by Gary Haynes
Chapter 55
The little girl, baba Maroof’s three-year-old granddaughter, was wearing a flora dress and black patent shoes. She tottered behind his every move like a dependent puppy, her floppy curls parted in the middle and reaching down to her nape. Her mouth was full and prettily curved, her eyes as pure and deep as a salmon pool. When he was with her he thought that it was the closest to heaven that he’d get. He’d never truly loved anything or anyone in his life, but he loved little Asya.
Maroof was wearing white linen overalls and a wide-brimmed hat, with a circular veil. His hands were bare, with protruding veins and deep semi-circular wrinkles like fish scales. His spacious villa was ten miles from Ankara, a secluded spot next to an elongated lake, bordered by Oriental Hornbeam and Rize Birch. It had terracotta roof tiles, a glass conservatory, and was surrounded by a high, redbrick wall. The sky was a dusty blue, the wind sporadic. It was just after daybreak.
He was standing in the back garden, an immaculate lawn, framed by beds of indigenous wild flowers: scarlet snapdragon, wild basil and butter-coloured St John’s wort. In front of him were six apex-roofed, rectangular beehives. They were made from cypress wood, the old-fashioned way, rather than dense polystyrene.
With Asya positioned behind his legs, he used a smoker to produce wafts of grey smoke. It looked like a coffee pot, with bellows attached to it. The smoke was generated from slow-burning pine needles and hessian. It masked the alarm pheromones released by the vigilant guard bees. Asya began to cough and sniffle.
“It won’t hurt you, my angel,” he said. “I would never let anything hurt you.”
“Mama spanked me,” she said.
“Ah. Now stay here awhile. Grandfather is going to collect the honey. You like grandfather’s honey, don’t you angel?”
“Like grandfather’s honey,” she said.
Smiling, and after removing a wooden frame, he strolled about thirty feet to a metal table. On top was a honey extractor surrounded by glass jars. He used an electronic hot knife to cut off the cap wax before placing the frame into the extractor. Then he created a few more wafts of smoke and took off his protective hat, hearing a conversation behind him.
“Hello, little Asya.”
“Hello,” she said.
He knew the voice and turned and saw Arnaud, his Corsican bodyguard, walking down the lawn. He was wearing a dark brown suit and a cream, open-necked shirt. Arnaud was about the same height as him, but had a broad, muscular physique and a bloated head. His grey-black hair was shaved close to his skull, his nose badly misshapen, his eyes pig-like. He’d done twelve years in the French Foreign Legion, the 2nd Rep, the elite paratrooper unit. He’d had to change his nationality to another French-speaking country in order to comply with the declared identity rule, and had left a sergent chef, a senior sergeant.
“Tell me,” Maroof said, sucking some honey from his thumb.
“The American we picked up is called Tom Dupree, a special agent in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. He’s been kept in Ankara overnight, but is on his way now.”
“Walk with me,” the baba said, shuffling off. “The bees are attracted to your breath. A sting to the face is most painful.”
The villa was swept for surveillance bugs, both audio and visual, on a daily basis, although not one had ever been found. Given their unofficial relationship with the highest echelons of MIT, the various forms of aerial surveillance were deemed to be so remote that Maroof had stopped worrying about it years ago. Consequently it was deemed safe to discuss anything here.
He stopped beside a muslin sack lying on the grass. “Donaldson?”
“Did as we asked. He was waiting on the track. He would have feigned saving Tom Dupree in just an hour’s time as planned. He was radioed when Dupree made his own escape. He feigned saving him just the same, then turned the car around and brought him back. But Dupree would not give up the name of the black.”
Maroof turned around and motioned with his hand towards the villa. “Go inside now, Asya. Grandmother has made fresh pomegranate juice for breakfast.”
“Yum yum,” she said, rubbing her stomach.
He watched her turn around and run with precarious-looking steps towards the backdoor, her tiny hands acting like stabilizers by her sides. She loved pomegranate juice.
Turning back, he said, “Hand me that.” Maroof pointed his finger at the sack.
He watched Arnaud flinch. The contents of the sack had moved as soon as his bodyguard had touched it. Taking it from him, Maroof undid the knotted string and felt around inside. He pulled out a hare, holding it by the scruff of its neck. Its hind legs kicked out in a mechanical fashion, although they were tied together with thin plasticuffs.
“Look at it. It’s terrified,” Maroof said, handing the empty sack to Arnaud. “The bees will mistake it for a destructive rodent or a small bear. They hate brown fur. It gets them very agitated. But they need to hone their defences. Otherwise, well, they’ll die out. Won’t they, Arnaud?”
“As you say, baba.”
He placed the hare down on its side on the grass. It kicked its tethered legs again, and struggled to right itself.
“We need to find the black and when we do we will find out the truth. All that they know about us, about Ibrahim.”
“What about Donaldson?” Arnaud asked.
The baba bent down and picked some grass from the lawn. Standing upright, he tossed the grass into the air, as if he was figuring out the direction of the wind.
“We owe him,” he said. “Don’t we owe him, for all the things he’s done for us? But then again.”
A few bees had settled on the hare.
“You see that,” the baba said, pointing to them. “The hive has three levels of guard bees. Those are the skirmishing variety. It’s a wonderful thing. Give it a few more minutes and they’ll be all over it. A bee colony is a perfect society. A perfect society.”
Arnaud nodded.
The baba felt his chest wheeze. His airways had begun to shrink, as the muscles around them had tightened. The linings were swelling. He pulled out his blue inhaler, pressed down on the cylinder and inhaled the ventolin. An asthmatic, he always had to take a puff when he was about to watch the last breath leave a living thing, even though he knew his body’s response was wholly psychosomatic. The hare would die soon. He pictured it gnawing its tongue in agony.
The baba knew he was one in a hundred. The psychiatrist had told his mother it was so years back. One in a hundred of the human population were sociopaths, or psychopaths. It didn’t matter which word was used, the terms were essentially interchangeable, and were essentially misunderstood. He preferred the former, as the latter were considered mindless murderers.
He didn’t do what he did for money or power; he didn’t do it for an unlimited supply of casual sex or numbing drugs, either. He did it because he could, because he felt no empathy for human suffering whatsoever. Less, even, than the dumb animal that would die before him. He knew too that sociopaths covered a broad spectrum of human personalities and behaviour, everything from the spiteful emails of a co-worker to the despicable acts of a serial killer. The psychiatrist had told his mother that the death of his brother meant he was closer to the latter.
And yet he loved Asya. He had never understood that.
“He will die of a heart attack.”
“The hare?” Arnaud said, clearly bemused.
Ignoring him, the baba said, “Take Asya and her grandmother to town before Dupree arrives, Arnaud.”
The bodyguard nodded and left.
Chapter 56
In the pre-dawn darkness, four hours ago at the baba’s farm near Ankara, Tom had been wheeled into the back of a rusted white campervan, with paint-stained sheets for drapes. The chair had been secured with metal clasps, affixed to horizontal poles eighteen inches off the bed of the van. He’d been unconscious still.
He heard a rhythmic ticking sound now. Vaguely, he thought it might be a metronome. No, it’s a clock,
he thought, a large clock. Opening his eyes, he saw before him a well-ordered room, with dark-wood furniture and pastel-coloured plates nailed to the walls. Pale sunlight shone outside the French windows, a large, immaculate lawn beyond.
He realized he had a gag across his mouth and he breathed in deeply through his nose, feeling the first tendrils of panic. He couldn’t move his hands or his legs. He wondered if it was the effect of the drug, but then he looked down and saw the plasticuffs, together with the large wheels. He was strapped in a wheelchair.
He heard breathing behind him, but as he turned his head, he could only see the broad-shouldered man, Rapper, who was sitting on a leather chair, chewing. He nose was dog-legged, his eyes blackened, where he’d beaten him in the farmyard.
The man got up and strolled over to the French windows, bent down and pulled back the bolt. He stretched up to the one above, did likewise, before pushing the doors wide open. Tom heard birdsong and felt a waft of warm air. It’s morning, he thought.
There was a metal ramp, which led from the pine decking outside the windows. It extended over the pink gravel that abutted the shorn grass. He was wheeled out in silence. After about twenty yards, Tom saw something on the grass, something like a vague hump on the ground.
Closer now and it looked like an old leather football, situated about three yards from what he could see were bee hives. But as he was pushed closer still, he saw that the object was pulsating. No, not pulsating, he thought, rather things were moving over whatever was beneath. Bees, he thought, it’s the bees.
As they got to within two yards of the cluster of bees, a hand pressed down on his crown and, after a short nip at the nape of his neck, the front of the gag hung over his left shoulder. He took a couple of gulps of air.
“Every bee knows its place. Every bee strives for the good of the colony. The workers work. The drones mate. The guard bees protect the queen to the death. Water bees cool the hive. There are even mortuary bees, who remove the dead. The perfect society,” baba Maroof said.
Tom realized the man’s pidgin English had been a ruse, and as he came around the wheelchair, dressed immaculately in a tailored suit and silk black shirt, clean-shaven and seemingly a decade younger, he realized his previous persona had been a facade, too.
Rapper walked past the chair then and bent down to the quivering mass of bees. He had something in his hand that Tom only had a chance to glance at. His hands were gloved.
“Careful,” the baba said. “The face, remember the face.”
Rapper pointed at what Tom could now see was a smoker, and as he activated it the bees started to disperse. A couple landed in his own hair and he felt the baba’s hands remove them with a peculiar, unnerving tenderness. Gradually, Tom saw the gruesome sight come into view. It was a severed head, a reddened monstrosity of a thing. But there was a certain familiarity.
The poor, ignorant traitor, Tom thought.
It was Jack Donaldson’s head.
“Yes, it’s the big CIA man. If he can give you up to me like a queer boy junkie gives up his honour, I thought, well, he could give me up, too. I am right, am I not, Mr Tom Dupree?’ Maroof said. “I know where you have been. I know all about you. Do not worry, I do not kill people in my home. You will be taken back to the farm, the ghost house, my men call it.”
Rapper snickered then, finished as he was with subduing the bees, and he walked behind the wheelchair.
Tom’s head was reeling and he felt bile rise in his throat. I’m done for, he thought.
“It’s ironic,” the baba said. “And I know that you Americans don’t understand irony, so I’ll keep it simple. Donaldson was coming to pretend to release you. He would have asked the same questions, I imagine, before he headed back to the farm. But you had used your skills to escape. And for what? A worse torment awaits you now. You should’ve trusted Donaldson in the car. The black would be here now. It would be he who had to go through all the unpleasantness. Did you wonder why Donaldson was arriving at the farm? Was that what gave him away? Yes, I suspect so. No matter.”
Tom felt the baba’s hand rest lightly on his shoulder. He winced involuntarily, a shiver rippling through his lower back. He knew the baba had felt it too.
“They become almost unrecognizable when my men have finished with them, even to their mothers. Their faces become badly swollen. Blood drips from long scars that are made with a length of wood or metal, rather than a man’s fist. A hand comes from nowhere, grasps the tortured man’s cheeks like a pair of tongs, and thrusts him forwards towards a webcam where I watch, smoking a cigarette. Some, like you, get special treatment. And when my men get the scent of fear, well, emotions are difficult to control, even for me. You will slump in the torture chair like a lobotomized psychiatric patient. Your face will be an empty canvas. For some reason, my men will have shaved your head. You can be sure it will be covered with red welts. Your mouth will ooze a frothy white substance.”
“You’re insane,” Tom said.
He lurched forwards. It was as if a small star had exploded in his head. Red streaks, like the ones he’d seen in his last Muai Thai bout, flashed before his eyes. Even his brain seemed to throb. As he eased himself up, he groaned. The back of his head felt as if it had been hit by a slab of concrete. He knew Rapper had just punched him.
“We will torture you and you will give up the black. And then we will torture you in front of the black. We torture the one to obtain information from the other,” the baba went on. “When the one being tortured realizes this, he starts to turn on the other like a hungry wolf. It’s a game, a physiological game; an old Gestapo technique. When the burning starts, the stench and the blistering of skin, the screams, it means the end of the game is near. I have heard that a man can last another two hours then, but never more. If you have withheld anything, I’ll know. If there is someone else who knows, I will know. You and the black will see it simply as a means of survival. It is a genetic thing, Mr Dupree, a primordial instinct, if you will. And then, just before the end, we will pump you with drugs. Revive you a little. Pep you up with truth serums, which will already be careering through your veins. It will start again, then again and again. There will be no doubt after this. No doubt at all.”
Tom knew about such drugs, psychoactive medication that was deemed torture under international law. But they were sometimes prescribed to psychotics in the field of psychiatry, a cocktail of ethanol, temazepam and scopolamine, together with several barbiturates. And no mind could withstand that.
“And mark me, when Turks torture, it is grotesque. No race tortures like Turks. Donaldson told me all about your mission here. He told me you wanted to find out who Ibrahim is and what he is about. You think that Ibrahim killed the American general here. He did, he did kill him here. I can tell you that because you are never going home. Is that not so, Mr Dupree?”
But he didn’t know one important detail, Tom thought. Due to the fact that he didn’t have his father’s surname, the old devil didn’t know that he was his own father. The baba came around in front of him then and smiled, but, as the his gaze rose towards the French windows, Tom saw the old man’s expression turn to one of astonishment, quickly followed by fear.
“There,” the baba said, pointing.
Maroof fell then, a spurt of blood erupting from his forehead. Rapper got hit next, his throat looking like a bubbling hot spring as he fell forwards from behind the wheelchair, and lay beside Tom. He’d yelped like a puppy, twisted like a Samba dancer, and had hit the lawn like a sack of woodchip.
The discharges made the small birds in the bushes fly off, made Tom wish his hands weren’t tethered. It was long-term muscle memory borne of countless hours of training exercises, countless hours of learning to go for his SIG and engage, rather than hit the deck or run. There was movement now, he sensed it on the grass; he sensed it because his senses were heightened tenfold.
Ten seconds later a muscular black man with fire in his eyes stood before him.
“Let’s y
ou and me get the fuck outta here,” Lester said.
Chapter 57
They stepped out of the front of the villa and Tom saw the body of a young Turkish man beyond the curve of a gravel driveway that straightened out into the distance, where it was flanked by broad-leafed trees. His body was slumped against a marble statue of what looked like a god from antiquity. Flies were already buzzing around his head, which was limp.
As they walked down a short flight of taupe-coloured stone steps, heading for a black Mercedes on the driveway, Lester said it was the MIT piece of shit that Crane had mentioned, name of Habib. The man who’d set up the general and Tom too, to be sure, he added. Tom thought he looked as if his neck had been broken. Ducking down into the front seats, Lester went into the detail.
Three miles west of the street where Lester had fallen asleep, he’d crouched by a plastered wall, the moonlight playing upon the moss and lichen there, and making it look as if it had been flecked with precious metals.
Crane had sent him a text message on the secure smartphone just over an hour before, stating that the registered owner of the vehicle he’d photographed was a corporation in the Cayman Islands owned by various discretionary trusts, which meant that the real owners would remain vague shadows, at least in the short term.
At that point, Lester had decided not to trust anyone, not even Crane, and had made a call of his own back to his office in DC. Twenty minutes after that he’d gotten a texted address, which was right across the brightly-lit, suburban street in front of him.
Without any equipment, save for the two phones and the SIG, he’d decided that subtlety wasn’t going to figure highly in his methodology, so he’d just got up and, waiting for a break in the traffic, had jogged over to the small, single-storey whitewashed home, surrounded by the plastered wall, with a wrought-iron gate dead centre. There had been hanging baskets of multi-coloured flowers bracketed to the front wall of the property, illuminated by a couple of security lights. Lester had reckoned that there wouldn’t be any pressure mats or infrared security and he had simply opened the gate and had walked up to the panelled wooden door and had knocked twice, with the heavy metal knocker.
