A Deniable Death

by Gerald Seymour

‘I hear you.’

  ‘My opinion, ma’am, it’s not possible – and the other guys would say it – to leave them out there beyond help. Wouldn’t be able to hold my head high again.’

  ‘Then we’ll hack it. Somehow. Thank you.’

  They might be lucky and they might not. They might have time, the angels singing with them, and they might not. She bit her lip.

  ‘Have I spoken out of turn, ma’am?’

  She shook her head. He had spoken with politeness, respect, but had given a clear message – rags in the wind – and two men far forward couldn’t be left, after guarantees had been given. She had little sense of honour, obligation, when she gave the Service’s word, but her men would have believed in necessary trust, and she had felt the younger man against her body, inside it.

  ‘Hack it and sweat it out.’ She walked away from the gate, and considered how many dollars to feed out now, how many later.

  The consultant phoned Berlin. He leaned back in his chair and gazed through the window at the sleet spattering the glass. He gave the switchboard the name and was asked his own.

  ‘My name is Steffen. I am calling from Lübeck.’

  The connection was made. He didn’t waste time on pleasantries. He began with the costs, in euros. There was the fee for his own time, for the clinic nurses, for the scanner, and the fee for X-rays, for the staff operating the scanner and the radiology team. He continued with the potential sums required if the examination showed that a stereo-tactic was possible and that an operation had a chance of success, then added, ‘You should have no anxiety that we would conduct the procedure merely to gain the payments when we have no hope of a favourable outcome. We have a long waiting list. We only take a patient into theatre when there are grounds for optimism.’

  The numbers were in front of him and bounced in his eyes. A consultation and examination – and a verdict that denied hope – would cost thousands of euros. Surgery, then close supervision in intensive care and a further period of convalescence would add up to tens of thousands. He said that debit cards could be used, in advance, but not credit cards or cheques; a money order taken out on a German bank would be acceptable.

  Were discounts available to the Islamic Republic? He said that his own remuneration might be subject to a realistic adjustment, but all other fees were non-negotiable. He had made provisional reservations for facilities on the following Monday.

  The fees were agreed.

  He finished, ‘Such a reservation will attract comment because, as yet, the patient has no identity. I am not interested in the patient’s name, but would be grateful for one that matches a passport and the medical records brought from Tehran. I would suggest a name is furnished as quickly as possible, or suspicion will be aroused. We are talking about an initial appointment for nine in the morning, Monday.’ He allowed a whiff of sarcasm. ‘I trust that finding a name for the patient will not prove too great a problem.’

  The consultant rang off. He had pushed to the limits, but he had won nothing, and danced to their tune.

  In his office, Len Gibbons moved paper round his desk, sent it in clockwise circles, the other way, then north, south, east and west. The phone did not ring. The sheets were the contents of two files, cardboard and downloaded from the computer. The phone did not ring because there was – obviously – nothing to report from that far-away front line, nothing of significance. It was the life of intelligence officers, such as Len Gibbons, who handled men and women who were sent across borders and were at the extremities of survival, that the phone only rang when matters reached breaking point. He liked to have paper on his desk and regarded the screen as a poor substitute. Through the door, which was open, he could see Sarah was at her desk, typing briskly, not in the style of his own battering two fingers. She would be busying herself with the detail of the accounts for the operation – wise, sensible, and mind-destructively dull. Nor had there been contact from the Towers.

  The paper he moved anti-clockwise was headlined Joseph Paul Foulkes. It wasn’t the first time he had read the résumé of a biography, or the tenth, and wouldn’t be the last. Foxy to his friends – not many of them. Aged 51, brought up in West Yorkshire, grammar-school educated, joining the local Police at eighteen marrying Liz (Elizabeth Joyce Routledge), a hospital worker, fathering two daughters, and specialising with the force in the élite Covert Rural Observation Post unit. Noticed. Advised that a careerenhancing move would be a transfer to the Metropolitan Police and Special Branch, then sent to Northern Ireland and given commendations for his work in dangerous country. A flair for languages. Courses at a language laboratory in Whitechapel, one on one, then six months of cramming in the culture aspects at the School of Oriental and African Studies, then Bristol University, and the military’s Beaconsfield camp, culminating in a useful knowledge of Farsi, the principal tongue of the Iranian diplomats based in the capital. Where they met contacts – woodlands, parked cars, remote country hotels, restaurants and lorry drivers’ cafés – he used the shotgun microphones or the larger parabolic versions and listened. Twice he had provided evidence leading to conviction and imprisonment. The marriage had not survived. Posted to Basra, Nov 03–Feb 04 for work with Intelligence and Interrogation, utilising his language skills in Farsi. Second wife was Ellie (Eleanor Daphne Wilson), now aged 33, employed by Naval Procurement in Bath. Remains a serving police officer, with good reputation, running CROP skills courses. Summary: Reliable, self-opinionated, wealth of experience. Gibbons would say that Foxy Foulkes was as good as any spewed up by the computers – he was what he had, and almost as old as himself.

  Gibbons could not imagine, or have survived, the privations of where he had despatched the man.

  No call came through from the Towers. No colleague rang in to offer moral support. He was isolated. He could have contaminated others so they had, effectively, consigned him to the leper colony. He had the funds, the contacts, the links, and was cast adrift. If it all fouled up it would be deniable in the Towers, and a whisper would be passed that ‘A junior official overreached himself, exceeded his powers, acted with no authorisation’. The great and the good would wash their hands of him. And if it succeeded?

  The paper manoeuvred clockwise was headed Daniel George Baxter. It said he did not have friends, was generally known as Badger, and was 28 years old. He had been brought up by his parents, Paul and Debbie Baxter, on the outskirts of Reading. His father sold second-hand cars and his mother took care of the books; they lived at Burghfield close to the Atomic Weapons Establishment. Schooled at a comprehensive and regarded as an under-achiever; criticised in school-leaving report as a non-contributor. Accepted into the Thames Valley Police in 2001 and initial reports described him as quiet, resourceful and utterly dependable. What had changed? Gibbons could almost have recited it – he’d read it often enough. One referee had been a doctor, an obsessional ‘birder’, who treated Baxter’s parents. Baxter had taken him to flooded gravel pits west of Reading where he had led him, on his stomach, closer than he’d imagined possible to the perch from which a kingfisher dived; he had raved about the mind-set and calm of the applicant. A second referee had been a local accountant who prepared the business’s final tax papers, and whom Baxter had taken to the Kennet where they had sat through a summer evening watching a female otter with her cubs, feeding and playing; he had written of the young man’s patience and dedication. Had been taken into the force CROP unit at 22, extraordinarily young, after three years as an undistinguished beat constable. Had found his vocation: court evidence for a narcotics ‘untouchable’ at Wantage, and the principal surveillance on a tinkers’ site at Windsor, doubling as a thieves’ kitchen. Had been drafted into the West Country regional office of the Box. Reported to have the highest standards of professionalism. Not academic, not particularly intelligent, but an operator of genuine class. Almost teetotal, does not smoke. No known hobbies but holidays are spent hiking, alone, in the west of Scotland.

  If they won through – him on the back
of Foxy and Badger, in co-operation with the Cousin and the Friend – he would be able to go back to the Towers, to a place dedicated to ‘need to know’. Word would have seeped through the cracks in the walls and he would be the star of the moment. Few would know what he had done, what had been gained, only that a triumph lay at the Service’s feet. For many years, almost the totality of his career, a catastrophe in the terms of intelligence gathering had dogged him. Triumph, wherever it was to be found, would help to wipe away dim memories of the watchtowers, fences and deceits of the trade . . . but it would be on the backs of those two men, Foxy and Badger.

  He was skilled at judging others, gutting their files, and could assess himself: he still suffered from a cruelty in the youth of his career, seemed to make a virtue of dullness and reliability, and kept his passions covert from work colleagues. He had the chance, now, to walk tall in the corridors of the Towers and take what he thought was his rightful place on the benches of those with influence . . . if two men performed, if luck favoured them, and if the dice rolled well, if . . .

  The telephone didn’t ring, and he moved the papers until they seemed to have little meaning. Then he looked at the pictures Sarah had pasted on the walls, and an outline of a face gazed down at him. It had no eyes, nose or mouth and was an enemy . . . He couldn’t imagine where they were, Foxy and Badger, or how they were.

  She was in front of him, inside the bakery, waiting to be served. He and Beryl were next in the queue, and he must have banged her elbow with the sleeve that held the two parts of the pole that carried the standard of his Royal British Legion branch. She turned, and he recognised her. She smiled, and he sensed that Beryl didn’t understand.

  ‘Hello,’ Doug Bentley said. ‘So, you’re back again.’

  ‘I come to quite a few,’ she answered, and gave a little shrug. ‘Afterwards I get some bread here.’

  It had been a big turn-out that day. He and Beryl had done their usual thing. One bus from their own village into Swindon, then the 12 from Swindon to Wootton Bassett. They had met friends – the new colleagues they had come to know from their journeys to the town . . . too many of those journeys.

  He did not think it impertinent to ask: ‘Are you often here, in the town?’

  She said, ‘Only when they’re bringing the heroes through. It’s so moving, so emotional. I come when I can. I always see you.’

  He had his position, with his standard, in the line and opposite the war memorial. He was well placed each time and faced the relatives who had brought flowers, usually roses from the florist behind the library. ‘I wouldn’t miss it,’ Doug Bentley said. ‘It’s a responsibility I’ve been given by our branch to be here. The way I see it, I’d be letting them down, those coming through, if I wasn’t here, if I just reckoned to be too busy. It’s a responsibility and a privilege.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  The customer at the counter had paid, picked up the paper bag with chocolate caramel slices and now eased out of her way. She asked for a loaf and he took a step forward. Beryl was fidgeting in her purse for coins. It had been a big turn-out because of the work the serviceman had done in Afghanistan. Ammunition technical officer – explosive ordnance disposal – down on hands and knees, defusing roadside bombs. Many photographs of him, young, a sergeant, had been held up by relatives, and posters with messages of love and admiration. So many of those who came through Wootton Bassett had been cut down by the bombs, and this man had lost his life in trying to make the wretched things safe. In his own military service – Pay Corps, National Service, never out of the UK – Doug Bentley had never come across any officer or NCO who would have attracted the level of support that the bomb men had when the bell tolled in the High Street, the hearse came up the incline and the funeral director walked with his top hat off and his staff in his hand. When the relatives had had their chance to put the flowers on the roof and touch the shiny black bodywork, that day, there had been rivulets of rain running down through the flowers, and tears cascading down faces. Doug Bentley had had his head lowered in respect and his eye had been on the black ribbon at the top of the pole above his standard. He did not know why good men, so loved and held in such regard, needed to chance their lives in defusing dangerous devices out in the middle of deserts, and in ditches beside fields.

  She paid. She faced him and smiled. ‘I’ve changed my hair. Fancy you recognising me.’

  He’d known her because of the chain round her neck and the name in gold letters hanging above her blouse, resting on the skin where the cleavage started.

  He lied, with a grin: ‘I’m good with faces – and good with names, Ellie.’ He didn’t say he recognised her because the buttons of her blouse, worn under an open winter coat, were out of order, as if they had been fastened in a hurry.

  She was gone, and the shop’s doorbell rang as she closed the door behind her. He asked for a loaf, a cob.

  His wife’s voice grated in his ear: ‘She’s been shagging again, hasn’t she? It’s that tart you spoke to in the summer. A woman can always tell. She’s wearing a wedding ring, so it’s a boyfriend she’s been shagging, and she’ll have a husband who’s being two-timed and is too pathetic to know it.’

  ‘Can you not, Foxy – for fuck’s sake – stop your hand moving?’

  ‘I’m trying.’

  ‘Can’t you try harder?’

  Rare for Badger to criticise, and rare for him to be with an oppo he hadn’t chosen, doing continuous stags with only faint chances of a doze, not proper sleep. Last time it had been like a holiday-camp talent contest, except that Ged hadn’t been stripped down to a bikini. He had chosen his oppo after going to the line manager and complaining they’d shown out because George had coughed in a bush and they’d had to bloody run: George was dumped; feet didn’t touch the ground. He would have preferred a rookie with him now, someone who had no knowledge of the tradecraft of covert rural work, who would take orders and do as he was instructed, and who had been there only to listen for Farsi talk. Badger had good hearing, and the shake of the hand beside him was an increasing irritation, like a dripping tap. They’d had the confession about the language.

  ‘I can’t stop it.’

  ‘You’re tired, I’m tired. You’re hungry and thirsty, so am I. You’re stressed, I’m stressed. You’re shaking, I’m not.’

  ‘I’m doing my best.’

  ‘Not good enough. Try biting it.’

  The confession had been the final issue. He could almost take the shake of Foxy’s hand, with the rustle of the dead fronds. It was what he had said to Badger that had made a tipping point. He’d hidden it, and now he’d trotted it out.

  A car, with a military escort riding inside the cab, had pulled up at the front of the house. A man had climbed out, then gone to the back and opened a rear door. He had extracted a bouquet of flowers, massive and colourful, then gone towards the officer, Mansoor. They had spoken, the man had been taken to the door and the wife had come out. She had accepted the flowers, and the car had driven away. Badger had seen in the glasses that she had had to fight to control her tears.

  ‘What happened?’ he’d asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Isn’t it working? Is the gear down?’

  ‘Gear’s great.’

  ‘Why don’t you know?’

  ‘It’s the language.’

  The children were out again, and the officer had gone back to fishing, no bites, and smoking. Badger could see the flowers inside, through the open window. Hadn’t anyone known? Not the Boss, the American, the Israeli, or fucking Foulkes himself? Had they known and kept quiet? In the confession the star word had been dialect. There were dialects in Farsi. Tribes had dialects, regions had dialects, the north and south had dialects, as did the east and west. There was the vernacular and there was the classical. Foxy had classical, but the vernacular was what the troops spoke and the officer spoke. In the confession it was stated that half of what came through the earphones was ‘rough translation’
and half was accurate. How had Foulkes managed with the interrogation team? He hadn’t enough of the language to grasp the nuances that betrayed a man’s lie. The diplomats he had tracked out of London, who had talked with young militants in students’ unions, were educated and spoke classical. What could he not understand? He hadn’t understood what the officer said to the man who brought the flowers, or most of what the Engineer had said to his wife, but he had been fine on the meeting she’d taken because that had been formal.

  The hands shook.

  They were together, hip against hip, shoulder against shoulder, two plastic bags by their knees and four bottles of urine. They might not even understand the mention of a destination, if they were lucky enough to hear one.

  Badger said, ‘You’re useless, full of shit.’

  ‘You’re arrogant, full of conceit and piss. You – you wouldn’t even have scraped through in my day.’

  ‘I passed out well.’

  ‘My day it was a proper test. Your day, Health and fucking Safety killed the hard bits. You wouldn’t have come through.’

  He was drawn in – shouldn’t have been. ‘I was top rated in marks.’

  ‘Did you do the claustrophobia one, buried in a box with a pencil-wide air vent, in darkness, silence, and last thing you hear is the instructors walking away? Left for half an hour. You do that?’

  ‘They’d scaled it back, wasn’t permitted.’

  ‘Send you up the Fire Brigade Tower, did they? The vertigo test. No restraint harness and lean over the edge of the tower’s top to read the number-plate of a car parked right under you. How were you at that?’

  ‘As you well know, it had been banned.’

  ‘Dump you in a car boot, did they? Drive you over rough ground, bouncing, bashing? The boot opens and there’s a German Shepherd looking to make a meal of you. Was that tough?’

  ‘It had been ditched.’

  ‘And isolation. What about water and a biscuit pack, driven to the far end of an airport fence, dropped off and told to sit against it, never lose contact with it. There’s a car parked two hundred yards away and you have to log everything that happens to it, moves near it. The hazard lights might flash at midnight, a guy walks past in mid-morning. You’re there as many as sixty hours, and you miss anything, you’ve failed. How did you do?’