Bad Soldier by Chris Ryan

Author:Chris Ryan [Ryan, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2016-08-25T06:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

Joe woke up.

At first, he didn’t know where he was. It didn’t worry him. He’d been sleeping on the floor, which was hard and a bit uncomfortable. But he was warm and dry, which was more than he normally hoped for these days.

Then he remembered. The interview with the asylum official. The way she’d locked him in the room when he had told her his story. He sat up and wondered how long he had been asleep. An hour or two? He stood up, walked to the edge of the room and looked through the glass window towards the open-plan office beyond. When he’d last looked, it had been full of people. Now there were only a few. One guy, obviously a security guard, was sitting on a chair just outside the room. When he saw Joe at the window, he sat up a bit straighter, but didn’t make eye contact. Joe saw that the screensaver on one of the computers had been set to tell the time in large digits. 0615. He realised he’d been asleep all night.

He was about to sit down when he saw two men striding across the office in his direction. Their eyes were fixed on the interview room. They were a mismatched pair – one very tall, with a bushy moustache and thinning hair, the other short and dumpy, with a very full head of black hair and a crumpled suit and tie. Joe could tell these were the people he’d been waiting for.

The security guard obviously had the same intuition. Either that, Joe thought, or he’d seen them before. He stood up, almost to attention, and when the tall man gave him a nod, he unlocked the door to the room. The two guys entered and closed the door behind them. During his time with Daesh, Joe had grown sensitive to the presence of weapons. He immediately noticed the bulges under these guys’ jackets. He knew they were carrying.

‘Good morning,’ he said, as politely as he could.

The short man stepped forward and offered his hand. ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘Robin Galbraith. This is my colleague Owen Sharples. Very good of you to wait for us.’

Joe shook his hand and smiled. He decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to point out that it wasn’t really a question of waiting. He’d been imprisoned in this room all night long. Galbraith smiled back. Sharples, on the other hand, didn’t. Joe had the impression that his face was rarely troubled by a smile.

‘Sounds like you’ve been through the mill, old thing,’ Galbraith said. ‘Wonder if you’d like to talk about it some more.’ He looked around. ‘We’ve got somewhere more comfortable we can go. Would you like that?’

‘Who are you, exactly?’ Joe said. ‘If you don’t mind me asking?’

‘You probably wouldn’t mind something to eat, eh? Here . . .’ He removed a chocolate bar from his jacket. ‘That should tide you over. Till we get there.’

Joe accepted the chocolate bar and read the wrapper, which said ‘Snickers’.

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