The Sunglasses drank Coke.

I had the afternoon to myself, and as it looked like being the last one I’d get for a while, I wasted it extravagantly. I drank wine, read old newspapers, listened to an open-air performance of some Mahler, and generally sported myself as a gentleman of leisure.

I met a French woman in a bar who said she worked for a computer software company, and I asked her if she’d have sex with me. She just shrugged, Frenchly, which I took to mean no.

Eight o’clockwas the appointed hour, so I dawdled in a cafe until ten past, pushing another helping of boiled pork and dumplings around the plate and smoking immoderately. I paid the bill and walked out into the cool evening, at last feeling my pulse shake itself up at the prospect of action.

I knew I had no reason to feel good. I knew that the job was almost impossible, that the road ahead was long, rocky, and had very few petrol stations, and that my chances of makingthree score years and ten had dropped through the floor.

But, for whatever reason, good is what I felt.

Solomon was waiting for me at the rendezvous with one of the Sunglasses. One of the pairs of sunglasses, I mean. Although of course he wasn’t wearing sunglasses now, it being dark, so I quickly had to concoct a new name for him. After a few moments thought, I came up with No Sunglasses. I think there may be a touch of Cree Indian in me.

I apologised for being late, and Solomon smiled and said I wasn’t, which was irritating, and then all three of us climbed into a dirty, grey diesel Mercedes, with No Sunglasses at the wheel, and set off on the main road out of the east of the city.

After half-an-hour we’d cleared the outskirts ofPrague, and the road had narrowed to two fastish lanes, which we took at an easy pace. Just about the worst way to fuck up a covert operation on foreign soil is to get a speeding ticket, and No Sunglasses seemed to have learnt this lesson well enough. Solomon and I passed the occasional remark about the countryside, how green it was, how parts of it looked a bit likeWales - although I’m not sure if either of us had ever been there - but otherwise we didn’t talk much. Instead, we drew pictures on the steamed-up rear windows whileEurope unfolded outside, Solomon doing flowers and me doing happy faces.

After an hour the signs started showing forBrno, which never looks right written down, and never sounds right said, either, but I knew we weren’t going that far. We turned north towards Kostelec, and then almost immediately east again, on an even narrower road, with no signs at all. Which just about summed things up.

We wound through a few miles of black pine forest, and then No Sunglasses went on to side-lights, which cut our speed down. After a few miles of that, he doused the lights altogether, and told me to put out my cigarette because it was ‘fucking with his night vision’.

And then, all of a sudden, we were there.

They’d been keeping him in the basement of a farm house. For how long, I couldn’t tell - I only knew that it wasn’t going to be for much longer. He was about my age, about my height, probably had been about my weight before they’d stopped feeding him. They said his name was Ricky, and that he came fromMinnesota. They didn’t say that he was scared out of his wits and wanted to go back toMinnesota as soon as he could, because they didn’t have to. It was in his eyes, as clearly as anything has ever been in anyone’s eyes.

Ricky had dropped out at the age of seventeen. Dropped out of school, dropped out of his family, dropped out of just about everything that a young man can drop out of - but then, pretty soon, he’d dropped into some other things, alternative things, and they’d made him feel better about himself. For a while, anyway.

Ricky felt a lot worse about himself at this moment; most probably because he’d managed to get himself into one of those situations where you’re naked in the cellar of a strange building, in a strange country, with strangers staring at you, some of whom have obviously been hurting you for a while, and others of whom are just waiting to take their turn. Flickering across the back of Ricky’s mind, I knew, were images from a thousand films, in which the hero, trussed-up in the same predicament, throws back his head with an insolent sneer and tells his tormentors to go screw themselves. And Ricky had sat in the dark, along with millions of other teenage boys, and duly absorbed the lesson that this is how men are supposed to behave in adversity. They endure, first of all; then they avenge.

But not being all that bright - being two balls short of a pig-fuck, or whatever they say inMinnesota - Ricky had neglected to notice the important advantages that these celluloid gods had over him. In fact, there really is only one advantage, but it is a very important one. The advantage is that films aren’t real. Honestly. They’re not.

In real life, and I’m sorry if I’m shattering some deeply cherished illusions here, men in Ricky’s situation don’t tell anyone to go and screw themselves. They don’t sneer insolently, they don’t spit in anyone’s eye, and they certainly, definitely, categorically don’t free themselves in a single bound. What they actually do is stand stock still, and shiver, and cry, and beg, literally beg, for their mother. Their nose runs, their legs shake, and they whimper. That is what men, all men, are like, and that is what real life is like.

Sorry, but there it is.

My father used to grow strawberries under a net. Every now and then, a bird, seeing some fat, red, sweet things on the ground, decided to try and get under the net, steal the fruit there from, and clear off. And every now and then, that bird would get the first two things right - no sweat, they’d go like clockwork - and then he or she would make a complete dog’s breakfast of the third. They would get stuck in the fine mesh, and there’d be a lot of squawking and flapping, and my father would look up from the potato trench, whistle me over, and tell me to get the bird out. Carefully. Get hold of it, untangle it, set it free.

This was the job I hated more than any other in the whole universe of childhood.

Fear is frightening. It is the most frightening of all the emotions to behold. An animal in a state of rage is one thing, often a pretty alarming one thing, but an animal in a state of terror - that juddering, staring, skittering bundle of feathered panic - is something I never wanted to see again.

And yet, here I was, seeing it.

‘Piece a fuckin ’ shit,’ said one of the Americans, coming into the kitchen and immediately busying himself with a kettle. Solomon and I looked at each other. We’d sat at the table for twenty minutes after they’d taken Ricky away, without exchanging a word. I knew that he’d been as shaken as I was, and he knew I knew, so we’d just sat there, me staring at the wall, him scratching lines on the side of his chair with his thumbnail.

‘What happens to him now?’ I asked, still staring at the wall. ‘Not your problem,’ said the American, as he spooned coffee grounds into a jug. ‘Not anybody’s problem, after today.’ I think he laughed as he said that, but I couldn’t be sure.