experience — or kicked in the ribs until he forced himself to his feet. ‘If you keep trying to delay us,’ a man had whispered in English to him, though with an oddly Latino accent, ‘we will simply kill you. It’s not you we need, and you know it.’ They had seen through his ploy immediately. He’d thought that by causing himself to fall more times than he did by accident, he might slow their progress and thus allow their pursuers to gain ground. ‘No one is coming now,’ the man had said with an air of certainty.
An hour later, perhaps two, Bernard had arrived, bleeding, panting, dehydrated, bruised from the captors’ boots, at another dusty roadside. There he and Greeves had been pushed and dragged into the rear of a pick-up. The road they travelled, at high speed, was badly corrugated. Dust entered the cab and found its way through the hessian weave to clog his nostrils and throat, and he was slammed into the unforgiving metal floor of the cargo compartment with every tortuous bump and pothole. Twice they had slowed to a stop and heard voices. Each time, Bernard had felt a blanket drawn over his body, the heat adding to his fears of suffocation, and felt the hard cylindrical metal imprint of a rifle barrel pressed against his temple under the covering. Police checkpoints? he wondered. It was difficult to hear what language was spoken, enclosed as he was in the back of the truck and smothered, but it wasn’t English and it didn’t sound like an African dialect. Portuguese? That was the language of Mozambique.
When they arrived at their destination he had smelled the sea. The air was cool on his bare arms and legs and it was a relief just to stop moving, and to stand there for a second or two and stretch his aching, battered limbs. The relief was short-lived. They had come for him once and said nothing. Two of them had dragged him across the slippery, polished concrete floor to another room, lain him on the bare squeaking wire frame of a bed, cable tied his ankles to the tubular metal foot of the bed, and laid into the soles of his already tortured feet with a cane. The tears had flooded the inside of his hood, though the tape had muffled his screams. They didn’t ask him a single question — didn’t speak a syllable.
He’d had the lecture on resistance to interrogation as part of his training as a naval officer deployed overseas on sensitive operations. He knew the techniques the men were employing, but that didn’t make them any easier to bear. He was being disorientated, kept in the dark in a state of sensory deprivation. He was being kept off balance — he knew nothing of what they wanted from him, so he couldn’t develop a means of misleading them. He had already learned to associate the sounds of footsteps with pain. He had been humiliated already — he had pissed himself out of sheer necessity. When the footsteps came again he’d try hard not to void his bowels in fear, but he couldn’t trust himself not to.
He heard the scream, and it made his whole body start.
Again. An animal noise, but coming from a man. From Robert Greeves.
‘Never!’ Greeves yelled.
Bernard had heard dull thuds and another scream — even more high-pitched than the last. There had been muffled voices, sometimes raised, followed by defiant profanity, yelled by his urbane, educated political master. The bastards. More wailing.
The noise of water being poured, an open palm slapping flesh. Had Robert passed out? Were they trying to revive him? Then silence.
Bernard’s heart pounded as he heard the footsteps. Doors opening and slamming shut. Footsteps getting louder. God help me, he prayed silently.
Two of them entered and grabbed him under the armpits. They dragged him — he couldn’t have walked if they’d let him — the tops of his toes burning from the friction on the polished floor, and lifted him onto a wooden chair.
Bernard blinked as the hood came off, his eyes seared by the unaccustomed light. The tape stung as it was quickly ripped off his mouth, but that was the least of his pains. He was at a desk, a man sitting opposite him, smiling. The face was dark — handsome, even — with a thick black moustache, Saddam style. A cigarette was smouldering in a tin ashtray, next to a small electronic device which looked like a portable DVD player. The room was otherwise unfurnished, the walls whitewashed but grubby. The windows were set in metal frames, but the light came from a bare overhead bulb; paper or plastic had been taped over the glass panes.
‘Leave us,’ the man said in English to the other two. Bernard blinked and looked over his shoulder at his captors. One wore jeans, the other three-quarter length cargo pants. Their shirts were plain cotton, one blue, one white. Both had ski masks on, but from their hands, and the ankles of the one in the shorter trousers, he could see they were black Africans. The men, who each had a mini version of an AK 47 slung over his shoulder, departed without a word.
‘Hello, Bernard.’
Joyce said nothing. From his brief training he recalled that he should give only what was known as the ‘big four’, and nothing more. The big four were name, rank, date of birth and service number. As he was no longer a serving naval officer, he decided to limit it to two — name and date of birth. For now, though, he said nothing.
‘Cigarette?’
He was about to say he didn’t smoke, then realised that would be breaking the first rule. ‘My name is Bernard Joyce and I was born on the sixteenth of November, nineteen seventy-four.’
The man laughed, and the noise echoed off the bare walls. ‘I don’t care, Bernard. And that’s the truth.’ He picked up the cigarette and drew deeply on it, blowing the smoke towards the ceiling. ‘Filthy habit, I know.’
‘My name is Bernard Joyce and I was born on the sixteenth of November, nineteen seventy — ’
The man held up a hand. ‘I need nothing from you, Bernard. I don’t need to know about your job as policy advisor to Robert Greeves. I don’t need to know about the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines, and I don’t need to know about your future plans for troop deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else for that matter. I don’t even need to know that you are homosexual, save for the fact that it is a useful detail — a good way of breaking a man down is to anally rape him, but perhaps that wouldn’t work on you. In fact, Bernard Joyce, born nineteen seventy-four, I don’t really need you at all.’
Bernard shifted in the chair. He felt sick to his stomach. The man wouldn’t have revealed his face if he had any intention at all of letting him live.
‘So here is my dilemma. What do I do with you, and can you be of any further use to me? You see, Bernard, you were insurance. In the unlikely event that Robert Greeves was killed in the abduction phase, you were to be my back-up hostage. But Robert, for the time being, is very much alive, if not too well at the moment.’ He smiled at his own cruel joke. ‘So you, my friend, are redundant.’
Bernard felt like he was going to shit himself. He wondered if this talk would end with a bullet in his head, or a slower, more barbarous fate. He needed to stay alive if he was to fulfil his duty as a former officer — to try to escape. He was as good as dead already, so he would not go peacefully.
‘What thoughts, I wonder, are going through your head now?’ The man waved the lighted cigarette in the air, as though punctuating his words with a question mark. ‘Will you become my Scheherazade, talking and talking now to keep yourself alive, trying to think of something to say that will keep me from killing you? Or will you try to escape, risk your life on a futile gesture, but go out fighting, as the Americans would say?’
Bernard said nothing. The man leaned across the table and flipped open the screen of the portable disc player. ‘There are many ways to fight a war, Bernard, as I’m sure you know. My people, the people oppressed by the Israelis, the British, the Americans and their puppets in Pakistan and the House of Saud, do not have nuclear submarines or jet fighters or B-52 bombers. My people are good at making the most of what they have. This little device — and the video camera in the next room — are what military people call force multipliers. Do you know what that means?’
Bernard did, but he was sticking, for the time being, with his say-nothing strategy.
The man sighed. ‘It means that I can inflict disproportionate damage on my opponent by using a tool which will enhance my meagre military resources. The media, Bernard, is a force multiplier, and one that my people are very good at using. As good as your submarines and jets and bombs are, your people are hopelessly inept at using the world’s press, radio and television to your advantage.’
If the conversation were being held over drinks in the Naval and Military Club, Bernard would probably agree with the man.
‘Now, Bernard, allow me to multiply the power of my words with some home videos.’
Bernard took a deep breath, then closed his eyes.
‘Open them, Bernard, or I’ll get one of my men to slice your eyelids off.’
Bernard blinked, looked at him again and swallowed. There was no smile on his face, just a deadpan look
