They’d left her father tied to the chair in his room and torched the place. She imagined him sitting there as the flames rose around him, imagined the fear he must have felt. She closed her eyes and almost inevitably thought of her mother too. What evil could have conspired to take both her parents from her in a handful of months? And the only other person she loved, Sean, had given her up to the enemy.

That thought caused the throbbing in her head to pulse faster. Had he really done that? Put his loyalty to his country above her? She held back a sob. Perhaps he’d never really loved her at all, perhaps everything had been a sham. She remembered the times they’d spent together, the quiet, tender moments, the laughs… no he had loved her.

Had or did?

A wave of emotion hit her and it was as if she was falling into the weir at her mother’s house all over again. Sliding down the weed-covered sill and plunging underwater. No air. No light. Slipping down into the depths. She tried to take a breath but could do nothing but wheeze. She gagged against a constriction in her throat, fighting asphyxia.

Sean?

His face was distorted in a blur of tears and then she was biting her lip in anger, feeling pain, tasting blood.

She blinked, the copper tang of the blood snapping her back to reality. She was lying on a piece of sacking stuffed with straw. The light bulb illuminated four walls of crumbling bricks and mortar rising to a roof of asbestos sheeting. In one corner there was some kind of trough, and water dripped from a join in the galvanised pipe that ran from the trough to a stopcock halfway up the wall. Scattered in one corner were several piles of dried faecal matter. Silva looked closer, but couldn’t distinguish if the crap was animal or human. The latter would suggest she wasn’t the first to be brought here. Not the first to wait in trepidation of what was to come.

Did Sean know where she was or what fate awaited her? Would he really have turned her over to the American authorities? Then again, this was nowhere official. Not a prison or a police station or a military base. She thought of Afghanistan. There’d been places where al-Qaeda militants had been taken. Black sites. Deniable. Places where the Geneva Convention didn’t apply. American operatives had waterboarded suspects and worse. Not that the British were without guilt. Silva knew UK intelligence officers had been present when militants had been interrogated. Silva hadn’t much cared back then. The militants had to be stopped by any means necessary. Now, though, the tables had been turned.

Thanks to Sean.