The Corporal's Wife (2013) Read Online Free PDF

going forward rested on them. He had lifted his head and stared at her.
    The senior man in Abu Dhabi, eighty miles and ninety minutes up the coast road, was in a Qatar-based conference hosted by the Agency, and the Bahrain station people were there. The Service  couldn’t get their hands on a charter for another six hours, and by then the diverted flight would be on approach over the Gulf.
    His confidence was the precious commodity. He was a wild animal in a cage, she reckoned, stunned by the suddenness of the trap closing, therefore hunkered in that corner, baleful, watching and uncertain. Katie had not the experience to begin a debrief, or the rank to offer deals. He gazed at her. She wondered how she compared with the Ukrainian tart on the video, whom she had met briefly in the brothel: a pleasant-enough woman, with a sweet smile, generous with her cigarettes; she looked raddled under the brightness from the cubicle’s centre light. Katie, in comparison, might have seemed flat-chested and wide-hipped; her hair – cut short – wasn’t coloured. The corporal-driver would never have come across a woman like Katie, a junior officer in the Service, carrying a burden that practically bent her double.
    She assumed his confidence would grow. She and the ex-marines would not be able to frogmarch him up the steps and onto the aircraft if he chose to resist. He would be an idiot, she thought, to go voluntarily.
    He had refused food and coffee.
    Disorientation was what she hoped for, and confusion, the inability to think clearly – his mind should be addled with doubt.
    Each minute that passed on the big wall clock by the door closed the window of opportunity – a phrase much used by lecturers of the probationers coming into the Service: a ‘window’ and an ‘opportunity’ were never to be ignored. Katie knew that the damage done to the station’s funds exceeded sixty-five thousand pounds. The money had sweetened the madam, was an inducement to the girls, who would scrap to get their hands on an Iranian. It had paid for the webcam, the microphone in the smoke alarm, and the recording kit in the inner office. Funny, but the man had not seemed concerned about the papers stuffed into an inner pocket of his jacket. Everything from the jacket was now in a plastic bag, with his wallet and his open-return air ticket. A bag, with overnight clothes, stood at the feet of an ex-marine but it contained nothing that interested her.
    Katie was not authorised to offer inducements, to mention an annual stipend or cash payment. She couldn’t question him because she had no knowledge of the areas that the interrogators would choose to work over. She could not add to the threats and insults that had been acceptable currency at the start. How to dominate ?
    She strode backwards and forwards in front of him. She had taken a call on her secure mobile from PK, the boss, telling her of the diverted flight. When it had rung a second time, she had gone out into the corridor, leaving him with the ex-marines, and had been told what she could say – no more.
    She was a woman who showed him no respect and no fear. She confirmed prejudices and stereotypes. She prayed for the hands of the clock to speed up.
    She had a half-blue from Oxford in lacrosse, another in netball. She showed him no kindness. Nothing in her actions betrayed a vestige of sympathy for him. He was a commodity, and the sooner he was shipped on, the better. He would know of the British intelligence apparatus, perhaps have more respect for it than he had for the Agency. Since childhood, he would have learned of the perfidy of the British Service, the tentacles it had spread, and he would know of the evil, duplicitous men employed at the Old Fox’s Den in Tehran – the embassy complex on Ferdowsi Avenue, now closed. He’d regard her as a devil.
    It was not her job to be liked, loved, admired.
    She paced. The ex-marines stood stock still, one before the door, the other beside it. The