Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [67]
[Back to the witness in silhouette.]
WITNESS: Oh, the police are in on it. I mean, they’ve been after proper riot shields for years, haven’t they? There’s always a lot of police at COPEX. That’s what Peter bloo– That’s what Morgan says, anyway. Said. UN intelligence people as well.
INTERVIEWER [off]: Why should the UN be interested in the kind of equipment on sale at COPEX?
WITNESS: I dunno. Because they don’t want to be behind everyone else, I suppose. Look, once you get into this stuff… it’s like an end to itself, isn’t it? The hardware’s all that matters. You don’t worry about how people are using it.
INTERVIEWER: Amnesty International says some of that ‘hardware’ is being used for torture in foreign police cells. And that a lot of it’s made by British companies.
WITNESS: They’re always saying something, aren’t they? Civil-rights people. I mean, maybe they’re right. It’s not the point.
INTERVIEWER: What is the point?
[There’s a long pause.]
WITNESS: Sorry, what?
[Scene change. We see a prison cell, unfurnished, with brick walls and a cement floor. In fact, this is a reconstruction of a cell in Saudi Arabia. We watch several actors in black plastic body armour using electric-shock batons on a half-naked prisoner. The electric-shock FX are convincing, but the prisoner’s screams aren’t.]
REPORTER [voice]: Among those attending fairs like COPEX are representatives from Saudi Arabia, recognised by Amnesty International as a torturing state. We’ve obtained first-hand testimony from a prisoner tortured by British electric-shock weaponry in a Saudi prison. He declined to appear on camera, but confirmed that his captors were equipped with state-of‐the-art ‘security’ hardware.
[The grim scenario continues. The captors are shouting at the prisoner in their native tongue. We notice that the actor playing the prisoner is definitely European in origin.]
REPORTER [voice]: The torturers, like almost everybody else we came across during our investigations, seem to form a kind of clique, a covert subculture answerable to nobody. Though our source claimed there was no reason for him to be tortured, he told us that his captors took an almost perverse pride in their equipment. The picture is becoming clear. The hardware is an end to itself. Pieces of top-of‐the-range torture and surveillance technology are considered to be objects of veneration by many of these people.
[Scene change. We see more hidden-camera footage from COPEX. Oddly enough, the point of view seems to be quite low to the ground, as if we were seeing the exhibition through – say – the eyes of a dog. The footage shows us a side office at COPEX, where four people are assembled. One of the people is clearly the reporter, in a blonde wig and business suit. Another has had his face blanked out. Of the remaining two, one is a young man with spiky black hair, and the other is a tall, powerful-looking dark-skinned man.]
REPORTER [voice]: This man calls himself Guest. Nothing is known about his true identity, and no official body has ever questioned his presence in Britain. Yet, when Guest offered to sell high-level security equipment to the UN, the UN entered into negotiations with him, despite his lack of credentials. And we’ve learned that, in addition to the UN, Guest has attempted to sell merchandise to both Saudi Arabia and to Peter Morgan’s company in London.
[We see Guest shake the hand of the blanked-out man.]
REPORTER [voice]: We may never know exactly who Guest is, or where he comes from. The important thing to remember is that nobody seems to care. Provided he can uphold his part of the bargain, his past history is irrelevant. These are the rules by which the techno-cults function.
[Back to the witness in silhouette.]