The Tango Briefing

'Nothing much. They want some information, that's all.'

Because if they'd intended to kill, as the other cell had intended, they would simply have sent a marksman to wait for me to leave the clinic or they would have ordered an armed group into the building to do it summarily. And if they'd intended to put mobile surveillance on me they wouldn't have used four vehicles to set it up: they couldn't hope to do it without my knowing and in a mall town like Kaifra it wasn't even necessary.

They wanted me for interrogation.

This idea would have worried me in the ordinary way, but not too much. I had twice explored this psychological terrain in earlier missions and I knew roughly what to do: the only possible way is to remove the mind from the body and to look at the situation objectively — the pain is expressed in the nerves and is perfectly natural but it doesn't have any significance; it's totally physical and there's no message; you merely want it to stop and you could say the word but you couldn't live with yourself afterwards so you might as well die now and if you're prepared to die then they've had it because once you're dead you're no more use and they know that.

The worry would have been about the unpleasantness, that was all, not about whether I'd break. And at the moment they wouldn't have a lot of success because there were bruises everywhere and the effects of the gas were still hanging around and they'd only have to push me a bit too far and I'd flake out and they wouldn't learn anything.

But there was a new factor involved tonight. I didn't know how long I'd be able to hold out if they went to work on Diane instead of me.

The Citroen pulled up and someone got out and walked up to us holding a sub-machine-gun. For a moment his shadow grew immense, flitting across the bonnet of the ambulance; then the light blazed again and he came to the side and stood there waiting for something, the muzzle aimed at my head.

I turned to look at him. Except for the man who'd died in the ravine this was the first time I'd seen anyone from an opposition cell because they'd worked covertly for the most part: the bomb in Tunis, the marksman here in Kaifra. This man wasn't of any interest because he was just a factotum but I looked at him so that I'd know him if I saw him later.

There were footsteps on the loose sand and another man came up from one of the cars behind us and stood looking in at Diane.

'Get out of the car.'

I noted that he was an Egyptian, with a Cairo dockside accent. I told her 'You only speak English.'

'What?' she called to him through the window.

He jerked his sub-machine-gun.

'Get out this side,' I told her, 'with me.'

'All right.'

I opened the door and the one who'd come up from the Citroen got worried and jerked his gun at me.

'Get your hands up!'

'Oh bollocks.'

He was Egyptian too. I suppose Loman must have known the UAR was involved but hadn't been allowed to tell me, on the grounds that the less the ferret knows the longer he lives.

Diane followed me out and we stood waiting. Two other men came up, one from the Fiat and one from behind us, and both had guns trained on us. Only one of them wore a fez: the others looked inferior material, capable of subduing or killing but nothing more. By their speech they were all from dockside Cairo and they called the man in the fez by the name of Hassan.

'Bring the Fiat here,' he told one of them. Then he turned to me. 'Give me your gun.'

'I haven't one.'

I spoke in Arabic because at least one of the opposition cells had a dossier on me: Loman had warned me about that.

'Search him! Get his gun!'

Hassan was very nervous and I placed him fairly high up in his cell or even in the network: he had the intelligence to know his responsibilities and to know that if I got out of this trap he'd probably get a chopping.

One of the thugs frisked me and I didn't make it difficult for him.

'He has no gun, Hassan.'

'He must have!'

I was frisked again and they dragged open the doors of the ambulance and ransacked the compartments and then one of them said it was the woman — she had my gun. Hassan looked at me to see my reaction when they tugged the Colt.38 out of her pocket and I looked suitably upset.

'He gave the woman his gun,' said a man, 'but we found it!'

Hassan told him to shut up and turned away and spoke to the man who'd brought the Fiat alongside.

'Is Ahmed coming?'

'Yes.'

The transmitting aerial went on waving, slower and slower.

I thought that Ahmed wouldn't be likely to come alone: he was obviously higher in the cell and would have at least one trigger-man. So far there were only the four of them here, unless there were others who'd stayed in the Mercedes or the 404 and I doubted this because Hassan was nervous and. would have brought every one of his men in to guard me. There was no hope of estimating how long it would take Ahmed to reach here from their radio base but it would need only ten minutes to cross the whole of Kaifra. He could be here within sixty seconds.

Hassan was watching me.

'Where is the rest of your cell?'

I said I was operating freelance and there wasn't an actual cell, and he just shook his head and didn't take me up on it. I think it was just a random question to try me out. He looked like a hardworking field executive, the eyes alert but unimaginative, a man who had reached the position of lieutenant in a small cell operating overseas. I thought he would put the requirements of the operation before everything else, and would work well with Ahmed when the grilling began. I would have given a great deal to know whether either of them would have the intelligence to use Diane as the means of persuasion; I believed they would, because it had two immense advantages over a single interrogation session: a man might easily hold out if the pain was his own but might as easily break if he had to listen to someone else going through it, especially a young, girl; secondly the girl could be brought again and again to the point of mental unbalance while the man was left with a clear head and the ability to answer questions.

It would depend partly on how well Ahmed and Hassan understood the European attitude to things like this: an Arab would entirely ignore the suffering of a mere woman and it wouldn't be worth touching her.

'Where is the aeroplane?'

'I still can't find it.'

The answers had to be acceptable: it was no good saying what cell, what aeroplane, so forth. He knew I was an agent operating in the local field and he knew I was assigned to the UK Tango Victor mission and if I could give him some answers that would fit in with what he already knew it might get him to think of a few more questions. The more I could persuade him to talk, the more he'd tell me.

'Do you think the aeroplane is somewhere near Kaifra?'

'Well,' I said, 'I don't know about near. We certainly thought it was, but it looks as if we were wrong,'

He seemed about to ask me another one and I waited but he shut up and began stamping his feet impatiently, looking along the perspective of the palm-trees to see if Ahmed were coming. I thought it was interesting to note that this was an Egyptian cell and not the one controlling the marksman; also that one of the other cells was Algerian and working at government level with immediate-category liaison, because Chirac had brought in five squadrons of desert-reconnaissance aircraft just by mooning around up there at dawn this morning.

'Feeling all right?'

'Yes,' she said.

She was looking pale, the gold skin losing colour.

'Do not talk!'

Hassan had swung round nervously.

'You mean don't talk in English?'

'Yes. Talk in Arabic.'

'But this woman doesn't understand Arabic.'

'Then do not talk.'

His olive-black unimaginative eyes stared at me to make sure I was getting the message; then he turned away and looked for Ahmed again.

He wasn't trying anything subtle: he was energetic and efficient but not educated and it was almost certain that his henchmen didn't speak anything but their own crane-hook argot but it'd be too risky to rely on that so I asked her in English: