Why did he persist? Easier, by far, to say that surgery was no longer an option and tell the patient to go home and spend her remaining days with her family. He could not have been gainsaid. But there was about her something magnificent that had captivated him. He had thought her husband a rat-faced bastard, and a regime man, but the man’s face was wet with tears.
‘We would start the necessary pre-operative examinations tomorrow, and I believe I could have access to surgery time, at the university medical centre, in Hamburg-Eppendorf, within a week.’
Had this been a German woman, she would probably have reached out her hands, held his cheeks and kissed him. It happened often. This woman’s expression remained stoic and her fingers stayed clasped on her lap. He thought her beautiful. She might have been the price of his marriage and have cost him a place in the upper echelon of Lübeck society. Others now would be sitting in his waiting room, showing, perhaps, less fortitude.
‘If you ring my receptionist this afternoon she will advise you of a schedule. We will need details of how the account will be settled and will give you a breakdown of costs. In the meantime, you should hope the weather clears so that you can enjoy the old quarter of the city, but do not tax yourself too greatly. I will see you to your car.’
He stood. The man – an Engineer who made bombs that killed and mutilated troops far from their homes – blubbered like a child, but she was composed.
The tide was sliding away and the beach showed a damp ribbon of sand. He stood where it was dry and could see miles along the coast line . . . as he had that day. It was where the border had run from alongside the Dassower See, and its shore, then cut across the peninsula at its narrow point, leaving Priwall in the west, Rosenhagen and Potenitz in the east. It had come down from the sand dunes, now a nature reserve: Naturschutzgebiet – Betreten verboten. Then, the wire, the minefields and barricades had crossed the beach and gone far out into the waters of the Lübeckerbucht. It had been an early-summer day, with a brisk wind but clean sunshine.
The pastor had brought him.
The Lutheran priest had worn jeans, an open-necked checked shirt and heavy sandals, while the youthful Len Gibbons had dressed in grey slacks, lightweight brogues and a sports jacket of quiet herringbone. It had been the pastor’s invitation. He wants to see you once more, see the man he works for whom he trusts. His friend’s cousin is a border guard and it is arranged, but you must give no signal, and you will see him only very briefly, but it will be, for him, as if you touched hands. They had walked on the beach and had gone towards the fence, where it dropped down into the dirty Baltic water. A watchtower overlooked that section, and a patrol boat was out in the Bight. It had been a naturist’s beach, and they had gone among the flapping bosoms and shrivelled members of elderly males and had seen the guards, behind the fence or up in the towers, clicking their cameras; there had been a joke about porn stocks in the guards’ camp being low. They were the only clothed people on their side of the wire.
On the far side, every man was uniformed and armed, big dogs had howled at them, and Gibbons had seen him. Maybe for a half-minute, and at a distance of some three hundred yards, a young, slight-built figure had come from the gorse behind the dunes and walked towards the sea with a guard. Antelope had stopped close to the waterline, and gazed towards the barriers, then turned away. Gibbons and the pastor had gone back through the naturists and the young SIS officer had felt bonded with his asset, more trusting.
Two months later, the message had come through that new courier arrangements were required and Gibbons, to his desk chief, had spoken up on behalf of the asset’s request. Contacts had been supplied. Three at least, because of Gibbons’s naïveté and his superiors’ lack of due diligence, were dead, and their lives would have ended unpleasantly. The experience had made Len Gibbons – surviving by fingernail grip – fight as he had been fought. He had been taught, in a front-of-the-class seat, the value of ruthless application of his government’s policy. No sentiment intruded into his professional life, no qualms were permitted. Morality? He wouldn’t have known how to spell it.
So cold. Near his feet there was an old, pockmarked railway sleeper, with heavy chains nailed to it. It would have been a tiny part of the underwater system with which the East German state had sought to defend itself. Pathetic people, wiped from history . . . Eleven summers before Len Gibbons had come here, a teenage international swimmer from the east, Axel Mitbauer – 400-metres freestyle – had gone into the water up the coast, having anointed his body with petroleum jelly, and had swum fifteen and a half miles before reaching a bobbing buoy in the Lübeck Bight. Gibbons always took that story as proof of the superiority of his country, his creed, his calling. He still felt it as strongly as he had when he had last been on this beach those years before. He had never worn patriotism on his sleeve, but it was warming to be on a winner’s team.
The wind whipped him. Pretty shells crunched under his feet. He looked at his wristwatch. It might already have happened, or would be about to happen. He thought it time to start the journey home. He had done well. It was a triumph and would be recognised as such by the few inside the loop. Good to have been at this place of failure when a success was acted out.
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Lübeck 24.11.2011 09.12
Police report fatal shooting on the campus of the university medical school.
The Cousin heard it on a news flash on the local station – he had tuned in on his car radio for that purpose. ‘That’s my boy,’ he murmured. He ignored the No Smoking sign in the car, lit a cigarillo and drove a little faster down the wide highway. He felt good – like after the best sex or a decent dinner – and he’d stay with the station for updated news.
Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
Lübeck 24.11.2011 09.29
Eyewitnesses at the university medical school of the UNESCO heritage city of Lübeck report two dead and one injured in a gun attack outside the neuro-surgery unit of the teaching hospital. A confirmed fatality is Steffen Weber, a consultant at the hospital, who was shot on the building’s steps. An unidentified gunman fled from the scene of the attack. Police have now cordoned off the hospital grounds.
The swap had been done, vehicles switched – the clothing and the weapon would go back to Berlin for disposal – and the Friend drove carefully within the speed limit towards the ferry port on the road to Travemünde. He knew these people, had had experience of them for more than thirty years of his working life. He had been on the periphery of the teams that had gone into Beirut for the revenge killings after the Munich Olympiad, and those hitting targets in North Africa, Rome, Paris, London and Damascus. He would have said he could read the feelings of the trigger men, whether they fired pistols at close range or detonated bombs remotely. This one was extraordinary. The man beside him was quiet, relaxed and had yawned a couple of times. He showed no sign of having spent a bad night on a cot bed in an outer office at a local synagogue. It was on the radio, made a news flash and interrupted an item about the preparations for the Christmas fair and the hope of a boost to the city’s economy.
‘They have not spoken of him yet.’
‘They will. Give them time.’
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Lübeck. 24.11.2011 09.43
A Lübeck police spokesperson said that Steffen Weber, consultant in neuro-surgery, was pronounced dead at the scene after being shot on the steps into the building where he had his office. Also killed, she said, was a foreign national, as yet unnamed, and a driver from the Iranian embassy in Berlin was wounded – but with no life-threatening injuries. The unidentified gunman is believed to have escaped from the hospital grounds in a commercial black Nissan van driven by an accomplice.
She sat on a hard chair in a corridor. Her husband’s body and that of the consultant were beyond swing doors. Twice she had tried to breach them and twice she had been gently, but firmly, refused entry. No one spoke to her. If she spoke to them, her language was not understood. M
any hurried past and the swing doors flapped open for them, but not for her. There were policemen, doctors in gowns, nurses. She was not offered tea, coffee or water. She was forgotten. A woman came past her, escorted by uniformed men and bureaucrats in suits. She was blonde, expensive and boot-faced. Naghmeh assumed her to be the wife of the man who had tried, and failed, to shield her husband. Her head hurt, where her hair had been wrenched and there was blood on her face and hands, but no one seemed to see it.
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Lübeck, 24.11.2011 09.58
A police spokesperson has confirmed that the fatalities following a shooting in the grounds of the university medical school were a neuro-surgery expert, Steffen Weber, married with one child, and a foreign national, believed to be an Iranian male, who was escorting his wife from the building following a consultation with Dr Weber. An Iranian embassy driver was shot twice as he attempted to block the gunman’s escape. Across the street at the time of the shooting was twenty-three-year-old Manfred Hartung, a student: ‘The two men and the woman came down the steps from the doors. They were smiling and radiant, laughing. The driver of the waiting car opened the back door for the lady, and a short man, young, wearing workman’s overalls, laid a shovel on the pavement and stepped forward. I saw he held a handgun. He aimed at the man who held the woman’s arm, but the other attempted to put his body in the line of fire. The gunman shot four times. Two bullets hit the one I now know to have been a doctor, and when he fell, two more were fired at the man who was with the woman. The first put that man onto the steps and the woman fell over him, but the gunman pulled back her hair with one hand, placed his weapon against the man’s forehead and fired again. The driver put himself in the way of the gunman and was shot at close range. It was very fast, like a film, and I doubt it lasted more than fifteen seconds. It was an assassination. The gunman did not run but walked at a brisk pace up the road and a van drove him away.’
The talk was of cuts, small neat slashes to the budget on which his empire depended. The director general had Human Resources, Finance, Overseas Stations and Purchasing in his office and they nit-picked around costs and outgoings. Fiefdoms were defended and . . . He had the text on the television screen that was on the wall behind his department managers. The politicians demanded savings but were wary of the power he exercised. If he were to leak that the nation’s security was threatened by penny-pinching, the Westminster crowd would capitulate. He played the game, went through the processes. Something would be offered, but not much. They were on the matter of foreign travel – business class or cattle truck – and he read the text reporting an incident in a distant town in northern Germany. It was enough for him to collate the sums: three plus three made six.
Take the bastard down, Len, he had said, and the head had ducked in understanding. Gibbons, always described as ‘a safe pair of hands’, had delivered and might get a minor gong out of it for long service, but not much more, and there would be no meeting in this office with congratulations bouncing off the walls and no pumped handshake. It was deniable, and would be kept that way, but he felt a frisson of excitement and his blood flowed faster. Matter closed, business completed. He switched off the television screen. A good outcome.
‘Miss, are we fucked?’
Not a question that Abigail Jones needed to answer. Pretty bloody clear. She strained to hear better. Sounds filtered in her ears. There was the light wind that ruffled her hair, the fullness of her skirt, the scarf at her throat, and sang a little against the radio antennae on the Pajeros. Harding had a hacking cough. Hamfist had the habit, when tension rose, of slapping the palm of his hand across the stock of his weapon and making a rhythm of it. Corky kicked stones he found on the bund line. Some went off in ricochets and a few cannoned against the bulletproofed sides of the Pajeros. Shagger sang a hymn, barely audible – it would have been one he’d learned as a kid in chapel, in Welsh.
Hamfist asked again: ‘Are we fucked, miss? If we are, what can we do about it? Put it this way, miss, I’m not going into the hands of the crowd in front or the crowd behind. No chance, miss.’
Abigail Jones thought of all the women in the SIS, those who did power-walking up and down the corridors, jogged in the midday break, were shagged by line managers and desk chiefs to get up the ladder faster, contributed at seminars and think-tanks, and wanted responsibility. They would sweat for it and spread their legs to be given it. She hadn’t sought it and it had landed in her lap. ‘Where are you, girls, when you’re needed to share the load?’ More important: where was Badger? Prime importance: where was the chopper?
‘Nearly fucked, but still a little slack to wind in.’
She listened for the Black Hawk, but didn’t hear it. She knew it was coming, was airborne and had the co-ordinates. She knew also that the crew would have flown special forces, done difficult stuff, was experienced in extraction, but it had not, yet, showed.
‘Minimal slack, but a bit. You meant that, Hamfist, about not going into a cage?’
She didn’t know where he was, how far forward. Didn’t know how far he had to come. The Iranians, described by her guys as IRGC, were in a cordon line and coming through. They were some four hundred yards from her, her Boys and the two Pajeros. They had good firepower – her team couldn’t match the hardware – and came steadily towards the single man in the olive green, with the officer’s flashes, who tracked Badger.
Of Badger, there was neither sight nor sound. She had powerful binoculars, and the Boys did. They also had trained eyes for watching ground and the subtle changes movement made. Abigail had not seen him. Neither had Shagger, Corky, Hamfist nor Harding, who had the best eyes of them all. It was as though he had disappeared, burrowed into the ground and gone. The cordon line came to the officer. She couldn’t know what was said but saw the little cameo played out: authority gone, rank lost, humiliation on show. He was spoken to – the line had stopped – and his head didn’t lift. He might have mumbled an answer. A more senior officer’s hand thrashed across his face, and there would have been a drawn pistol in it. Her lenses showed the grey, or white, flashes of teeth falling, then the blood drops. He was hit again, was on his knees and kicked. How would it have been in her own crowd? If she failed to bring Badger home, and Foxy, if they were paraded on state television – dead or alive – and if a government had to squirm out apologies, how would it be? Not kicked, not losing teeth, not pistol-whipped, but out on her neck, erased from memory. She’d be – to those who knew – a cult figure of ridicule and hate. Perhaps better to be kicked.
‘Miss, their cage isn’t for me.’ Hamfist said it distantly, as if – each minute – her importance counted a little less.
She looked into their faces. Harding’s was impassive, told her nothing. Corky wouldn’t meet her gaze. Shagger murmured that goddamn hymn.
‘Could we go across country?’ It wasn’t rhetorical: she didn’t know the answer.
There was a chorus, but clearest was Harding: ‘We can’t, ma’am. Go down, get round the firepower in front of us and trek into Iranian territory. Go right or left and we hit water. We wouldn’t do a half-mile and they’d take the vehicles out with the weaponry they have. It would be a shooting war and not on ground of our choosing . . . and it does nothing for the reason we’re here – for the guys, Badger and Foxy. If you’ve looked behind you, ma’am, the outlook is worse.’
Behind was the hard place, the anvil.
The elevated track on which they had come was blocked by the Iraqi vehicles. The mounted machine guns had men behind them, and she could see the layers of belt ammunition, lit by sunlight. They were .5 calibre weapons and the Pajeros would not be able to go down into the dirt and survive that sort of attack. They were around two hundred yards behind her and the Boys. Local people, local troops, loathed the private security contractors. They might have had a decent relationship with their mentors in the American or British Army, but the private soldiers – not answerable to civilian or military law – were detested.
A single shot was fired, from a rifle. She ducked, then focused. An officer in a swagger pose, legs apart and barrel chest pushed forward, stood in front of the Land Rover’s bonnet, held an AK and had it pointed to the sun. A warning. Near to the officer, gesticulating, was the sheik who had lost a BMW top-of-the-range saloon.
She turned. Looked the other way. To the front. The IRGC men and their officer were closer now, and the beaten, kicked man lay in the mud far in their rear. The first shot was answered. She heard the crack of a bullet going high . . . between a rock and a hard place, a lump hammer and an anvil.
She searched the ground and couldn’t see him.
Two forces and two shots. She had nothing sensible to say and left her Boys hanging on her silence. If they were taken she would have a fair chance of not growing old in either the Evin gaol of Tehran or the Abu Ghraib lock-up in Baghdad. The Boys might have a poor chance of ever smelling fresh air again, particularly if an Engineer had gone into a gutter and bled his life away, and especially if tribesmen from a marsh village had been killed in the break-out with the Pajeros.
She searched again, every damn stone, every rotted reed stalk, a buffalo’s white bones and a frame for a boat encased in mud. She saw a movement and thought it was a rabbit. The lump hammer and the anvil came closer – maybe less than a hundred metres to each side of them. She heard the scrape as one of her Boys armed his weapon.
‘For fuck’s sake, miss, what now?’
It was because they had come back for him, for Badger. It was because Badger had gone to get Foxy. She could have screamed it. All bloody sentiment, the crap about going the extra yard to retrieve a colleague, obligations in a world she didn’t inhabit. She sucked in her breath and would scream that the bloody hole they found themselves in was their fault. Blame should not be levelled at her. She bit it down, clamped her teeth on her tongue, felt blood on her lips – and heard them.
A Deniable Death Page 46
