3/11/07
9:10 AM
The Truro Centre

Adam tapped twice on the door of the hospital room.

"Zaf?"

"Adam." He sounded much more like himself than he had done the last time Adam had seen him. It was early on Saturday morning, a full week since Ros had called him to say Zaf had been found. Adam stepped in to the room and let the door shut behind him. Zaf looked very different to how he had looked a week ago. The bruises on his face were paling to green and yellow, some were already brown. There was a tube of some sort protruding from the side of his neck. He had a catheter in one arm, but no drip now. His hands had been bandaged before, now they were heavily stitched, swollen, had fresher bruises than his face, but Adam could see skin, even if there were only stubs of fingernails, just starting to grow back. And Zaf looked fully awake. The way he was holding his face looked much more normal.

"Hey, how are you doing?"

Zaf made a strange face. "Well, I can honestly say better." He made an effort to push himself in to more of a sitting position. Adam pulled his pillows up behind him. "Thanks."

"No worries. You look better."

"I guess that's not saying much."

Adam looked around. "There are still no bloody chairs in this place. Ten years ago the staff were always complaining that there were never any chairs. Nothing changes." Something flickered across Zaf's face. He'd realised why Adam had been here ten years ago. Adam hadn't meant to bring that up. Zaf looked down and shifted his legs across the bed a bit.

"Here. I don't know where you can find a chair, so…"

"Thanks." Adam perched on the end of the bed.

"What brings you all the way down here again? Someone trying to blow up Land's End?"

"It's Saturday. I'm my own man unless someone actually does try to blow something up."

"Is it? I've lost track. Someone could have blown up Parliament and gassed out Buckingham Palace and I don't think I'd know a thing about it."

"Well thankfully we've had a fairly quiet week past Monday and nothing's blown up." Zaf looked at him, inviting him to go on. "Unfortunately Harry ordered us off the trail of the mercs who had you on Wednesday morning. We weren't getting far enough fast enough." Zaf didn't let himself react. "They had too big a start on us, they must have known they were open by noon on Saturday, we didn't have the resources to start doing much before Monday morning. Harry says it's not our priority and sent us off looking through some whisperings in North Africa."

"Is Michael still operational?"

"What, your Waterfall asset? Yeah. Jo took him over."

Zaf sighed. "He's quite stable, he should be okay with a change of handler."

"Yeah, we think he is."

Zaf drew a breath and immediately started coughing. He lifted an arm to cover his mouth.

"You alright?" Adam asked, as the coughing fit subsided.

Zaf nodded. "'S not the bioweapon."

"If it were you'd be dead."

Zaf looked across at him. "Come to that, how the hell did you survive it?"

"Russians had a cure." Adam said. "We ah… persuaded them to give it up. Jo did really well that day. I had to leave her for dead, she got herself out of it. She's been at this, what? Eighteen months? There are people twice as experienced couldn't have done that." Zaf sort of smiled. "Anyway, I thought it might… I thought you might want to know what happened with the guy you ID'd last time I was here, the driver." Zaf looked intently at him. "He broke. He broke in seven and a half hours, without a mark on his body. I only laid a hand on him twice, and one of those times he grabbed me first."

A look of grim satisfaction settled on Zaf's face. "Good." He said coldly.

"I don't think I've ever broken anyone that fast before. He gave us an address, his name, the name of the company, the names of most of the rest of them…"

"You think his intel's good?"

"Not too sure about the names, but for the rest of it I believe him. The real problem I had was who they were hired by. I don't think he knew."

"Do you think you'll get it from him?"

Adam shook his head. "He's gone. Harry ordered us to drop it, he's been handed back to the police, and Harry's forbidden us to pursue the inquiry any further. So I am definitely not going to ask you questions to confirm that the location he gave us was right."

Adam saw Zaf smile. "Of course you're not."

"And I'm definitely not going to ask you where you were kept between bouts."

"A cell. Rough stone walls, metal door, barred window. Probably two metres by four."

"And I'm not allowed to ask you which way you turned out of that cell to get to where you were interrogated."

"Right. Probably two metres between the doors." That fitted with the place the driver had given them.

"Thanks."

"No problem. Is there anything else you're not going to ask me?"

Adam smiled. "In terms of figuring out who hired them, it would be really helpful to know what they were asking, to compare it to what the Driver told us."

Zaf sighed and looked away. "A lot."

"Was there a pattern to it? Anything they were particularly interested in?"

Zaf shook his head. "I'd tell you if I knew, Adam, but… There was nothing. None of it ever made sense, there didn't seem to be a main aim, it felt like they were asking anything they thought I could possibly know."

Adam sighed. "Okay. That's it. Next thing." Zaf visibly relaxed. "This has probably occurred to you, but your mother has made multiple calls to various confused government departments trying to find out where you are. Sooner or later, you are going to have to see her, and sooner is probably better."

Zaf nodded. "That's okay."

"And obviously we can't tell her what really happened."

"What's she been told?"

"Ros went and told her that you'd been captured with a British diplomatic unit in Syria and interrogated. Probably the best line to go down is mistaken identity; they thought you were with a different group, they didn't believe you when you told them who you were…" Adam tailed off.

Zaf nodded. "Has anyone told her how I got out?"

"Ros used the term 'retrieved'. Say the British Army sent men to find you. And we need a convincing excuse for why she hasn't been allowed to see you yet."

"I'll take the flack for that. I can just say I didn't want her to see me like that."

"Okay. I'm going to push you a bit, see how you hold. Just to check you're with it enough to have civilian visitors."

"Okay." Zaf said. He didn't look particularly bothered by the idea. Adam stood up.

"Name."

"Zaffar Younis."

"Job."

"I work for the British Civil Service as an interdepartmental interpreter." That sounded fine to Adam. Zaf had been telling his family that for ten years.

"Where were you captured?"

"On the road between Damascus and Al Tawani. I was with a British Diplomatic unit, serving as an Arabic-English translator."

"Who captured you?"

"I don't know."

"What do you mean you don't know? How long were you with them?"

"About ten days."

"Ten days and you don't know who they were?"

"They never identified themselves."

"Why did they take you?"

"I don't know. My guess would be they're anti-Westerners who didn't like the fact I was traveling with white men who only spoke English."

"What did they want?"

"I don't know. I don't think they did either. I think they thought, since most of the group was white, we must have been spies or saboteurs, they wouldn't believe anything else we told them."

"Why would they bother with you? You're only an interpreter."

"I don't know. I don't think they believed me."

"I'm hearing a lot of 'I don't know' in this, you're playing ignorance." The door opened behind Adam, he ignored it and kept staring Zaf down. Zaf glanced at the door, then met his eye again. "What are you holding back?"

"Who are you and what are you doing in here?" A nurse had walked in to the room, and was looking at Adam as though she'd found him punching a kitten.

"Emily, this is Adam." Zaf said. "As for what he's doing here… I don't think I can tell you."

"Trying to prevent a breach of the Official Secrets Act." Adam supplied.

"That's not what it looked like." Emily said coldly.

"He's doing his job Emily." Zaf said. Emily gave a soft huff and turned away to one of the cupboards in the room. Zaf looked back at Adam. "I'm not withholding information for the sake of it. Torturers don't tend to want to tell their captives very much." Adam put himself back in interrogation mode.

"It wasn't even Syria, was it? Assad favours beating, trauma is to the torso. That's not what I'm seeing on you."

"I didn't say it was Assad."

"No, you didn't say anything. You're just talking at me."

"I can stop this." Emily said, turning back to face them. "I have a responsibility to stop this, this man has seen enough of rough questioning recently. I'm calling security."

"He's doing his job." Zaf repeated firmly. "If he doesn't do this, I can't see my family. And as 'rough questioning' goes, this doesn't figure." Emily's mouth had turned in to a thin line. She folded her arms and backed in to the corner of the room. Zaf looked back at Adam. "I've told you what I know. There's not much to it because I don't know much. Go and talk to the spec ops troops who got us out of there, they've been questioning the ones that took us hostage. They'll know much more than me by now."

"What the hell were spec ops troops doing in Syria in the first place?"

"They got annoyed with Assad not finding us quickly enough, so they came in."

"What?" Adam stepped closer and stood over Zaf. "Assad just gave them permission to just waltz in?"

"I don't know. I doubt Assad knew beforehand, it was probably a surgical strike."

"This entire thing just sounds made up. What are you hiding?"

"I've told you what I know." Zaf said calmly. "Unless you want to go in to specific details of what they asked and how they hurt us, there's nothing more I can tell you."

Adam relaxed. "Okay, well done. You'll do." Zaf relaxed too.

"You do that for real, don't you?" Emily said.

Adam turned and looked at her. She was looking at him with absolute disgust. "For the record, I devise and deliver R2I courses for British Security and Military Personnel. That necessitates knowing how interrogation usually works." None of that was untrue. Adam didn't feel the need to mention that he also taught interrogation, or how he'd spent most of Monday. He stepped away from Zaf's bed. The nurse approached and faffed around Zaf for a couple of minutes, wrote a few things down and left again. Adam went back to Zaf's bedside.

"I'll call in when I leave here and tell Harry you're fit to see your family, and get a car arranged for your mother."

"Thanks."

"How are you filling your time?" Adam asked, looking around.

"Well since I can't use my hands…" There was a brief silence.

"There must be so much intelligence in this place." Adam said after a moment. "Think about it. Every single person in here, someone thought they were worth torturing for it. Between them they must know enough to bring down a couple of small countries. Trouble is we can't usually get at it. We couldn't bring anyone in here in for questioning."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm not telling you to go and start questioning people, given how the nurse reacted just now I don't think that'll get you anywhere, just… see what you can pick up. I bet there are a few interesting things. And just remember, if anyone asks you any questions at all, we didn't receive any messages and we definitely did not shoot the delicious plump-breasted pigeon."

Zaf laughed.

It wasn't so much that he wanted the information, Adam mused as he left, as much as he wanted Zaf to keep thinking of himself as a spook, to have something to do that felt productive, so he wasn't just lying there, unable to stand up, remembering what they'd done to him.

If anybody is wondering the 'we definitely did not shoot this delicious, plump-breasted pigeon' line is a reference to the comedy series 'Blackadder'. Adam seems the type to watch it.