The Dark Chronicles (49 page)

‘Tell me about school,’ he whispered under his breath.

I stared at him, not understanding.
School?

‘You know about it,’ I said slowly. ‘You were there, too, remember?’

‘Tell me about it anyway.’

It was then that I noticed his hand. Why hadn’t I seen it before? It was gripping something I recognized, but had never expected to see again. A cat-o’-nine tails. He lifted it and I caught a closer look: it had a thin black leather grip, opening into the plaited thongs.

‘Did you enjoy it?’ he said, seeing that I had begun to understand where we were heading. ‘Did you take pleasure from seeing me suffer?’ His voice rose and he loomed over me, the cat waving in his hand. ‘Oh, I know you didn’t take part in the fun yourself, but you stood by and watched readily enough, didn’t you?
You didn’t do
anything to stop it!
’ The intensity of his rage seemed to be growing by the second. I had to calm him down before he completely lost control and killed me.

The cat’s tails came down, and as the agony shot through me I finally understood what was happening inside the mind of Charles Severn.

In 1942, shortly before I left to join the army, I had been made a praefect at Winchester. One of my first duties had been to sit in on the ‘Notions Examina’, the school’s initiation ceremony for new boys. Like most such ceremonies, it involved an element of humiliation: stupid games, coarse questions, name-calling. I’d experienced it myself, but had forgotten until this moment that Severn’s test had gone horribly wrong: a few of the praefects had whipped him with a cat and somehow bones had ended up broken.

He had spent a few days in the San, but as far as I knew had suffered no lasting damage. Three months after sitting in on his Notions test I had gone to Oxford, before being sent to train with SOE. Just over a year later, I had seen men mown down by machine-gun fire in a village in Normandy. Severn’s ordeal was small beer compared to what the rest of the world had gone through – though not, of course, to him. He had been recruited into the Service after the war, but would still have seen his share of men injured and killed over the years. But this had been his injury, and it had been deeper than anyone could have guessed.

I hadn’t been one of the boys who had hurt him, but it didn’t look like that was going to mean much now. And he had a point. He had been whipped brutally, and I hadn’t lifted a finger to stop it. He had been thirteen then, and I had been seventeen: old enough to act. I hadn’t realized how badly it had been going – none of us had – and I certainly hadn’t enjoyed it. But it hadn’t occurred to me to try to
stop
them. Severn had been having a worse time than most, certainly, but that was just hard luck. Someone had to. I hadn’t felt ashamed of my inaction then, or in the intervening
decades. I did now, although I suspected that if I had tried to stop them, they would have simply laughed, and quite probably turned on me.

But that was easy to say now, and not much of an excuse when it came down to it. That way led to mob rule, to Eichmann and his ‘following orders’. I had stood by and let it happen. Yes. I was just as guilty as the others had been.

I became dimly aware of the sound of singing. It was Severn.

It had always struck me as a strange kind of school song, one that remembered and glorified home. He was singing it very loudly, and flat. His face was scarlet and the tendons on his neck were bulging like tree-trunks. He had clearly gone quite mad, and the reason I was here and not in London was because he wanted to exact his revenge on me, in private. There weren’t going to be any letters to The Trusty Servant about this particular reunion.

‘What do you want to know?’ I managed to gasp out.

He spat in my face and then leaned forward and kicked me in the stomach, winding me. I crashed to the floor.

He raised the cat again.

‘What did she tell you?’ he hissed.

I looked up at him, lost.

‘Who? About what?’

‘
What did she tell you?
’

His eyes stared out from his head as he screamed at me, and then he lifted the cat higher, above his shoulder. ‘I’m going to destroy you, Dark,’ he said. ‘First I’m going to break you into little pieces, and then I am going to destroy you. Nobody…’ he whispered, spittle foaming at the edge of his lip.

‘… touches…’

His hand twitched.

‘… my
wife!
’

He brought it down, and I let out a long scream. He kept going, bringing the thing up and then down, I don’t know for how long, and then I started falling back into the abyss again, and my mind clouded over.

*

Something was terribly wrong.

That was my first thought as I came back to consciousness. The whole of my back throbbed with pain and, as I opened my eyes, my vision was still blurred. But I was
alert
. That should have been good news, but I knew it wasn’t. Presumably they had drugged me again, but this time with some sort of stimulant.

I was strapped to a table. My arms and legs were in iron cuffs, making it impossible for me to move them. I couldn’t lift my neck more than half an inch, but I could make out that we were in some sort of an operating theatre. Someone was hovering near the table, but all I could see was a slash of white sleeve.

I had spent twenty-four years in almost constant fear of being exposed, but I had never envisaged it ending like this. Interrogation, prison, perhaps even the chair, yes. Prolonged and sadistic torture, no. But it seemed fairly clear that that was their plan. Well, I didn’t have anything to complain about – I
had
betrayed them. I’d had it coming to me.

I looked up. Neon lights lit a frame of steel instruments that was suspended from the ceiling, waiting to perform whatever form of punishment Severn and his friends had thought up for me. I tried not to think about water, food or cigarettes.

‘He’s come to,’ said a voice I didn’t recognize.

There was a delay of a few seconds, and then Severn’s face loomed in front of me, his eyes expressing mild concern. They turned to stone again as soon as he saw I was conscious.

‘Be brave, Paul,’ he said with a grim smile. ‘This will hurt you more than it will me.’

He patted me on the wrist, and I clenched it out of instinct, even though I couldn’t move it away. Sweat ran down my forehead as I watched a hydraulic arm descend from the ceiling: it was clutching a needle, and I had a good idea that it would contain more than a sedative this time. Here came the squeeze of the syringe. Here came the part where I spilled out every secret I had ever betrayed. And after that they would shoot me, as they had Pyotr…

I looked up at the ceiling and then away, clamping my jaw as the needle plunged in, desperately searching for something in the room that would take my mind away from what was happening and give it something new to focus on as the drug pulsed through me.

Yes. There it was.

The room itself. The whole thing. Like the cell they’d kept me in earlier, it was immaculate, state-of-the-art. Glistening machines hummed, and the walls were made of the same strange plastic material. The thought leapt into my mind that it must have cost a fortune. Followed by ‘Yes – but whose?’ The Italians surely couldn’t afford such a facility alone. Had the Service helped fund it? A stretch, I’d have thought: mechanical syringes and doors that disappeared into walls. The Americans, then? All three? I had been a Head of Section for four years but had never even heard mention of such a place. But to keep something like this so secret, it had to be operating at the very highest level. What was it Severn had said earlier? Something about me getting myself into something bigger than I understood.

And what had all that been about Sarah and me? He seemed enraged by jealousy, apparently for no other reason than he’d seen her touch my arm. But he also thought she might have told me something, which was interesting because it meant she had something to tell, and that he suspected her loyalty. I thought back to the Thursday evening, on the balcony. ‘
Perhaps the bullet hit the wrong man.
’ Had she been trying to tell me something then? No, surely she had just been angered by my overreaction to her trying to help
me. Help me, yes – she had wanted me to talk to Zimotti… But that didn’t get me anywhere either, because Zimotti was in on the game. But she had said something else, in the corridor. That I had managed to find out something, or I wouldn’t have been in Rome. Perhaps she’d been trying to warn me. Perhaps she had wanted to show me something in the Station. But what? Evidence of the plan to kill me?

‘What is your name?’ It was Zimotti’s voice.

‘My name? You know my—’

A shard of agony pierced my chest, and I realized they had wired me up to some sort of electric shock machine. In my peripheral vision, I glimpsed pieces of coil dangling from the table.

‘That was just a warm-up,’ said Severn, as though we were playing tennis and he’d aced me on the first serve. ‘I will now increase the voltage. Please answer the question.’

I hesitated for a moment and another jolt shot through me, a sheer blast of pain that made my bones shudder and my heart palpitate madly.

‘Paul Dark,’ I said, gasping.

‘Age?’

‘Forty-four.’

‘Where were you born?’

‘London…’

They were softening me up, getting me to talk about innocuous subjects so my mind would offer less resistance. They wouldn’t be innocuous for long. It was the standard technique. They would have asked me all these questions before they had injected me, but I’d forgotten what answers I’d given them. The drug was already starting to take hold and I could feel my thoughts drifting away from me like pieces of an ice floe. I had at most a couple of minutes before they disintegrated completely and I lost control of my own mind, after which I wouldn’t be able to stop them probing it for every last secret they wanted. But there was something wrong, and I had to find out what it was. I had to interrogate
them
.

‘Bill Merriweather told me about this,’ I said. ‘There are several phases to it, aren’t there? The first—’

‘Who’s Bill Merriweather?’ asked Severn.

‘Porton Down,’ I said. ‘Don’t you know him? Our chap there. Flaky skin, plays golf with Chief, used to anyway.’ Steer clear of Templeton – you’ll be confessing to murder next. ‘Met him a few times, first in ’65 after I’d been made Head of Section, and I went down to see him, took Vanessa’s car, not that we were involved then’ – steer clear – ‘but I suppose it was the beginning of something because I took her car, and I visited Bill in his office and he told me all about how it works.’

Porton Down was the Ministry of Defence’s chemical laboratory, and Merriweather was the Service’s chief scientist on the staff. He had told me in gruesome detail about how the North Koreans had managed to brainwash American POWs. According to Merriweather, the Americans wanted to beat the Koreans at their own game, and had a project dealing with barbiturates that could break down the mind and render any subject helpless in the arms of his captors. Merriweather wanted a larger research budget, but admitted that there were ethical concerns.

Someone had obviously overruled them.

There was also Blake, of course, whose files I’d studied. One theory was that he had become a double after the North Koreans had captured him, and in the rounds of vetting that had followed his confession there had been a lot of discussion in the office about the plausibility of brainwashing, or ‘conversion’, as it was known. Could it really be the case, some had wondered. Wasn’t all this conversion stuff simply fantasy? Let’s not beat about the bush here, chaps, Blake was just a bloody Dutch Jew
traitor
. I had asked Merriweather about Blake, and he had explained in chilling detail how they might have done it, enumerating each phase, or ‘plane’, in the process. The first plane was to break down the mind so you got at everything there was in it, and that, I was sure, was what they were going to try with me now. I tried desperately to remember
the other planes, because Merriweather had also said that no drug was perfect. The drugs simply ‘opened up’ the mind, enough to let the interrogator pry into it. But if you were prepared for it to happen, or knew about it, you could counter it. So I tried to counter it now by thinking about the very process I was going through, and blocking out the part of my mind that wanted to cooperate.

‘What have you used?’ I said. ‘Amytal?’

Severn looked at Zimotti anxiously. He didn’t know Merriweather, but he knew that a subject who was aware of mind control techniques was going to be a lot harder to crack.

‘You met Barchetti,’ he rapped out. ‘Do you remember?’

‘Yes,’ I said. Volunteer nothing. It’s his interrogation.

‘What did he tell you?’

‘He was scared,’ I said, unable to help myself. ‘He ran away from me. I followed—’

‘What did he say to you?’

The voice was firmer, urgent, and it rang alarm bells. Why did they want to know this? Instinct warned me not to tell them.

‘He didn’t say anything. He didn’t get the chance.’

There was silence, and then I thought I heard a fluttering sound far off in the distance: a helicopter in flight? There was suddenly fierce whispering between Severn and Zimotti. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I knew what was wrong now. They were going about this all the wrong way. They were asking
the wrong questions
. I had been a double agent for over twenty years, but they hadn’t shown the faintest interest in any of the secrets I’d revealed in that time. They didn’t want a confession. Instead they were asking me about Barchetti, and what he had told me. That suggested that something was still running, that they were in the midst of some kind of operation. So the sniper in St Paul’s was not the whole picture, just part of it – part of something wider. The wave of attacks Innes had mentioned back in London? Only Arte come Terrore hadn’t been responsible for Farraday’s death in the first place,
they
had, so why would—