Her stranger was on the second screen. He was also sitting in the corner of his cell, but his legs were crossed, his arms were in his lap, and his face was completely still, his eyes locked on the camera. Bennett was sure he couldn’t know she was watching him, but it felt like he did, and he was staring straight back at her. She flicked the switch on his television—he was being subjected to the same constant assault of noise as the other man, but he didn’t seem to hear it.

Bennett turned the speaker off and picked up the file that had been left on the desk next to the screen. It was marked ‘classified’ but, after coming this far, Bennett chose to ignore that small detail. Inside were a series of transcripts of the man’s apparent confessions. Each one seemed more confused, disjointed, and shorter, but all of them had words underlined or asterisked in red. The same words appeared more and more as the MKULTRA interrogators zeroed in on a succession of different subjects.

Bennett skimmed through the pages. The more she read the less she took in what had been forced out of the man, until the last page. The interrogators had pushed him to reveal his identity—his true identity. She could tell from the fractured notes that he’d struggled not only to tell them his name, but to know what it was. But then he had and, as Bennett read it, she realised she knew him.

Chapter 15

Chapter 15

Bennett should have put the folder back on the desk, left the block, and forgotten about both men.

But she didn’t. She couldn’t bury what she’d just witnessed or banish it from her mind. The two men weren’t being interrogated, they were being tortured, and she’d played a direct part in putting both of them in those cells, and in the hands of MKULTRA.

As she ran across the compound and out through the main gates, a tiny part of her brain registered that she hadn’t even looked at the file of the man from Cerro de San Francisco. She’d been too astonished by what she’d discovered about her stranger. He wasn’t the Wolf, but who he was made no sense. She knew him, but there was no way he could know her, because he was dead. At least he was supposed to be.

Bennett sprinted up to the highway and hailed a taxi that was making its way back to the centre of the capital from the barrios on the other side of the small estuary that Haina sprawled over. It was late, she was alone, and the car was old and rickety—it couldn’t have more than a few hundred miles left in it—but the driver stopped for her, and didn’t question the address she gave him.