A Deniable Death (13 page)

She had the door of the back Pajero open for him. Foxy seemed to huff, then slid on to a back seat strewn with weaponry, magazines and vests.

She said, like it was no big deal, ‘I put it together, it’s my shout. If it fouls up and you lose your head, it’ll be my neck on the block for decapitation. It’s the best I can do.’

The door was slammed on Foxy. With a thumb she gestured for Badger to follow her to the lead vehicle. He had to burrow for a space on the back seat. When she was in and the doors were shut, they were driven away. He didn’t catch her eye, didn’t see the point in trying, and kept silent. Best to stay silent as he couldn’t picture where the road led or who it led him to.

The Engineer’s car had diverted in the city of Ahvaz, off the route that was shortest, quickest, to the camp. It had crossed the Karun river and gone to the principal clinic in the town where his wife’s medication awaited collection. But the painkillers were not on the usual shelf and the man administering the pharmacy had not come to work that day. The woman who replaced him was unfamiliar with the stock held in storage, and there was a delay. By the time the plastic bottles containing the pills and capsules were in his hand, he had lost the first half-hour of an appointment awaiting him when he reached his workplace.

Not his driver’s fault that they were late, but the man – his driver for nine years, loyal and fully aware of the importance of Rashid Armajan to the al-Quds Brigade – went now for a back-street cut-through to get them onto the main highway out of the city. They were away from the wider boulevards and the big concrete housing blocks, the post office and the railway station were behind them, and the homes were smaller, more roughly constructed. Cyclists, men on scooters, women walking with children and carrying water cans from or to the standpipes blocked and slowed them. The driver blasted the horn.

Rashid knew Ahvaz, had spent three years at the university in the city, but this was a district he had not been in, and the size of the Mercedes in the narrow streets made it an alien object. He warranted, as a senior man, tinted windows and blinds that covered the back windscreen: none of those who peered resentfully into the back of the car could have seen him, but the Engineer could see them, and when the Mercedes nudged the rump of a donkey or made children skip and women stumble aside. They would have known from the car that its passenger was esteemed by the regime.

At a crossroads, three policemen stood warily by an open jeep, holding carbines. Another was behind the wheel and had the engine running, fumes spilling out of the exhaust. The Mercedes braked sharply and the Engineer was jolted forward. Some of the papers he was trying to read spilled onto the floor by his shoes. Through the front window there was a brief exchange between the driver and the police sergeant, who pointed away from the direct route the driver was headed on. His arm made the sweep gesture of a long diversion. The Engineer could not hear them above the noise in the street, but the driver shook his head vigorously, as if rejecting advice, and the sergeant shrugged. The window powered up, and they went over the crossroads.

He asked what had been said.

The driver did not turn, was concentrating and weaving through obstructions. They were on the route to the gaol, the most direct way out of the city. There was a demonstration at the gaol, and they must pass it. To have taken the diversion would have added twenty minutes to the journey, and they were late.

A high-ranking official would be waiting for them, but the Engineer had been instructed never to use a mobile phone. There were satellites above that trawled for calls, did voice recognition and located the source of calls and their destinations. Mobile phones were the enemy of a man seeking discretion. The Engineer did not know of any specific threat to his life but the security officials had emphasised to him that anonymity was his best protection. The official who had come to see him from Shiraz would have to kick his heels and sip coffee or juice and . . . Why would there be a demonstration at the gaol?

The police had not said.

It was an Arab quarter they had been through. The street widened and they were edging clear of the alleyways. He reckoned his driver had done well to ignore the sergeant’s directions. The gaol’s wall was ahead and there was a rumble in front of them, like tyres on an uneven surface, but muffled because the windows were up and the air-conditioning was on. They came round the corner.

A crowd enveloped them.

He saw the faces through the windscreen. Arab faces, not Iranian. Ahvaz was the city of Arabs, and the Sepidar gaol was their prison.

It was as if the car was not seen and the mass of chanting, shouting men had their backs to the bonnet. The driver edged forward, and ahead the yellow-painted arms of two construction cranes jerked upwards. The men suspended from them kicked in their desperation but the arms rose until they were raised high enough for all the crowd to see them. A line of policemen, with riot shields and helmets, made a cordon between the crowd and the cranes, which were mounted on the flat beds of lorries: the gaol’s gates were behind. The driver was able to go forward, slowly. The hanging was outside the gates, in public view, so the condemned were rapists, narcotics smugglers or robbers, and would be Arabs. The movement of the legs, had slowed, and the nooses had tightened. Rashid Armajan had never before witnessed a public hanging. He tried to bury his attention in the papers on his lap – but sneaked another glance at the bodies. The spasms had ceased now, and they spiralled on the ropes.

His driver murmured that they had been ‘scum’ and it was good what had happened to them. They were Arabs . . . The crowd, having watched the deaths noisily, seemed to the Engineer to be at a loss as to how to respond. Until some noticed the Mercedes.

He was an influential individual, a Persian, or he would not have had a big Mercedes with blackened windows, so he was a target. A fist beat on the bonnet, another on the front passenger window, then more on the other windows. Within seconds faces and bodies obscured the sky, the hanged men and the raised arms of the cranes. Faces pressed against the glass, and there was darkness. He could not see the papers in his lap. Hatred boiled around him. There were enough of them to lift the car, then let it fall and lift it again, higher. One more heave and they might tip it over. If the Mercedes overturned, he was dead— A gas canister exploded above the car and the crowd. The faces contorted in loathing as the white gas spread.

It came in through the air ducts of the Mercedes. His driver had spat on his handkerchief and held it as close to his eyes as he could while leaving himself a view of the open area in front of him. The crowd had melted away. Sandals lay crazily on the tarmacadam, with some shopping bags. A separated child howled. The crane arms were still high, the bodies still turned, and the gas dissipated.

He had never before witnessed an execution – but then, the Engineer had never made the journey over the frontier to Highway 6 and taken up a position to watch a convoy pass and the lethal force of his work. He had seen it only on the video screens of hand-held cameras and phones. He had never been close to death, never near the explosions, as he had been when the cranes’ arms had been hoisted. He had never known how the soldiers of the Great Satan – or the Little Satan, also called the Poodle – were when they spilled out of their vehicles, or were lifted clear by medical teams, or were brought out as charred, unrecognisable shapes. He did not know if they screamed, or thrashed what limbs were left to them, or lay supine on stretchers, with their faces covered.

The windows were down. The gas was blown out of the interior and the driver swerved. A police officer shouted instructions as to which road they should take. The crowd had retreated to the edge of the square in front of the gaol, and the bodies would soon be lowered. Rashid Armajan would have said then, if asked, that the deaths of and injuries to soldiers in Iraq, foreigners or Crusaders, were matters for those in greater authority than himself, that his responsibility lay with the electronics on the circuit boards he manufactured. Some said, to his face, that he had done more to drive the Americans and the British from Iraq’s cities and deserts than any other individual. He could feel pride in that accolade. They drove on, and left the gaol wall behind them.

He hoped that day to hear when he and Naghmeh would travel to visit a better-qualified consultant. Quite soon, breaking onto the main road and with the car speeding, he had forgotten the faces pressed to the glass. His mind was on his meeting – and when he would be told of his departure date. He felt calmer, the gas was gone, the windows were again sealed, and the little tremor of fear was lost.

She had left them to shower, and the Jones Boys had a bundle of kit for them. An officer who was more junior than herself, based at the Basra airport complex as Six’s representative, had made himself scarce – run like a scared rabbit. With cause. Neither the junior, billeted on sufferance with the Americans and rarely allowed within the Agency’s wire-protected compound, nor the seniors in the Green Zone attached to the UK’s embassy, nor the team at the airport in Camp Cropper would have wanted to be contaminated by Abigail Jones’s mission. There would have been no volunteers to step outside the protection of diplomatic status that Six personnel enjoyed in this lice-blown, donkey-shit country. But it was her shout, and Abigail Jones would see the thing through. She understood the pitfalls of deniability and would live with them; most would not. The junior wanted nothing to do with them and had scooted as they’d pulled up in the Pajeros.

She called in, was connected to a Len Gibbons. She had taken the incomers to the shower room and shown them how it worked. The older one, Foxy, had waited for her to get out before even starting to unbutton his shirt. Not the young one. Badger was stripped down in seconds – muscled back, a close waist and clean-lined buttocks – and had gone into the shower, turned on the water and looked at her. There was soap but he didn’t reach for it, and she’d seen all of him. There was a store room off the office area and Hamfist was in it with Corky and a heap of clothing, all the kit they might need and the dinghy, everything, if they could carry it.

Badger hadn’t spoken. Foxy had talked for both of them, but she had seen the light in the young man’s eyes, and amusement. He’d looked clean into her, through her.

On the link the voice was curt, clipped, as if Gibbons disbelieved manufacturers’ claims on scrambled protection. She said that the younger one, Badger, seemed fit and was likely competent, but that Foxy looked on the edge of capability for where they were going.

‘You have to imagine the problem we had in locating covert rural observation post experience, along with decent Farsi. Doesn’t grow on trees. For CROP, I had a half-dozen to choose from, but Foxy’s the best qualified. For the Farsi aspect, there were no alternatives. It was him or we were into the business of an interpreter listening and translating, then having that fed to the rear, or of putting in someone like yourself, Alpha Juliet, who has the language but no experience of sitting in hides. You are, anyway, ruled out because you’re on the inside. They’re ignorant, they’re capable and, most of all, deniable. They’ll do because they have to. Time is not with us.’

She told him when they were leaving, and at what hour each morning and evening she hoped to make contact with him –
if
she had anything to report.

His response was sharp over the distorts on the link. ‘Not “if” but “when”. Please understand that a lot hangs on this.’

The call was cut. She looked through the door, not as a voyeur but to learn. The older man was in the shower now and the screen was misted so he was only an outline. The younger one was towelling himself hard, full frontal. He did not turn away from her. Not brazen, though. She saw that the soap was still in the bowl, seemed dry like it hadn’t been used. She would have lathered herself from toe to scalp. She wondered how well, in London, it was understood what was asked of these two men, who already displayed raised hackles when confronting each other. In London, in an office that had been set up away from the Towers, would they have the slightest comprehension of the resourcefulness required? Easy enough to flick across files, draw out names and proposition in such a way as to make it near bloody impossible to back out with self-respect intact. They would have been skewered, those two, and . . . Her mind moved on. Did she have the slightest comprehension of how it would be to lie up in a hide while the clocks ticked, the hours dribbled by and they were beyond a frontier, out of reach of back-up?

Abigail Jones, career intelligence officer, was not certain she did. She called, loudly, for Harding and Shagger to get the vehicles ready, then to Hamfist and Corky to hurry with the kit. Foxy had hung his clothing on two wire hangers, except for his underwear, which he dropped into a paper bag. He put his wallet into his blazer pocket – he glanced wistfully at a photo – with his wristwatch, a fistful of loose change and his wedding ring. His shoes slotted into the bag, then went into his overnight grip. The younger one threw his clothing, wallet and watch into a plastic sack. All their possessions were secured in a steel locker. They trooped, the two of them, with towels round their waists, into the storeroom.

It was a long drive across bastard country. Nobody in their right mind would want to be on that road when darkness had come.

Where they were going, they might as well send a telegraph by Western Union if they took a lift in a helicopter.

The sun was sinking when they pulled away from the base. She thought the older man was steeled for a fight about lack of sleep so she put him in Harding’s Pajero and let the younger man, Badger, ride with her. They were her eyes and ears. Without them the mission was doomed. With them it had a chance – not great, but a chance. They wore camouflage fatigues and Foxy had borrowed a pair of boots, and they had a bergen of food, water, medicines, whatever. A second bergen held the binoculars, the audio probe and directional microphone, the cameras, the batteries that everything needed, the radio, the sleeping bags, the scrim sheets, gillie suits – God alone knew how they’d get it off the ground and shift it on foot – and a shovel with a collapsible handle. They had flags, Iraqi pennants, on the front off-side wings.