still swinging in the rain.
And Sergeant Joe Mansfield.
His face was contorted. His right arm – clutching the handgun – was outstretched. He was striding off the bandstand… towards Delaney… he was standing above him…
‘You need me!’ Delaney hissed. ‘You’ll never see the light of
Mansfield didn’t even flinch.
‘You won’t do it,’ the CIA man whispered. ‘Not in front of your boy… How much
No movement.
‘I can help you find Ashkani.’
Was there a sudden spark of interest in his eyes?
‘Think of my resources… I can track him down in hours… I’ll tell you where he is…’
Delaney was nodding enthusiastically.
But why hadn’t Mansfield lowered his gun?
They stood there in the rain. From the playground, Delaney could hear the regular squeaking of the swing.
‘You
‘But I’m just one of the little people,’ Mansfield said, and he fired.
The driver stirred. The back of his head throbbed. He was wet through.
He pushed himself groggily to his feet, trying to work out what he was doing here, a crumpled heap in the teeming rain. He saw the bandstand and the playground. The strange child was no longer swinging. Mr Delaney was no longer taking shelter.
He walked nervously in the direction of the bandstand, clutching the welt on the back of his head. Once he reached it, he stopped in the centre of the decking and spun round.
He stopped.
A figure was lying on the ground three metres away. Perfectly still.
His hand fell, and he walked on.
He stopped a metre from the body, and now his hand was over his mouth.
Mr Delaney was identifiable only by his bow tie. His face was a mess, with five very distinct bullet wounds. He was clearly freshly dead because blood was still oozing from the flesh, and the rain was washing it away to reveal the full devastation of the impact. The shattered bone. The brain matter, clearly visible through the damaged forehead.
The driver staggered backwards. And as he looked up he thought he saw something. Two figures, perhaps fifty metres away, disappearing into the rain-haze. A grey man, one arm around the shoulders of the boy from the swing.
A moment later they were gone. The driver didn’t dare chase them. He ran back to his car, grabbed his phone with trembling hands, and called for help.
TWENTY-FIVE
An old, thin man shivered in the dark. He was naked, and had been for days. He did not know for sure where he was, but he assumed it must be America. Nowhere else could he be treated to such satanic torture.
He was underground. He knew that because, having arrived in this place by helicopter, he had been forced down a flight of stairs and had not ascended since. There were two rooms down here: the cell in which he now sat, with its ice-cold concrete walls and the overpowering stench of rancid, mouldering human waste from where he had been forced to defecate and urinate in one corner; and the other room, which he had learned truly to fear, and where they had taken him when he first arrived.
It looked rather like a hospital room. There was a bed in the centre with a rack of machines beside it to monitor vital signs. Steel cabinets along the walls contained an enormous variety of chemicals to be injected and implements with which to inflict pain in precise, measured quantities. They had stripped him naked the moment he arrived and strapped him to that bed. Then they had shaved him. Not just his head and beard, but also his pubic hair, the hair around his anus, the hair on his chest, his arms, his legs. He was bald and humiliated by the time they threw him in the cell. Now the hair had started to grow back, sharp and stubbly. If they needed a patch of truly bald skin for one of their tortures, it was their habit to rip the stubble away using a wax patch – the sort of thing Western whores used upon their intimate areas.
And the tortures. Such tortures.
He had thought he would think of Allah and withstand them. And at first he had. He had always known there was a possibility of such a fate awaiting him, and he was prepared for it, or so he believed. But these Americans had a gift for cruelty he could never have imagined. Now his body had been cut and punctured in a hundred places; they had injected him with compounds that set his veins on fire, and others that turned them to ice. They had driven needles into the roof of his mouth and through the centre of his joints, and cracked his bones with clinical precision. They had used electricity. They had beaten and crushed his genitals.
They had kept him awake with loud music. They had locked him in his cell for twenty hours between tortures, and then only for twenty minutes, so he never knew when it was going to come. They had shown him pictures: mutilated corpses, Western pornography, blasphemous images of the Prophet.
They had starved him, then laughingly offered him only pork to eat. They had offered him cool water when he was thirsty, only to snatch it away when it was near his lips. They had thrown him into that unclean corner of the cell where he was forced to relieve himself so that for days now his skin had been covered in stinking dried excrement and his captors were forced to approach him wearing latex gloves and surgical masks.
But worse than all this, they had kept him alive: daily antibiotic injections, a saline drip that hydrated him but did not relieve his constant thirst. The same doctor was always on hand, there to ensure that he always remained the right side of consciousness. The right side of the death he would have welcomed.
To start with, they did not even ask him any questions. He understood why. They wanted to break him first. When, eventually, they did – two days in, perhaps, maybe three – they seemed only to focus on questions to which they knew the answer. If he responded correctly, he was given a sip of water. If incorrectly, a swift, brutal punishment. He became grateful for the former and fearful of the latter.
They tried to confuse him with their questioning, pretending he had given answers he had not given. They had burst into his cell when he was on the verge of sleep, screaming questions at him, demanding answers. They had injected him with substances that made him drowsy and confused, eager to be compliant, reluctant to fight. It was during one of these periods that a new face had appeared: the well-fed, fattened face of a man in horn- rimmed glasses and wearing a neat little bow tie. He had stood over the bed, looking down with interest as the room swam, but he had not appeared again.
He had been wrong to think he could withstand it. They had broken him completely. He had told them everything. He had given them names; described places. He could not think how they knew about the plane attacks, but he told them about those, too. His final act ruined. Anything to stop the torment.
Anything for the death these Americans were denying him. Their final act of revenge for the glorious eleventh.
The door to his cell opened. A figure stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the light behind him. The sound of the door opening always made him jump. He jumped now, then trembled even more violently as the figure stood there in silence. What fresh hell did they have for him now? They had bled him dry. He had no more to give them.
The figure spoke. ‘Time for your burial at sea, you piece of shit,’ he said.
Burial at sea? His English was not good, but even when he had worked out what the silhouette had said, he didn’t understand it.
