The Cilla Rose Affair Read Free

Mobambo, in his heat-wrinkled fatigues, had leaned back in his chair, pressing his fingertips together, assessing his prisoner. On his desk lay Ian’s passport—American, false—and all of his identification…a camera, minus its film…and a hastily prepared document—a confession—badly typed.
    Ian had glanced at this sheet of paper, reading it upside down. There were a number of charges, many involving laws which had been invoked in the wake of the military uprising.
    “Not guilty,” he said.
    Mobambo grinned, displaying a mouthful of large, perfectly white teeth that gleamed against his black skin. “You may be what you claim—a journalist from Los Angeles. But you must understand my dilemma: if I release you, I am answerable to General Pinkerton, who is absolutely convinced you must be a foreign agent, and sends communications to me daily, demanding your immediate execution.”
    Ian waited. Above the desk, the ceiling fan swirled, slowly, stirring nothing but the flies who ventured too close to its smooth wooden blades.
    “If I hold you,” Mobambo continued, leaning back, so that his chair gave off a small wooden squeak of protest, “a trial would not be likely to take place in our courts for another two years.” He gave the piece of paper a push with an immaculately-manicured finger. “It might be better—for you—to confess.”
    Still, Ian waited.
    “You wish to think about it?”
    “Yes,” Ian said. “I do.”
    “Then we will talk again soon.”
    Mobambo had snapped his fingers, and two guards had stepped forward to escort him back to his cell.
    It was a given truth in this business that the extraction of information necessarily involved a degree of unpleasantness. Colonel Mobambo’s soldiers had been singularly unpleasant to Ian since his interview in the office. While the so-called civilized nations of the world tended to rely on psychology and pharmaceuticals to accomplish their ends, that level of sophistication hadn’t yet dawned on this dark little corner of the continent. Mobambo’s methods were crude, to say the least.
    They covered situations like this in your training sessions. The steps you could follow: parting with a few details to keep your captors guessing—not enough to cause harm to others in your organization and certainly not enough to jeopardize the overall success of your particular mission; denying your guilt—it was expected of you, all part of the game; trying to find out how much your interrogators actually knew—arguing with them, falling back on reason, pleading, swearing, getting angry. And then, there was the oldest trick in the book: giving them the impression you were breaking, the theory being, the more they beat you, the less they knew.
    If that was true, Ian thought, then Mobambo’s men were singularly unenlightened. The rope marks on his wrists and ankles—the cuts and bruises on selected regions of his body, and the pain that accompanied them—all attested to that.
    He could, of course, always sign the confession. The rules of that part of the game were pretty simple: scribble your signature on the piece of paper, hope the beatings stopped, put your faith in the knowledge that one day, your release would be negotiated as part of a high-level spy swap.
    Ian let his breath out. That was another of the theories they liked to trot out in the training sessions. It presumed the existence of strategically valuable spies on the other side. It also presupposed that the penalty for spying was not immediate execution in front of a firing squad.
    He’d already witnessed two poor sods meeting a ragged end in front of a bullet-riddled wall in the far corner of the compound.
    If he signed that confession, he’d be signing his death warrant.
    Evan collected his mail from the locked slot on the ground floor, and trudged up the three flights of stairs to his Knightsbridge apartment. He let himself in. In the sitting room, he could see his answering machine, winking on