Dirty Little Secret

by Jon Stock

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Can you give me your exact location?’

  ‘Northern France. We came by boat.’ She tried to listen again for Daniel and Jean-Baptiste’s voices, but heard nothing. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘We can trace this call if you stay on the line.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Stay with him, find out what he’s planning to do.’

  ‘There’s something else. I’m not sure, but –’

  ‘What?’

  She thought again about what she had heard. Maybe she had just imagined it. There was no time to explain. Daniel and Jean-Baptiste had been silent for too long.

  ‘I have to go.’

  She hung up, and deleted the call history. It wasn’t enough to fully cover her tracks, but it would be sufficient if nobody was looking. After putting the phone back on the chair, she climbed into bed. She should have told Spiro that Daniel had tried to turn Dhar, but perhaps she didn’t believe it herself. A part of her wanted it to be true. However shocking the implications, it made her own betrayal of Daniel easier to bear, more justified. She was no longer doing it solely in response to blackmail.

  If Daniel was helping Dhar with his jihad, she had no qualms about betraying him. Dhar had dedicated his life to destroying the country she called home. America had adopted her as one of its own, and she had promised to give something back. Wasn’t that why she had signed up to be a doctor? Why she had joined the Agency? Both men needed to be stopped.

  She closed her eyes and fell into a troubled sleep, unaware of the figure standing in the doorway.

  57

  ‘Are we ready?’ Spiro asked, striding into a small, well-lit room in Tor Jail. The brick walls were painted white and the floor was grey concrete. It was easy to clean, and disguised any bodily fluids that might have been missed. The room had no ceiling, just a metal grille. The jail was housed inside a vast hangar built by the Soviets as a workshop, and its span roof arced high above all the cells. It reminded Spiro of an old railway station, except that it echoed to the sound of pain rather than steam, and smelt strongly of excrement.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ an overweight Military Police guard replied, handing Spiro a clipboard. He noticed that the words ‘Fuck Islam’ had been tattooed across the knuckles of the guard’s hands. There was no military psychologist or lawyer present. Spiro had brought the interview forward without telling them. ‘The Hadgie’s had forty-eight hours of isolation, sleep-depped too.’

  ‘Music?’

  ‘2pac – “All Eyez on Me”.’

  ‘Now that’s just plain evil, forcing someone to listen to that. What’s wrong with Marilyn Manson?’

  The guard flinched for a moment before realising that Spiro was smiling. ‘He’s been shackle-standing for’ – the man checked his watch with professional pride – ‘three hours and twenty. Diaper last checked three hours ago.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Soiled.’

  ‘Get it changed. I don’t have to smell it to know Salim Dhar stinks of shit. Has he said anything yet?’

  ‘Not a word.’ The guard paused. ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘He’s not like the other BOBs.’

  Spiro had missed the crude lingo of the jail ghetto. BOB stood for ‘Bad Odour Boys’.

  ‘We gave him the usual welcome when he arrived, shaved off his beard, worked him over, strictly in accordance with our “shock of capture” routine.’

  Vicious dogs, screaming guards and strikes to Dhar’s body, Spiro thought. He knew the drill well. Make the first few hours of capture as terrifying and disorientating as possible, because that’s when a detainee is most likely to drop his defences. It didn’t take much. A well-aimed blow to the common peroneal nerve, just above the knee, could incapacitate the whole leg. Done repeatedly, it could necessitate amputation. Most people preferred to talk.

  ‘And?’ Spiro asked.

  ‘Heartbeat stayed around 60bpm. BP was 110/70. That’s weirdly low for someone in his situation. And he wasn’t showing any of the other usual stress indicators. I ain’t seen self-control like it. Whatever you say about him, the hadgie’s disciplined. Mind and body.’

  Spiro thought about this for a moment. He knew Dhar was going to be tough to break. It was why he wanted to do the job himself. He liked a challenge. He also owed it to Lieutenant Randall Oaks, a close friend and one of the six Marines who had been killed by the drone strike in North Waziristan. Spiro had personally ordered the attack, thinking the target was Dhar.

  ‘Is his mother here yet?’

  ‘Sir, there’s a problem with Dhar’s mother.’

  Salim Dhar’s mother had been renditioned to the UK from South India a few weeks earlier. Her presence in Bagram was crucial to the interrogation progress. She was Dhar’s weak point.

  ‘What sort of problem?’

  ‘We don’t know where she is. Nobody does.’

  Spiro had feared as much. He had put a call in to Denton earlier about the mother, and knew from his tone of voice that he was stalling. Fielding had insisted on taking custody of her. Unfortunately, Fielding was now on the run, last believed to be in Russia.

  Two minutes later, Spiro was on his phone, holding for Ian Denton.

  ‘Ian, it’s Jim. We need Dhar’s mother.’

  ‘That won’t be so easy,’ Denton said.

  ‘Are you telling me Fielding’s the only one who knows where she is? She’s at an MI6 safe house in the UK, right? That must kinda narrow things down?’

  ‘We’re working on it. How’s Dhar? We’d like to ask him a few questions.’

  ‘I’m not sure you’d want any of your officers out here at the moment. And d’you know what? I’m not sure I want them here either.’

  Spiro didn’t have to spell it out for Denton. They both knew what he was talking about. Nine months earlier, the Court of Appeal in the UK had ordered a communiqué between the CIA and MI5 to be made public. Spiro and others had kicked up a huge fuss, threatening to stop sharing intelligence with America’s oldest ally. The unredacted document revealed that a detainee, Binyam Mohamed, had suffered significant mental stress during a CIA-led interrogation in Karachi. Knowing how he had been treated, MI5 still sent out an officer to interview Mohamed, contravening its own guidelines on torture.

  ‘Perhaps we could just forward some questions,’ Denton said. ‘We’re in crisis here, in need of leads. The attacks appear to be by Dhar’s supporters. He must know who they are.’

  ‘By all means send over your questions, Ian. But find the mother too, will you?’

  Sometimes Spiro wondered about his decision to promote Denton. Didn’t the guy realise what was going on? The CIA was running the show in the UK now. It would find the bombers who had targeted US interests, with or without help from the muppets in MI5 and MI6. What did Denton think Spiro was going to ask Dhar? How did he find life in the frickin’ Cotswolds?

  ‘One other thing,’ Spiro said. ‘Marchant’s in northern France. He’s with Lakshmi Meena.’

  ‘What’s he doing there?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’ Something stopped him telling Denton about Marchant’s belief that Denton was a Russian mole.

  ‘Will she bring him in?’ Denton asked.

  ‘Not yet. I want to know what he’s up to.’

  After Spiro had hung up, he turned to the guard.

  ‘I need a local. Medium height, brown skin. And female.’

  58

  Marchant had only caught Lakshmi’s last few words on the phone, but he had heard enough to know that she had become a problem. She was still working for the CIA. Her imminent firing, the possibility of prosecution – he realised now that these were lies. And her drug habit, which she had managed to conceal from him, suddenly seemed irrelevant. She was hiding something far worse. He should have known, should have trusted his instincts.

  Careful not to wake her, he took Clémence’s phone and checked the
call history. It had been cleared. Then he clipped open the back, removed the battery and slid out the SIM card. Clémence would have to use Jean-Baptiste’s phone from now on. There was a chance the call had already been traced, but he was confident that Lakshmi had not spoken for long enough.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at Lakshmi. Her face was pale and a few strands of hair were stuck to the side of her forehead; she had been sweating. He tucked them back, thinking of Leila, whose damp hair he had cradled after she had been shot in Delhi.

  Her eyes opened, and she lay looking up at him. He shouldn’t have brought her with him, especially with limpid eyes like those. Already he could feel his resolve weakening. Perhaps he should give her another chance, let her explain herself. But he knew he couldn’t.

  ‘I owe you an apology,’ she said quietly, her hand resting on his. He wanted to remove it, but he forced himself to keep it there. ‘I should have told you.’

  ‘You should, yes.’

  ‘It’s not good to keep things from one another.’

  ‘No.’ Marchant closed his eyes. If she confessed, perhaps he could find a way to forgive her. She might have been coerced into betraying him, like Leila.

  ‘I didn’t choose this, Dan. It wasn’t a deliberate act on my part.’

  ‘I know.’ Was she about to come clean? They looked at each other for a long time before she finally spoke, her voice shaking with a mixture of emotion and withdrawal.

  ‘I was in agony in the restaurant. The medic gave me an injection. It took away the pain, but it brought something else back.’

  Marchant listened with a heavy heart as she went on to tell him about her student drug habit, how it had been a misguided act of rebellion against her parents, and how she was determined to be clear of it again under Clémence’s care.

  ‘I’ll tell Clémence everything, give her my full medical background, but I wanted you to know first.’

  ‘That’s good of you.’ Marchant stood up and walked over to the window. Then he turned to face her. ‘Who were you calling on the phone just now?’

  Her face remained unchanged, but he knew his question had cut through her discomfort, triggering alarms deep beneath the surface. His own brain was working fast too, calculating how best to play her. He wouldn’t force the phone issue, just watch how she reacted. He needed to see her betrayal for himself.

  ‘I had a dealer in Gosport,’ she began, lost in thought, buying time. ‘He wasn’t local. He came down from London when I called him. They’ll travel a long way when they know you’re desperate. I told him I’d pay anything. That time when I went to the guardhouse for you? After I’d chatted with them for a while, I went for a walk, along the fence by the golf course. There was no way I could get out of the Fort, so I scored through the perimeter wire.’

  He had to hand it to her. She was good, even in detox. For a moment he believed her. Perhaps she really had arranged for a dealer to come down to Fort Monckton.

  ‘So why were you ringing him from France?’

  ‘He rang me.’

  ‘On Clémence’s phone?’ He tried to conceal his disbelief.

  She paused. ‘I texted him first. On her phone. Asked him to call me back on the same number. I was desperate.’

  ‘And what did you say when he rang?’

  This time she paused for longer. Marchant wondered if the game was finally up, but she kept going. ‘He asked me where I was, and –’

  ‘You told him?’ Marchant’s voice was raised.

  ‘I said I was in northern France. I’m sorry. You think he might not have been a dealer?’

  He didn’t know what he thought. He tried to recall what he had overheard her saying to Spiro on the phone. ‘Northern France. We came by boat. I’ve got to go.’ Again, he almost found himself being taken in by her story.

  ‘Did you honestly think he’d come to France?’

  ‘I was going to ask him if he knew of any dealers here. They all know each other.’

  ‘But you didn’t?’

  ‘I hung up. Have you any idea how crazy you become, Dan? Right now, all I’m thinking about is how I want to steal your phone and ring him again. Tell him I’ll pay for a speedboat to get the gear here quicker.’

  She managed a thin smile, but he couldn’t bring himself to reciprocate. He was too angry – with her, himself. He would let her cover story remain unchallenged for now. Like all good ones, it drew heavily on her own life, giving it an air of credibility. He would use her loyalty to the CIA to throw Spiro off the scent, feed him false information, providing she hadn’t told him too much already.

  ‘I’ll get Clémence,’ he said. ‘Maybe she’ll give you methadone to make things easier.’

  ‘You do believe me, Dan?’ she said, a sudden desperation in her voice.

  ‘Believe what?’

  ‘That I didn’t want to go back there. To the past.’

  ‘Is there anything else you’re hiding from me?’ It was his final throw of the dice, her last chance.

  She hesitated before she spoke. Somewhere in the distance Florianne’s dog began to bark. It was always barking. ‘No more secrets.’

  ‘I’ll call Clémence.’

  59

  Dhar was ready for Spiro. It felt as if he had been preparing for this moment all his life. He had always known that one day they would meet, ever since he had learnt that it was Spiro who had waterboarded Daniel Marchant. It was Spiro, too, who had nearly cornered him in Delhi and who had almost thwarted his most recent attack on Fairford and GCHQ. His reputation at the CIA was well known among jihadis. He had been at the forefront of the infidels’ so called ‘war on terror’ for almost ten years, relishing the freedom that had been given to the Agency in the aftermath of 9/11.

  Young jihadis like Dhar had studied what had happened to their elder brothers at Camp X-Ray. They had familiarised themselves with the interrogation techniques of Survival, Evasion, Resist and Escape, knew their way around the Army Field Manual, even its notorious Appendix M. Copying the SERE instructors who had waterboarded fellow Americans to prepare them for capture, jihadi leaders had tortured their colleagues at training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, preparing them for Guantánamo and Bagram.

  It wasn’t only the body that had to be prepared, it was also the mind. And it was here that Dhar felt strongest. For as long as he could remember, he had been able to remove himself from his immediate environment, shutting off the outside world by focusing on an inner one. He credited his Hindu mother, who had taught him Patanjali’s doctrine of Samyama meditation – dhāraŋa (concentrating), dhyāna (contemplating) and samādhi (loss of self). They had both needed to shield themselves from the man who thought he was Dhar’s father.

  Later, he had learnt the Islamic mental state of al-khatir, purifying the mind with a heightened sense of oneness. At a training camp in Kashmir, a psychologist had explained the science to him, how meditation dramatically reduces activity in the primary somatosensory cortex, the part of the brain where pain stimuli were assessed for their intensity and location.

  When the guards at Bagram had first started to beat him, he had risen out of his bruised body and watched the scene from above, detaching himself from the pain. Now one of the guards was back in the room, standing too close to his face. Dhar recognised him by his stale tobacco breath. The guard started to pull at the masking tape that had been used earlier to strap a pair of headphones to his head. The tape pulled at his shaved skin, but he shut down the nerve endings, as if he was turning off a tap. It was nothing compared to what he had felt earlier. The music had stopped a few minutes ago. It had been too loud to ignore, but Dhar had parked the unholy sound in a remote corner of his head and built a wall around it, layer upon layer of bricks until it was no more than a distant thudding.

  After the headphones had been removed, the guard untied the blindfold, but there was no light. The space he was in was so dark that he kept blinking to check that his eyes were functioning. The guard flicked
on a torch and flashed it at his eyes. Dhar turned away. He was standing naked except for an oversized diaper, his hands shackled to a metal roof grille above him. The guard removed the diaper – rubber gloves again, like the ones they had worn earlier for the body cavity search – and then he felt a jet of cold water as he was hosed down.

  The guard left him on his own in the darkness, and for a few minutes there was silence. He steadied himself, swaying from the ceiling. The shackles around his ankles were biting into his flesh. He focused on his breathing, trying to ignore the pain in his chest where he had been beaten. Then he heard a voice in the next-door room. He knew at once that it was Spiro’s.

  ‘Bring her in here,’ the voice said.

  Dhar flinched at the reference to a woman. He knew his own weaknesses. They had been identified during his interrogation training. A closeness to his mother, and a chronic fear of insects. The brothers had laughed at the latter, but it was an entirely rational phobia. As a child in Delhi he had nearly died when a giant hornet had stung him. He had suffered an acute anaphylactic shock, and only the quick thinking of his mother had saved him. She had rushed him to a doctor’s surgery in Chanakyapuri, where he had been treated with adrenaline. The CIA was unlikely to know about the incident, but they would exploit the fear if they did. More certain was their knowledge of his mother. She had been renditioned from India by Spiro, and was now in British custody. At least, that was what Marchant had told him. Had he been lying?

  He heard the sound of a scuffle, and then someone being slapped. There was no reason to believe that Spiro had brought his mother to Bagram. He told himself not to listen. It was an old trick. Ever since the Spanish Inquisition, interrogators had learnt that torture by proxy was often the most effective way to get someone to talk. Pulling out the nails of a prisoner in an adjacent cell could have more of an effect than removing the victim’s. Then he heard Spiro speak again.

  ‘Your son Salim is in the next room. Are you going to let him hear you suffer?’

  There was no reply. Dhar closed his eyes, calming his thoughts, letting the bad ones go.