25

The abandoned cement works were on the site of an exhausted quarry a thirty-minute drive north of Oxford. Towers had suggested it as a suitable venue for the interrogation and had assured Black that he wouldn’t be disturbed. Black had taken him at his word.

The entrance to the narrow access road was unsigned and almost invisible between encroaching verges. Black left the A road and turned on to it. He continued for a third of a mile over crumbling tarmac as far as a set of locked plate-metal gates at the entrance to the redundant site. Here he turned right along a rough service track that ran along the outside of a perimeter fence. He had recced on foot two evenings before and been pleased at how overgrown the track had become. The hedge separating it from the neighbouring fields hadn’t been cut in several years and in places springy overhanging boughs extended from one side to the other. He nursed the van along, branches scraping noisily along its side and knee-high weeds dragging at the undercarriage.

After a further quarter of a mile he arrived outside a smaller set of wire-mesh gates smothered with bindweed and bramble where he pulled up. He climbed out to fetch a pair of bolt cutters and check on his passengers. The sound of the door sliding open caused them both to flinch. It was a good sign: they were alert. He studied them for a short while, like animals in a cage. Their breathing accelerated as they sensed danger. They also stank. Fear did that to people – it had a rank quality all of its own. He hoped he could make quick work of it.

Black drew the door closed again, stamped down the brambles and placed the blades of the bolt cutters around a link in the short length of hardened steel chain holding the gates together. Bracing one of the thirty-inch handles against his body, he pulled the other towards him. The blades bit but the power of his arms alone wasn’t sufficient. It was always the most trivial problems that threatened to foul things up. Cursing the delay, he retrieved the remainder of the tow rope from the holdall.

He tied one end of the rope to the upright of the gate six feet from the ground and employing a series of simple climbing knots and loops created a crude pulley system that allowed him to double his bodyweight in order to force the arms of the cutters together.

The stubborn link snapped with a satisfying clink.

He moved the blades to the other side of the link and repeated the process. The broken chain fell away.

He was in.

Black parked the van behind a crumbling brick wall and climbed out to take in the strange surroundings. The scene resembled those in photographs he had seen of the post-Chernobyl ghost town of Pripyat. It was hard to imagine that he was within minutes of commuter villages and the prosperous market town of Kidlington. The crude concrete mixing tower in which imported minerals had been combined with crushed limestone from the nearby abandoned quarry was sprouting grass and weeds from its many cracks and fissures. The several surrounding acres that had once been the factory yard had been broken up by successive winters and was slowly reverting to scrub. Rectangular ponds that had played some part in the industrial process were filled with thick, matted algae and cast in semi-shadow by dense clouds of circling midges. The impression of desolation was completed by the decaying hulk of a tipper lorry sitting on flat, perished tyres.

Black stepped through the empty doorway to the deserted building and entered an area roughly fifty feet long and thirty wide. The floor was strewn with rubble and broken glass. Where once there had been a steel staircase leading to several upper floors, rusting stubs of ground-off metal protruded from the walls. In the centre of the room were the remains of the three-storey-high mixing mechanism which had been fed at each level with different materials brought in from the outside by conveyor belts. He approached the circular guard rail surrounding it and peered down through the foot-wide gap between the edge of the floor and the mixer’s cylindrical body. A glint of natural light partially illuminated an even lower level at which the finished cement must have emerged. Curious, he went to investigate further.

The ground sloped downwards from the front to the rear of the tower, where Black found an open doorway at the entrance to a passageway some ten feet wide. Running along the length of its left-hand side was an open-topped horizontal chute made of galvanized steel that sat on a raised concrete plinth. In the centre of the chute was a rusting auger whose corkscrew motion would have pushed the finished cement from the base of the mixing mechanism outside to waiting delivery lorries.

He stepped inside. The air was damp and musty, the walls spotted with mildew. It was exactly what he needed.

Liberals and humanitarians (the HRBs, or Human Rights Brigade, as Freddy Towers had always referred to them) had long claimed that physical torture was no more effective at extracting information from a prisoner than polite questioning across a desk. To a certain extent it was true, but only up to a point. To be successful hands-off interrogation required time in which to build rapport and resources with which to offer incentives: friendship and reward were a persuasive combination. But the hard fact was that when searching for a ticking bomb or a sleeper cell about to spring into action, bonhomie and offers of used banknotes were of little use. Quick results called for brutal methods.

It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon when he brought first Quinn, then Clayton, into the tunnel beneath the mixing tower at gunpoint. Keeping their hoods on, he spread their hands and feet wide apart and tied them by lengths of rope to the rusty auger. He lifted their hoods above their mouths but not their eyes, removed the duct tape and allowed them each a sip of water. Clayton drank calmly and silently. Quinn gasped and spluttered, then groaned in protest as Black replaced the tape and pulled the hoods back down.

Then he left them, closing the door behind him so that they were confined in total darkness. Standing bent over and spread-eagled with legs, backs and shoulders aching, even the most hardened terrorists would invariably crack within four hours. Only those intent on becoming martyrs tended to last longer. Such cases provided a different order of challenge: they would have to taste death, then life, then death, then life again before they decided which they preferred. Black had no fear of either Quinn or Clayton wishing to be a martyr.

He waited in the cab of the van listening to the radio and watching swallows swoop through the clouds of flies above the stagnant ponds. A pair of rabbits emerged and grazed on clumps of scrub growing out of the decaying yard. Life was determined to continue its normal course. Life had no guilt or conscience. These were strictly human afflictions.

Shortly after five p.m. Black re-entered the tunnel, bringing a pair of industrial ear defenders – the last unused item in his holdall. He placed them over Clayton’s hooded head. At first glance the big man appeared to be holding up well. His hands were braced firmly against the auger, shoulders solid. Then Black noticed the tremor in his legs. The screaming muscles would be near the end of their resources and beginning to cramp. Before long, they would give way beneath him, but even so, without the ability to stretch them out, neither the pain nor the cramps would stop. He left Clayton to cook and turned his attention to Quinn.

The younger man’s legs had already collapsed. He was slumped forward with his head resting uncomfortably on the auger and most of his bodyweight supported by his chest where it crossed the lip of the chute. His breathing was fitful, his body trembling and his clothes soaked with urine. Suppressing his disgust at the sight, Black lifted the hood as far as his nose, removed the duct tape from his mouth and pulled the hood down again. Quinn gulped in air with such force that the cotton laundry bag clung to the contours of his face.

‘I don’t want you to suffer a moment’s more discomfort than you have to, Mr Quinn,’ Black said evenly. ‘You should already have gathered that this is most definitely not a training exercise. You are being interrogated over your involvement in the recent disappearance of four British scientists. You will have become familiar with their research during the course of your work. You should also be under no illusions about the lengths to which I am prepared to go to ascertain the truth. Do you understand?’

Quinn gave a jerky nod.

‘Are you familiar with the work of Dr Sarah Bellman?’

No reaction.

‘Mr Quinn?’

The prisoner’s head twitched. An attempt at another nod, perhaps. His breathing was wheezy and laboured.

‘I will release you unharmed, Mr Quinn, and, indeed, if you prove sufficiently helpful, you may even escape prosecution, but in order for that to happen I need you to tell me who you have been passing information to and for what purpose. Do I make myself clear?’

Quinn’s body convulsed like a landed fish. Then, suddenly, he stood upright, his shoulders thrusting backwards as if in a desperate effort to drag air into his lungs.

Responding on instinct, Black unfastened the hood and ripped it from Quinn’s head. The sight that met him was horrible. The young man’s eyes bulged from their sockets and his lips were blue. Black had seen this several times before among prisoners in Iraq – an attack of nervous asthma brought on by the stress of prolonged confinement. Quinn’s efforts to draw oxygen through his restricted airways were proving futile. Black quickly untied his hands. Quinn’s body slumped, forcing Black to catch him. He lowered him to the ground, untied one ankle and laid him out on the dusty floor.

Quinn’s eyes were glazing over and he was no longer fighting for breath. Black placed his circled thumbs and forefingers over his open mouth and attempted CPR. The air filled Quinn’s mouth but penetrated no further. His constricted lungs refused to inflate. Black tried again and again, but the airway was closed tight shut. He switched to chest compressions, pounding Quinn’s sternum with the flats of his hands, hoping that by some miracle his nervous system could be rebooted at the point of death.

Five minutes and several hundred compressions later, Black paused to wipe away the sweat dripping into his eyes and noticed a solitary fly land on Quinn’s lower lip. It paused, as if to assure itself that all signs of life had departed, then crawled inside his open mouth.

Black stared at the corpse, scarcely able to comprehend. One minute the prisoner had been alive and complaining and the next he was dead.

He had done what he had hoped never to do again.

He had killed a man.

Crouched over the lifeless body he waited for something to happen. It occurred to him that his mind might implode under the weight of his conscience. But it remained clear and strangely absent of emotion. Dust circled in the shaft of light coming from the doorway and outside the birds continued to sing.

Black rose to his feet in a strange state of almost peaceful detachment, rolled his stiff neck from side to side and turned his attention to Clayton. He pulled off the ear defenders and hood. Clayton winced and blinked as his eyes adjusted to the light. His clammy face was blue with stubble and his thinning hair plastered to his skull. He was weak, dehydrated and quite probably in more pain than he had ever known.

‘I’m afraid your colleague didn’t make it. Asthma.’

Clayton followed Black’s gaze to the body lying eight feet to his right. Black watched his eyes widen in alarm.

‘I take it you would like to see your family again, Mr Clayton?’

Clayton’s gaze remained fixed on Quinn’s lifeless form.

He was good. Black guessed that he was still in sufficient possession of his faculties to be able to calculate that being the only one left alive, he was unlikely to suffer the same fate. And this in turn would give him hope and strength to resist, or at any rate, prolong his ordeal.

Black was in no mood for waiting. ‘Excuse me, Mr Clayton.’

He walked over to Quinn’s body, untied the remaining rope attaching it to the auger, then hoisted it over his shoulder. Adjusting to the heavy weight, he made his way slowly to the door and leaving it open so that Clayton could follow his progress, carried it outside. He made it as far as the first pond and heaved it over the edge. He stepped back and watched it sink slowly beneath the thick layer of green sludge. A few residual bubbles rose to the surface and then the dense mat of algae closed in again.

The demonstration was effective.

Black returned to find Clayton suspended from his bound wrists, his knees tantalizing inches from the ground. His face was a picture of unbearable pain. Still Black was aware of a disconcerting absence of pity or sympathy. He regarded his prisoner with the same clinical curiosity with which a surgeon might appraise an anaesthetized patient.

‘In a moment I’m going to remove the tape from your mouth, Mr Clayton, and if you wish for it to remain off, you will give me the name of the person to whom you have been passing information in exchange for payment. Will you do that for me?’

Clayton clamped his eyes tight shut and nodded.

‘And when I have that name I will let you sit and you can give me your full statement. Only when I have that statement will I return you to your family. If you choose not to cooperate, you will be joining Mr Quinn. Do I have your assurance that you will cooperate?’

Another nod. His eyes were pleading and pathetic. He was broken.

Black took hold of the tape and gently peeled it away from his mouth. Clayton’s head lolled backwards as he gasped in relief.

Black closed his hands around Clayton’s throat and applied the slightest pressure to his Adam’s apple. ‘Your contact’s name.’

He felt Clayton tense, the sinews protruding from his neck. The last show of resistance.

‘Drecker,’ he whispered. ‘Susan Drecker.’

A woman. Droplets of blood from three assailants, two male, one female. Towers’ report of Finn’s post-mortem had included the surprising fact that one of Finn’s killers was female.

‘Nationality?’

‘American … I think.’

‘You’re not sure?’

‘No … But she sounds American.’

‘And who does she work for?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t play games with me, Mr Clayton.’

‘A company … That’s all I know.’

‘She works for a corporation, not a state? You’re sure about that?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how much has she paid you?’

Clayton swallowed. A sign that Black had hit a nerve. ‘One hundred thousand dollars.’

Tears spilled down Clayton’s cheeks. It made a pathetic sight. The tears of a man whose life, once so full of promise, had come to nothing. He hadn’t even been well paid for his treachery.

Black released the bonds from his wrists and let him slump to the floor, allowing him a moment to recover himself before they started on the statement.

‘Shall we begin?’