‘I’m not interested in you getting deep and meaningful. I want to know where he came from and what he’s doing here. If he’s smart he’ll cooperate.’

‘And if he doesn’t?’ Bennett asked.

‘Then that’s his problem.’

If Gibson wanted information extracted as quickly as possible, there was only one place in Haina the man would be taken. The whole Haina complex didn’t officially exist, but there was one building in the compound that even most of the CIA staff pretended wasn’t there—the MKULTRA interrogation block.

MKULTRA had started life in the 1950s as an experimental psych­ological warfare unit, which generally meant tricking unsuspecting civilians into taking LSD to see how they’d behave under the drug’s influence. Unfortunately, the people they experimented on had a tendency to throw themselves out of high windows.

By the early 1960s most of its operations were shutting down, but parts of the unit lived on in compounds around the globe like Haina, where the CIA protected US interests in ways that would be considered highly illegal on American soil. Techniques included extreme isolation, starvation, sensory deprivation or overload, or hooking people on opioids to then force withdrawal on them. MKULTRA specialised in fast and violent information extraction, but it wasn’t foolproof—people who survived invariably confessed to whatever they were told to.

When Bennett had first learned of MKULTRA, it had horrified her. The justification given by those who were less uncomfortable about its existence than her was that there were some truly evil people in the world who meant to do the United States unspeakable harm and needed to be dealt with by any means necessary—that one life was worth it if it stopped another Pearl Harbor. That always felt like a hollow excuse to her. She understood that the line of acceptability was often deeper, thinner, or more blurred than people thought when it came to national security, but MKULTRA definitely seemed to be on the wrong side of it.

However, her qualms didn’t stop it from continuing its dark work, so most of the time she settled, like the rest of Haina, for just ignoring it. And the feeling seemed mutual. The MKULTRA interrogators didn’t mix with their fellow Americans. They didn’t live in the same apartment block in Miramar, and they didn’t joke about who got caught in the latest tropical downpour over rums at Doralis’s.

Now, Bennett wanted to march across the compound and demand to see her stranger. But she knew she couldn’t. She had to wait.

During the day the MKULTRA block was permanently staffed, but at night it was left well alone and even avoided by the patrolling guards, in large part because they figured whoever might be inside would be in no condition to try to escape.