Book 14 in the Quiller series, 1990

'Then they started to -' Fisher began.

We waited.

He sat there like a schoolboy, legs together, head down.

I should have said no, I was busy or something. This wasn't my field.

It was very quiet. Tilson wasn't looking at me while we waited; he was looking at the ceiling, angled back on the chair with his thumbs hooked into his pockets. He didn't want to -

'Why the hell should I tell you?'

In a muted scream and we jerked our heads to look at Fisher and I said, 'You don't have to. We didn't -'

'You want to drag everything out of me -' near tears, his voice stifled, his knuckles white and spittle on his chin. Christ, what was he, twenty-two, twenty-three? 'You want me to go over the whole fucking thing for you -'

'No,' I said, 'we don't,' and I went over to him and sat on my haunches, so that I was lower and less threatening and he could concentrate on me and forget Tilson was in here, two against one. 'All we want to know,' I said, 'is how you feel now, now that it's over and you're back safe and sound. Just how you feel, that's all, about the future.'

The problem was that he wanted to know how we felt, and he didn't understand that it was totally beside the question. The question was: if you send out a man this age on his first mission in Beirut and they pull him into the camp and put a hundred and twenty volts through his testicles and keep him awake for six days until he breaks, what have you got when he finds a gap in the wire and gets a lift on a US army truck and comes back to London? Anything you can use again?

'We're not worrying -' Tilson began but I cut across him.

'You couldn't have told them anything important, and that's the -'

'I told them everything.'

'I know, but it wasn't critical and it doesn't concern us.' I didn't point out that you don't send a green executive into the field with anything in his head that's worth getting at. We'd got to save what was left of his pride.

He was sitting on his hands now, rocking on them, as if he'd just been bashed over the knuckles with a ruler, oh those schooldays, those bloody schooldays, they last you all your life, but his eyes weren't squeezed shut any more and he was looking at me with the patience of a trapped animal, waiting to know what I was going to do, kill him or let him go -

'Everything.' In a whisper.

'Most of us do,' I said.

Tilson had moved on his chair, making it creak, and I thought if he meant to start talking again I'd have to shut him up somehow. He'd caught me coming out of the Caff about half an hour ago:

Fisher had just got back from Beirut, in a bad way, would I mind giving a hand, so forth. Tilson had been moved up into Debriefing and I suppose he was competent, but he wasn't sure how to handle a wrecked schoolboy. I wasn't either, but I suppose he wanted someone who'd been through the same thing somewhere along the line, and now that he'd brought me into this thing I wanted to do it alone.

'That's not true,' Fisher said in another whisper.

'I've done it myself.' Not absolutely true, but it would help him.

'You?'

He thinks you're God, Tilson had told me on our way here. They need their mythic heroes, the young ones, the new ones, and we never tell them about the feet of clay bit because they crave belief, otherwise they'd never go out there.

'We're not expected,' I said, 'to be superhuman in this trade. We're expected to try holding out and you held out for a whole week, and on top of that you made your own escape and you got back here. We think that's -'

'You know what they did to me?'

'Yes, but that's -'

'Don't worry,' I heard Tilson say and I got onto my feet because Fisher was off the chair and it rocked back and hit the floor and he was standing with his face in his hands and shaking badly and a lot of what he was saying got lost in the sobbing… 'Told me… never see… mother again… light in my eyes… then they… wires all over me… kept screaming for them… stop but it went on and on… syringe with stuff in it… give me AIDS… something, do you know something? They could've eaten me.. .'

That bit was familiar because it's the feeling you get after a while when there's nothing more they can do to you: they're not human any more; they're just creatures with huge jaws and you go into the final phrase where you lose identity and you wait for them to swallow you up. The worst fear, the instructor had told me at Norfolk, is that of emasculation, and it had taken five missions before I found out that he was wrong: the worst fear is of annihilation, of being eaten, swallowed up.

He was still sobbing, Fisher, swaying on his feet with his face blotted out by his thin white hands, his hair sticking out, button off his cuff, his narrow shoulders hunched over the rest of his body to give it shelter. Someone tapped on the door and looked in and went out again, making a point of being quiet, and I glanced at Tilson once – he was just standing there miserably with his arms folded and I think he'd got the message: we'd have to let Fisher go through it all again because he still couldn't believe what they'd done to him out there, taken away his identity day after day until at last he was nothing but a piece of food. And if he could get over it, day after day and in front of other people, it would save him from the nightmare that could goad him into picking up a knife or wrenching a window open. But in any case he wouldn't be allowed to sleep without someone else in the room, perhaps for months. We'd lost Claypool like that, and Froom.

'What do you think?' Tilson was beside me, unsettled.

'He needs time.'

'Is this all right? What he's doing?'

'It's all he can do. He's got to get to the other side of what they did to him.'

'But I mean -' he thought about how to put it.

I said, 'You can't throw him out.'

'It won't be up to me.'

'Standing behind me… I could feel it… back of my head… kept pulling the trigger…"

Rocking and swaying: it might have looked as if we weren't even here, but that wasn't true – he remembered we were here all right; he needed us for his survival. This was the confessional we were listening to, the confessional and the statement for the defence and an appeal for the court's clemency, the whole thing coming out as fast as it could because if it stayed locked in there for much longer it was going to kill him.

'You won't get anything useful out of him,' I told Tilson, 'until he can face himself again. Could take weeks.'

'He sent in quite a bit of stuff before they got him, stuff we can use. I suppose,' he said, watching Fisher, 'we ought to have some kind of resident shrink, for people like this.'

'I've told Loman that till I'm sick. Policy is, if they can still stand up, send them out again, and if they fall down, throw them into the street. They've lost good people like that.'

'They're going to do it again,' Tilson said, didn't look at me.

I could feel anger quickening. 'What have they said?'

'Give him the rest of the day, and if he's no better, sign him out. He -'

'Shit. Who said that?'

'Mr Croder.'

'Quick,' I said and left it to Tilson because he was nearer the boy and he caught him halfway to the window and Fisher went mad, then, and Tilson couldn't hold him so I went over to help and had to work on the median nerves, get them numb enough to stop him using his hands, and then I said, 'Listen, 'I'm taking you to my place and tonight we're going to get smashed out of our minds.'