footnote, son, and I don't have time to waste on you. I've got a major operation to stage and this sideshow is holding me up.'
He turned back to face my dad.
'I had intended to torture your boy, make you beg me to stop, break you, force you to tell me everything you knew and then kill him in front of you,' said the general. 'But events have moved more quickly than I'd anticipated. I have new orders, and that's no longer necessary.'
Then he stepped to his left, reached out, and pulled the sheet away with a theatrical flourish to reveal an electric chair.
'So I'm going to skip to the end.'
The sun was half hidden by the horizon now. In a few minutes darkness would fall. The shadow of the electric chair stretched long across the marble. It was a curious thing, home made and jerry rigged. It was an ornate, tall backed ebony chair that probably once sat at the head of a grand dining table. Who knows, it may have been Saddam's. Thick metal wire had been wrapped around the arms and legs, leading to a plain metal bowl, once intended for eating out of, now pressed into service as the head contact. The four other contacts – two for the feet, two for the hands – were made of gold, some relic of Ba'athist luxury beaten with hammers and flattened into something far less elegant. It made sense, though; gold's the best conductor there is. Thick straps festooned the framework, ready to secure my body and limbs and ensure that contact was not lost when I thrashed and jerked as the current hit me.
'Please, I beg you, don't do this,' cried Dad. 'He's my son. Please, God, no.'
I tried to catch Dad's eye, tell him to stay calm, but it was getting too dark, and anyway it sounded like his eyes would be too full of tears to see clearly. The sound of my father begging for my life was the purest despair I'd ever heard. I wanted so much to tell him everything was all right, but I couldn't. The truth was, I was probably about to die, and he was going to have to watch it happen.
'Power up the generator,' shouted the general, and the man who'd brought me here emerged from the shadows and stepped outside. A moment later there was the sound of a large engine spluttering into life, faltering momentarily, then finding its rhythm and settling into its work.
'Strap him in.'
I felt strong hands grab me and force me towards the chair. I tried to resist, I screamed my furious defiance, but they were too strong and too many. One of them punched me hard across the face and my senses reeled. Then I was sitting in the chair, and my arms were forced down and strapped in place. My shirt was cut off and my boots removed. Then the straps were fastened across my chest, forehead and legs. My hands and feet rested on solid gold as I felt someone taking an electric shaver to my head, shaving off all my hair and smearing my raw scalp with conducting gel.
The sun was gone now, and twilight was fading fast. I heard someone pull a switch, and arc lights burst into life, flooding the room with cold white brilliance. My father, able to see me again, let out a feral cry of agony and screamed his fury into the echoing dome above us, where it reverberated and rebounded, briefly amplifying his defiance before fading away into hopeless, beaten sobbing.
The general stepped in front of me and said: 'any last words, son?'
'I am not your fucking son.'
'So be it.'
Then he crouched down beside a junction box and pulled a big red lever, releasing the current to fry me alive.
Chapter Five
'He gives them a choice,' Tariq had said, as we sat on the roof the night before.
'A choice?'
'Of execution.'
'You have got to be kidding me.'
'No. You can be shot, hung…'
'Hanged.'
'What?'
'Sorry, it's hanged, not hung.'
'Oh. Your father said hung.'
'Yeah, well. Hanged. I got this scar on my neck when I was hanged. I like to be grammatically correct about the forms of execution I survive. I'm a pedant. Sue me.'
'Okay,' said Tariq, rolling his eyes. 'Anyway, you can be shot, hanged, injected, or he's got this electric chair he's made.'
'Made?'
'Yeah, out of a big generator, a dining chair, some wires and a lot of gold.'
'Shit.'
'Your dad is going to be executed tomorrow. Blythe has decided he won't break, so he gave him the choice.'
'Shot,' I said immediately.
'Um, yeah, how did you know?'
'Dunno, just seems like the one he'd choose.'
'But we have a plan to rescue him and it depends on him changing his mind and sitting in the chair. Unfortunately our inside man can't get a message to him and tell him to change his mind.'
'So your plan is, what, I get captured and tell Dad to change his mind?'
'Perhaps. But I think it will not be so easy. Blythe will try and use you to get your father to break. So you may have to improvise.'
'Okay. No, wait, hang on. Your plan is that I get captured and then give Blythe an excuse to kill me – but not there and then, later, at his leisure – and I choose the chair?'
'Yes.' He saw the look on my face. 'I know.'
'That is a fucking useless plan.'
'I know, I know.'
'And who is your inside man?'
'Oh, that's the best bit…'
As the lever slammed home, the arc lights dimmed and flickered.
My back went rigid, I gritted my teeth as my eyes bulged out of my head. The veins in my temples strained to bursting point and the muscles in my neck stood out like ropes. I shook uncontrollably in the grip of the current.
Then I turned my head to General Blythe, smiled, winked, and said 'gotcha!'
The lights went out and darkness fell, but not for long.
The chain of high explosives that ringed the walls of the compound exploded one by one, like a string of enormous firecrackers, lighting the room with a blinding orange strobe.
I saw the man who'd turned on the generator run into the room, pistol raised. In his early twenties, dark skinned, of medium height and build, he was nothing to look at. Just another shaven haired grunt made anonymous by the shapeless uniform and regimented body language. But his face was a terrible mixture of fury and pain.
He picked off the guards one by one, calm and efficient, his gunshots timed exactly with the explosions, so it took the guards – those not already dead – a few moments to realise what was happening. And a few moments was all it took.
When the explosions finally ended, he and Blythe were the only men standing in the room, cast into sharp relief by the flickering fires that now raged outside.
'Put down the gun, son,' said the general.
'I'm not your son,' said the man with the gun.
'Yes, David, you are and you will do as I say.'
