Matthew Dunn - Spycatcher

“That’s when you were approached?”

“Not immediately.” She took another draw on her cigarette. “It was another two months before that happened. After I lost my job, I kept myself occupied helping in any way that I could: getting food parcels to the city from the airport, working in shelters, doing basic first aid-anything, really. They were terrible times. And then”-she studied the burning embers of her cigarette before returning her gaze to Will-“then he introduced himself to me.”

“His name?”

Lana shook her head slowly. “I never found out his name.”

“Age?”

“He was then in his late twenties.”

“Why did you agree to work with him?”

Lana’s smile faded, and she looked down at her feet. “The first time I met him, I was working in a makeshift hospital trying to care for victims of bombs and sniper bullets. He came up to me and told me that he worked for a special unit in the Iranian army. He told me that Bosnian Muslims were being slaughtered throughout the country and beyond. He told me that he’d been sent to Bosnia to try to help stop that from happening. He said he needed my help.”

“Why you?”

Lana slowly turned her gaze back up toward Will. “Maybe because I am a Muslim. Maybe because I looked young and impressionable. Maybe because he had few other options available to him.”

“Or maybe because you still had a media identity pass, which in theory offered you a bit of protection when traveling?”

Lana said nothing.

“What did you do for him?”

She coughed. “Initially it was mapmaking. Establishing secret routes in and out of the city, finding small ways to breach the siege. Then, after a few months and when the maps were ready, he started using me to take cash to the Muslim paramilitary groups beyond Sarajevo so that they could buy armaments, food, clothing, and medicine. I would make the journeys, then come back and report anything he needed to know, and then he would send me on new journeys. I did that for nearly four years.”

Will was silent for a moment and then said quietly, “Extremely dangerous work. If you had been caught on one of those trips, you could have been raped, tortured, and executed.”

“I know.” Lana’s face had grown stoical. Her tears had ceased.

Will tapped his fingers on a knee before bringing them to a stop. “Tell me about the man.”

Lana extinguished her cigarette and then immediately lit another. “I worked out recently that over the four-year period I saw him on fourteen occasions, and then only for a few hours or less at a time. It was only during the last three meetings that we became”-she shifted slightly in her chair-“better acquainted.”

“That’s still fourteen meetings. What can you tell me about them?”

Lana frowned. “To start with, he seemed inexperienced and headstrong, but nevertheless very clever. Toward the end of the war, though, he seemed totally in control of his work. In some ways he had also grown cold and extremely calculating. And it became clear to me that this unit he worked for, the Qods Force, was in some way testing him, encouraging him to prove himself to them.”

Will’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“He said to me once that he was the only Qods Force officer in the Balkans, that there were others from his unit but they were merely foot soldiers, that Bosnia was just an overseas school for him. He said that if he could demonstrate sufficient promise in the former Yugoslavia, his masters had significant plans for him beyond the war.”

“What plans?”

Lana raised her palms. “I’ll never know. Because NATO joined the war in 1995 and fighting ended almost overnight. He disappeared, and I’ve not heard from or seen him since.”

Will exhaled deeply. He glanced away toward the far side of the room and began tapping his fingers again. He looked back at Lana. “It benefits me to believe you.”

Lana breathed heavily. “I’m glad. I have told you the truth.”

Will held up a palm. “I told you that it benefited me to believe you, not that I do believe you-or certainly not that I believe you have told me the entire truth.” Will patted his hand against the breast pocket holding his notebook. “For example, when the war ended, why would you then fly to Rome and present yourself to the British embassy there? Why would you plead to them that you had information about the Iranians’ intentions to use their experience from the wars in Yugoslavia to strike Western targets and Arabian Gulf targets? Why would a noble heroine, who was concerned only about saving Muslim lives during the war, ask the embassy to pay her money in exchange for the information she claimed she had, information that was inconsistent and clearly fabricated?”

Lana sighed. “I was desperate.”

“That is certainly possible. There are also a number of other possibilities. One such is that you felt rejected by your former agent handler, the Qods Force officer who was also your lover. You wanted revenge against him and therefore concocted some rubbish about Iranian terrorist plans. You did so purely out of spite.”

“I was fucking desperate and alone.” Lana stood suddenly, and her chair fell backward. “Even though he would never deign to give me his name, I still shared my bed with the man. And then one day he was gone and I was penniless. Yes, I asked your embassy for money, and when they turned me away with a sneer, I did not stop there.” Lana’s voice had grown loud and frenzied. “I got on the next available flight to Abu Dhabi. I told the Emiratis a similar story. You know what they did?”

Will said nothing. As he was listening to her words, he was also rapidly processing and calculating the implications of what she was saying. He was starting to feel a sense of optimism about Harry’s lead.

“They put me in a prison in their desert for forty days and beat me because they, too, said I was lying.” Lana kicked the prone chair away and then took a step closer to Will. “I’ll show you, Nicholas Cree.”

She swung her arms up to remove her sweater. She wore nothing beneath it. Her upper body showed multiple old scars, each at least six inches long. She turned, and he could see that her back was covered with more of the same.

Will sprang up and grabbed her sweater, which he held out to her. He said softly, “Here, get dressed. There was no need to show me your wounds.”

Lana frowned at him, and fresh tears emerged. She pulled on her sweater with shaking hands and said, “Bamboo canes. And they did worse than that. My back teeth and toenails were removed with pliers. I was drowned and then revived at least five times.”

For the briefest of moments, Will wanted to hold her, to comfort her and tell her she would never suffer like that again. But he knew he had to continue to appear threatening. It was a part of his job he detested. He nodded and sat back down. “And I bet that during that horrible forty-day period your anger against your former lover must have intensified significantly.”

Lana sat and lit herself yet another cigarette. She seemed to be calming down. “I tried to tell myself that my anger was futile. I tried to tell myself that he must have been killed by the Serbs or maybe captured by the UN or NATO.”

“Either is a strong possibility.”

She shook her head and smiled. “I was merely fooling myself. He took my maps. He got out of the country alive. I’m certain.”

Will sat quietly for a moment. Then he said, “How do you feel about this man now?”

Lana waved a hand dismissively. “I was a young girl then, full of energy and purpose. But since the end of the war and my experience in Abu Dhabi, I’ve spent the rest of my life feeling hollow and frightened. I’m approaching middle age now, and all I have to show for my life is four years of doing the right thing in Sarajevo. But even that”-she raised a finger toward Will-“was discarded by him. He used me for what he needed, cast me aside, and sullied the only good memory I have.” She looked around her and then directly at Will. “How do I feel? I feel that he has stolen my life.”