The afternoon wore on, and the sense of isolation and confinement yawned inside him. You’ll suffer mood swings, the CAC instructor had lectured. Despair, rage, euphoria at any sign of hope. Develop a routine. Exercise, meditate. Keep yourself on an even keel. He kept telling himself they would not kill him, and the image of Hamed’s bloodied, twitching body kept reminding him how it would be if they did.
The strip of light from above the door was replaced by an elongating bar of hazy yellow from the window. It crept over his mattress and started to spread up the wall. At least I’ll always know what time it is, James thought. There was no breath of air now, and the yellow curtain hung motionless, thin as tissue paper before a blazing sky.
‘You come! Come!’
The older guard was standing in the doorway. He carried a Beretta Tomcat in a holster on his belt. The younger man had an AK47 which looked several thousand rounds past the end of its useful life.
‘Come now!’
The guard grabbed James by the arm. He was strong with an iron-hard grip, but he couldn’t pull James to his feet with one hand. He released him with a hiss of impatience, handed the Tomcat to his fellow guard, then took James’s arm with both hands. I could have the pair of you laid out cold in less than twenty seconds, James thought. The younger guard had jammed the handgun into his waistband and was holding the AK47 up like a trophy. Did he have any idea that at close quarters an automatic rifle is rather less useful than a shovel?
Make your captors believe that you do not pose any threat.
‘Don’t hurt me,’ James whined, cowering and shielding his head as the older guard propelled him through the door. They followed a concrete path down a short passage in one corner of the yard and arrived at a steel gate. The older guard whistled and they stood and waited while one of the blue-overalled men came and unlocked them – a task he completed with an insulting lack of urgency. The razor wire was fixed to the wall on either side of the gate, forming a corridor that led to the compound beyond. The four dogs loped over and stood stock still, watching until they had cleared the wire and moved on into the compound. James kept his head down and breathed steadily: the sooner the dogs learned to ignore him, the better.
When he looked up, he saw a set of buildings that wouldn’t have looked out of place on an army base outside Aldershot. Ahead of him was a two-storey barracks with the rim of a satellite antenna projecting from the roof. Behind it was a cylindrical water tank mounted on an iron frame. Over to his right, separated from the barracks by a fifty-yard square of roughly laid concrete slabs, stood a larger building – an administration block of some kind, he guessed, full of offices and function rooms. It had a set of double doors shaded by a slab of concrete on steel poles. Above the doors hung a black, red and green flag he didn’t recognise.
The whole of the compound occupied perhaps twenty acres of packed dirt and sand. Beyond the barracks to the south was a fourth building, a big modern warehouse with ridged steel sides. There were two guards out front, reclining under a yellow parasol – they looked like they’d just looted a homewares store and decided to take a nap on the way home. Behind their backs, rendered fuzzy by the steel links of the perimeter fence, the dun-coloured desert pulsed irritably in the early evening heat.
They led him past a concrete bunker and on towards a door in the end wall of the barracks. A woman was standing outside, scraping out the remains from a large enamelled pot, and three men in blue overalls were playing cards at a plastic table. They stopped to stare at James and his guards, and one of them made a jeering remark. The other two laughed and slapped the table. His guards ignored them and took James through the door and up steel stairs to the first floor. He heard music – a melancholy female voice accompanied by a dance beat – and the sound of a shower running. Through an open door, he glimpsed coils of wiring spewing from the ceiling, half-empty bags of sand and cement, and a steel table with a set of new office chairs shrouded in plastic. The door at the far end of the corridor had been dust-proofed with a thick layer of felt around the inside of the frame. His escort banged it with the flat of his hand and after a moment James heard the click of a lock and three bolts being slid back. The door swung open. The older guard directed him inside, then slammed it shut behind him.
‘Good evening, Dr Palatine. My name is Rakesh Nazli. May I welcome you to my lab.’
A tall man of about his age, in a clean white T-shirt, jeans and brown leather mules. He had plump, acne-scarred cheeks, a delicate mouth and large brown eyes with milky whites that gleamed in the semi-darkness. Jet black hair was drawn back from a sloping forehead, ending in short, glossy curls at his collar. He was handsome, in the placid, well-fed manner of a second-rate Bollywood film star.
‘Please, sit down. I hope you’re being looked after OK?’
An American accent with a hint of Ivy League condescension, the weary drawl of someone accustomed to being the smartest person in the room. James took the proffered white plastic chair and sat. The room was lit by the evanescent glow from an array of monitors and a dim bulb under a dirty white plastic shade which hung over Nazli’s desk. The only window had been adapted to house an air-conditioning unit that shuddered ineffectually – the room was hot.
His host locked the door, tossed the key into an open drawer of his desk, then settled in a grey upholstered swivel chair. James studied the contents of the drawer: notebook, pens, cable adapters, and what looked like the handle of a screwdriver.
‘I guess your journey over here was not too pleasant?’ A hank of hair fell forward over one eye and Nazli swept it back, then tugged his small, fleshy nose between thumb and forefinger.
‘I’ve been paralysed by a Taser, sapped and drugged to the point of coma,’ said James. ‘And one of the men who arranged it was butchered outside my window. Not pleasant doesn’t do it justice.’
‘It was necessary to bring you here, and this was the way that was found, I guess. You have a shower and other facilities?’
‘He lay in the dirt while your friend Mansour hacked at him with a sword. And you ask me if I’m happy with my shower?’
James was conscious that the soles of his feet were pressing the floor, that the muscles of his legs and back were poised and his mind was clear: the state Sam Hu Li taught him to seek when preparing to attack.
Don’t. Not yet.
‘I’m just saying that if there is anything you need for your personal comfort, you must please let me know.’
Why was Nazli prattling about his personal comfort? James gripped his chair seat until its sharp plastic edges cut into his fingers.
‘This has come as a shock to you, of course. Let me kick off by explaining the setup here.’
Go on then, thought James, you explain and I’ll hold on to this chair. Not that it needed much explaining. It was a computer science lab, the sort of room in which he’d spent much of his working life. There was a Sun server, worth a minimum of twenty grand depending on how it was configured, half a dozen desktops arranged on steel racks, and two routers sprouting thickets of cabling, some of it fibre optic and fat as an index finger. Nazli gabbled on about software architectures, bandwidth and throughput, and James succeeded in suppressing the compulsion to kill him.
‘We have a GEC 7000 satellite dish on the roof,’ his host was saying. ‘So you see, we are pretty well provided for.’
Who was paying for this stuff? The GEC would provide a reliable satphone link but was excessive for a lab this size – capable of locating the data equivalent of a needle in a haystack, as well as hoovering up the haystack itself and sending its secrets cascading down into Nazli’s den.
‘No cabling, unfortunately. We rely on the good heavens above.’
Nazli grinned the tentative grin of a man who believes himself to have been witty but isn’t sure. His teeth were not as white as the rest of his face suggested they should be. He jabbed his finger upwards at the rooftop antenna, in case James had missed the point. James couldn’t muster a sufficiently mis
erable quip to offer in return. His desire to find out what grand scheme was gestating in this sultry little room was making this chit-chat hard to endure.
‘What’s it all for?’ he said when Nazli’s smile had faded. ‘Who set you up here? And where is here?’
James looked into Nazli’s eyes for some sign that an illuminating response might be assembling itself within, but there was none. Instead, Nazli reached beneath his desk and produced a large bottle of fluorescent orange soda with a plastic cup over the cap. He set the cup on his desk, filled it carefully to the brim, then drank.
‘I can’t answer any questions, Dr Palatine.’
‘Then what? We just sit here staring at each other?’
‘You are here to help me configure and operate some technology we have acquired.’
James thought back gloomily to his phone call with Sir Peter Beddoes. ‘You have Little Sister.’
‘Little Sister? That is your project name for the IPD400?’
‘Reminds me what a rotten thing it is,’ said James.
‘A play on Big Brother, of course.’ Nazli looked delighted with himself. ‘Yes, our job is to get Little Sister operational. When the work is done, you’ll be paid and taken home.’
‘That isn’t what happened to Hamed.’
Nazli reached for his stray lock of hair and smoothed it neurotically with his fingertips. ‘That had nothing to do with this project.’
‘How about I smash Little Sister to bits and strangle you in your chair? They’d kill me then, right?’
‘They have no reason to want you dead.’
‘They?’
Nazli pinched his nose.
‘From what I’ve seen, they are the sort who enjoy torturing their victims until the blood runs from their eyes.’
Nazli adopted the manner of a man being unfairly harangued. He returned his orange soda to its place beneath his desk and stared down at his notebook. One leg was pumping up and down on the floor. The atmosphere in the little chamber was suddenly unbearably cloying.
‘You’d better show me you really do have it.’
Nazli went round behind the array of racks. James stood quickly, stepped to the desk, reached into the open drawer and closed his hand over the screwdriver. Nazli emerged backwards, dragging a wooden crate reinforced at the corners and tied with steel bands. James moved in behind his host’s back, easing the screwdriver into the pocket of his trousers with the heel of his hand.
‘Need a hand?’
‘Please, sit down.’
Nazli lifted off the lid, reached in and heaved out an aluminium case with ribbed sides and a black handle on top. He lowered it gingerly onto the table and straightened it carefully, fussing over its alignment like a man positioning a new television set.
‘Recognise this, Dr Palatine?’
He bloody well should recognise it. He’d made the case himself, adapting it from one made for an old 35mm movie camera. He could disarm each of the security devices embedded in the system to prevent unauthorised use. He knew every micron of circuitry by heart, and could explain both the theoretical and practical details of every solution that had been engineered to every technical obstacle encountered during its design and assembly. He could describe its operation, its capabilities and limitations, its most ingenious features and its ugliest fixes.
‘I hope you didn’t pay too much for it,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t work.’
‘It’s a prototype, of course. We know there will be issues to address.’
‘That’s what they told you, is it?’
‘You yourself have said that the technology is proven,’ said Nazli. ‘So has Dr Vanic.’
‘A lot of money was spent. It was expected.’
Nazli walked over to the door and banged hard with the flat of his hand. ‘I have kept you too long. The doctor said to take it easy for the first day.’ He turned and shouted through the door: ‘Salif! Younes!’
Footsteps along the corridor, then a knock. Nazli unlocked the door. James remembered another thing from the Conduct After Capture course: Demand to be treated with respect. He stared hard into his host’s pretty-boy eyes.
‘Get me a toothbrush, will you, Rakesh? Oh, and I’d like a complimentary portion of fresh fruit with every meal.’
Chapter Six
Magda Podolski liked nothing better than lunch at Ivan Kaminsky’s with a fellow businesswoman. From its fourth-floor terrace one could hurl bucketfuls of hot scorn at the parade of yacht-gawpers on the harbour front below, and bucketfuls more at the objects of their gawps, lounging expansively on their polished teak decks, the desire to appear insouciant fighting a losing battle with the desire to show off. The terrace, Magda explained, was high enough that one could enjoy the sight of some blonde trophy pursing her lips like a cat’s ass because she wasn’t being treated as lavishly as she would have been if, say, she had been ten years younger and married to Brad Pitt, while remaining beyond reach of the yowling noise made by overfed hick-spawn campaigning for a Big Mac. She carried with her a pair of compact binoculars so that she could scour the promenade for choice examples of either tendency. She was doing so now.
‘Uh oh, here we go, bratz alert code red!’ she bellowed. ‘Can anyone tell me how she can sit in a force six wind with her hair absolutely stock still. That’s not a hairdo, that’s hair architecture. It’s fucking hair engineering!’
Magda was a former detective with the Washington Police Department who’d gone private when the challenge of defending all women, all homosexuals and all Poles from the accumulated wit and wisdom of DC’s finest lost its relish. For a while, she had worked in corporate espionage, ‘snooping for creeps and creeping for snoops’ as she called it. Grosvenor had hired her to unsettle a fledgling surveillance systems outfit that looked like winning a Mexican government contract they were after. She did better than unsettle it: she unearthed documents written by their head of software testing that showed they had faked the data needed to achieve legal compliance and they went out of business altogether. Soon afterwards, she decided to milk the rich saps of the West Coast instead, and within two years, she and her team were turning over $20 million a year.
While Magda watched the harbour, Nat told her about Grosvenor. Magda put down her binoculars and swelled with outrage. She wasn’t a beautiful woman, but there was majesty in her rhomboid nose and broad-set brown eyes.
‘A girl like you should be running Grosvenor, not playing attaboy with the likes of Clive Silk and Sir Peter whatever the fuck his name is.’
‘Beddoes. Look, darling Magda—’
‘Darling Magda? I spy a curveball.’
Nat laughed, but it had been a mistake to open her appeal that way. She’d always been better at dealing with men than women.
‘Sorry, I’ll give it to you straight. Remember Tony Schliemann?’
‘Grey Tony? Grey hair, grey suit, grey skin, grey eyes, grey mind. Chief Procurement Officer for the SigInt peepers at the NSA? How could I forget him?’
‘You were working for San Hui and they beat us to the kill on an NSA tender I’d been working on. Their technology was three years out of date and their pricing was twenty per cent off. So how come they got the gig? You found out something about Grey Tony and San Hui used it to get the contract. Am I right?’
‘For the sake of the argument, sweetheart.’
‘Good. Tony owes me one and it’s payback time. He’s going to help me give Grosvenor the finger and set up on my own.’
‘How long do we spend in jail if you get caught?’
‘We won’t. Tony wants this deal and there’ll be a long round of back-slapping if he gets it. But I need to keep my name out of it. No one can know how he pulled it off and no one can know who helped.’
‘You want to plug his mouth with my San Hui dirt. And this earns you how much?’
‘Magda!’
‘OK, this earns me how much?’
‘You tell me: what do I have to pay to get Grey Tony wriggling beneath my heel
?’
‘Hold that thought, girl, it’s doing me good! OK, so I already have the evidence filed away at my lawyers’ – no need to run a new investigation.’
‘Money for nothing.’
‘Not quite,’ she said, tapping the table with a perfect oval of crimson-varnished fingernail. ‘If San Hui hear about this, they will be pissed. Tony is already pissed. He’ll guess where this information has come from and he’s not going to take it well.’
‘He knows you did the San Hui work?’
‘Sure he does. The Koreans are complicit in a corrupt procurement, so he’s safe from that quarter. But you blindside him with this stuff, he’s going to start wondering what kind of retirement will be provided for him by the private gated community of San Quentin State Penitentiary. And he’ll be thinking, how can I hurt that Podolski bitch.’
‘Maybe it’s too risky.’
‘I didn’t say that.’ She thought for a moment. ‘One time use only – you get your deal, that’s it, you unpin Grey Tony from your stiletto and the story is dead. The file stays with my lawyers.’
‘Agreed.’
‘For the information, and the risk: sixty grand.’
‘Christ, Magda, I thought you were doing me a favour? Make it ten, will you?’
‘I am doing you a favour, sweetie, I’m slapping a sign saying “Shoot here!” right in the middle of my big ol’ butt.’
‘What about this: if Grey Tony comes through, I’ll give you one per cent of the deal value.’
‘Points are good, but you have to tell me what the deal is worth.’
Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel) Page 9