Iain Banks - Complicity

He smiles.

My hands are tied behind my back; my ankles are taped together. I work back to the wall behind me and lever myself up until I'm sitting, too. I can see more of the water outside now, and more land; a faraway scatter of houses, a couple of buoys bobbing in the wind-patterned water, and a small coastal freighter heading away.

I work my mouth; it tastes foul. I blink, start to shake my head to try and clear some of the fuzziness, but then think the better of it. My head aches and throbs.

"How are you feeling?" Andy asks me.

"Fucking awful, what do you expect?"

"Could be worse."

"Oh, I'm sure," I say, and feel very cold. I close my eyes and put my head carefully back against the chilly concrete of the wall. My heart feels like it's beating air; too fast and faint to be propelling anything as thick as blood. Air, I think; Christ, he's injected me with air I'm going to die, heart thrashing on foam on froth on air, brain dying, starved of oxygen, sweet Jesus no… But a minute or so passes and, while I still don't feel too good, I don't die either. I open my eyes again.

Andy is still sitting there; he's wearing brown cord trousers, a combat jacket and hiking boots. There's a big camouflaged rucksack against the wall a metre to his left and a half-full bottle of mineral water in front of him. By his right hand there's a cellphone; by his left, a gun. I don't know very much about handguns beyond the difference between a revolver and an automatic, but I think I recognise that grey pistol; I think it's the one he had that night a week or two after Clare died, when he was all set to take vengeance right then on Doctor Halziel. Maybe — I'm thinking now -1 should have let him.

I'm still wearing what I was when he kidnapped me: black suit, dirty and stained now, and a white shirt. He's removed my tie. My Drizabone is lying, neatly folded but looking scruffy, a metre to my right.

He stretches out one leg, and his hiking boot touches the water bottle. He taps it. "Water?" he says.

I nod. He gets up, takes the top off the bottle and holds it to my lips. I glug down a few mouthfuls, then nod, and he takes it away. He sits back where he was.

He takes a bullet out of his combat jacket and starts turning it over and over in his fingers. He takes a deep, sighing breath and says, "So, Cameron."

I try to get comfortable. My heart's still beating like hell and making my head pound, my bowels are threatening terrible things and I feel kitten-weak, but I'm fucked if I'm going to plead with him. Actually, I'm probably fucked no matter what I do, and — being realistic — when it comes to it I'll probably plead like a little kid, but for now I might as well tough it out.

"You tell me, Andy." I keep my voice neutral. "What happens now? What have you got in store for me?"

He grimaces and shakes his head, frowning down at the bullet in his hand. "Oh, I'm not going to kill you, Cameron."

I can't help it; I laugh. It's not much of a laugh; more of a gasp with pretensions, but it raises my spirits. "Oh yeah?" I say. "Like you were going to give back Halziel and Lingary unharmed."

He shrugs. "Cameron, that was just tactics," he says reasonably. "They were always going to die." He smiles, shaking his head at my naivety.

I inspect him. He's clean-shaven and fit-looking. He looks younger than he did; a lot younger; younger than he was when Clare died.

"So if you're not going to kill me, Andy, what?" I ask him. "Hmm? Give me AIDS? Chop off my fingers so I can't type?" I take a breath. "I hope you've taken into account the advances in computer voice-recognition which are making keyboard-free word processing a realistic possibility in the near future."

Andy grins, but there's something cold in it. "I'm not going to hurt you, Cameron," he says, "and I'm not going to kill you, but I need something from you."

I stare meaningfully at my taped-together ankles. "Uh-huh. What?"

He looks down at the bullet again. "I want you to listen to me," he says quietly. It's as though he's embarrassed. He shrugs and looks me in the eye. "That's all, really."

"Okay," I say. I flex my shoulders, grimacing. "Could I listen with my hands untied?"

Andy purses his lips, then nods. He takes a long knife out of his boot. It looks like a thin bowie knife; the blade is very shiny. He squats while I turn round and the knife slices slickly through the tape. I tear the rest off, taking some hairs with it. My hands tingle. I look at my watch.

"Jesus, how hard did you hit me?"

It's half nine in the morning, the day after the funeral.

"Not that hard," Andy tells me. "I kept you under with ether for a while, then you just seemed to sleep."

He sits back where he was, sliding the knife back into his boot. I put one hand out and lean to the side, looking out the doorway. I squint into the distance.

"Christ; that's the fucking Forth Bridge!" Somehow it's a relief that I can see the bridges and know home's only a few miles away.

"We're on Inchmickery," Andy says. "Off Cramond." He looks around. "Place was a gun battery during both wars; these are old Army buildings." He smiles again. "You get the occasional adventurous yachtsman trying to make a landing, but there are a couple of bolt-holes they can't find." He pats the wall behind him. "Makes a good base, now the hotel's gone. Mind you, it's under the flight path for the airport and I suspect the security boys'll want to give it the once-over before the Euro-summit, so I'm bailing out today, one way or the other."

I nod, trying to think back. I don't like the sound of that "one way or the other'. "Do I remember you bringing me here in a boat?" I ask.

He laughs. "Well, I don't have access to a helicopter." He grins. "Yes. An inflatable."

"Hmm."

He looks to each side, as if checking the gun and the phone are still there. "So; sitting comfortably?" he asks me.

"Well, no, but don't let it put you off."

He gives a small smile that disappears quickly. "I'm going to give you a choice later, Cameron," he says, sounding calm and serious. "But first I want to tell you why I did all those things."

"Uh-huh?" I want to say, It's perfectly fucking obvious why you did them, but I keep my mouth shut.

"It was Lingary, of course, first," Andy says, looking younger still now, and staring down at his hand and the bullet. "I mean, I'd met people I despised in the past, people I had no respect for and who I thought, Well, the world would be a better place without them. But I don't know, maybe I was being naive and expected that in a war, especially in a professional army, it would somehow be better; people would rise above themselves; stretch their own moral envelope, you know?"

I nod cautiously. I'm thinking, Moral envelope? Coast-speak.

"But of course it's not true," Andy says, rubbing the little copper and brass shape of the bullet between his fingers. "War is a magnifier, a multiplier. Decent people act more decently; bastards get to be even bigger bastards." He waves one hand. "I'm not talking about all that banality-of-evil stuff — organised genocide is different — I mean just ordinary warfare, where the rules are obeyed. And the truth is that some people do rise above themselves, but others sink beneath themselves. They don't gain, they don't shine the way some people do in combat and they don't even muddle through the way most people do, scared to death but doing their job because they've been well trained and because their mates are depending on them; they just have their faults and weaknesses exposed, and in certain circumstances, if that person is an officer and his flaws are of a particular type and he's risen to a certain level without ever encountering a real battlefield, those faults can lead to the deaths of a lot of men."

"We all have moral responsibility, whether we like it or not, but people in power — in the military, in politics, in professions, whatever — have an imperative to care, or at least to exhibit an officially acceptable analogue of care; duty, I suppose. It was people I knew had abused that responsibility that I attacked; that's what I was taking as my… authority."