A Deniable Death

by Gerald Seymour

  She had a habit of lowering her voice until it dripped conspiracy. ‘Is it a big one?’

  ‘By my standards.’

  ‘People on the ground, at the sharp end, in danger?’

  ‘I carry the responsibility.’

  She looked far into his eyes. ‘Is it like the old days . . . when you were young, tilting at windmills, the world yours, and me running to keep up? Like that?’

  They might have been alone on a Suffolk beach, in a Scottish forest or on a Welsh hillside, and only honesty counted. Len Gibbons said, ‘I can hide it pretty well, but I’ve not felt such excitement in thirty years. I’m alive with it. I’ll go to the end of any road in front of me to see this one through and make it work. Three decades of sneers and titters, I’ve lived with . . . This sort of makes it worthwhile. All those bastards who put me down, I think I’m going to walk all over them. I feel blessed to be a part of it . . . Is it going to happen? God’s truth, I don’t know. I’m willing it to . . . Just have to believe it will.’

  She smiled, would have tried to offer encouragement. ‘It’ll be all right, Len.’

  ‘If it’s not, and goes public, they’ll crucify me at the Towers . . . but it’ll be worse for those at the sharp end, on the ground.’

  He lifted her hand, kissed it, passed her another bag, the dirty bundle, and was gone out of the door. The snow had eased, but the sleet drove hard. They were never out of his mind, those for whom he carried responsibility – and the man he targeted.

  It was the end of his day. The Engineer stood in the anteroom outside the brigadier’s office and the secretary gave him the fat envelope, telling him it contained his travel documents. He opened the envelope, glanced at the top sheet and said the itinerary would exhaust his wife. She shrugged. She reached down for the big envelope at her feet and said these were the X-ray and scan results requested from Tehran. She unlocked a drawer. From another envelope she took two passports, both bearing the crest of the Czech Republic. Finally from a plastic pouch she took a mass of euro banknotes and ostentatiously counted out a thousand in different denominations.

  He read her attitude. Were there no better calls for foreign currency? Was there not a medical framework inside the Islamic Republic superior to any other? Why was so much deference shown to him?

  The items went into his briefcase. She rang through, then indicated cursorily with her hand that he should go inside the office. He was greeted. Did he have everything? Was he satisfied? He did and he was.

  He wondered whether this ranking officer knew of the questions put to him by a colleague and whether a crude trap had been set for him, or whether the regime was indeed a house of cards. But, that early evening, he was not to be tested and tricked.

  ‘Come back to us soon and safe with the best news of Naghmeh . . . I would like you to consider who you are, and therefore understand the esteem in which we hold you. You are, to us, our Nobel or our Kalashnikov, even our Oppenheimer. You are the father of the bomb in the road . . . Do you know of a town in England, Rashid, that stops when the coffins come through, or of the crowds that line the bridges of the Highway of Heroes in Canada? Do you know of the communities in the United States that come to a silent halt when a local soldier is brought back? You sapped their will to fight, Rashid. You broke their commitment. When the time is judged correct your devices will be shipped to Afghanistan and the sophistication of the war raised. Afghanistan will be fertile ground for you. We will not tolerate the Great Satan’s military – or the Little Satan’s – against our borders. Our prayers go with you.’

  He was kissed on each cheek and went out of the door. He hurried to the parking area and looked for his driver. He could not telephone her, never did, so he could not tell her what was in place until he was back at his home.

  Stomach runs had arrived, one of the many strains of ‘Basra belly’. It was early evening and the air was cooler, but without a wind, so the smell in the hide was foul. It had come on fast.

  Bowel movements were not a chosen subject for conversation among croppies. Nor likely to be, Foxy would have said, among astronauts. How moonwalkers or surveillance men did their business was not big on the talk agenda among colleagues. One minute Badger had been lying beside him, on his rest time, and the next he had been squirming to turn over, and the top of the hide’s camouflage, above the scrim net, had jumped. He had scrabbled for the plastic bags.

  Not a smell for living with. Foxy – relief writ large – was more constipated than the other way. There was nothing he could have done – had he wanted – to help. Diarrhoea was part and parcel of a croppie’s job. Foxy did not know how much was in Badger’s trousers, how much in the bag and how much had spilled onto the earth of the hide. Badger was wiping hard, almost furiously. They had with them tubes of sanitary jelly that cleaned hands and that was next on Badger’s list. Then the pills. They hadn’t spoken since the punch was thrown.

  On the headset there was only the crackled voice of a radio announcer and music. He watched the front of the house and waited for the car to come, for the children to run out and the target, the Tango, to get home. Strange old life he lived . . . Because of RIPA, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, the trade of law-enforcement surveillance was watched, eagle-eyed, for abuses. Couldn’t call a bad guy a ‘target’ in a briefing because it might come up in the legal process, and to name the accused, in court, as a ‘target’ was likely to be prejudicial. He watched for the target and the target’s wife, and wondered whether she was resting or filling the suitcase that had been brought for her. The goon, the officer, had been on his chair as the sun had started to dip. He’d had the binoculars on his chest and seemed to use them to watch birds. Maybe birds were his turn-on . . . There was nothing for him to listen to but his nose was filled with the smell.

  Badger did not apologise.

  Perhaps it was not appropriate to apologise for diarrhoea. Maybe Foxy would have done if he’d had any other oppo. No apology . . . and no wind to freshen the air. Possible to go in reasonable secrecy from the hide after darkness came, but that was more than an hour away. Badger had swallowed Imodium, which would, sort of, plug him. Probably taken enough to stop Niagara in full flow. He hadn’t asked what the correct dose should be. Foxy watched the goon, and couldn’t get the stink out of his nose. When darkness dropped, Badger could move, with his bags, whatever was soiled and the collapsible entrenching shovel, to dig the pit.

  The pig came, the sow. He knew stories about pigs, had heard them from the base medic, an orthopaedic specialist, who had talked about them after he’d put an interpreter back together – the man had been out in the marshes with a patrol when he was charged; a thigh bone had been broken and a knee smashed. When the big beast came out of the reed bed to the right of him and Badger and moved purposefully over the open ground, grunting, Foxy thought they faced a problem.

  The problem worsened: the boar followed the sow.

  Badger swore.

  The sow led. Old teats hung slack from her underbelly and the mud glistened on her, was caught among the whiskers at her mouth. The boar had big bollocks and – more important – tusks jutting from the lower jaw. Badger thought the sow looked dumb, hungry, inquisitive, but that the boar was menacing. He could see why: at each side of his mouth, where the cheeks were, there were twin welts – the skin was broken and there were weepy patches. Badger realised that the tusks were in-growing and pierced the flesh, which would have been enough to make the brute mean.

  They came closer, were within twenty feet.

  They stopped. Now they were wary. Badger thought the sow might be the more cautious. The little eyes gleamed bright, tracking towards them.

  In the last years, Badger had had birds come and perch on him, little songbirds, blackbirds and pigeons, and once a snipe had walked on elegant legs across his hands. Rabbits had played a few feet in front of him, and a fox had been over his back, jumping to clear it, as if his spine was a fallen log. Mice and rats had used his gillie suit fo
r warmth. His ability to blend into nature made him good at what he did, as good as any – better than the old idiot beside him. A rat, heavy with the young it was carrying, had made a friend of him, enough for him to worry that he might be playing midwife when its time came. He could be still, and didn’t know how still Foxy could stay.

  There were flies round him.

  Badger could accept rats, mice and birds sharing his space but the flies fazed him during the day, and the mosquitoes were worse in the evenings. All irrelevant. The sow mattered most. Badger thought that if she backed away, or lost interest, the boar would tuck along. Her interest was aroused but she did not yet seem to feel threatened. The boar’s size was intimidating: he would have been more than a yard to the shoulder and the tusks were four or five inches long – the creature must live with perpetual discomfort.

  Foxy had wriggled a little, making enough noise to raise the sow’s ears. He murmured, ‘I’ve a pepper spray.’

  Badger thought he read it better. He had four plastic bags, all partially filled, one pair of fetid underpants and a body that stank. He flicked his eyes away. The kids had come out of the house with the old lady, and the goon was out of his chair. There was, far away, dust rising between the trees, where the road was, and guards were coming out of the barracks, rifles loose on straps across their backs and chests. The wife came, leaning on her stick. Foxy passed Badger the pepper spray, then clasped the headset tighter against his skull, tiny movements; he would have been straining to hear any remark made. Badger’s own movement was to take the penknife from his belt and unclasp it; the blade was only two inches long but he thought it enough, and preferred it to the spray.

  He saw the car, the Mercedes saloon. It was driven past the barracks and veered towards the house.

  At that distance, the cries of the children were faint but clear. Their excitement carried.

  He might as well have laid a trail of aniseed, grain or swill. The sow came forward. Badger could not stand up, clear away the scrim and the camouflage, get hold of the plastic bags, chuck them out and wave a deodorant spray to replace the smell of his shit with lemon fragrance. He thought, now, the pig knew he was there.

  She was beside the edge of the scrape, where the scrim and the dead leaves covered his bergen. She was two feet, perhaps a few inches more, from him. She pawed the ground. The boar followed.

  The target came out of the car and his driver carried his briefcase. The children were around him, and he lifted the little girl. The goon faced out across the water, and the open space that flanked the reed bed would have been in his view. It was the wife who saw the pigs and pointed at them. The boar was pushing at the shoulder of the sow, trying to come close. Badger saw the eyes and each whisker, each bristle, the sharp broken end of a tusk. The boar panted . . .

  Now the boar led. He had pushed aside the sow. He drove down with his nose. The scrim snagged on a tusk. The snout pushed. The beast might weigh a hundred kilos, a hundred and fifty. It routed in the scrim for the bags and . . . Badger had the knife.

  The boar’s weight pressed down on him, and he used his left hand to hold the scrim tight, then jabbed the knife blade upwards and hit what felt like thick rubber or a leather wad. Blood spurted from the space between the nostrils. The pig reared back. The scrim ripped, the foliage fell away, and he let out a scream of pain, loud and shrill, parading that he was hurt. Maybe the boar didn’t know what had made the pain, who had hurt him. He ran across the mud of the open ground, heading for the lagoon. The sow followed, seeming reluctant and confused.

  They hit the water.

  In front of the house, everyone watched.

  The sow and the boar lumbered at speed towards deep water until only their heads remained visible. They seemed to make for the end of the mud spit where Badger had built the platform, with foliage washed away from the reed bed, where the microphone was mounted. In front of the house, they turned away as if the spectacle was over and Badger chose that moment to congratulate himself. The pigs swam towards the spit.

  Foxy’s head jerked forward. His turn to swear. The cable to the headset had tautened. The boar broke the surface close to the mud spit, kicked, rolled and tried to throw off an impediment. The cable was pulled up from the mud in front of the hide. Badger saw it rise in the water. There was a final convulsion and the cable from Foxy’s headset went slack . . .

  There were gravel pits out to the west of Reading and alongside the motorway. The teenage Danny Baxter had known them as well as any heron did. It was to one of them that he had taken his dad’s accountant and brought him close to an otter’s holt. The man had never seen the creature up close and was thrilled enough to become a referee of status when Danny had gone for the police job. Anglers patronised the gravel pits. Once, from the hide he’d made for himself, he had watched a bent, straining rod, a tight line and huge swirls from the depths. It had gone on for twenty minutes or more until the line had floated back, loose, nothing to hold it. The guy hadn’t known he was watched, had sworn, kicked out and sent his stool and a rucksack into the water. It would have been a big pike that had snapped his line. Danny had seen it.

  Now the line was exposed on the mud spit and floated on the water’s surface. He saw where it ran up the spit and went into the mess of foliage where the microphone was.

  It hurt to speak to Foxy, but he had to know. It was like he took a backward step. One question. ‘Does it work?’

  A nod, as if he were an interruption to concentration, therefore a goddamn nuisance. Then, ‘Yes, but couldn’t you have done a half-decent job with the cable? Bit bloody obvious, young ’un, because you didn’t bury it properly.’

  It was. The cable was a dark line across yellow mud, then a black thread over the water. If the goon, the officer, went back to his chair and used his binoculars to look again for the birds, the otters or the pigs, he must see, had to, the cable on the mud and where it floated. He thought he’d done well in concealing it and better than that in getting rid of the pigs, but his efforts had been ignored.

  Everyone except the security man was now inside the house, and the light was failing. They had nothing. His throat hurt from lack of water. The irritation of the tick scabs and mosquito bites was acute, and the plastic bags were by his knees. The quiet came and – almost forgotten because of the sow and the boar – the smell returned. Time was running out, their covert rural observation post was near to compromised, and they had nothing to report.

  There had been a re-evaluation, he was told. When he had been called to the unit’s offices, he had brought his bag.

  He was taken by one of their drivers to the airport.

  It had been decided Gabbi should fly that evening to Europe. A neurosurgeon at Tel Aviv’s Assuta Hospital – the most expensive and discreet in the country – had been asked, late, to advise. The medical opinion was that several European capitals had capacity beyond the best in Tehran, that a consultation at any one of a dozen locations might take little longer than the time needed for an examination, consideration and the decision to operate or not. It was explained that the couple could, within a dozen hours – twenty-four at most – be back at whichever airport they had flown into and looking for a flight home. The unit planned on the basis that information on a destination would be fed to them, and any who were privy to the surveillance mission mounted from the south-eastern Iraqi marshlands and harboured doubts did not share them.

  He did not know whether Leah had worked on this last stage of preparation. She had been normal in bed the previous night, and over a light breakfast, then had left on the bus. He had planned a gym work-out, and the phone had rung: the call to come in, and the instruction that he should bring a bag. She might have known, she might not.

  He would go to Rome. He had collected his passport: the Republic of Ireland was the flavour of that month. The days of big operations, he had been told, were over. There would never again be deployed as many as had gone down to the Gulf with tennis recquets and wigs. Nor did they loo
k for the spectacular of the exploding headrest on a car seat, the detonating mobile phone when held against an enemy’s face, or the poison squirting into an ear. One bullet, two maximum, was the day’s order.

  On arrival in Rome, he would be booked into an airport hotel, within sight of the terminals, and the call would come to send him forward or bring him home. He was not one to complain about the vagueness of the plans. He accepted what was put before him. If Leah had known, her kiss that morning as she went to work would have been no different.

  They would not hold the El Al flight for him if he was late: to delay take-off could only draw attention to him. The car went fast on the airport road. A poem was in his mind:

  Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

  Who never to himself hath said,

  This is my own, my native land!

  He was the servant of the state, and did not doubt what the state asked of him.

  Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,

  As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,

  From wandering on a foreign strand?

  He would not challenge what was asked of him, and did not believe he could look into a face, see life and humanity, and hesitate. He liked the poetry of Walter Scott, but most of all he loved ‘Patriotism’, and he had faith. He did not query where the road took him.

  When he’d boarded he would have forgotten the poem and would be engrossed in a business magazine.

  The arrangements were in place.

  It was a black-tie evening.

  The consultant had used his authority to make the booking for scan facilities and X-ray without the usual requirement of a patient’s name. It had, predictably, been queried. He had snapped back that there was more to medicine than filling in forms, and had seen a long-serving assistant wilt. He did not feel able to tell his staff that an unidentified Iranian, with the co-operation of the Berlin embassy and the likely support of an intelligence agency, suffering potentially terminal illness, was to be inflicted on them, so he had blustered and been unnaturally rude. His status at the university medical school was such that no complaint would be lodged.