Road (A Joe Tiplady Thriller Book 2)

by John Sweeney

  ‘Mr Tiplady, you haven’t answered my question. Please answer my question. Tell me about the sarin.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Wrong answer, Mr Tiplady.’

  A phone chirruped. It was answered, listened to, and then a different voice, not Mansour’s, said, ‘Nichevo.’ This voice sounded like the high notes of a flute, querulous. Joe had spent enough time with Katya when she was at her most nihilistic to know that nichevo was Russian for ‘nothing’.

  ‘Mr Tiplady, when did you become a CIA asset?’ asked Mansour.

  Joe laughed out loud.

  Mansour repeated the question. This time Joe replied, ‘Listen, Mansour, I am not now, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever be a CIA asset.’

  ‘Very good, Mr Tiplady, very good. That resolves a puzzle for us. We are most grateful. Taahid?’

  So that was Mr Click-Clack’s name. A lighter snapped on, and then there was the unmistakable, forced hiss of a blowtorch igniting. Although still mummified by the bag on his head, Joe felt a wave of heat wash over his upper body. Then the focus of the heat shifted to behind him, and the hair on the back of his cuffed hands began to singe.

  ‘Our concern was, Mr Tiplady, that the Agency is quite vengeful and, therefore, we have established certain modus operandi. We do not torture CIA assets, and they do not whisk our people off to Poland, Romania or the middle of the Pacific for what they like to pretend are Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. These rules of thumb are respected by both sides. But as you freely admit that you have nothing to do with the CIA, then you are, as they say, fair game.’

  The heat was becoming painful; his hands felt as though they were on fire. Joe shuffle-scraped the chair away from the heat. The heat followed him. Joe shifted some more until, blind, he hit a wall. The heat washed over to his right; he shuffled to the left until he realised he had been boxed into a corner. Joe started backing out when, to his relief, he heard the blowtorch going out. The blow to the side of his head, when it came, was utterly unexpected. It poleaxed him, chair and all, to the floor, his skull making an unhealthy crack as it connected with the floor. A few beats, then the lighter snapped on again and the blowtorch was reignited. Joe could hear it burn but the heat stayed away from his skin.

  ‘You see, Mr Tiplady, we don’t quite believe you. You are something of a mystery to us. An Irish national, you turn up in Damascus, affecting to be an art dealer. The address you give for your sponsor does not exist. He is a fiction. You consort with the treasurer of the so-called Free Syrian Army, Adnan Qureshi, and his Ukrainian mistress. On your very first night in Damascus, you attend a party thrown by Qureshi, a man known to us as a supplier of the nerve gas sarin to ISIS. And then – and at this point the puzzle becomes all the more problematic – you pop up in Ghouta, where no CIA operative would dare go.’

  ‘Perhaps you are a tourist,’ suggested Flute-man, this time not in Russian but in fluent English, ‘with an interest in antiquities of the ancient world, regime change and nerve gas, who somehow lost his way? But unusually for such a tourist, we have a record of a man with your name entering Pyongyang some years ago.’

  That Flute-man knew about Joe’s time in North Korea was not good. He’d placed, or so it felt, an icicle in Joe’s bowels.

  ‘So’ – Mansour again – ‘our hypothesis is that you work for the CIA, that you are here to cement the false Western narrative that the government of the Syrian Arab Republic has hoarded nerve gas, and to build ties with Qureshi’s circle to foment regime change.’

  ‘That’s just rubbish.’

  ‘Rubbish, you say? But Qureshi’s whore confirmed our hypothesis. Are you suggesting that she is a liar?’

  Joe grunted non-committally. A slap to the side of his face, stinging, then blood trickling into his mouth. Joe remembered that the only time he’d met Mansour he was wearing a big emerald ring on his middle finger. Now it was fulfilling its function.

  ‘She liked you, you know. She tried to protect you. It took Taahid some time to persuade her to confess the facts. I fear Taahid may have enjoyed himself too much, but . . .’ His voice was a soft caress, whimsical even. ‘But eventually, confess she did.’

  The inside of Joe’s mouth felt horribly dry at the thought of what Taahid might have done to Daria to make her talk.

  ‘So, do you still deny that you’re in the CIA? Or, to be more precise, that you’re a CIA asset? That you work for them?’

  ‘I deny it.’

  This time the heat grew closer, more intense than ever before, burning the small of his back where it was exposed until the stink of it reminded him of kebab, of Timur. Someone screamed, a piercing cry. And then Joe realised the scream was coming from his own mouth.

  ‘You’re confident in your denial?’ asked Mansour.

  The heat reversed away from the base of his spine a few inches, then a foot, more. Then the cold of a knife against his belly, his trousers and underwear ripped to shreds, pulled away, exposing his penis and testicles to the air.

  ‘So, Mr Tiplady, once more for the record. Do you deny that you are an asset for the CIA?’

  The heat found his groin.

  ‘Aaaaaargh!’

  And then a cell phone rang.

  ‘Kak dela?’

  ‘Aaargh! I’m in the CIA,’ Joe screamed. ‘I’m not an asset, I’m an agent. Pyongyang, Damascus, Syria, all for the CIA.’ The blowtorch died. The torture was put on hold while the call lasted. Joe forced himself to suppress his fear and listen. His Russian wasn’t good enough to follow the conversation, but he did hear, over the racket of his breathing – heavy, erratic, inhaling great gasps of oxygen – Flute-man say, ‘Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin.’

  A pause, then more Russian, but he made out two phrases: ‘the White House’ and ‘Kompromat’.

  After a time, the conversation ended.

  ‘Perhaps it was not a good idea to take that call, Grozhov,’ said Mansour, the irritation clear in his voice. ‘You cannot assume that others will not be listening.’

  ‘It was Zoba’s personal aide-de-camp,’ said Grozhov.

  ‘So?’ said Mansour.

  ‘Syria is a sideshow. Interesting, yes, but we have more essential work elsewhere,’ replied Grozhov. ‘I must return to our embassy, to make an important call on a secure line. Continue giving heat to this Irish. I believe he killed a loyal servant of Russia, Reikhman, in cold blood. In my personal experience, only when a person screams at the highest possible pitch for some time is their mind genuinely open to the truth. Do not spare him. Ask him everything he may have found out about the sarin. Understand?’

  Mansour grunted his agreement.

  ‘Ask him about Reikhman. Ask him about what he did and didn’t do in Pyongyang. Whatever happens,’ said Grozhov, ‘I wasn’t here and Russia knows nothing about him or the nerve agent. Understand?’

  The tone was of master unto servant. Joe didn’t know Mansour very well but he knew him well enough to know that he would not like that.

  ‘Of course,’ Mansour replied, with a fluency, almost a graciousness, that Joe had not expected.

  An electric whine sounded. Grozhov was leaving. And then a whir, as if the wheelchair had reversed.

  A pause.

  ‘Mansour, one other thing. I asked for a package. Nothing has been delivered to my hotel.’

  ‘Mr Grozhov, the Syrian Arab Republic is your host here. But there are some things which we do not provide. You can find your own . . . packages.’

  ‘I see,’ said Grozhov softly. ‘On another matter, Qureshi’s oilfields—’

  ‘Are now the property of the Syrian state,’ said Mansour with a proprietary air.

  ‘Pity. They’ve been selected as a priority target by our ministry of defence.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Mansour, ‘that’s precipitate. The trade gives us useful leverage with ISIS. You must reconsider.’

  ‘It’s out of my hands,’ said Grozhov flatly.

  ‘Then, Grozhov, put
it in your hands.’

  The electric whine got nearer. ‘Mansour’ – Grozhov’s voice was as close to a cobra’s hiss as Joe had ever heard – ‘I’m beginning to wonder whether we’ve overestimated you. It seems the most striking thing about you as an intelligence operative is your choice of tailor. The facts are that you and the giraffe-cum-ophthalmologist in the palace on the hill are in danger of losing control of this state. Out of fraternal solidarity, we are coming to your rescue. We abhor colonialism in all its forms. Syria is, of course, not a Russian colony.’

  ‘Of course not,’ echoed Mansour.

  ‘But, for the time being, it’s probably more time-effective for all concerned that you think of it as being something like that. We suggest. You concur. When we act, don’t waste time questioning our decisions. The bombing of Qureshi’s oilfields started ten minutes ago. Had you been in any way a competent head of military intelligence, you would already know that.’

  The electric whine began again, the chair moving off. Then, one more whir and click. ‘Oh, Mansour, the Irish. We need an answer to every question I wish answered. If he dies, we will not mind. The next time we meet, try telling me something I don’t already know. The novelty of that might prove stimulating. Surprise me.’

  The electric whine receded. Far off, Joe heard car doors slam and the sound of a powerful engine picking up speed. Someone, Joe assumed Mansour, spat on the ground, close to him, then walked out of the room, and Taahid returned Joe to his cell in the tomb, his shoes click-clacking all the while. When the guard closed the door behind him, Joe realised that Timur had gone, been taken somewhere else. Joe sat on his haunches against the wall in near total darkness and listened to muffled thunks and slams as his ears popped with the changes in air pressure, and he wondered, in some crazy delirium, whether he had imagined meeting Timur, ISIS’s heretical bomb-maker-in-chief. But on the concrete floor, close to the dagger-slash of light, lay Joe’s bandage, blackened with blood.

  Then the light outside Joe’s cell door, the light from the corridor, died, and he was plunged into blackness so complete it was terrifying beyond the utterance. Deep below the surface of the earth, he was locked inside a tomb that his jailers could no longer power nor light.

  PIRAEUS, GREECE

  The ferry landed in Piraeus just after dawn and, as soon as its huge door opened, the throng of Syrians ran frantically for the bus stop in the docks, to queue for the buses that would take them to the train station. Jameela realised that there was a kind of gold-rush psychosis about this movement, a species of collective madness. And yet, if you were inside it, it was extraordinarily difficult not to be consumed by it.

  At Athens railway station, a posse of Golden Dawn fascists, with skinhead haircuts, black T-shirts and black-and-white camouflage trousers, strutted up and down, waving red flags with a black rune on them, suggesting a variant of the swastika. One of them, a big lout with a fat belly, peeled off from the main group and came nose to nose with Jameela, evidently a Muslim in her headscarf, and yelled ‘Allahu Akbar!’ deafeningly in her ear. She ignored him but Ham, sensing that the man was being obnoxious to his mother, bit him on the hand. The skinhead howled in pain and was about to knock Ham flat when a Greek police officer armed with a sub-machine gun danced between the two of them. The officer smiled, unsmilingly, at the Golden Dawn man until he rejoined his group, nursing his fat paw all the while. The officer watched over Jameela and Ham as they bought their train tickets, and waited with them until they boarded their train and it started clanking away, heading north. As Jameela gazed at Ham waving goodbye to their guardian-angel police officer through the train window, she reflected that Greece’s finances might be broken but not its heart. Safe, for a time at least, Jameela scolded Ham: ‘You shouldn’t go round biting people.’

  ‘Mom, I was hungry. I wanted a Big Mac and all I got was a fat finger.’

  She shook her head and reflected that maybe Europe had something to be afraid of in this particular Syrian – well, half-Syrian – child refugee.

  Midnight and a fresh shower of rain fell on a mudslide made of people, making the wretched of the earth yet more miserable. You could sense the mass of humanity stuck on the wrong side of the border. Every now and then the car headlights of aid workers or visiting journalists would flick across the field and capture thousands and thousands shivering in the muck. The lucky ones had tents but most sheltered from the incessant rain under blankets. The Macedonians to the north had closed their border with Greece but the pipeline of humanity kept on flowing, so the numbers and the pressure grew and grew.

  Jameela and Ham, exhausted after a grim three-mile trek through the rain from the last train station on the Greek side, were bewildered by the scene. You couldn’t make out much in the headlights: just the rain and a great field, as far as the eye could see, sheeted by wet plastic. To bed down for the night, she chose asphalt over mud. She chose the side of the road.

  ‘Darling,’ said Jameela, ‘we shall soon be safe in Germany, love. Maybe two, three more nights, but then we will be in Berlin.’

  Together, they lay down on the asphalt, Ham on the side closest to the field, her with her back to the road. She draped the blanket a Sikh aid worker from Coventry had given them and – wet, miserable and afraid for what the future might hold for them – they tried to sleep.

  ‘One and one is two,’ started Ham.

  ‘Oh, baby . . .’

  ‘Go on,’ said Ham.

  ‘One and two is three.’

  ‘Two and three is five . . .’

  But exhaustion is the best anaesthetic, and soon Ham had forgotten about the Fibonacci sequence and was asleep. Jameela tried to stay awake, to protect them from danger, but she, too, succumbed. In the night, Ham, always a restless sleeper, managed to wriggle out of his mother’s arms and upend himself so his head was facing the road – and that was how, at five o’clock in the morning, a green Volkswagen van driven by a party of journalists from Belgium reversed into him, smashing into his jaw.

  DAMASCUS, SYRIA

  Seven, ten, twelve, fourteen feet high, ten times seventy, no twelve times seventy, no twelve times seven, no, eighty-four plus fourteen, ninety-eight a tomb one hundred feet below the ground the pit there Chong put me in the pit it was March and the land was still rimed with frost and the cold, the cold ate your bones and I killed Chang I broke his back so that he would never put us in the pit again but this this is worse, once our fishing boat off County Mayo flipped in the Atlantic swell and for ten, fifteen seconds we were all upside down drowning in dark but then slowly the old fool of a boat righted itself but this isn’t happening the darkness weighs deep on the boat the engine screamed the sea sloshed and gurgled as it found its dark way into our warm cabin but this blackness is silent the rumble rumble rumbling of machinery that might have been the lifts working in the lift shaft falls silent still power cut, power cut blood pumping in my ears breathe breathe breathe they built stairs down to my level yes no I don’t don’t don’t no know no probably, yes but I can’t shut the possibility out of my mind that I am absolutely trapped, deep below ground, with no one on earth knowing where I am, Katya no shoot me no no no Katya no run away and I pull the trigger and he dies but she is dead and I scatter her ashes in the cold cold Atlantic but this this this forgive me Katya oh sweet Christ . . .

  Joe pounded the door of his cell until his knuckles cracked with blood and the salt from the tears in his eyes fell on the broken flesh and made him smart with pain. Later, he suspected it must have been the intensity of his fear, the fear of being locked in the dark for eternity, that drove him to act in the way he did. The only explanation he could offer was simple and bleak – that, for a time, far longer than he had thought possible, he’d lost the balance of his mind.

  Joe remembered ripping off all his clothes. He remembered daubing the walls of his cell with his own shit. He remembered howling like a wolf, for hours on end, until his voice cracked and he could only croak.

  Then the light
in the corridor outside came back on.

  Taahid took him down the corridor to the elevator shaft and then up seven storeys, and he was allowed a shower and was given a new set of clothes: a black tracksuit, underwear and a white T-shirt.

  Then Zeke walking towards him, his trademark, gormless grim in place, shaking his hand: ‘Hello, Joe. You look pale. Not been getting enough sunshine?’ Joe started to cry and Zeke hugged him, then turning to Taahid and saying something in Arabic and Taahid was frowning, not liking what Zeke was saying, and Mansour bowing at Zeke and Zeke smiling but not meaning it, not meaning it at all, so Mansour pulled a face and disappeared, and then they were outside in fresh air and into a convoy, three big SUVs, driving fast, men in shades, with guns, driving west, towards Lebanon.

  Zeke didn’t ask Joe anything on the journey to Beirut. He just gazed out of the window most of the time, watching the arid land go by. Once or twice Joe caught Zeke studying him, a worried look in those shrewd eyes of his, and then he smiled blankly at Joe, nodded to the security men sitting in the front seats, suggesting that they couldn’t talk until they were alone, and looked out of the window some more.

  At the American embassy in Beirut it was ‘Open Sesame’ the whole way, every single gate parting wide as they reached it until their convoy ducked down into the basement garage.

  Zeke said, ‘Follow me,’ and Joe traipsed after him. In turn, they were followed by four grunts, all of them armed, through a door and out into the embassy gardens. As dusk approached, the light over the Mediterranean began fading from ochre towards blood. Zeke led Joe towards the shade of a giant, ancient cedar tree, and they sat down on a handmade wooden bench that circled its base.