Black Water (14 page)

‘My mind’s gone blank.’ How was it possible to name yourself?

The trainer sighed, lifted a sheet of paper on his clipboard, looked down and said, ‘Walton, Fullerton, Jamieson, Johnson, Harper, Headley . . .’

‘Harper,’ he said to his trainer. Then, firmly, as if he had just put on a pair of shoes that fitted well, ‘John Harper.’

Once his probationary year was over and he had Stage One security clearance, he was based in Amsterdam at the Institute’s head office. His training was twofold; the training for what he would tell people he did for a living and the training for what he would really do. Officially, John Harper was a researcher for the Institute of International Economics, Amsterdam. His job was to read the newspapers and make economic forecasts and write reports. The international companies that retained the Institute then used those reports to decide upon the wisdom of sending in staff or building factories or digging holes in whichever particular country they were interested in.

Unofficially, there were the games. Maybe that was why he got into his line of work. Maybe that was why anyone got into it, because they liked playing games: well, that was why men did it, he presumed. Women didn’t seem all that bothered about playing games, let alone winning them. It was the watching – yes, that was it. Maybe women just weren’t voyeurs: too used to being the observed rather than the observer.

During this secondary induction period, his trainer told him to go and sit in a doctor’s waiting room and stay there until he had worked out what was wrong with every single patient.

‘Why?’ Harper had asked. ‘And how will you know if I’m right?’

‘That’s not the point of the exercise,’ his trainer had sighed. ‘The point of the exercise is to get you used to looking at people and working out what their story is. I don’t want to know whether you are right or not. I want you to come back and tell me how you came to your conclusions.’

In years to come, when his line of work turned into big business – it really took off in the eighties – there would be whole manuals on this stuff, training weekends, presentations on whiteboards with handouts in folders to take away and read at your leisure; graphs, statistics. Back then, in the sixties, the people who trained you more or less made it up as they went along: a little amateur psychology mixed with a whole bucket of intuition. Maybe it was easier, back then, when it was clear who the enemy was – and it was very clear.

Despite what was going on in Saigon, Harper’s department, the Asia Department, wasn’t really where it was at in 1964 – President Johnson wasn’t listening to de Gaulle, so what was new there? No, the best people were all in the Soviet Section, a whole separate unit staffed by people who had Russian or Eastern Bloc language skills: bunch of comedians they became round the office, once the guy with the eyebrows took over in Moscow, those Groucho jokes wore thin pretty fast. Other than that, there were certain countries that were hot for a while for one reason or another; the small South American desk got very excited about the coup in Brazil. There was Panama, Zanzibar, Cuba of course. The focus tended to change emphasis according to the State Department’s priorities. Even though the Institute was independent and nominally Dutch, the Americans were their most important clients – nearly three quarters of the contracts were coming from them. Company offices were going to open up in Los Angeles and New York as a result and they were already in partnership with a West Coast firm like theirs – later, there would be a merger. Harper was one of the operatives who applied for transfer there but the jobs all went to people with experience in the Soviet Section.

Everybody wanted to be in America if they could, not Europe with its old, cold, bombed-out cities, their cheap concrete buildings flung up like dentures in a ruined mouth. There was going to be this big new skyscraper in New York, the world’s tallest building it would be. They’d been arguing about it over there for years but now it was going to be designed by some Japanese guy – how ironic was that. Harper had a debate about it with Joosten who said that the guy wasn’t a Jap, he was just an American with a Jap name, and Harper said he didn’t care, he thought maybe the guys who gave him the job had memories that were pretty short, like, er, Pearl Harbor, a load of aeroplanes came out of the sky one sunny day without warning, remember? He didn’t really mean it and Joosten knew he didn’t, being anti-Japanese was something he made a show of to remind his colleagues that not all brown guys were the same. It was just something to say while they sat in a bar after work. A moment later they were arguing about whether the A-11 would burn to a crisp at seventy thousand feet.

One day, Harper’s boss Gregor came to the door of his office and leaned casually against the doorpost, arms folded. Harper had his head bent over his desk but the moment he became aware of a figure blocking the light, he knew who it was. Gregor never announced himself with a ‘good morning’ or a ‘hi’. He announced himself with silence.

Harper’s head was down over a list of figures. He was muttering the figures out loud and twirling ticks and crosses on the list with a pencil, so he had a small but satisfying excuse to take a moment or two before he looked up. While he took advantage of that moment, Gregor waited. Gregor continued to wait when Harper lifted his head. Gregor met Harper’s gaze and waited long enough for their mutual stare to become odd, expectant.

Gregor dropped his gaze, lifted it again, pushed his glasses further up his nose and sniffed – only then did he say to Harper, ‘Got a minute?’

Harper sat back in his chair to indicate that he had. He did not put the pencil down.

Gregor used his weight to lever himself upright from the doorframe, looked behind him at the open-plan office, quiet but for the discordant clacking of several typewriters at different distances from where he stood, and only at that point did he uncross his arms, take a step into Harper’s office and close the door behind him.

‘It’s raining,’ Gregor said, lifting an arm to indicate the view from Harper’s office window, which included the brown water of the canal and the blank brick wall of a warehouse building that dropped straight into the water. Harper liked the fact that there were no other windows looking into his office. The rain was invisible against the brick but when he looked at the brown canal he saw tiny pits on its surface, disappearing and reappearing in a pattern.

‘So, our Asia Department.’ It was a statement rather than a question so Harper remained silent.

‘Well,’ said Gregor with a sigh, as if Harper was being particularly truculent that afternoon. ‘We need someone on the ground. Jakarta, land of your birth, it was Jakarta, wasn’t it? Six months, a year maybe, maybe longer.’

‘Long time.’

‘He speaks! The enigmatic one speaks!’

Harper did not return Gregor’s smile. ‘Have they asked for me?’

‘I’m asking for you.’

He frowned, leaned forward, dropped his pencil on his desk. ‘Why me?’

Gregor actually shrugged. ‘Look, it’s up to you. I know it’s a big deal, it would be your first big job and you’ll need Stage Three clearance, and some physicals. To be honest, seeing how new you are I’m not sure but you know the region.’ He sniffed and rubbed at the side of his nose with one extended finger. ‘It’s your background rather than experience.’

‘Joosten knows the region better than me. He’s been.’

‘This one isn’t for Joosten. This one needs the time to develop contacts on the ground and we need to send someone as soon as possible, now the guy in the black hat has pulled them out of the UN. You’ll be taking a crate on delivery so instead of an aeroplane through Karachi, you get to go on a cruise, pretty good I would think, lots of deckchair time to do your homework . . . and,’ this next point a concession to the obvious, ‘Joosten can’t pass for a local if he has to. Things are getting a little hot for us palefaces out there.’

‘Why not use the local operatives?’

‘Client doesn’t trust them, wants someone we’re sure of here, who we can move swiftly to another island as soon as job done, but it also has to be someone who can do the local thing, which, my friend, narrows it down to you. Pronto.’

Gregor watches too many movies, Harper thought. ‘Why the hurry?’

‘I can’t tell you until you’ve said yes.’

He’d been waiting for an overseas assignment ever since he joined the Institute. He had always been curious to visit the country where he spent his first three years, even though, especially though, he had no memory of those years and only his mother’s dubious stories to go on. True, it was something of a backwater, but that would give him more autonomy too.

Gregor was waiting. His patience irritated Harper so much that he was on the verge of saying he wasn’t sure he was ready and didn’t want to be told any more details, just to be difficult, but then Gregor lifted both hands, splaying his fingers in an
okay, hands up
motion, as if Harper had opened a drawer of his desk and extracted a pistol. ‘Look, there will be bonuses involved. Quite a few of them, in fact. And an opportunity to move sideways, which is presumably what you’ve been waiting for. It’s what all you new young guys want, isn’t it?’

‘Sideways in which direction?’

‘You don’t look all that happy behind a desk.’

Did anyone look happy behind a desk?

The following week, Gregor summoned him to his office and introduced him to a middle-aged American who called himself Johnson. Johnson had dull, pitted skin on his cheeks, the remnant of some childhood disease, and a very bald, very shiny head – it was adulthood that had done that bit. He kept running a hand over his shiny head while he spoke, as if he liked to keep it polished that way.

After things were agreed, Harper shook hands with both men and Johnson said, ‘Gregor here speaks very highly of you. I must admit I was a little concerned you were inexperienced, on paper, I mean, but now I’ve met you I can see why he does.’

Now you’ve seen my skin, Harper thought.

Gregor intervened. ‘I told him you got the Cadet Lion Honourable Mention in your year. And you scored ninety-eight per cent on our induction programme. There’s a few physicals but that won’t take long.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Harper replied.

Later that day, Gregor said, ‘I also told him you spoke all the languages out there. You can get up to speed, can’t you, once you’re on the ground? It’s not going to take you that long to pass.’ He wondered if the Malay he had learned as a child might help with his Indonesian, whether it was buried there somewhere. He was quick at languages, he’d get conversational faster than most, but the sort of fluency Gregor was talking about took years – and Javanese was another thing altogether. Javanese was fiendish. Gregor’s optimism about Harper’s language skills was based on no more than his own colossal ignorance. He pulled a face to indicate it wasn’t that simple and Gregor said, ‘Oh c’mon, you half-castes have a real facility for languages, you’re gifted at it, you guys, you’ll be fluent within weeks, accent and everything.’

Harper felt the drip, drip, drip of all the remarks they made around the office, about how good his sun tan was, how much he must like spicy food. Such remarks were always phrased as compliments. He had been permanently resident in Holland since the age of twelve but people often remarked on the flawlessness of his Dutch.

His pain threshold was fairly high but he had a secret weakness: a great and pressing fear of any situation where breathing might be difficult. It wasn’t the same as claustrophobia: lifts and cars were fine. If the situation demanded it, he could have happily spent hours hiding in a wardrobe as long as there were holes in it – but suffocating, drowning, these were the fates he dreaded. It was the totality of them, he sometimes thought. Pain belonged to the location where the pain was situated – a broken arm was a broken arm, however agonising. Even a stomach ache or backache, those most internal of pains, could be ring-fenced from the rest of your body, your consciousness, if only you were strong enough: but being unable to breathe, for whatever reason, was a state that possessed the whole of you.

So when the hood came down over his head, he panicked, sucking in a great breath that pulled the rough fabric into his mouth. The two men holding either arm threw him to the ground and he landed on his back with a thump that made his head snap backwards and expelled what little breath there was left in his lungs out into the hood – he sucked in again, more violently this time. As he rolled to one side, he forced himself to do an inventory: whiplash, perhaps, some bruising to his back no doubt. No broken coccyx at least – he would have felt that immediately. He tucked his chin down and braced himself, expecting one or both of the men to kick him now he was on the floor: with his hands tied behind his back he couldn’t roll into a ball – his head was very vulnerable. But it wasn’t that that was worrying him most, it was his breathing. He had a moment to observe his own efficiency in noting this.

Instead of laying into him, the men left the room. At least, he thought they had left – there were the sounds of their feet scuffing on the dirt floor, the slam of the door.

He lay very still but his own breath was ragged against the cloth and too harsh for him to listen to the room. He was still hyperventilating and each time he did, he sucked the hood back into his mouth, shortening the breath and making him hyperventilate more. It came to him that if he did not control his breathing, then without the men doing anything more, the end would be suffocation. That was what happened. You shortened your own breath millilitre by millilitre, a bit like someone with a rope around their neck struggling so much they pulled the noose tight. Would they use the water trick? He had heard stories of people choking on their own vomit when they did that.

It would be really stupid to suffocate himself when they weren’t even trying to kill him. He lay trying to steady his lungs, interrogating the pain in his shoulders where his arms were pulled back. He found that if he rolled his shoulders back in tiny movements, like a minute version of a limbering-up exercise, it eased the pain.