At their closest point the walls were four feet away on either side. As I spun, they receded and then lurched back towards me. I looked up again, and then craned my neck backwards to look down. Corrugated lines of infinity separated and converged around me. The ceiling was close, a foot above the soles of my bare feet; the plywood floor so near I wondered that my head did not scrape on it as I moved about. Twenty feet distant a bright white halogen lamp shone into my face. The jagged black lines of my own shadow leapt across the grey metal tunnel. The light picked out four air vents and no obvious cameras … but hid the exit behind its blinding halo. At the opposite end was a metal wall. Dead centre, stencilled on a red oblong, white Cyrillic letters spelled out the acronym РЖД: RZD – the name of the Russian state railway. I was, without doubt, inside a shipping container. And I was, without doubt, moving. ‘Where to?’ was the sixty-four thousand dollar question.

My throat was parched. I licked the sweat from my lips and tried to swallow. My stomach was empty and racked with cramp. The bullet wounds in my thigh and shoulder burned, though separating the pain of one injury from another was almost impossible. But I couldn’t have been hung like that for long. The human body isn’t meant to be inverted – and the consequences are ultimately, inevitably, fatal. At around the twenty-four-hour mark death from asphyxiation becomes imminent. Stroke was a possibility, too, as was heart failure. I knew: I’d seen the CIA string enough people up during black site debriefs to be intimately familiar with the consequences of not cutting people down in time.

I wasn’t a fan of torture. Especially not when I was the subject. You can make anyone confess to anything – eventually. If your captive doesn’t fear death and you have nothing to trade – their family, usually – then you may as well quit while you’re ahead and save yourself the bruised knuckles and, if you’re that sort, the guilty conscience. I just hoped that whoever had strung me up was as well versed in the medical implications of enhanced interrogation techniques as I was.

I gave myself a once-over as best I could. No boots, no T-shirt. The dressings Doc had patched me up with were loose and dirty, but still in place. I was wearing the same jeans I’d made my run in. My wrists felt as if they were bound with a cable tie. I peered up towards the ceiling. My ankles looked like they were gaffer-taped together under the rope that held me to the ceiling. How, exactly, I was fixed in place I couldn’t see, but there was no pulley, no guide rope, to lower me.