‘There is, of course, a solution to the problem of regime collapse and vengeance turned on former influential people. I can go abroad. I am authorised to fly to Damascus. Under deep cover I can travel to Dubai or Abu Dhabi. The American consulate in Dubai is in the World Trade Center, and the embassy in Abu Dhabi is located between Airport Road and Coast Street. They would not, if I walked in cold off the street, treat me like a friend, but they would show me respect, and I would avoid the rope suspended from the streetlamp. If you were to take a similar course when you go abroad, you also would be safe from the rope. Could you do that, brother, to save your neck?’
He saw that a trap yawned in front of him.
First there had seemed to be sympathy, then there had been honesty and, last, conspiracy. He was not one of them. He did not wear uniform, and was inside no inner circle. They were military men and he was a scientist in the field of miniaturised electronics. They used him. A trip wire might have lain across his path. If he had snagged it he would have gone into the prepared pit.
The Engineer said, ‘I am completely devoted to the Islamic Republic, its leaders and its future.’
He was rewarded with a smile, slow but broadening.
He went on, ‘I am devoted to my God, my country and my work.’
‘I hope your journey is fruitful, brother. We will be waiting to welcome you home and pray God for the best outcome.’
The brigadier was gone from his side. He realised he had been taunted, also that he had been warned against making unwise contacts outside Iran. He could not remember when, before, he had felt such keen anger towards a senior officer of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They mocked and threatened him. While they strutted on parade grounds, lined up their men across wide streets, then ordered baton charges or the firing of live rounds to disperse crowds who protested that an election had been stolen, he – the Engineer, Rashid Armajan – had been creating the weapons that defeated an enemy that was a super-power. He could not tell the brigadier to go fuck his own mother because that man had to initial the final authorisation for the journey in search of a consultant. He felt blood on his lip, and realised how hard he had bitten it, how much pain he had absorbed. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief and hoped no stain remained.
They were called into the next session, and the brigadier did not catch his eye as they went back into the operations area.
Badger had rested, but not slept. He had eaten some biscuit and drunk sparingly, had defecated into a bag and urinated into a bottle. He had done all of that within six inches of Foxy, without disturbing the leaves spread over the hide. He had thought more about the woman in the plastic chair across the expanse of water than he had about Alpha Juliet.
She was still there. She might have moved, or not, in the three hours he had had his eyes squeezed shut while the sun was still crystal bright.
Her children were close to her. Their toys were out. He thought the kids more subdued, less raucous, than the previous day. Once, the girl fell and screamed and her mother did not move, but the old lady came out, waddled to the child, swept her up and cuddled her.
The smell hung rancid between them, around them, with no wind to drift it.
‘Anything happened? Anything said?’
A slight shake of Foxy’s head, insufficient to rustle the dead stuff over him.
‘Nothing?’
The slightest nod.
The flies crowded above them and surged on his hands as Badger lifted his binoculars and adjusted the focus so that he could see the mess of reed leaves and stems where the microphone lay, then sweep on from the bund line to the barracks and a few of the soldiers playing basketball, then across the palm trees. He saw the head goon sprawled on a sunbed, and picked up the house and the kids, then the old lady who banged dust from rugs. He went by the flowerbed, abandoned, and reached the chair.
It annoyed Badger that he had twice asked the question and not been answered, annoyed him that he had felt it necessary to make bare, semi-civilised talk – like it was a weakness in him. He had ticks on his legs – could have been three bites or four. If he scratched hard, broke the surface and drew blood, the itch would be worse. They had to be endured. He would not fidget, give Foxy the pleasure of seeing his discomfort.
He wasn’t proud of himself. He didn’t ask, just pulled the headset from under Foxy’s head covering. To achieve that he needed to get his fingers across Foxy’s face, touch his cheeks, then go up to the crown and drag forward the arch linking the earpieces. His wrist was gripped.
‘On induction courses, do they teach wet-behind-the-ears recruits, rookies, that courtesies matter?’
He had a hold on the headset.
‘If they don’t, they should run one for beginners in basic manners. Fucking ask.’
He didn’t. A stand-off moment. Badger had hold of the headset and Foxy had hold of his wrist. Three seconds, five, ten. Badger let go and Foxy let go, and managed to choreograph it so that neither was the outright winner nor loser. He was given the headset and slotted it under his camouflage covering with small, slow movements. He thought he had lost high ground, which seemed – hard up against his oppo – to matter. What also mattered was his own inadequacy. He could watch the front of the house across the lagoon, and track the movement of the wife, her mother, the kids, the officer and the other guards, but if she spoke, and he was the one on stag, he must break into Foxy’s rest time. It hurt him that he was reliant on the older man, hurt more than the tick bites bothered him.
She was very still.
There were birds on the water in front of her and they fed, ducking and diving. An otter swam close to the main wall of the reeds: the first he had seen that day. He knew otters from the islands off the west coast of Scotland. Only a glimpse, and then it dipped, showing an arched back and a stubby tail.
He didn’t think she watched the birds or had seen the otter. On his earlier watch, a pair of pigs had crossed in front of him, would have swum over the sunk cable from the microphone, with just their snouts above the water.
The light had changed and was no longer on her face, but the sun’s force was now more to her left side and her cheeks were not in its glare. Badger couldn’t say whether there were still tears. Maybe earlier she had looked too closely into the sun’s reflection from the lagoon and her eyes had watered. A woman who ran a mine-clearance campaign might be made of stern material – or might weep in private because of what had happened to her, to her man and her children. He didn’t know.
Foxy farted. The foul smell hung around them, the residue of the last Meal Ready to Eat they had shared – beef in some congealed liquid. If someone had walked over them, he or she might have thought they’d picked up pig shit on a boot.
He reflected: there was no other way to do the job that the Boss, Mr Gibbons, had set them. They had to be there, marooned and . . . He watched her.
She was not the woman of a drugs-dealer he had once kept pinged, day after day, while she lounged in a summer garden close to her pool, wearing not much on a rare warm week, and she was not one of the women from the tinkers’ camp who had pegged out washing, lounged and smoked while the men planned thieving, and she was not the woman with the mousy hair and pale face, mistress to the man whose wife was under the patio extension and who would be led away, handcuffed, as the digger moved in. He had pinged many women who were consorts of a target and had not felt any of them were special or worth interest.
The Engineer’s wife dominated any thoughts of Alpha Juliet. An instructor on the last week before Badger had been awarded his Blue Book, certifying his surveillance competence, had told the group that thinking of sex, stripping down women, doing business with them, was excellent for holding the concentration needed in a hide when paint drying might have seemed interesting. He had said that far and away the best shagging he’d had in his life was when he’d been lying on his belly, enveloped in a gillie suit, with nothing happening. It would have been good to remember Alpha Juliet – a fine, stron
g girl who didn’t blather, didn’t seem in search of commitment and seemed to have chosen him for better reasons than that she had gone without for a week: unfathomable – but he couldn’t remember Alpha Juliet now. He stared through the glasses at the woman, and because he kept the focus on everything familiar about her, he knew which crow’s feet were deepening at her eyes. Her breathing seemed harder, and her mouth would twist when the pain dug.
‘You’ll call me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Because without me you’re worse than useless.’
He didn’t answer.
Foxy went on, ‘And keep watch all round.’
A point of principle: he didn’t react and kept the glasses on her. He didn’t take orders from the older man.
‘Why are you only watching her?’
No response. He held the focus. Her hands were very still, and he thought she had a serenity.
‘You gone soft on her, young ’un? Unprofessional if you have.’
Badger held his silence.
‘If you’ve gone gentle on her, just remember who she is. She’s the wife of Rashid Armajan, bad bastard, bomb-maker and enemy. She shares his bed and, before she went sick, used to spread her legs for the guy who spent his days planning the next generation of nasties to kill our boys inside Iraq. I feel nothing for her. She would have kept a nice tidy household for him, left him with no worries in his life other than working out the best way to blow up, mutilate and kill coalition troops. He was pretty good at it. Forgotten what the man said? ‘A small number of clever and innovative men is capable of wrong-footing us so consistently that the body-bags keep going home, and the injured with wounds they’ll carry to their graves . . . We call an enemy a Bravo. Rashid Armajan is a big bad Bravo.’ That’s what the man said. She’s that man’s woman and what she has in her head is immaterial to me. It matters that, because of what’s in her head, he’ll travel away from here. Nothing less, nothing more. In case you’ve forgotten it, young ’un, the ceremonies at Wootton Bassett when the dead come home didn’t start with Afghanistan killed-in-action troops. They started with Iraq. We couldn’t stay in Iraq because of the bombs, his bombs, bombs turned out on a production line to the Engineer’s blueprint. My Ellie calls them heroes, the soldiers brought through that town. It’s fantastic, such an honour to those soldiers, to have thousands line a street in respect. Only, sad thing, they don’t see it. They’re in the box. A good number of them were put there by that man and his talent for bomb-making. Because of him, all that the rest of us can do is stand on the pavement and give them respect, which is something but not much. A good number of the first heroes who came through were victims of explosions, his bloody bombs. And maybe by now his gear’s in Afghanistan, I don’t know. So, I have no love for him, and I’m not going soft for her. My Ellie talks about Wootton Bassett and the heroes . . . Are you getting my drift?’
A crisp whisper. ‘So much of an enemy that we’re going to turn him.’
Surprise, a murmur. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘It’s interdiction.’
‘So, it’s interdiction. Yes.’
‘I checked it with the Boss. It’s their way – spook jargon – of describing an approach. “Interdiction” is “approach”. They hope to turn him.’
‘Is that what he told you?’
‘They’re going to turn him, Mr Gibbons said – like it’s a defection.’
Foxy muttered, ‘Time for my sleep. Wake me when there’s something you can’t do.’
She had fine features and she sat so still. Her back was straight in the chair and she gazed ahead. Almost, her eye line was on him. Nobody came to her, she had no one to talk to, and Foxy slept. The wind had gained strength and he heard its rustle in the reeds.
Chapter 9
‘What the hell are you—’
‘Wake up.’ As normal, when Badger used his elbow to dig into Foxy’s ribs, he held the palm of his hand across the older man’s mouth, loose but a reminder.
‘Where am—’
‘In the hide in the marshes in Iran. What more do you need to know? Could give you the co-ordinates, except you bloody dropped the GPS.’
The voice whistled back, almost shrill, between the teeth: ‘I was saying, before you fucking interrupted, “Where am I looking?” That was my question.’
‘You don’t have to look anywhere. Just listen.’
The headset was already off Badger’s ears. He tried to pass it to Foxy. Foxy muttered that he needed a piss, always did when he woke up. Badger told him to wait. The cable was caught in the front of Badger’s gillie suit, had fastened itself among the material strips sewn into it and the dried-out reeds. You couldn’t pull a cable tight and hope it would free itself, and it was underneath Badger. They were in darkness, hip against hip, elbows locked and legs bloody nearly entwined. Their movements had roused the mosquitoes, and there were convulsions under the covering that shielded them. The cable wouldn’t come free. Insults were swapped.
‘Be careful, you clumsy bastard.’
‘Use your fingers!’
‘How did you snag it?’
‘If you stayed bloody still I could free it.’
Badger laid down his night-sight kit. It was the hour before dawn. His fingers felt for the tangle in the cable. Foxy had his head down, grappled for and found the headset and put it over his ears. God alone knew how, but the cable’s snag was near Badger’s groin, and Foxy’s head was halfway there. Time for a laugh? Foxy’s head had moved to a comfort zone below Badger’s ribcage. His fingers were under Foxy’s chin and tugged gently. Twice Foxy gulped, then the cable came free.
He would be told, and didn’t ask. To ask would demonstrate dependence on the older man. Nor would he get, now, a running commentary from Foxy.
He settled again as best he could. Difficult while Foxy used the bottle. There was no relief from the mosquitoes and when they crossed the moon, almost full, they seemed dense enough to throw a shadow. They had both been out of the hide during the night, and Badger had buried more plastic bags. He had gone as far as the wall of reeds to their right, where it bordered the open ground, and done exercises there, had moved his limbs and stretched his back. Foxy had gone further, almost as far as the mound of mud, but had stopped short of the bulldozer tracks. He could go further than Foxy. Anytime Foxy left the hide, the translation of remarks passed at the house was zero.
It was the time of morning that medics said was when people died – and well known to police crime squads as the best time to hit front doors, break them down and get up the stairs before weapons, narcotics or documents could be hidden. The target had emerged from the front door and started to pace.
She had joined him. He would have been well on with his first cigarette, a white glow in the dull greened wash of the night-sight lens. He wore cotton boxer shorts and a vest, and she had a shawl across the shoulders of her nightdress and was barefoot; he had put on sandals. The guard using the plastic chair by the pier had already scrambled away when he’d appeared, before she’d come – and Badger had woken Foxy.
It was going to be soon.
They had logged the carrying into the house of the new suitcase – black, with no motif that would stand out on a carousel. She had greeted him and her voice had been easy, clear, in his ears. He dreaded most that one dawn or evening, that day or the next, the black Mercedes would come, the driver would go to the door, bring out the case and lift it into the boot. The targets would climb into the back seats, the engine would rev, the goon – the officer – and the guards would straighten, the old lady would wave from the door, the kids at her knee, and the car would go. Where? Which airport, connecting with what flight? It was what he dreaded most.
The Engineer talked and his wife listened. He smoked, then threw the stub into the water. He walked with his hand under her arm and she had the stick to support her. There was no fat on the man, and Badger could see her contours, breasts, waist and hips, because a light wind was off the w
ater. He would have had a better view, through the night-sight, if the moon had been smaller or had gone down over the horizon.
He dreaded most that he and Foxy would lie in the scrape with the bags and the bottles, their food; the bergens, the ticks, mosquitoes and flies, and the microphone would not pick up a remark on the destination. To have gone through this and not heard it . . . It was more than he could have endured.
A Deniable Death Page 21
