Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

Spend their days stuck in bunkers trying to make sense of radio traffic and – I suppose – looking over aerial pix with a magnifying-glass and searching for an oil drum of anthrax in suburban Baghdad.

Feel for me, darling, it's going to be grim.' He was a safe pair of hands. More important, as the trail of Al Qaeda funding grew colder, was iced over, in the City of London, his absence from his desk would matter little. Mercy had grimaced, had kissed him again.

'I am an interrogator at Camp Delta.'

'Oh, are you? Well, that's a rather interesting place.' He hoped the little intake of breath, sharp, went unnoticed. At Thames House there was a desk on the third floor that dealt with Guantanamo Bay and the eight Britons detained there. Five visits had been made to Camps X-Ray and Delta but he had never seen anything remotely relevant coming back, or not, at least, across his desk. He knew that High Court judges refused to denounce the detention without charge and trial of the Britons as illegal under international law; he knew also that the relevant government ministers obdurately declined to make a noise, or waves. The Britons were, as Lovejoy understood it, in a Black Hole.

The whole working life of Michael Lovejoy, twenty-eight years an intelligence officer with the Security Service and before that his fifteen years as an Army officer with the Green Jackets, had been governed by the Bible of Need to Know. Since marriage, only Mercy had needed to know – not the people he met in the pub or other guests at dinner parties and, often enough, not colleagues. Himself, if he had just come off a flight in New York or Washington, Lovejoy would have guarded his secrets closely, said what was necessary and not a damned word more. He listened.

'The only thing fascinating about Camp Delta is that it is bogged down in a rut – that is, one hell of a rut, like a tractor wheel makes in mud. We're just going through the motions. Not even a dozen times in two years – after the first splash of intelligence – have we learned anything new or important. We go to work, we talk to people, we read back the transcripts, and we fall asleep. We don't learn anything. Then it happens, and we're shaking. It happens.'

'Out of a clear blue sky is, I believe, the cliche.'

'Out of that clear blue sky comes a thunderbolt. Got me? We released a man. We're under heavy pressure to find a few innocents and ship them back with a fanfare, the full shebang. We released a man whom we believed to be a taxi-driver, from Afghanistan… '

Lovejoy waited – he was rarely impatient.

'I was on holiday, up in Wisconsin with my wife and kid and getting in some fishing before the winter came down. The taxi-driver, he made my list – I wasn't there when they decided to shift him.

We have the Joint Task Force 170, which is Bureau, Agency and us, but the Bureau, the Agency run it, we're country cousins. They made that decision. He was flown out. He was being driven into Kabul, asked for a comfort stop and did a runner. If he was just a taxi-driver, who cares?'

'You care.' A further talent of Lovejoy was his ability, with apparent sincerity, to flatter. Sandwiched among the lorries and vans, he drove at a steady pace, anxious always to relax his informant…

God, what would he do when he retired? What sort of man would he be? He dreaded the day. 'So, you came back from leave and found the taxi-driver gone.'

'I had a Brit in with me. Some creep, a nobody. I asked the questions I was supposed to ask – last week. You know how it is, that gut feeling. You get a match. It was his accent… I was a Cold War specialist when I started, then I went to the Balkan desks, now I do Guantanamo. I've heard every goddamn accent there is – Russian, Polish, North Korean, Serb, Bosnian and Croat, Yemeni, Egyptian, Saudi and Kuwaiti. I got accents coming out of my ass. The Brit I had in, he spoke with the same accent as the taxi-driver.'

'Did he now?'

'To me, it was the same accent – then I got sort of scared at what I was looking at…'

With good cause. Lovejoy's hands had tightened on the wheel.

Little parts of three lunchtime lectures seeped into his mind. A psychologist had said: 'I urge you to look elsewhere. Where? For quality, for ability, for the best – because it is those young men that the lieutenants of bin Laden search for.' A Russian counter-intelligence officer had said: 'Somewhere, in his psyche or his experience, there will be a source of hatred. He hates you and me and the society that we serve.' A scientist had said: 'We start with a suitcase. Any suitcase of a size that a man or woman uses for a week's stay in a hotel…' Scared with good cause. He remembered the stunned quiet in that room at Thames House, the day before. A man who had the skill to defeat the interrogation process was a man who was owed respect… Funny thing, respect. It was often churned out for an old enemy – respect for a Rommel, or for a Vo Nguyen Giap, or for the Argentine pilots in the south Atlantic – but he had never heard respect given to the new enemy. On any floor of Thames House he would not have expected to hear of respect for a suicide bomber, or for a fighter in the new order's army. If an enemy was not shown respect – given only the status of a pest – that enemy presented increasing danger.

'Do you have the tapes of the interrogations, the Brit and the taxi-driver?'

He saw the head nod.

'How long have you got, Mr Dietrich?'

'I got till yesterday – and please call me Jed.'

The rain on the windscreen had come on heavier. 'You travelled light – have you brought winter clothes?'

'I got authorization, and I went out of Gitrno, like a bat out of hell.

I know if the Bureau and the Agency had gotten their act together, I'd have been called back. This could bring down empires, could wreck big careers… but, for the moment, it's mine and I'm keeping it. I'm going to the end of the road, Mr Lovejoy, and -'

'Michael, please.'

'- and if I'm wrong, I will be fed to the crows. And if I'm right, probably the same. I will not win a popularity contest. I don't give a fuck.'

Lovejoy took his mobile from his suit jacket and rang Mercy. She would have been upstairs, making the beds for the kids, coming that night. He told her he would be away, apologized, then asked her to dig out the sweater his daughter-in-law had given him two Christmases back, a size too large and never worn, and the old green waxed waterproof coat he hadn't used for five years. He said he'd be by for them in an hour, but would not be stopping. Then, steering with one hand and locking the wheel with his knees when he changed gear, he thumbed through the contacts book that was filled with names and numbers. He tapped out the digits on the phone and made the appointment he needed.

After two hearings, the professor of phonetics at King's College, London University said, 'Well, you're wrong. I'm sorry to disabuse you. It's not a matter of argument, but a fact. The accents are not from the same place. What you have called Tape Alpha, the Briton reading Pashto, is quite different to a trained ear from Tape Bravo. I regret any disappointment that may cause you, but facts are facts. Tape Alpha is Birmingham, with only marginal similarities to Tape Bravo.

Tape Bravo is the Black Country. Now, you'll have to excuse me, I have a tutorial.'

They were out on the street, hurrying through the sluicing rain across the car park, and the American was struggling into the old waxed waterproof coat.

Lovejoy said, 'Don't look so bloody miserable. The Black Country is not at Kandahar, or Peshawar, or in the Yemen. Forget that pedantic buffoon. The Black Country is on the immediate north-west boundary of the city of Birmingham. You did well. Fifteen miles from Birmingham, maximum. You did very well.'