A Deniable Death

by Gerald Seymour

  Badger hit the reeds. They lacked the life of the beds beside the hide and were diseased, stunted. He could hear, to his left, shouts and dried stems breaking. He thought – so far – that a fragile curtain of morning mist might have saved him. Useless things now played in his mind. There had been big estates above the Thames, outside Reading, and kids he had known had earned cash from beating: they had been paid to drive reared birds, most of which could barely fly, into the cordon where the guns were. When they came out of the cover they were blasted. He was down on his knees and still carried Foxy, didn’t allow him to slide off his shoulder. He dragged at some broken reeds and made a shallow pile of them over the two bergens. He had, now, only the pistol, the magazine already in it and one more, and he had short-range communications that would link with Alpha Juliet. Everything else that should have been brought home and returned to Stores was in the two bergens. It hurt him to abandon them. Badger pushed himself up and turned his back on them. He began to thread through the stems. The light was growing.

  ‘Worst thing I’ve ever done, Foxy, is dumping that kit. What I do reckon, though, is that she’ll be at the extraction place. We have to get there. She won’t ditch us like I ditched the bergens. She’s the sort of girl who’ll be there. She’s great. Foxy, all that shit you told me about your woman, about your Ellie, I’ve forgotten it. I’m going to get you to where Alpha Juliet is, Foxy. That all right?’

  He went carefully, and the light grew. He could do a better pace without the backpacks to pull, but he knew the cordon line would be in front of him, and the guns. Who knew where he was? No bastard did. Who cared where he was? Alpha Juliet might. No other bastard would. He was deniable. No reason for any bastard to know or care.

  Gone2work. A cryptic text to Len Gibbons had shown up on his mobile. It was as if one of the last pieces of the jigsaw had slotted together. Not the final one, but one of the most important.

  He was not a grandstander. He didn’t expect a seat where he could sit and watch the deed done. It was still dark on a late November morning at the leisure resort of Travemünde, up the river and north of Lübeck, facing into the Baltic. The text had been sent by the Cousin. The message told Gibbons that the consultant had left home, had arrived at the university and gone into the block where his offices were. Good enough. It seemed to indicate that no security alert had been launched.

  Further up the floodlit quay, out towards the groyne on which the lighthouse flashed, there were piers on wood piles and cormorants gathered on the hand rails – black, with long necks, big beaks and the lungs to give them diving time when they hunted. They had been perched on those hand rails when he had been here thirty-something years before. Then there had been a winter morning when he had waited for the first ferry to return across the river from the village of Priwall and bring with it the workers who had jobs at Travemünde or Lübeck. He had last been here a few weeks before the collapse of the Antelope operation. It was, for Len Gibbons, almost a pilgrimage and he might have brought flowers with him if a kiosk had been open. Had he done so, it would have been because he cared to remember the lives that had been lost because of his trust in a man he had met once and so briefly and seen once from a distance. To make this journey, come here and wait in the bone-piercing cold, with the wind snapping off the sea, was of greater significance to him than when he had loitered outside the church of St Andrew and watched the man who had been a pastor.

  The ferry came towards him. As he remembered it, there was a café on the far side of the river. He would buy himself a hot breakfast – eggs, sausage, a heated pastry and coffee. He was savouring the thought when the phone bleeped again.

  Both arrived, all in place. Warm congrats, your favourite Cousin.

  He read it twice, then deleted it. Not quite the final piece, but so close.

  He had believed in confusion and a complex chain of command, had dared to hope that the terse message, passed through many links in a chain, reporting the capture of Foulkes did not mean that a protective net would be tossed over the target. The Engineer and his wife were now at the consulting rooms and the building was not flooded with detectives and armed uniforms. By a miracle, word from that distant corner of Iran had not seeped out, A cargo ship, monstrous in the dark, passed in front of the ferry.

  He shivered, from the cold, nerves. He could absorb the Baltic’s November chill. Len Gibbons had done time as maternity cover in Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn, and a decade earlier he had been the second man in Stockholm. Had it not been for the Schlutup Fuck-up he would never have been sent as a fill-in to the former Soviet satellite, and if he had gone to Sweden it would have been as the station officer. The boat laden with containers had passed, the ferry had come in and the ramp was down. He walked on board, as he had done three decades before. Then he had left the pastor on the quay. Now he stood with a few hardy spirits on the deck.

  The ramp was raised, and he felt the shudder of the engines below his feet. His mobile bleeped again. His ‘Friend’ was in place.

  Len Gibbons switched off the phone, opened its back section and removed the chip. He dropped the phone first into the white wake of the water that was pushed aside by the ferry’s passage, then the chip. It floated for a fraction of a second, then was swamped. He had broken all contact with the conspiracy. In a minute they were at the Priwall ramp.

  He felt calm, comfortable, and satisfied with a job well done. He had brought them together and they would face each other within the hour. He had no doubt that the assassin in the pay of a semi-friendly government would show the necessary skills and take the life of an engineer who served a semi-hostile state.

  Late that afternoon he would drop off his hire car, fly from Hamburg to Brussels, take the last Eurostar connection into London, then a bus to the Haymarket. He would climb the stairs of what would be, probably, a deserted building, but Sarah would be there, and he’d give her the present he would buy before leaving Lübeck. Perhaps she’d blush a little, and murmur something about his ‘thoughtfulness’. The office would be cleared and ready for them to move out. She would have known the outcome of the operation by listening to any news bulletin, and he might invite her for sherry in his club’s bar. Then they would go their separate ways.

  The following morning he would leave his train at Vauxhall and walk to the Towers. It would be well known that a prominent Iranian weapons scientist had been ‘taken down’ in the German city of Lübeck the previous day – it would have been broadcast widely and reported in the newspapers. A minimal minority would find the opportunity, out of sight, to press his hand. Only later would rumour and gossip spread: he would then be a noted man, respected. He chuckled.

  He came off the ferry at the side of the ramp. The cars sped past and threw up the puddles’ water. He went to the café for his hot breakfast.

  It was right that he had made the pilgrimage.

  The Cousin, too, had no more use for a mobile phone. The main part, not the inner brain, was tossed casually into the back of a corporation rubbish cart as it cleaned streets before the rush-hour began; the brain was wrapped in the paper bag that had contained the pastry he had bought from a stall by the Mühlenbrücke. He dropped it into a bin in the park off the Wallstrasse. He felt bullish.

  Like Gibbons and their Friend, the Cousin expected to stay in the city for the next hour, no longer. There was nothing he could do in that time, and his connections were now broken. He would then drive south, fast, to Hannover. He would leave his hire car there and pay his bill – false name and cards – and a military driver would take him far to the southwest, towards Kaiserslautern. By late evening he would be on a military flight out of the Ramstein USAF base. Those who disapproved of extra-judicial killing would not know about it, and those who did not would pump his hand and slap his back.

  He was in the park, and shared a bench with a derelict guy. He bought the man coffee from a stall and a pastry with a custard centre. The derelict had few teeth and bobbed his head in gratitude. The Cous
in felt no need to communicate any more than his general sense of well-being. It was not every day there was a chance to waste the bastards who had done the damage in Iraq, and were in the process of getting devices into Afghanistan. Christmas was coming early.

  The images in his mind were of bombs detonating in those far-off places. He had forgotten them since he had left the rendezvous city of London. As if why they were in Lübeck, and what they were doing, had no relation to the deserts and mountains where the young guys were sent. As if he, the Friend and Gibbons had lost sight of the reasons and been buried in the detail of it. He laughed, and the derelict cackled with him. The Agency man came from small-town Alabama where there were good fire-and-brimstone preachers. Ten years earlier he had visited an elderly uncle; it had been the fourth Sunday after the planes had been flown into the Twin Towers. He could not remember where the text had come from, which Old Testament chapter, but the preacher that morning had said, ‘ “If I whet my glittering sword and my hand take hold on Judgment, I will render Vengeance on my enemies and will reward them that hate me.” ’ Fine stuff. Allelujahs to go with it, and plenty.

  The rain had started to patter on his shoulders. There were, of course, the two guys who had gone forward, identified the destination and hit trouble, but an alarm had not been raised and the hit was in place. The target faced Judgment, was adjacent to Vengeance. The two guys were blanked out of his mind, deniable, and he laughed again, then walked away, leaving the derelict with the last of his pastry. He would have time for a quick walk around Lübeck, the renovated historic buildings, before driving away.

  He laughed because he thought vengeance a fine rich dish, best served as a surprise.

  He sat in the van, and did not smoke or drink take-out coffee. Instead he read. Gabbi’s choice was to be among favourites.

  Just as his driver, who had brought him the weapon during the night, did not know his name, so Gabbi would have been kept in ignorance of the driver’s – except that his wallet had been flipped open, a euro note extracted, and he had seen the plastic-fronted pouch inside it with the ID that would take the man, in the name of Amnon Katz, into the car park of the Embassy of Israel, 14193 Berlin. Little escaped Gabbi. Probably, when he was back in Tel Aviv tomorrow, and had his debriefing, the day after tomorrow, he would mention that the embassy’s man had not satisfactorily hidden his identity or troubled to disguise his workplace.

  He thought the man with him, Amnon Katz, squirmed too often in his seat. Maybe the people who should have escorted him were on holiday or had made excuses. After the chaotic affair of the Emirates killing, intelligence-gathering officers had sought to distance themselves from the work of his unit. He had Amnon Katz, who had been calmer in the night and had spoken coherently. Perhaps he had not slept. Perhaps he had a knotted stomach. Perhaps he had doubts, now that he was up against the place where a man would be killed. They had a view of the steps leading up to the main door of the block and of the lit windows on the first floor. A saloon car was parked at the kerb. The top of a man’s scalp showed above the driver’s seat headrest. There was no other security in sight. He coughed hard, cleared his throat. He had not drunk any coffee because it would be unprofessional to be stuck outside on a cold pavement and need to piss. He could feel the weapon lodged in his trouser belt, under the overalls. He reached to open the van’s passenger door.

  The man, Amnon Katz, gave him his hand. For encouragement? Gabbi ignored it.

  He closed the door quietly behind him and went to the back of the van. He took out a road-cleaning brush and a couple of bin liners, and smiled ruefully. He would be fucked if there were no leaves to collect and no rubbish to sweep up. He had a shovel and thick, industrial gloves.

  He did not look behind him but walked towards the parked car and the steps. The wind blew harshly down the road in the centre of the teaching-hospital complex and buffeted his face. His baseball cap was well down over his eyes and a scarf closely wrapped at his mouth. The cameras would be rewarded with little. And the van? He heard its engine start. It reversed, and would be driven away. Somewhere behind him, watching him, was the stubbily built man with the old face, the bright eyes of youth and the coldness at the mouth who had met him off the ferry. Gabbi trusted that man, and regarded him as a friend. He was the one who would take him away when it was done.

  He began to sweep the gutter – slush from the salt put down, a few leaves, some soil washed off the frozen shrub beds. He went slowly, had no wish to be close to the saloon car in front of him. He had seen his target go inside, with his arm around his wife’s shoulders, but the target’s back had been to him and he had seen little of the face. The condition of the wife, and the verdict she would be given, did not concern him. Each time Gabbi pushed the broom, he could feel, against his belly, the stock of the pistol – and now his mind was closed.

  They sat very still, and close. The Engineer did not speak and neither did his wife, Naghmeh.

  They were in the waiting room. The door to the office was shut but they heard his voice and thought he made telephone calls. Men in loose-fitting, unbuttoned white coats crossed the waiting room, knocked and went inside, then nurses in starched white trousers and figure-hugging white jackets. There was a woman at a desk close to the door, a gatekeeper. She did not make eye contact with either of them but kept her face bent over her screen. Soft music played from high speakers. There were magazines but they did not read them. They had nothing to talk about. His wife would not have wished to hear about the progress he was making in extending the range of electronics that could transmit the signal to the receiver fitted in the device, and do it from further outside the bubble that protected the enemy’s convoys from remote detonations. He had no interest now in which block of land beside which length of raised road leading to which village would be granted the necessary funding for a mine-clearance team to begin work.

  Their lives were on hold and they barely dared to breathe. Neither could read the faces of those who went into the consultant’s room or left it. He could not be pessimistic or optimistic, and she could do no more than hold his hand.

  It was sudden.

  The door opened. He was shirt-sleeved, but with a tie in his collar, well shaven and looked to have slept. His face gave no clue. The Engineer had heard it said that an accused could always tell, from the moment he was brought back into the courtroom and confronted the judge, whether he would hang or take the bus home to rejoin his family. He felt his wife’s hand stiffen in his. She clung to him and their fingers locked.

  There were X-rays in a pouch in the consultant’s hand and he spoke quietly to the gatekeeper, who nodded. Neither gave evidence of what was said, and he waved for them to follow him inside.

  They crossed the waiting room shakily, did not know what awaited them.

  Presence and courage radiated from her, as they had on the previous evening. In his experience, talking to patients was more difficult than performing complicated surgery on them, and he had been told that his manner was not always satisfactory: he should curb brusqueness when the news was bad and elation when it was good. He was tired and had slept poorly. Lili would have fled to her mother, taken their daughter with her, would have poured into her parent’s ear a litany of his craven acceptance of a call to old loyalties. She might come back to him, might see that his affluence would not easily be replaced on a divorcee’s circuit, if he made a call and grovelled – he accepted that their lives were altered, that a crack had appeared that would not easily be repaired. She might not come back.

  They intruded into his life.

  If they had not come to Lübeck, he would have slept well and been against the warmth of his wife’s body. He would have been woken by his daughter climbing across him . . . but he had woken cold. She looked into his face. He indicated the chairs, but they stood in front of him, silently demanding his answer.

  He said, ‘There is much to talk of and I ask you not to interrupt me but to listen carefully to what I say. I have identifie
d a glioblastoma, grade two, which is confirmation of what you have already been told by your consultants at home. The tumour is close to what we call an “eloquent” area . . .’

  Having intruded into his life they had derailed it. He held up the scan images. ‘I want to show you what we have learned.’

  ‘Time to go. Hit the road, guys.’

  She thought she sounded authoritative and that her voice had a crisp bite. The light was up. Dawn slipped into day. Abigail Jones’s last birthday had been her thirty-third, which should have marked her out as being at the peak of her powers. She did not believe the crap about veterans’ experience outweighing youth’s innovations. All she had worked at now hung precariously on that day’s events. She couldn’t escape it. The sun was low, bright on her face. It threw grotesque shadows.

  Those shadows were edging nearer to her. She couldn’t say how fast they advanced with each minute, but at first light they had started to form, nudging through the broken gate to the compound. They were now well up the track towards her, and if she didn’t take control, get the show on the road, they would be tripping against her feet. Hard for her to see the men because the sun was behind them, but there would be a hundred, perhaps more. Nor could she see what weapons they carried. Some of the money she had paid out to the old bastard, the sheikh, would have been distributed but more would have gone into his own biscuit tin, and a suggestion would have been made that there’d be more where it had come from. She heard the sound of the big engines behind her. It would be about bluff, always was. Either the sea would part or it would not. If it did they would be fine, dandy, and on their way. If it did not, they’d be swamped and drowned. The Boys would have sorted it out for themselves: Corky in the first Pajero with Harding riding shotgun, and she would be with Hamfist, close behind – like up against the fender. Shagger would be alongside Hamfist, and they’d try to do it with gas, and if not, it would have to be live rounds – and if it was live rounds, her career was mired and she would be gone.