Spider Shepherd 11 - White Lies (33 page)

‘You have nothing to say to me?’

Shepherd kept his eyes averted.

‘I know you are British, of course. So if you are refusing to speak because you are worried that I will recognise your accent, you are wasting your time.’ Al-Farouq folded his arms. ‘The satellite phone you were carrying. You had called a London number on it. Who did you call?’

Shepherd tensed but he didn’t look up. Had they brought the phone with them? If they had, and he could switch it on, it would notify Button of his location. He had to find out where the sat phone was.

‘You are here for Rafiq, aren’t you? This is also how I know you are British. He is your man, isn’t he?’

Shepherd folded his arms and stared at the teapot. It was too soon to be talking. He had to make the man work for it.

‘You shouted his name. Remember?’

Shepherd stayed silent.

‘Would you like to see him? That could easily be arranged.’

Shepherd said nothing.

Al-Farouq sighed. ‘Very well, then.’ He clicked his fingers and made a flicking motion with his two hands. The two men standing by the door walked towards Shepherd. Al-Farouq spoke to them in Pashto and they grabbed Shepherd by the arms and hauled him out of the chair. ‘Next time you are back in this room, you will be more forthcoming, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘The pain you are about to experience is the result of your own intransigence, remember that.’

The two men hauled Shepherd out of the room. The men with Kalashnikovs were waiting for him in the corridor.

Charlotte Button’s mobile rang as she was opening a bottle of Pinot Grigio in the kitchen. She put down the bottle and took the call. The number was blocked but she recognised Richard Yokely as soon as he spoke. ‘Not calling at a bad time, am I?’ he said. ‘I can never get the hang of time differences.’

‘It’s nine o’clock in the evening,’ she said. ‘I’m just opening a bottle of wine. Where are you?’

‘I’m just leaving Virginia Beach,’ said Yokely. ‘Heading for the sandbox. I just wanted to touch base with you about the lovely Salma. Have you seen a photograph, by the way?’

‘I haven’t, no.’

‘Well, I’m looking at her photograph right now and I can tell you she’s a little cutie. Long black hair, almond eyes, soft silky skin, fit body, I can see how she managed to entrance your agent.’

‘He’s not an agent, he’s an officer, and he’s not mine, he’s MI6.’

‘Well, her name is Salma Jawanda, and a cursory look suggests that she’s a typical young Pakistani girl, middle-class family, university educated, Muslim but not fundamentalist, covers her head on family occasions but happy to knock back the odd glass of wine. But when I dug a little deeper all sorts of alarm bells started to ring, especially that phone number you gave me. I’ve checked the phone records and over the past year she’s talked to a lot of people on our watch list. When she was at university she was a leading light in the student wing of Jamiat Ulema Islam and the Imamia Students Organisation. When she left university she went very quiet politically. She works for a public relations company with some big American clients. I’m told she’s gotten quite close to some of those clients, too.’

‘So what do you think?’

‘I think someone is using her. Someone who spotted her potential at university and who taught her how to stay below the radar. Do you know how she met your man?’

‘I’ll find out,’ said Button.

‘One of the numbers she called belongs to a guy we’re definitely interested in. A Saudi by the name of Saeed al-Haznawi who’s been on our no-fly list for the last five years. And she was calling him several times a day just before the SSG went in.’

‘That’s interesting.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘So what do you think?’

‘I think you know what I think, Charlotte. The question is, what we’re going to do next.’

The technique had many names, including bastinado,
falanga
and
falak
. The Germans used to call it
Sohlenstreich
. It was one of the most efficient – and painful – torture techniques, with the added advantage that it left few physical marks. Most people knew it as foot-whipping.

They had tied Shepherd to a wooden chair and fixed his legs in a set of stocks. There were two of them administering the punishment. They were either Afghans or Pakistanis – Shepherd didn’t know for sure because they never spoke. The taller of the two administered the blows with a long, flexible cane. The shorter man’s weapon of choice was a short flexible club made of hard rubber.

The pain was intense, and after the first few blows Shepherd had screamed at the top of his voice. The reason foot-whipping was so effective was because of the cluster of nerve endings in the foot, along with lots of small bones that were easily fractured. The excruciating pain was temporary; Shepherd could bear it because he knew it would pass, but what worried him was the damage that they were doing, short-term and long-term.

The pain wasn’t as bad as when they had suspended him from the ceiling. The suspension torture had been unrelenting, and every movement had sent searing bolts of agony through his arms and shoulders, but at least he had kept passing out, which meant there had been a break until he recovered. With foot-whipping there was no passing out. Just pain. And screaming.

The two men took it in turns to beat the soles of his feet. They said nothing to him, but every now and again they spoke to each other in their own language. The one with the cane had taken his shirt off and his upper body was bathed in sweat from the exertion. He had a large gut that wobbled with every blow, and flabby bits of skin under his arms that swung to and fro. When he tired he had leant against the wall, breathing heavily, while his colleague continued the torture.

The cane and the rubber club produced completely different sensations. The cane was like an electric shock, it stung rather than burned. The club produced a duller pain that affected the whole foot.

The men weren’t there to question him, they were there only to inflict pain. It wasn’t personal, they weren’t doing it because they hated him or because they took pleasure from his suffering. They did it because they were following orders. It was part of the process, and eventually it would end. So Shepherd screamed and shouted and tried to get free, even though he knew everything he did was futile. They would stop when they stopped and not before.

In between the blows and the pain, Shepherd tried to get his thoughts together. They must have switched the sat phone on to have known that he had called a UK number. The crucial question was where the phone had been when it was switched on, because if Charlie had been looking for it she would have seen its location. And Al-Farouq knew that Shepherd knew Raj. It had been a risk shouting out for Raj but he’d had no choice. Now he knew that Raj was in the building. But when Al-Farouq started asking questions again, Raj would be high up on his list. Shepherd had to make sure that he had his story straight. He wouldn’t be able to stay silent for ever. At some point he would have to talk, and that meant he would have to lie.

Lex Harper lit a cigarette and blew smoke out through the open window of his van. His mobile phone rang and he answered it. It was Charlotte Button. ‘How are you getting on?’ she asked.

‘I’m in Bradford,’ he said. ‘I’m looking at the mosque as we speak.’

‘I need something soon, Lex,’ she said.

‘I know that,’ said Harper. ‘But he’s a hard man to pin down. You know he’s got three families?’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘It wasn’t in the file you gave me, I got the details from one of his jihadists. Three wives, three families, three houses. He’s got four kids with one wife, two with another and his latest wife – she’s a teenager by the look of her – is pregnant. He moves between all three homes so you can never be sure where he is.’

‘So what’s your plan?’

‘If I can nail down which house he’s staying in tonight, I can pick him up first thing when he leaves for pre-dawn prayers. Any news from Paki-land?’

‘I’ve a few irons in the fire, but any intel you can get would be a big help.’

‘I should have something for you tomorrow,’ he said.

‘Soon as you can, Lex. Spider’s clock is ticking.’

Shepherd touched his feet gingerly, and winced. He was sitting with his back to the wall facing the cell door. He stretched his legs out slowly and wiggled his toes. So far as he could tell there was nothing broken. His feet hurt like hell but there wasn’t the searing pain of a fracture.

He’d been back in the cell for several hours. They’d dragged him all the way because his feet couldn’t bear his weight. They’d let him keep his clothes and they’d given him a bowl of rancid water and a bowl of rice and some sort of vegetable. He’d eaten half the rice. At one point he’d crunched down on something hard. He had a horrible feeling it was an insect of some sort but he’d swallowed it anyway. Protein was protein, when all was said and done.

He tried to calculate how many days he’d spent in the cell. Four? Five? There was no way of telling, he didn’t even know what time of day it was outside. The only point of reference he had was that when he was taken to see Al-Farouq it had been daylight, but he’d lost track of the time since then.

Charlotte Button would be looking for him, he was sure of that. But looking and finding were two very different things. He had been unconscious when they’d taken him from the fort, probably for an hour or so. And he’d spent several more hours in the truck before they’d hauled him into his present cell. That meant he was as little as four hours’ drive from the fort. Assuming the truck managed forty miles an hour on the rough roads, that would put him a hundred and sixty miles from the fort. If the trip had taken six hours then he’d be two hundred and forty miles away. That was a lot of area to cover. The only thing that would narrow the search was that the area didn’t have much in the way of roads.

They’d be using satellites and drones to search for him, but he doubted that his captors would be allowing him outside any time soon. He had to do something that would help them find him. But the only thing he could think of was the sat phone and he doubted that Al-Farouq would be stupid enough to let Shepherd get his hands on it.

So far they hadn’t done any permanent damage, which was good of them. He assumed that his torturers had been told by Al-Farouq not to push it too hard, to cause him pain but not to break any bones or damage any vital organs. He’d been able to tolerate the pain, albeit with a lot of shouting and screaming. He wasn’t sure how brave he would be if they had threatened to cut out an eye or pull out a tooth, either of which were options available to them. There was no Human Rights Act, no rule book that al-Qaeda had to follow. They could do whatever they wanted with no comebacks. The fact that his torture had been bearable meant that they were effectively going easy on him.

He rolled up some rice into a ball and slipped it between his lips, chewing it slowly to get the maximum nutritional value from it. He tried not to think about what the next stage of the process would be. If he was lucky, they’d take him back for another chat with Al-Farouq. If he wasn’t lucky … Shepherd shuddered and tried to think happier thoughts.

Charlotte Button made herself a cheese omelette and a green salad, poured herself a glass of wine and carried it through to the living room, where her television was already tuned to
Newsnight
. She sat and toyed with her food as Jeremy Paxman grilled a Tory politician about the failure of the government to deal with the growing problem of illiterate school leavers. She didn’t have much of an appetite but knew that she had to eat to keep her strength up. She picked up the glass and smiled to herself. She hadn’t lost her taste for alcohol, and there was no doubt it did help her sleep at night.

She had photographs of Saeed Al-Haznawi and Salma Jawanda on the coffee table and she stared at them as she chewed thoughtfully on a forkful of egg and cucumber. She swallowed and sipped some wine, then put down her fork and picked up her mobile. She had Yokely’s number on speed-dial but the moment she heard it ring out she remembered that he wasn’t in the States any more and Kabul was four and a half hours ahead of London. He answered on the fifth ring, and to her relief sounded wide awake. ‘Richard, I’m sorry, I’d already dialled when I remembered you’re in Afghanistan.’

‘That’s all right, Charlotte, I’m not a big one for sleeping these days. What’s up?’

‘I’m just looking at a photograph of the lovely Salma Jawanda.’

‘She is pretty, isn’t she? You can see how she would have turned your man’s head.’

‘There’s no doubt, is there? She passed the info on the raid to Al-Haznawi?’

‘She called him almost as soon as she’d finishing talking to your man.’

‘Please stop calling him that, Richard. He isn’t my man, never has been and never will be.’

‘No offence. I meant the MI6 kid. As soon as he spilled the beans she called Al-Haznawi. That’s can’t be a coincidence.’

‘Have you found out anything else about her?’

‘Not much more to add, I’m afraid. She keeps a very low profile. For obvious reasons.’

‘What about questioning her? Either get your people to do it, or hand her over to the ISI.’

‘We could do that, but as soon as we move against her, Al-Haznawi will know. He’ll go to ground. And probably tip off Al-Farouq.’

‘So why not pull in Al-Haznawi at the same time? Get them to tell us where Al-Farouq is?’

‘Again, if Al-Farouq realises that we’re questioning Al-Haznawi, there’s a possibility that he’ll just disappear. The last thing we need is him hiding in a Tora Bora cave. You sound worried, Charlotte.’

‘Of course I’m worried. I can only guess what hell they’re putting Spider through. And Raj is a rank amateur. He hasn’t been trained to withstand interrogation.’

‘What’s your worry? That they’ll kill him or that he’ll talk?’

‘There isn’t much Raj can tell them,’ said Button.

‘Just names, I assume. Including yours.’

Button laughed. ‘In these days of open government, names of the MI5 big guns are easy enough to find. I just want my men home, Richard.’