Stephen Leather - The birthday girl

A smaller doorway was set into one of the gates and it opened as the three of them approached. A young soldier stepped out and spoke to Connors. The soldier nodded and stepped aside to allow Connors inside. Freeman realised that his wheelchair wouldn't go through the doorway. He looked up at the soldier and shrugged. The soldier looked back at him with unfeeling eyes and sneered. He shouted something to two more soldiers behind the gates and they all laughed. The gates grated back and Katherine pushed Freeman inside.

'My God,' Katherine said. 'What is this place?'

'It's a holding facility,' Connors responded.

'It's a concentration camp,' Freeman said, his voice little more than a whisper.

The prisoners were confined to the area that had once been the football pitch; the white markings could still just about be seen in places through the mud. There were hundreds of them, dressed in rags and with their heads shaved. Many of the men were bare-chested; some of them were little more than skeletons with deep-set eyes and slack mouths. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire ran around the perimeter of the playing area and machine-gun emplacements looked down on the encampment from the stands. Inside the fence were a few makeshift huts surrounded by tents, but most of the prisoners stood or sat out in the open, talking in huddled groups or staring vacantly out at their guards.

Connors seemed oblivious to the suffering and misery. He stood with his hands on his hips and surveyed the camp. A soldier with a bushy beard came over and spoke to him, and they both looked over at Freeman and his wife who were staring at the prisoners with looks of horror on their faces. Connors and the soldier laughed and the soldier slapped Connors on the back.

Katherine looked down at Freeman. 'You wanted to do business with these people?' she asked.

'I had no idea,' he said, shaking his head. 'I didn't know.'

'They wouldn't keep her here, surely? They're all adults.'

Freeman stared at the human scarecrows behind the wire and shuddered. Connors walked back and loomed over Freeman.

'She's not here, is she?' Freeman asked.

'Uh-huh,' Connors grunted. 'She fought like a soldier so that's how she's being treated. They're going to find her now.'

A guttural amplified voice boomed across the stadium from loudspeakers that had once announced nothing more sinister than the half-time score. A skeletal figure stood scratching its chin and stared at Freeman with blank eyes. Freeman shuddered. There was no way of telling if it was a man or a woman. The electronic voice barked again, and as it did the crowds parted. Freeman shaded his eyes with the flat of his hand.

'Can you see her?' Katherine asked.

Freeman shook his head, then he stiffened as a small figure walked towards the wire fence. He looked up at Katherine but before he could speak she began to push his wheelchair forward.

'My God, what have they done to her?' he whispered. Her head had been shaved and they'd taken away her clothes and given her a threadbare cotton jacket and trousers and she was wearing shoes that were several sizes too big for her so that she had to shuffle her feet. She reached the wire and gripped it with one hand as she waved to a guard.

'Is that her?' Katherine asked, horrified.

Freeman nodded, unable to speak. His eyes filled with tears and he reached down to push the wheels of his chair, trying to move faster. Freeman and Katherine got to the fence before the guard. Freeman put out his hand slowly and stroked the back of Mersiha's hand. She looked back at him blankly. Her face was stained with dirt and one eye was almost closed amid an egg-shaped greenish-yellow bruise.

'Mersiha?' he said softly.

She didn't reply, but a tear ran down her left cheek. Freeman looked up at Katherine. 'We're not leaving her here,' he said.

Katherine nodded. 'I know,' she said.

The meeting took place in a windowless office with no name on the door and a sterile air about it, as if it was used only for emergencies, or for business that was supposed to remain secret.

Connors was there, but he said nothing. He stood by the door with his arms folded across his barrel chest like an executioner awaiting his orders. Freeman sat in his wheelchair, his hands lying loosely on the tops of the wheels. The two other men had arrived separately. One was American, a State Department official called Elliott who had a clammy handshake and an over-earnest stare and who clearly outranked the now-taciturn Connors. The final member of the group was a Serb, a small thick-set man with a square chin and eyes that never seemed to blink. He made no move to introduce himself and the Americans didn't tell Freeman who he was or why he was there, but it was soon apparent that it was the Serb who was going to have the final say. It was, when all was said and done, his country.

Elliott was shaking his head. 'Out of the question,' he said.

'She has no relatives,' Freeman said. 'No family members to take care of her.'

'She is a prisoner of war,' the Serb said.

'She's a child!' Freeman protested. 'A small, frightened child.'

'Mr Freeman, I can assure you that once hostilities are over, she will be released. This war will not go on for ever.'

Freeman thought he saw the beginnings of a smile flit across Elliott's face, but it vanished as quickly as it appeared. 'And what then? How's a thirteen-year-old girl going to survive on her own?'

The Serb made a small shrugging movement. His eyes were hard and unreadable. Freeman couldn't see what he had to gain by refusing to allow him to take Mersiha out of the country.

'I can take care of her. I can give her a home.' Freeman leant forward in his chair. 'I'm the only friend she has.'

'She tried to kill you,' said the Serb.

'No,' Freeman said quietly. 'Your people tried to kill her.'

The Serb looked across at Elliott. 'Mr Freeman,' the American said, 'have you really thought this through? This girl knows nothing of America, she has no connections with the country, and she is a Muslim. What religion are you, Mr Freeman?'

Freeman was an irregular church-goer at best but he had no wish to be drawn into a religious argument. 'I'll be responsible for her religious upbringing. I'll make sure she has a tutor who teaches her about her religion, and her culture.'

Elliott had a file under one arm, but he made no move to open it. Freeman doubted that the State Department would have a file on a thirteen-year-old girl, and he wondered what was in the folder.

'The girl is a terrorist, and she will be treated as such,' the Serb said.

Freeman's eyes flashed fire. 'The girl has a name,' he retorted.

'Mersiha. Her name is Mersiha. She was with her brother, because you killed her parents. There was nowhere else for her to go. She's an orphan. Now you've killed her brother, she has no one. Where's it going to end? When they're all dead?

When you've cleansed the whole fucking country?' His hands were snaking with rage and he had to struggle to keep himself from shouting.

'Mr Freeman, there's no need to be offensive,' Elliott said.

Freeman glared at him. 'Listen to what he's saying, will you?

First of all he says she's a prisoner of war and that she'll be as right as rain once the war's over. Now he says she's a terrorist.

She's a thirteen-year-old girl, for God's sake. She needs help.

She needs a family.'

Elliott nodded as if he understood, but it was clear from the look on his face that he didn't care one bit how Freeman felt.

He took a slow, deep breath. 'You had a son, didn't you, Mr Freeman?' The 'Mr Freeman' came almost as an afterthought, as if Elliott was nearing the end of his patience. Freeman didn't reply. The room seemed suddenly cold. He held Elliott's stare and gripped the wheels of his chair. 'Are you sure you want to do this for the best of motives?' Elliott continued. Still Freeman didn't reply. He knew that the State Department official was trying to provoke him, to prove that he was unstable, and that if Freeman did lose his temper they'd never let him take Mersiha.