Free Die Twice by Andrew Grant Page A

choice. You had to stay. You couldn’t abandon your contact.
    My final map reference turned out to be the location of a telephone box. One of the old-fashioned red ones that you don’t usually see anymore, except in the tourist hot spots around London. I guess it was too remote for the phone company to bother with a replacement. It really was isolated. Scrubby, barren fields stretched out on both sides. A narrow, winding country lane led back to the nearest village. The lights of a single farmhouse glowed in the distance. And nowhere in sight offered any kind of adequate shelter.
    I slid under a stretch of thin, weedy hedgerow and settled down to wait. The rain cascaded onto me from above. My clothes absorbed more water from the ground. I was thoroughly soaked within seconds. Daylight started to fade. The temperature was dropping steadily. The wind picked up and started to make the sharp strands of bramble dance and scratch at my face. My head filled with reminders of why I’ve never felt at home in the country, but I kept my eyes on the phone booth the whole time. And saw that no one approached it. Not a single person passed it on the road. Even a pair of stray dogs gave it a wide berth. It was like a magnet with the wrong polarity, designed to repel people and animals.
    An hour and a half crawled by. The daylight had drained almost completely away. Another half hour passed, and I realized I was shivering more or less uncontrollably. I’d been there for the designated two hours. There was no sign of the agent. She’d technically missed her contact. I would have been entitled to return to base. Officially it was time to call it a day but I gave her an extra fifteenagonizing minutes, just in case. And because I hated the idea of not having met my objective. But still, she didn’t show up. So I slid out from my hiding place. Crouched at the edge of the rough grass verge. Checked both ways along the road. Scanned the fields. Saw nothing. Started to move. And heard the sound of a shotgun cartridge crunching into place behind me.
    At that moment I thought I’d blown it, but the exercise turned out to have been a success after all. The scope was just a little wider than I’d been led to believe. As well as our people, the army was involved. Their challenge was to capture the operator I was supposed to be meeting. It was a kind of contest. Pride was at stake, so our instructors were taking no chances. They suspected that details of the final rendezvous would have been leaked, since the army was handling the communications. So, to find out, I was sent to the place alone. The theory was that if the army was staking it out, they wouldn’t react as soon as they saw me. They’d wait for my contact to show herself and snatch both of us. And if she didn’t show up, they’d snatch me hoping that I’d know about some backup plans, rather than let the trail go cold. So my role had been to flush them out. With that achieved, the other operator was successfully retrieved. The navy won. And an important lesson was learned.
    In an operation, everyone has a role to play.
    It just may not be the one you’re expecting.
    Everyone knows that interrogating a suspect is A PEST. To make it work, you need:
    A ccess control, so that word of his capture doesn’t have the chance to spread.
    P rivacy, to make sure nothing he reveals is overheard.
    E fficiency, to milk every last drop of useful intelligence out of him.
    S ecurity, so that no one can silence him before he spills the beans.
    And a way to judge the . . .
    T ruth of what he says before you commit any resources on the strength of it.
    So, all things considered, the third-floor landing of an insecure building would not be top of your list of favorable locations for the job. If the guy was a big enough fish, you’d take him somewhere specially designed for the task. A place where he couldn’t escape, and no one else could get at him. Where the physical environment itself would help to