The Silent War

by Andreas Norman

  ‘Who is that?’

  The prisoner groans hoarsely.

  ‘What’s that?’

  The sergeant stretches and shakes his head. Then he walks around the man and gives him a hard kick between the piteously parted legs, right on the balls. The prisoner groans loudly. Then another kick, and another, the body spasming as he vomits into the drain. The soldiers get out their weapons, reinforcement rods, and start hitting the man across his back and legs and the soles of his feet with swift, rhythmic blows anywhere they can reach, gasping with the effort, and through the panting and dull, slapping impacts he hears a monotone roar coming from the man.

  He looks away. ‘Stop,’ he mumbles, but there is no one listening. It can’t carry on, he thinks, and perhaps it is because the scream is so terrible that all he wants is for the prisoner to die so he can escape the bawling, he wants to destroy the soldiers so he can avoid seeing their actions. He goes upstairs and hurries into the courtyard, but he isn’t quite sure what he is meant to do. He hears the man’s subdued cries through the doorway.

  No. He has to go back. When he re-enters the room the sergeant is standing there with a wet rag pushing it into the prisoner’s mouth until it looks like he is going to push it all the way down his throat.

  They hold out the screen.

  ‘Who is he?’

  The sergeant pulls out the rag and waits. ‘Who?’ he repeats and the man pants and looks at him, Jonathan, but what is he supposed to do? The sergeant swears and pushes the rag back into his mouth. The sergeant soaks another towel and swings it around the captive’s neck, sitting astride his back and pulling at the towel as if it were a bridle. The man shakes, twisting and turning, and is pushed to the floor under the weight of the sergeant’s heavy body. The sergeant pulls the towel with all his might. After a while the body beneath him starts to shake and he lets go.

  He is lying on the floor. They pour a bucket of water over him. They nudge the listless body with their boots. With a bizarre form of helpfulness, they carefully assist him into the usual position, slumped on his knees.

  The sergeant crouches and holds the screen under the man’s face.

  ‘Who is he?’

  The man mumbles.

  ‘I can’t hear you. Speak up.’

  He has to stay in the room. That’s the least he can do, he thinks to himself.

  The sergeant has stopped for a break. The soldiers are smoking in the yard.

  ‘Give them the right answer,’ he whispers in Arabic. ‘Please, just do it. You know them,’ he says. ‘I know you know them.’

  The prisoner stares at him groggily – can’t he hear what he is saying? Then he appears to panic and starts pulling at the noose, panting, gasping for air.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he pants, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you said you did know.’

  ‘I don’t remember. Help me, please. Help me.’

  He is trying to save the man, that’s how he sees it. If only he can get the man to talk to him, to give the real names and places, then he can still save him – what does he mean, saying he doesn’t know?

  He says a name and tries to get the man to understand that this is not the correct name.

  ‘You know it’s wrong,’ he says. ‘Why do you keep saying the same thing? Can’t you give us a different name? You were their driver . . .’

  The soldiers come back down the stairs and sit down on the boxes around them in the room. They wait. It has to happen now – doesn’t Khaled understand that Jonathan is his saviour?

  ‘I don’t remember,’ he says, shaking his head.

  He leans in close to him, almost crawling down to him on the floor and for a while he is almost level with the captive’s eyeline and their eyes are right against each other. He can smell the sour stench from his mouth. What does he mean, he doesn’t remember?

  ‘I don’t know any of them,’ he whispers. ‘I just drove a car. What do you want me to say? I’ll say anything.’

  The realisation that the man really doesn’t know runs through him like a deep chill. He will never be able to provide them with the right answer. He is just a driver, a Syrian taxi driver from Raqqa who ended up in the midst of the whirlwind of destruction and madness that has consumed his city. Perhaps he thought he was lucky when – against all the odds – he got a job for the new regime leaders. They came from Jordan, Libya, Iraq, even the UK; he didn’t know them, he just drove them around in his car. No, he then thinks. It is a difficult situation, but the man is the right person. The very thought that the man has no idea about what they are asking is intolerable. He refuses to believe that such a mistake could have occurred, because what salvation would that leave, what meaning? He refuses to allow the doubt to take hold. Furiously, he whispers:

  ‘Don’t you understand? We need the truth.’

  The prisoner doesn’t answer, sweat running down the tense furrows on his face. And in that moment, his perception of Pathfinder is transformed. It happens quickly, like a chemical split; from one second to the next the man is someone else, or perhaps it is that for the first time he sees who he actually is: a stranger. There is an enormous distance between him and the panting, skinny body on the floor. He thinks: What are we to each other? Nothing. And that is a relief, because he had been invested in the other man, but now that feeling is alleviated and he feels like he can breathe more freely; there is nothing between them, there never was.

  He gets up. The pale body on the floor isn’t his, it is here as a peculiar object on display – how was he ever able to identify with him? he wonders. He angrily says that he is disappointed, why won’t he cooperate? And then, without thinking, he kicks the man’s side. Not hard, but not softly either, and it is a relief for him. He is on the verge of tears. The soldiers seem to think he is laughing, and they holler, pleasantly surprised.

  The darkness in the kitchen is like thick water as he takes in deep, gasping breaths. Then the darkness wants to leave him. He makes it to the sink before throwing up. Leaning over the basin, he waits while the cramps subside. Then he sits down on the floor and finds some respite; it feels good to sit there in the quiet, spacious kitchen – something like that assumes a strangely enlarged sense of significance.

  When he opens his eyes again it is lighter in the room.

  He starts when he sees the sergeant standing by the table, as if convinced that he too will be struck.

  ‘Wake up,’ says the sergeant. ‘We need you.’

  He shivers in the cool morning air as they cross the yard. The soldiers are sitting by one wall, a row of sullen figures. As they approach the door, he pulls himself together and tries to control his breathing because he doesn’t want the sergeant to notice his anxiety.

  The basement room is illuminated. The sickly-sweet stench of blood and shit immediately thrusts itself upon him. Nausea makes him belch and he pulls his shirt over his mouth for protection. In the harsh light of the fluorescent tube he can see the man lying spread out with his face against the drain and his arms splayed from his sides. The concrete is dark from urine and blood. The body is covered in bumps, wounds and large bruises. The face is swollen, with a fine web of burst blood vessels, as if they have burst through an eruption of internal pressure.

  He immediately makes up his mind: he will never speak of this. He will carry it with him, remembering but never uttering a word. Because he already knows, standing beside the man’s body, that if he tried, then the words would grow within him until something burst. He nods when the sergeant tells him that they need to clean up.

  His entire being recoils at the way the man is lying there, naked and beaten to a pulp. How can he see himself as part of this? It isn’t possible. But if he were ever to tell someone what happened, perhaps many years later, when life has moved on, when he thinks he is ready to talk and able to see himself as the person he thinks he is, despite everything, he would
still describe how he and the soldiers helped to pick up the man’s body and wrap him in rough tarpaulin. He lifted the body by the ankles and it hung between him and one of the soldiers like a sack. It was light – weighing almost nothing. And he thought: Dear God, what have we done?

  He would say that they placed the bundle in the back of the van. Once the body was inside the rustling blue tarpaulin he became anxious that it might still be alive. It was a strange thought, but he couldn’t let go of it. It was as if the corpse hated him for what he had done, and he was ashamed.

  He would say that he and the sergeant and one of the soldiers had driven along the narrow gravel tracks in the half-darkness up towards the mountains on the Turkish side of the border. It was dawn when they stopped on a bend in the road in a place where the locals threw away their rubbish. The hillside below the road was strewn with refuse, plastic bags hanging from the shrubs and rustling in the wind. They dragged the bundle out and stood at the edge of the road, swinging it between them. He held on to the tarpaulin as best he could, but the body was cumbersome, he lost his grip and was afraid it would fall out. He just wanted to get away from there. The bundle flew through the air, they saw it tumble down the slope and come to rest on other bags of rubbish. Then they drove back in silence.

  He would say that it had been awful, but also a relief. The matter was resolved. But he didn’t know how to carry on living. He might say that it is difficult to explain the insight that what he had done would never leave him, only grow over time and become an incident in his life that was so heavy that he would never be free of it. Because what he had done was unforgivable. But it is strange how one gets used to it, how the mind tries to make the best of everything. How the unbearable becomes liveable with, over time, like a callus, a tender bruise that he is careful not to touch.

  When they return, the other soldiers have lit a barbecue. That is what receives him in the chill morning air: the smell of grilled meat.

  23

  They are driving into London. He can hear people asking him things, but he is too tired to answer. He sits silently reclined in the backseat. He can’t stand the music playing on the radio, the beat makes him feel unwell. ‘Turn off the radio,’ he says after a while. A fine drizzle turns to steady rain.

  He is back, but for a brief moment everything still seems foreign. He watches the evening traffic and the smooth onrushing movements of the cars. How is it possible for such a well-organised normal day to be happening under the same evening sky that looms above the House? There wasn’t the slightest sign here of what had happened; he could claim to be innocent. It could be done with obscene ease – everyone would believe him.

  He is received by the two handlers and Grandma, the coordinator, who unlocks the flat.

  It isn’t the same flat as the one he stayed in before he left. This one is different, newer, with shiny surfaces. He sees other people, there are so many of them around him. Exhaustion throbs through him.

  One of the handlers shows him to his room and explains where everything is, the practical details. He barely has the energy to listen. When they leave, the flat is wonderfully quiet.

  In the bathroom he catches sight of himself in the mirror, and at first he can’t comprehend that it is him. The face is emaciated, the cheeks are slack and hollow. There are dark shadows around his eyes. An ugly scratch has formed into a scab on his forehead. He thought he was smiling, but no, the corners of his mouth aren’t moving. His face remains serious.

  The room is light. What time is it? He is lying in a bed. Then he calms down and closes his eyes. When he once again wakes up the light has changed.

  ‘Hello,’ he calls out.

  The response from the other rooms is one of dense silence. He gets up, stiffly pulling on a dressing gown.

  The flat is bright and tastefully decorated. A generous sofa and two armchairs that no one seems to have sat in are in the living room surrounded by bookcases filled with unopened volumes. The kitchen is clinically clean and well equipped, and even the fridge contains enough food for a substantial breakfast and dinner. This could be a home, but no one lives here. There is presumably no name on the door and no post ever arrives. The logisticians at Vauxhall Cross are careful about those kinds of details.

  The digital clock on the cooker confuses him – it must be wrong. Has he slept for more than twenty hours? His thoughts move slowly and coagulate. He peers out of the thin curtains onto a narrow, neat street in Kensington. A well-heeled area where no one wants to be in view and everyone prefers discretion.

  His legs stiff, he walks to the bathroom and after relieving himself and taking a shower he feels much better.

  Few people know where he is. That makes him calm. He is once again just Jonathan Green, an employee of MI6. He doesn’t need to pretend, doesn’t have to claim to be the Trade Attaché, an aid worker or a patient. He is nothing.

  Even within MI6 there are departments without the authority to know his true identity, who only know who he is by a code name or number. That is the fundamental principle behind a secret: it controls information, enveloping and protecting it.

  He sits in the unused kitchen while it gets dark. Having just awoken, it is confusing to see day becoming night, as if time had left him half a rotation of the earth’s axis behind. In that moment he has a diffuse but intense experience of standing outside of existence. What does it want of him? Does it really apply to him? Reality, he thinks, all this is just an ongoing flow of perceptions that he could leave, quietly and unnoticed, without it making the slightest difference. He thinks about Antakya. What they did there was bad, perhaps part of him will never be able to reconcile himself with what happened. Yet he let it happen. If that was the wish of the government, how could he have changed the course of events? He knows that isn’t the right question. But he also knows the feeling will dissipate, his gaze will grow accustomed, because it gets used to even the worst things. Over time it won’t matter, he tries to persuade himself.

  It is only then that he discovers his mobile and real passport on the kitchen counter. He reaches for them and thumbs slowly through the passport. Someone has been here while he was sleeping and returned his real identity. He will be leaving the flat as Jonathan Green, but he doesn’t know whether that is a relief.

  He turns on his mobile and is surprised when it starts to vibrate in the palm of his hand. Ten missed calls, eight new messages. He would like to delete them because it is the ambassador in Brussels who has called him, and he can’t stand that man’s brisk, demanding whine.

  ‘Jonathan, we’ve got a bit of a crisis here. Please call me as soon as you can.’

  Then the ambassador again, but now in a sharp tone:

  ‘Jonathan, I don’t know where you are. This is important. It’s regarding your assistant Heather Ashford. Please call me. Thanks.’

  A shooting sensation of fear flashes through him.

  ‘Where are you? This is urgent, Jonathan. It’s regarding your assistant. She has been declared persona non grata. They’re throwing her out the day after tomorrow.’

  He closes his eyes.

  ‘Jonathan . . .’

  He puts down his mobile with a sinking feeling. He should never have trusted Heather, he thinks. She was too young, too inexperienced; it was madness to give her such a demanding assignment.

  The thought hits him like a sinking feeling of nausea. Heather said she had dealt with the leak; she must have lied to him. Now he is in a labyrinth he can no longer survey. It’s over, he thinks to himself. They’ll crucify him.

  ‘Hello.’

  Robert is standing in the doorway.

  ‘You scared me.’

  ‘Welcome back,’ says Robert, lumbering into the kitchen as if it were his own home, opening the fridge and helping himself to a bottle of mineral water that he drinks in deep gulps without taking his eyes off him. He feels the room shrinking, as if Robert’s
presence is forcing him towards its edges.

  ‘I’ve got good news,’ says Robert, leaning against the kitchen counter. ‘You’re looking at the new Assistant Head of MI6.’

  Jonathan looks down at the table and smiles to disguise his discontent. Robert, the new operational chief for all of MI6. The degradation hits him like a caustic acid. Then he realises he ought to say something.

  ‘Then let me offer you my congratulations.’

  Robert nods and looks at him in concern.

  ‘This whole business didn’t go well, Jon.’

  He says nothing.

  ‘You delivered a fat nothing. What you got out of Pathfinder is bloody worthless. I’m starting to wonder whether you even interrogated him.’

  ‘I think it was the wrong man.’

  ‘It was not the wrong man.’

  Robert slams his hand against the kitchen counter; the sudden noise makes him jump. He can imagine Robert as an interrogator – how inexorable it would be. But he wouldn’t have had more success with Pathfinder than he had.

  ‘The Swedes have taken Heather.’

  It becomes apparent to him that his former friend is now his superior. Second-in-command, Head of Foreign Operations. Perhaps he has already discussed the crisis in Brussels with their chief, C, perhaps he has already signed an order to get rid of him, to exclude him from the organisation he has committed his life to.

  ‘Old boy,’ says Robert with a degree of sarcasm, ‘you really are causing problems.’

  He says nothing.

  ‘What does she know, your agent – about the House?’

  He thinks. ‘Nothing,’ he mumbles.

  ‘Do the Swedes still have the documents?’