The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  His hand was gripped, held tight, as if Dean Weymouth was a lifeline.

  ‘I hear what you say, Dean. My dad, and your dad, my mother and your mother – just the same – and worried sick as yours and mine would be. To expect help from the boys in blue, well, that’s asking too much. Yes, I’ll ring. Are you resting up? Good to hear it. Look after yourself, and we’ll see you before you go south again.’

  He was Roderick Johnstone. He opened a file on the screen of his computer. The abbreviation of his first name, and an exchange of one letter gave ‘Ruddy’. There was a duck with that name. He was known therefore, to his face and his back as ‘Duck’ and had been since school. Most casual observers of Duck rated him stereotypical: a mane of blond hair, a public-school education but few academic qualifications, a commission via the Royal Military Academy into a good cavalry regiment, a middling career, then into the outside civilian world, a pinstripe suit and a Mayfair office. Such observers would badly have misread the man. He had formed a private security company, had drawn around him a kernel of experienced men, mostly with the hallowed Special Forces background, had shown rare business acumen and had landed major contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He did protection of property and personnel, and used UK nationals from the Regiment at Hereford, the Squadron at Poole and from the Parachute Regiment. He had built a reputation for the delivery of what he promised, value for cash and discretion. His payroll was small, but he was expensive, and clients queued for his services. Among illustrious clients, among those requiring total anonymity, was the Central Intelligence Agency, and Duck’s email in-box was filled with ‘sincerest thanks’ and ‘deepest gratitude’ and ‘top to bottom appreciation from those inside the loop here’, and on his payroll there was a hostage co-ordinator. He was searching that file.

  Why did Duck bother with a matter so seemingly trivial?

  Where were the rewards?

  Would he involve himself in something so lacking in fact and intelligence?

  There was about Duck a quirk of anarchy that had made him a second-rate soldier and an alpha-class business operator. He liked to say that ‘ordinary’ people used the same hand, same paper, same technique to clean their backsides as the self-appointed élite, and those that his teams protected were ‘ordinary’ – ordinary accountants, ordinary telecom engineers, ordinary electricity-supply managers, ordinary sewage-treatment technicians, ordinary advisers on hospital management – and his teams, too, were made up of ordinary people, as Dean Weymouth was, and had ordinary parents and…

  Duck’s care for men such as Dean Weymouth, the men on whose backs – and guts – the company prospered, was utterly sincere. He valued them, listened to them and tried damned hard to stay loyal to them. His own company had not – thanking the good Lord – had an employee kidnapped. He’d met other CEOs, whose firms had. He understood the awfulness of it, and he had on the books a bloody good man. The file told him of a link that, sort of, confirmed the matter, something in his man’s past that would open Italian doors and guarantee co-operation of a sort. He knew what effect a kidnapping had on a family and an employer. There, but for God’s grace. Because Dean Weymouth had called him, he was – damn near – obliged to get involved.

  He lifted the telephone again and dialled the number given him by the one-time Royal Marine.

  ‘Mrs Deacon? Hello. I’m Roddy Johnstone, but everyone calls me Duck. Dean Weymouth has just spoken to me, and explained your problem. Up front, Ground Force Security makes big money from governments, which sort of underwrites the costs when we deal with individuals. I want you to tell me what you know of your son’s situation – all the names and locations – because I might have someone who can help you. If your fears are founded, time is always against us so we should push on. But it’s your decision… Right, Mrs Deacon, begin at the beginning…’

  Lukas ran. Just when the light had failed over the rooftops, he had come back to his apartment and unlocked the door. Dark in the hallway, and before he had switched on the ceiling light, he had seen the flashing red bulb on the telephone. He ran for the Solferino Métro station.

  At the airport he would get downloads, but important now was speed and getting there. The bag, always packed with the few things he needed, was high on his shoulder. Pedestrians darted out of his path, as if realising that when a grown man ran at that speed he wouldn’t swerve to avoid collision. He hurried because he didn’t acknowledge complacency, and knew it travelled alongside failure. Lukas had been at Waco.

  ‘Where the shit/the fuck/the hell is this place – Waco?’ had been the chorus on the flight down from Andrews. They had half emptied the stores huts at the Bureau’s place in Quantico, among the forests, where the HRTs sat and waited for the call. The beepers had gone and the Hostage Rescue Team had scrambled, and filled more than one C-141 could carry. They believed there – except for the few who had been at Ruby Ridge – that they were the ‘invincibles’ and were given missions beyond the capabilities of other SWAT groups. Seven weeks at Waco, endless books read, stuck behind a Barrett .5 calibre sniper rifle with 3000 feet per second muzzle velocity and a high hit probability at 1000 yards… and watching from a distance the fuck-up to end all fuck-ups, so many children killed in the fire, no medals, only inquests, and complacency stripped bare.

  He went down the steps into the Métro station, and was still running.

  Most had quit after Waco rather than face the interrogations, under subpoena, of the Office of Professional Responsibility. New snipers were brought into new teams. He would have quit if not for the creation of a Critical Incident Response Team, when the negotiators, profilers and Hostage Rescue heroes had to gather in the same room, even had to talk to each other. A new world and a new style of action, with a co-ordinator sitting at the end of a CIRT table. The job of the co-ordinator was to weigh the input of the negotiator, hear the profiler’s analysis, listen to the fears and demands of the ‘stormers’, then make a decision and live with it. He liked the job. Only decent thing that had come out of Waco, the fire and the deaths was the creation of the job, its culture and the responsibility that went with it.

  He forced his way on to a train as the doors closed.

  *

  He had had to break off. He had cursed when his mobile had rung. Always – Castrolami’s belief – it rang at the least opportune moment. She was talking well. He would have kept her going all through the evening, changed tapes and not let her off the hook.

  He took a call from Naples, from the palace, the personal assistant to the prosecutor.

  Confused… a boy, English, aged twenty-seven, an adult-student English teacher, reported kidnapped, believed to be taken from via Forcella, named as Eddie Deacon. ‘What has that to do with me?’ Impatience shouldered out politeness.

  An investigator from a private commercial security firm was flying tonight to Rome on behalf of the family, and would wish to see, at the start of the working day, Mario Castrolami.

  ‘Tell him and whoever volunteered me to get lost. No possibility of me involving myself.’

  The parents of the boy, Castrolami was told, had reported that their son had gone to Naples to find his girlfriend.

  ‘I feel like my knees are weak, that I could throw up, because I know what you’ll tell me. Let me have it. What’s her name?’

  He heard it.

  ‘Mother of Jesu…’ Castrolami told the assistant where he would be in the morning, at the start of the working day, and rang off. He murmured, to himself, ‘What have I done to deserve that?’

  He went back into the living room. He could mask reactions. It might have been his wife who had called with news of a new dress purchased in faraway Milan, or the administration department at the piazza Dante barracks with confirmation of his annual leave dates near to the Christmas holiday. He smiled thinly, switched the tape-recorder back on and prompted Immacolata Borelli on her father’s involvement with City Hall. She started again, as if a tap had been turned on.

  Why had he not
believed she would lie to him? Why had she lied? He felt no sympathy for the boy, for her, and he let her talk without interruption about City Hall, then give the names of national politicians, the location of meetings, the dates. In the morning he would learn and then he would confront her. He took it badly that she had lied to him about a boy.

  He was kicked in the face. That was first, then kicks to the chest and the small of his back. Eddie tried to curl himself into the foetal position for protection, and succeeded well enough for more kicks to find his upper arms and wrists where the handcuffs were, but not to reach the organs that would hurt more. His head was lifted, then punches were thrown at him. He realised the crime.

  Feet had approached, the trapdoor had been lifted. Light had cascaded into the bunker but had not reached right into the corner recess next to the filled sacks. He had seen the man clearly, the same face as had been on the street, that of the man who had taken him. The man would have realised the hood was off and that he was stared at. Eddie hadn’t really absorbed the face on the street, but now he’d had a good clean sight of him. It was when he was punched that he wet himself – all those bloody hours of lying on his side or sitting, clamping his muscles overtime and calling for will-power, wasted effort. When the punch went in he could hold back no longer. Could have cried then. He felt the heat of the urine and its stream on his leg, then the clamminess of his trousers. It was degradation, learned hard.

  More blood in his mouth, swallowing it, unable to cough properly because of the sagging tape, and choking.

  He felt a new emotion. Eddie Deacon, ‘steady Eddie’, easygoing and friend to almost everybody, little riled him and not much exhilarated him: he hated. He had, now, a true sense of loathing. Novel. He took in all the features of the face. Didn’t think in terms of a police station line-up, or of having a crowbar in his hand, but reckoned he needed to get that face into his mind, acid-etch it there. He’d coughed and taken that blood down, and the heat was gone from the urine on his thighs. He could have just felt miserable and sorry for himself.

  The hood was put on. He was back inside the small world, hemmed in by the material and the cuffs, the sodden trousers and his ankles were again roped and he was kicked some more. The kick went into the stomach. The force made him piss more. He didn’t cry out.

  No moan, no cry, no scream.

  He wondered if the memory of faces, and the hope of a judicial process had kept those people alive in the camps – they’d done that at school, German extermination camps, and in Berlin he’d seen the plaque that marked where the railway station was from which the Jews were shipped, and he’d been on Prinz Albrechtstrasse where they had excavated the holding cells used by the Gestapo. He wouldn’t forget that face.

  Or the voice.

  ‘I speak it, a little, English. You fuck the whore, Immacolata. You come here to find Immacolata. Immacolata is with police. Immacolata is infame. Immacolata betrays her family. If she likes again to fuck with you, she will leave the police. To encourage her to leave the police, we send perhaps an ear, orecchio, perhaps a finger, dito, perhaps a hand, mano, perhaps we must send the pene – and she will recognise it as from you. Did you not know who was Immacolata, who was her family? Did you not know what she did? She will leave the police or we send the ear, the finger, the hand, the pene, then all of you but not breathing. I think I speak English very good. She will save you or she will kill you. It is her choice. Not another person will save you.’

  He heard the man grunt as he levered his way up and out through the trapdoor, then it was closed. He heard the footsteps retreat. Bloody hell. What to think about? Sort of put pissing his pants in the background. He sensed all of them – his ear tingled, his finger scratched his palm and his penis was still wet, but shrunken.

  He hated the man. He hoped the hate would give him strength.

  Lukas walked out of the terminus where the airport bus had dumped him. The warm night air hit him after the cool of the vehicle, and he felt then the little lift in his step, the stretch of his stride, and reckoned the mission launched – always did feel good then. Afterwards was bad, when he had the name and face of a target, a threat level to assess. Then the hard times came. As yet, walking briskly, he was not burdened by the responsibility of a human life in his hand, but when he thought like that, Lukas either stubbed a toe on the kerb, spat, or kicked his ankle bone. He crossed a couple of dark streets, wove like a native through the traffic, was in the immigrant quarter – north African, west African, east African – predictable alongside a railway hub. He passed a telephone bar, where calls could be made to Mogadishu, Lagos or Algiers, and a café where guys sipped soft drinks and had at their feet the mountains of unsold handbags they’d try with again the next day. A trolley bus went up the street, rolled and rattled. There was a narrow door into the pensione. He was told by the guy behind the desk that a single room was booked for him, the bill open-dated and prepaid. He didn’t bother with the lift and climbed two flights of stairs.

  The room was fine: a television he didn’t switch on, a mini-bar he didn’t open, an air-conditioner going like a tank’s engine and the noise of the street coming through a double-glazed window. It was the way Lukas liked it, the sort of place where he was comfortable. Why was he there? It confirmed he was still capable, not washed up, not yesterday’s creature, that he wouldn’t hesitate to accept an invitation to travel. It was why he was there, and it went unshared.

  He hooked power into his laptop, wired into his mobile, and information cascaded through to him. He started out on the first steps of learning about Edmund ‘Eddie’ Deacon, and about a girl, and with each page passing on the screen, so the deadweight, the responsibility, settled heavier. Nothing ever changed. She looked a pretty girl, and he looked an ordinary boy – nothing was different from every other time – but the scorpion sting was at the end. Last page up was the sitrep profile on Immacolata Borelli – who she was, what she did, where she was. A Camorra-clan girl, a money-washer, now a traitor to her own, was what the kid had gone looking to find.

  In his career, Lukas thought, there had been worse situations, but not many. He didn’t know when he’d next get any rest, so he killed the laptop, stripped, and pretty soon was asleep.

  9

  The hatred was like the wire scouring pad that his mother had by the kitchen sink, and it cleaned Eddie’s mind.

  He needed it clean. He didn’t think he could lie propped up against the sacks, hooded, handcuffed and bound, with wet trousers, his guts aching with hunger, his throat dry with thirst, the scars on his face itching incessantly and those inside his mouth shooting pain, and do nothing else. Hate had taken over his mind, and given him clarity of thought.

  He had ditched the disbelief. He knew the reality, had had it confirmed. He thought he needed, more than anything, to regain a sense of control – with nothing to see, no leg movement, nothing to eat, no arm movement, he needed a sense of some input into his destiny, whatever it was. He had to find control. He had kicked off the process. Thoughts came, and jumped, raced, flitted. He must remember everything he had seen when the hood had been off, the trapdoor lifted and light had flooded in: the dimensions of the bunker, the colour of the plastic sacks and what was printed on them, face of the bastard he hated, the clothes he had worn, the markings on the trainers that had done the kicking, the Nike symbol – he had all that. He should keep a sense of time… How? He screwed his right fingers on to his left wrist and realised that his watch wasn’t there – had to be somewhere on the floor, dislodged when he was beaten. They would bring him meals. Meals would be a routine. Told himself: no sentimentality and no self-pity.

  Wait, heh… Wait, wait.

  No self-pity? He’d picked up a girl in a park, hadn’t even used a hoary old chat-up line. Apologies and stumbles and embarrassments and then, ‘I don’t understand this – “turn over”. What is “turn over”?’ He’d been picked up – might have been a thousand different girls but hadn’t: had been her, Immacolata. Wouldn�
�t tolerate self-pity, wouldn’t entertain it… Would try not to tolerate and entertain self-pity.

  No sentimentality? Didn’t know who he could be sentimental about – not his mum and dad… Good enough people, on railway lines of predictability, not particularly loving and not particularly disapproving, much like everyone else’s mum and dad. But worse things came into his mind and squeezed away the small matters, self-pity, control and sentimentality.

  The man had spoken with a sing-song reciting voice, the sort of language he might have learned in a sixth-year classroom. He would have had a textbook open that showed a man’s body, with arrows pointing to an ear, a finger and a hand – not to a penis. She will leave the police… we send perhaps an ear… perhaps a finger… perhaps a hand… the pene… then all of you but not breathing… He saw a knife and his gut squirmed in fear as the shock waves surged and the pains came hard.

  Not easy – fuck, no – to plead the need for control.

  Hardest to understand: they wanted nothing of him. He had no secret to hide or squeal, no ideology to cling to or renounce. He was not an agent in occupied Europe or a heretic in Tudor England: he was just a piece of garbage.

  Would Immacolata, his Mac, leave the police – she would be in protective custody – and walk away to save him, his ear, finger and…? Couldn’t say. He had slept with her, loved her, sucked her juices, whispered with her, laughed with her – he didn’t know.

  Eddie thought he heard – indistinct – the moan of engine noise. Cars, lorries, vans? Couldn’t be sure. Might mean a new day had started. If he was right, noting that a new day was born was an act of control – pretty bloody small, pretty much all he was bloody capable of. He teetered then on the edge of self-pity – and righted himself. Another day.

  Then teetered again, rocked, was near to capsizing. How big was Eddie Deacon in the emotions of Immacolata Borelli? Hard to say, admit, spit out that he didn’t know. He knew where the birthmark was, deep brown at the top of her right buttock, and where the minute polyp was in her left armpit, but he didn’t know her mind. Eddie had heard of prisoners in cells, or in interrogation rooms, who took a point on a wall or a ceiling and focused on it, or found a spider crawling and tracked it, but the hood didn’t allow that.