Dirty Little Secret

by Jon Stock

  Jean-Baptiste was on the phone again as Marchant slung his bag into the back of the Mehari.

  ‘I’ve booked you a ticket to Essaouira. Direct flight from Orly, plenty of holiday cover. I know the sector well. Have you got money?’

  ‘I’m good,’ Marchant replied, but he didn’t feel great as he sat behind the wheel, his hand hesitating before he inserted the key into the ignition. It went against his instincts to leave Lakshmi with Clémence. Despite everything, he was still in two minds about her. While she remained heavily sedated, she was vulnerable. He didn’t like that. But she was also working for Spiro, and knew Marchant’s location. She had already demonstrated that she was prepared to betray him. He got out of the car and walked back to the main house, weighing up his options.

  It was quiet as he entered the door to the kitchen. Too quiet. Florianne was usually at the long farmhouse table drinking coffee, or sitting outside beside the small lake at the back of the château. There was no sign of the Pomeranian, either. Marchant tensed. The incident with Jean-Baptiste at the supermarket had shaken him out of the complacency that had set in over recent days.

  ‘Clémence?’ he called, walking up the stairs. For a moment he considered returning to the car for the gun, which was in his bag. He had planned to hand it over to Jean-Baptiste once he was safely at the airport.

  There was no answer.

  ‘Clémence?’ he called again, making his way quietly down the landing to the room where Lakshmi was sleeping.

  He stopped to listen. Silence. Then he heard a muffled sound, and entered the room quickly. Clémence was sitting on the chair beside the bed with her hands tied behind her back. Her feet were tied too, and there was a gag in her mouth.

  Lakshmi’s bed was empty.

  71

  Lt. Col. (Dr) Patch McQuaid, emergency medicine flight commander at Bagram’s Craig Joint Theater Hospital, was prepping the four-bed trauma bay for the imminent arrival of a Medevac helo when a patient from the internment facility was wheeled in through the door on a gurney. McQuaid had already been alerted by a doctor at the jail’s small medical facility that a high-value detainee was coming over. He was suffering from severe anaphylaxis and his condition was critical, beyond their limited resources.

  It wasn’t the first time some jerk from JSOC had overstepped the mark during an interrogation, he thought, and it wouldn’t be the last. He was through with putting prisoners back together after they had been broken apart by torture. It wasn’t why he had joined the USAF, or why he had been deployed from Lackland Air Force Base in Texas.

  The Craig Joint Theater Hospital prided itself on acting as the main hub for all forward surgical stations in Afghanistan, looking after US servicemen and locals, including the enemy. Only last week an injured Taleban fighter had been brought into the trauma bay, thrashing around and spitting at staff. It turned out the Marine who had shot him was on the next gurney in. The fighter eventually calmed down after an Afghani nurse, on a mentorship programme at the hospital, explained that he wasn’t going to be killed.

  The detainee lying in front of him now wasn’t thrashing about, but he was clearly a threat to someone, given the level of security that accompanied his arrival. Half a dozen Military Police guards stood at the door of the trauma bay, M4 carbines at the ready. McQuaid recognised Jim Spiro, a spook whose path he had crossed before, waiting beyond them.

  ‘Sir, he’s not responding to IM adrenaline,’ a young medical technician said, glancing up at the Military Police guards. ‘And he’s important.’

  ‘Every patient is,’ McQuaid said, looking down at the swollen body. ‘Every patient is.’

  ‘Some kind of crazy giant wasp was found in his cell. He was in the separation wing.’

  ‘Just flew in through the open window, I guess,’ McQuaid said, adjusting his stars-and-stripes scrub cap. ‘We need oxygen and IV epinephrine, chlorphenamine and hydrocortisone. Titrate slowly and keep an eye on the monitor.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘What happened?’ McQuaid called across the room to Spiro as he stabilised the patient, establishing his airway. His blood pressure was low, his heart racing. Urticaria wheals covered more than 90 per cent of his body. McQuaid had seen far worse in the previous six months, blast injuries that would wake him at night in his retirement, but the red, bloated figure was still shocking. He doubted if his own mother would recognise him. His face was without features, blown up like a basketball, eye sockets reduced to tiny slits, his nose hardly breaking the surface of the puffy flesh. Only his lips stood out, grossly swollen like a pair of baby bananas.

  ‘Another fucked-up question-and-answer session?’ McQuaid continued, still addressing Spiro as he glanced at the ECG monitor. ‘Dangerous insect dropped into confined space with detainee? Oh shit, he’s not talking, he’s dying. Jesus, when are you people going to learn?’

  Spiro appeared not to have heard his outburst. Either that or he was ignoring him. A lot of people did. McQuaid glanced up at the large American flag hanging on the wall. It was good that he was flying back to Texas in a week. He was beginning to lose it. Too many stressful shifts. A few weeks earlier, one of his radiologists had discovered a bullet lodged in the scalp of an Afghani. It turned out to be an unexploded incendiary round. Everyone except key personnel had to be evacuated from the hospital while a surgeon removed the UXO from the poor guy’s head, assisted by the bomb-disposal team. Today had all the hallmarks of another hectic watch. Reports were coming in of an attack on a US patrol just outside Bagram. Two dead, four traumas on their way.

  A member of the Afghan National Army (ANA) had been bitten by a snake and reacted badly. He was about to arrive too, no doubt with his entire family in tow. When locals were brought in, the place resembled one of the Pashtun villages beyond the perimeter fence. As if that wasn’t enough, the base had been put on full alert after a rocket attack the previous day. It wasn’t an unusual event.

  Bagram had been attacked half a dozen times during McQuaid’s latest tour, and he had grown used to the sight of the fifteen-foot-high blast walls everywhere, including a line of them between the hospital entrance and the helipad. The only consolation was that the Taleban’s rockets and mortars were about as accurate as Ryan Rowland-Smith’s pitching. Why the Houston Astros wanted to sign him next season was anyone’s guess.

  The first US traumas began to come through the door as McQuaid was administering epinephrine intravenously to the detainee. There were six in total, not four, and their injuries were some of the worst he had seen. McQuaid and his team remained calm, as they always did, but a chilling scream of pain and the sudden influx of people into an already crowded trauma bay began to nudge the atmosphere towards chaos. The simultaneous arrival of two ANAs with their snakebitten colleague and extended family didn’t help. He was almost as swollen as the detainee.

  ‘We should have taken him to Kabul!’ one of the ANAs shouted. He was hysterical, accusing staff of ignoring his friend, who was lying on a collapsible gurney.

  It was just as McQuaid began to explain how his hospital treated everyone as equals that the first explosion rocked the hospital. The blast, a white flash of heat, knocked him to the ground. Later he could only recall snatches of what followed, fleeting cameos of carnage. Amid the panic and the shouts of ‘Incoming!’ he remembered the lights going out and seeing the ANAs move purposefully through the smoke and debris towards the detainee. It only later struck him as odd that they had somehow managed to avoid the worst of the blast.

  At the same time, he spotted Spiro lying on the floor next to the armed MPs, at least two of whom appeared to be dead. His sense of the order in which things happened was poor, but he was almost certain that there was a second explosion – he remembered another blinding flash – before he saw the ANAs and locals gathered around the high-value detainee’s bedside. Had they lifted him up? Slumped in the corner, his ears ringing and dust in his mouth and eyes, McQuaid couldn’t be sure. All he could remember was the ANAs walking out of t
he trauma bay, accompanied by the locals and a bloated figure on a gurney.

  72

  ‘I hate what he does, his work. Sometimes he goes for weeks, never calls. Then he’s back in my life as if nothing happened. And now this. Who the hell was she? What was she doing in my mother-in-law’s house? How dare she?’

  Marchant knew that all he could do was roll with the punches. Clémence had every right to be upset. After spending three days looking after Lakshmi, she had been tied up and gagged. He did his best to keep out of the way as Clémence paced around the room, running a hand through her short hair. She could be very frightening for someone so small.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he offered. ‘I should never have brought her. As I said to Jean-Baptiste. It was a big mistake. Selfish.’

  ‘You’re all the same. British spy, French espion, what does it matter? You lie in your job and you lie at home to your lovers and your friends. I don’t want anything more to do with this. After she tied me up, she looked at me with pity. Pity! As if to say, “You poor bitch, married to a spy.” And she’s right.’

  ‘Clémence, Jean-Baptiste will be back in a few hours.’

  ‘Is that what he said to you? He hasn’t rung me since he left for London. Didn’t dare, because he knew what I would say. And I can’t ring him, because I don’t even have my own phone any more.’

  ‘It was my fault he went. I asked him to go.’

  ‘But he knew this was meant to be a special holiday. The one time in the year when we can be together, be ourselves. First my phone is taken away from me, then my husband, and now I’m tied up by someone I’ve spent the last three days looking after. I even thought we could be friends.’

  ‘I must go,’ Marchant said. ‘Find out where she’s gone.’

  Clémence said nothing for a while. She just stood in the middle of the room, smirking, nodding her head in anger.

  ‘Go. Why not? You didn’t protect me when you were here. Do you have a cigarette?’

  ‘I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Nor do I. But I need one.’

  ‘I had no idea she was –’

  ‘You’re right, you had no idea. Do you know what Jean-Baptiste asked me to do? Keep her as close to death as I could. That’s not an easy thing for a doctor to do. We are trained to make people healthy. Actually, I don’t blame her for running away. She was a strong woman, making a good recovery from an addiction she had beaten once and was determined to beat again. Why should she lie there, taking morphine when her body could be free of drugs? And why should I give it to her?’

  From the moment he had found Clémence bound and gagged, Marchant had wondered how a sedated Lakshmi had managed to overpower her. Now he began to understand.

  ‘Had you been giving her the right dose?’ he asked.

  ‘What is “right”? How would you know the correct dose? You’re not a doctor. I gave her what I thought was right in the circumstances. She had suffered a minor relapse after two years of clean living. It was not right to sedate her so strongly.’

  ‘Did you give her anything?’

  Clémence paused, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Tears were beginning to well. When she wasn’t speaking – or shouting – she suddenly seemed vulnerable, a tiny figure in a dangerous world. Marchant was about to walk over and comfort her when she looked up at him, struggling to maintain her defiance.

  ‘To begin with, yes. But then she was making such good progress. How could I stop someone from getting well? I didn’t spend seven years at medical school so I could stop someone from recovering.’

  So Lakshmi had played them all, faking her sedation. It was a pact between her and Clémence, the doctor who could do no harm. He should have known.

  ‘Did she say where she was going?’

  ‘I didn’t ask. I heard her screaming, apparently in pain. I came running, and she was hiding behind the door. I had no chance.’

  ‘Did she say anything to you at all?’ Marchant asked, looking out of the window onto the courtyard below.

  ‘Only that she was sorry and didn’t want to harm me. She even checked that the gag in my mouth was not uncomfortable.’

  ‘She’s a spy too, you know that?’

  Clémence smirked again, lost in thought.

  ‘Then she’s not like other spies I know.’

  ‘She works for the CIA, who want me dead. Her job was to report back on me.’

  ‘I thought you were lovers.’

  ‘We were.’

  ‘I’d better check on my mother-in-law. I heard a car drive off.’

  ‘Florianne’s?’

  ‘I think so. It’s a Golf, GTI. Her pride and joy. Lakshmi must have taken the keys from the kitchen.’

  Two minutes later, Marchant and Clémence were untying Florianne, who had also been bound and gagged in her bedroom. She was a strong, dignified woman and her pride was still intact, even as she sat at her dressing-room table, her feet and hands tied with silk scarves to the chair, another scarf in her mouth.

  There was no sign of the dog.

  73

  ‘We’ve got orders not to let anybody in or out,’ the young guard said as an HH-60 helicopter arced low over the main entrance to Bagram Air Base. Moments earlier he had watched it take off from the helipad beside the hospital, rising through the smoke that had engulfed the building. It was the second attack on the base in a week, but this one looked serious. The hospital had never been targeted before.

  ‘Our friend is dying,’ the ANA soldier pleaded, nodding towards the back of their Humvee. ‘You saw when we brought him in.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the guard said, glancing across at the hospital, hoping the chaos of the situation was enough of an explanation. But he knew he was weakening. He couldn’t forget the bloated body the ANAs had shown him fifteen minutes earlier, the concern of the relatives who had accompanied him. He had nearly retched when he had seen the puffed-up skin. Bitten by a snake, apparently.

  ‘The hospital has been badly hit,’ the ANA continued. ‘We were lucky not to be killed.’

  ‘Will he make it to Kabul in the Hummer?’ the guard asked. He had heard on the radio that they were transferring patients and injured staff by helicopter to various forward operating bases. The worst were being flown out to Landstuhl hospital in Germany.

  ‘If we go now,’ the Afghani said. ‘Many people are injured here. We will only add to their burden. It is better we go elsewhere.’

  The guard glanced again at the back of the Humvee.

  ‘Please check,’ the Afghani said. ‘I don’t want to get you into trouble. We just want to save our friend.’

  The guard walked around the vehicle and knocked once on the rear door. It was a new Humvee, one of many that the Afghan National Army had bought from the Americans. What he couldn’t see was that the identification markings on the roof had not been changed yet. They still signified that it was a US military vehicle. The rear door swung open. Three locals stared back at him, heads covered with scarves, fear in their eyes. On the floor the bloated patient lay on a collapsed gurney. He wore uniform and his face was even more swollen than before, like a Kharbouza melon. The guard closed the door and vomited into the sand by the roadside.

  ‘OK, you can go through,’ he said. ‘And take care on the way. Someone’s got it in for us today.’

  The driver smiled nervously and drove off. But when he reached the main road, he didn’t turn south towards Kabul, he headed north. Shortly after Charikar, he turned left onto Asian Highway 77 and prepared to drive west through the night towards Herat, where they would switch vehicles for a smaller 4x4, change into civilian clothes and speed seventy-five miles with their patient to the Iranian border.

  74

  Marchant spotted the dog as he was crossing the courtyard in the Mehari. He pulled up at the gates, climbed out of the vehicle and walked across the lawn. At first he had thought it was a T-shirt belonging to one of the boys, who had left earlier in the day, but clothing would have sunk. The dog was floating
head down, in the middle of the deep end.

  Marchant had left Clémence with Florianne. He hadn’t been able to look either of them in the eye as he had said goodbye, saying that Jean-Baptiste would be with them soon. Why should they believe him? He had failed to shield them from a dangerous woman he had brought into their home.

  Glancing up at the house, he found a net that was used for cleaning the pool and slipped it under the dog. He lifted it up, hoping the net wouldn’t break with the weight, and swung the animal onto the grass. It was obviously dead, but he still checked the soggy fur for signs of life. He didn’t want Florianne to know that her beloved Pomeranian had drowned, silenced by the same woman who had tied her up in her own house.

  Carrying it by the legs, Marchant took the wet carcass over to some bushes, and tossed it deep into the undergrowth. He didn’t have the time – or the inclination – to bury it, he told himself, as he walked back to the car. It was just a dog. Then he saw a spade and a garden fork propped up against the raised vegetable beds. Damn, he thought. Damn the bloody Pomeranian, damn Lakshmi. Where had she gone? To the nearest village with a public phone, he guessed. She would ring Spiro, who would tell her to keep following him. So why had she left, and in such a hurry? What did she want to tell him?

  There was no sign of anyone at the windows of the house as he jogged over to the spade, but he was careful to remain out of sight, cutting behind a row of poplar trees. After digging a shallow grave, he retrieved the dog and placed it in the cool earth beneath the bushes. He wasn’t going to make a cross out of sticks, he really wasn’t.

  It was as he accelerated down the drive that Paul Myers rang him.