28/10/07
10:50 AM
The Truro Centre

Zaf came to slowly. He blinked and twitched, moved his mouth, made sounds that weren't speech… Adam talked at him. The same sort of inane, meaningless stuff you said to dying men and to babies. "It's OK." And "You're safe now." Over and over again until they were nothing but sound. It was maybe another fifteen minutes before Zaf looked at Adam and seemed to see.

"Zaf, can you hear me?" Zaf nodded slightly. "Can you speak?" He tried, his voice was faint and cracked, barely comprehensible. "Right. I'll give you ten minutes." Zaf coughed and swallowed, grimacing. He made a sound that might have been a request for water. Adam looked around. There was a sink in the corner, and a few plastic cups. He put half an inch of water in the bottom of one and went back over to Zaf. Zaf pulled his shoulders a couple of inches off the bed. Adam put a hand between his shoulder blades to keep him there. Zaf raised a hand to reach for the water and barked in pain.

"Hand." He said. His voice was still barely a whisper.

"Alright then. Come here." Adam said. He put the cup to Zaf's mouth and let him take the water slowly. Once he'd finished, Adam sat back down and waited for the ten minutes to run out.

"Do you think you can talk now?"

"Yeah." It didn't sound much like Zaf, it obviously hurt him to speak, but it was comprehensible.

"Right. I talk first." Adam said. "The first thing I need to say is thank you. You let them take you to save my life and keep the op viable. Malcolm recons we'd have had half a million dead in London inside a week if we hadn't got it under control so fast. We wouldn't have managed it if you hadn't… So thank you." Zaf didn't reply, but Adam could tell he understood him. "Where's the last place you remember being?"

"Don't know where it was."

"Where you were being held?"

Zaf nodded.

"Okay, we don't know that either. Whoever had you was trying to get you out of the country in the half term rush. They got stopped at customs, which was sheer blind luck. Border police searched the car and found you, sent you to hospital, hospital tagged you as a torture victim and sent you here. Truro. Do you remember any of that?"

Zaf shook his head. "They said they were going to kill me." Adam said nothing. "When they were done."

Adam nodded once. "They often say that, almost never do it."

"No, I wanted them to." His voice was still slurred, it was obviously still hurting him to speak, but he went on. "I wanted them to kill me. It was-"

"Zaf, stop." Adam said firmly. Zaf fell silent, still breathing too hard. "You've come through over a week of the worst humans can do to each other. I'm not going to tell you the next couple of months are going to be easy because they're not. They're going to be awful. But they are going to be a world better than what you've just come from. Whatever happens now the worst is behind you."

Zaf didn't look convinced.

"Zaf, I've been there, three bloody times. Every time I thought it was the end. Every time, I've ended up in here and walked out again. That's how you ended up in our unit in Six. Then two months later we were pulling arms dealers out of hotel windows together. It can only get better from here." Maybe he should drop this now; Zaf was as good as ignoring him. "And we have the driver. Jo sweet-talked the police in to giving him to us, he'll be at Thames House by nine tomorrow. Our next question is-" Adam picked the printed mug shot up from the floor. "-do you know him?" He held the photo up for Zaf. Even before Zaf nodded, Adam could read the answer on his face. Adam smiled briefly. "Right then. The weekend has worked against us, but we still might break him in time. I can try, anyway." A dark look of satisfaction had settled across Zaf's face. "You know what I have to ask you, Zaf." Zaf nodded once. He knew what was coming. "We made our guesses of course, we moved Jo, she's fine, we're certain that all but one of your assets are safe, we're less sure about the one in East Atlantic Oil, Edward Owens, but we're not sure he's been lifted either. He's just tricky to contact. By the look of your records he always was. What else did-?"

"Everything." Zaf said. "Everything they asked, everything I knew. I tried, I just… I couldn't do it. I couldn't… I wasn't strong enough, I gave them everything."

"Zaf." Adam cut him off. "You were with a professional pack of torturers who weren't bound by any law for eleven days. Of course you broke. I wouldn't expect Harry to last four days like that. They put you through hell, you gave us time to get your assets and Jo to safety. That's all we ever need. The rest of it is awful, but it doesn't harm anyone else. Not if the rest of us have done our job properly." Zaf didn't argue back. "We assumed assets and Jo. Is there anything else we need to be aware of?"

"Names of the whole section. They asked addresses. They didn't believe that I didn't know."

Adam nodded. They almost never believed you when you said you didn't know. "Did you make it up in the end?" Zaf nodded once. "Did it work?" Zaf nodded again. "Anything else?"

"Door codes."

"For Thames House?" Adam asked. Zaf nodded. "We assumed that, they all get changed every few days anyway, the ones that don't, you'd need to have got through the pods to get to them. Your family?"

"Didn't ask."

"Any other names or addresses?" Zaf shook his head. "Is there anything else? Anything I'm missing?"

"Names of groups we're investigating."

"Do you know who they were? Who hired them?"

Zaf shook his head. "They just said they were professionals, that they knew exactly what they were doing."

"Accents? Dialect?"

"Americans, or putting it on."

"Zaf, this is really important. They want you dead."

"Should have killed me then."

"Zaf, I'm serious, they've tried once this morning."

"What?"

"Someone stabbed a doctor and stole his ID to get in, then tried to get past a paranoid spook to spike your drip."

"Where is he now?"

"Somewhere outside. He got away." Adam saw the fear creep across Zaf's face again. "We're upping security here. I passed it to Malcolm over an hour ago. He'll have something figured out by now. But I can't stay." Adam stood up. "If anything else comes back to you… you know what to do." Zaf nodded, his jaw sort of set, probably as near set as Zaf could get it without hurting himself. "I need to get back to London. Apart from anything else, I've got to make this guy's-" He gestured to the photo of the driver. "-life hell for a few days. You'll be OK, they do have armed guard here, they'll be vigilant now. And whatever else, the worst is over."

Adam, having had a long conversation with the man on the security desk about exactly what he was going to do to make sure a hostile agent couldn't just waltz in with lethal drugs and a knife again, got back in his car. On a Sunday afternoon the drive back to London would be slow, he might as well get going. He had a couple of phone calls to make, he could do that stuck in one of the inevitable traffic jams.

The first call was to Jo, just to say that Zaf was alive and still sane, but that he'd be out of work for a while.

"What's… Is he..? I don't even know what to ask you Adam."

"You can ask me more face to face tomorrow, but he's told me that the driver is one of them."

"So what will we do with him?"

"You're not going to go near him. I'm going to get him to tell us who and where the rest of the cell are."

"You mean-?"

"Don't ask Jo, deniability. Anyway, Zaf'll be out for a couple of months I expect, so wherever you move in to you can have it to yourself for a while."

"What… What did they do that'll keep him…"

"It's his hands mostly. They broke a lot of bones. They think they can fix it, but it'll take time." The mental stuff would dog him for longer, but it shouldn't be incapacitating for that long.

"Okay."

"Are you still on the Grid?"

"No, I'm at the safehouse."

"See you in the morning then." Adam hung up.

The next was to Harry.

"Harry, the driver's lying. Zaf ID'd him as a torturer. When is he arriving with us?"

"Ten tonight, the police are ahead of schedule for once."

"I'm imagining we want him to tell us who they are and where the rest of his unit is?"

"Yes, we do."

"And would you like me to be prepared for the fact that he may not want to tell us?"

"Yes."

"Would you like me to take care of it?"

Harry hesitated. "Yes. But I want to make it quite clear that I expect you to treat him as he deserves, in accordance with the ethical principles of this service." That was an order. As he deserves. Adam wouldn't go to a third of that. He couldn't leave a mark on the man.

"Understood. Can you make sure he doesn't sleep tonight?"

"That far, I think I can stretch."

"And, Harry, we've got another problem."

"I know. Malcolm reported to me. The leak most likely came from the general hospital. Malcolm has procured a list of staff who had direct contact with Zaf, we need to find out how this leak occurred, and who we're up against."

"Zaf said they had American accents, so did the attempted assassin."

"And so does the driver, Jason Brewer, or whatever his name actually is. The police sent a tape of his initial interview. But that doesn't help us much, they're not likely to be the CIA."

"No, the means of torture are wrong, they're not allowed to draw teeth or nails anymore, and what they were asking was far too general."

"Not to mention, snatching a British spook on British soil would be a very, very foolish move."

"So American mercenaries?" Adam braked sharply. An idiot in a convertible had just pulled out too close in front of him.

"That's my assumption. When will you be back in London?"

"Six or seven PM?"

"Go home, eat and rest. You'll have a long day tomorrow."

Note: I repeat at this point: I do not necessarily agree with anything any character thinks, says or does.