A Deniable Death (18 page)

He blurted, ‘I’ve just come out for a sandwich. I have little time, and—’

‘I have driven from Berlin and you have – distinguished Soheil – as much time as I need you to have. So, do we stand here and cause an accident or go somewhere? Your office? Can’t someone go out and fetch coffee for you, juice for me, some food? Will you entertain me in the rain or in the dry?’

Would he take an Iranian intelligence officer into his sanctum? Hang up a wet jacket beside a radiator? Introduce him?
My friend here is from the Ministry of Intelligence and State Security in Tehran. Everybody knows – don’t they? – that I’m not really German, that I’m Iranian by birth. My education was subsidised by the Ministry of Health in Iran, and now the debt has been called in. They want a favour from me. Please, make him feel at home and bring him juice and a sandwich – salad with fish would be best – and see if his shoes need yesterday’s newspaper in the toecaps
. He took the man’s elbow and led him towards the café.

There was a table by the window, and three chairs. They took two and the official kicked away the third so they had the table to themselves. From the wet on the man’s face, hair and jacket, the consultant thought he had waited for him for at least a half-hour, and knew he would have stayed there all day if necessary. No appointment had been made, but that screwed the pressure tighter.

He brought the tray with coffee and juice, a sausage baguette for himself and another with salad and fish. The man was reaching into his pocket and a cigarette packet emerged. The consultant – Soheil or Steffen – hissed that smoking was forbidden on all the university sites.

The man smiled. ‘We can bring the patient at any time now.’

He was known for his cool head, and was said to be as sure as any in the big Hamburg hospital if he was faced with potential catastrophe in theatre. He stammered that he had not yet had the chance to check the availability of facilities. The stammer became meandering waffle: he did not know what was required, would not know until he saw the patient, had read the case history and examined the scans. The man let him finish. He might have fought, called a bluff, but he didn’t dare.

What he did dare was to ask, ‘My patient, who is he?’

The smile was laughter. ‘Who? We have not yet decided on a name for them.’

The man took the consultant’s hand. As a surgeon he was reputed to be slick and fast, which kept anaesthetic times to a minimum and lessened the dangers of internal bleeding. Now the pressure on his fingers showed him how vulnerable his talent was.

‘I will see the patient.’

‘I didn’t doubt it.’

‘And I will look into the availability of theatre and scan equipment. I know we are heavily booked, but I will look into it.’

‘You will do what is necessary.’

His hand was freed. He was given a card. The man’s baguette was finished, his own not started. The juice glass was empty, and his coffee cooling. They could come with a hammer, force his hand onto a table, or one of the low walls around the canals of Lübeck, and break every bone. They could destroy him. The man stood up. The printed card had a first name only on it, with the address and numbers of the embassy in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin. The man put euros on the table, as if it would sully him to accept the consultant’s hospitality, and slipped out through the door into the rain.

Back in his small clinic, the consultant checked the availability of scanners in Lübeck and the theatre in Hamburg. Then a patient was shown in. He forced a smile. His daughter had a toy marionette: he understood the way it danced to its handler’s tune. If they had not yet determined the identity of the patient it was a security matter, sensitive . . . He thought his life teetered as a chasm yawned.

It had been a day like many others. He had finished the debrief – had enjoyed the session with the psychologist – and had been shown a file that told him little. Then he had walked out of the building into the winter sunshine of the Mediterranean, pleasant and clean, and had gone to eat on his own.

Gabbi did not have a living soul in whom to confide. Had he been dependent on company – his wife’s, the regulars in a bar, even others making up the numbers on the team – it would have been noted and the information tapped into his file. Any form of dependency, alcohol, bought sex or company, would have been noted and he would have been sliding fast out of the unit’s building, down the steps, across the car park, past the sentries and into the street. It would have ended.

It would end one day. It was not a pensionable activity. Long before old age caught up with him, he would be gone from the unit. There was no ‘former employees association’, no reunions on the eve of public holidays, no gossip opportunities with veteran campaigners. It would end when exhaustion dulled his effectiveness, and the psychologist would call it ‘burn-out’. He would be gone, and might get a job in a bank, or sell property, or just waste his days on the beach. His work for the state of Israel would be complete, and his pension earned.

He had sat on a bench and watched the sea, had had a book open on his knee but had watched the sails beyond the surf, the fitness joggers and dog walkers, the young soldiers who had their rifles hitched across their backs. He knew the case histories of the great failures of the unit’s work – he knew more about the failures than the successes. He could talk through, if he had to, the minute by minute intricacies of Lillehammer in Norway: wrong man shot dead, the team captured by local police – catastrophic. Could relate the disaster of the botched poisoning of Khaled Mashal in Amman: a toxic substance, lethal, squirted into the ear, but the unit’s people being held in police cells and their government having to deliver the antidote that would save the bastard’s life – humiliating. A wry smile, because the killing of the state’s enemies could be complex. But he did not make judgements, and the file he had been shown would carry the same importance as that of the man, buried the previous day in Beirut, who had stood outside a Maltese hotel. It was always best when he stood in front, blocked the path, looked into the face.

He headed for home and would reach it only a few minutes before she was due back. It was a day like many. The shadows fell, the sun dipped on a far horizon, and he would wait, as he did so often, for his pager to bleep or his phone to ring.

At last light they had their view.

Foxy was beside him.

It seemed so ordinary, so close and yet so remote. He could not have said, without hesitating, what he had expected.

‘You all right, Foxy?’

‘Fine.’

‘Just that you sound clapped out.’

‘I’ll manage.’

‘Good.’

‘And don’t bloody patronise me.’

The evening cool didn’t penetrate the gillie suit. The hood was like a heated wet towel on his head, and his hair would be flat and wet under it. Not only ordinary, but dreary and cheap, the sight gave out no atmosphere of danger, or of a place where an enemy of importance was bedded in. An enemy. A target, like any other. Could have been organised crime, or a serial-rapist inquiry, or a training camp for the rucksack guys or the vest ladies. Just a target, and the only difference was that the Golden Hour would be a fine-run thing, if push came to shove.

They had come past a herd of water buffalo that had gone on grazing while half immersed, and there had been no herdsmen with them. They had seen small columns of smoke to the left, the north, and once there had been voices, kids’, and the sounds of distant life carried across the marsh. He had dragged the inflatable, with Foxy and Foxy’s bergen, and if he hadn’t they would still have been back at the wire. They had gone slowly and twice he had been up to his chest in the water. Once he had gone out of his depth and had had to cling to the side of the craft and grip Foxy’s sleeve. There was a narrow strip, going north to south, of land and they had come onto it. He had gone forward and dared to stand beside the sole tree there. He had gazed out and seen enough, then gone back for Foxy and found that the inflatable had been folded away and was tucked into the top of a bergen. They were together, on their stomachs. The tree was beside Foxy and they had a view that went through slow-waving reeds, then across water and over the brow of an island that was some eight or ten feet above the waterline. A lake stretched away, perhaps three hundred yards across and then there was a steep bank, palm trees and buildings.

To the right there was a group of huts, put together crudely with concrete blocks. Badger had his glasses on them, the start of his traverse, going south to north. There were men in uniform at the huts with infantry weapons. They wandered and smoked, sat and talked, hugging the shade. He scanned to his left and followed two children who kicked a ball without co-ordination. One of the soldiers joined them and squeals of delight carried to him. Tracking further left brought him to the mooring in front of the house where a uniformed man squatted and fished. The lenses picked up a little red dot on the water, a float. There was a block-house building behind the man, and its front was in shade, but Badger could make out a woman sitting in shadow. She was on a hard-backed chair and held a stick. The bright colours close to her were a child’s plastic tractor and a tricycle. He thought where they were now was safe, a decent distance from the target zone. In the last light, a vehicle’s headlights lit the dullness, and the man who was fishing reeled in his line, stowed the rod on the bank and hurried towards the single-storey house. The kids abandoned their game and ran to the woman on the chair. She pushed herself upright with the help of the stick. Where they were was safe, and useless. He didn’t have to ask Foxy’s opinion on it. It was useless because it was too far back, and they would have been voyeurs there, wasting their time.

‘We have to do it now.’

‘You asking or telling me?’ A snarled whisper.

Badger said he was ‘telling’. He was rummaging in a bergen for the audio-direction stuff and a spool of fine-coated cable when the car pulled up and they saw him.

Quite a good-looking guy, hurrying from the car to the woman and hugging her.

It couldn’t be left to the morning. It would be hard in the darkness but he had to hack it, get closer to the guns and where the kids played and the woman had sat. He watched them and they had their backs to him. They went inside . . . a good-looking guy.

Chapter 6

The dawn was coming up, and the niggle prospered.

The geography of the location dominated, as it always did when cameras or microphones were involved. Distances were crucial. A light wind in the night had rustled the reeds. Barely audible to the ear, they rattled – almost clattered – against each other when heard through the earphones.

Foxy whispered, ‘The sound quality isn’t good enough. I’m here for conversations, maybe half a sentence. The audio’s beam is having to travel through the reeds and that’s dominating any talk by the front of the house and the door inside. I didn’t set the parameters of this caper. I’m the poor bastard that has to get here – wade, paddle, damn near swim. I didn’t choose the ground.’

‘Did I hear that right? ‘‘Wade, paddle, damn near swim’’? You were on your backside, floating and being dragged along.’

The sun was a gold sliver peeping up, far away, above a flat horizon that was unbroken by trees or high ground, only by the reed beds that moved endlessly with the wind’s force.

‘What I’m saying is that where we are now is unsustainable. More important, where the mike’s placed is—’

‘By me, of course.’

‘By you, yes. Where
you
placed the mike isn’t good enough. If that’s the best you can do we might as well load up, turn round and walk out.’

‘Quit?’

‘I came here to do a job, not for my health. I see little point in staying if I can’t do the work.’

‘So I have to go forward and move the mike?’

‘About right.’

‘And how close do you suggest I go – the front door, into the kitchen?’

Foxy could have stood up, stamped and shouted, but he didn’t. One thing, verbally, to clip Badger’s ears for his rudeness, but another to break the rules of thirty years’ practice. Badger ought to show him respect for his accumulated knowledge. ‘You should get the mike into a position where its beam doesn’t cross a bed of reeds, so screening its access to the front of the house. Simple enough. You up for it, or do I have to do it?’

A shrug from Badger, sour little beggar. The sound was too poor for Foxy to identify more than occasional words. The one who fished had come by the house after darkness and spoken to a soldier, or trooper, or Guards Corps man, but the words had been muffled by the reeds’ movement. The same man had again come into the magnified vision of the image-intensifier, and the night-sight had shown him talking to the target. Both had smoked and their speech had been distorted.

In a half-hour, the house and the low quay in front would be bathed in low sunshine and movement would be dangerous, or stupid.

They had good cover where they were. Off to the right, which was south, there was a bund line that bypassed the shallow island where the mike had been placed by the young ’un the previous evening. It marked a boundary to the lagoon onto which the target’s house faced and came to the main shoreline on the far side of the buildings he’d identified as a barracks compound. The bund line was too far away for the mike to be set, but might make a better route onto the island.