A Deniable Death (34 page)

There were gravel pits out to the west of Reading and alongside the motorway. The teenage Danny Baxter had known them as well as any heron did. It was to one of them that he had taken his dad’s accountant and brought him close to an otter’s holt. The man had never seen the creature up close and was thrilled enough to become a referee of status when Danny had gone for the police job. Anglers patronised the gravel pits. Once, from the hide he’d made for himself, he had watched a bent, straining rod, a tight line and huge swirls from the depths. It had gone on for twenty minutes or more until the line had floated back, loose, nothing to hold it. The guy hadn’t known he was watched, had sworn, kicked out and sent his stool and a rucksack into the water. It would have been a big pike that had snapped his line. Danny had seen it.

Now the line was exposed on the mud spit and floated on the water’s surface. He saw where it ran up the spit and went into the mess of foliage where the microphone was.

It hurt to speak to Foxy, but he had to know. It was like he took a backward step. One question. ‘Does it work?’

A nod, as if he were an interruption to concentration, therefore a goddamn nuisance. Then, ‘Yes, but couldn’t you have done a half-decent job with the cable? Bit bloody obvious, young ’un, because you didn’t bury it properly.’

It was. The cable was a dark line across yellow mud, then a black thread over the water. If the goon, the officer, went back to his chair and used his binoculars to look again for the birds, the otters or the pigs, he must see, had to, the cable on the mud and where it floated. He thought he’d done well in concealing it and better than that in getting rid of the pigs, but his efforts had been ignored.

Everyone except the security man was now inside the house, and the light was failing. They had nothing. His throat hurt from lack of water. The irritation of the tick scabs and mosquito bites was acute, and the plastic bags were by his knees. The quiet came and – almost forgotten because of the sow and the boar – the smell returned. Time was running out, their covert rural observation post was near to compromised, and they had nothing to report.

There had been a re-evaluation, he was told. When he had been called to the unit’s offices, he had brought his bag.

He was taken by one of their drivers to the airport.

It had been decided Gabbi should fly that evening to Europe. A neurosurgeon at Tel Aviv’s Assuta Hospital – the most expensive and discreet in the country – had been asked, late, to advise. The medical opinion was that several European capitals had capacity beyond the best in Tehran, that a consultation at any one of a dozen locations might take little longer than the time needed for an examination, consideration and the decision to operate or not. It was explained that the couple could, within a dozen hours – twenty-four at most – be back at whichever airport they had flown into and looking for a flight home. The unit planned on the basis that information on a destination would be fed to them, and any who were privy to the surveillance mission mounted from the south-eastern Iraqi marshlands and harboured doubts did not share them.

He did not know whether Leah had worked on this last stage of preparation. She had been normal in bed the previous night, and over a light breakfast, then had left on the bus. He had planned a gym work-out, and the phone had rung: the call to come in, and the instruction that he should bring a bag. She might have known, she might not.

He would go to Rome. He had collected his passport: the Republic of Ireland was the flavour of that month. The days of big operations, he had been told, were over. There would never again be deployed as many as had gone down to the Gulf with tennis recquets and wigs. Nor did they look for the spectacular of the exploding headrest on a car seat, the detonating mobile phone when held against an enemy’s face, or the poison squirting into an ear. One bullet, two maximum, was the day’s order.

On arrival in Rome, he would be booked into an airport hotel, within sight of the terminals, and the call would come to send him forward or bring him home. He was not one to complain about the vagueness of the plans. He accepted what was put before him. If Leah had known, her kiss that morning as she went to work would have been no different.

They would not hold the El Al flight for him if he was late: to delay take-off could only draw attention to him. The car went fast on the airport road. A poem was in his mind:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!

He was the servant of the state, and did not doubt what the state asked of him.

Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,

As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,

From wandering on a foreign strand?

He would not challenge what was asked of him, and did not believe he could look into a face, see life and humanity, and hesitate. He liked the poetry of Walter Scott, but most of all he loved ‘Patriotism’, and he had faith. He did not query where the road took him.

When he’d boarded he would have forgotten the poem and would be engrossed in a business magazine.

The arrangements were in place.

It was a black-tie evening.

The consultant had used his authority to make the booking for scan facilities and X-ray without the usual requirement of a patient’s name. It had, predictably, been queried. He had snapped back that there was more to medicine than filling in forms, and had seen a long-serving assistant wilt. He did not feel able to tell his staff that an unidentified Iranian, with the co-operation of the Berlin embassy and the likely support of an intelligence agency, suffering potentially terminal illness, was to be inflicted on them, so he had blustered and been unnaturally rude. His status at the university medical school was such that no complaint would be lodged.

Her parents would mind Magda for the evening. The black-tie occasion was a celebration of a local politician’s birthday, an influential woman from the ruling party with the ability to dispense patronage. He and Lili would be with the great and the good of the city. In such company, his given name was Steffen and his family name was that of his wife. He was Steffen Weber, and soon there would be a prefix to his name, the title ‘Professor’. He changed in the bedroom. Lili was at her dressing-table and sat in her underwear to apply her cosmetics. He could have said that until the last week he had been successfully absorbed into the German dream – the downturn in the economy seemed not to affect him – but he had brought the mood home.

If he had talked to her, it would have been a burden shared. He had not. He carried it alone. Easiest would be to look the patient in the face – he did it often enough – assume a look of principled sympathy, and say it straight: ‘I am so sorry, there is nothing I can do. I regret that the question of surgery does not arise.’ Those patients hurried away, and he had a cup of coffee, then carried on with his day. That evening in the
Rathaus
, there would be good food, fine wine and a string quintet. He would be among the élite and accepted . . . He sensed a shadow hung over him.

Dust trailed behind the big car. Abigail Jones had heard all four of her Boys arm their weapons.

It was a defining moment. The crowd ahead parted, the car was driven through it and came to stop in front of her – had to, or the BMW 7 Series would have gone right over her, squashing the life from her body. The driver braked with a certain flamboyance, and the tyres scattered dirt, some falling on her. It was about appearances and postures, and she took her time. She did not stand until the man had emerged from the darkened interior. It was a start, a good one. She had demanded that a leader come and he had. He was gross at the waist, wore a bulging
thobe
, long but cut like a white nightshirt, a
ghutra
on his head, chequered cloth with woven ropes to hold it in place, and sandals. He carried a mobile phone in one hand, his beads in the other. An assault rifle hung from a shoulder, and over the shirt he had a well-cut and discreetly patterned sports jacket that would have come from a London tailor, or from Paris. What else for Abigail to learn? He used a potent eau-de-Cologne. He had brought a youth with him, perhaps a son or nephew, who carried a briefcase – and two men for security, along with the driver.

As he approached her, she stood. Did it easily – did not betray exhaustion, dehydration or stiffness. It was Corky who had read it. The Irishman scurried forward with two old packing cases from the buildings. He put them down as if they were good-quality chairs, and used his sleeve to wipe them . . . The defining moment. She knew it, and her Boys. It was down to her skills as to whether they stayed or whether they were hoofed and in the process lost the mass of their gear. If they were hoofed, the guys up ahead were beyond reach.

She smiled – always did that well. Seemed to show frankness and honesty.

She called him ‘Sheikh’ and invited him to sit.

It was over water.

‘You’ve had a drink.’

Only the quality of the microphone and its cable link were more important to them than water.

‘I haven’t.’

The light was sinking. Badger had been out of the hide and had gathered more dead fronds from inside the reed beds. He had waited until a rare cloud was over the last of the sun’s brilliance, then had scattered pieces over the cable. He could not affect, without going far out into the water, the part of the cable that floated. Why not wade out? Too knackered. Badger had never known such tiredness. He could hike in bad weather, trek on moss and bog, and lose sleep. He didn’t have the strength he’d needed those hours before when he’d scraped out the hide, moved the surplus earth into the reed bed, then gone out into the lagoon – his gillie suit absorbing water, weighing enough, almost, to drag him down – and built up the flotsam on the mud spit to hide the microphone.

‘We’re not due to have a drink for three-quarters of an hour – forty-three minutes, actually.’

‘Don’t make accusations, young ’un, that you can’t prove.’

He came back, groped his way into the hide, and the cloud was now off the sun. One last beam of gold light penetrated the scrim, and he’d seen the glisten at Foxy’s mouth, the dribble on his cheek.

The diarrhoea had weakened Badger. He had come back to the hide, crawling, feeling faint, worse shape than he’d known, and the job of hiding the cable only half complete. The exchange was in cutting whispers, neither voice raised.

‘You’ve been at the water. It’s on your bloody face.’

‘You can’t prove it.’

‘We’ve enough for today, enough for tomorrow. We’re supposed, in this heat, to drink seven or eight litres a day each. If we have a litre and a half each, we’re lucky. It’s despicable to steal water.’

‘Shut your mouth, young ’un, before I shut it for you.’

He did so – but intended it to be temporary. He went into his bergen and brought out the bottle. He held it up and squinted at the level. It was about halfway down – he hadn’t marked it. There was no indent on the plastic where his thumbnail had gouged a line. Had it been spit on Foxy’s cheek? He reckoned not. His own throat was too dry for saliva, and he was dehydrated enough for there to be no sweat coming off him. If he’d tried to spit he would have scarred the skin in a parched mouth. Badger was sure. He pushed the bottle at Foxy, right up to his face. ‘You want to drink, help yourself.’

‘Don’t bloody play with me, young ’un.’

‘Go on, drink it all. Have yours and mine.’

‘Watch it.’

‘Finish this bottle and start the last. Swig your way through that too.’

‘You’re pushing me, young ’un.’

‘And when it’s all gone, we can fuck off out of it . . . if that’s what you want.’

The scrim netting that held together the head covering he wore was gripped. ‘You’re shit, young ’un. When this is over I’ll tell the world what shit you were here – tell all Gibbons’s crowd. Tell them everywhere I get to take a seminar. I’ll wreck you.’

Badger thought he was right, but the light had gone and he wouldn’t know. Apologise? No. Might he have been wrong? No – and there was no worse crime than taking rationed water . . . The security lights came on outside the house. The goon paced, and the children came out to kick a ball.

Foxy said, ‘My misfortune was to be teamed with a kiddie who was so ignorant, and had so little comprehension of the English language as to be at moron level. Know what “moron” is, young ’un, or is that too big a word for you?’

Again, he couldn’t help himself: Badger did the short-arm jab.

The head was twisted so the blow cracked into the right side of the headset. It fell apart.

Foxy said, ‘Not just a moron, but an ignorant one.’

The woman came out and Badger saw her through the glasses, a misted figure against the background lights. The children still played with the ball. She looked proud, he thought, and brave. She had dignity. He watched and admired her. She stood alone, leaned on her stick and didn’t speak to the goon. He wondered how it would be for her: a sea change in her life, when it hung in the balance, was in a medical man’s hands. He couldn’t say how it would be for her if the approach was made and her man was turned . . . and he couldn’t shift further from Foxy. It was as if he were anchored to the man.