by Jon Stock
Again he ran through the situation in which he found himself: Lakshmi Meena was on his tail, turning up at dawn on the streets of Marrakech. Booking a flight as Daniel Marchant from the city’s airport had given him a head start, but Meena had friends in the Moroccan intelligence service, and someone might have recognised him here at Agadir. No one had stopped him at passport control, but then he was given an upgrade. Perhaps he was over-reacting, and Meena was just making sure he left town. It was too easy to see threats where none existed. But he knew he was right, particularly when another passenger was shown into business class and sat down in the seat beside him.
‘Mind if I join you?’ the man asked. He was Moroccan, and looked faintly familiar.
‘Sure,’ Marchant said, glancing at the empty seats on the other side of the aisle.
‘You’re a photographer?’ he asked, nodding at Marchant’s camera bag.
‘For my sins,’ Marchant said, struggling to stay in character. ‘And you?’
‘Me?’ He paused. ‘I’m a dentist.’
22
‘There’s something else,’ Myers said, after Spiro had sat down. It was more of a slump, but Spiro somehow managed to make it look controlled. For a moment, Fielding wished he felt sorry for Spiro, a pang of pity. But there was nothing but cold contempt, the sort he normally reserved for Russians. ‘Work for the Foreign Office if you want to be liked,’ he had been told by the don who had tapped him up at Oxford. What Fielding didn’t know was that another blow to Spiro’s self-esteem, his career, his whole raison d’être, was about to come from Myers, who was still standing in front of the audio.
This time, Myers didn’t look to Fielding for guidance. He was on his own now, score abandoned, improvising. ‘Actually, I agree with the American analysis that Dhar would not risk being with the captured US Marines.’
Spiro seemed to take heart from this, and sat up to listen.
‘I didn’t at first, but I do now. Using this assumption as my starting point, I went back to the audio this morning and asked myself, in the light of the American scream, how it was possible for Salim Dhar and Lieutenant Oaks to be in the same place.’
‘And?’ Chadwick said, glancing at Spiro. Like Fielding, he was intrigued to see what this awkward analyst from Cheltenham was going to say next. Spiro was staring out of the window, lost in his own thoughts. The head of GCHQ didn’t know where to look.
Myers picked nervously at the back of a front tooth and then stopped himself, as if being chided by a parent. ‘The only explanation is that Dhar’s voice was recorded.’
Spiro looked from the window to Myers, suddenly encouraged.
‘Don’t you think that scenario might just have been checked out by the NSA?’
‘Of course. And I’ve looked into it, too. But the quality of the intercept is too poor to be able to establish if Dhar’s voice is a recording. There’s also no audio trace of a recorder activating before or after Dhar speaks.’
‘So?’
‘For once, the answer doesn’t lie in technology.’
Fielding was enjoying this, watching Myers grow in confidence, trying to guess where it would lead. This was what intelligence work was all about: intuition.
‘You’re an analyst, right?’ Spiro heckled. ‘Stick to IT and leave the couch work to others.’
Myers ignored him, more out of dysfunctional shyness than defiance.
‘Why did Lieutenant Oaks scream?’ Myers asked, addressing the whole room now.
‘Why?’ Spiro echoed. ‘He was about to be incinerated by a Hellfire missile, that’s why.’
‘About to be. Exactly. It’s not my area, of course — ’
‘Too right.’
‘- but my understanding of munitions is that such things are pretty instant. Like, no time to scream. Oaks had worked out what was going on. It was the second time Dhar had spoken. He wouldn’t have known what was happening the first time he heard his voice. But when he spoke again, Oaks would have realised that there was nobody else in that hut apart from the six Marines. He was trying to give Fort Meade a message, tell them it was a mistake, that there was a tape recorder strapped to Dhar’s phone. Just like this one.’
With uncharacteristic panache, Myers reached into his fleece pocket and pulled out a small mobile phone strapped with masking tape to an equally thin tape recorder. Myers was turning out to be a natural showman, Fielding thought, despite the phone catching awkwardly on his pocket. Next up, he’d be pulling rabbits from a hat, sawing Harriet Armstrong in half, performing the Indian rope trick. Armstrong would like that. She wasn’t afraid to play to the gallery. At Cambridge, she had played the fairy godmother in a university production of Cinderella.
The two units were linked by a small audio lead, which might have looked like a detonator to an inexperienced eye. The room didn’t exactly gasp — those present were too versed in the modern tools of terror to be surprised — but there was a shuffling of papers that Fielding had come to recognise over the years as civil servants’ applause.
‘As soon as Lieutenant Oaks heard the voice a second time,’ Myers said, brandishing the phone, ‘the penny dropped and he screamed, but it was too late. The phone had already disconnected. Except that it wasn’t too late. We heard him, and we know Dhar’s still alive.’
Spiro knew as soon as Myers had spoken that he was right. He thought back to the UAV trailer at Creech, to the sensor operator who had cast doubt on the target. For a moment, Spiro had imagined he had seen what looked like a crucifix, but the image was blurred and he had shut it out of his mind. Just as he had removed the operator’s suspicions from his official report afterwards.
It took almost a minute for someone to speak after Myers had shuffled back to his seat. Chadwick was the one who broke the silence, and his comments were addressed to Spiro.
‘I think I speak for all of the British agencies when I say that we offer you our unconditional sympathy. It’s at times like this that allies must pull together and help one other.’
Whitehall shorthand for Thank Christ the mistake wasn’t ours, Fielding thought.
‘That’s good of you,’ Spiro said quietly. America wasn’t used to needing its allies. ‘I must make some calls.’
Fielding thought that Spiro looked a genuinely broken man as he stood up to leave. But again there was no sympathy, just the thought of what could be leveraged from the situation.
‘Before you go,’ Chadwick said, ‘I want you to know that there’s no reason why our official position should change: Dhar is thought to have been killed, but it is believed, with great regret, that six US Marines whom he had taken were killed too. Adopting such a line carries a political risk, and the Prime Minister will make no official statement on the incident, but our experience of Dhar is that he’s not the sort of jihadi who will turn up on a website telling the world he’s alive and well. It suits him better that the world thinks he’s dead. Clearly, we need to qualify any statement we make to give us sufficient slack if he does show up, but for the time being, Dhar is dead.’
23
‘Please, have a rinse,’ Abdul Aziz said.
Marchant sucked at the straw that was put to his bruised lips, swilled the liquid round his mouth and then spat out a mixture of blood and fragments of his lower right molar. Aziz held a kidney-shaped stainless-steel dish up to his mouth, resting it on his lower lip, and caught the debris.
The moment Aziz had introduced himself as a dentist, two men had appeared from behind the economy-class curtain. Aziz had stood up to let them through to Marchant, who had put up a fight, taking one of them out, but it was still two against one, although Aziz had held back, limiting himself to a gratuitous kick to Marchant’s groin. Eventually, he was forced down into an aisle seat, his wrists bound to the armrests with plasticuffs and his legs secured to the footrest.
The two men left the plane before it took off, one helping the other, leaving only Aziz and a pilot on board. Lakshmi Meena never showed, but Marchant assumed she was the
one who had set him up with Aziz. He regretted opening up to her in their chat the previous night, knew he should have listened to his instinct, not trusted anyone. The sole grain of comfort was his right hand. In the struggle to secure him to his seat, he had been cut in the soft flesh of his wrist. It wasn’t a deep incision, but it was painful enough to give him hope, because it meant that somewhere there was a sharp edge.
Marchant had heard of Aziz, knew the enhanced techniques he had used on enemy combatants as they had passed through black sites in Morocco on their way to Guantanamo; but what was it with the polite small talk? Had he once trained as a real dentist? He’d be offering him an old copy of Punch next, something to read while he waited for his teeth to be extracted without anaesthetic. He wondered if Aziz knew about Marchant’s long and painful relationship with dentists, or whether he just assumed that dentistry would always touch a raw nerve in his detainees.
‘We don’t have to do this, Daniel,’ Aziz said, adjusting the settings on the steel brace that held Marchant’s head in position. Marchant couldn’t reply. His mouth had been wedged open with a metal clamp that tasted of linseed oil. He was also barely conscious. At least his business-class seat was upright. Up until now it had been fully reclined, reminding him of an actual dentist’s chair, which was no doubt the point. Aziz’s entire approach — the perverse offer of mouthwash, his authentic tools of the trade — seemed designed to remind him of the real thing. Except that there was no soothing classical music, no funny posters on the ceiling. Just the hum of the aircraft and a silence behind the curtain that confirmed Marchant’s worst fears. He was the only passenger who had proceeded to boarding.
‘All I need to know is what you saw in the mountains and if it had anything to do with Salim Dhar,’ Aziz said. He was standing in the aisle, examining an ultrasonic scaler that was buzzing in his hand. The reverberating whine began to shake down memories from the walls of Marchant’s skull.
‘Unfortunately, this instrument is a bit faulty,’ Aziz apologised, lowering the scaler into Marchant’s mouth. ‘I borrowed it from a horse vet who didn’t seem to care so much about maintenance. The problem is the sharp tip at the end — it isn’t being cooled by water, so it becomes red hot. Normally, a dentist moves quickly from one tooth to the next to prevent overheating, but I am not a normal dentist.’
Marchant screamed as Aziz pressed down with the instrument, scorching into the soft pulp of his molar. The surrounding gum seemed to explode into flames, the heat spreading through his head, licking down into his neck and shoulders until it felt as if his whole upper body was being blowtorched.
‘Please try to remember the mountains, Daniel. Because if what you saw did involve Salim Dhar and I didn’t know about it, the Americans will remove my teeth after I’ve finished pulling yours.’
Aziz unfastened the clamp and put down the scaler. He then picked up a steel dental drill and tested it. More whining, as if the drill was suffering pain rather than about to inflict it.
‘Tungsten carbide,’ Aziz said, inspecting the drill’s burr. ‘You see, I’m meant to hear about everything that happens in Morocco, or as our friend James Spiro put it so politely, “every fucking fart from Fes to Safi”. I know it’s not fair, but that’s the way it goes. The Americans, they expect a lot from us, and I would hate to let them down.’
‘I didn’t see anything unusual,’ Marchant repeated, his voice thick with blood. He thought back to what he had said a few minutes earlier, knowing that if he repeated it verbatim, it would be a clear indication that he was lying. He remembered the instructor — army moustache, tight-fitting T-shirt — who had taught him at RAF St Mawgan in Cornwall, where all new MI6 recruits were sent for basic SERE (Survival, Evasion, Rescue and Escape) training. Small errors and variations were more convincing than perfect recall, which suggested a fake story that had been well rehearsed.
‘It was my last night in Marrakech,’ Marchant continued. ‘I wanted to go up into the mountains one last time, so I borrowed a friend’s motorbike, went for a ride.’
‘Sometimes I think you British believe Moroccans are a genuinely inferior people,’ Aziz said. Marchant braced himself for more pain. ‘It’s the only explanation for the way your courts of justice betray us. We interrogate terrorists on your behalf, in confidence, beyond your jurisdiction so nobody in your country breaks the law, then you release details of our work because of so-called freedom of information, and suddenly the whole world knows about it and treats us like pariahs. Never mind that it was your questions we were asking.’
‘We objected to the publication of the information,’ Marchant said. ‘Unfortunately, the courts overruled us.’
Aziz laughed. ‘What sort of secret service is it that gets pushed around by a judge?’
One that operates in a democracy, Marchant thought, but he held his swollen tongue.
‘Tell me one thing, my friend: who is going to remember it was Britain’s dirty work we were doing? No, all anyone remembers is that someone got tortured in Morocco. Happily, we’re not in Moroccan airspace any more, so please answer my questions. Was Salim Dhar in the High Atlas?’
Marchant hesitated a moment too long. Aziz pulled his mouth open and inserted the clamp again, tightening it until his top and bottom jaw were so far apart that he thought his mouth would split at the corners. It was a repeat of what Aziz had done earlier, but he was angry now, curiosity replaced by irritation. Once again, Marchant couldn’t talk, move his head or his jaw, but the sense of vulnerability was nothing compared to the next wave of pain that he knew was about to break over him.
‘We have a choice, Daniel. Either you tell me what you saw, or I will have to remove the molar — it will be no good to you now.’
Marchant instinctively checked the bloodied tooth with his tongue, working it around the edge of the cavity. At the same moment, he flexed his right wrist, trying to find the sharp edge. He felt rough metal cut into his skin again. It was the lid of the ashtray in his armrest, flipped half open. Suddenly his predicament was bearable. He moved his wrist and felt the plastic of his cuffs rub against the edge of the ashtray. It would take time, but at least there was hope.
‘All right, then. I think it’s better we take it out,’ Aziz said, just as turbulence rocked the plane enough for him to steady himself on Marchant’s arm. He hadn’t noticed Marchant working his right hand. ‘I can see it’s clearly causing you some discomfort.’
Again, Marchant wondered if Aziz had ever tried to go into dentistry. When it suited him, he had an excellent bedside manner, a soothing tone of authority that was utterly at odds with his work.
‘Unfortunately, Morocco can be a very backward country at times, as tourists from Britain often remind us, and I’m afraid we have no anaesthetic with us today.’
Marchant thought for a moment that he saw genuine remorse pass across his face.
‘But I do have these. Extraction forceps. The ones for molars have these beak-like ends, do you see?’
He didn’t look at the steel pliers Aziz was holding up in front of him. They were in a medically sealed plastic bag, which seemed an unnecessary precaution in the circumstances. Aziz ripped it open and removed the pristine tool. Marchant guessed he had reached the point of Aziz’s interrogation process that broke his victims. It used to be scalpel cuts to the genitals, but clearly things had moved on.
‘First, though, we have a problem. Your molar is too big, even for these forceps. Maybe I got the wrong ones. Maybe they are for children’s teeth. But it’s OK. We have this.’
He put down the forceps and picked up the drill again, testing it one last time.
‘Perhaps I will drill down through the molar, deep into the nerve, and split the tooth clean in two.’
Marchant could feel his legs shaking. His body was already in shock. He inhaled deeply, letting his diaphragm rise as high as it could, and breathed out slowly, trying to block the pain, focus on the only way out.
‘It’s funny, you know,’ Aziz contin
ued, resting the drill on Marchant’s bottom lip. ‘I was going to say “Open wide,” the way they do, but I was forgetting.’
Fucking hilarious, Marchant thought, tasting the metal of the drill. His right wrist wasn’t free yet, and he was beginning to wonder if it ever would be. The one thing he still had control over was his eyes. The point about torture, the SERE instructor had told him, was that the victim must feel totally out of control in order for it to be successful. He must not believe that he can influence anything in his immediate environment except through compliance.
When the CIA had waterboarded him in Poland, he had managed a soaked, defiant laugh, but he couldn’t even muster that with his mouth levered open like Jonah’s whale. He desperately wanted to shut his eyes, but he kept them open, fixing Aziz with a stare that momentarily unsettled his torturer as he began to drill.
24
‘I’m sorry,’ Myers said, cracking a knuckle so loudly it made Harriet Armstrong jump. The American, Australian and Canadian representatives had all left the Cabinet Room for the second half of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which was traditionally for UK agencies only. ‘I know I should have briefed you all before, and I know it wasn’t my business, but — ’
‘I think, in the light of your initial analysis, we can overlook the histrionics of the second act,’ Fielding said, turning to Chadwick for formal approval.
‘Of course, it was a significant breach of JIC protocol,’ Chadwick said. ‘But I agree, an exception can be made.’
‘Does that unit actually work?’ Armstrong asked, nodding at the handset in front of Myers. She was back to wearing her familiar severe suit jackets. Apart from her crocked knee, the only other visible legacy of her Indian adventure was a silver necklace, which had a hint of tribal art about it. She had also confided in Fielding that her mornings now began with half an hour of Vipassana yoga, something she wholly recommended as a way of getting through tedious meetings at the Home Office.
