jar says.
‘Vindaloo anyone?’
They both look up as Max enters with two brown paper bags of takeaway curry.
77
Cromer, 2012
Kirsten stumbles a bit as she walks over to the bathroom. She’s drunk a lot tonight, we all have. A and her must have been chatting in the kitchen for a good two hours, no doubt complaining that men don’t know how to open up, talk about their feelings.
I already know the guest-room cameras are working, but I can’t help myself. The earlier champagne has erased what remains of my guilt. It’s 1 a.m. and I think my patience is about to be rewarded. Kirsten’s cleaning her teeth vigorously at the basin, her arse cheeks wobbling with the effort. I told her earlier that there’s plenty of hot water to run a bath. Sadly, it seems like she has other ideas. She turns and looks around the small bathroom, glancing at the walls, the ceiling, now looking straight up at the central light fitting. Has she seen the camera? Her eyes are staring directly into mine. I’m holding her beautiful gaze, but there’s no love there, only anger and suspicion.
She’s turned back to the sink now and is looking hard at the mirror, running her hands along its sides, trying to see behind it. What’s she up to? Now we’re back in the main room and she’s doing the same: moving around the walls, checking behind a picture (lifting it off the hook, returning it), removing books carefully from a small bookcase above the dresser.
My mouth is drying. She’s in the middle of the room, looking around her. Again, she glances straight up above, staring at the light, at me. Christ, something’s caught her eye.
She goes over to the bottom of the bed, picks up a wooden chair and moves it to below the light. Then she stands on it – her drunken imbalance has gone – and examines the fitting, where the wire joins the ceiling. Her cheek is so close to the camera I could reach out and stroke it, smell her sweet breath (citrus?).
What am I going to say? Explain about the need for security? Make something up about CCTV film being deleted after twenty-four hours? How the hell did she know to look? Does A know? Did she warn her? Has she been down here, to the shed?
The cameras are tiny, concealed as small screws and Kirsten would have to know what she’s looking for. Unless she has a screwdriver, I’m safe.
She’s climbing down off the chair now, places it back at the foot of the bed. Is sitting on the covers. Come on, Kirsten, quit all this mucking about: it’s time to get your clothes off.
But she doesn’t. She knows. How the fuck does she know? She’s pulling back the sheet and climbing in, fully clothed. Side light off.
Kirsten is swimming beside me now, round and around in the water, keeping to the edge, peering up at me. I’ve turned down the lighting in the shed – it’s glowing blood red here, like in a submarine.
Her legs are tiring, her body sinking beneath the surface. Four minutes and thirty seconds. The longer she is in the water, the more disorientated she will become, until it’s too late. Panic is tiring.
But then, just now, without warning, she summoned every last ounce of strength, scratched at the sides of the beaker and caught the rim with a claw. The next moment, she was out, perched on the table, staring at me, triumphant. Too much water in the beaker. I grabbed Kirsten and tossed her into darkness.
78
I’m late for my date, but Jar’s pleased to see me. We’ve agreed to meet in the park, on a concrete bench, far away from anyone. On our own. I have washed my face in some water I kept from earlier (my guard turns off the mains when he’s not here, which means the basin stinks – so does the loo), and I am wearing the clothes I was brought a few months back: the Ali Baba trousers and fleece. I can’t brush my hair because it’s been shaved off.
Tonight I just want to talk, without alcohol or distractions, which won’t be difficult. I want to tell Jar a few things, sort out in my mind what really happened.
‘I didn’t write that letter,’ I begin, on safe ground. For I am certain that it wasn’t me who wrote the email. My guard has shown it to me on countless occasions over the years, explained how I left it in the drafts folder on Amy’s computer. Jar takes my hands in his, which are so much bigger than mine. Better manicured, too – not saying much. I turn the silver ring on his thumb.
‘I still should have realised how upset you were,’ I hear him say. ‘You never said anything.’
‘It was difficult, after Dad died.’ I’ve got used to hearing myself talk, but I’m surprised by the emotion in my voice. I thought I’d stripped out all feeling from my life.
‘You went for a walk,’ Jar says. ‘At two in the morning. Why?’
‘I needed to clear my head. I’m sure I left a note in my room saying I was going out for a bit. Handwritten.’
‘But not a suicide note?’
‘I want to live now. That’s all I know.’
I look around the cell, tears welling. I have no way of telling if Jar cares about me, even believes that I’m alive. And then I remember his wry, pinched smile, the unrushed Irish brogue, intelligent eyes.
‘I think that you walked to the pier and stood on the railings, looked down at the dark water, gave it some serious thought,’ he says.
‘But I didn’t jump.’
‘What stopped you?’
I think about my diary again, what it says happened next. I have read that diary over and over, so many times. It’s all typed – I used a laptop then, not like now. I remember the retreat outside Hereford, Sejal, Dr Lance. But I am less sure about Karen. Was there a counsellor at St Matthew’s with that name? There could have been. My memory has been shredded by medication – so many different pills.
‘How long will you keep looking for me?’ I ask. I’m sure we had so much more than what’s written about us in the diary. It’s as if great chunks of our life together, however brief it was, have been removed from my past.
‘Till I am old with wandering.’
Jar loves Yeats, used to r
ead it out to me late at night, when I stayed over in his college rooms. ‘One day we will meet at the place we agreed that night,’ I say. ‘When we got drunk at The Eagle, remember? Our secret.’
79
Jar is on his own in the office now. Carl left first, just after midnight, followed by Max, who told him to sleep on the sofa in reception if it got too late. The air is stale with the smell of curry and Jar wants to get home before dawn.
He glances at the clock behind Max’s desk. It’s almost 1 a.m. He wonders if he’s the only person left in the tower, apart from the Spanish-speaking cleaning staff he saw entering the building earlier. Jar’s glad they’re around. He doesn’t like the idea of being on his own up here in the tower. Max said a security guard was supposed to do a circuit of their floor a few times a night, but Jar’s yet to see him.
For the past hour, Jar has been searching for other posts by people who posted a comment on Max’s original story. He is now convinced that the article is central in some way to finding Rosa, given the similarities between it and Rosa’s diary. I’m sorry, Jar. I think someone’s playing you.
He has found no further mention of Eutychus, but he keeps coming back to Laika57, who has posted more widely elsewhere than Carl initially thought. If only he could find his real name. (‘Onionland’s anonymous. That’s kind of the whole point,’ Carl had said earlier, when Jar had asked him.)
He goes back to the disturbing Guantánamo torture site that Carl found. There are several other posts from Laika57, one pointing out that what the CIA were doing to detainees owed much to experiments conducted in the 1960s, another about vivisection. (‘With the dark web, it’s a question of knowing where to look rather than searching randomly.’ That’s another thing Carl said before he left.) And then Jar finds a video posted by Laika57.
Most of the footage Jar’s watched tonight was posted by prison guards. At first glance, this video looks like it was filmed at Guantánamo, but there’s something different about it.
Jar swallows. The quality is poor, but it’s possible, as the camera pulls back, to make out the body of someone suspended horizontally from the ceiling in what looks like a straitjacket or a hammock, coloured bright orange. The person’s legs and arms are hanging down through holes in the harness and an electric cable is connected to one foot. Another cable runs up between the legs.
He can’t see the face as it’s covered by a black mask of some sort, a stitched grille covering the mouth. Only the eyes are visible.
Jar puts his hand to his mouth as the person’s body suddenly convulses, head thrashing like a pinball between what looks like two panels that have been placed either side of the face. Some sort of yoke, connected to the two panels, has been secured around the neck.
‘Jaysus,’ Jar says, as if the electrical current has just passed through his own body.
He pauses the video and searches for the comments, which are not immediately visible. After locating them, he finds a post from Laika57, who describes how the CIA paid $81 million to two psychologists to oversee the interrogation of high-value detainees in Guantánamo.
Jar goes back to watching the video, flinches at a second shock. There’s no sound, but he can hear the screams. He pauses the video again, glances around the empty office – why, he’s not sure – and leans in to the screen to look more closely. The person’s head has been caught in freeze frame, turned to one side. Jar is transfixed by the image in front of him.
He studies the eyes, and then traces down the trunk of the body to the legs and then the calf muscles. The victim is female, no question.
He presses play. A third shock rips through her body. Jar pauses it again, the woman’s thrashing head clearly visible. It couldn’t be her. But his gaze lingers on the woman’s eyes. It doesn’t look like Rosa and anyway, why would they take Rosa to Guantánamo?
He scrolls back through the footage and freezes the image of the woman’s face. After scrutinising it, he gets up from his desk and makes a circuit of the office, trying to hold on to the thought that it’s not her. He comes back to the screen. The face is contorted, blurred, the eyes behind the mask all wrong: too lifeless. But as he turns his head to one side, Jar can’t help but see the woman on the cliffs in Cornwall.
He sits down, closes his eyes and opens them again. He’s seeing things. From another angle, the woman doesn’t look like Rosa. He begins to work methodically through all the comments – there are more than he originally thought. Torture trolls have crawled out from their caves en masse. And then he sees it, a few words near the beginning of the thread:
Nice work, Laika57 – best video yet.
Jar repeats the words in a whisper, noticing another, anonymous thread below the comment.
Psychochem: You still writing novel? When’s it out?
Laika57: Fiction not so easy. I’ve written a journal – not sure will ever be published.
Psychochem: Could publish here?
Laika57: Too honest about my Seligman experiments – ha ha. Makes Knausgaard look reserved.
Jar’s mouth dries. Fingers trembling, he googles ‘Laika’ on the surface web. A stray dog on the streets of Moscow, she was the first animal to orbit the earth, launched into space in Sputnik 2 in 1957. ‘Muttnik’, as the American press dubbed her, died after four circuits of the earth, from overheating. Rosa told Jar once that Martin’s two beagles were named after Russian dogs that had been sent into space.
Martin. Is Laika57 Rosa’s uncle?
Jar switches back to Max’s article, trying to control his breathing, and finds Laika57’s comment again that compares the story of Rosa’s disappearance to a spy novel. What about all those times over the years when Jar emailed Amy and Martin with his theories about Rosa’s disappearance? Martin was always so scornful of them, dismissing Jar as paranoid, unhealthily obsessed with conspiracies. What’s he doing posting on an article on the dark web that suggests Rosa was recruited by the intelligence services?
What’s he doing posting videos of a woman being abused in Guantánamo?
We now think Martin may be into torture videos. Jar should stop, ring Miles Cato, tell him what he’s found. If Cato’s investigation into Martin and his dodgy computer habits is genuine, this video is the proof that he’s been looking for. But what exactly has Jar found? What if it is Rosa in the video…
He tells himself again that it’s not her. Martin’s interest in the site is purely professional: a self-confessed spy-fiction fan who worked in Big Pharma, he just wants to point out similarities between CIA torture techniques and animal experiments in the 1960s. Jar exits Max’s story and looks for other Laika57 posts, for something that will prove Martin’s innocence in all this. On the site’s main index page, he spots a thread on the origins of George Smiley, an innocuous enough subject. Martin would never pass up a chance to show off his knowledge.
Sure enough, Laika57 is in full flow:
Bingham or Green? On balance, Smiley owes more to John Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris, Le Carré’s MI5 colleague and a fellow novelist.
Jar blinks. John Bingham was the fake name used to hire the car in Cornwall.
80
Cromer, 2012
The tail-suspension test has a lot going for it, not least its cost-effective simplicity. Using medical adhesive tape, mice are hung from their tails, away from any objects that they might try to hold on to or use to escape. Rosa is currently dangling in front of me as I write, secured to the underside of the shelf above my desk. But this shed is not ideal for these sorts of experiments.
In the past few months I’ve realised that I can’t just stop what I was doing in the lab before I was fired, can’t just turn off my interest like a tap. It’s been my life for thirty years and I was close to a breakthrough: developing a next-generation antidepressant that works within days rather than weeks, in a wide variety of people and with limited side effects. If I’m not allowed officially to continue my research, I must find a way of carrying it on unofficially and complete the work tha
t I was doing when I was sacked.
We used to have an off-site lab in the late 1990s. I went out to have a look at it this afternoon, took me an hour on the bike to get there. It’s in a converted Nissen hut on a disused Second World War airfield on the far side of Holt. There are lots around here: in the war the flat expanses of north Norfolk were one giant airfield for Flying Fortresses and Wellington bombers. This one finally closed in the 1960s and part of it was then used for intensive poultry farming, but that business shut down too, leaving rows of low, empty buildings. For a brief period in the 1990s, some of them were used by local businesses, including us, but they are all derelict now.
I’d forgotten about the facility in the intervening years and was pleased to see that the place hasn’t changed much. The original hut, which is in a clump of pine trees on the side of the airfield, has been converted to include a series of dormer windows along the front that allow in more light. I looked in through a broken window – one of the original ones in the brick walls at either end of the building. There wasn’t much to see: just some empty office space, peeling wall paint, a couple of broken chairs. Nothing to suggest that it was a laboratory, which is probably why the antis never found out about the place. The real lab was in the basement, away from prying eyes, in a converted former air-raid bunker.
I was one of only a handful of people who knew about the facility, what we did there. The ground floor was used for company admin – a good front for anyone passing by (part of the airfield was occasionally used by light-aircraft crop sprayers) – but there was a fully equipped, if rather small, lab in the basement, entry to which was via a panel in the floor, covered by a filing cabinet, that led to a short set of steep iron steps.
