Ryan, Chris - Zero 22

And then there was the kind of conversation that Alice Goodenough and Maxwell Stark needed to have with Dmitri Poliakov. The off-the-record, deniable kind of conversation. The kind of conversation that involved bruises. Split lips. A broken bone or two, if the suspect was being particularly uncooperative. Or worse.

Conversations like that take place in unofficial locations. An anonymous safe house, perhaps. Or, in this case, a prefab warehouse in an industrial park in west London. A bleak, grey, single-storey structure, surrounded by a high, sturdy wire fence, the entrance ordinarily padlocked and an old metal plaque with the words ‘Park Royal Logistics’ hanging off it at an angle.

It always amused Alice, on the rare occasions she had time to watch TV, to see spooks arriving in black cars with tinted windows. In real life they used cars like the one she and Stark had taken from the car pool in the basement of the MI6 building: a five-year-old Skoda Octavia, never-look-at-it-twice unremarkable. Stark was driving. The car suited him: they were equally shabby. He looked even tubbier behind the wheel, but Alice couldn’t help noticing that he drove with a deft skill that she wouldn’t have expected of him. As they approached the entrance to the warehouse, Alice saw a transit van with the Amazon logo printed on the side parked out front. The chain and padlock on the entrance gate were hanging loose. She got out of the car, opened it up and returned to her place in the passenger seat. Stark drove into the warehouse, parked up by the Amazon van and killed the engine. But he didn’t get out. He seemed to be thinking. Alice gave him the space to do that. He took off his glasses and looked at her. It was the first time she’d seen him without those thick-rimmed frames, and she was surprised at how much younger he looked. Sharper, too. It occurred to her that his avuncular persona and all that business with the extra strong mints was an act. It was designed to put people at their ease and maybe to make them underestimate him.

But all of a sudden Maxwell Stark did not look like a man to be underestimated.

‘You’re going places, Alice,’ he said finally. ‘You’re a bright girl. Bright enough to know that, I’m sure?’

Alice nodded.

‘The trouble is, you’re not the first to be in this situation. I’ve seen it happen before. A promising prospect, exactly the kind of person we need, but they never make it because there are certain parts of the job they can’t stomach. Do you follow me?’

‘I think so, sir,’ said Alice.

‘Sometimes the ends justify the means, Alice. The SAS have delivered Poliakov to us and he is now in the gentle care of two MI6 operators in this building. It may be that he sings like a canary the moment we walk in. But in my experience, that rarely happens. It can take weeks, months even, to break these people down. We don’t have that kind of leisure. We have active military operations all over the world. If General O’Brien has leaked intelligence on any more of them to Poliakov, it means we have men and women in danger of their lives right now.’ He held up one finger. ‘You’re thinking that confessions extorted through torture are seldom reliable and you’re right. Up to a point. But the men who are looking after Poliakov in this facility cut their teeth performing rendition during the Iraq War. They are skilled at enhanced interrogation techniques. They know what they’re doing. If you have a problem with it, now would be the time to speak up.’

Alice glanced at the grey prefab. ‘No problem, sir,’ she said.

‘Excellent. Peppermint?’

‘I think you can stop offering me peppermints now, sir.’

Stark inclined his head. ‘Shall we go?’

It was a warm night, but the temperature dropped a few degrees as they entered the building through a dented, green metal side door. They were in a large open space. The floor was a concrete slab, the walls concrete panels sapping any residual warmth. The strip lights hanging from the ceiling buzzed and flickered, but only over the far side of the warehouse. Alice and Stark were in shadow.

Two men stood under the flickering lights. They both wore black balaclavas. A third guy was tied to a high-backed chair, rope coiled around his body and arms, his ankles tightly bound to the chair legs. He was naked. He was trying to shout out, but his voice was muffled because he was gagged with something. The chair shook as he struggled against the ropes, and that was the only other sound in the room: the knock and scrape of the chair legs against the concrete floor.

‘Shall we?’ Stark said. He made an ‘after you’ gesture. Alice thought it was oddly gentlemanly, given the circumstances.

As she drew closer, Alice recognised Poliakov’s face from his picture. Of course, he looked different. The rag in his mouth gave him the slight appearance of a goldfish. His eyes were bloodshot, his face pale. She couldn’t help looking at the rest of his body. The pallid white skin, losing its definition with age. The triangle of dark chest hair. His penis, unusually fat. As she grew closer, she could smell something. Urine. There was a puddle under the chair and liquid dripped from the wood. The two balaclavad men stood silently behind him, hands behind their backs. Alice and Stark came to a halt a couple of metres from Poliakov, just shy of where a rivulet of urine was flowing from the puddle. Poliakov fell silent and stopped struggling. He looked at the two newcomers with wide eyes and started to shake his head.

‘ Zdravstvuyte ,’ said Stark in impeccable Russian. Hello. He nudged his spectacles further up the bridge of his nose. ‘We happen to know you speak English, Mr Poliakov, so I suggest we conduct our conversation in that language.’ He smiled. ‘I say conversation. What I really mean is, we’re going to ask you questions and you’re going to tell us the answers. If we suspect that you’re not telling the truth, we’ll ask our friends here –’ he gestured towards the two men in balaclavas – ‘to persuade you to do so. In my experience, that usually involves fingers. Is that right, gentlemen?’

The taller of the two balaclavad man walked round to the front of the chair. His boots splashed in the puddle of urine, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He held something up: a pair of garden secateurs with green rubber handles. He gave them a couple of test squeezes, then returned to his position behind the chair. Poliakov’s eyes were bulging and he was shaking his head more frantically than ever; the chair scraped and banged and scraped and banged and Alice thought he might topple.

Stark raised a calming hand. ‘Mr Poliakov, please, such a display helps neither of us. The calmer we can all remain, the more productive this conversation will be.’ To Alice’s surprise, his words had the required effect. Poliakov fell silent again, though he couldn’t entirely suppress his trembling. ‘That’s much better,’ said Stark. He removed a packet of extra strong mints from his pocket, popped one in his mouth and sucked noisily for a few seconds. ‘Now then, we’re going to talk about our friend, General Frank O’Brien. We’re very well aware that he gave you intelligence about a British military operation in Syria. For your information, that resulted in the death of thirteen British soldiers, and I have to tell you, the consensus is you should be thrown to the wolves for that. If you’d rather not spend the next thirty years in our frankly appalling prison system, I suggest you tell us right now what other operations, British or otherwise, are currently compromised.’ He looked at the man with the secateurs. ‘Would you mind?’ he said, wagging a finger at the rag in Poliakov’s mouth. The man walked to the front again and removed the gag.