The footsteps started moving again. Faster than before. The door flew open. I dropped down to the floor, took all my weight on my hands and whipped my legs around in a wide arc, catching the guy emerging from the apartment just above his ankles. He went down, hard, losing his grip on his gun. I was up first, kicking it away and closing on him before he could get to his feet. He rolled onto his side, keeping his head off the ground, jabbing with his right leg, effectively fending me off. They were controlled kicks. Well aimed. Economical. Certainly not desperate lunges. He clearly knew what he was doing. Overpowering him was going to take a while. It would be tiring, and hard to guarantee he’d be in a position to talk at the end of it. So I pulled out my Beretta and put a round through the floor on either side of his head. To warn him. I didn’t want him dead. I just had no desire to waste all my energy.
And after that, he decided not to waste any more of his.
In training, we’d learned to look for items that could be useful to us.
In the field, we found the same thing applied to people.
SEVEN
There are lots of ways to teach a person to navigate.
The way our instructors did it was to show you a map. Give you an hour to memorize it. Make sure you didn’t have a compass. Then send you out into the Welsh countryside to find a specific place where they said another agent would be waiting.
The exercise was designed to be realistic. The idea was to simulate your part in an emergency covert rendezvous. And it seemed simple enough, at the outset. You didn’t have far to travel. There was nothing heavy to carry. You didn’t have to steal anything or trick your way into anywhere secure. It was daylight. They even gave you a packed meal.
Get there on time, you pass. If not, you fail.
The truck dropped you off exactly where they promised. But that was the last thing to go as advertised. First, they changed the meeting point. Four times. Each time you reached what you thought was the correct spot, all you found was a concealed note containing new coordinates. Each set was harder to find than the previous one. And on the third occasion, they added an extra piece of information. The “agent” had been delayed. She could be anything up to two hours late. And despite the sheets of icy rain that had begun to fall, you had no choice. You had to stay. You couldn’t abandon your contact.
My final map reference turned out to be the location of a telephone box. One of the old-fashioned red ones that you don’t usually see anymore, except in the tourist hot spots around London. I guess it was too remote for the phone company to bother with a replacement. It really was isolated. Scrubby, barren fields stretched out on both sides. A narrow, winding country lane led back to the nearest village. The lights of a single farmhouse glowed in the distance. And nowhere in sight offered any kind of adequate shelter.
I slid under a stretch of thin, weedy hedgerow and settled down to wait. The rain cascaded onto me from above. My clothes absorbed more water from the ground. I was thoroughly soaked within seconds. Daylight started to fade. The temperature was dropping steadily. The wind picked up and started to make the sharp strands of bramble dance and scratch at my face. My head filled with reminders of why I’ve never felt at home in the country, but I kept my eyes on the phone booth the whole time. And saw that no one approached it. Not a single person passed it on the road. Even a pair of stray dogs gave it a wide berth. It was like a magnet with the wrong polarity, designed to repel people and animals.
An hour and a half crawled by. The daylight had drained almost completely away. Another half hour passed, and I realized I was shivering more or less uncontrollably. I’d been there for the designated two hours. There was no sign of the agent. She’d technically missed her contact. I would have been entitled to return to base. Officially it was time to call it a day but I gave her an extra fifteen agonizing minutes, just in case. And because I hated the idea of not having met my objective. But still, she didn’t show up. So I slid out from my hiding place. Crouched at the edge of the rough grass verge. Checked both ways along the road. Scanned the fields. Saw nothing. Started to move. And heard the sound of a shotgun cartridge crunching into place behind me.
At that moment I thought I’d blown it, but the exercise turned out to have been a success after all. The scope was just a little wider than I’d been led to believe. As well as our people, the army was involved. Their challenge was to capture the operator I was supposed to be meeting. It was a kind of contest. Pride was at stake, so our instructors were taking no chances. They suspected that details of the final rendezvous would have been leaked, since the army was handling the communications. So, to find out, I was sent to the place alone. The theory was that if the army was staking it out, they wouldn’t react as soon as they saw me. They’d wait for my contact to show herself and snatch both of us. And if she didn’t show up, they’d snatch me hoping that I’d know about some backup plans, rather than let the trail go cold. So my role had been to flush them out. With that achieved, the other operator was successfully retrieved. The navy won. And an important lesson was learned.
In an operation, everyone has a role to play.
It just may not be the one you’re expecting.
Everyone knows that interrogating a suspect is A PEST. To make it work, you need:
Access control, so that word of his capture doesn’t have the chance to spread.
Privacy, to make sure nothing he reveals is overheard.
Efficiency, to milk every last drop of useful intelligence out of him.
Security, so that no one can silence him before he spills the beans.
And a way to judge the . . .
Truth of what he says before you commit any resources on the strength of it.
So, all things considered, the third-floor landing of an insecure building would not be top of your list of favorable locations for the job. If the guy was a big enough fish, you’d take him somewhere specially designed for the task. A place where he couldn’t escape, and no one else could get at him. Where the physical environment itself would help to demoralize him. And where experts were on hand to harvest and validate his information. The snag was, in the middle of Chicago, in daylight, without a vehicle outside, and with no one to assist, I had no way of moving him. Not without attracting unwanted attention. There was nowhere locally to take him. And no one qualified to handle the questioning. So that left me only one option. If I couldn’t move him physically, I’d have to take him somewhere else inside his head.
It was obvious that the guy knew how to handle himself, so there was no point in trying to beat any information out of him or scare him with threats of arrest or jail. Instead, I’d have to rely on a technique I’d picked up a few years ago. Or at least a variation of one. Something I’d seen a Danish anarchist cell use. I’d been sent to Copenhagen to penetrate them after the eavesdroppers at GCHQ sniffed out a plot to blackmail one of the ambassador’s assistants. As missions go, it was pretty much a damp squib. Two months of work to confirm the threat they posed was negligible. They were more interested in raising beer money than stealing state secrets. The shadow they cast just turned out to be larger than they were because they were so good at manipulating hostages. And that was down to one of their leaders. He prided himself on controlling people. Not through violence, though. Or bribery. Or empty threats. He had a much more effective technique. He turned his victims’ minds against themselves. Led them to accept they were about to die. To really, truly embrace the fact that their lives were over. And when they reached that place, they were like putty in his hands.