INCARNATION (7 page)

He pressed down on the pedal and his little electric buggy picked up speed to its maximum of ten miles an hour. He didn’t bother looking, but he knew that, right behind him, his state security tail would be accelerating to exactly the same rate. Karim gave an inward shrug. He’d been brought up in what one writer had called Iraq’s Republic of Fear, and it was never much of a surprise to find yourself shadowed by a dead-faced secret policeman trying to be inconspicuous.

Here in the installation, of course, there wasn’t much point in pretending, so his shadow just went along with him everywhere. Since Karim didn’t speak a word of Chinese and his tail knew not a word of Arabic or Turkish, communications between them were extremely limited. They’d told him to drive down the corridor until the tripometer on his buggy reached the figure 2850, whereupon he was to stop and ask permission to enter a door numbered 74:6 (3). At least the numbers were written in characters he could understand. When he slept, he had bad dreams about being lost down here, dreams in which he rode round and round for hour after hour, never seeing a way out, never coming across anyone he could ask for help. He shivered and looked at the dial in front of him. It read 2789. Another sixty metres would bring him to the door.

He knew what was behind the door, and didn’t relish the thought of passing it. He hadn’t a clue about details, of course, but he did have a shrewd notion as to what awaited him. They wanted him to help question a man, someone who knew more than he should about the weapons being developed here. Karim was a scientist, and he spoke Turkish, which was as close to the Uighur spoken in Sinkiang as you could get, so they’d fingered him as a help and comfort in present peril.

Karim was a Turkman from the mountains north of Mosul. His father had brought the family to Baghdad soon after the Baathists took power in 1968, had opened a successful business trading in agricultural equipment with Istanbul, and had eventually sent his three sons to university. Karim had gone to Baghdad’s University of Technology to study chemistry. He’d come top of his class, made a good impression on the dean, and gone on to study for a doctorate at MIT. He’d been tempted to marry an American girl, stay in the States, and settle down in a comfortable job with a petrochemical company in the Mid-West.

Then one day he’d arrived back at his rooms to find a man from the Iraqi embassy waiting for him. A big man with prowling eyes. Sally had been there: she’d been the one to let the man in. He could still remember her eyes, the look of raw fear in them. It hadn’t been anything the man had done or said. All it had needed was his presence. Karim learned later that the man’s name was Hamza, and that he was the embassy’s dog, the one they set on dissidents.

By then he’d packed his bags, and signed all the papers he needed to sign, and bought a one-way ticket from New York to Baghdad. One ticket. He’d cried silently all the way home, and when he’d stepped down from the plane his family had been waiting for him. They hadn’t been alone. A man in shades had watched him back to their house. The following morning, he’d reported to the State Establishment for Phosphates Production, where a quiet-spoken man in a neat military uniform had handed him papers posting him to the giant fertilizer complex at al-Qa’im on the Euphrates. Long before he got there, Karim knew that phosphoric acid wouldn’t be the only thing produced at his new place of work.

At 2850 he took his foot off the pedal and the buggy stopped. There was a grey door to his left. It looked exactly like all the other doors he’d passed. The number on it read 74:6 (3). Unlike most other doors, it bore no logograms spelling out the identity of whatever activity went on behind it. He smiled at his shadow and invited him to introduce them. The security man smiled back. He looked animated for once. Karim cringed inside. It was a hard and fast rule back in Iraq to dive for cover the moment you saw so much as a flicker of amusement cross a mukhabarat agent’s face.

The little man spoke into a grille set in the wall next to the door.

‘Wo shi Kao Shien-nun. Zhe wei shi Karim shiansheng.’ The door opened soundlessly. Karim stepped inside, followed by his tail. The door closed, leaving them in a small vestibule. There were photographs on the walls. Karim tried not to look, he knew what they were, but it was hard to avoid them. Over the years, he’d learned how to prevent himself being sick. He took a deep, slow breath and waited for the next door to open. It was heavier than the first, and he knew it would be soundproof.

There was a click and a soft whirring sound, and the second door rolled back. Waiting for him a few feet across the threshold was a familiar face. Huang Zhengmei smiled and held out her hand. Karim smiled back. It almost made him feel better to see her here. Perhaps things wouldn’t turn out as bad as he feared. Huang Zhengmei was aged about thirty. pretty, with a musical voice and frighteningly intelligent eyes. You couldn’t imagine anything remotely unpleasant happening while she was around. He took her hand in his. It was no larger than a child’s.

‘Miss Huang. It’s good to see you again.’

She’d been responsible for settling him in over the first couple of days he’d spent in the complex. They communicated in English, which she spoke fluently: he’d been impressed to learn that she’d spent several years studying at London University.

‘And you, Dr Hasanoglu. I’d like you to meet someone we all admire. Allow me to introduce Colonel Chang Zhangyi.’

A man stepped forward from a cluster of shadows on Huang Zhengmei’s left. He’d been watching them all along, hidden. Now, as he came forward, Karim realized that he’d been foolish ever to think that the presence of a pretty woman might be allowed to get in the way of what happened here.

‘Colonel Chang Zhangyi is head of security for Sinkiang Province.’

Karim felt the familiar chill, the instinctive lowering of emotional temperature he experienced every time he met men like Chang Zhangyi. Today, he thought, he was an honoured guest. Tomorrow, he could be served up to the colonel as a wholly different form of humanity. All it would take would be a word out of place, a hint of betrayal, or too great a degree of curiosity. He reached out his hand for a second time and tried to smile.

The colonel was like a statue come partially to life. Animate, but only in so far as there was movement in his face and limbs. Otherwise dead. No heart, no proper feelings, no remorse, no love, no depth, no fear, no compassion, no true hate - just the mechanics of life, without the essence. The perfect servant of a state system predicated on obedience. It was all there in the face, Karim thought, as though a fine calligrapher’s brush had painted letters of the true man across his pockmarked skin.

‘I’m grateful to you for coming today, Doctor. I know you’re a very busy man and that you’re engaged on important work here. But I assure you, this won’t be wasted time.’

‘You speak very good English, Colonel. You’ve been to England like Miss Huang?’

‘Hong Kong. I spent some years there very early in my career, working for a British finance company. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get this over with.’

Chang Zhangyi gestured casually, and a guard standing near the door flicked a switch, turning on more overhead lights. Huang Zhengmei stood aside, allowing Karim to look past her into the rest of the room. It was a long, narrow room. The walls were painted black, a very deep, matt black that seemed almost to swallow the light as rapidly as the lamps threw it out. Karim felt a bitter taste in his mouth and swallowed hard. Chang Zhangyi led the way to the other end of the room.

There were several pieces of apparatus set against the walls. Karim tried not to look at them. He could guess their function well enough. He’d never been in a torture chamber before, but he knew enough people who had. Some had been tortured, some had done the torturing. One of his best friends at university had been a Kurd. They’d lost touch for several years after Karim went to MIT, then made contact again about three years ago. On their second meeting, Dara had taken off his shirt and shown Karim the knotted scars that ran like tramlines across his back. It had happened during the year and more he’d spent in the Red Security Building in Sulaymaniyya. hi a room like this.

The prisoner was at the far end. The apparatus that held him resembled nothing Karim had ever seen or heard of. It was a cage with widely spaced bars, in which the man was standing upright. His head emerged through the top of the contraption, and his feet were supported on wooden boards that were covered in faeces and urine. He was naked and dirty, and his hair and beard were long and unkempt, straggling across the top of the cage like a weed that threatened to choke him. His features were masked, but Karim could see nevertheless that he was not Han Chinese.

‘We have been questioning him for a very long time,’ said Huang Zhengmei. ‘We want to find out what he knows.’

‘Does it matter?’ asked Karim. ‘He’s hardly in a position to tell anyone.’

‘He has not always been in this position,’ said Chang Zhangyi. ‘He may have told others before he came here. I need to know what sort of information they might possess.’

‘Information about what?’

‘About your project. Our joint project.’ Huang Zhengmei walked up to the cage and stood in front of it, staring at the trapped man as if he was an exhibit at the regional museum in Urumchi. ‘That’s what he was being paid to ask about. He was a professional, he did a very good job before Colonel Chang Zhangyi’s men found him. If we know what he has passed on, we may be able to do something to limit the damage.’

Karim took a closer look at the man. He was clearly in a lot of pain. The cage was stretching his neck, forcing him to stand on tiptoe to hold himself high enough to go on breathing.

‘Can he talk? He seems…’

‘He can tell us “yes” and “no”. If we need anything more detailed than that, we can raise him.’ 

‘I don’t understand what the cage is for.’ Chang Zhangyi reached out a stubby-fingered hand and took one of the bars.

‘It’s an old punishment,’ he said. ‘The name for it is kapas. Our old masters had great ingenuity. To cut a man’s head off takes no more than seconds. Even to flog him to death is a matter of hours at the most. But this cage is exquisite, don’t you see? It will take about eight days to kill a man. Sometimes longer if the victim is strong. The neck is stretched, but as long as he can keep himself upright, he will not completely choke. Each day one of these thin boards is removed, and he is forced to stretch a little more. He can never sleep, he can never move. All his energy must go into standing and breathing.’ He shook the cage gently, and the man inside moaned. ‘It’s a form of execution, really,’ said Huang Zhengmei, ‘but we’ve found it useful as a means of extracting information. A few days in the cage does wonders for someone’s vocal powers. Dull pheasants become songbirds almost overnight. They understand what is happening, and they know that, if they talk, they can stop it. They will either be sent back to their cells, or given a swift end. The penalty for not talking is an eternity in the cage.’

‘And this one has not talked?’ Karim tried to look into the man’s eyes, but they were glazed over with pain. He wondered if the man knew they were there. He wished he could do something to put him out of his misery. Get him to talk, at least.

‘He’s told us nothing of any value.’ 

‘Then why do you think he’ll talk to me?’ 

‘He probably won’t. But you know better than I what questions to ask.’ Chang Zhangyi tried to inflect his voice with flattery, but it came out more like a threat: Ask the right questions, or else.

‘I’ll do what I can. What are you most concerned about?’

‘The M80 and M90 stages of the project. I don’t understand it, but I’m told that information about these aspects might make it possible for the British or the Americans to develop counter-measures. Is that so?’

Karim nodded. There were elements in both those stages, and in a few others, that would suggest useful neutralization techniques to a scientist of the proper calibre. He turned to the man.

‘Can you hear me?’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Huang Zhengmei, ‘he can hear you. Just ask your questions.’

‘Did you know that the M80 experimental stage of the weapons project had five protocols?’

No answer.

‘Did you know that only three of those were followed?’

No answer.

‘Did you know that M80 was a multiple-level stage within a much larger experiment called Hsiao Ch’u, within a project known as Hong Cha?’

No answer. He turned to Huang Zhengmei.

‘He’s not responding,’ he said. ‘I think he’s too far gone to answer, maybe even to understand.’

‘Tell him that, if he answers, we will let him out of the cage. Tell him death will be very slow and very painful it he refuses to reply to your questions. He can be given drugs to keep him alert for as long as it takes to die. But if he answers, I will see to it that he suffers no longer. Tell him that.’

Karim felt the bile rise in his throat, and grew afraid he would throw up in front of them. This was unfair.

He’d been brought here as a scientist, not an interrogator. He succeeded in fighting the acid back, and told the prisoner everything Huang Zhengmei had said. He would have risked telling the prisoner just to nod, whatever the question; but he wasn’t sure how much Uighur Chang Zhangyi understood. Or the woman.

‘Please, try to answer this as well as you can. It will help us both. Hsiao Ch’u refers to sub-atomic particles. I think you must know that. But do you know what sort of particles were involved in the experiment?’ No answer.

Huang Zhengmei pushed him aside. She snapped at the prisoner in Chinese, but there was no response. Again she shouted at him, still there was no response. The man was breathing stertorously, and when Karim looked into his eyes he saw more than a flicker of recognition. He looked at the woman’s face and saw it changed. He’d been wrong to think that nothing terrible could happen in her presence. Very wrong indeed.

‘Send him out of here!’ she snapped at Chang Zhangyi, indicating the guard, who stood a few yards away, watching impassively. Chang Zhangyi grunted, and the guard walked back down the room and through the door.