only a few hours’ flight from the City airport. This is what matters, here and now, not making money.’
He paused, waiting for a comment, sympathy perhaps. Ginty was prepared to wait him out. He must have understood because he picked up the unlabelled wine bottle and held it towards her, raising his eyebrows.
‘Sure you don’t want some?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘OK. So, I left my job and came over here, planning to sort out some aid, or help them organize a proper international appeal for medical equipment, drugs, that sort of thing; but when I saw what was going on I knew I had to get involved. Have you any idea what they – we – have suffered over the centuries?’
Ginty nodded, but that wasn’t enough for him. He started to describe the sacking of villages, the burningsalive, the rapes, the killings, the desecration of holy places, deaths of babies, torture of fighting men, starvation, disease and exile. She listened, feeling battered by his remorseless stream of stories and remembering all the others she’d heard in the last two weeks.
‘You can see why it’s important that everyone in England knows the truth, can’t you?’ Rano was saying. She nodded. ‘International opinion has swung away from us again. Supplies of arms and money and everything else we need have almost dried up. We’ve got to mobilize all our support in the west.’
‘So this interview is part of a PR campaign,’ Ginty suggested, needing to show that she wasn’t a complete doormat. She wondered what his leaders thought about his private enterprise, this murderous miniature army that had topped every excess committed by anyone else.
Rano put down his glass, swung his feet to the floor and leaned across the table. His face was only a foot from hers. She moved back instinctively, remembering that being a doormat was safe as well as humiliating.
‘It’s rather more than that, as you very well know, Ms Schell.’ He waited for some acknowledgement. She despised herself for nodding again. ‘Good. All we’re doing is demanding justice. You have to understand that.’
‘Oh, I understand all right,’ Ginty said. He moved back, but that didn’t make her feel any easier. She forced herself to add: ‘But I’ll have to be fairly even-handed in what I write. If I pretend it’s only your people who’ve suffered, I become … the Sentinel becomes partisan and therefore automatically untrustworthy. I’ll have to include some balance. Do you understand that?’
Rano said something to the man behind him, who straightened up and stopped picking his teeth. Ginty couldn’t withdraw a single word. She just sat, watching them both, hoping she didn’t look too much like a rabbit in the headlights.
‘I know what you’re getting at, yes,’ Rano said at last, his eyes softening a little. Ginty tried to keep her own confident. ‘And it’s a reasonable point, but don’t overdo it. You have to make your readers see that we’ve had no alternative when we’ve hit back. I’ll need your agreement to that before you leave.’
She was very much aware of the other men in the room. Rano was waiting for her response, impatient, his hand clenched around his wineglass.
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘That’s not enough, Ginty.’
She hated the intimacy, and she wondered what Harbinger had said to make Rano feel he had the right to use her name like that. ‘It might help me write convincingly if you could make me understand why what you’re doing to them now – particularly the rapes – is any different from what they have done to you in the past. Aren’t you just fuelling the next bout of revenge?’
Rano frowned and said something over his shoulder to the guard, who stepped forwards. Pictures flashed through Ginty’s mind as her body seized up: the man who had been dragged away as she arrived; the burned villages; the fifteen-year-old who had killed her own child rather than live with the knowledge that he was theirs too.
The soldier walked deliberately round the table to stand just in front of her. Something glinted in his fingers. Her heart thumped, and her throat closed so that she couldn’t breathe. Then she saw he was holding a cigarette packet. He opened it and offered it to her. She shook her head, not trusting her voice. He took it to Rano, who put a cigarette between his lips and leaned forwards for a light. Sucking in the smoke with greedy pleasure, he leaned back in his chair and swung his legs up on to the table again, picking up his wineglass in the hand that already held the cigarette.
Ginty pressed on: ‘Won’t your actions now make them – or their children – try to do the same to you and yours as soon as they get the power back?’
‘If we do our job properly, they won’t get it.’ Rano paused, looked over her head, then added deliberately: ‘And even if they do, most of the next generation of children will be half ours anyway. This time we will sort it out once and for all.’
He looked directly at her. She knew he must have been told what she’d been doing in the camps, that her main job here was to collect stories from the rape survivors for a quite different magazine. And he must have some idea of what she – or any other woman who had heard them – would feel about him and his men.
She tried to listen to what he was saying, instead of the remembered voices of his victims, as he explained that rape of the enemy’s women is the natural response of men at war, and that people in the west made far too much fuss about rape in general. It had always been part of life, he told her, because of the way men have been genetically programmed to ensure a wide enough spread of their genes and prevent in-breeding within the tribe.
He could have been an academic lecturer, offering evidence from well-known scientists and anthropologists, adding as a clincher the observations of primate-watchers, who had seen males of one group raping and kidnapping females of another.
Work on the guns had almost stopped, and the singing with it. If Rano’s men really didn’t understand English, something outside her five senses was making them remarkably attentive to what he was saying.
Half an hour later, he switched off the tape recorder, ejected the two cassettes, labelled them, dated and signed them, and then passed both across the table towards Ginty. The blood caught in his cuticles had dried to a dull brown, but she was beyond horror. Concentrating on his lecture, while fighting her fear, had been more tiring than anything she’d done before. She hoped she’d lived up to Harbinger’s faith in her. But she couldn’t think of that now.
‘If you would just sign both, then we can be sure we’re dealing with the same interview.’
She did as he’d asked, making sure her fingers didn’t touch his. Her hand looked tiny next to his. She wasn’t sure that her legs would hold her up when he let her go.
He stubbed out his cigarette and signalled to the men behind Ginty. One of them came into her peripheral vision, holding a camera.
‘Harbinger will need an illustration. You and I will look good together. A nice contrast. Come on.’
Unable to fight him, Ginty let Rano usher her outside into the sun. Muscles in her knees were jumping, and she felt sick, but she could walk perfectly well. He carefully positioned her in front of a spray of bullet holes near one of the blackened windows, before standing beside her. The young soldier with the camera shot the whole film. Sometimes Ginty was made to smile up at Rano; at others direct to the camera. She felt his arm heavy on her shoulders and tried to show something of her real feelings.
When it was over at last, the man with the camera rewound the film, took it out, and handed it to Ginty. Her hand was sweating so much she thought she might drop it, but she got the little reel into her pocket. The young man fished in his pocket and handed Rano a bundle of black cloth.
‘We have to use this,’ he said, shaking it out and reaching towards her head. ‘As much for your protection as ours. If you were seen unblindfolded with my men, the other side could make you tell them where you’d been today. D’you understand?’
Making a supreme effort,