Stealing People

by Robert Wilson

  She was pleased because all she had to do now was file this report and in less than three months her last tour of duty would be over. She would be retiring from military intelligence, leaving the army and taking six months off to get married to her girlfriend and go on an extended honeymoon around Argentina. On her return she was finally going to use her Cambridge law degree and was starting a job with a law firm specialising in human rights. She was as happy as any soldier could be under the circumstances that prevailed in Afghanistan.

  They were the lead vehicle, travelling at forty miles per hour on the completely flat desert terrain. The tarmac road was taking them into what had become the new HQ of British forces in Helmand in August last year after they handed over Lashkar Gah to the Afghan troops. There were some lights up ahead on the road. Cook’s driver slowed and radioed back to the vehicle behind.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ he asked.

  ‘Fuck knows,’ said Cook. ‘But it won’t be the Taliban out here and it’s too early in the year for the opium growers.’

  ‘There’s an American flag,’ said the driver. ‘You think they’re in trouble?’

  ‘OK, let’s stop, see what they want,’ said Cook. ‘Tell the others to keep their distance for the moment.’

  An obviously American-looking soldier in full combat uniform was holding up his hand in the middle of the road and swinging a light in front of him. The driver pulled up. It was cold, maybe just below zero, and the soldier’s breath was visible in the light. From behind him came five men also in combat gear.

  One man went to the driver’s side while two came to Cook’s window, which she rolled down. The others continued to the vehicle behind.

  ‘Can I help you, gentlemen?’ she said, knowing how formal Americans, even soldiers, liked to be.

  ‘Is your name Captain Jennifer Lucy Cook?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Would you step out of the vehicle, please, ma’am?’

  ‘Only if you tell me what it’s about.’

  ‘The opium trade.’

  ‘What exactly do you mean?’

  ‘The CIA are currently interrogating a warlord on the growth of opium crops in Helmand and Nimroz provinces and we have been advised that you could provide substantial background material that would enable us to prosecute this man.’

  ‘That might be true, but do you have to stop me in the middle of nowhere? Can’t it wait until I’ve got back to Camp Bastion and had a shower and cleaned up? I’ve been on the road for a week.’

  ‘This is urgent, ma’am. My orders come from Colonel Mark Rodgers of the CIA. We have a helicopter waiting to take you to Camp Leatherneck.’

  ‘Here? Now?’

  ‘That’s right, ma’am.’

  ‘And presumably you have permission from my commanding officer in Camp Bastion?’

  ‘From Brigadier Martin Jenkins himself,’ said the soldier.

  Cook looked at her driver, who knew that the soldier had not given the correct name, and suddenly there were two rifles in the cockpit of the vehicle, inches from their noses.

  ‘Out of the vehicle, ma’am.’

  Cook eased herself slowly out of the now open door. Two of the soldiers marched her off into the darkness. There were shots, and the two British vehicles sagged on flat tyres. Two further shots finished the radios.

  The Americans withdrew. Their vehicles took off into the night. Some time later, the British soldiers heard the sound of a helicopter.

  ‘I’m very sorry you had to watch that footage of your son,’ said Forsyth. ‘How is your wife?’

  ‘She has gone to the hospital,’ said Yermilov. ‘She fell over and hit her head when she saw what they were doing to my little Yury.’

  ‘I hope she’s all right.’

  ‘Just a slight concussion. She will be under observation for the night.’

  ‘I wanted to ask if you knew a guy called Boris Bortnik, who works for a Moscow mafia—’

  ‘I know of Boris Bortnik. What has he got to do with this?’

  ‘We believe that this kidnap gang is being run by a man called Conrad Jensen, and we understand that he made a payment to Boris Bortnik into an account in the British Virgin Islands called Kaluptein.’

  ‘Send me an email immediately,’ said Yermilov, waving at his men to go to the computer. ‘I will look into this.’

  ‘We don’t know how much money he received or what it was for.’

  ‘We will find out,’ said Yermilov, with a finality that chilled even Forsyth’s hot blood.

  Yermilov hung up and called two of Solntsevskaya’s most brutal enforcers in Moscow and told them they had an hour to find Boris Bortnik. Then he called his sponsor, the president’s banker, and asked him to investigate the Kaluptein account in the British Virgin Islands.

  23

  06.45, 17 January 2014

  Camp Leatherneck helipad, Helmand Province, Afghanistan

  Jennifer Cook was kept face down, gagged and hooded, hands cuffed behind her back, on the floor of a Russian-manufactured Mil Mi-17 helicopter, which touched down in Camp Leatherneck twenty minutes after she was taken on the road to Camp Bastion.

  A strange thing happened on landing. Rather than being marched from the helicopter, she was wrapped in a sheet, picked up bodily and carried by what felt like six men, who put her in the boot of some kind of personnel carrier and secured her arms and ankles. Having been scared before, she was really terrified by this development, as she realised now that she’d been brought in covertly. She still wasn’t even sure whether this was Camp Leatherneck or that these were bona fide American soldiers.

  The vehicle moved off and a few minutes later they started going through the procedure of leaving the camp, the men signing themselves out but making no mention of her. When she’d been on the road to Camp Bastion and guns had appeared in the cockpit of the Foxhound, she’d been unnerved. Once she was in the helicopter and landing in what she thought was Camp Leatherneck, she’d got a grip. But now that she knew for certain she’d been unofficially kidnapped, she had to make a conscious effort to control her terror.

  They drove for an hour in total silence. Only part of the journey was on tarmac road; the rest was on what felt like desert piste, with the noise of loose stones clattering against the bottom of the vehicle. They slowed and stopped. She was lifted from the vehicle and taken indoors, where she was unwrapped from the sheet and dropped on the floor. Hands picked her up, threw her into a metal chair and strapped her in. She was left alone, a wooden door slammed shut. She was still hooded and gagged, panting with fear.

  After some minutes she realised she was not alone in the room. Somebody was watching her. She listened, turning her head this way and that, and heard the chewing of gum. There was a rush of air and contact was made with the side of her head. So hard that blue lightning flashed across her brain and she keeled over on to her left side. She was immediately righted. More silence followed. Another rush followed by a terrible slap on the other side of her face, which made her neck crack and toppled her backwards so that her head flicked back on to the hard ground. She was righted again. Disorientated and shuddering, she didn’t know where the next—

  A boot thudded into her chest and she cannoned backwards, hitting a wall as she went down. This time she was left on the ground, lying on her right side, her wrist trapped painfully underneath her body, winded. She was rolled on to her back. The tie at her neck was loosened. A hand came under the hood, pulled out the gag. The hood was lowered and retightened around her neck. More silence apart from her own grunting as she relearnt how to breathe.

  The sound of a plastic water bottle top being ripped off, someone drinking from the neck. Then water was splashing onto the thick material of her hood so that it was quickly sodden and sticking to her face. The water kept coming so that air was difficult to come by and she started to panic at the lack of it. Hands clasped the sides of her head and the water kept coming and she knew she was dying, could already feel a deeper darkness
encroaching. The wildness of the terror that rose in her throat infected her brain, which was shot through with sadness at such a pathetic ending.

  The water stopped. She was pulled upright, the hood drawn back above her mouth and nose. Her lungs tore at the air, ripped it open, sucked in the oxygen.

  ‘What the fuck do you want from me?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘This is the new interrogation technique for military intelligence officers,’ said the voice, southern US accent, maybe Louisiana. ‘You invent your own questions. Give us the answers. We don’t like them. You go back under the hood and the water.’

  ‘But I don’t know—’

  ‘That’s the point. You do know.’

  ‘What do I know?’ she said. ‘I only know what you know. We’re allies, we share information, don’t we? You’re Americans … I liaise with INSCOM via Captain Rick Hewitt of the 297th Military Intelligence Battalion …’

  ‘This is nothing to do with MI in Afghanistan.’

  Silence from Cook, blinking under the hood, the panic rising in her throat. Suddenly she felt a face close to hers; the chewing gum breath worked its way through the wet cloth.

  ‘You gettin’ me now, Jeff ?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Bang! She was on her back again. Her head smacked into the earth floor, whose wetness she could now smell. Nausea rose from her stomach. Hands were at her waist, undoing her buttons, tugging down her trousers so that involuntary squeaks of terror and humiliation creaked in her throat.

  ‘We know you,’ said the voice. ‘We know you’re a commie piece of shit and you don’t like cock.’

  She was shuddering inside now, her guts quaking with vulnerability and the knowledge that this was something completely out of control; that if these were American soldiers, they were behaving a long way outside all normal procedures.

  ‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ she said, and she didn’t.

  ‘This is about London,’ said the voice. ‘Think about that while I give you some more water.’

  The water splashed down on her face, plastering the hood to her mouth. Immediately the air wasn’t there any more. She struggled against the horrible sensation of drowning, felt the storm-cloud darkness of dread creeping in. She wanted to kick out with her now bare legs, but they were strapped down and there was nothing in them anyway, gone to rags.

  Just as she found herself on the brink of asking for help from God, the water stopped. The hood came up to her nose. Light shimmered beneath her eyes. She tried to lap it up, her chest working like a bellows, her ribcage stretching the skin to splitting point.

  ‘You had time to think now, babe,’ said the voice. ‘Let’s hear your shit. Come on.’

  ‘About London,’ she said gasping. ‘I’m … trying …’

  ‘No need to try,’ said the voice. ‘You know, babe. There can be no doubt in your mind why you find yourself in this position. Now start comin’ through, kiddo. You don’t and this waterboarding is going to look like chickenshit. I got some hungry guys out there, haven’t been with a woman for some months. They’ll take it in turns, all together, every which way. You don’t want that, do you, babe?’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ she said. ‘What have I done? I don’t know what …’

  ‘Don’t ask me that question,’ said the voice. ‘Ask yourself and let’s have the fuckin’ answer. You got thirty seconds. Then I’m calling in the guys.’

  She swallowed. Couldn’t believe she’d found herself on the brink already. In training she’d been the most resistant to interrogation, but this guy had her on the edge after twenty minutes. She tried to remember how she’d got through it: by imagining a steel bar in her middle that she could grip so that nothing could shift her. But this was different. No rules here. Just as there wouldn’t have been any rules with the Taliban, except that these people weren’t the enemy.

  ‘Twenty seconds.’

  Or were they?

  The thought of her lover came into her mind. Carmen. Her sweetness. The sheer ghastliness of war had never reached her. They would lie together in the sunshine after a picnic and it was an immense relief to Jennifer that Carmen’s mind had never been bruised with anything like the bloody aftermath of an improvised explosive device. Its acronym, even its real name, didn’t communicate any of the horror of discarded limbs, random offal, seared flesh.

  ‘Ten seconds.’

  Could she allow herself to be brutalised? What purpose would it serve? Was it going to save the world? She quelled a rush of disgust at the prospect of her utter defilement; didn’t want it to get in the way of her pristine logic. It occurred to her, too, that they wouldn’t kill her. They knew she wouldn’t reveal anything to her commanding officer. All she had to do was balance the ethics in her mind. What was more valuable to her future? Carmen or what exactly?

  ‘Five seconds.’

  She searched herself for a sense of duty, until she realised that this was different.

  ‘Four.’

  She wasn’t betraying anybody but herself.

  ‘Three.’

  The personal weighed more than the political.

  ‘Two.’

  Her love mattered more than any belief.

  ‘One.’

  ‘I met a guy called Conrad Jensen.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You don’t need to know that.’

  ‘I don’t need to but I want to. Everything. Let’s have it, Jeff.’

  ‘I know a guy called Martin Fox who runs a British PSC in London called Pavis. Jensen approached him wanting some unusual personnel for a project. Fox remembered a conversation we’d had about the opium trade in Afghanistan and drug use in the military. He asked me if I knew someone who was trained, no longer serving, into drugs and could perform a straightforward piece of work. I said I knew a couple of people, but I wouldn’t talk to just anybody. I had to know the nature of the project and the person running it.’

  ‘Why would Fox even approach you with something like that?’

  ‘He makes it his business to know about people who can help him in the real world,’ said Cook. ‘Fox knows my elder sister. They went out with each other before he got married. My sister knows me very well. I have never denied my left wing beliefs and I’ve always had a subversive streak since I was at university.’

  ‘Why join the army?’

  ‘Perversity. I vehemently disagreed with the war in Iraq and I wanted to see things for myself from the inside. I was a committed socialist. I did not approve of Tony Blair. I had the misguided notion that I could make a difference.’

  ‘So you met Conrad Jensen through this Martin Fox guy?’

  ‘Not exactly. Jensen didn’t trust Fox. He didn’t want to work through him. He only wanted direct contact with me.’

  ‘How did you meet?’

  ‘We set up a dead drop. He was able to observe me and satisfy himself that I wasn’t working some other agenda. We met in St James’s Park in London.’

  ‘And he managed to persuade you that his project … I don’t know why you’re calling it that. He’s a fucking criminal. I mean, did he say you’d be participating in the kidnap of children?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. I wouldn’t have agreed to that. He told me he wanted to use my contact to kidnap a known adult drug user.’

  ‘You’re a lawyer,’ said the voice. ‘What the fuck’re you playing at?’

  ‘He said he couldn’t tell me his precise plan because it would be too dangerous to have me out in the world with that knowledge. His vision was to create a fairer society and to do that meant bringing about some sort of revolution. He said the difference with his revolution would be that it would not be started by the poor with nothing to lose rising up and violently attempting to assume power; rather it would come from the top down.’

  ‘Sounds like bullshit to me.’

  ‘He said he would not be seeking to make money out of the kidnap.’

  �
�The guy’s asked for a hundred and fifty million; he’s tortured children and he’s shot two guys so far. That sound like the velvet revolution to you?’

  ‘How do I know you’re telling me the truth?’

  ‘There’s nothing more we can do now,’ said Mercy. ‘You should come back with me. You shouldn’t spend the night alone.’

  She drove south, telling Boxer about the meeting with Forsyth. Boxer had nothing to say. They continued through Victoria and down to the river.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ said Mercy. ‘I don’t like it when you’re silent.’

  ‘I’m trying to work out why I don’t feel anything.’

  ‘It’s normal, just the mind’s way of coping with trauma. It puts you into a kind of emotional coma until you’re ready to take it. You function, but you don’t feel.’

  ‘That’s straight from the manual, isn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t expect to be able to apply the manual to yourself. You’re in shock. Nothing makes sense.’

  Silence again. They crossed the river at Vauxhall. Boxer stared out of the window at the light playing on the black water, the MI6 building with its antennae towering into the orange night.

  ‘You never spoke to me about Isabel,’ said Mercy.

  ‘I didn’t speak to anyone about her, not even Amy.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was private. Nothing to do with anybody else.’

  ‘Not even the people who care about you?’

  ‘Not even the people who care about me.’