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intelligence service, were siphoning off millions of dollars and pocketing them. If Zeke was right, then the CIA was being conned, big time.
    To find proof of that, he’d ended up in Kabul. The lead had been a shipment of one hundred thousand British-designed .303 Lee Enfield rifles and thirty million bullets, which had arrived in Karachi paid for by the CIA, destined for Afghanistan. This particular arms deal had been odd.
    He had found out more in a cheerless strip club by the docks in Copenhagen, dimly lit by flashing blue lights, like being inside a police car. To the relentless upbeat nonsense, to Zeke’s ear, of ABBA’s ‘Waterloo’, a Danish ship’s engineer had told him a story that made no sense.
    ‘Never had a job like it,’ said the big Dane, taking a great swig of beer as a stripper’s bottom synced in his face to the rhythm of the music. Ignoring the buttocks, the Dane set it out for Zeke: ‘We arrive in Karachi just before midnight. With guns and ammunition, there’s a lot of paperwork and that kind of thing. Over there, in Pakistan, it can take a week, maybe two. The bureaucracy, it makes you mad. But with this job, the paperwork is signed off in two minutes, they load the guns, the ammo, in a flash. It’s a hush-hush job. We leave that morning, before dawn. The skipper, he was Ukrainian. I don’t like the guy, he says very little to me, I never work with the guy again. So we sail for three days out into the Indian Ocean, due south, and then turn round and sail the whole way back to Karachi, three days. This time, we arrive midday, it takes ten days to unload, everything is as slow as Christmas. Made no sense.’
    Zeke bought him another beer and stared into his orange juice. It did make sense, of course, if the guns and bullets had been in Pakistan the whole time, if the ISI had loaded up the ship in Karachi with Pakistan’s own military stores, ordered the ship to sail into the middle of the Indian Ocean and then sail back to Karachi. That way they could make a markup of some three thousand per cent. If the Dane was telling the truth, the ISI was ripping off Uncle Sam.
    The proof of the pudding would be if the shipped bullets were marked ‘POF’ – Pakistan Ordnance Factories. The whole thrust of the CIA’s secret arms supply to the rebels in Afghanistan was based on plausible deniability. If he could find bullets in Afghanistan marked ‘POF’, he was on to something.
    Zeke’s instinct had told him that the ISI – or, more correctly, a secret enclave inside the Pakistani intelligence service, known as Division S – was conning Uncle Sam. It was the equivalent of a raid on Fort Knox.
    Zeke’s urgency, his impatience to be proved right about the robbery, had led him to a basement garage in Kabul and a world of pain scented with lavender. Castration, paralysis . . . there was no limit to the horizon of his bodily fear. But his mind was still working overtime.
    The fat man with the electrodes kept on asking questions about things he should not have had any knowledge of, period. How exactly was the power play between the regional station chiefs – Weaver in Delhi and Crone in Islamabad – being read back at CIA HQ in Langley? Who did the CIA trust the most, Weaver or Crone? Who had told Zeke about the POF cargo that had been shipped out of Karachi only to be shipped back in again? Was it the Danish seaman?
    The only person Zeke had told about the Dane was Jed Crone, to get his sanction for the trip into Afghanistan.
    Zeke did his utmost to hold out. The fat Georgian got serious sexual pleasure from making people suffer intense pain, it was true, but he was also extraordinarily well informed about the inner workings of the Company and Zeke’s mission. And then his torturer switched off the electricity. His whole body heaved with relief but it was short-lived. Now the fat guy was spraying water on his skin. And then the electricity came back on, more unbearable than before.
    ‘Does