‘I agree,’ said Button. ‘The Uddin brothers supply British passports. They’ve no American connections, as far as we know. So if he’s got a UK passport, he could be going anywhere except the US.’
‘I suppose it’s possible that he could have been picking up passports for someone else,’ said Ellis. ‘I think we just watch and wait. I’ll notify my opposite number in Homeland Security, but we’ll run with the ball until we know for sure where he’s going. How about getting a name on the passport? It’d make tracing an itinerary easier.’
‘The only way to do that is to bring in the Uddin brothers and their Passport Agency contact straight away,’ said Button.
‘How’s your investigation going?’
‘All done and dusted. Shepherd collected his passport today. We followed the passport on to the system and we’ve identified the man. A Bangladeshi, he’s been with the Passport Agency for ten years. David Bingham has the details. We were going to let him run for a while longer.’
‘Would you have any problems if I called David and had them pulled in now?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Thanks,’ said Ellis. ‘Are you still at the embassy?’
‘Unfortunately, yes.’
‘Not pleasant?’
‘No, not really,’ said Button.
‘There’s an echo on the line, I do hope our cousins aren’t listening in.’
‘I’m in the loo,’ said Button.
‘Lovely,’ said Ellis. ‘Call me when it’s over. We’ll have a drink.’
‘I’ll need one,’ said Button.
She ended the call, then stood for a while staring at her reflection in the mirror above the washbasins. She looked tired, and regretted leaving her bag in the room with Yokely. Her make-up needed refreshing, and her hair could have done with a brush. She tidied it with her fingers, then practised her smile. But she didn’t feel like smiling, not with what they were doing to the Saudi down the corridor.
Hagerman stood on the right-hand side of the escalator, holding the suitcase in front of him. He’d carried it all the way from the house and hadn’t once used the towing handle.
Shepherd waited until the man was close to the bottom, then stepped on to the escalator and followed him down. He had taken off his pea coat, rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and slung the coat over his shoulder, in case Hagerman had seen him when they’d travelled up from Edgware Road. More often than not it was clothing or posture that gave away surveillance teams, rather than faces.
Shepherd was pretty sure that Hagerman would be taking a southbound train. The suitcase meant he was going away for a while and all the mainline stations and airport connections were to the south. He wandered on to the platform and made a point of looking at his wristwatch, as if he was in a hurry. Hagerman was sitting on one of the plastic seats fixed to the wall, elbows on his knees, deep in thought. He seemed unaware of his surroundings, and Shepherd felt a bit happier about the one-on-one surveillance.
He stood next to a chocolate-vending machine and looked at his watch again. Providing Sharpe had gone straight to Maida Vale Tube station, he shouldn’t have any problem getting on the same train.
Yokely looked up as Button walked back into the room. He put down his coffee mug. ‘Everything under control?’ he asked.
‘Everything’s fine,’ said Button. ‘Sorry about that. As you can appreciate, I was pulled in here at short notice and we’ve got a lot on at the moment. Now, where were we?’
In the adjoining room, Broken Nose bent down and punched the Saudi in the side of the head. Yokely spoke quietly into his headset. ‘Not the face,’ he said.
Broken Nose straightened up and kicked the Saudi’s ribs.
‘The thing about threats is that they have to be carried out,’ the American said. His voice was flat and emotionless, almost as if he was giving dictation. He didn’t look at Button. Instead he stared at the Saudi through the mirror. ‘Talk or we’ll beat you. He doesn’t talk, he has to be beaten. Talk or we’ll cut off your finger. He doesn’t talk, he has to lose a finger. Talk or we’ll castrate you. We’ll electrocute you. Drown you. Burn you. First the threat. Then the pain. Once he knows that the pain will follow the threat, the anticipation can be as crippling as the pain. But if at any time the threat isn’t followed up, further threats will become ineffective.’
‘And the level of pain is increased as time goes on?’ asked Button. She was repelled by what was happening in the next room, but fascinated too. The American was right: it was a science, one she knew nothing about.
‘That’s the true skill,’ said Yokely. ‘Self-inflicted pain is the most effective.’
‘Self-inflicted?’
‘Spreadeagled against a wall. Standing on a stool for extended periods. Crouched. Any of those positions adopted for long periods causes pain, but the source of the pain is the guy’s own body. He can’t be angry with the interrogator because the interrogator isn’t causing the pain. But it takes time, and we don’t know how much we have.’
‘But why don’t you just use the torture that causes the maximum pain?’
‘Like what?’ asked the American with an amused smile.
‘I don’t know. Red-hot needles in the eyes. Something like that.’
Yokely chuckled again, and Button felt a flash of embarrassment. ‘Here’s the thing, Charlie. Intense pain, real, searing, life-threatening pain, is so crippling that the subject will say literally anything to stop it. You get an immediate false confession. Now, you can work through that but you’ll get a second fake confession. He might even tell you what you want to hear just because he wants an end to the pain. And each time he tells you a lie you have to stop and check it. During the checking, he has time to regain his strength and think up a better lie. Intense pain slows down the process.’
‘So, less pain is better?’
‘It’s the anticipation of greater pain that does the damage,’ said Yokely. He put his hand to his headset and frowned. Then he smiled. ‘Let me know as soon as you have the satellite link,’ he said. He flashed Button a thumbs-up. ‘We have a cousin,’ he said. ‘I need you back in there.’
Button placed her mug on the table and clipped her Bluetooth headset over her ear.
The train slowed as it emerged from the tunnel into Maida Vale station. There were fewer than a dozen passengers scattered along the platform. Jimmy Sharpe was the only one to get into Shepherd’s carriage. He had his hands in his coat pockets and kept them there as he sat opposite Shepherd. Shepherd looked to his left, then at the floor. Sharpe cleared his throat, face impassive. Hagerman was staring at an advertisement on the carriage wall, his hands on his suitcase.
The doors closed and the train accelerated into the tunnel.
Broken Nose untied the webbing straps and hauled the Saudi into a sitting position. ‘Stand up!’ he screamed, then dragged him to his feet. ‘Stand to attention!’ The Saudi tried to comply but he could barely move. Broken Nose grabbed him by the hair and pushed him face-first against the wall.
Button shuddered. She was sitting at the table, trying to appear calm, as if she watched men being tortured regularly. ‘Tell us what you know and this will end, Mr Ahmed,’ she said.
The Saudi said nothing. His left leg buckled beneath him. Broken Nose pushed him upright again.
‘Do you know what waterboarding is, Mr Ahmed?’
Broken Nose spun the Saudi so that he was facing her. Scarred Lip grabbed his left arm to help keep him vertical.
‘I said, do you know what waterboarding is?’
The Saudi stared at the floor.
‘I’m told it’s in common use in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and in US prisons in Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan. It’s a form of controlled drowning. If you don’t tell us what you know, these men are authorised to use the technique on you. I’m told it’s incredibly painful.’
The Saudi refused to look at her.
‘What have you been doing in London?’ she asked.
The Saudi said nothing, eyes on the floor.
Button could see that he had no intention of answering any questions. Obviously he knew that silence was the best defence in any interrogation. To be able to tell if someone was lying, one had to know how they behaved when they were telling the truth. That required conversation. It didn’t matter what the subject was, as long as Button could observe the man’s mannerisms. Then when he lied, hopefully she’d spot the telltale signs: the breaking of eye-contact, lip-biting, a hand moving up to the mouth or nose, a change in the blinking pattern, eyes moving up and to the right as the brain created images. There were numerous signs that a suspect was lying, but none came into play if they refused to speak.
‘What was the purpose of your visit to the UK?’
The Saudi sighed.
Button nodded at the two men and they half carried, half dragged the Saudi to the door. She followed them out of the room and down the corridor to another room. A square-jawed marine stood to attention beside the door, an M16 carbine cradled in his arms.
Inside, a plank of wood lay on a metal support – like a seesaw except for the webbing straps at one end. It was next to a child’s plastic paddling pool illustrated with Disney cartoon characters and filled with water. Two CCTV cameras covered the windowless room.
Button watched as Broken Nose and Scarred Lip laid the Saudi on his back on the plank and fastened him down with the webbing straps. Then she went back along the corridor to the observation room. Yokely was sitting at the table, watching a small flat-screen monitor that showed what was going on in the room down the corridor.
‘You’re allowed to do this?’ she asked as she sat down next to the American.
‘It’s been approved by the Defense Department,’ said Yokely.
‘Will it work?’ she asked.
‘It’s painful, no doubt about that,’ said Yokely. ‘But wait until they start the pumping. That really hurts.’
‘Pumping?’
‘They’ll use a garden hose to pump water into his stomach. “
Tormento de toca
”, as they used to call it in the Inquisition. It’s reckoned to be the most agonising pain that visceral tissue can experience. And the beauty is that it doesn’t leave marks.’ He grinned. ‘Not that that’s an issue here.’
‘It doesn’t worry you?’ asked Button, pacing up and down as the American stared intently at the monitor.
‘In what way?’
Broken Nose and Scarred Lip slowly lowered the plank so that the Saudi’s head dipped into the paddling pool. He shook his head from side to side as his hair went under the water. The two men toyed with him, letting the water play over his face.
‘It’s torture, pure and simple.’
‘It’s robust interrogation,’ said Yokely. ‘He comes from a society where torture is used routinely. We haven’t done anything yet that wouldn’t have been done to him in his own country. They stone women to death for adultery, Charlie.’
‘Just because they behave like savages doesn’t mean we should fall to their level.’
‘Al-Qaeda wrote and published a manual to tell their people how to deal with interrogation if they got caught. It detailed the torture they could expect if they were captured in Middle Eastern countries sympathetic to the US. And then there was a section on GTMO.’ He smiled. ‘That’s what we call Guantan amo Bay. Anyway, the thrust of the al-Qaeda manual was that in GTMO all they had to do was ride it out. The Americans were not warriors and the interrogators were not allowed to inflict harm. They could lie or they could stay silent, because other than keeping them incarcerated and feeding them three meals a day, there was nothing the Americans could do.’ Yokely’s smile widened. ‘We’ve moved on since then, I can tell you.’ He stared at the monitor. ‘What’s happening now is about control as much as pain,’ he said. ‘He has to learn that his life is in our hands. Whether he lives or dies is up to us. We decide when he breathes and when he doesn’t.’
‘Where did you learn this stuff, Richard?’ asked Button.
The American grinned. ‘That’s classified,’ he said. ‘I could tell you . . .’
‘But you’d have to kill me. Yeah, it’s an old joke.’
‘I got started in South America where there are fewer concerns about human rights than there are here. But I was there as an observer. I cut my teeth in Afghanistan. The hunt for bin Laden. We had to get intelligence and we needed it quickly.’
‘Forgive me, but aren’t we still looking for bin Laden?’ said Button.
‘We got close,’ said Yokely, ‘and we got a lot of his people. And that was as a direct result of the information obtained by the coercive techniques we employed. Then I was in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq for a while.’ He smiled. ‘Incidentally, there are no interrogators in Abu Ghraib. They’re all human-intelligence collectors now.’
‘A rose by any other name?’ said Button, drily.
‘Exactly,’ said Yokely.
Button stepped closer to the monitor. Broken Nose had moved to stand by the paddling pool while Scarred Lip let the plank drop so that the Saudi’s head dipped under the water. His feet drummed on the plank and his shoulders and chest strained against the webbing straps. His cheeks were puffed and his eyes bulged as he fought to hold his breath. It wasn’t a battle he could win. Broken Nose was peering at him, waiting for the moment when the Saudi had to give in.
Button was appalled. The Saudi’s chest heaved. Then there was an explosion of bubbles from his mouth and his head thrashed as he breathed water.
Broken Nose made a chopping motion with his right hand and Scarred Lip put all his weight on the raised end of the plank. The Saudi’s head and shoulders burst out of the water and he coughed.
Broken Nose nodded and Scarred Lip let the plank fall back. The Saudi’s head disappeared under the water again.
‘And this works?’ asked Button.
‘It’s part of the process,’ said the American. ‘Under normal circumstances we wouldn’t be under so much time pressure so we wouldn’t get to this stage until we were well down the line. We’d start with disorientation and sleep deprivation. Then we’d move on to standing.’ He grinned. ‘You’d be surprised how effective that is.’