better of him. He looked back at the hut. The veiled woman was marking the piece of paper with an ink stamp. She slammed it onto a metal spike.
‘Crazy!’ Ramón produced a delighted grin. ‘In Casablanca they pay their parking tickets in the middle of the fucking woods. Never saw this before, man.’
‘Me neither,’ Carradine replied.
It was another forty-five minutes to the hotel. Carradine sat in the heat of the back seat, smoking another of Ramón’s cigarettes. On the edge of the city the Mercedes became jammed in three-lane traffic that inched along wide colonial boulevards packed with cars and motorbikes. Ramón grew increasingly agitated, berating the driver for taking the wrong route in order to extract more money for the journey. The swings in his mood, from back-slapping bonhomie to cold, aggressive impatience, were as unexpected as they were unsettling. Carradine followed the progress of the journey on his iPhone, trying to orientate himself in the new city, the street names – Boulevard de La Mecque, Avenue Tetouan, Rue des Racines – evoking all the antiquity and mystique of French colonial Africa. Mopeds buzzed past his door as the Mercedes edged from block to block. Men hawking drinks and newspapers approached the car and were shooed away by the driver, who switched on the windscreen wipers to deter them. Several times Carradine saw cars and scooters running red lights or deliberately going the wrong way around roundabouts in order to beat the jam. Stalled in the rivers of traffic he thought of home and cursed the heat, calling his father to tell him that he had arrived. He was busy playing backgammon with a friend and had no time to talk, their brief exchange leaving Carradine with a sense of isolation that he found perversely enjoyable. It was exhilarating to be alone in a strange city, a place about which he knew so little, at the start of a mission for which he had received no training and no detailed preparation. He knew that his father had been posted to Egypt by the Service in the early years of his marriage and thought of the life he must have led as a young spy, running agents in Cairo, taking his mother on romantic trips to Sinai, Luxor and Aswan. Ramón offered him yet another cigarette and he took it, observing that the smog outside was likely to do more damage to his lungs. Ramón went to the trouble of translating the joke for the benefit of the driver who turned in his seat and smiled, acknowledging Carradine for the first time.
‘Vrai!’ he said. ‘C’est vrai!’
That was when Ramón showed him his phone.
‘Jesus Christ, man. You see this?’
Carradine pitched the cigarette out of the window and leaned forward. The headline on the screen was in Spanish. He could see the words REDMOND and MUERTA.
‘What happened?’
‘They killed the Redmond bitch,’ Ramón replied. ‘Resurrection fucking killed her.’
They kept her in the van for the first thirty-six hours. She screamed when they took off the gag, so they put it on again and left her to rage. They offered her water and food, but she refused it. She soiled herself. When she had spent all of her energy, Redmond wept.
Towards the end of the second day they took her from the van, still blindfolded, and tied her to a chair in the basement of the farmhouse. They played the recording into the room. A loop of Redmond’s words, repeated over and over again. A torture of her own making. The bearded man called it ‘The Two Minutes of Hate’, after Orwell, but the recording lasted for more than twelve hours.
The immigrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean are the same insects already swarming over Europe. They choke our schools and hospitals. They dirty our towns and cities. They murder our daughters at rock concerts. They mow down our sons on the streets.
It went on and on into the night. Whenever Redmond looked as though she was falling asleep, they turned up the volume. She was prevented from sleeping by the words she had written. ‘Sentenced by your own sentences,’ said the man who had knocked down her husband.
The only answer is to lock up every young Muslim man or woman whose name appears on a terrorist watchlist. How else to protect British citizens from slaughter? If we cannot take the sensible precaution, outlined by the government of the United States, of preventing potential terrorists from entering the United Kingdom from countries that are known sponsors of Islamist terror, then this is the only option remaining to us.
On the morning of the third day they removed Redmond’s gag and again offered her food and water. This time she accepted. The bearded man asked her, on camera, if she wished to defend her words and actions. She said that she stood by everything she had written. She insisted that, given the chance, she would write and broadcast everything again. She had no regrets for exercising her right to free speech and for articulating views held by millions of people in the West who were too cowed by political correctness to speak their minds.
The bearded man was standing behind her as she spoke. He lifted her hair clear of her shoulders, held it in a fist above her head, and sliced her throat with a knife. Redmond’s body was dumped at a stretch of waste ground on the outskirts of Coventry. A photograph of her corpse was sent to the editor of the British newspaper who had commissioned her column.
Somerville switched off the recorder.
‘What are your feelings about what happened to Lisa Redmond?’ he said.
Bartok shrugged.
‘I do not know enough about it.’ She stood up and stretched her back, twisting one way, then the other. ‘I know that Kit was upset. He talked about it a lot. I think it haunted him.’
‘What about you?’ the American asked. His tone was supercilious. ‘Were you upset by it? Were you haunted, Lara?’
Bartok picked up one of the biscuits. She turned it over in her fingers. She liked Somerville. She trusted him. She did not like or trust the American.
‘As I have said. I did not know Redmond’s writing. I did not have the opportunity to listen to her radio broadcasts wherever I was hiding in the world. She sounded like somebody who we might have gone after.’
The American seized on this, closing the space between them.
‘We?’
‘Resurrection.’ Bartok looked at Somerville as if to suggest that the American was starting to annoy her. ‘In the old days. Before the violence and the killing. She was the sort of figure Ivan would have looked at. Redmond, and those like her, men like Otis Euclidis, they gave encouragement to the bigots, to the ignorant. Ivan wanted to teach them a lesson. We all did.’ She bit into the biscuit. It was dry. She could only swallow by taking a sip of water to wash it down. ‘When I see what has happened to Resurrection, I feel nothing but sadness. It began as something remarkable. It began as a phenomenon. Ivan had a conception of a new kind of revolutionary movement, one which harnessed the power of the Internet and social media, one which was fuelled by international outrage among young and old alike. He wanted to take that revolutionary movement out onto the streets, to fight back against those who had corrupted our societies. He knew that Resurrection would catch fire with people, inspire groups and individuals, oblige the masses to mount operations of their own – however small, however apparently insignificant – so that bit by bit and step by step, democracy and fairness would be restored. But all of the hope and the beauty of those ideas,
