Dead Spy Running (8 page)

The gang of Year Five boys in the corner of the playing field knew all of the helicopters that flew through the Wiltshire airspace above their primary school: Chinooks were their favourite, flying low down the route of the canal, the sound of their twin blades reverberating like thunder in their tender eardrums. They knew their Merlins from their Sikorski Pumas, and barely commented these days on the black-and-yellow Wiltshire Police helicopter, which flew in every Friday for low-level practice over Bedwyn Brail. So when the boys saw the MD Explorer coming in towards the village from Hungerford, it was such a familiar sight that nobody noticed that it was a Thursday, not a Friday.

Half a mile south-west of the school, Daniel Marchant crossed over the two bridges and turned right onto the towpath of the Kennet canal. He smiled to himself as he remembered how his father had dropped down from Minchinhampton at more than 90 mph, the Lagonda's low chassis threatening to shake itself apart as they raced through the frosty hedgerows without any real brakes, until their pursuers had finally given up.

Marchant wasn't sure if he could run faster than his minders, but he wanted to find out. The marathon was five days ago, and this was his first run since he had arrived at the safe house. He knew he couldn't keep going like this: the drinking followed by the guilt-runs. One of them had to prevail. The babysitters from MI6 had been replaced the previous evening by heavier-built types from MI5. Relations chilled accordingly, and conversation had all but dried up.

Marchant wasn't unduly worried by the change of guard. At worst, he assumed that he might be subjected to Wylie again, the man who had interviewed him at Thames House. More worrying was the silence from Leila. He had no means of contacting anyone in the outside world. There was no phone at the house, no computer or internet connection, and the babysitters kept their mobiles strapped to their expansive waistlines.

His plan this morning, as he gradually increased his stride, was to stretch the two from MI5, see how long they could cope with a six-minute-mile pace. They hadn't been keen on the idea of a run, but relented when Marchant agreed to show them on a map his exact route to the nearby village of Wilton and back. They preferred a shorter loop, along the canal towpath, up through the woodland known as Bedwyn Brail, and then back along the lanes into the village. Marchant agreed, tickled by the idea of pushing these two to their limits. The fitness levels in MI6 had always been greater than those of MI5, whose gym was no match for the one that glistened in the basement of Legoland, out of sight of Whitehall's bean counters.

But it was not proving nearly as entertaining as Marchant had hoped. His whole body hurt like hell. And both men from MI5 responded with unnerving ease to his initial kick, and he soon found them on his shoulder.

‘Don't be a muppet, marathon man,' one of them said, barely out of breath.

Without answering, Marchant kicked again, turning off the towpath, as agreed, and carving out a diagonal route up the hillside towards the Brail. Near the top of the hill, he glanced over his shoulder and saw the lead minder floundering at the bottom of the slope. It looked as if he had slipped. Exhilarated to be alone for the first time since Sunday, Marchant upped his pace again.

It was as he crested the hill that he became aware of the black MD Explorer hovering in the field behind him, to his left. He slowed a little, taking in the scene, assessing the situation. His first thought, as he read the yellow police lettering on the side of the helicopter, was that he had stumbled on an incident of some kind. But seconds later, as his two minders drew level, the helicopter was no longer hovering, but tracking him across the field.

Marchant looked out across the stretch of farmland in front of him. It was at least two hundred yards to the woods on the far side, but he thought he could make it to the safety of the trees if he ran hard. He glanced above him and saw the face of the pilot in his helmet and visor, looking down at him with wasp-eyed indifference. At the same moment, he felt a minder on his shoulder and shrugged him off. The man fell away, swearing as he stumbled, but before Marchant could accelerate, the other minder was on his back, dragging him down.

They seemed to slow as they fell, Marchant rolling the man over so that they hit the ground with him on top. All around them, the flattened grass danced in the helicopter's downdraft. He grabbed the man by his hair and pushed his face hard into a flintstone lying in the earth. For a moment there was stillness. Marchant stood up and started to run, aware of the first man coming up behind him, the helicopter above. The woods suddenly seemed a mile away.

Twenty yards from the trees, Marchant began to believe that he could make it. Once he was inside the Brail, the helicopter would be useless, providing he kept to the cover of the trees. But he still had the man on his right. Five yards short of the trees, he saw a branch on the ground, heavy with the rain of winter. He veered off his path and picked it up, arcing the sodden log behind him in the same movement. As it collided with the side of the man's face, knocking him backwards, the blades above him seemed to grow louder, roaring their disapproval. Marchant sprinted into the dark woods, sidestepping through the trees like a street thief eluding his pursuers.

He had run barely thirty yards when the woods opened up into a small clearing. The helicopter swooped low overhead, touching down on the patch of grass in front of him long enough for two more men to jump out. Tired now, Marchant turned and headed back into the woods, but he was soon being dragged towards the helicopter, the smell of aviation fuel filling the air.

 

Marchant calculated that he had been in the air for fifteen minutes before the helicopter touched down, which made Fairford the most likely airfield. It was run by the Americans, who had spent $90 million extending the main runway for its B-2 Spirit Stealth bombers and the Space Shuttle. He suspected he would be travelling in something smaller. He couldn't confirm which airfield it was for himself because of the hood over his head, and he couldn't hear any cockpit talk because a pair of headphones had been slipped over the hood. His hands had been tied tightly behind his back, and his feet were bound together too. But he wasn't in any real discomfort, not yet.

Mentally, he was as together as anyone could be who knew he was in the process of being extraordinarily renditioned by the CIA. It was the only logical reading of the situation he found himself in, given that it was unlikely MI5 or even MI6 would use such extreme methods on one of their own. During his short flight he had concluded that Fielding, for reasons as yet unclear, must have agreed to hand over the keys of the Wiltshire safe house to MI5, who had duly allowed the Americans to remove him for their own questioning. What made his stomach tighten now, as he lay on the cold metal floor of the stationary helicopter, was the thought of the physical and mental pain that lay ahead.

The undisputed waterboarding world champion was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Marchant knew this thanks to a flippant email that had leaked its way from Langley to Legoland. The architect of 9/11, the Bali nightclub bombings and a thwarted attack on Canary Wharf, ‘KSM' (as the CIA called him) deserved some silverware for his efforts, but instead Al Qaeda's number three had to make do with grudging respect from his interrogators. Two minutes thirty seconds – there were no officials, but that was the time clocked when he was waterboarded in early March 2003. At two minutes thirty-one seconds he broke, finally believing that he was about to drown. He screamed like a baby and filled his diaper. As the email concluded: the smell of victory is the whiff of excrement.

Marchant knew everything there was to know about waterboarding, a method of interrogation that had been favoured by the Gestapo and, thanks to the CIA, had been enjoying a revival in recent years, until the new President put a stop to it. The sensation of water being poured onto his mouth and nose convinced the victim that he was about to drown, triggering an immediate, involuntary gagging response. Because the feet were raised higher than the head, however, water did not flood the lungs, thereby avoiding death and allowing governments to categorise it as an enhanced interrogation technique rather than torture.

Marchant knew all about the three different levels, the same unrelenting message that each sends to the brain, the convenient absence of physical marks, the acute mental trauma that can be triggered for years afterwards: by taking a shower, washing up, watering the windowbox.

What his interrogators didn't know was that Marchant had broken KSM's record during his survival training course at the Fort. It wasn't official, because Marchant had been aware, at least before the water started flowing, that it was an exercise. KSM had thought he was about die. But two minutes fifty seconds was still a record of sorts, good enough to make him the toast of the Fort. As Marchant was told afterwards, no CIA agent who had tested the technique on himself had lasted more than fourteen seconds.

Marchant liked to joke that his ability to endure waterboarding was honed at birth – he was born underwater. His mother had told him that he came out with his eyes open, looking around like a startled carp. Others, like Leila, said it was his Indian childhood: a case of Yogic mind over matter. As he lay in the dark now, his tightly bound feet raised above his hooded head on a cold metal table, he tried to recall the banter in the Portsmouth pub afterwards: his voice sounding funny because of the water still blocking his nose; Leila's tenderness beneath the bravura; her wet-mouthed kiss that he thought would asphyxiate him.

He suspected he was in Poland, or maybe Romania. The CIA had been ordered to shut down its network of black sites, but Langley was in no rush. It knew the bureaucrats would struggle to verify the closure of facilities that had never officially existed. After the helicopter had touched down, he had been escorted, still blindfolded, across the tarmac to another plane, a Gulfstream V, he guessed. Dubbed the Guantanamo Bay Express by enemy combatants, his flight had lasted two hours, although for Marchant, travelling in detainee class (complimentary boilersuit and adult nappies), it had felt like a lifetime.

He heard the two men enter his cell, closing the door behind them. Waterboarding was just a trick of the mind, he told himself, involuntarily flexing his fingers. They said nothing as they checked his wrists, bound tightly in shackles by his side, and pulled the cotton hood further down over his head. In a moment they would pour water continually over his porous hood.

When the water came, sooner than he expected, Marchant instinctively tried to turn his head away, but the man on his left held his jaw firmly while the other poured water onto his face, and then over his chest and legs, soaking his boilersuit. He could feel the panic rising. There was his twin brother, lying at the bottom of the pool in Delhi, staring up at him through the clear water. He screamed for the
ayah
, jumped in and tried to grab his brother's arm. Sebastian, barely six years old, stared back at him, his hair floating like a rockpool anemone, unaware that he was about to drown.

The flow of water was constant, Marchant told himself, struggling to control his breathing. That suggested that they were using a hose rather than a watering can, the preferred method at the Fort. He screamed again, at his interrogators, at his mother, who had come running out from the house, but his cries were muffled by the damp cotton hood pressing down against his face. He could feel the water starting to seep through, running up his nose and into his mouth. It was warm, just as the training manual stipulated. This was an exercise, he told himself: they weren't going to kill him. The new President wouldn't allow it.

‘Where's Salim Dhar?' one of the Americans shouted, twisting Marchant's jaw violently towards him. Marchant was shocked by how young the voice – Midwest – sounded. ‘Tell us where he is and your brother will live.'

Marchant said nothing, waiting for Sebastian to start breathing, watching his mother bent over the tiny body. ‘Is he OK?' he begged her. ‘Is Sebbie going to be OK?'

His interrogator held the hose closer to his mouth. ‘Where's Salim Dhar?' he repeated.

Why were they asking him? He wasn't his father. The water started to pour in through the cotton hood. Marchant kept his lips pressed tightly together, breathing in slowly through his nose, but that was what he was meant to do: the water flooded up both nostrils. His lungs were bursting, desperate now for air. He tried twisting his head away, then he saw Sebastian spluttering back to life, vomiting the pool water, his tiny chest convulsing, coughing into his mother's perfumed embrace.

Marchant remembered what his trainer had told him: ‘Your interrogator's greatest fear is that you might die on the board before you sing. Hold on to that. It's the only power you have over him.' He clutched this thought close to him as he lay still, feeling the water rise up through his nose and down into the back of his throat. The gag reflex kicked in as the water tumbled over his epiglottis. He knew it would sound as if he was choking. His interrogators pulled off his hood just as he vomited, turning away to conceal their faces. They cursed him: round one was his.

Waterboarding at level two required one airway to be sealed off. The taller of the Americans handed him a pair of tight swimming goggles and ordered him to put them on, all the time shielding his face. They must be embarrassed to be doing this to one of their own, Marchant thought. What about the real enemies? The West had enough of those without having to do this to each other.

The goggle lenses had been painted black, and he found the darkness a relief. The building they were in, wherever it was, was inhospitable, anonymous. He had glimpsed four dirty white plaster walls, a low ceiling, with some sort of crude plumbing running down one corner. Above the door was a small, reinforced aperture. The room's ordinariness made Marchant feel alone, vulnerable, accentuating his sense that he could be anywhere in the world. His two interrogators were wearing regulation army fatigues, but the brightness of his own orange jumpsuit had surprised him.

He closed his eyes behind the goggles, but before he could seek solace in the blackness a piece of cloth was pushed into his mouth as far in as it could go. Marchant gagged as the cloth touched his epiglottis. The American, satisfied that the material was in place, pushed it in still further, working the cloth in a circular motion against the back of Marchant's throat, swearing at him all the time in his young voice. Marchant gagged again, and for the first time he thought he was going to die.

Instead, he forced himself to remember how his instructor had told them that there were only two types of people who could control the gag reflex: sword swallowers and deep-throat hookers. As Marchant gagged again, his stomach contorting, lifting the small of his back off the metal table, the hose was on him, more pressure this time, the water colder. Marchant could feel the cloth swell with water, pushing against the sides, the roof, the back of his mouth. He instinctively tried to breathe through his nose, only for his nostrils to fill up with water again. Panic gathered in the wings of his consciousness. He thought of his father polishing the Lagonda in the bright morning sunshine. As a child, he used to stand there watching him, one leg crossed in front of the over, a grubby hand leaning against the glistening passenger door.

‘Get your filthy little hands off my car!' a voice shouted. ‘Where's Salim Dhar?'

Marchant could feel round two slipping away from him. His nausea was now mixed with an intense claustrophobia, a sense that he would never be able to escape the cloth expanding down his throat, the water, the permanent imminence of drowning. He focused on his interrogator's questions, the reasoning behind them. There hadn't been a mistake. They were asking him about Dhar because somebody must have linked him to the marathon attack. ‘Tell us about your fucking running buddy,' the shorter one was shouting, in between shoving the cloth deeper still into his mouth. ‘How long did he know Dhar?'

The secret of surviving waterboarding, Marchant told himself again, trying to work through the consequences of Dhar's apparent role in the marathon attack, was not to fall for it. Because that's all waterboarding was: a trick of the mind. The body wasn't about to drown, the brain just thought it was. At the Fort, he was the only one who had remained cognisant of the training element. Now, as his entire upper body twisted with each new retch, he reminded himself that he was being interrogated in an equally safe context: the CIA wouldn't kill an MI6 officer, even if he was the suspended son of a suspected traitor. The struggle happening now was taking place in his head, not in the room: his amygdalae, the oldest, most primal parts of the human brain, were in a desperate dialogue with his more reasoning solar cortex. That's what the psychiatrist at the Fort had said, wasn't it?

Marchant's resilience was taking the two Americans to the limits of their trained self-control, and they were now swearing repeatedly at him. One of them finally flipped, ripped Marchant's goggles off and grabbed him by the back of his neck, lifting his head off the table. For a moment they looked into each other's eyes. Marchant saw more fear than he felt in the young CIA agent's face. He pulled the gag out of Marchant's mouth. Round two was also his.

‘He's unreal, Joey. The guy's unreal,' the American said, tossing Marchant away, unable to cope with the eye contact. Marchant savoured the pain as the back of his head hit the table. He hung on to its sharpness, juggled with it in his hands as if it were a hot coal: it was real, physical; it would leave a mark, provide evidence that this had happened, and wasn't just taking place in his head. He turned to one side, spat out some phlegm and then managed a desperate cough of a laugh.

‘Any chance of a drink of water?' he asked. ‘My throat's a little dry.'

Marchant knew it was essential to maintain the pretence, however false, of being in mental control, without pushing his interrogators so far that they killed him out of frustration. He also needed to keep them interested: a balaclava-clad face had just appeared behind the bars of the small opening above the door, disappearing as soon as Marchant had seen it. He managed a smile for his interrogators, knowing the consequences, and hung out his tongue like a panting dog.

‘You got something to say, save it for St Peter,' Joey said, taking over from his colleague. He turned away, as if he had finished for the day, but Marchant knew he wasn't done yet. Joey swung his arm in a long loop, smacking the back of his hand across Marchant's face.

At the Fort, they had used clingfilm for level three, wrapped tightly around the face, making it impossible to breathe through the nose or mouth. A hole was cut for the lips, only it wasn't for breathing, but as a way to fill the victim with water. This approach, like waterboarding itself, was nothing new. They liked to cut straight to level three in the seventeenth century, swelling the bodies of victims to three times their normal size – without the clingfilm, of course.

But Marchant never reached level three.