A Deniable Death (50 page)

‘So that there is no misunderstanding, I am now German. I live in Germany, my wife is German. I do not expect, ever, to return to Iran.’

‘But if you are born Iranian you are always Iranian – and not one of the traitors, the monarchists, or we would not be here. I do not understand.’

‘What you should understand is that I, too, have had a long day. I am tired as your wife is tired. I do not want to sit here and gossip about life today in Iran, and how many demonstrations have been broken up this week by the Basij, how much tear gas has been fired by the Guard Corps in Tehran this month and how many have been arrested on the university campus.’

‘Why are you seeing us?’

‘Because threats were issued, and I feared for my family. Because the regime in which you, no doubt, have a senior position, with influence, is known in Europe for its brutality and its long arm. We do not, whatever the blood connection of nationality, have any bond other than that I am a man of medicine and your wife is to be examined by me. You will guarantee the remuneration that is necessary under German practices.’

The consultant turned to the wife. He thought her an attractive woman, but bowed with exhaustion and illness. He reckoned her to be around forty. He smiled and asked her quietly, ‘Is there a name I can use?’

‘I am Naghmeh.’

The man interrupted, ‘We have been forbidden to travel under our own names.’

He said, the smile hardening, ‘I could ask what is the nature of your work that prohibits the use of your own name but it would shame me. You are not the patient. Your wife is. Naghmeh, you have brought documents, X-rays? Yes?’

His wife was about to answer but the man’s intervention was faster. ‘We have the X-rays from Tehran, from the university hospital, and the most recent haemoglobin checks from the laboratory. The name has been cut off, but they are ours.’

An envelope was passed. The consultant did not open it, but laid it aside on his desk. ‘They are giving you steroids to combat the headaches?’

‘They increased the dose for her last month, but last week when we went again to Tehran they confessed they were not expert enough to offer further treatment and—’

‘Have they told you, Naghmeh, what condition they believe you suffer from?’

‘They have not told her. They did a biopsy, then told us that new procedures were not possible and—’

He said, ‘Would you, the anonymous man, wish to be afflicted with a brain tumour? It’s about the size, I imagine, of a pigeon’s egg. Would you care for it to be inside your skull? If not, please allow your wife to answer when I address her.’

‘You insult me.’

‘In Germany women are entitled to speak for themselves. Please . . . Naghmeh, the procedure is this—’

‘You show me no respect.’

‘I speak to my patients with great respect – and with little respect to those too frightened to give me their names.’ The consultant, feeling he was now Steffen, and not Soheil, was conscious of victory, a cheap one. He said, ‘Naghmeh, we will need to do more X-rays and also an MRI scan – that is, magnetic resonance imaging. It identifies the hydrogen atoms that lie in soft tissue, and will show what is there. For that you go into a scanner and lie full length. You do not move, very important, and will have removed all jewellery and metal objects. We are told then what we need to know. Naghmeh, I am being frank. We will look and see. I know my skills and what is beyond them. There are two stages. On the basis of what I find tonight I will know whether I can operate. I may believe I can but I offer no guarantee of success if I decide to do so. If I do not feel I have anything to give you, I will tell you so, with honesty. They are waiting for you. Maria will escort you. I assume, Naghmeh, that you do not speak English or German.’

She shook her head. He tried to smile, and reassure her. Why? They came through his consulting rooms at the university in Lübeck every week, people who were frightened, defiant, clinging to some small hope and trusting in him. Why? It was about the dignity of her face, about courage, and there was something of the Madonna in her features, as depicted in the statue that his wife and daughter knelt before each Sunday during services at the Marienkirche. There was depth in her eyes, and majesty. He had no mother or anything of her to treasure beyond vague memories from when he was a small child; a few photographs had been left behind in Tehran and would now be lost. He thought Naghmeh was how he would have wanted his mother to be.

The nurse came, took the wife’s arm and led her out of the room. The husband began to follow but was brusquely turned away by the nurse. The door closed.

He said, with aggression, ‘What work do you do in Iran that warrants such secrecy – or am I not to be told?’

Already he knew part of the answer. The man did not have the stature of a soldier. He was not old enough for high rank in the Revolutionary Guard Corps, and did not possess the chill in the eyes that the consultant presumed would be evidence of work in intelligence. When he himself had spoken of MRI scans and hydrogen atoms, there had been no confusion on the man’s forehead. He was a scientist or an engineer.

‘My work is to ensure the successful defence of my country – of our country.’

The patient would be gone for three-quarters of an hour. The consultant sensed he kicked an open door. ‘Nuclear work? Are you a builder of a nuclear weapon?’

‘Not nuclear.’

‘Chemical, microbiological? Do you work with gases, diseases?’

‘No.’

‘What is left? What is so sensitive that you travel across Europe with false papers and have no name, with embassy people running errands for you? What else is there?’

‘My wife is a good woman.’

‘Obvious.’

‘She heads the committee responsible for clearing minefields in the sectors of Ahvaz and Susangerd.’

‘Fine work.’ He had not expected to confide, was drawn to it. The Farsi bred confidence and suspicion ebbed. ‘My father and mother were killed during the recapture of Khorramshahr. They were together, both doctors, treating front-line casualties. They were martyrs. Your wife does noble work . . . And you?’

The man hesitated. The consultant had noted his fingers, the stains. He asked the man if he wanted to smoke, accepted the nod – there were days when he himself yearned for the scent of fresh tobacco smoke – and led him out of the office, past the empty desks of the support staff. He took him to the back fire escape and let him out onto a steel-plate platform. A cigarette was lit and smoked. Sleet spattered their shoulders and ran on their faces.

‘What do you do?’

A simple and unemotional answer: ‘I make the bombs that are put beside the road.’

‘Good bombs? Clever bombs?’

‘I am told the counter-measures, electronics, are difficult, that I am ahead of the American scientists, and the British. I am told I am the best.’

‘I understand why you travel in secrecy, then, and have no identity.’

‘To what purpose to be the best while my wife is dying?’

‘You are right to go in secrecy, without a name. Iraq and Afghanistan?’

‘More sophisticated in Iraq, but we teach the Afghan resistance about basic devices. There, they do not need such advanced devices as I made for the Iraq theatre, my best work, but I have influence on what is used in Afghanistan.’

‘And we see on the television many funerals in NATO countries because of the bombs beside the road. If they knew of you they would kill you. Do I approve, disapprove, of what you do? I do not interfere in matters I cannot influence. You should have no fear that I will allow any feelings to dictate my decisions concerning your wife. Thank you for allowing me to breathe the smoke.’

The moon was at its height and there was good light over the clear ground. Badger caught two rats on the periphery of his vision, extreme right side of the 150-degree arc he was capable of. When the moon went down past the horizon, Badger would take the two bergens and leave nothing to show he had been present, a witness to the place. The rats came from the reed beds to his right and straight towards him.

There were people who did not like rats, and people who were scared shitless by them. There were people who saw rats as vermin, to be slaughtered.

Badger did not feel strongly about them. They scurried towards him and the one behind gave slight squeaking sounds. He couldn’t have said if it was twenty minutes, half an hour, longer or shorter, since he had last heard the scream – it had been weaker the last time. The lights in the house were out, but the security ones were lit. There was no movement beyond the pacing of the two guards who watched the single-storey building, and another guard – uniform and assault rifle – who sat under a tree. One more leaned against the outer door of the barracks. He could see the guard at the door clearest because he was in the range of the most powerful light, which beamed down from the lamp-post.

They came towards him.

The smaller one, greyer than the other, came to Badger’s side, skipped onto the small of his back and was over him and gone without a backward glance. He had barely felt its weight. The other had a more russet coat and a longer tail, well scaled and as long as its body. It was down to training that Badger could observe and note every moment of an event that seemed, at the time, insignificant. They said that, in the world of the jihadists and of the high-value targets in organised crime, the little moments that seemed to hold no significance were those that might put a puzzle piece in place. Unlikely that there would be importance in the movement of a rat across his body, but he noted it. It came on a slightly altered track and had veered towards his shoulders. It came onto Badger’s arm, went over his armpit with a brief sniffing stop, was on his right shoulder, then the nape of his neck. It paused there, was close to his ear, and there were the sounds, faint, of its breathing. It went forward, crossed the crown of Badger’s head and a claw seemed to catch in the netting of his headpiece. It came down onto his forearms, then his hands, covered with camouflage cream, which held the binoculars. It stopped there, he saw the glint of its eyes, a yellowed amber. Perhaps it was aware, at that moment, of larger eyes watching it or felt the beat of Badger’s heart, but it was not fazed. It moved off him and went by the image-intensifier, laid on the ground, and was gone. He had had many such encounters and—

The scream came.

It didn’t matter to Badger that the sound was even fainter than before. He clutched the binoculars, had nothing else to hold on to.

The rats, together again, were exposed on the open ground in front of him and the moonlight was on them. The difference in colour was lost, their size seemed to merge and the length of their tails. Badger could have sworn that both rats stiffened at the scream, like it was a sound alien in their world.

He listened for the scream to come again, shared the pain a little. And he saw the faraway lights across the lagoon. Then his attention was taken by the rats: they had found the carcass of the bird. It was tugged between them and feathers flew. He watched them maul and mangle it, but another scream did not come.

He understood that he had fainted. He had no sense of time gone. His first image was of the bucket. The goon held it, swung it, and the water doused him. It would have been the second or third bucket because water cascaded off him towards a growing pool in the corner. It was aimed at his head and came in a wall towards him, splashing hard. It went up his nose, into his mouth and some forced a passage into his eyes, which were slitted with the swelling.

Foxy must have lifted his head. An automatic reflex gesture, not one he controlled. His vision was distorted, and although he looked up into the face of the goon he couldn’t see the expression: anger, frustration, panic that his prisoner might have croaked on him? There was laughter. Foxy didn’t know whether it was humour, or manic.

A barrage of questions was thrown at him, none new. He didn’t know how long his fainting had protected him. The questions bludgeoned him, but he had no chance to reply. He thought the goon as weak as himself and . . . The cigarette was on the table, laid across the packet. A match was out of the box, and on the piece of wood he had been clubbed with. He would have fainted as the cigarette was about to be lit – as if he had been granted a stay, because the pain was not worth inflicting if he was unconscious.

Questions, and their answers:
I am Sergeant Joseph Foulkes of the Metropolitan Police Service. I am on a deniable mission put together by the Secret Intelligence Service of Great Britain. As an expert in covert rural surveillance, I was tasked to observe Rashid Armajan, the Engineer. I have a good working knowledge of Farsi and deployed a microphone directed at Armajan’s home. I heard it said that Armajan, the Engineer, travelled to the German city of Lübeck with his sick wife. I relayed that information to my back-up team who are across the frontier in Iraq. I do not have a schedule, but in the next few hours an operation will be launched to kill Armajan in Lübeck. I am told that the killing is justified because of Armajan’s talent in constructing the electronics of roadside bombs
. They were the answers he had not given, would give. There was a threshold.

He saw the cigarette picked up, the filter lodged in the goon’s mouth. A match was raised and the box was lifted.

He had been to the threshold of pain, and could not go there again. Through the swollen lids, tears ran . . . They would be in an officers’ mess, after dinner had been served with drinks:
What I heard, not for repeating, we had their stellar IED boffin in our sights in Europe after a clandestine operation on the Iran border, and that guy, Foulkes – self-styled surveillance wizard – was captured, interrogated, only had to hang on a few hours, keep his mouth shut, but spilled the lot. We didn’t get the boffin, which would have been worth popping corks for.
A variety of the theme would have passed between beds and cubicles in a ward at Selly Oak where the military casualties were cared for:
What I was told, the bastard was damn near in the gun sight, but this guy talked . . .
And in a gymnasium at the place south of London where they taught the amputees a degree of mobility:
He talked a good talk about himself, but he spat it out and didn’t give our people the time they needed.
That was what they would say and where they would say it.