A Deniable Death (43 page)

He stared into the middle distance. The dusk was coming slowly and the wind whipped him. He saw only desolate heathland, where no trees grew: dead ground. It had been his place, his territory. He had been ‘Gibbo’ then, and considered bright enough in his twenty-ninth year to be sent from London to join the Bonn station and be given responsibility to run assets in the northern sector. Not as exciting as Berlin, but good work that would have been the envy of the peers who had joined the Service with him. The man had been codenamed Antelope.

Where he looked now there had then been the Customs post and the base from which the Grenztruppen and the Staatssicherheit had been deployed. It had been a complex of buildings, reached by a corridor between high wire fencing, a minefield, dogs, watchtowers – all the paraphernalia that awful state had needed to keep its citizens from flight – and now was levelled. The barracks of the border guards from which they deployed to the watchtowers and patrols in the killing zones had been flattened; the cells and interrogation rooms of the Stasi had been bulldozed. It had been Gibbo’s ground when he had run Antelope. He accepted that a bewildering coincidence had brought him back to Lübeck, extraordinary and unpredictable. He thought that the Fates had dealt him a fine hand, the chance to obliterate old memories and wounds. A successful killing would wipe clean the slate of the Schlutup Fuck-up.

They had travelled – himself, the Cousin and the Friend – on separate flights. His had taken him via Brussels and then a connection to Hamburg. The Cousin had also gone to Brussels, but had had a fixed-wing charter bring him on to the smaller airfield outside Lübeck. The Friend would have travelled in his own mysterious way, by his own routes and channels. Another hired aircraft, most likely, and documentation that would fool most experts and certainly would have been accepted by local officials. They had met by the canal in Lübeck, near to the gardens between the Muhlen and Dankwarts bridges and sat on a bench. The Israeli had smoked cigarettes and the American a small cigar – Gibbons had yearned to ditch his abstinence. The pieces of the jigsaw had come together.

It was where the story of Antelope had been launched by a pastor. The young Gibbons, fresh-faced and revelling in a job that brought him to the cusp of Cold War action, had been standing almost at the point where he was now and had been staring up that road past the barriers. Dogs had been leaping on their leashes at him and he would have been under the gaze of half a dozen pairs of binoculars. Three or four Zeiss and Praktica cameras would have been focused on him. He had known, then, so little of the East. He had once been on an
Autobahn
drive direct to West Berlin, and on the military train that ran across communist territory to Berlin from Helmstedt in the West. There was little to learn from watching the empty road, the ground where no cattle grazed and the expressionless faces of the guards, so he had turned and walked down the hill.

The pastor had approached him, sidled to his shoulder . . . The pastor had a friend who was trapped in the East. There was a café down the road from which the old border had run and they had gone there. The Pastor had refused alcohol and drunk tea. He had talked more of his friend. Where did the friend work? At the telephone exchange in Wismar – where else? Trumpets had blasted, excitement had gone rampant. Soviet military formations were close, naval forces had moorings on the Mecklenburgerbucht to the north and at Rerik and Warnemunde to the east, and the telephone exchange had the potential to offer up the pouches of gold dust so coveted by the Service. He had filed his report of the meeting for consideration in Bonn and London. With reservations, and instructions for due care on Gibbons’s part, Antelope had come alive.

He stood in the road and was oblivious of the traffic. The dusk had arrived sharply enough for the oncoming lights to dazzle him. Cars, vans and lorries swept past, the slipstreams buffeting him. He stood his ground. The jigsaw’s pieces had slotted together well. He had remarked, without apparent humour, that the marzipan factor had clinched the location, Lübeck. The Americans had the database, and were able to name an Iranian-born neurosurgeon resident in Lübeck who practised there. He performed complicated surgery either in the city’s medical schools, or in Hamburg; there was a home address on Roeckstrasse. The Israeli said that a man would come from Berlin and would have with him necessary equipment. The facilitator was in transit and would reach the city late in the evening, but had not volunteered details of the man’s travel plans. They had gone their ways and would meet again in the late evening. Hands had been shaken. A course of action had been launched and would not now be revoked. They had stood, and the Cousin had remarked, off-hand, ‘I say this, Len, with real pleasure. Your boys who went forward – that old guy and the youngster – they did us proud. My sincere congratulations to them.’ He’d answered that they were unable to beat it straight out because there was kit to recover, but about now they would be on the move and, yes, it had been a first-class effort. He had not thought about them before or since the Cousin had spoken of them.

It was, in a sense, a pilgrimage that Gibbons had made to Schlutup, straight from that bench in his hired VW. There was a small centre, deserted, but dominated by the church where the pastor retired now, had stood in while the incumbent was away. Then there were residential streets of bungalows with a sprinkling in the gardens of the winter’s first snow. He had parked and walked past a lake – ducks had scattered off it. He had remembered the lake, and there were concrete bunkers that British military engineers had put in place when the borders were defined and the barriers had gone up; the structures were now collapsed and overgrown. There was a paddock with horses. One was old, a skewbald, and had had its head down with tiredness. There was a trace in his memory of a young horse, roan on grey, possibly. He had walked onto the death strip where there would have been smoothed sand, firing devices and patrols, and the bankruptcy of the regime was on show. He had found an apple tree. A few rotten fruits had survived the autumn and he imagined the bored young guard, a conscript, far from home, who had tossed down a core and bred the tree. The death strip was now in the possession of hikers and dog-walkers, and he had met children out with a teacher, a man with Schnauzers and a woman with a yellow Labrador. He had walked along the strip where the fences and towers had been dismantled two decades earlier, where few signs survived to corroborate his past and the Schlutup Fuck-up.

The place, and Antelope, had governed his life, fashioned and shaped it, and had made him the man he was. So much had been expected – based on recommendations from young Gibbo – of a traitor working inside the Wismar telephone exchange. Few escaped their past, and actions of many years ago, and Len Gibbons was not among those who did. The pastor had introduced him – tantalisingly brief – to a man in the café, and had murmured that he was indeed from the exchange, allowed across the frontier to watch a football match between Dresden and Hamburg. Bundles of phone dockets were passed, with red crosses on them if they were between military units, and spools of tape. He had been with the man no more than fifteen minutes and had thought him brave, committed and, almost, a hero. He had seen him walk to the pastor’s car outside the café and be driven away. The pastor then had access to the East and became a regular and reliable courier, until his health was said to have failed. The question was raised: did the Service have potential couriers in the East, men and women who could be trusted? The question had been answered, and the Schlutup Fuck-up was born. They were old wounds but had not healed.

It was an indulgence for Len Gibbons to have come here. He knew all the escape stories from this section of the Inner German Border: home-made balloons, gliders built in garden sheds, tranquilliser pills buried in meat and thrown to the dogs, then payment to the traffickers, who would attempt to hide a client under the back seat of a car, with sedatives for a child, and bluff a way past the border troops and the Stasi. One appealed to him hugely. The next day, while the hitman worked and while his own presence on the streets was unnecessary, he would go a little to the north to where he had walked for comfort and peace thirty years earlier, and he would think of Axel Mitbauer of the East German national swimming team. He would be there the next morning because it was unnecessary for him to witness a killing, merely to have a role in its organisation.

He turned away. A car blasted its horn at him, but he ignored it and began to walk to Schlutup’s church, dedicated to St Andrew. He had spent much time there and thought that being there had sculpted him, made him the man he was – whom some hated, some despised and few admired.

‘You didn’t have to,’ Badger whispered.

Low, but almost brusque from Foxy: ‘ “Didn’t have to”?’

‘About you and her. You didn’t have to tell me.’

‘Don’t remember telling you anything.’

‘Please yourself.’

‘I usually do.’

It was enough and couldn’t be put off longer. Did he regret the agony-aunt session now? They hadn’t spoken in the last quarter of an hour and the light had failed. Badger would have gone out, loosed the cable, then faffed about until he found the microphone. He would have come back, reeled in the cable and not thought too much about it. Foxy had made it a big deal: he had talked about danger, and the wire, and suggested the goon had seen and noted. God’s truth, Badger had observed nothing that rang alarm bells, and he’d thought he had a good nose for them.

‘And you don’t have to.’

‘ “Don’t have to”?’

‘You don’t have to go. I can do it.’

‘Far as I’m concerned you can barely wipe your arse. What I told you to do, do it and be ready. Then we shift straight out.’

‘It’s done and checked.’

‘Well, check it again.’

Foxy started the slow wriggle backwards, using his elbows and knees to move himself, and his head went past Badger’s chest. Badger ducked – shouldn’t have spoken, but did anyway. ‘Is it her badmouthing you, sneering about heroes and Bassett, letting you know you’re second-rate, that hurts?’

‘You’re out of order, young ’un, and taking a liberty. I don’t remember telling you anything. Reckon I’ll be about fifteen minutes.’

He was gone and Badger was alone. The space beside him gaped. He began to clear out the inside of the scrape and shove their rubbish into his bergen. He took out the Glock and could do the business by touch: he checked the magazine and felt that the safety was in place. He heard, very faintly, Foxy’s crawl towards the reed beds. He pulled their kit out of the hide, lay in silence on his stomach and waited.

Chapter 14

Foxy went forward. No call for farewells: no last handshakes, no clenched fists punching against shoulders. He crawled to his right, leaving the mass of dried fronds behind him, and used his fingertips to guide him. He reached ahead to check for obstructions, anything that would break as he went over it.

The moon would be up later. Now it was not much more than a silvery wedge behind the mist that came up off the lagoon. It was the best time to be on the move, and the creatures in the water helped him: the frogs, the birds, and the pigs that had moved on and were almost up against the raised bund line that divided the lagoon beyond the beds. Croaks, splashes and grunts broke the quiet, and he felt good with the noises around him – not that the goon or the guards, who were more than two hundred yards away, could have heard the crack of a twig breaking.

He went into the reeds, and wriggled on elbows, stomach and knees. He felt a great stiffness in every joint. He had assumed it would be hard to get his muscles supple again after the hours in the hide, but hadn’t imagined it would be this bad. He had never done such a long stint in a cramped lie-up before. It would make good copy in a lecture hall, with the same old curtains drawn as before: ‘Sorry and all that, guys, but I’m not at liberty to tell you which corner of the world I was in – enough to say it was hot and the donkey shit smelt recent enough. I hadn’t moved more than a handful of yards before every muscle had seized and . . .’ Couldn’t say where, but his audience would be total pillocks if they didn’t understand he’d been behind enemy lines, alone, and going forward. Ellie was forgotten, and Badger, as was a monologue that had demeaned him. He thought about faces in grey light stretching away from him in an auditorium. A spotlight was on him and the men and women in the audience – from an infantry unit, a logistics regiment, the cavalry or the intelligence family – would listen to what he had to say. There would be no when or why but they would finish up with a good idea of what it was like to lie in a hide in the thick fabric of a gillie suit. At the end, there might be a little hint of what it had all been for: ‘You won’t, of course, expect me to break the Official Secrets Act, but out in that dismal wasteland, where the sun shines and we’ve had few thanks for the sacrifices made, we lived with the curse of the IED, that wretched little package at the side of the road, in the body of a dead dog, behind a kerbstone, and always cleverly made. Let’s just say that one man who made the damn things is now pushing up the daisies. Thank you all for your attention.’ He’d smile a little, and take a step back from the lectern, and they’d have learned about the privations of being a croppie. He would expect a brief moment of stunned silence. Then a colonel or a brigadier would stand and lead an ovation.

He was where the reeds thinned and there was open water ahead. He didn’t know – hadn’t asked Badger – how deep the water was, or how far he had to get from the hide to the mud spit. Most of the time he had held the binoculars in front of his face and the magnification had foreshortened the distance to the concealed microphone. The water lapped in his boots and saturated his socks. So damn tired because they had finished the drinking water some twenty-two hours before and his body had no more moisture to lose in sweat. His mouth and throat felt like sandpaper, and his muscles were slow, unresponsive. He was wading. He made each step forward with huge effort, which became greater with each step he took. He could see the back of the bird ahead, a slight blob of soft colour. If, then, Foxy could have found the cable, he would have yanked it.