Dead Spy Running

12

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.