27/11/07
8:10 PM
London

About half an hour later, supper cleared away, Zaf heard someone come to the door. He heard Jo get up and go to look. Sense told him it was probably Adam. But something else whispered that the torturers would want him dead, that they'd found him at Truro. He could identify them, and spooks were dangerous enemies. He froze and waited.

"Zaf?" Jo called from the door. "Adam's here."

Zaf straightened up, determinedly ignoring the part of himself that wondered if Jo was under duress, and went to the door. It was Adam, of course it was Adam, hanging his coat up behind the door, a rucksack in one hand.

"Zaf." He smiled broadly and clapped Zaf on the shoulders. "You look better, much better."

"I feel better."

"Did you get anything interesting from Truro?"

"Ah… Al Khef is getting very bold in Algeria, but I think you already knew that. The Eritrean State is blaming a lot of what it does on rebel groups." Zaf started back towards the living room. Adam followed him.

"By which you mean-"

"Torture, systematic rape, summary executions…" Zaf sat down. Adam copied him. "Stuff that might attract a lot of foreign attention if they were known to be doing it widely. And the staff there are very good at telling who did the dirty work. We could probably make use of them alongside conventional forensics in some cases."

"The thing about Eritrea is news." Adam said. "How much more can you tell me about that?"

"Not a lot. As I think you saw, you have to be very careful about how you ask anything in that place."

"Who's responsible for the bulk of the patients in there?"

"Governments. Often it's mercs being paid by governments, but most of it is being run by regimes, not rebel groups."

"Do you think that's just because the rebel group ones don't get out alive?"

Zaf shrugged. "No idea. But it's alarming how young some of them are." Adam looked up at him. "Two boys. Their voices weren't even starting to break yet. You looked at them, you just knew they weren't sleeping."

Adam ran a hand through his hair. "Assad, don't tell me."

"Yeah. Suspected of spying for anti-government groups."

Adam sighed heavily. "It's bad enough when it's us; adults who've… It's much worse when it's kids." Zaf nodded once in agreement. Adam shifted his weight. "Right, I've got one thing to say to you, two things to give you." Zaf waited. Adam looked around. "Is Jo still..?" He added quietly.

"I think I heard her go to her room."

Adam nodded. "Okay, she doesn't need to hear this." Adam shifted as though steeling himself. "Right. Obviously, it'll be a while before you're back in field work. Tring will want to get hold of you soon and they'll probably tell you exactly how they want you to deal with…" Adam tailed off. "Some people take that well, some people don't. I'm just going to tell you what I was told by my handler after the first time I was caught like that." Zaf waited. After a moment, Adam looked up at him. "You know when you start working medium to long term covers, they tell you to put yourself, your real self, in a box and build the cover outside it. Don't open the box, but remember what's in it and exactly where you put it. Richard told me that the best way he'd found for dealing with this stuff was to build a cover, like you were going in to deep cover, expecting to stay there for months, years even, so flesh the cover well and keep fleshing him as you go. The purpose of the cover is to be a man who, for whatever reason, isn't bothered by what happened to him. Whether that's because he can rationalise it, he just doesn't care or he's… embraced the philosophy of Stoicism to such an extent that he can be indifferent to the pain. In every other way, the cover is like you. Same skill sets, same family, same friends, same sense of humour… Then you let yourself lose the box. You separate off the part of yourself that… feels this and hide it until you almost forget it's there." Zaf looked down. That was quite daunting, to create a false self and let that false self crush him, or parts of him, out of existence. "The professionals will probably tell you something completely different anyway." There was a long silence.

"Did you do that?" Zaf asked.

Adam hesitated. "Yeah." He said shortly, looking away. "More than once." Of course. Adam had had this twice; Syria and Serbia. Possibly other times Zaf didn't know about. And Adam was still going, losing Fi seemed to have done him much more damage than any of the other stuff he'd been through.

"Do you think it works?"

"Doesn't work perfectly. There might be something that you see or hear once in a while that threatens to break the cover, and of course you can't hold it when you're asleep. But I think it helps."

Zaf nodded. "Okay."

Adam sat up straighter. "Right, serious bit over." He reached in to his rucksack and pulled out a shoebox. "You're stuck at home for at least a couple of weeks, you'll have stuff to sort out, but how long is that going to take you?" Zaf shrugged. "You're going to be bored out of your skull in a few days, so I brought you these." Adam took the lid off the box. Inside was a series of padlocks. Zaf reached forwards and picked up one of them. Underneath was a lockpicking set. "I thought you'd be in need of something to do, picking locks is a useful skill, you can start with these, then try using pins or something."

"Thanks." Picking locks had been Fi's trick.

"I was going to try to learn when I got shot last year, but… I just never got round to it. Maybe you'll do better."

"I can try, anyway." It might make him use his hands better too. They just weren't right, still. They didn't exactly hurt any more, certain joints ached now and then, but it wasn't the same pain as it had been. But they slipped, even doing simple things. He was clumsy.

"Then these." Adam reached back in to the rucksack and pulled out two battered paperbacks, neither of them had English script on the cover. Zaf tilted his head to better read them at an angle. Arabic. "If you don't use language…"

"I know." He picked up the top book, it looked like a sort of pop-history tome, he wasn't up to reading serious academic literature in Arabic. "I've actually been using Arabic quite a bit, it's my Farsi that's in danger of slipping."

"Who've you been speaking Arabic to?"

"A few people, including an Moroccan who didn't have a word of English, or Urdu or Farsi, so that was fun."

Adam laughed and nodded. "Opposite ends of the language. I don't think I could order coffee in Morocco."

"It was hard, it was really hard. The staff can't communicate with him either, they were very glad to have someone who was willing to try. We ended up using the Quran as a sort of spelling board over games of chess."

"Who won?"

"Oh, he did, every single time. In the end he took pity on me and started trying to explain why my moves were wrong."

"But if you could barely…"

"Yeah, it didn't really work. He had to move the pieces for me as well to begin with."

"Because-"

"Yeah, hands. My chess improved a bit once I was off morphine, but only a bit."

"What did you get from that guy?"

"Absolutely nothing. I kept thinking I would, but he just refused to talk about anything useful. I thought I'd get to him in the end, but…"

"Ah well." Adam reached back in to the rucksack and pulled out a plastic case, grinning this time, and set it on the table. Zaf read the title and chuckled. Blackadder, all four series. "Have you seen all of them?" Adam asked.

"Bits over the years."

"Don't start with the first series, I don't like the last one in series two, General Hospital in series four is about spy hunting and it's the only spy hunting thing from TV I can stand." That was unlike Adam. He very publically made a point of never watching spy films or anything remotely to do with spies.

"What does it do right?"

Adam thought about it for a moment. "Everything and nothing. Just watch it."

Jo's door opened somewhere else in the flat.

"Does anyone else want tea?" She called.

"Please." Zaf called.

"No thanks Jo, I'm heading off now." Adam stood up. Zaf copied him. "You're not under any time pressure to come back." Adam said to him. "Obviously you've got a way to go physically, but… Anyway, it'll be good to have you back when you're ready, but don't hurry. Hopefully we won't get any Al Qaeda cells between then and now. I feel horribly vulnerable on those ops."

"Well if they think they're blown they usually shoot the white man first."

"Exactly. Goodnight, I'll see you when I see you." He raised his voice a bit. "Jo, I'll see you at 8:30 for briefing."

"See you." Jo called over the kettle.

Note: Zaf's remarks about dialects of Arabic are based in what I believe to be fact, though not being an Arabic-speaker myself I have had some trouble substantiating this. I have been told that asking a Syrian or a Pakistani and a Moroccan to speak to each other in Arabic would be less likely to work than asking a man who has never left the Scottish Highlands to speak to an African-American from rural Georgia.

Note: There are fairly credible reports of boys as young as eleven being seriously abused by the Assad regime.

And another note: The final episode of the second series of Blackadder features abduction and interrogation of two of the main characters. It is intended to be funny (and to my mind it is), but it's probably deeply uncomfortable viewing for anyone who has been tortured.