Will Adams - The Lost Labyrinth

Knox had heard about water-boarding, of course, but he hadn't paid attention to the details, had never imagined it might happen to him. He didn't know, therefore, the mechanics of it, or how to resist.

'Lift his feet,' said Mikhail. 'They need to be above his head.'

The far end of the bench was picked up and held about a foot off the ground. It was an uncomfortable sensation in itself, blood flowing towards his head; but it was nothing to his fear of what was coming next. He took and held a deep breath just before the first saucepan was tipped over the towel. Most of it splashed away, but plenty more soaked through the towel into his mouth, held open by the bit, and trickled down into his throat. He had to fight the urge to cough.

'He's holding his breath,' observed Mikhail.

A fist smashed into Knox's solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him. He heaved for air just as the second saucepan was tipped out, and so he breathed in water, triggering his gag reflex, making him buck and convulse, his whole body arching as it dedicated itself to the single ambition of air. He choked out as much water as he could, sucked in again, got only towel and more water. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't breathe. The necessity of air was extraordinary, like nothing he'd ever felt before, utterly terrifying, he tried to kick and flail, he hurled himself sideways so violently that his shoulder almost dislocated from its joint, but still he had no air, his head was pounding crazily, his heart was bucking and kicking, and he could feel the blackness coming; and it was a relief when it pulled over him like a shroud, and he was gone.

A furious barking accompanied Iain's departure, but the German shepherd must have realised its impotence, for the fury was soon replaced by a self-pitying snuffling that distracted Gaille from her efforts to decipher Petitier's code. She went to the door, stood there watching indecisively from the shadows. There was enough slack between the two leashes to allow the dog a little movement. It began to turn in circles, so that she worried it might choke itself; but it stopped in time and went the other way, unwinding itself. A fly buzzed by Gaille's ear; she flapped it away. The movement caught the dog's eye. Instantly, its whimpers turned back to yowls of fury, it started straining at the rope, trying to get at her.

She fought her instinct to retreat indoors, lest it think it had won a victory. Instead, she took a couple of steps outside into the pleasant freshness of the morning. Sunlight glinted on a pair of steel bowls by the door, presumably food and water for the dog, empty except for a few caked-on scabs; and next to them was what looked like the thighbone of a goat or sheep, gnawed bare of meat. She felt a swell of irritation at Petitier, that responsibility for his wretched dog should fall onto her. But fall on her it had. And suddenly she noticed how thin the German shepherd was, its ribs showing, its coat patchy and speckled with sores and scabs where he-it was a he, Gaille now saw-had scratched himself against the stone walls. And he was slightly favouring his left hind leg too. And despite his still furious barking, her heart went out to him.

They hadn't finished their conchiglie in tomato sauce the night before. She fetched the leavings down from the roof, scraped them into one of the bowls, refreshed them with some water, then added slivers of ham from the joint hanging in the pantry. Then she filled the second bowl with water and took them both out. He raged to see her, hurled himself so violently towards her that she couldn't help but jump back and splash water over her leg. 'You stupid fucking dog!' she cried. 'I'm only trying to feed you.'

But he continued to snarl until she shrugged her shoulders and took the bowls back inside. The barking stopped at once, the whimpering resumed. She gave a wail of exasperation and went back out. This time she defied his barking to set both bowls down on the ground as near to him as she dared. Then she went back inside and fetched the Mauser and held it by its barrel and pushed the bowls with its stock close enough to him that he could feed. He didn't even look at them, not while she was there, just continued to rage, so she returned inside and replaced the Mauser and picked her notebook once more, tried to focus on the journals.

She strongly suspected a simple substitution cipher. Petitier would surely have wanted to be able to consult them without going through elaborate decipherment every time. People who devised their own ciphers were often so familiar with them that they could read them almost as easily as though they were in plain text. No code could hope to defeat sophisticated modern decipherment techniques anyway, so all he'd have hoped to do was confound a casual visitor-and a substitution cipher would have been plenty for that.

The trick with cracking such ciphers was to find repeating sequences of symbols, which would indicate the same original word. It wasn't long before she'd identified several of these, enabling her to take some guesses at what those words might be, then applying the letters she'd broken back to the journals. But though she tried in a variety of languages, all she got was gibberish. She put it aside for the moment, took a different tack, totting up all the different symbols he'd used, hoping to discover at least what alphabet the deciphered text was in. The Greek alphabet had twenty-four symbols, for example, as opposed to the standard twenty-six of the Roman or the twenty-eight of the Arabic. But she quickly counted forty-two different symbols, suggesting his cipher included numerals and mathematical or grammatical symbols, as well as letters. She tried a third approach, noting down the relative frequency of each of the symbols and combinations of symbols; but that didn't prove much help either, for she didn't know what language she was working in.

She put her pad down in frustration. There was silence outside. Or not silence, exactly. Her ears pricked up at the sound. She rose stealthily and tiptoed to the door. The dog had his muzzle deep in the bowl of pasta, and as she watched he threw back his head to gobble a mouthful down, and the glad squelching noises of his swallowing were a kind of music to her ears.

Knox's ribs and chest felt as bruised as he could ever remember. His stomach too, from the punch he'd taken. His heart felt worn as perished rubber, and his throat and nostrils were chafed raw, as though sand-papered from within. He turned to one side, spat out watery mucous that ran feebly past the gag and down the side of his mouth. Time was blurring, his mind was playing tricks. He wasn't sure how many sessions of this torture he'd already endured. Four? Five?

'Ah,' said Mikhail. 'Rejoined us, I see.' He was holding the hand-towel down by his side, still wet, but twisted in a gentle spiral, as though he'd just wrung it out.

Knox shivered with Pavlovian tremors. 'What do you want?' he asked. But the gag rendered it into an incomprehensible moan.

Mikhail flapped out the hand-towel and then folded it in half, ready to lay once more over Knox's face. 'Hold his head,' he told Davit.

'Please,' wept Knox. 'No more.'

'He's ready to talk,' said Davit.

'Lift his feet,' Mikhail told Zaal.

'Please,' said Knox. 'I beg you.'

Mikhail set the folded towel back over Knox's face, turning his world dark. His heart started racing, he could hear footsteps going round and around, deliberately building his apprehension. 'Do you know what the function of torture is, Zaal?' asked Mikhail.

'To get information, sir?'

'No,' said Mikhail. 'Information is the fruit of torture. It's not the function.'

'I'm not sure I understand, sir.'

'Mankind is self-aware, Zaal. It's what separates us from the animals. Our minds are distinct from our bodies, our thoughts from our words. If you like, we're each puppeteers pulling our own strings. During ordinary interrogations, that gap is still there, that distance between mind and body. It allows people like Mr Knox here to consider their answers, to say whatever they believe is to their greatest benefit. The function of torture is to eradicate that gap, so that the subject's thoughts are no longer distinct from their words.'