Crocodile Tears

pants pocket.
    Even now he might get a chance to use it. He had no other surprises left.
    With two guards behind him and the woman a few steps ahead, he was taken down a path that followed the edge of the river. The camp disappeared behind them, and looking ahead in the far distance, Alex saw a family of elephants washing themselves in the sparkling water. It was an extraordinary sight, but Alex couldn’t enjoy it. Not when it might be the last thing he ever saw.
    Desmond McCain was waiting ahead of them, dressed comfortably in a well-tailored safari suit with a white silk neckerchief. It seemed they had arrived at their destination. Alex looked around him. He didn’t like what he saw.

    A steep slope ran down to a stretch of sandy shingle, a narrow beach at the very edge of the water.
    There was a stepladder, about twenty feet high, standing on the beach, and above it a metal pipe that had been fastened to the branch of a tree. The pipe ended with two handles and reminded Alex of a periscope in a submarine. A wooden observation platform had been constructed at the top of the slope.
    This was where McCain was standing.
    Alex had already worked out what might be going on here and was making calculations. If he walked down to the beach and climbed the ladder, he would be able to reach the handles. Then the ladder could be taken away and he would be left hanging from the pipe. He would be close enough to the platform to be able to talk to McCain and to hear what he had to say—but not close enough to reach him.
    Because the pipe was rigid, he wouldn’t be able to swing back and forth. In other words, he would simply have to stay there until his arms grew tired and he dropped.
    The question was—why? What was the point?
    “ This will not take very long, Alex,” McCain said. He had watched Alex taking everything in. “I will talk to you a little bit, and then, I’m afraid, we will begin. As I have already told you, I need most urgently the answer to three questions. What was it that brought you to Greenfields? Why did MI6 send you? And how much do the intelligence services know about Poison Dawn?”
    Alex had already decided what he was going to say. “You don’t need to play your sadistic games, Mr.
    McCain,” he said. “I’ll tell you what you want to know anyway.”
    McCain held up a hand. “I don’t think you were listening to me last night. Of course you will tell me what I want to hear. That is the point I’m trying to make. You will tell me anything to protect yourself.
    But I have to be one hundred percent certain that you are telling me the truth. There cannot be even the tiniest margin of doubt.”

    “ And you think torturing me will achieve that?”
    “ Normally, no. There are many horrible things I could do to you, Alex. We have electricity here and wires attached to various parts of your body could produce excruciating pain. My Kikuyu friends could take you far beyond the limits of endurance using only their spears, perhaps heated first in the flames of a fire. We could cut pieces off of you. We could boil you alive. And do not think for a single minute that I would hesitate to do any of this because you are fourteen. MI6 clearly does not think of you as a child, so why should I?”
    “ Is part of the torture boring me to death?” Alex asked.
    McCain nodded. “Bravely spoken, Alex. Let us see how brave you are ten minutes from now.” He took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. The sun was beating down on his bald head, and beads of sweat were standing out. “The pain that you are about to experience is going to be all the worse because you will inflict it on yourself. You will, as it were, cooperate with your torturers. And you will do so to escape the terror that lies below.” He took out a gun, an old-fashioned Mauser with a shortened barrel and a white ivory plate over the grip. It looked like something out of a museum. “I would like you now to go down to the river,” he explained. “If you refuse to do so, if you attempt to run away, I will shoot you through the knee.”
    Alex stood where he was. Beckett was smiling properly for the first time, and he realized that she knew what to expect, that she had seen this all before. The two tribesmen were covering him with their rifles.
    If McCain missed with his pistol, they would certainly gun him down before he’d taken a single step.
    He glanced at the beach and at the river. There was nobody else down there. He had a nasty