A Deniable Death (14 page)

When they were past the forward sentries, and the perimeter lights were drifting away, Hamfist armed his weapon. The rattle tore into Abigail’s ears, and she thought that, beside her, Badger flinched. There were two handguns in the bergen with their supplies, ammunition for four magazines, flash grenades and gas. He’d looked at them carefully, then deliberately shaken his head. Was he firearms trained? He’d answered, almost apologetic, that he was not. She cocked her own weapon, a Browning 9mm pistol, and checked again, with her hand, that the rifle was on its clips along the bottom of the bench seat in the back behind her ankles.

She had done what was demanded of her, and a little more – and had no fucking idea if any of it was sufficient.

They hit the road and Shagger said they’d burn some rubber. They went north, and the sunlight, low, bathed her. If she couldn’t comprehend what it would be like in the marshes over the border, who else could?

‘Are you all right, Mr Gibbons?’

It must have been three-quarters of an hour since he had spoken with Abigail Jones on the link, and he had sat through that time with his chin on his hands, staring across the room at the map with the lines marking the rivers, the route of Highway 6, the edges of the marshes, the larger islands and the canals. The strongest line was the border with Iran, and his focus had been the cross in black marker ink that located the household of Rashid Armajan, the Engineer, a bomb-maker of great skill.

His head jerked up. She had allowed him his chance to reflect, had twice put fresh tea beside him, but neither mug had been touched nor the biscuit. She would have thought his mood had lasted long enough. He twisted to face her. ‘Thank you, I’m fine, Sarah.’ He grimaced. ‘What do we say at these moments?’

‘We say, Mr Gibbons, “on a wing and a prayer”.’

‘A dodgy wing and a big prayer.’

She turned to the window. The rain ran hard on it and seemed set in for the afternoon. He drained the lukewarm mug, then crunched the biscuit. He clicked on the memory of his phone and called the Cousin first, then the Friend.

The American told him that all was in place. ‘Whatever we can give you, Len, we will, but at day’s end your guys have to deliver.’

The Friend said his people waited to be told of developments. ‘We’re ready to go, but we need the ticket filled out, and that’s for your people. At our end, we can run.’

Len Gibbons did not doubt what he was told, that the Friend could produce a killer.

Gabbi asked, ‘Don’t you have others?’

The man did not take offence at the challenge. ‘There is a file. Read it.’

‘Do you not have others?’ It was not a complaint, more with amusement that he was asked again so soon.

‘Do you want a state secret revealed? Do you wish to know how many competing operations are in discussion, development? Do you have to be told who has influenza, a hernia, who has a pregnant partner about to give birth? Do you concern yourself with who is tired, who might have lost the faith? The file is thin, but will thicken.’

He opened it. In the unit there were still older men, conservative, who preferred to use paper rather than rely exclusively on the electronic screen. The file contained four sheets of A4 – no photograph, no street map. He had driven in from his home, had dropped Leah at the defence ministry; they had talked about the coming public holiday, whether to go to the beach – not about choosing targets or killing them at close quarters – and why the refrigerator failed to achieve its maximum chill range. There was a concert at the end of the week, at the Mann Auditorium, and the Israeli Philharmonic would be playing Beethoven. They’d talked of that, and he had left her at the gate, seen the greetings of the sentries as she flashed a card at them and started to walk with her stick swinging in front of her. Many in the ministry, her section, would have wanted to bed her: only a few tiny fragments of the rocket’s casing had blinded her and she was not scarred, her skin without flaws. Many times on his travels Gabbi could have called whores into his hotel rooms. He had not. He believed she had not. The file had a name, a cursory biography, a map of a border area and an Internet digest on ‘brain tumours for beginners’, dummy-style. The last sheet told him that the wife of the target was believed to be about to travel abroad for final efforts at treatment.

His smile never carried humour. A finger stabbed at the map and found a point fractionally on the Iranian side of the border with Iraq. ‘I’m pleased to read this. I thought you wanted me to go there. How soon would I travel, wherever I travel to?’

‘There are surveillance people who go close today or tomorrow to watch the house and try to learn. Perhaps it will happen, perhaps not. If word comes, there’ll be a stampede.’

‘And you are giving it to me?’ He shrugged. He might go to a sales conference and he might not; he might be heading for a marketing seminar and might not; he might be called into a research-and-development brains trust and might not; he might be sent to shoot a man at close range but might not. He had been present at the killing of Moughniyeh in Damascus, of Majzoub in Beirut; he had been in Gaza, and in Turkey for a Syrian. That morning he had gone through the debrief and had told it factually, without remorse or triumphalism. He had reported that the pistol issued to him kicked to the left when fired. He had sat with the unit’s psychologist, and they had talked of the programme the Philharmonic were offering at the Mann. The report the psychologist would write might have been dug from the records: it would be the same in essence as that produced after his return from Damascus, Beirut, Gaza City, Istanbul . . . He changed little and was not scarred by his work.

‘Stay close.’

‘Of course.’ He finished the glass of water offered him, and stood. He had heard it said that the man behind the desk, elderly, a little obese, bald and almost haggard, had been a junior on the planning team for the incursion into Tunis when the life of Khalil al-Wazir, who rejoiced in the title of Abu Jihad – Father of the Holy War – was taken, and the blueprint of the operation was taught to recruits as a model. Gabbi would not have considered flippancy with this man, who had much blood on his hands. It was the end of a long day: the dusk fell on the city, throwing shadows on the buildings. The last of the sunlight blistered on the sea beyond the empty beach. ‘Call me.’

‘We hope to hear soon. The Americans bring the money, the British bring the idea and the location. We bring you. It’s a good arrangement, and gives us currency for the future, which is leverage. I do not know, no apologies, where you will go.’

‘I have, my darling Lili, a problem.’ He had been in Hamburg that day. He had operated. After seven hours in theatre – the patient was a prince from Riyadh who might, if he survived, buy a new wing for the neuro-surgery section – the consultant drove slowly and carefully home. He had been, unusually, complimented by the
Chefarzt
for the skill and precision of his work, but he could not be sure that the beast was fully extracted or whether enough remained to grow again beyond the most delicate reach of his knife. He had done his best and been praised. ‘It is from Iran, from my past, and it pinions me.’

He came off the
autobahn
and turned for Lübeck. His pleasure at the praise was diluted. What he might say to his wife, after he had read a story to his daughter, as they sat at dinner and she poured wine, served the food she had cooked and told him of her day played on his mind. When he interrupted her, she would hear him out with a frown and an ugly twist at her mouth. Then she would snap, ‘Tell them to go to hell. Put the phone down on them. Reject them out of hand. If they persist then call the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz. It’s what they’re there for, to deal with foreign threats. They’re in the book. Are you intimidated by those people? Are you, Steffen? They’re no part of your life.’ She could not understand. He would not know how to explain to Lili – a little thicker on the hips since childbirth, and fuller in the bosom, with the first grey hairs that needed the salon’s attention, dressed from the best of the shops in the Königstrasse – the power and reach of the al-Quds Brigade and what could be done to the elderly couple who had fostered and mentored him. They would end the meal shouting, and doors would be slammed and the little girl would be crying on the stairs. No one who had not lived there would understand.

He came off the big traffic circle and headed for Röckstrasse. Sleet was in the air, and there might be snow before morning.

She might throw at him, ‘Are you not prepared to stand up to these people, tell them to go fuck . . .’

He owned a fine villa. Much of the old part of Lübeck had been devastated by British bombers in the spring of 1942, but the grand properties beyond the Burgtorbrücke had survived untouched. He was proud to have been able to buy a home on this street. It was an accolade to his work and endeavour. The light was on in the porch to welcome him, and the sleet flew in lines across it.

He would say nothing. She would not understand. Neither would her father, nor counter-intelligence officers. He thought himself alone, isolated.

He parked his car, went inside and told Lili of the praise heaped on him. He read the story to Magda, sat at the dinner table, complimented Lili on the cooking and asked about her day. He said nothing of the cloud hanging over him.

He had been dozing, might have been snoring gently, when the first shot hit the Pajero.

He was thrown forward, bounced off the back of the front passenger seat, then cannoned into the door. More shots followed.

Badger had woken fast. Since they had been on the big drag, which she had said was Highway 6, she had opened her window, unclipped the rifle and let it rest on her lap. The guy called Hamfist had a weapon peeping out into the growing darkness. He was awake. There were men milling in the road, lit by the Pajero’s headlights and probably half blinded by them. One crawled and seemed to scream up into the night. He might have had a broken leg.

‘What the fuck . . .’ Badger murmured, for want of something sharper.

The road was clearing and the girl was shooting, Hamfist too. He heard her say it was thieves, and that Harding had hit one with his front fender. Corky might have winged another. They had gone straight over one of the tyres left in the road to slow vehicles down.

He could see the lights of the first Pajero, where Foxy was, then the flash and the screaming moving light – it would have been about a hundred metres in front. The light went past the front of that vehicle and carried on across black open ground. There must have been a berm or a dune because it exploded. Shagger swore and called it an RPG round. Hamfist matched the obscenity. They’d gone off the road into a ditch and Badger’s elbow was driven sharply into his ribcage.

He thought they bucked over the sand and scrub for about a quarter of a mile. Then the wheel was wrenched again and they tilted, climbed and ground up onto the road. For a few seconds the two vehicles were side by side, stationary. The Six lady didn’t speak, but there was a fast exchange between Harding and Shagger in a military
patois
. Badger deciphered enough to learn that thieves had put tyres on the road to slow vehicles, then stop them to rob the passengers of valuables and cargo. One thief had been run down, another had been shot. Around thirty bullets had been fired at the two Pajeros, and one rocket-propelled grenade.

Was it par for the course? Badger didn’t ask. Neither Harding nor Shagger reckoned their tyres had been damaged.

Now she spoke: ‘Can we, please, move off and get the hell out?’

They went on in darkness.

Mostly the road was clear, but a few times men emerge would from the dark, dragging along a pack-beast, and a few times great lorries drove towards them and made a chicken-game challenge. There were dull lights at a shack that seemed to serve food but had no customers, and there was a police road-block, but the Pajeros had their pennants up and were waved through without having to slow. Badger reckoned they wouldn’t have slowed anyway, would have kept going and might have started shooting again.

They’d come into a town. She whispered that it was the Garden of Eden and Badger hadn’t any idea what she meant, but again the windows were down and the guns readied. They crossed a bridge, and there was enough light for him to make out a sluggish, stinking flow of water. It looked a crap place, and he didn’t see an orchard with apples, any naked girls or a fellow with a fig leaf for modesty. Out of the town, the bridge behind them and the road emptying again, they were on a track and the front Pajero threw up a dust storm they had to drive through. There was enough moon for the surface to be visible without the vehicles’ headlights.

Badger closed his eyes, clamped them tight, and the pain lessened in his ribs and arm.

The end of a road, at a broken gate that had posts set into a sagging wire fence: through the gate there were heaps of discarded, rusted piping that went nowhere. He realised it meant oil and that it had been bombed. He’d carried his bergen, the fullest and heaviest, and had made certain he accepted none of the Jones Boys’ offers to help. There was a single-storey concrete building with little compartment rooms that were filthy, shrapnel-spattered, looted. He’d taken one, and Foxy had been next door – but there were no doors. There was pain, though.