A Deniable Death (11 page)

On her other side was Corky, not from the south-west of Ireland and County Cork but from the Andersonstown quarter of west Belfast, but there was no logic in acquired military names. He had been mentioned in despatches for his reaction in an ambush in Basra seven years back, and was in awe of her, but he allowed her to help him choose birthday and Christmas gifts for a son in Colchester aged eleven, and a daughter in Darlington, aged five. Her phone vibrated, and she raised her eyebrows – gold, the colour of her hair – lifted it, read the message and cleared it. She had organised the paperwork by which part of his salary was paid by Proeliator Security to each of the mothers. He had the same gear as Hamfist except that his rifle was an M16A1, with a muzzle velocity of 3,200 feet per second and a catastrophic hydrostatic shock effect on tissue when it hit, which Cork swore by. He wore a rumpled T-shirt, camouflage trousers, big wraparound shades, his boots, and was always a tousled mess.

Somewhere behind her, out of view, Harding and Shagger would be on plastic chairs or hunkered on their haunches, ready to go. She knew she merely had to hitch a leg off the lounger and drop the book –
Field Guide to the Birds of the Middle East
– into her bag, on top of
Birds of Iraq
, and they would be on their feet. By the time she had draped the towel around her legs and knotted it at the waist, all four would be wearing their flak vests and rucksacks, with their weapons in their hands. When she stood and lifted the bag, Shagger would come forward with her own vest and hold it up so that she could shrug into it. When she quit Baghdad, at the end of this show, took the Six shuttle flight down to Kuwait, then headed for the Towers, she reckoned they would be devastated. Not her problem, but it nagged. She thought often – with relief or ruefully – that the Jones Boys ensured her celibacy. It would be a rare bastard who ambled towards her and began a chat-up routine:
Hello there. Do you believe in love at first sight, or should I walk by you again?
Or,
Excuse me, I’ve left my wallet behind. Do you mind if we share an armoured personnel carrier home?
If an officer, American or British, Latvian or Australian, a diplomat or an administrator, had tried to get his hand in her pants, most likely he’d have ended in a Casevac tent. There were times when she ached for—

She had long legs, tight waist, fair bumps, pretty mouth and a good sun-kissed complexion, but no man. She called quietly, ‘Guys, can you come over? Guys, please.’

She had the four around her. ‘Don’t get me wrong, this is serious and not bull. We’re concerned about the survival prospects of the Basra Reed-warbler – smart name is
Acrocephalus griseldis
– the Black-tailed Godwit, the Greater Spotted Eagle, the Sacred Ibis,
Threskiornis aethiopicus
, and a few others, how they’re dealing with drought and what effect renewed oil exploration in their habitat will have. Two supposed surveillance experts are taking off tonight and will hit here tomorrow. The ecogame is the cover. Questions?’

There never were. They relied on her to tell them what they needed to know, and she gave them more than was necessary, which showed her trust in them. In their world, and hers, trust was a big factor, sometimes the biggest.

‘And there’s people we have to see and bits of paper we have to collect. What do I think of it? Doesn’t matter. We’re back, they’re forward and over the frontier, at what you guys call the ‘sharp end’. We’re supposed to be their support, but easier said than done. Rather them than me. It’s all a bit old-fashioned, a bit of a shout from the past – but I’m up for it. Anyway, if the birds get oil on their wings, they’re bollocksed.’

She went to get dressed in the female changing area, where they wouldn’t follow her, and now felt challenged. She sensed she was heading, roller-coaster, towards an end-game more hazardous than anything she had experienced before, and that the risk factor had ratcheted.

The piper played what he assumed was a lament. Their host and his wife were on the front steps. In their foreheads, the positioning of their eyes and the push of their jaws, Foxy Foulkes thought he could read something of the grandson in the photograph. The old man and woman had shaken hands as they’d left. By chance Foxy was last out of the door, and they had gripped his. Might have been because he was the last, or that small morsels had dropped from the table and they knew a little of what was planned in the Iraqi marshlands. Maybe intuition told them that in their home an act of revenge was plotted against someone, anyone, who had worked to kill the grandson who might one day have taken over this pile of damp grey stone. It was grim stuff that the piper played. A light rain fell on his shoulders, and there was a stag in the field that seemed forlorn, lost. The dogs ignored the helicopter and chased furiously after crows that flew away from them. The grandmother held Foxy’s hand and shook it. Foxy didn’t know whether he should thank them for their hospitality or . . . They willed him forward. A murmur of ‘God keep you safe’ from her and a growl from him: ‘Remember us, and go after them wherever you find them.’ It was all theatre, had a majesty to it – decayed but there – and the piper’s cheeks puffed with his efforts and the dirge was fit for a funeral but went mostly unheard as the rotors gathered speed.

He raised his voice: ‘We’ll do what we can.’

It was rare for Foxy Foulkes to feel that his words, drowned by the helicopter’s engine and the piper’s efforts, were utterly vacuous. Felt it then, could have bitten his lip. What he thought of as banal was a beacon to the couple. He saw their eyes blaze and wetness formed in the grandfather’s. She stood tall and kissed his cheek – roughly shaven that morning in tepid water. He freed his hands and scurried past the piper. The crewman waited on the lawn for him, near to an old rose bed. The others had boarded. He thought the American would have paid in cash for the privilege of using the house and that there would be no paper trail. The helicopter’s flight plans would have been listed as ‘training exercises’ and the flying logs would have perpetuated the lies. There would have been, Foxy realised, elderly men and women the length and breadth of the country who mourned grandsons cut down by the bombs left at the side of a straight road traversing a desert, men and women who had lost children, young women whose husbands had come home in coffins, and children taken to full military funerals who had no father. He was as trapped as if they had taken him to a pathology theatre at the John Radcliffe in Oxford where the corpses were brought, to the military hospital in Birmingham or the Headley Court rehabilitation clinic. He could never have refused. The crewman put a gloved fist under Foxy’s arm and heaved. He flopped into the cabin.

The others were already belted to their seats, and he saw the looks of impatience because he had delayed them – for a minute and a half.

He wondered what he would tell Ellie, what sort of phone call was permitted, how long and how detailed . . . where the kit would come from, and what the duration of the operation would be. He knew so little and there was an almost infuriating calm about the little beggar sitting across the cabin from him. They were airborne, and there was a view of the once grand house, the couple on the steps who waved, the castle keep, the grey sea, the grey rocks and the shingle beach. Then they smacked into the grey clouds – and the little beggar showed no sign of letting the lack of information fester in him. Of course, he hadn’t been there.

The helicopter shook and the pilot made no concessions to the comfort of his passengers. If ‘Badger’ Baxter had been to Iraq, he might not have been slumped in his seat, apparently relaxed about close support, how near they were expected to get and – Foxy’s knowledge of the language raced in his mind – what the quality of the directional audio would be. Had he been able to reach across the width of the cabin, he might have kicked the little beggar’s shin and wiped the calm off his face. It was his language skills that had done for him.

They powered through dense cloud. The Cousin and the Friend talked into each other’s ears, protectors lifted. Foxy could not read their averted lips. The Boss, Gibbons, sat upright, hands tight on the frame of the canvas seat. Foxy met Badger’s glance. Hadn’t intended to. Was rewarded with a brief smile, as if they were equals and shared authority, responsibility. He wouldn’t tolerate that. They were not equals.

He shivered. Couldn’t help himself. He hoped the thick coat wrapped round him would mask it. He shivered at the thought of the reed beds, the water in the lagoons and channels, the heat and the hatred – and saw again the faces, some bloodied but not pleading, some bruised but not begging, in the interrogation rooms of the Joint Forward Intelligence Team. God help them if they were taken because of the hatred that had been incubated in that fucking place.

He was walking with his daughter when the mobile phone warbled. He let Magda’s hand go, reached into an inner pocket, saw the number and did not recognise it. Few people had his personal phone details, and the majority of those he worked with did not. It was a way to protect his privacy. Had the number been generally available his phone would have controlled his life. He answered.

‘Yes? Steffen . . .’ There was a pause. A wrong number? He spoke again. ‘This is Steffen.’

It annoyed him. He was a busy man, sometimes almost overwhelmed by the volume of work that his success and reputation brought him, and he valued the moments he spent with his daughter, who was seven. She had been talking about her day at school, the art lesson.

His own number was given by the caller, but not in German: the man spoke in the Farsi of his past. The caller waited.

He repeated, in German. ‘This is Steffen, yes.’

The caller persisted, again in Farsi. Was he not Soheil, the Star? Was his name not Soheil? He called himself Steffen. He was married to Lili, who had been a theatre nurse at the Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf. From the day of their wedding, he had cut his links with an old world and his history. Lili and her parents had expected it of him, and his patients did not wish to be treated – at a time of personal crisis – by a specialist who was obviously an Iranian immigrant. He had a pale complexion and his German was excellent; the habits and culture of the new identity had been easy to acquire. His wife was blonde and pretty, and his daughter was not obviously mixed-race. They had settled well into the prosperous society of the city they had chosen as their home. His daughter tugged at his arm, wanted his attention.

Again, was he not Soheil, the Star?

It was fourteen years since he had left Tehran. On the day he took the flight to Europe, he had recently qualified at the Tehran University medical school. His talents were such that he had been sent to the neuro-surgery wing of the UKHE to study under the tutelage of a
Chefarzt
. He had not gone home. He had married, changed his name, had believed he was forgotten – it was now four and a half years since the embassy in Berlin had last contacted him to make certain he was ‘happy and content’ and to tell him that his achievements were watched with pride by those who had provided him with the opportunity to go abroad. Magda tugged harder. He let go of her hand and she sagged back – he thought she might fall.

He could have cut the call. He could have switched off the phone, taken his daughter’s hand, walked on beside the Hansahafen and put the contact out of his mind. He was asked if it was convenient to talk. There was an edge to the voice.

His thoughts meandered: to speak in German or Farsi? To answer to Soheil or demand to be called Steffen?

‘The professor of oncology in Tehran, almost your foster-father, asked to be remembered to you. He is old now, and his wife is in poor health. Times at home are difficult, in what is their country and yours, Soheil. There is violence, and there are difficult people who exercise authority in some areas. The taint of treason is attached to those who befriend the few who distance themselves from the Islamic revolution. Is it convenient to talk?’

He asked for the identity of the caller, and was told he was just a humble functionary at the embassy in Berlin. Magda had gone to the edge of the quay, where there was a drop of three metres to the waterline. She was beside a gap between two traditional sailing boats. He could not shout at her because she might flinch and trip. He remembered the professor who had reared him from the age of nine after his parents, both doctors, had died in a forward medical post, under mortar attack during the battle to liberate Khorramshahr, when tending the wounded. The professor and his wife, childless, had taken the orphan into their home . . . He understood the nature of the threat to them. He did not contradict and give his German name . . . He had qualified with the highest marks, was the son of martyred parents and had practised for a year in a slum district of the capital. He had therefore been permitted to study abroad – but had not returned. He answered in his native language. His wife and daughter, his colleagues at the Klinik in Hamburg and the medical school in Lübeck, between which he split his time, understood no Farsi. His daughter reached into his overcoat pocket for the bread they always brought when they walked beside the harbour.

The blunt question: ‘You work in the field of brain tumours?’

‘I do.’

‘There is a procedure called “stereo-tactic”?’

‘It is in my field.’

‘There are cases where a condition is inoperable in conventional surgery, but where stereo-tactic is an alternative?’