Commandante Odil Obliq, peril of the Orient as an admiring enemy had once described her, was dancing with her new lover, the admiral of her ekranoplan assault squadron, in the moonlit ruins of New Quezon while a blindfolded orchestra did their best to out-voice the Howler Orangs that were ululating from the tumbled stones and twisted metal frames of the most recently destroyed buildings. Across the plaza, from which the wreckage had been cleared by chain gangs of defeated Royalists, came a waiter carrying a tray with their champagne and cocaine.
They stopped dancing, both smiling at the fat old eunuch waddling towards them with the tray.
“Commandante,” he wheezed. “Admiral.”
“Thank you,” Obliq said. She picked the silver straw from the tray. At the ends of her long ebony fingers, her nails were painted in swirling green camouflage, as a joke. She handed the straw to the admiral. “After you.”
“We shall never sleep,” the admiral sighed, bending slightly to the tray and the first two lines of powder, glowing white in the moonlight.
She handed the straw to the commandante, who had taken the opportunity to sip some of the champagne. Then the admiral’s expression changed. She gripped Obliq’s hand and said, “There’s something wrong…”
Obliq stiffened, her hand dropping the silver straw and going to her holstered pistol.
Her earpiece crackled. “Commandante!” her ADC radioed, his voice desperate.
The eunuch waiter hissed, twisted his hand under the tray so that it began to fall, taking the champagne flutes and the rest of the cocaine with it while the pistol revealed underneath pointed straight at the commandante. Obliq had already started to drop, going limp in the admiral’s arms and falling as though in a faint, but it meant only that the chest shot the eunuch had aimed at her became a head shot. The admiral stared on blankly as the first shot was followed by two more before the nearest guards finally woke up and started shooting.
The assassination teams sent after Mrs Mulverhill could find no recent trace of her anywhere.
When I wake, I am in some pain and tied to a chair. Altogether, this is not a satisfactory turn of events.
I underwent some training to cover such situations, and know enough to wake slowly without, one would hope, giving any sign of having woken. This is the theory. In practice I have never been convinced that this is really possible. If you’re unconscious you’re unconscious – so by no means in full control of what your body is doing – and if you’re unconscious you’re probably unconscious for a good reason, like some gorilla in a suit smacking you so hard in the face that your nose seems to be broken, you cannot breathe normally, you have bled copiously down your naked chest, two of your front teeth feel loose and the whole forward portion of your face feels swollen and suffused with bruised blood.
I am hanging forward in the seat as far as my bonds will allow, my chin nearly on my chest, my gaze falling naturally on my own lap. I’m naked. My thighs are bloodstained, brightly lit. I become more fully aware, wallowing my way to consciousness like a nearly waterlogged lump of wood rising slowly to the surface of a cold and sluggish stream. I have taken the most immediate and rudimentary stock of the situation and am just starting carefully – without giving any outward signs of movement – to flex the appropriate muscle groups to test precisely how tightly I am tied to the chair, when a male voice says, “Don’t bother, Temudjin, we can tell you’re awake. And don’t waste your time testing the wires and the chair, either. You’re not going anywhere. We know what you’re doing because it was us who taught you to do it.”
I think briefly about this. My captors seem to know exactly how I am trained to react in such a situation, and they appear to be claiming that they are my own people, or at least that they helped to train me. The individual addressing me is probably not of first-rank education.
I bring my head up, stare into the darkness between a pair of lights pointed at me from a couple of metres away and say, with all the fluency I can muster, “It was we who taught you to do it.”
I’m expecting a “What?” or a “Huh?” but he just pauses and then says, “Whatever. The point is we’ll know what you’re trying to do at every stage. You’ll save us both a lot of time and yourself some pain if you drop the tradecraft stuff.”
An ominous phrase. “At every stage of what?” is the obvious question. I can see nothing beyond the lights. As well as the two to each side of straight ahead there are two more I can see, one level with each shoulder, and from the shadows beneath my chair I guess there are another two behind me. I am encircled with brightness. The voice talking to me is male and I do not recognise it. It might be that of the wide-shouldered man who talked to me on the aircraft, but I don’t know. His voice is coming from directly behind me, I think. Listening to it, I get the impression that I am in a large room. I don’t seem to be able to smell anything, except my own blood: a sharp, metallic scent. The fragre of the place, the information from that extra sense that people like myself have, indicates a world I have not visited before, and a place which feels confused somehow, full of clashing, competing historical and cultural sensations. I check my languages. English. Nothing else.
That is unprecedented. I do not have even the language of my home or my base reality in the house in the trees on the ridge looking out over the town with the casino, where my original self wanders round the place dead-eyed and monosyllabic.
Now I feel fear.
“At every stage of this interrogation,” the man’s voice says, as though in reply to my earlier thought.
“Interrogation?” I repeat. Even to my own ears it sounds as though I have a heavy cold. I try to snort back some of the blood blocking my nose but succeed only in producing a sensation akin to somebody having just stuck a large metal spike in the centre of my face.
“Interrogation,” the man confirms. “To determine what you know, or what you think you know. To discover who is controlling you, or who you think is controlling you. To find out what it is you think you’re doing-”
“Or what I think I think I’m doing,” I offer. Silence. I shrug. “I was spotting the pattern,” I tell him.
“Yes,” he says, sounding tired. “Be clever about it, give cheek, be defiant and even insult the intelligence of the interrogator, so that when you are put to the question your collapse will be all the more abject and your apparent degree of cooperation all the more complete. As I said, Temudjin, we did train you, so we know how you’ll respond.”
I let my head drop so that I am looking at my bloodstained thighs. “Ah, the infinite cowardice of the torturer,” I mutter.
“What?” he says. I did mutter very quietly.
I raise my head again. I try to sound tired and world-weary. “How easy it is to be so confident and to sound so in charge when the person you’re talking to is tied down, utterly helpless and at your mercy. None of that annoying freedom of action for the other party that might let a person fight back, or just leave, or speak as they want to speak rather than as they hope – in their desperation and terror – you want them to speak. Does all that make you feel good? Does it give you that sensation of power people always denied you in normal life, so unfairly? Does it give you what you always missed when you were growing up? Did the other children bully you? Did your father abuse you? Overly strict potty training? Really, I’d love to know: what’s your excuse? What aspect of your upbringing fucked you up to the point that doing this seemed like such a promising career? Do tell.”