‘I’m freelance,’ Lock said. It was only half a lie, but Mareta’s expression told him that she didn’t buy it — and neither did he for that matter. It wasn’t such a bad thing to be crap at playing dumb, he supposed.
Mareta stopped pacing the cell and approached Lock. She held the point of the knife about a foot from his right eye — not close enough for him to take it from her. ‘And say I don’t believe you.’
Lock did his best not to blink. He knew that arguing would make him seem even more suspicious. ‘Not much I can do about that.’
She kept the tip of the blade where it was. ‘They tried this once before. In Moscow. They put me in a cell with another woman. I made sure she would never have children. And that time, I had no knife.’
‘You were captured?’
‘Twice. Twice I escaped.’
Lock glanced at the knife, then shifted his gaze back to Mareta. ‘So if you think I’m a spy, why haven’t you killed me already?’
‘Getting information from someone can go two ways. I have learned more from my interrogators over the years than they ever learned from me.’
‘No shit.’
‘Please don’t use such words.’
Lock made a mental note.Likes: public decapitation. Dislikes: Inappropriate language.
‘Maybe I make sure you won’t be able to make any children either.’
She moved the knife slowly down from his face, letting it come to rest level with his crotch.
Fifty-four
Lock sat on the floor with his back against the cell wall. All he was missing to complete the Steve McQueen look was a baseball.
‘So, what do you think we should call the kids?’
Mareta, who was on the bed, pointed the knife in the direction of his face again. ‘You talk too much.’
‘Just trying to pass the time.’
‘You should be thinking of how we get out of here.’
‘I thought you’d have that covered.’
She looked straight at him. ‘And why would that be?’
Damn. Nothing Lock had said since he’d entered the cell had in any way suggested that he knew her by reputation, and that was too close. ‘You said you’d escaped twice after being captured, didn’t you?’ he countered, thinking quickly.
She sneered, swung her legs over the edge of the bed frame. Jabbed the point of the knife gently against his arm, like a housewife checking the chicken to see if the juices are running clear. ‘You’re not a journalist,’ she said.
‘And why do you say that?’
‘I’ve met many of them.’
Lock flashed back to another story that Mareta had reputedly featured heavily in. Six pro-Kremlin reporters dispatched from Moscow to show how well the war effort was going in Chechnya. The first head arrived back in their Moscow office in a large brown box a week later. A day later, a second head. Within the week all the heads had been returned. Then the hands started to arrive. That took two weeks. In all, it was a three-month process. A constant drip of gruesome detail. Only their hearts didn’t make it back. Presumably they left them in Chechnya.
‘Most journalists are fat,’ Mareta continued. ‘From sitting on their backsides and sticking their noses in the government trough.’
‘Not here they ain’t, lady,’ Lock said. ‘We have freedom of the press.’
‘So does Russia. They’re free to say or write whatever they like. But somehow what they write is what the people who pay them want to hear. Big coincidence.’ She kept staring at him. ‘So, who are you?’
She didn’t look like she was about to give up this line of questioning any time soon.
‘I told you already.’
‘You mean you lied already.’
‘Listen, if we’re going to get out of here in one piece, we’re going to have to trust each other.’
‘Trust requires honesty.’
Lock conceded that point. He was about to break the primary rule of capture: pick a cover story and stick to it. But this wasn’t a regular situation. For one thing, Brand wouldn’t hesitate to break his cover, especially if he thought it would get him killed.
He examined Mareta. In a straight fight it would be no contest, despite her reputation. But she had the knife. Guys who watched the Ultimate Fighting Championship might talk about knife ‘fighting’, but in reality there was no such thing. There was only getting stabbed. Quickly followed by bleeding to death.
‘OK, you’re right,’ he said.
She listened calmly as he told her about working for Meditech and filled in the details leading up to his being taken prisoner at the facility. She said nothing, remained resolutely expressionless, only occasionally stopping him to seek clarification of a word or phrase she didn’t understand. The only time she reacted to Lock’s story was when he mentioned the animal rights activists and their cause. The very idea seemed absurd to her. Lock understood her scepticism. For someone who’d witnessed and enacted the slaughter of human beings, it must have seemed a foreign concept. He considered repeating the Gandhi quote that Janice had fired at him from her hospital bed, but thought better of it.
He finished, and waited for Mareta to say something. Silence filled the space between them. Normally he would have been content with that, but what was needed now was rapport. Storytelling was about as good a way to establish that as he knew.
‘So, what about you? Why are you here?’
‘You already know who I am,’ Mareta replied.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘But you don’t seem scared.’
‘Should I be?’
‘Everyone’s afraid of ghosts.’
Lock mulled it over. ‘Maybe I’m different.’
Mareta studied the walls of the cell, equally reflective. ‘That’s true,’ she replied. ‘You’re still alive. And if you want to stay that way you might want to think about how we can get out of here.’
Fifty-five
Lock was the first to hear the door being opened at the far end of the corridor. He waved Mareta to her feet. They flattened themselves either side of the cell door as two sets of footsteps made their approach, accompanied by the rattle of a metal trolley. There was more clanking of metal, followed by a man shouting something in a language that Lock didn’t understand.
‘What’s he saying?’
‘He’s asking who else is here.’
Mareta pressed her face to the cell door and shouted something back. Lock picked out that it was her name. In her own language it sounded more guttural, and laden with threat.
‘Proper little reunion you got going on,’ Lock noted.
Mareta shouted something else, this time maybe in Chechen. He could hear the man laugh at whatever it was she’d said.
‘What did you just say?’
‘I told him that we would wash in the blood of our captors.’
‘No wonder we don’t get any Chechen stand-ups playing the clubs here. Why don’t you try asking him how many of you there are?’
She shouted something else, and the man roared a reply.
‘Ten. Maybe more.’
‘What’s happening now?’
Mareta pressed her face to the access panel at the bottom of the door. Lock grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled her back. She glared at him.
‘Get too close and they might open that thing and give you a good dose of mace,’ he warned.
Another shouted exchange.
‘It’s feeding time,’ Mareta told Lock.
Sure enough, a few moments later the flap opened and a tray was shoved inside — metal, so it would be difficult to break to form a weapon. Filling the tray’s ridged compartments was what Lock imagined to be standard-issue prison food. Two slices of bread. Orange juice. Some kind of a stew with rice. A square of low-grade cooking chocolate, and a banana. Not bad. Better than economy in most airlines he’d flown.