27/10/07
10:45 PM
The Truro Centre

Adam got out of the car and rolled his shoulders. It had not been a smooth drive. It was pitch black out here, except for the lights on in the centre itself. It was late, nearly eleven PM. He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. Spooks often weren't well received here and this place didn't exactly hold fond memories for him. It had been ten years now. He had a job to do. He was going to do it. Adam set his jaw and strode towards the front door.

It was locked, of course it was locked, but there was an intercom just beside it. He pressed it.

"Hello?" A male voice asked.

"Hello, I'm a Security Service Agent here to positively identify a patient of yours, my section head should have called you to say I was coming." There was a moment's pause.

"If I say 'yellow elephant'?"

"I say 'red ceiling'." It was one of those combinations that must have made sense to Harry. The door buzzed as it opened. Adam walked in. A lone man sat at the security desk.

"ID please?" He asked. Adam handed it over, his real ID. He wasn't going to faff about with false identities here. If Zaf was stoned he might blow his cover anyway, and everyone working here had signed the Official Secrets Act and been vetted almost as thoroughly as the people at Thames House.

"Name of the person you're looking for?"

"We think he's Zaffar Younis."

"Alright, he's in the ACTU, I'll just call someone to take you down to him. Please take a seat." Adam sat down. They'd stepped up security here in the past decade.

A couple of minutes later, a woman maybe five years Adam's junior emerged from a doorway, solid blue top, black trousers. Nurse.

"Evening Eric." She said to the watchman with a soft Yorkshire accent.

"Evening. This man's here to ID the new patient."

"Ah, right, come this way." She offered a hand to him. He shook it. She looked faintly familiar. "I'm Tia Yates, I'm on the night shift tonight.

"I'm Adam."

"Nice to meet you."

"How's he been?"

"Stable." She replied. "I'm not a doctor, I'm not really supposed to comment. We've been keeping him heavily drugged, the referring hospital let him come round and he didn't take it well."

"I need to talk to him. I can wait a day or so, but not much more."

"You'd need to talk to the attending doctor, he'll be up at seven. He's gone to bed." There was a moment's silence. "Have I met you? I feel like I've seen you before."

"No, I don't think so." Adam lied smoothly. If she'd met him when he'd been here a decade ago, he didn't want to be reminded of it.

"My mistake then." She tapped a code (4692, he'd remember that) in to a keypad next to a door and led him through it.

She stopped and turned to face him.

"Right, how well do you know Zaffar?"

"Quite well."

"Have you worked with recent torture victims before?"

"Yes."

"So you understand that he's not going to look like himself, he's not going to behave like himself. He's had just about the worst possible time."

"I know." Adam said. "Nevertheless, I need to see him."

"OK, so long as you understand. And, by the way, I am not going to let you make him talk to you. He's had enough of that." She pushed the door open.

A man lay on the bed. His hands were bandaged, he was motionless, his skin was dappled with burns and bruises and there were cuts at various stages of healing along his forearms and a few on his face, there was an oxygen cannula up his nose, but it was unmistakably Zaf.

"Oh Zaf I'm sorry." Adam breathed. He'd left him. He'd left him with the mercs and run. He'd though he was leaving him to die. He'd made his peace with that. This was different.

"When you've been here a while," Tia started after a minute or so, "you start to learn to tell who did it. Assad do a lot of blunt trauma with plastic or rubber hoses, they're quite distinctive. The CIA, you get very distinctive wrist injuries, genital infections and often water aversions. The Serbs used to go for the face when the genocide was going on… He's not any of those. This was done by someone who knew how to cause a lot of pain without risking killing him too quickly." They'd suspected it was Mercs; mercenary torturers. They were, to Adam's mind, the lowest kind of human.

"What are the most significant injuries?" Zaf still seemed to have both his eyes and all his limbs.

"In terms of affecting him for the rest of his life, hands and feet. He has a lot of broken bones in both. We've strapped them up for now and taken X-rays. The surgeon will have a proper look at them in the morning, see what's fixable. We don't think there are major internal injuries, but they do sneak up on you sometimes. We're also treating him for a fever, we think the cause of that is an infected wound in his groin or the localised pneumonia, but we're not a hundred percent sure."

There was a muffled cry from another room. Tia spun on her heel.

"Fatimah. Excuse me." She walked out. Adam took out his phone and pressed one on speed dial. He laid a hand on Zaf's shoulder.

"Zaf." He pushed gently. "Zaf." He didn't respond at all. The phone stopped ringing.

"Harry Pearce."

"Harry, we have a positive ID, this is definitely him."

"You're sure."

"He's right in front of me."

"Put him on."

"He's out, I think they're drugging him out."

"Then hold position until you know what he did and did not give up."

"Alright. Are you going to call the others?"

"What?"

"Ros, Jo and Malcolm, and Connie if you like, are you going to call them?"

"Yes I suppose I should."

Note: The injuries described by Tia as typical of torture by Assad and the CIA are based on factual reports. Those attributed to the Kosovo genocide are not.

Also, the hints that Adam has been hospitalised at the Truro Centre are based on the fact that we know Adam has been tortured at least three times (Syria, Serbia and the Yemen). This is explored in my other fic, 'Come Home'