Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

I obeyed. I was shivering. The cellar was cold. I could hear nothing.

  Then, suddenly, a knife sawed at my wrists and the ropes fell away. I gasped, half expecting the knife to swing up at my belly, but nothing happened. I rubbed my wrists, then raised my hands towards the bag tied around my head.

  A club or cosh hit my kidneys.

  I screamed and half fell, but hands held me upright. I wanted to be sick again. The pain swelled in me, receded, swelled again; a pain that came in red waves. The pain reminded me that they wanted me to stand still.

  So I stood still.

  Hands gripped my sweater and jerked it upwards. Without thinking I stepped back and immediately the pain whipped at me as I was hit again, expertly hit so that the agony slammed up my back. I half crouched to escape the pain, but the hands on my sweater pulled me upright.

  They wanted my sweater off. Weeping, unable to resist, I raised my arms and they tugged the woollen sea-jersey off. The bag over my head had been tied at my throat and so stayed in place.

  Fingers touched my throat. The touch of the fingers was warm, light and fluttering. The very lightness of the touch terrified me, then I realised that the fingers were merely undoing the buttons of my shirt. I was shaking with fear as the fingers slid down my chest and belly, then as they tugged the shirt-tails clear of my jeans and pulled the flannel sleeves off my arms.

  I gasped as the fingers caressed my belly. Only it was not a caress, but rather the touch as the belt of my jeans was unbuckled, then the jeans were unbuttoned and unzipped. Hands pulled my jeans down, then my underpants. Obediently, eager to help, wanting these remorseless captors to like me and to stop hurting me, I stepped out of the clothes.

  I was naked and I was cold. I was hurting and I was frightened.

  Hands touched my throat again. I whimpered softly, then realised that the warm fingers were merely untying the lacing of the bag that shrouded my head. I sensed the person take a backwards step, then the bag was whipped off and, though I was instantly dazzled and though my sight was still smeared and my eyes smarting from the ammonia. I could at last see where I was and who was with me.

  Facing me was Sarah Sing Tennyson. She was holding my clothes. Standing beside her was a tall and well-built man wearing a black balaclava helmet like those which the IRA favour when they are photographed by journalists. The knitted cap hid all but his eyes and his mouth. I could see he had a moustache, and that his eyes were blue, but otherwise the man’s face was utterly masked. He also wore black leather gloves, a black sweater, black shoes, and black trousers. I sensed that there was at least one other person behind me, but I dared not turn round in case they hit me.

  The cellar was stone-walled and completely bare of any furnishings except a coiled garden hose that had been attached to a tap which served a metal sink fixed to one wall. The ceiling was big, suggesting a large house, while its bareness spoke of an abandoned one. The wooden stairs were to my left, climbing steeply to a closed door. The cellar was lit by a single light bulb which, though dim, had been sufficient to dazzle me in those first seconds after the hood had been removed from my eyes. The cellar floor was a screed of bare cement with a single drain in its very centre, a feature which, in these circumstances, was as menacing as the garden hose.

  Sarah Sing Tennyson had my clothes draped over one arm. She was also holding a pair of shears. They were tailor’s shears with black handles and steel blades a foot long.

  She said nothing, but, when she was certain that the sight of the shears had captured my attention, she began to slice my clothes into shreds. She first cut the shirt, then the jersey, then my underpants, then the jeans. She worked slowly, as if to emphasise the destruction, and looked up frequently as though to make sure that I was aware of what she was doing. One by one she reduced my clothes into a pile of frayed patchwork at her feet. The sound of the shear-blades sliding against each other made a sinister metallic sibilance in the echoing cellar. The message of that hiss, and of the dumb show that ruined my clothes, was to emphasise my vulnerability. I was naked, and I had no hope of escaping without the help of my captors. They had reduced me to a shivering, frightened, naked dependant. Each slice of the blades reminded me that I was totally at the questionable mercy of Sarah Tennyson and her companions and, as if to stress that dependence, when she was done with my clothes and the last cut scrap had fluttered down to her feet, she dropped her gaze to my shrunken groin and opened the shear-blades wide so that the light slashed off the steel in a glittering angle. I felt myself shrivel even further. She smiled, my humiliation assured and complete.

  “You’re going to answer some questions,” the masked man beside Sarah Sing Tennyson said suddenly, and his voice gave me the first clue as to who my abductors were for he spoke in the sour accent of Northern Ireland, so harsh and ugly compared to the seductive cadence of the southern Irish voice. “Where’s the boat?”

  I had to prevaricate. Christ, but I could not just give in! “What boat?” I asked, and then I screamed, because there was not one man behind me, but two, both of them masked like the first man, and both of them had hit me at once. I fell, and this time no one tried to hold me up, but instead the man who had asked the question kicked me, then all three were working me over, using short, sharp blows that pierced and shook and terrorised me with pain. I could control neither my bowels nor my bladder and, when they had finished, I was both weeping and filthy.

  Sarah Sing Tennyson had not joined in the beating, but just watched with a half-smile on her face. The three men were all masked, all gloved, and all dressed in black. They were experts at pain and humiliation and I suspected they had not been trained by torturers, but by psychiatrists. I remembered the nameless men who had gone from Belfast to Libya to learn the modern techniques of interrogation, and I knew that I would have no choice but to tell them what they wanted to know. Of course I wanted to be brave. I wanted to emulate those men who claimed to have resisted the interrogations in the cellars of Castlereagh Police Station, but all Belfast had known that such stories were bombastic rot. They had all broken; the only difference being that some had told their secrets in awful pain and some had told them quickly to get the ordeal done.

  “Stand up,” the man ordered me. There was no emotion in the voice, nothing but resigned tones suggesting that this was a man doing a routine job.

  I staggered to my feet. I was weeping and moaning, because the pain was all over me like a second skin. One of the three men went to the wall and uncoiled the hose. He turned on the tap, then triggered the jet of water at me. The ice-cold soaking was not a part of their brutality, but designed to wash me down.

  By the time I was clean, I was also shivering. My teeth chattered and my voice was moaning very softly.

  “Be quiet!” the man next to Sarah Sing Tennyson said.

  I went very quiet. The cellar stank of faeces and urine.

  “Let me lay down the rules of this interrogation,” the man said in his quiet, reasonable voice. “You’re going to tell us what we want to know. If you tell us, then you’ll live, and that’s a promise. If you don’t tell us, you’ll die, but you’ll suffer a lot in the dying. None of us enjoys inflicting pain, but pain has its uses. So where is the boat?”

  “She’s travelling deck cargo.” My teeth were chattering and I could not finish the sentence.

  “Going to Boston?”

  “Yes,” I said eagerly, “that’s right, going to Boston.”

  “When will it arrive?”

  I hesitated, distracted by the small sounds of the two men behind me, but they were merely shifting their feet. “They didn’t give me a date, but they thought the voyage should take about six weeks!” I hurried the last words, not wanting to be hit.

  “They?”

  “The shippers.”

  “Their name?”

  “Exportación Layetano.”

  “In Barcelona?”

  “Yes.”

  A dozen rivulets of water trickled away from my shivering body towards
the drain. There was no blood in the water. These men had hurt me, but without breaking my skin. They were experts.

  “You arranged for the boat’s shipment?” The Ulster voice was curiously flat and neutral, as though he were a bored bank manager asking tedious details of a customer in order to determine whether or not a loan would be a wise investment for his bank.

  “I arranged the shipment.”

  “The boat’s name?”

  “She used to be called Corsaire. I changed it to Rebel Lady.”

  “Describe her.”

  I stammered out the description: A forty-four-foot sloop, centre cockpit, sugar-scoop stern, with a deep heavy keel, red anti-fouling under her bootline, white gelcoat above.

  “How much gold is on board?”

  “Five million dollars.”

  Was there a second’s hesitation of surprise? Maybe, but then the metronome-like voice resumed. “Describe how the gold is stored aboard the boat.”

  So I described the saloon’s false floor, and how the cabin sole lifted to reveal the slightly discoloured fibreglass that needed to be chipped away to reveal the mix of sand and gold.

  “Does the boat have registration papers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, where are they!” A hint of impatience, promising pain.

  “They’re at my house.” I told the lie because I could not expose Johnny to these bastards. Then I screamed, because something thumped hard and sharp in my tender kidneys, and I was falling as another slash of pain seared down from my neck. I hit the wet concrete, whimpering.

  “Get up.”

  I slowly struggled up. A small, red, atavistic part of my brain counselled a sudden counter-attack, a whirling slash at the tormentors behind me, but I knew such an assault would be doomed. They were ready for me, they were fitter than me, they were better than me, and I was weakened, slow, shivering and so horribly vulnerable.

  “Lies will be met with pain,” the man said in a bored voice. “The boat’s papers are with Johnny Riordan, yes?”

  So they had known all along and had just been testing me. “Yes.”

  “How much money did you give Riordan?”

  I had almost forgotten giving Johnny any money, and I had to think quickly before anyone hit me. “About a thousand bucks.”

  “Why?”

  “To hire a crane to get the boat off the truck. Or in case the longshoremen at Boston need a bribe.”

  “Who’s the importer?”

  “I don’t know. Exportación Layetano decide that.”

  “The name of your contact at Exportación Layetano?”

  “Roberto Lazarraga.”

  The questioner had been holding the black hood that had covered my eyes. He now tossed it to me, but I was so feeble and shaking that I muffed the catch.

  “Pick it up.”

  I picked it up.

  “Put it on.”

  I obeyed.

  “Stand still. Hands at your sides!”

  The blindness and my nakedness combined to make me feel horribly vulnerable. I could hear my four captors moving about in the cellar. Footsteps climbed the stairs, then came back. Something scraped on the floor, filling me with the terror of apprehension. There was silence for a few seconds, then feet banged hollowly on the wooden stairs again.

  “Take the hood off,” the voice ordered, and as I did so the door at the top of the stairs slammed shut and I found myself alone. The scraps of my clothes had been taken away and the scraping sound had been merely the noise of a metal camp bed being placed by a wall. Three blankets were folded on the camp bed and a zinc bucket stood at its foot. I just had time to notice those amenities when the light went out.

  I staggered to the cot bed, pulled the blankets about me, and lay down. I curled up. I was wet, cold and shaking.

  God alone knows how long I stayed there. I was no weakling, but I could not fight these men. Their silence and their discipline spoke of their professionalism. I had watched an interrogation in Belfast once; sharing with Seamus Geoghegan a privileged view of some poor bastard being questioned about the betrayal of a bombing mission. The questioners wanted the name of the boy’s contact in the security forces and, in their desperate attempts to get it, had beaten the lad into a raw, red, sodden horror. The interrogators had argued amongst themselves as they worked, daring each other to inflict more hurt, accusing each other of being counter-productive, and finally they had abandoned their attempts with nothing to show for their work but blood-bubbling denials from the crippled twenty-year-old. He had lost one eye, most of his teeth and was sheeted with blood. He never recovered his full sight, and would never again walk without a dipping limp, and the IRA later learned it was the boy’s sister who had telephoned the security forces. By then she had moved to England and had married her soldier lover, while her lacerated, dribbling, stammering brother still declared his pathetic allegiance to the Provisional IRA and their heroic freedom fighters.

  But my questioners were different. This team had been trained to give pain in measured doses and to reward answers by granting freedom from that pain. This team worked as a disciplined unit, without hesitation and without any need to speak. The only words used were those addressed to me, and those I offered back. There was no fuss or noise to distract me from the main business of the proceedings, which was to elicit what poor Gillespie had so signally failed to discover; the whereabouts of the gold.

  But their very knowledge of the gold’s existence told me who they were. They believed that their anonymity conferred menace, and so it did, but as I lay in the shivering dark I retained enough sense to realise that the only people who knew about the gold were those who had despatched it. The CIA did not know, the Brits did not know, only the IRA and the Libyans and the Iraqis knew.

  So either I was in the hands of il Hayaween’s men or in the grip of the Provisionals, and the evidence was overwhelming that it was the latter. No Palestinian or Libyan terrorist would dare try to enter the United States while the war in the Gulf raged, but any number of Irish could have come here. I had defied Michael Herlihy, and now he was striking back. I had underestimated him and I had misunderstood Sarah Sing Tennyson. She had to be a terrorist groupie, a hanger-on to the movement. I knew she was an acquaintance of my brother-in-law, who in turn was associated with Herlihy, which tied her in neatly with the Provos. Had she been left in my house expressly to raise the alarm when I came home? And she had met Johnny, which would explain their knowledge of his involvement. God, I thought, but let these bastards spare Johnny. And what had they done to Kathleen? Or was she a part of it? Had she been sent to lure me out of the house while they prepared their ambush? That thought was the worst, the last straw of despair, yet why should I be surprised? I had lied to her in Belgium, so what possible consideration did Kathleen owe me?

  I shuddered in the dark. I had taken a risk, a vast risk, five million dollars’ worth of risk, and it had left me in the hands of the Provisionals’ trained interrogators. Professionally trained interrogators. Colonel Qaddafi had seen to that; dreaming of the days when his pet Irishmen would make some Englishman or Scotsman or Welshman shriek in a Belfast cellar in repayment for the American bombers screaming over Tripoli.

  I shivered under the thin blankets. By staying very still I could somehow hide from the pain. A small, brave voice nagged me to struggle off the camp bed and crawl up the wooden stairs to see if the door at the top would open, but I did not want to move, nor draw any attention to myself. I just wanted to huddle under the blanket. I wanted to shudder by myself in the dark womb of the cellar listening to the heartlike rhythm of the sea.

  My God, I thought, but it was the sea I could hear. It was not the thunder of huge ocean rollers, but the susurration of smaller waves breaking on a soft beach which suggested I was held in a house either close to Nantucket Sound or on Cape Cod Bay. Weymouth, perhaps? The town, south of Boston and nicknamed the Irish Riviera, would be a good place for a Provisional IRA interrogation team to hide.

>   And the fact that this team was from the Provisionals was good for me. I did not for one moment believe my questioner’s seemingly earnest promise that I would live if I told the truth. Every interrogator holds out that hope, but when these people heard my truth they would let me live, simply because they would not dare kill me. They thought I was a renegade and thief, and they were about to discover I was something far more dangerous; a legitimate American agent.

  And if I was wrong, then my best hope lay in my trust that professionals like these did not inflict a slow death, but would want to be rid of me quickly.

  And so I lay in the dark, shivering, trying to remember prayers.

  The door at the top of the stairs crashed open. There was no light. I shouted, expecting pain, still half asleep. I had been dreaming of Roisin. “Hood on! Now!” the Northern Irish voice shouted from the stairhead. “Put it on! Put it on! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” Feet clattered on the stairtreads. “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”

  I frantically fumbled for the black hood, discovering it on the floor beside the cot. I pulled it on.

  “Stand up! Move! Move! Move!”

  I scrambled in agony off the cot. Light suffused the black weave of the hood.

  More footsteps hurried loudly down the stairs. I thought I detected all four of my tormentors, but I could not be certain. I wondered how long I had been asleep. I sensed it was now nighttime, but I guessed my sensations were quite useless as a gauge of the passing hours.

  “Drop the blanket,” the voice snapped.

  I dropped it.

  “Step forward. Stop there! Hood off.”

  I pulled the hood off, blinking in the light.

  “Hands to your side!”

  I obeyed, exposing my vulnerable nakedness. As before the unmasked Sarah Sing Tennyson faced me while, to her left, my questioner stood in his sinister head-to-foot black. I guessed the other two men had taken their positions behind me.

  “What was the purpose of the five million dollars?”

  “To buy Stingers.” My speech was thick with sleep.

  “How many Stingers?”