The Man Between: The gripping new spy thriller you need to read in 2018. Charles Cumming

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       8

      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, the purity of the early attacks, has been lost.’

       Somerville reached for the recorder. They needed to get the whole story out of Bartok. There was no point letting her talk during the breaks if nobody was keeping a record.

       ‘Would you like to go back to those early months?’ he asked.

       ‘Of course, whatever you want,’ she said.

       ‘Please. Tell us how it all got started.’

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