by elfin

It’s quiet here. Too quiet. Too many opportunities to sit and think, and remember. To wallow in grief and self-pity. He remembers the long-haired blond girl sitting in the window when he asked if anyone wanted to go for a beer.

Just before he met Freddy. Scary Freddy who’s still living in Beirut.

Beirut was years ago. Since then he’s endured ten days of torture in Yemen, listened to his wife’s desperate pleas and the shot that killed a colleague, walked away from an innocent woman wired up to a bomb, watched a terrorist kill a prince, almost died at the hands of Syria’s intelligence officers. He’s had a son. And lost his wife.

He doesn’t know how much more he can take before he loses it. He has no idea how he’s made it this far but he has.

Freddy frightened him, because he knows that’s how he might have ended up, still might if he lets this defeat him. Beirut was his first foreign assignment from Six. Barely out of training and sent there with Freddy, to a bar that was a front for weapons trade.

Suspicious, soldiers had raped and murdered three local women in front of them. Somehow he’d kept it together, kept quiet, kept still. Freddy hadn't. He'd blown their cover to hell. Adam stills remembers the taste of metal – the gun forced into his mouth – the scratching of the barrel against his teeth like fingernails on a blackboard, choking on the thickness pushed to the back of his throat. He remembers closing his eyes and expecting his world to turn red before he died. And then Freddy’s scream, the sound of an explosion, the sharp laceration of glass into his skin.

He awoke in a military hospital, sewn up but otherwise fine. Dandy.

Alive.

Scared shitless and unable to tell anyone.


Everyone else is in bed. Dreaming drug-induced fantasies of lives they’ll never go back to and probably never want to. He can’t lose this life – he doesn’t have anything else. Without this he’ll go nuts just like they have. The idea of being here – a willing prisoner – for the rest of his life scares him more than anything he’s ever had to face at the hands of unfriendly governments or terrorists.

Lifting one foot onto the old-fashioned sofa he takes the small mobile out of his sock. First law of spying, always carry a spare. Years ago it would have been a handgun, these days it’s a phone.

He stares at it. Who the hell is there to call? Colleagues? He hates the way everyone he works with has been looking at him with pity, checking every sentence before it’s spoken, terrified that one misplaced word will have him sobbing on their shoulder and they don’t know how to deal with that. Even Zaf. Maybe, especially Zaf.

Friends? People like him don’t have friends. Can’t afford them. There is one, he thinks, but he doesn’t have a number anymore.

More tears get away from him. He needs them to stop. Or maybe it’s what the quacks want to see – a tearful release, a display of grief, something to prove to them that he’s not burying it all, that it won’t all blow up one day during a critical operation that threatens the lives of other officers.

Suddenly he’s tired – more tired than he's ever been. And there’s nowhere to go but up to the room they’ve allocated him. Comfortable, double bed, tea and coffee making facilities. Impersonal, no emotional connection to any of it – except for people who’ll spend years here, not facing the real world. Not accepting what’s happened, not moving on.

Like Freddy. He’d rather face the Syrians again than a life that ends like this.

He doesn’t want to be here. He isn’t insane! This is a psychiatric facility! He doesn’t need shrinks. He needs someone’s arms around him. Needs to cry and be held and to hear everything’s going to be okay even when it’s not. He wants to be home, in his own bed, Fiona at his back warm and happy.

It’ll never be like that again. Never.

The sobs break free, threatening to drag him under with them. Shaking, instead he pushes himself to his feet, pocketing his phone. He stumbles up to his room only to grab his bag, leaving the door open. The only other thing he handed over is a copy of ‘Pride and Prejudice’. He can get another copy. His only friend gave it to him, but his friend would understand. His friend whose telephone number he doesn't have.

Quietly, as if this is something he isn’t allowed to do, he pads down the carpeted stairs and turns the handle on the front door. He wipes his eyes and nose with his hand, taking out his car keys.

He’s on the road before he starts to wonder where he’s going. And it’s not until he’s on the quiet motorway that he realises he might not have a number, but he does have an address.