mind is a crowded washing line that lifts and tugs and settles and whips in the cold wind. Facts – phone numbers, postcodes, street names – are the pegs that keep him from blowing away. He spends at least half an hour traipsing corridors until he can picture the face of the headmaster who suspended him for filling the pipes of the chapel organ with ping-pong balls. He is desperate to get away. He is desperate to get away from himself. His mind has no loyalty to his broken body; it’s prepared to do whatever it takes to escape. Facts patrol the perimeter of his sanity like guards. The code name of every agent he handled. The paintings on the walls of his father’s offices in London, Cairo, Geneva and Hong Kong. He swims in icy darkness to an old Star Ferry at anchor a hundred metres from shore and clambers on board to sit in the captain’s chair and operate the dials and levers and switches before descending into the black glistening engine room like the belly of a sea monster. Sucking on a damp corner of his shirt to draw out moisture, he twists his wrists apart to loosen the tape and with trembling fingers fashions a weapon from shards of broken plastic. He asks himself the questions put to him by the police in the week he was fired. Have you ever had unauthorized contact with a foreign government? Who instructed you to leak intelligence? How much were you paid? What role did your wife play in this? How many times did you carry material out of the building without permission? At the time it came as a shock to realize they suspected he had been acting on behalf of another country, instructed not just to steal secrets – although they clearly assumed he had done that too – but to act as an agent of influence, to make mischief, to sow the seeds of a subtle chaos, to create the impression that British intelligence was vulnerable and to demonstrate to its foot soldiers that disobedience was not just possible but would go unpunished, in the hope that in time others might be persuaded to follow suit. If he’d made any comment at all it would have been to tell them what a ridiculous idea this was. Any government with an agent in such a position would have instructed them to be unimaginably careful. But it seemed his accusers actually wanted him to be working for another country – it would have been easier to understand, it would have fit neatly into the imprint of history. Lawrence wanted his Philby, his Maclean. In his desperation August is prepared to entertain every idea lavishly and so he questions whether he was too quick to dismiss their theory. Do they know something he doesn’t? Something about Martha? What if she had been working for another country? What if she had been the agent of influence? What if she had been provoking, suggesting, steering him in the direction of another country’s objectives? He knows this is false. He knows it is false as a matter of factual and emotional certainty. But he cannot help pursuing the idea with outstretched hands because he sees that it might lead him to a place where she isn’t dead, where the accident was a carefully staged piece of theatre, where she was spirited across the border by her handlers, where she is right now cycling along a country lane in bright foreign sunshine. The thought is too much to bear. The sound of a bicycle bell, the way the wind lifts her hair. It is all too much. Finally untethered by fact, in imaginative free fall, the washing line whips loose and fills the sky with bright clothing like birds of paradise, and the only thing that saves him is that the vizier chooses this moment to open the fridge, and August tumbles out in a shivering heap onto the floor.
• • • •
Five minutes, he says, cutting the tape from his wrists with a knife. Use the bucket in the corner. Eat some food.
August unfolds on the floor like a piece of violently crumpled paper – a blackmail demand, a Dear John letter, a terminal diagnosis. He is dazzled by the weak dawn light through the window. Five minutes? Five minutes might just be long enough to stretch out an arm, he thinks. A leg would take at least ten. He can’t begin to imagine standing up, or walking, or swinging the tiny plastic blade in his pocket towards the throat of the vizier. To his surprise he misses the fridge and the way it held him as tightly as a splint in one single agony, rather than this, which evolves every time he —
Four minutes, says the vizier.
It hurts when he laughs.
You’re joking, says August.
The vizier reaches down and places the pad of his thumb on August’s eye. He presses it quickly like the doorbell of someone he is reluctant to disturb. The pain is sudden and vast. August twists away and puts his hands up to protect his face but the vizier has already lost interest and is looking out of the window. He has the air of a man who has been involved in violence on an industrial scale, thinks August, once the worst of the pain has gone. The vizier seems utterly bored by it, as though he has once spent days, weeks, months doing little but this – hurting people. Debriefs of Daesh prisoners suggest a gleeful, adolescent approach to torture. This is different. This has an institutional feel to it. Which probably means someone with power in a police state: a prison guard, a militiaman, an intelligence officer. Plenty of them defected from Saddam or Assad, if this has anything to do with IS, which he is no longer sure of. In any case, August has met their kind before. He remembers one man, an Iraqi, with
Comments (0)