A Deniable Death

by Gerald Seymour

  He wasn’t handsome, had fuck-all talk. He felt the warmth of her, and the moistness . . . He couldn’t have said that any woman before had mattered in his life. The heat burgeoned and his throat was crisp, dried. His eyes ached from the glare of the water, and the man sat in front of the house, the rifle across his legs. Badger’s head turned slowly as he watched, through his glasses, the reed beds, the spit where the microphone was disguised and the open ground into which he had scraped the hide. They were pressed hard together, his hip into the slack part of Foxy’s stomach wall, and Foxy’s hip bone sharp against his thigh.

  Foxy whispered, ‘It surprised me, how well my Farsi’s lasted . . .’

  If the man was fishing for a compliment, Badger wouldn’t take the bait. He answered, ‘It’s what you’re here for – what you’re paid for.’

  ‘You know why we’re here?’

  ‘Are you going to tell me?’

  ‘We’re here because they – the spooks – don’t have an asset to put in here. They would have wanted a local, some guy who could wander around and chat in the coffee house or the garage and talk to the goon guards. They don’t have one. So it’s us. There isn’t a turned Iranian they could put in and trust, and there isn’t a lieutenant of the Republican Guard, who thought Saddam was the bee’s bollocks, or a slimy little sod from the Ba’ath Party they can rely on. They’ve reached down to the bottom of the barrel, and it’s us they’ve pulled out. It’s crazy, daft, idiotic.’

  ‘You volunteered so stop whining.’ So close together, like lovers, that the words barely needed articulation. Badger’s murmur in Foxy’s ear, and the two camouflage head kits were almost meshed.

  Foxy’s response: ‘We’re the end of the road for them or the barrel’s scrapings, whichever. And they’ll feel good. They’ve done something – put two arseholes, daft idiots, into harm’s way. It’ll go on the papers they write and they’ll get congratulated. What chance is there that the target will walk out of his front door and shout in Farsi I can understand and no fancy dialect, to the bloody sky, “Heh, anyone there? If you are, and you’re upset about the growth in my wife’s head, you need to know I’m off in the morning to Vienna, Rome, Kiev, Stockholm, any place where there’s someone with good knife skills. Hear that?” We’ll see him go, perhaps. Where to? We’ll see farewells, tears et cetera. Where are they headed? We’ve no chance.’

  ‘You could have refused.’

  ‘And they’d have let me walk away? Grow up, young ’un. They’d have made sure it haunted me the rest of my days. No more work. Considered “unsuitable”, branded “lack of commitment”. You’re held by the short and curlies. Didn’t the lady tell you? Or wasn’t she talking too much?’

  ‘Best you shut your mouth.’

  ‘But they can have their lunch and their gin, and can congratulate themselves that they tried, were audacious, and when we crawl out of here and get back, don’t expect a load of back-slapping and gratitude. They won’t remember your name. It has no chance.’

  Badger murmured, ‘Saying that because you’re scared shitless? Or do you mean it – “no chance”?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think you’re crap. Try it again. I know you’re crap.’

  He thought Foxy was close to hitting him, and they both lay motionless. Badger watched as the security man roved the area with his glasses. He didn’t know if Foxy had spoken the truth – that they had no chance, were small pawns and served other agendas.

  ‘I will do it, subject to satisfactory arrangements.’

  He was asked what arrangements would have to be satisfactory.

  The consultant had gone out of the building and loitered in front of the café. He was not overheard. He had dialled the number given him, had been held at the embassy’s switchboard for perhaps a half-minute, which he thought excessive, and when the call was answered he received no apology.

  ‘The patient must have a name. There must be a date of arrival and—’

  He was interrupted. The life of the hospital and the medical school flowed past him; the rain fell and snow threatened. There was often snow when the Christmas market began in Lübeck, in the square in front of the Rathaus and beside the Marienkirche. Then it was prettier and the traders coined cash. He was not, of course, a Christian but his wife went to services most Sundays and took their daughter, and on special saints’ days he would attend with them. The patient would arrive as soon as it could be arranged, and the name would be given him when he saw the patient. Did anything else need to be ‘satisfactory’?

  ‘What would be the method of payment? These are expensive procedures. We require guarantees, money lodged in escrow, a banker’s draft, a credit card or—’

  A hardening of a faraway distorted voice. Had he forgotten who he was? What he owed? Did greed govern him?

  ‘I’m not talking about myself. There are technicians, scans, X-rays. Assume that surgery is a possibility. Then you have theatre, and intensive care.’ His temper was shortening. ‘The patient cannot have that type of intervention, hours of it, then be put out into a winter’s night.’

  He would be told about financial arrangements when the timing and date of the patient’s journey to north Germany were known.

  The call ended. He pocketed his phone, went inside the building and sucked in a long breath. He wrapped a smile of confidence and competence around his face and greeted his first patient of the day.

  His wife waved to him. From his car, he watched her go. All the sentries and security guards knew her. If they hadn’t, there would have been bedlam at his stopping so close to the main gates and inside the concrete teeth placed to prevent access to a car bomber. Gabbi watched her and, for a moment, almost unseen, his lips moved in to kiss her. She swung the stick in front of her legs and went to the guard who controlled the pedestrians’ entrance. With her free hand, she would have gestured towards the ID in the plastic pouch that hung from her neck. All the sentries and guards would greet her – they saw her coming and going, swinging the white stick and getting to work or heading home, as if there were no impediment in her life. He shared her with many. He left the ministry building and took a route from the city to the south.

  There was a complex at Giv’at Herzl that had a small-arms firing range, soundproofed, at the rear.

  Those who used the range, as many women as men, were from the National Dignitary Protection Unit and the Secret Service, and there were soldiers who did bodyguard duties for senior military staff. The instructors knew most of the client base. Some fired at circle targets, others used life-sized figures. Gabbi had asked for a figure, a head wrapped in a keffiyeh. He did the fast slide of the pistol from a waist holster, then the double-tap shots for the head. They did not consider chest shots, or those aimed at the stomach, to be of any value. The instructors taught that bullets should be aimed at the skull. That day, his weapon was the Baby Eagle, the Jericho 941F, with a nine-shot magazine, manufactured inside the country. The instructors would never have been told of the role he played in the affairs of Israel – would not have expected or wanted it. They had seen the clients come and go, and could make judgements on the work the shooters did, what they trained for. Gabbi used a different technique on the range from that employed by protection or those who hoped to be close enough to take down a suicide bomber. They fired in screened booths, and only the instructors would have seen Gabbi with his back to the target shape, then producing the weapon from under his lightweight coat, spinning, whipping the pistol up, aiming, steadying it, holding it cleanly, doing the squeeze – and it was double-tap. The instructors would tell him, each time he fired twice, where his bullets had struck.

  They had nothing to teach Gabbi.

  He would not have claimed his skills were too great for him to need practice. Sweat ran on him, clogging at the edges of the ear baffles. He was a man apart and did not laugh with others and had no friends there, but he had the instructors’ respect.

  It was somewhere to go, somewhere to
pass the time while he waited for the call – and he never tired of the cordite whiff or the rippling recoil through his wrists, forearms and elbows, and the kick of the Baby Eagle.

  The instructors could have made a judgement on his work because he always fired at the head, was only interested in head hits that would drop a man dead.

  Others would not have coped with the waiting, but Gabbi could . . . Later, after a wasted day, he would be at the ministry’s gate, watching for the woman, pretty, with the white stick, and would pick up Leah. All the shots he had fired had been at the head, and all would have killed.

  Time to think, time to reflect and time to brood. Len Gibbons waited and the phones stayed silent.

  Other officers in the Towers, with time on their hands, would have been with Sarah in the single room allocated him at the Club. Not Len Gibbons and not Sarah.

  She had made fresh coffee, and brought with it a plate of biscuits. He owed his wife, Catherine, too much – not that it made a jot of difference in Sarah’s case as she rebuffed all advances from whichever direction and had done since a captain in the Life Guards had dumped her in favour of a girl from the Intelligence Corps – that had been after the first banns were read. He was hugely in debt to Catherine, and doubted he would ever pay it off. He was – to everyone who knew him in the Towers – Len Gibbons. When he was young, and Catherine was his new wife and the world had seemed at his feet, he could have anticipated that, within a few years, he would be Leonard Gibbons and on a fast track to the higher ranks. His career had come to a juddering halt and the scars were still on his back. But for that impact, he might have climbed to great things, and had not. By a thread, by a fingernail, he had survived – damaged – a professional débâcle and she had stood by him when the scale of his failure had made him nearly suicidal. With her encouragement, he had hung on, and had known that on his record was the condemnation of what had been codenamed Antelope, that the best he could hope for was to be labelled ‘diligent’ or, worse, ‘conscientious’. The debt ran wider than his wife: it permeated the building from which he worked. He could, therefore, be given any bag of excrement and the safety of his hands would ensure that the job was done.

  If he set his mind to it, he still had good recall of that bloody border, the watchtowers, the dogs and the guns.

  He called through the door that the coffee was excellent, and thanked her for the biscuits. His phone stayed silent and he waited.

  The Engineer explained to the brigadier the first principles of the bombs he had made, which were now stockpiled and kept in underground storage. They would use ‘low explosives’ and he spoke of TATP’s contents: triacetone triperoxide had minimal scent, emitted no vapours, and would go undetected by even the best-trained sniffer dogs. He told the brigadier – who sat stern, rapt, not interrupting, as if he recognised the privilege of access to a man of renown – about the blast effects of the larger-scale bombs he worked on. There was, first, the ‘positive phase’, when the windows of buildings adjacent to the bomb were blown in, then the ‘negative phase’, when the debris and glass shards were airborne and dragged out again to refill the vacuum created by the blast. Calm, emotionless, he told the officer – who would have responsibility for the defence of the province if the troops of the Great Satan were unwise enough to invade the Islamic Republic with ground forces – of the effects of explosives detonating: ‘blast lung’ injuries from the thrust into the ears, nose and throat; more injuries from the high-velocity impact of the ball bearings incorporated into the bomb and the glass splinters raining down on a street or flying inside buildings. Further injuries, as soldiers of the enemy were thrown across a street and careered into buildings or cars, their brains bouncing against the inner wall of their skulls.

  With a dry smile, he indicated a photograph on the wall of an American soldier’s helmet: an arrow pointed out of a ventilation hole in its side. He said that such openings provided a conduit that concentrated blast into the hole, like the driving in of a nail. He spoke, too, of the medium-term damage to troops’ psychology, if they had been exposed to situations where bombs were widespread, particularly if there had been casualties in their unit: a large number of enemy combatants in the Iraq war had gone home with post-traumatic stress disorder, as sick as if they had been severely wounded, and would not return. The brigadier grimaced as the Engineer finished and told him that he – almost alone – was responsible for the defeat of the coalition inside Iraq. His weapons had destroyed the will and resolve of the enemy. He had smiled and shrugged. Many this year had come to his office, had sat where the brigadier sat, and congratulated him on his achievement.

  What news was there of the war in Afghanistan? Did it affect his work? the brigadier asked.

  He said it was a low priority, that the devices used by the resistance were simpler than those employed in Iraq . . . They had been taught, had been supplied with chemicals and explosives, and he had written papers, but he kept them at arms’ distance. It was Iraq that had mattered, where the true victory had been won.

  Then they drank sweet tea – with cardamom, saffron, rose water and liberally spooned sugar – from small glasses, and smoked.

  The brigadier raised it. He had heard of the illness of the Engineer’s wife, and was privy to plans for sending her abroad for consultation and, hopefully, treatment. They talked about suitcases, what sort and size would be best for the journey. The brigadier had recently been in Damascus with new baggage and could offer advice.

  When the tray had been cleared, the Engineer spoke to the brigadier of the theory of roadside thermobaric bombs, the ability of fuel-air explosions to devastate, and their potential inside trucks and saloon cars that could be driven by a ‘martyr’ into the doorway of a building. There, the blast would be confined and enhanced. He was working on that, on miniaturisation of the circuit boards for the explosive formed projectile, on extending the range of passive infrared beams and . . . He yawned, then flushed, embarrassed. He apologised.

  He was told he had nothing to apologise for.

  He said, confiding, that it was difficult to focus on his work.

  He was asked if he knew an itinerary.

  He hoped to hear that day, or the next, when he would travel with his wife.

  It had simmered, but had been below boiling.

  The spat stayed with them, but was carried along on whispers, almost soundless, and the voices played like soft winds on the front of their camouflaged headpieces.

  Foxy said he needed water. Badger said he had drunk his ration for the morning.

  Foxy said the biscuits tasted foul. Badger said he thought they were good.

  Foxy said they should move to their right, maybe forty paces, and be deep in the reeds for greater protection. Badger said it was important they had an eyeball on the property and could ping the target.

  Foxy had looked at his watch and wondered, barely aloud, what his Ellie was doing at that moment. He had started to relate how they had met and— Badger had cut him off, said he wasn’t interested.

  Foxy hissed, ‘Are you contrary for the sake of it? You think I want to be here with you – the fuck I do – the most difficult, awkward oppo ever given me? I make a remark about my wife and you’re not interested.’

  ‘Correct. I’m not interested in your wife.’

  ‘Who’s special. Who I miss. Who I—’

  ‘Not interested.’

  And Badger, as usual, spoke the truth. He wasn’t interested in Foxy’s wife and didn’t want to talk about her. He was interested in the one-storey house of concrete blocks, the big front windows, which were open, the door, ajar, the chairs and table outside in the shade. And he was interested in the guard, who sometimes sat on a chair and sometimes walked, sometimes coughed and spat, sometimes smoked, and who had now started to fish with a short rod, worms and a float. He watched the boat that was tied near the little concrete pier. He saw the wife, who was dying and walked with a stick, and the children who were chided by an older woman when t
hey screamed too loudly and too close to their mother . . . If he and Foxy didn’t talk, they didn’t argue.

  He knew that the long, motionless hours played havoc with Foxy’s knee and hip joints, but couldn’t bring himself to sympathise. Hours passed and the sun cooked them. He thought how vulnerable they were, vulnerable enough for him to bloody near wet himself . . . He would never again volunteer, never again shove his hand up.

  The explosion burst in Badger’s ears.

  Chapter 7

  Foxy knew the sound of an artillery shell exploding. There had only been a slight squirm of the young ’un’s body but it was enough to show him Badger was ignorant of weapons’ detonations. It gave him pleasure. He twisted his head slowly, cranked his neck round far enough to see the smoke pall, first stationary, then climbing into the clear blue of the sky.

  It was off to the right, near to the raised bund line. It rose, spread and began to lose shape. Silence fell.

  He felt, now, a heavy pressure on his shoulder – as if a hand was spread wide and forced down. He could move only his head, not his upper body. Badger had hold of him. His pleasure at Badger’s initial reaction had dissipated. He couldn’t move, was treated like a passenger who wouldn’t know how to react in a crisis and needed to be held still. What did the man think he was going to do – jump up, yell and bloody run? He couldn’t free himself of the hand, but could manoeuvre his head, tilt his neck and look to the front. There was shouting.