Games Traitors Play

23

‘Please, have a rinse,’ Abdul Aziz said.

Marchant sucked at the straw that was put to his bruised lips, swilled the liquid round his mouth and then spat out a mixture of blood and fragments of his lower right molar. Aziz held a kidney-shaped stainless-steel dish up to his mouth, resting it on his lower lip, and caught the debris.

The moment Aziz had introduced himself as a dentist, two men had appeared from behind the economy-class curtain. Aziz had stood up to let them through to Marchant, who had put up a fight, taking one of them out, but it was still two against one, although Aziz had held back, limiting himself to a gratuitous kick to Marchant’s groin. Eventually, he was forced down into an aisle seat, his wrists bound to the armrests with plasticuffs and his legs secured to the footrest.

The two men left the plane before it took off, one helping the other, leaving only Aziz and a pilot on board. Lakshmi Meena never showed, but Marchant assumed she was the one who had set him up with Aziz. He regretted opening up to her in their chat the previous night, knew he should have listened to his instinct, not trusted anyone. The sole grain of comfort was his right hand. In the struggle to secure him to his seat, he had been cut in the soft flesh of his wrist. It wasn’t a deep incision, but it was painful enough to give him hope, because it meant that somewhere there was a sharp edge.

Marchant had heard of Aziz, knew the enhanced techniques he had used on enemy combatants as they had passed through black sites in Morocco on their way to Guantanamo; but what was it with the polite small talk? Had he once trained as a real dentist? He’d be offering him an old copy of Punch next, something to read while he waited for his teeth to be extracted without anaesthetic. He wondered if Aziz knew about Marchant’s long and painful relationship with dentists, or whether he just assumed that dentistry would always touch a raw nerve in his detainees.

‘We don’t have to do this, Daniel,’ Aziz said, adjusting the settings on the steel brace that held Marchant’s head in position. Marchant couldn’t reply. His mouth had been wedged open with a metal clamp that tasted of linseed oil. He was also barely conscious. At least his business-class seat was upright. Up until now it had been fully reclined, reminding him of an actual dentist’s chair, which was no doubt the point. Aziz’s entire approach — the perverse offer of mouthwash, his authentic tools of the trade — seemed designed to remind him of the real thing. Except that there was no soothing classical music, no funny posters on the ceiling. Just the hum of the aircraft and a silence behind the curtain that confirmed Marchant’s worst fears. He was the only passenger who had proceeded to boarding.

‘All I need to know is what you saw in the mountains and if it had anything to do with Salim Dhar,’ Aziz said. He was standing in the aisle, examining an ultrasonic scaler that was buzzing in his hand. The reverberating whine began to shake down memories from the walls of Marchant’s skull.

‘Unfortunately, this instrument is a bit faulty,’ Aziz apologised, lowering the scaler into Marchant’s mouth. ‘I borrowed it from a horse vet who didn’t seem to care so much about maintenance. The problem is the sharp tip at the end — it isn’t being cooled by water, so it becomes red hot. Normally, a dentist moves quickly from one tooth to the next to prevent overheating, but I am not a normal dentist.’

Marchant screamed as Aziz pressed down with the instrument, scorching into the soft pulp of his molar. The surrounding gum seemed to explode into flames, the heat spreading through his head, licking down into his neck and shoulders until it felt as if his whole upper body was being blowtorched.

‘Please try to remember the mountains, Daniel. Because if what you saw did involve Salim Dhar and I didn’t know about it, the Americans will remove my teeth after I’ve finished pulling yours.’

Aziz unfastened the clamp and put down the scaler. He then picked up a steel dental drill and tested it. More whining, as if the drill was suffering pain rather than about to inflict it.

‘Tungsten carbide,’ Aziz said, inspecting the drill’s burr. ‘You see, I’m meant to hear about everything that happens in Morocco, or as our friend James Spiro put it so politely, “every fucking fart from Fes to Safi”. I know it’s not fair, but that’s the way it goes. The Americans, they expect a lot from us, and I would hate to let them down.’

‘I didn’t see anything unusual,’ Marchant repeated, his voice thick with blood. He thought back to what he had said a few minutes earlier, knowing that if he repeated it verbatim, it would be a clear indication that he was lying. He remembered the instructor — army moustache, tight-fitting T-shirt — who had taught him at RAF St Mawgan in Cornwall, where all new MI6 recruits were sent for basic SERE (Survival, Evasion, Rescue and Escape) training. Small errors and variations were more convincing than perfect recall, which suggested a fake story that had been well rehearsed.

‘It was my last night in Marrakech,’ Marchant continued. ‘I wanted to go up into the mountains one last time, so I borrowed a friend’s motorbike, went for a ride.’

‘Sometimes I think you British believe Moroccans are a genuinely inferior people,’ Aziz said. Marchant braced himself for more pain. ‘It’s the only explanation for the way your courts of justice betray us. We interrogate terrorists on your behalf, in confidence, beyond your jurisdiction so nobody in your country breaks the law, then you release details of our work because of so-called freedom of information, and suddenly the whole world knows about it and treats us like pariahs. Never mind that it was your questions we were asking.’

‘We objected to the publication of the information,’ Marchant said. ‘Unfortunately, the courts overruled us.’

Aziz laughed. ‘What sort of secret service is it that gets pushed around by a judge?’

One that operates in a democracy, Marchant thought, but he held his swollen tongue.

‘Tell me one thing, my friend: who is going to remember it was Britain’s dirty work we were doing? No, all anyone remembers is that someone got tortured in Morocco. Happily, we’re not in Moroccan airspace any more, so please answer my questions. Was Salim Dhar in the High Atlas?’

Marchant hesitated a moment too long. Aziz pulled his mouth open and inserted the clamp again, tightening it until his top and bottom jaw were so far apart that he thought his mouth would split at the corners. It was a repeat of what Aziz had done earlier, but he was angry now, curiosity replaced by irritation. Once again, Marchant couldn’t talk, move his head or his jaw, but the sense of vulnerability was nothing compared to the next wave of pain that he knew was about to break over him.

‘We have a choice, Daniel. Either you tell me what you saw, or I will have to remove the molar — it will be no good to you now.’

Marchant instinctively checked the bloodied tooth with his tongue, working it around the edge of the cavity. At the same moment, he flexed his right wrist, trying to find the sharp edge. He felt rough metal cut into his skin again. It was the lid of the ashtray in his armrest, flipped half open. Suddenly his predicament was bearable. He moved his wrist and felt the plastic of his cuffs rub against the edge of the ashtray. It would take time, but at least there was hope.

‘All right, then. I think it’s better we take it out,’ Aziz said, just as turbulence rocked the plane enough for him to steady himself on Marchant’s arm. He hadn’t noticed Marchant working his right hand. ‘I can see it’s clearly causing you some discomfort.’

Again, Marchant wondered if Aziz had ever tried to go into dentistry. When it suited him, he had an excellent bedside manner, a soothing tone of authority that was utterly at odds with his work.

‘Unfortunately, Morocco can be a very backward country at times, as tourists from Britain often remind us, and I’m afraid we have no anaesthetic with us today.’

Marchant thought for a moment that he saw genuine remorse pass across his face.

‘But I do have these. Extraction forceps. The ones for molars have these beak-like ends, do you see?’

He didn’t look at the steel pliers Aziz was holding up in front of him. They were in a medically sealed plastic bag, which seemed an unnecessary precaution in the circumstances. Aziz ripped it open and removed the pristine tool. Marchant guessed he had reached the point of Aziz’s interrogation process that broke his victims. It used to be scalpel cuts to the genitals, but clearly things had moved on.

‘First, though, we have a problem. Your molar is too big, even for these forceps. Maybe I got the wrong ones. Maybe they are for children’s teeth. But it’s OK. We have this.’

He put down the forceps and picked up the drill again, testing it one last time.

‘Perhaps I will drill down through the molar, deep into the nerve, and split the tooth clean in two.’

Marchant could feel his legs shaking. His body was already in shock. He inhaled deeply, letting his diaphragm rise as high as it could, and breathed out slowly, trying to block the pain, focus on the only way out.

‘It’s funny, you know,’ Aziz continued, resting the drill on Marchant’s bottom lip. ‘I was going to say “Open wide,” the way they do, but I was forgetting.’

Fucking hilarious, Marchant thought, tasting the metal of the drill. His right wrist wasn’t free yet, and he was beginning to wonder if it ever would be. The one thing he still had control over was his eyes. The point about torture, the SERE instructor had told him, was that the victim must feel totally out of control in order for it to be successful. He must not believe that he can influence anything in his immediate environment except through compliance.

When the CIA had waterboarded him in Poland, he had managed a soaked, defiant laugh, but he couldn’t even muster that with his mouth levered open like Jonah’s whale. He desperately wanted to shut his eyes, but he kept them open, fixing Aziz with a stare that momentarily unsettled his torturer as he began to drill.