E.V. Seymour - The Mephisto Threat

He must have fallen asleep. He woke up with a yell. A guard standing over him had thrown a bucket of ice-cold water over his head. Tallis stuck his tongue out, eager to catch a few precious drops. Two other guards were pulling him up, banging his knees along the concrete, dragging him towards the open door. God, he thought, what next? He’d heard about enhanced interrogation techniques. He’d heard they weren’t very nice.

He managed to get up onto his feet. They were taking him at a fast trot down a dingy corridor. He could hear voices now. Men shouting. A gut-wrenching cry of pain tore through the fetid air. Barked orders.

Stairs ahead. One of the guards led the way, the other behind threatening him with a Taser stun gun should he try anything clever. Not that Tallis had any intention of risking 50,000 volts and total muscle paralysis. The noise was growing louder now. More desperate. The unmistakable clamour of violence. In spite of the heat, Tallis felt a chill as cold as a desert night creep deep into his soul.

The corridor opened out. Overhead strip lighting flickered with enough of a strobe effect to induce a fit in an epileptic. Doors off on either side, some of the metal grilles open, sounds of excessive use of force crashing around his ears. He hoped it was staged. If it wasn’t, poor sods, he thought.

They were walking three abreast, Tallis stumbling slightly, not used to walking in bare feet, and feeling off balance with his hands tied together. Finally they came to the end and to what looked like the type of lift you saw in a car park. One of the guards pressed a security keypad and the metal doors drew apart. Tallis was butted through into another corridor, more stairs, more fancy codes and security panels, more shouts of protest. For a brief moment, he thought he heard the strains of classical music and the sound of dripping water. Must be the product of a vivid imagination. Either that, or he was hallucinating. And then all his birthdays came at once. He was standing in an open space, like an atrium, natural light flooding through the barred windows in the ceiling. So delighted by the sight of the sun crashing down on blue, he hardly noticed Ertas, but he did clock the man standing next to him. Deeply tanned, strong-jawed, and sturdy with eyes that were too close together so that it was impossible to detect who or what he was looking at. The man dismissed the two guards with a short command. At once, Tallis could tell that, fluent though the man’s Turkish was, it wasn’t his first language.

‘This way, please,’ Ertas said, coldly remote, indicating that Tallis follow.

Despite feeling a twat, standing there in his underwear, Tallis stood his ground. ‘This how you normally treat visitors to your country?’ he fumed. ‘I demand to know where you are holding me and why. I also insist that I have full legal representation. I want to see Mr Cardew at once.’

‘You make many demands, Mr Miller,’ Ertas said quietly, with disdain.

Thank God for that, Tallis thought. At least his true identity hadn’t been revealed. Could only make things complicated. A quick visual of the building told him that escape was probably out of the question. The atrium appeared to be the highest point of the structure. There were no other windows, only doors off with a staircase leading down at the opposite end. A man in boxer shorts, even in these soaring temperatures, wasn’t exactly likely to go far. ‘Who’s your friend?’ he said, bolshie.

Ertas answered. ‘You may call him Koroglu.’

Strange, why can’t he speak for himself? Tallis thought, eyeing the man suspiciously.

‘Come,’ Ertas said, pivoting on his heel.

Tallis let out a belligerent sigh. He felt less fear now, his outrage building and genuine. Shown into a room not too dissimilar to the one at the police station, he asked first for water then to be untied. Both requests were ignored.

Ertas pulled up a chair for himself. Koroglu took a position behind Tallis. Ertas asked Tallis to sit down.

‘I pro—’ Two firm hands grabbed his shoulders, fingers digging deep into his nerves. Tallis gasped with shock and slumped down, arms half paralysed. He wondered what rank Koroglu held, from which department he hailed. Bastard division, he concluded.

Ertas, who was sitting opposite, showed no emotion. ‘After you left the station, what did you do?’ His voice was soft, coaxing.

Fucking predictable, Tallis thought, straight out of the hard-guy, soft-guy school of police interrogation. Ertas had probably picked that up in the States, too.

‘Not sure exactly when that was,’ Tallis said, leaning forward slightly, wishing he could rub his arms and get the circulation going. A stolen glance at Ertas’s watch told him it was four in the afternoon.

‘Two days ago.’

Right, Tallis thought so now he knew exactly how long he’d been held, which wasn’t very long at all. Just felt that way. ‘I went back to the hotel. I can tell you what I had to eat if you insis—’

The blow came from the left, flat-handed, mediumstrength, precision-aimed. Tallis’s ear rang. He felt temporarily deafened.

‘I will ask the questions,’ Ertas said softly. ‘You will answer.’

Tallis nodded, raised his tied hands, rubbed at his ear and did his best to look stricken. Inside he boiled with rage. In two fluid movements, he could throw his head back against the goon standing behind him, swing his hands round and punch Ertas in the throat, smashing the hyoid bone.

‘And after dinner, what did you do then?’ Ertas continued elegantly.

‘I went for a stroll.’

‘Where?’

‘Not sure I re—’

Another clout on the other side ensured that he did. He told Ertas what he wanted to hear. No point in denying it. These guys already knew where he’d been.

Ertas leant forward with a tight smile. ‘You were observed, Mr Miller, following a man who is of interest to us.’

‘I don’t know wha—’ Tallis flinched, expecting another blow. But it was Ertas who raised his hand in a restraining gesture. Tallis heard Koroglu grunt with frustration at being denied another chance to use him like a punchbag.

‘You deny it?’ Ertas’s expression was hard.

Tallis smiled. ‘Since when was following someone a criminal offence?’

‘So you were following him.’

Checkmate, Tallis thought. Those blows to his head must have addled his thinking.

‘The man in question,’ Ertas continued smoothly, ‘is a Moroccan known to have links with al-Qaeda.’ A Moroccan ? Tallis thought, surprised. According to his victim’s passport, he had been a Turk—unless it was false, like his own. ‘He was deported by your own government two years ago,’ Ertas continued, ‘and is of interest to the United States.’

Shit. Tallis baulked. Who the hell did they think he was? More to the point, who were they? In his mind, the USA was synonymous with extraordinary rendition and secret detention centres. Could this be one of them? From what he’d heard, they were more likely to be found in Poland and Romania, but the closed prisons there were reputed to be full and so the States had outsourced and turned their attention to the Horn of Africa. What all this definitely pointed to: Garry Morello had been onto something, and he was deep in the shit. He remained stubborn. ‘I don’t see what this has to do with me.’

‘Because you were the last person to see him alive,’ Ertas said, down-turned eyes meeting Tallis’s.

‘You mean he’s dead,’ Tallis said, sounding aghast.

Ertas picked up the phone, ordered a jug of water and two glasses. Nobody said a word. Tallis was trying to work out what they wanted from him, confession or revelation? The water arrived. Ertas poured out, unlocked Tallis’s cuffs and handed the glass to Tallis who drank it down in one. ‘Thank you.’