Private Wars
Authors: Greg Rucka
For my brother,
Nick
The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting that the most common techniques were “beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask.” Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported. The February 2001 State Department report stated bluntly, “Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state with limited civil rights.”
—From “U.S. Recruits a Rough Ally to Be Jailer,” by Hans Rudolf
Oeser, for the
New York Times,
May 1, 2005
c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
The law prohibits such practices; however, police and the NSS routinely tortured, beat, and otherwise mistreated detainees to obtain confessions or incriminating information. Police, prison officials, and the NSS allegedly used suffocation, electric shock, rape, and other sexual abuse. . . . In February 2003, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture issued a report that concluded that torture or similar ill-treatment was systematic.
—From “Uzbekistan,” in
Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,
published by the U.S. Department of State, February 25, 2005
The government claims its efforts serve as part of the global campaign against terrorism. Yet in the overwhelming majority of cases, those imprisoned have not been accused or convicted of terrorism or charged with any other violent act. Human Rights Watch has documented the torture of many of those detained in the context of this compaign, including several who that [sic] died as a result of torture . . . including beatings by fist and with truncheons or metal rods, rape and sexual violence, electric shock, use of lit cigarettes or newspapers to burn the detainee, and asphyxiation with plastic bags or gas masks. A doctor who examined the body of a detainee who died in custody in 2002 described burns consistent with immersion in boiling water.
—From “Torture World Wide,” published by
Human Rights Watch, April 27, 2005
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A thank-you is owed to the following for
their assistance in bringing this work to life.
Ben Moeling, for giving freely of his time, insight, and experience. All things considered, the late hit really wasn’t that bad.
In London, gratitude to Andrew Wheeler, Alasdair Watson, and Ade Brown; in Barnoldswick, to Antony Johnston and Marcia Allas. Thanks to all for giving me the lay of the land, the turn of the phrase, and the occasional couch to sleep on.
At Oni Press, where
Queen & Country
continues to thrive, thanks to James Lucas Jones, Randal C. Jarrell, and Joe Nozemack, not solely for their wonderful friendship, but for their continued support as well.
As before, I am indebted to all of the gifted artists who have worked on
Queen & Country
thus far—Steve Rolston, Tim Sale, Brian Hurtt, Durwin Talon, Christine Norrie, Bryan O’Malley, Leandro Fernandez, Jason Alexander, Carla “Speed” McNeil, Mike Hawthorne, Mike Norton, Rick Burchett, and Chris Mitten.
Once again, to Gerard V. Hennely, who spends a lot of time thinking about the kind of things the rest of us don’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about. As always, your help has been invaluable.
To David Hale Smith at DHS Literary, and Angela Cheng Kaplan at the Cheng-Kaplan Company, who continue to represent me with diligence, passion, and only the barest hints of annoyance. Additional gratitude to Maggie Griffen.
Thanks again to the real Tara F. Chace, who would always rather be carried; to Ian Mackintosh, for creating a world where a fictional Tara F. Chace
could
be carried; and to Lawrie Mackintosh, who is truly one of the most profoundly generous men it has ever been my pleasure to know.
Finally, to Elliot, Dashiell, and Jennifer, who make the hard things easy.
Preoperational Background
Chace, Tara F.
As far as Tara Chace was concerned, she
died in Saudi Arabia, in Tabuk province, on the rock-hard earth of the Wadi-as-Sirhan.
She died when Tom Wallace died, when she heard the chain of gunshots from the Kalashnikov, saw the spastic strobe of the muzzle-flash from across the wadi, one man, unnamed and unknown, lighting the other with gunfire even as he killed him. There were nights when she still heard her own howl of anguish, and she knew the sound for what it was, the little life within her stealing away into the desert air.
Tom was dead, and as far as Tara Chace was concerned, she was, too.
She’d
been wounded in the Wadi-as-Sirhan, had fought hand-to-hand with the man who had murdered Tom. He’d tried to split her skull with the butt of his rifle, and when that had failed, tried to choke her to death with his bare hands. Chace had used her knife, and opened his lungs to the outside air, and at the School they would have called that winning. She might have called it that, too, if she’d felt there was anything left to win.
She was still numb from it all when she came off the plane at Heathrow to discover her Director of Operations, Paul Crocker, waiting for her at the gate itself. It was unheard of for D-Ops to greet a returning agent, and the surprise managed to penetrate the fogginess she now traveled in, and she had cause to wonder at it, but not for long. With Crocker as her escort she avoided Customs, winding through endless switchback corridors and through baggage claim until emerging into the drizzle of an early autumn morning.
Crocker guided her to a waiting Bentley, climbed in beside her, and the driver pulled out as soon as the door closed, and that was when Chace finally understood what was happening, and where she was being taken. Her mission in Saudi Arabia had been entirely unsanctioned, and Chace had gone AWOL to do the job. Even if they did still trust her, she had to be debriefed, and that debriefing would take place away from London, at a secure facility hidden in the Cotswolds, called the Farm.
The drive was long, and held in silence. Crocker knew better than to try to engage her in conversation, and for her part, Chace was sitting beside a man whose living guts she now hated.
When she’d fled London some ten days earlier, the boys from Box hot on her heels, she’d been a Special Operations Officer in Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. She’d been the Head of the Section, in fact, code-named Minder One, with two other Minders under her command and tutelage. Along with Minder Two, Nicky Poole, and Minder Three, Chris Lankford, she had provided HMG with covert action capability, as directed and supervised by D-Ops, Paul Crocker. He was their Lord and Master, their protection against the vagaries of government and the whims of politicians who saw agents as disposable as Bic pens, as nothing more or less than small cogs in a very large machine.
Stolen documents needed retrieving in Oslo? Send a Minder to get them back and hush the whole thing up. Potential defection in progress in Hong Kong? Send a Minder to evaluate the defector’s worth, to then either facilitate the lift or boomerang the poor bastard back into the PRC as a double agent. Islamofascist terrorist assembling a dirty bomb in Damascus? Send a Minder to kill the son of a bitch before he can deliver the device to Downing Street.
Tara Chace had left London knowing that she was one of the best—if not the best—Special Operations Officers working for any intelligence service anywhere in the world today.
She had no idea what she had returned as, but a trip to the Farm made at least one thing clear.
Tara Chace was
not
being welcomed home with open arms.
The
Farm wasn’t, really, though from a distance, if people didn’t know what they were looking at or looking for, they could perhaps take it as such. From the lane, a single road wended through a gap in the dry stone wall, disappearing beyond a wall of trees that concealed cameras and sensors designed to keep people out as much as to keep people in. After another mile came another fence, this one more serious, of metal and chain, guarded by a gatehouse and walking patrols, and past that, one could glimpse the manor house concealed beyond further trees. Into the compound, one found the dormitories, as they were euphemistically called, bungalows constructed in the early sixties that demonstrated all of the architectural grace of the period, lined up side by side along a paved walkway, surrounded by yet another chain-link fence, this one topped with razor wire.
As far as prisons went, Chace thought that this one wasn’t half bad. Her bungalow was simple and comfortable enough, and when she wasn’t being interrogated by the likes of David Kinney and his Inquisitors from Box, or being evaluated by the head SIS psychiatrist, Dr. Eleanor Callard, or submitting to yet another physical by yet another physician she’d never met before in her life, she was left alone. She could take walks with an escort, read books from the manor library, exercise in the gym. There were no clocks anywhere she could see, and she was forbidden access to television, radio, newspapers, or the internet.
The supply of scotch and cigarettes, however, was generous, and Chace availed herself of both.
She’d
been at the Farm a week when Crocker returned. The Director of Operations came to her bungalow, let in by a guard, to find Chace vomiting into the toilet, and he waited until she was finished, until she had used the sink to rinse out her mouth and slop water onto her face, before saying, “It’s time to come back to work.”
Chace dried her face on a hand towel, refolded it, and replaced it on its bar, before asking, “And what if I don’t want to?”
“Of course you want to,” Crocker said. “You’re a Minder, Tara. You don’t know how to be anyone else. You can’t be anyone else.”
It was what she’d feared the most since arriving at the Farm, the question she’d taken to bed with her every night. Not wondering what would happen if they threw her out on her ear, if they discharged her dishonorably, if they sent her packing. No, that would have made it easy; they would have made the decision for her. Shunted off with a reminder of the Official Secrets Act and an admonishment to keep her nose clean, she could have left and blamed it all on them, on Crocker and Weldon and Barclay, on politicians and analysts in London and DC who felt Tara Chace was a world more trouble than she was worth.
That would have made it so easy.
Instead, her worst fear realized, manifested now by Crocker, telling her that all was forgiven.
Telling her what they both knew.
So she went with him, back to London, and back to work.
Six
weeks later, she and Minder Two went to Iraq on Operation: Red Panda, to assassinate a member of the new government who had been passing defense information to the insurgency. Things got bloody.
Things got very bloody.
Perhaps bloodier than they needed to get.
When they returned to London and had been debriefed, Chace was ordered to see Dr. Callard a second time.
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine. Some trouble sleeping, but fine.”
“Are you still drinking?”
“I eat, too.”
Callard’s mouth twitched with a smile, and she scribbled something on the pad resting on the desk in front of her. She asked Chace more questions, and Chace answered them with requisite evasion. The whole process lasted an hour, and when Chace again descended to the Pit, the basement office she shared with Lankford and Poole, she knew what the Madwoman of the Second Floor would report to D-Ops.
Chace wasn’t a fool, and she knew herself well. She was drinking too much and sleeping too little. More often than not she started her mornings by being ill into the toilet. She was sore, and plagued by bad dreams when she could sleep. She was prone to irrational anger and sudden sorrows.
Even if she hadn’t been able to read Callard’s notes upside down, even if she hadn’t seen the words
post-traumatic stress,
Chace would have made the diagnosis herself. Either that or assumed she was premenstrual, but she’d already missed two periods since Saudi Arabia. That wasn’t unique in her life; there had been times of high stress in the past when she’d missed her cycle more than once.
All the same, she stopped at the Boots nearest her home in Camden on her way back from work that day, just to be certain. She read the instructions on the box, followed them, waited.
And found herself staring at two pink lines, which, according to the instructions, indicated a positive.
She left her home, returned to the Boots, bought another test, and repeated the procedure, with the same result.
Two pink lines.
“Bloody fucking hell,” she said.
The
hard copy of the Minder personnel files—past and present—were held by D-Ops, or more precisely, held in the secure safe in his outer office. Keys to the safe were in the possession of Crocker; the Deputy Chief of Service, Donald Weldon; and the Head of Service, C, known outside of the building as Sir Frances Barclay. Duplicates were stored on the in-house computer network, but access to those files in particular required a password that was altered every twenty-four hours, and even then, only supplied to the aforementioned holders of the keys.
Plus one other person, Kate Cooke, who manned the desk in Crocker’s outer office, serving as his personal assistant. Not only did she have access to the password, but she had her own set of keys. After worrying the problem all night, it was Kate that Chace finally decided she stood the best chances with. First, they shared minority female status in the Firm; second, they bore a common cross, most clearly embodied in the form of D-Ops, but readily recognizable in the guise of any of the other Department Heads. That Chace was Head of Section for the Minders didn’t change this; Minders were considered in SIS to be more or less pariahs, closer to working-class thugs than to the more refined agents posted to stations around the world.
Finally, she and Kate had known one another some four years, and, in that time, managed a weak kind of professional friendship, one that began when each entered Vauxhall Cross at the start of the day, and ended when they departed again for home.
All the same, it took Chace some cajoling, and more deft lying, before she was able to get Kate to hand over the file on Wallace, Thomas S. (deceased). She scanned it quickly, and learned that Wallace was survived by his mother, Valerie, and that she lived in a town in Lancashire called Barnoldswick.
The
following morning, Chace delivered her request for a leave of absence to Crocker, by hand. He read it at his desk, scowling, while she stood opposite him. When he’d finished he lit a cigarette, leaned back in his chair, and glared at her.
“Don’t be a damn fool,” Crocker said. “You can’t possibly keep it.”
It was more anger than humiliation that colored Chace’s cheeks. Of course Crocker had known. They’d given her a complete workup at the Farm; they’d have done bloodwork as well.
Which meant Crocker had sent her to Iraq knowing she was pregnant.
“I am taking a leave of absence.” She was more than a little surprised at the sound of her own voice. It was surprisingly calm.
“Is it Tom’s?” Crocker demanded. “Is that it?”
“Twelve months,” she said.
“You can’t do it, Tara, not on your life. You can’t have a child and be in the Section, it’s not possible.”
“Ariel and Sabrina,” Chace countered, using the names of Crocker’s daughters.
“Jennie.” The name of his wife.
“Twelve months’ leave. Sir.”
“Not on your life.”
“Then I quit,” Chace said, and walked out.
She
caught an early train out of King’s Cross the next morning, bound for Leeds, riding in a nonsmoking carriage that reeked of stale cigarettes. The ride took some two and a half hours, and once in Leeds she changed to a local connection, taking it as far as Skipton, where she hired a car and bought a copy of
Lancashire A to Z
. She took a room at the Hanover International Hotel, stowed her things, and, famished, ate a late lunch while going over the maps. She went to bed early.
In the still-dark hours the next morning, Chace made the fifteen-minute drive from Skipton to Barnoldswick. She parked the car near the town square, and after a seventy-minute reconnoiter, had found four positions ideal for static surveillance of number 17 Moor View Road, the home of Valerie Wallace.
It was light surveillance, the best Chace could manage without giving herself away, the best she could manage working alone. As a result, she was careful, trailing Valerie Wallace at a distance as the older woman went about her business in the town, working at the local charity shop, meeting friends for lunch or tea at this or that house, visiting the local surgery to see her GP. Autumn brought an already cold wind that promised a fiercer chill come winter, and most of the widow Wallace’s activities were thus confined to the indoors, which made getting close difficult.
Shortly after midnight on her third day of surveillance, Chace broke into the surgery, curious as to the reason for Wallace’s visit. She spent an hour with a penlight in a darkened file office, reading Valerie Wallace’s medical history. When she was finished, she replaced everything as she had found it, and managed to relock the door on her way out.
In the afternoon of the sixth day, while Wallace was having her regular luncheon with friends at the tea shop off the square, Chace picked the lock on the back door of 17 Moor View Road, and worked her way in careful silence through the older woman’s home. If her schedule held true to form, Wallace would go from lunch to the local hospice for volunteer work that would stretch until almost the evening, and so Chace took her time. She searched in cabinets and closets, beneath the beds and in drawers, even going so far as to examine the contents of the kitchen, just to gain some insight into the older woman’s diet.
