A Deniable Death

by Gerald Seymour

  She had power up and the satellite signal was locked.

  It would have been in her eyes – lit by the fire: she had co-ordinates of where the sheikh lived and where his extended family were gathered, and the implication would have been that a bomb could go astray and she would give not a flying fuck if it did . . .

  Abigail Jones opened a link to the Agency in the communications area of the station, in the fortified, sanitised sector of the capital. She was answered. Could she identify herself? She was Alpha Juliet. She gave her message, spelled it out again, but with a codified alteration. Kilo – Tango – Alpha – Delta – Bravo – Juliet. She added one word, ‘Enroute’, then ‘0647’. The cut-out process had begun. She didn’t know to whom she spoke, and a technician didn’t know who had sent him that brief message, or the identity of the receiver at the Vicenza base. Cut-outs bred deniability and fogged a trail.

  She turned off the laptop and walked back towards the fire. Abigail Jones might have welcomed the thought that word of this would seep through the firewalls of need-to-know inside the Towers. It would be the same for her as for old Len Gibbons; whispers, nods and no complete picture. She would be noticed in the atrium hall, the canteens and corridors. She felt a little whiff of pride.

  Shagger broke the indulgence. He asked, ‘When do they come out?’

  ‘They have to retrieve the gear, then shout and start moving. I don’t have a time yet. Now let’s get these bastards on the road, and what’s left of that mutton. The big part’s done and we know where he’s headed. It’s a fantastic result.’

  He came into their darkened bedroom, hoping she was still asleep, but Lili’s voice was sharp: ‘Steffen? How is your headache?’

  When he had come home from the Rathaus, alone, her parents were already in bed. He had gone to the remaining guest room, where he had tossed and turned. He had heard the crunch of tyres, long after midnight, on his drive, then laughter – hers and a man’s – talking and finally the key in the door. The car had driven off. Perhaps a man she had known from childhood had brought her home.

  The bedside light came on and she sat up, her back against the pillows, the sheet tight to her throat. She wore nothing.

  He had been nine when his father and mother had been killed in the battle for Khorramshahr. They had died in the liberation of the city after nearly a year of Iraqi occupation. He had been told they could rejoice in martyrs’ deaths. He struggled to remember them, to picture their faces and hear their voices. His father had told him once that there was never a good or bad time for confession. It had involved him taking a handful of piastres from his mother’s purse to buy sweets from another kid at school. His father had told him that confession was a fine purging agent. He had gone to his mother, interrupted her work on medical case histories and seen her brow furrow with annoyance. He had said he had taken some money and bought sweets. She had shrugged and returned to her work.

  Now he said, ‘There was no headache.’

  ‘What, in God’s name, were you up to?’

  ‘I did not want to be there.’

  ‘That is pathetic. It was important – we talked about it.’

  Something of his pain would have been in his face. He was wrapped in a bathrobe, had come to their bedroom to find clothing for the day: he wore a suit, shirt, tie and polished shoes when he saw patients; he dressed down only for days with his students. He sat on the side of the bed. He took a deep breath – he was not Steffen but Soheil. He was not from Lübeck and German, but from Tehran and Iranian. He spoke the truth, bared himself.

  He spoke of a phone call from Berlin, a meeting with an Iranian, who might have been an intelligence officer of the VEVAK. He said he had cleared facilities for a patient to come for consultation, and had been rude to his staff who had queried why he had agreed to see a nameless patient with no medical history. He said he was trapped, that his past and origins had claimed him.

  The sheet dropped. Her hands reached out and gripped his shoulders. ‘You are German! You do not have to—’

  ‘Wrong.’

  ‘You are German. You are Steffen Weber.’

  ‘I was, but am not now. I am Soheil – I am my father and mother’s child.’

  ‘You do not know who you are treating? You do not know who their secret police are bringing?’

  ‘I do not.’

  Her back arched, and he saw the upper curve of her chest, which had been on show at the Rathaus. It would have been covered only with a loose wrap on the ride home.

  She shook him. ‘Call the police or the security people. This is not a banana country. You cannot allow thugs to manipulate you.’

  ‘I—’

  She flared, ‘Are you married to me? Yes. Are you their servant?’

  He could not answer her. He pushed himself up from the bed and went to the wardrobe. He took out a suit and a folded shirt, fresh socks and laundered underwear, a quiet tie and shoes that glinted with the polish the maid had applied. He closed the wardrobe, turned and knew what he would see.

  His wife, Lili, held the sheet high, covering herself. He thought that a woman would always cover her body if confronted by a stranger. He went to dress. He faced a long day in Hamburg before he returned to the medical school at Lübeck for his evening appointment with a patient whose name he had not been told. He did not think, then, that her marriage to a stranger could be saved.

  He reached the door and said. ‘They would hunt me, track me, find me if I refused. They will have chosen me because of my birthright. I assume that the patient is someone of military importance or in intelligence gathering. If you wish, Lili, to condemn me, you could lift the telephone and speak to the police or the security apparatus. I ask you not to . . . They have a long arm and a long reach, and I would spend the rest of my life searching the shadows at my back.’

  He closed the door after him.

  Sarah knew.

  The telephone on the desk had rung. He had been sitting on his desk, feet dangling, when it had screamed for his attention. He had picked it up.

  She knew the story.

  His face had seemed to contort as he’d listened. A greyness came to his skin, followed by pallor, and Gibbons’s tongue had flipped over his lips. She understood that a location had been given. Then Gibbons shook, as if throwing off an unwanted skin, a burden, and his back straightened. His only question: which airport were they going out from, City, Heathrow or military? It was as if, by the time he hung up, he had regained control.

  She was in the outer office and it was not her place to pressure him for the information so she’d kept her head down.

  He called to her that the town named as the target’s destination was Lübeck. She asked if the transport was taken care of, and he nodded, but without excitement. Well, perhaps anticipation of ‘excitement’ was unrealistic, she thought, as she looked through the open door at Len Gibbons, whose office – and professional life – she ran. She knew why the name of Lübeck had stopped him dead in his tracks. She knew the story.

  The story held in the Towers’ archive was titled The Schlutup Fuck-up, and not many knew it, but she did.

  When Sarah had gone to work for Gibbons her friend, Jennifer, had quietly let her know about the Schlutup Fuck-up and its effect on his career, the struggle the man had put in to shift it off his shoulders. A veteran in the archive and able to ferret in restricted areas, Jennifer had unearthed the story. To Sarah’s knowledge, Len Gibbons had never been back to that northern corner of Germany, up by the Baltic coast and close to the Trave river. Small wonder the poor wretch had blanched. The pain of the Fuck-up would have been acid-etched in his mind.

  She disguised her privileged knowledge with apparent indifference: ‘Will you be wanting me to come with you, Mr Gibbons?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Sarah, but thank you. A pretty ordinary place, Lübeck, and unlikely to present problems. Not a place to be mob-handed on the ground.’

  She wondered how he would be – in a modern world of supposed inte
grity – when he was there, in Lübeck, and deniability might be hard to rustle up. And she wondered, all those years ago, how much tittering there had been behind hands in the previous home of the Service, and how much a Fuck-up of dynamic proportions would harden a man – a man such as Len Gibbons. He had not mentioned the men in Iraq, not expressed praise or admiration for their work, nor sympathised with the conditions they would have operated under, nor referred to the back-up team. She could do jargon with the best of them: Sarah considered the lack of praise, admiration, of any acknowledgement for what others had achieved to be part of the ‘collateral’ of the Schlutup Fuck-up and the scars it had left.

  ‘Whatever you say. I asked . . .’

  ‘Good of you. Pretty straightforward stuff, and an experienced team around me.’

  It was a cold morning in the city but the early sun gave beauty to the skies. The blue was cut by the exhaust fumes spewed from the engines of a Boeing 737, bound for the Swedish ferry-port city of Malmö. Gabbi did not query whether the most effective route had been chosen for him, or the quickest, or the one that would provide greatest security. He would land by noon, would be met and driven to the departure point. Layers of people worked on the problems and came up with answers that he would not second-guess. It gave Gabbi satisfaction to reflect that so many laboured behind him. He was launched, and had no thought for those who had gained the information that had set him on his way.

  The car had taken them.

  There had been a further delay when Mansoor had looked down at the nearside rear tyre of the Mercedes and thought it too smooth, barely within legal limits, not fit for carrying passengers of such status. He had queried the tyre’s safety. He had almost accused the driver of taking a good tyre to the market in Ahvaz, selling it and replacing it with an inferior one, then pocketing money. They had argued, until the Engineer had clapped his hands and demanded that he and his wife left.

  The dust cloud thrown up behind the car had thinned, and the children had left cheerfully enough with their grandmother for school.

  The bird had stayed. He had as good a view of it as he could have hoped for. He did not tire of watching it. His father would not have understood, or his wife or his mother. Himself, until he had been allocated to the security of the Engineer, he would not have believed that a man could watch a bird that sat across a hundred and fifty metres of water from him, and pray that the moment would not pass. The focus of the glasses was on the feathers of the wings and neck, the clean lines of the beak – and on the expanse of mud behind it that was broken only by the debris of dead reeds.

  ‘What’s special about that bird?’

  ‘It’s endangered, rare – his obsession.’

  ‘We’re screwed. We can’t move while he’s there.’

  ‘State the obvious, young ’un.’

  ‘We can’t leave it but we can’t go to get it.’

  He couldn’t leave the scrape and move in the gillie suit across bare ground to the reed beds, then go into the water, wade to the mud spit and give the bloody bird a shove while binoculars were on him. He couldn’t tug out the microphone because the cable would be out of the water and visible. He couldn’t leave it there either, because that would break the disciplines. It would be the equivalent of leaving a semaphore sign that ‘UK was here’ when the microphone was found – as it would be.

  ‘Then we stay put. Night follows day, right? We go at dusk.’

  ‘That’s a whole day to kill.’

  ‘So sleep a bit, think of water.’

  ‘We haven’t got any.’

  ‘You ever get tired of stating the obvious, young ’un? Apparently not.’

  ‘I have to go forward and collect the stuff. I have to get . . .’ Badger didn’t finish. Foxy had grunted, sighed, turned his back on him. Maybe it was nine hours before he could move out to collect the kit. He could reflect and evaluate. He could count the flies that swarmed above the scrim net. He could watch the goon in the plastic chair and wonder how a grown man had such an empty skull that he needed to sit with a rifle across his knees and watch a bird that was not much different from the herons Badger had seen in Wales, and half as interesting as the eagles he knew from Scotland. He could think of Alpha Juliet and holding her, of sending the call-sign code back for a meeting at the extraction point, and . . . Time for interrogation.

  Badger asked, What was our justification for coming here?

  He answered himself: They said it was a rogue state and reckoned there were weapons that could nuke us, gas us, poison us.

  Were we surprised that they wanted us out so shot at us and blew us up?

  He answered himself, Gob-smacked.

  Did no one question the inevitable bit? That clever bombs might be provided by a neighbour and laid by a local? he asked. Did no one reckon it might be none of our business?

  He answered: Plenty did, but they were ignored, out of step with policy.

  Us coming here, was it done in my name? Badger asked.

  He answered, and his words rang in his mind, Who needed the opinion of a moron? The big people knew what was in your best interest.

  The big people – were they right to say that the man I fingered was our enemy?

  Irrelevant. It’s done, can’t be undone.

  Badger asked, Do I take pride in what I did – getting here, surviving here, fulfilling the mission – or am I ashamed?

  He paused, then answered, A luxury and an indulgence. A waste of space – and breath. Done and impossible to undo. You are, Danny Baxter, the little fellow who is told what to do and does it. A man will have his head blown off and a good woman who clears minefields – who is dying – will be widowed. You are a part of it, and it’s done in your name. Perhaps they’ll give you a fucking medal to polish.

  The sun was higher, and his need for water was cruel. His stomach was distended by the Imodium tablets, and the sores were suppurating. Their mission was complete . . . except that the bird sat on the microphone. There was nothing else for Badger to look at. He could see the bird’s back and fancied that a small loop of the cable had hitched up and was near to its folded legs.

  The goon sat in his chair. A guard had brought him coffee and a plate of sandwiches.

  Hours to kill before he went into the water. They had done their work and should by now have been with the guys in the Pajeros and Alpha Juliet. Congratulations should have been gruffly conferred and he might have had cream on the scabs and sores. He worked out which route he would take, and considered how dark it should be before he moved. The time dragged and Foxy slept. Then the pigs came and an otter passed by. Ducks were there, and coots, and the hours crawled. Badger’s body was racked with pain. He knew each step he would take when he went into the water.

  Chapter 13

  The sun had dipped and started its slide.

  Badger moved. When he shifted it was better for some of the sores and worse for others. The flies still swarmed and it was not yet dark enough for the mosquitoes. He could see the face of his wristwatch.

  ‘Not long, thank God,’ he murmured.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, “Not long.” ’

  When he was out of this hell hole, Badger reckoned, he’d want to shout. He would need – maybe at the airfield at Basra, or at Kuwait airport – to get up on a table in the spooks’ office or in a coffee lounge and bawl the roof off, yell, scream, shake the walls. He’d shout in the shower, and louder in the surgery when the medic examined the wounds that the biting creatures had given him. He craved to shout now at the goon who sat in the chair, facing the lagoon and the still water.

  Another thing he’d do, when he was back at any imitation of civilisation, was take the gillie suit, and the vest he wore under it, the pants and the socks, maybe even the boots, and chuck it all into one of those oil drums used as an incinerator, spill some fuel in and throw into it a lit roll of newspaper. They’d burn: the lice and fleas, ticks, ants and little red spiders. It would be sheer pleasure to watch them. Thr
ough the day, the thought of stripping off that gear and of the flames leaping in the drum had been companionship for Badger. He envied little about Foxy but his ability to sleep wherever and whenever.

  He squirmed a little. Any movement seemed to set off the irritation of the insect bites. The next evening, those that weren’t lodged in the gillie suit would turn up and find the meal ticket had moved on. His mind jostled between reality and fantasy, as it had done to kill the hours: fleas, ticks and ants who found the empty hide should consider themselves lucky not to have been in the suit when it went into the drum . . . Maybe he’d gone a little mad. Maybe ‘a whiff of insanity’ was part of a croppie’s job description. But it was good to let the madness take hold because then anxieties about it’s in your name and it’s done, can’t be undone were pushed back. He stretched his legs to the limit and his left thigh cramped.

  ‘About another hour, then I’ll be moving.’

  ‘That so, young ’un?’

  ‘The bird’s awake, seems it’s getting some life back.’

  ‘Should be hungry. It’ll need to go and feed.’

  ‘The further away the bloody better, and him with it.’