Zero 22, p.17
Zero 22, page 17
part #8 of Danny Black Series
A brief pause. Then another male voice, thin and reedy. ‘This is Sturrock. What is your status?’
‘I’ve got a Russky called Poliakov under my boot and another one called Rostropovic who might have tae use his other hand tae tug himself off for a wee bit.’
‘What do you mean, man? Is Rostropovic hurt?’
‘I shot him in the shoulder, so it probably stings a little.’ Cunningham didn’t know who Sturrock was, but he didn’t like the sound of his voice. ‘He’ll live,’ he added. ‘But he needs a medic. You want us tae bring Poliakov in?’
‘Immediately. You know where to go?’
‘Aye,’ Cunningham said. ‘We know where to go. What about Rostropovic?’
‘Keep him there for now and await further instructions.’
Cunningham killed the call and bent over. With one hand on the back of Poliakov’s shirt and the other on his bound wrists, he hauled the Russian to his feet. Poliakov’s hair was dishevelled. The mole on his left cheek was bleeding slightly. He staggered, then started hissing away in Russian again. Cunningham drew his handgun, put it to Poliakov’s head and put one forefinger to his lips to make a shush gesture. Poliakov’s fell silent. ‘Better,’ Cunningham told him. ‘You’re coming with me.’
‘You are not from Moscow?’
‘Don’t insult me, I’m from fucking Glasgow, you cunt.’
He guided Poliakov to the exit. The Russian’s eyes bulged when he saw the wound in Rostropovic’s shoulder, but he kept quiet as Cunningham manoeuvred him down the corridor. The door where the woman and kids were being held was half open. One of the police officers was standing there, blocking the view in and out. The woman shouted something in Russian – she sounded distraught – and Poliakov shouted back. ‘I said shut the fuck up,’ Cunningham told him, and he pressed his weapon into the flesh of his neck.
Hunter and Parsons were in the lobby area. Hunter had the manager on his back, two fingers pressed to his neck. The two guards were still on the floor. ‘Medics are on their way,’ Hunter replied to Cunningham’s unasked question. Hunter stood up. The guard with brown hair and the burn mark was face down a couple of metres away. Hunter bent over him, grabbed the hair at the back of his head and smashed his face hard into the floor. ‘Never fucking try it on with me again,’ he said. As he spoke, three more guys entered the room from the direction of the service lift: Cracknell, Finch and Knowles, the remaining men on Hunter’s team who’d being keeping eyes on the building all day. Cracknell glanced at the bullet holes in the wall, the damaged painting and the smears of blood. ‘Been busy?’ he said.
‘Clean up here,’ Cunningham said. ‘Deal with the medics, stick close to Rostropovic while we wait for the head shed to tell us what to do with him, and make sure the family’s okay. Hunter, come with me. We’re taking this fucker in.’
One of the guys must have reset the service lift while Cunningham had been dealing with Poliakov in the dining room. It was in its proper position and the doors were waiting open for them. Cunningham hustled Poliakov into the lift and he and Hunter escorted him back down to the basement. As soon as the lift doors opened, they were flooded with the flashing blue lights of an ambulance screeching down into the basement. More were coming – they could hear the sirens outside. The SAS men didn’t get involved with the medics. They kept their heads averted from the lights that flooded the whole underground car park as they hurried their prisoner to the Amazon van. The engine was already turning over. Hunter opened up the back doors and Cunningham unceremoniously chucked Poliakov into the back. He lost his footing and fell heavily, unable to stop himself because his wrists were still bound. Cunningham and Hunter jumped in after him and slammed the doors shut. Total darkness. As the van pulled away, Cunningham took his Maglite from his pocket and pointed it at the Russian sprawled uncomfortably on the floor of the van. He looked back into the light. To Cunningham’s surprise, he was smiling.
19.30 hrs, Amman.
Bethany and the General were on their third drink. Danny had no way of knowing if her apparent tipsiness was an act, but he knew for damn sure that it was having an effect on the General. O’Brien was becoming a good deal more touchy-feely. His flirtation was becoming more meaningful. He was leading up to something. Danny stood up and walked to the bar where he ordered another glass of water within earshot of Bethany and the General. ‘You know,’ he heard the General say, ‘this is a pretty swell hotel. You seen the rooms?’
‘No,’ Bethany replied. She hesitated. ‘But I’d like to. Do you have a minibar?’
‘Do I have a minibar!’ The General grinned.
Danny took his water back to his seat and carried on watching them. The stroke of Bethany’s arm. The touch of her leg. Each time the General made physical contact with her, she seemed to lean in closer to him. She reciprocated. She gazed outrageously at him over the brim of her champagne glass. And when he leaned in and whispered something in her ear, she did something Danny had never seen her do before: she giggled. It was a masterclass.
The General stood up from his stool. He looked around the bar, absentmindedly correcting the stiff collar of his pink shirt, and caught Danny’s eye. Danny cursed inwardly, but he didn’t make the mistake of looking away. That would be suspicious. He held the General’s gaze – there was absolutely no indication of drunkenness in his demeanour now – and made a cheers gesture with his glass of water. But by then the General had moved on. Danny restarted his pretence with his phone, while keeping an eye on the General. He was obviously looking for somebody. He found them at a table by the main entrance to the bar: it was one of the three army guys he’d walked in with. No words were spoken, but some kind of understanding passed between them. A pre-arranged signal. Danny recalled what Attwood had said about the General. O’Brien will be well guarded in the hotel, but he has a weak spot. It’s about six inches long and hangs between his legs. The soldier at the entrance knew exactly what was going on and what his boss was silently telling him. Let her come. We don’t need any close protection for an hour or two. The soldier inclined his head in acknowledgement. The General turned to Bethany. Said something. She smiled. The General, perhaps unconsciously, rubbed his right brogue against the back of his left leg, keeping it shiny, obviously concerned that he should look as good as possible. Bethany was quite a catch. He turned, walked back along the bar and exited the way he’d entered.
Bethany gave it five minutes. Danny noticed that she didn’t touch the remainder of her drink. She examined herself in the mirror behind the bar and rearranged her hair. If she saw the smirk the soldier by the door gave her, she didn’t show it. Nor did she acknowledge or make any eye contact with Danny. She just sat there, cross legged, straight backed, beautiful but unapproachable.
And then, when the five minutes were up, she stood and followed the General’s path out of the bar.
There are some conversations between the authorities and a suspect that can safely take place in public. The ‘do you know what speed you were doing, sir?’ kind of conversation. Other conversations need the security and focus of a police station. The ‘can you account for your movements on the night of the fifteenth?’ kind of conversation. Sometimes the security arrangements require more heft: the basement cells of a secure central London location, perhaps, for the ‘trust me, pal, right now we’re your best chance of avoiding a rap for terrorism charges’ conversations.
And then there was the kind of conversation that Alice Goodenough and Maxwell Stark needed to have with Dmitri Poliakov. The off-the-record, deniable kind of conversation. The kind of conversation that involved bruises. Split lips. A broken bone or two, if the suspect was being particularly uncooperative. Or worse.
Conversations like that take place in unofficial locations. An anonymous safe house, perhaps. Or, in this case, a prefab warehouse in an industrial park in west London. A bleak, grey, single-storey structure, surrounded by a high, sturdy wire fence, the entrance ordinarily padlocked and an old metal plaque with the words ‘Park Royal Logistics’ hanging off it at an angle.
It always amused Alice, on the rare occasions she had time to watch TV, to see spooks arriving in black cars with tinted windows. In real life they used cars like the one she and Stark had taken from the car pool in the basement of the MI6 building: a five-year-old Skoda Octavia, never-look-at-it-twice unremarkable. Stark was driving. The car suited him: they were equally shabby. He looked even tubbier behind the wheel, but Alice couldn’t help noticing that he drove with a deft skill that she wouldn’t have expected of him. As they approached the entrance to the warehouse, Alice saw a transit van with the Amazon logo printed on the side parked out front. The chain and padlock on the entrance gate were hanging loose. She got out of the car, opened it up and returned to her place in the passenger seat. Stark drove into the warehouse, parked up by the Amazon van and killed the engine. But he didn’t get out. He seemed to be thinking. Alice gave him the space to do that. He took off his glasses and looked at her. It was the first time she’d seen him without those thick-rimmed frames, and she was surprised at how much younger he looked. Sharper, too. It occurred to her that his avuncular persona and all that business with the extra strong mints was an act. It was designed to put people at their ease and maybe to make them underestimate him.
But all of a sudden Maxwell Stark did not look like a man to be underestimated.
‘You’re going places, Alice,’ he said finally. ‘You’re a bright girl. Bright enough to know that, I’m sure?’
Alice nodded.
‘The trouble is, you’re not the first to be in this situation. I’ve seen it happen before. A promising prospect, exactly the kind of person we need, but they never make it because there are certain parts of the job they can’t stomach. Do you follow me?’
‘I think so, sir,’ said Alice.
‘Sometimes the ends justify the means, Alice. The SAS have delivered Poliakov to us and he is now in the gentle care of two MI6 operators in this building. It may be that he sings like a canary the moment we walk in. But in my experience, that rarely happens. It can take weeks, months even, to break these people down. We don’t have that kind of leisure. We have active military operations all over the world. If General O’Brien has leaked intelligence on any more of them to Poliakov, it means we have men and women in danger of their lives right now.’ He held up one finger. ‘You’re thinking that confessions extorted through torture are seldom reliable and you’re right. Up to a point. But the men who are looking after Poliakov in this facility cut their teeth performing rendition during the Iraq War. They are skilled at enhanced interrogation techniques. They know what they’re doing. If you have a problem with it, now would be the time to speak up.’
Alice glanced at the grey prefab. ‘No problem, sir,’ she said.
‘Excellent. Peppermint?’
‘I think you can stop offering me peppermints now, sir.’
Stark inclined his head. ‘Shall we go?’
It was a warm night, but the temperature dropped a few degrees as they entered the building through a dented, green metal side door. They were in a large open space. The floor was a concrete slab, the walls concrete panels sapping any residual warmth. The strip lights hanging from the ceiling buzzed and flickered, but only over the far side of the warehouse. Alice and Stark were in shadow.
Two men stood under the flickering lights. They both wore black balaclavas. A third guy was tied to a high-backed chair, rope coiled around his body and arms, his ankles tightly bound to the chair legs. He was naked. He was trying to shout out, but his voice was muffled because he was gagged with something. The chair shook as he struggled against the ropes, and that was the only other sound in the room: the knock and scrape of the chair legs against the concrete floor.
‘Shall we?’ Stark said. He made an ‘after you’ gesture. Alice thought it was oddly gentlemanly, given the circumstances.
As she drew closer, Alice recognised Poliakov’s face from his picture. Of course, he looked different. The rag in his mouth gave him the slight appearance of a goldfish. His eyes were bloodshot, his face pale. She couldn’t help looking at the rest of his body. The pallid white skin, losing its definition with age. The triangle of dark chest hair. His penis, unusually fat. As she grew closer, she could smell something. Urine. There was a puddle under the chair and liquid dripped from the wood. The two balaclavad men stood silently behind him, hands behind their backs. Alice and Stark came to a halt a couple of metres from Poliakov, just shy of where a rivulet of urine was flowing from the puddle. Poliakov fell silent and stopped struggling. He looked at the two newcomers with wide eyes and started to shake his head.
‘Zdravstvuyte,’ said Stark in impeccable Russian. Hello. He nudged his spectacles further up the bridge of his nose. ‘We happen to know you speak English, Mr Poliakov, so I suggest we conduct our conversation in that language.’ He smiled. ‘I say conversation. What I really mean is, we’re going to ask you questions and you’re going to tell us the answers. If we suspect that you’re not telling the truth, we’ll ask our friends here –’ he gestured towards the two men in balaclavas – ‘to persuade you to do so. In my experience, that usually involves fingers. Is that right, gentlemen?’
The taller of the two balaclavad man walked round to the front of the chair. His boots splashed in the puddle of urine, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He held something up: a pair of garden secateurs with green rubber handles. He gave them a couple of test squeezes, then returned to his position behind the chair. Poliakov’s eyes were bulging and he was shaking his head more frantically than ever; the chair scraped and banged and scraped and banged and Alice thought he might topple.
Stark raised a calming hand. ‘Mr Poliakov, please, such a display helps neither of us. The calmer we can all remain, the more productive this conversation will be.’ To Alice’s surprise, his words had the required effect. Poliakov fell silent again, though he couldn’t entirely suppress his trembling. ‘That’s much better,’ said Stark. He removed a packet of extra strong mints from his pocket, popped one in his mouth and sucked noisily for a few seconds. ‘Now then, we’re going to talk about our friend, General Frank O’Brien. We’re very well aware that he gave you intelligence about a British military operation in Syria. For your information, that resulted in the death of thirteen British soldiers, and I have to tell you, the consensus is you should be thrown to the wolves for that. If you’d rather not spend the next thirty years in our frankly appalling prison system, I suggest you tell us right now what other operations, British or otherwise, are currently compromised.’ He looked at the man with the secateurs. ‘Would you mind?’ he said, wagging a finger at the rag in Poliakov’s mouth. The man walked to the front again and removed the gag.
Poliakov was talking almost before it was out of his mouth. ‘You’ve got it wrong, you’ve got it wrong!’ he said in Russian.
Stark sighed regretfully. ‘Put it back, if you’d be so kind,’ he said, and the man stuffed the rag back into Poliakov’s mouth amid much muffled dissent. Stark took a step back and Alice emulated him. Stark bowed his head miserably. ‘Go ahead,’ he said.
The masked man didn’t hesitate, other than to give the secateurs another couple of test squeezes. They didn’t make a sound as the curved blades closed in on each other. Poliakov started to squeal, each squeal accompanied by another scraping of the chair. The man leaned over and moved the secateurs into position over Poliakov’s right hand. Alice was relieved that she couldn’t see it happen. Her view of Poliakov’s hand was blocked by the masked man’s back. She heard it, though. The same slice and crunch that she remembered from watching her mother cut up chicken in their tiny kitchen at home. And she heard the flat splash as the finger landed in the puddle on the concrete floor. Poliakov’s squealing went up an octave. As the masked man stood aside, Alice couldn’t help her eye being drawn to the detached digit. It looked much smaller now that it was no longer connected to the hand. Blood dripped on to it from the wound. Alice felt nauseous, but manage to remain impassive.
‘We’ll try again,’ said Stark, his usual polite tone now had an edge. ‘Which other military operations are currently compromised?’
He nodded at the masked man, who stepped round again and pulled the rag from Poliakov’s mouth. Poliakov inhaled noisily and started to pant. Alice was reminded of a thirsty dog. But Poliakov wasn’t thirsty, he was desperately trying to control the pain, or so it seemed to Alice. His eyes were clenched shut, his face screwed up. After thirty seconds or so, the panting stopped and his eyes opened. ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ he said, and he was speaking English now, albeit with a thick Russian accent. ‘Why do you think I am hiding in London? Why do you think the oligarch Rostropovic is giving me sanctuary?’
Stark and Alice exchanged a look then Stark’s eyes flickered towards the finger on the floor. ‘I suggest you tell us,’ he said.
‘I was not receiving intelligence from O’Brien. I was supplying it.’ He grimaced horribly. ‘My hand . . .’
‘What do you mean?’ Stark said. There was a catch in his voice.
‘You don’t understand what’s happening. You don’t know your friends from your enemies.’
‘What the . . .’
Alice put a gentle hand on Stark’s arm to silence him. Stark flicked her away, clearly irritated by her intervention. But she persisted. ‘Sir, think about it. Number 10 were hesitant about us raiding Rostropovic’s apartment. Surely that means he’s more aligned to us than to the Russian administration.’
‘Rostropovic hates the Russian administration!’ Poliakov almost shouted. ‘He was the only person I could trust to hide my family while O’Brien does his work!’
‘Poliakov is a whistle-blower, sir,’ Alice said.
Stark shook his head testily. ‘We heard the tape of Poliakov and O’Brien talking,’ he said. ‘We heard O’Brien give him details of the Zero 22 operation.’
‘We heard fragments of a conversation, sir,’ Alice said quietly.
