A Deniable Death

by Gerald Seymour

  He wriggled over to lie on his side, his back to Foxy, and started to search in the bergen beside him for what he might need when Foxy went to get the microphone and the cable.

  They had reached Frankfurt. There was fog over Hamburg and the airport there was closed temporarily, but would reopen within two hours.

  She was exhausted. They sat on the silent stationary aircraft, with a full cabin of other passengers, and waited for the announcement that the pilot would soon be starting up the engines. They were now on their fourth leg. Ahvaz to Tehran. Tehran to Vienna with the national carrier. Vienna to Munich with the Austrian airline. Munich to Hamburg. She was tense and quiet. There was little the Engineer could do to comfort her, and old inhibitions died hard in him: he thought it would be ‘unseemly’ if he held her hand, with every seat occupied and a feeling that he was watched. Paranoia – what else? She was dressed as he had never seen her before. She had been given, in the toilets off the VIP lounge at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International, different clothes to wear, which she had protested she had never seen before. Now she sat in a skirt that reached a little below her knee, a thick cotton blouse and a solid jacket of deep green silk. It had been suggested that she no longer needed to wear a headscarf. They had Czech passports. She had whispered hoarsely, ‘Do I have to renounce my nationality, of which I am proud, and my religion, to which I am devoted?’ He had said, hesitantly, that concerned officials in the ministry considered she would attract less attention if she was not an obvious Iranian citizen. ‘Is attracting attention so important? Are we ashamed of ourselves?’

  Now her breathing was forced. He rang the bell above his seat, and when the stewardess came, he asked for water for his wife. It was brought, without grace.

  Through the porthole windows, the Engineer saw that lights glistened on the apron and that rain spattered down. He looked at his wristwatch and made the calculations. He said that by now, at home, it would be dark. She swallowed hard and said she hoped the children were in bed and would sleep well and . . . There was little to talk of that could be, in any way, appropriate. His only previous flight abroad had been as the student who went to Budapest. She held on her lap a briefcase that contained a full digest of her medical history with X-rays and printouts of scans. Abruptly, the music cut and a woman’s voice boomed. To ribald cheering, the plane shook as the engines ignited.

  ‘I think it is an hour to Hamburg. We take the local train to the centre of the city, then the faster one to Lübeck.’

  They were good boys, peasants, but not trained like the men of the al-Quds Brigade.

  He had drilled into them three times what they should do, where each would be. They were from the ranks of the Basij and they looked at him with the sort of awe that was predictable in simple youths who found themselves under the command of a war veteran of an élite force.

  They sat on the floor of the main communal area in the barracks and asked no questions but seemed to absorb what he told them.

  ‘It was always the duty of the defenders of the state’s frontiers to be on constant alert to prevent incursions from spies, terrorists, criminals, anyone who sought to undermine and betray the revolution of the imam. Perhaps, tonight, such a risk exists from our enemies, but we are ready.’ He dropped his voice, a trick he had learned many years earlier when he had been attached to Hezbollah, in the Lebanese Beka’a Valley, from a Syrian intelligence officer. ‘I could delay, do nothing, send for help from Ahvaz, and the senior men there would know I had no faith in you, that I did not think the Basij capable of confronting the spies, the terrorists, the criminals. If the threat is there, we will destroy it, and in the morning we will send for help from Ahvaz.’

  He had made a plan, on the table using sand from a fire bucket and coloured sheets of cardboard, that showed the house, the quayside and the pier, the lagoon, the barracks and the bund line that ran along the southern edge of the water. He used grass where the reeds should be and blue card for the water. He had been through the plan three times. He thought his wife, working on the computer at the al-Quds camp, would hear him praised.

  It was a simple plan, and he thought it a good one. The boys listened intently and held tight to their rifles.

  The landfall was lost behind them, taken into the mist.

  The ferry carried long-distance lorries and their trailers and was en-route from the Swedish port of Trelleborg, to the south of Malmö. It would reach its destination, Travemünde, after a 16.00 departure to sail across the Baltic, at 23.00 hours. It had been a close-run thing, but a representative in the Swedish capital had achieved, in eight hours, what had been asked of him. A passport had come from an embassy safe, and Gabbi’s photograph put in place. He was Greek Cypriot, living in Norway and working in the haulage industry. He was a driver’s mate for a shipment of bulk timber. To have created the passport, the biography and gained the necessary seat in the cab was a triumph for the representative, and the driver’s mate had a foot-passenger ticket to return on the ferry the following morning or on the additional sailing in the late afternoon. He would not have said it himself, but the representative, who had met him at Malmö’s airport, Sturup International, had told him that no other intelligence-gathering agency in the world could have put together such a package so quickly. They liked cargo ferries, from which cars and holidaymakers, passengers not connected with long-distance business, were barred. Customs and Immigration checks, and those for embarkation, were bare formalities and the representative had said it was a perfect route.

  Gulls wheeled over him.

  He stood at the rail, in fading light, and watched the long, straight line of the boat’s wake. He shivered, sucked in air and used his tradecraft. He wore a long-peaked baseball cap, a scarf covering his mouth, and gloves, and would spend the entire sailing on deck, not inside where it would be noticed if he kept on the cap, scarf and gloves – and on deck no cameras would record him. The wind was brutal and there was sleet in the air, but he stayed at the rail.

  The men were in place where he had positioned them. He was ready. Mansoor’s last action was to take out from a shed behind the barracks a small inflatable dinghy capable of carrying four men.

  He did not have night-vision – such equipment was kept by combat forces – but he had good eyes, and the moon would be up soon. He had good ears too.

  He watched and listened. He did not know what he might see or hear, but he felt confident. If he saw and heard nothing, if he had imagined the loop of wire and the tubing on which the bird sat, then he had not called out a platoon from Ahvaz and could not be ridiculed.

  The dark had come and sounds rippled from the lagoon, from the birds and frogs and the pair of pigs, and he believed – concentrating his gaze into the darkness – that the Sacred Ibis, a bird revered for three millennia, had not moved. It was the key.

  He stood in the middle of the road and gave his memories full rein.

  The road – once the northern trunk route from old West German territory to the German Democratic Republic – ran between Lübeck and Schwerin. East and West had met here, separated by a white line that had been painted across the tarmac. It was natural that Len Gibbons should come to the village that straddled the road and was called Schlutup.

  He stared into the middle distance. The dusk was coming slowly and the wind whipped him. He saw only desolate heathland, where no trees grew: dead ground. It had been his place, his territory. He had been ‘Gibbo’ then, and considered bright enough in his twenty-ninth year to be sent from London to join the Bonn station and be given responsibility to run assets in the northern sector. Not as exciting as Berlin, but good work that would have been the envy of the peers who had joined the Service with him. The man had been codenamed Antelope.

  Where he looked now there had then been the Customs post and the base from which the Grenztruppen and the Staatssicherheit had been deployed. It had been a complex of buildings, reached by a corridor between high wire fencing, a minefield, dogs, watchtowers – all the paraph
ernalia that awful state had needed to keep its citizens from flight – and now was levelled. The barracks of the border guards from which they deployed to the watchtowers and patrols in the killing zones had been flattened; the cells and interrogation rooms of the Stasi had been bulldozed. It had been Gibbo’s ground when he had run Antelope. He accepted that a bewildering coincidence had brought him back to Lübeck, extraordinary and unpredictable. He thought that the Fates had dealt him a fine hand, the chance to obliterate old memories and wounds. A successful killing would wipe clean the slate of the Schlutup Fuck-up.

  They had travelled – himself, the Cousin and the Friend – on separate flights. His had taken him via Brussels and then a connection to Hamburg. The Cousin had also gone to Brussels, but had had a fixed-wing charter bring him on to the smaller airfield outside Lübeck. The Friend would have travelled in his own mysterious way, by his own routes and channels. Another hired aircraft, most likely, and documentation that would fool most experts and certainly would have been accepted by local officials. They had met by the canal in Lübeck, near to the gardens between the Muhlen and Dankwarts bridges and sat on a bench. The Israeli had smoked cigarettes and the American a small cigar – Gibbons had yearned to ditch his abstinence. The pieces of the jigsaw had come together.

  It was where the story of Antelope had been launched by a pastor. The young Gibbons, fresh-faced and revelling in a job that brought him to the cusp of Cold War action, had been standing almost at the point where he was now and had been staring up that road past the barriers. Dogs had been leaping on their leashes at him and he would have been under the gaze of half a dozen pairs of binoculars. Three or four Zeiss and Praktica cameras would have been focused on him. He had known, then, so little of the East. He had once been on an Autobahn drive direct to West Berlin, and on the military train that ran across communist territory to Berlin from Helmstedt in the West. There was little to learn from watching the empty road, the ground where no cattle grazed and the expressionless faces of the guards, so he had turned and walked down the hill.

  The pastor had approached him, sidled to his shoulder . . . The pastor had a friend who was trapped in the East. There was a café down the road from which the old border had run and they had gone there. The Pastor had refused alcohol and drunk tea. He had talked more of his friend. Where did the friend work? At the telephone exchange in Wismar – where else? Trumpets had blasted, excitement had gone rampant. Soviet military formations were close, naval forces had moorings on the Mecklenburgerbucht to the north and at Rerik and Warnemunde to the east, and the telephone exchange had the potential to offer up the pouches of gold dust so coveted by the Service. He had filed his report of the meeting for consideration in Bonn and London. With reservations, and instructions for due care on Gibbons’s part, Antelope had come alive.

  He stood in the road and was oblivious of the traffic. The dusk had arrived sharply enough for the oncoming lights to dazzle him. Cars, vans and lorries swept past, the slipstreams buffeting him. He stood his ground. The jigsaw’s pieces had slotted together well. He had remarked, without apparent humour, that the marzipan factor had clinched the location, Lübeck. The Americans had the database, and were able to name an Iranian-born neurosurgeon resident in Lübeck who practised there. He performed complicated surgery either in the city’s medical schools, or in Hamburg; there was a home address on Roeckstrasse. The Israeli said that a man would come from Berlin and would have with him necessary equipment. The facilitator was in transit and would reach the city late in the evening, but had not volunteered details of the man’s travel plans. They had gone their ways and would meet again in the late evening. Hands had been shaken. A course of action had been launched and would not now be revoked. They had stood, and the Cousin had remarked, off-hand, ‘I say this, Len, with real pleasure. Your boys who went forward – that old guy and the youngster – they did us proud. My sincere congratulations to them.’ He’d answered that they were unable to beat it straight out because there was kit to recover, but about now they would be on the move and, yes, it had been a first-class effort. He had not thought about them before or since the Cousin had spoken of them.

  It was, in a sense, a pilgrimage that Gibbons had made to Schlutup, straight from that bench in his hired VW. There was a small centre, deserted, but dominated by the church where the pastor retired now, had stood in while the incumbent was away. Then there were residential streets of bungalows with a sprinkling in the gardens of the winter’s first snow. He had parked and walked past a lake – ducks had scattered off it. He had remembered the lake, and there were concrete bunkers that British military engineers had put in place when the borders were defined and the barriers had gone up; the structures were now collapsed and overgrown. There was a paddock with horses. One was old, a skewbald, and had had its head down with tiredness. There was a trace in his memory of a young horse, roan on grey, possibly. He had walked onto the death strip where there would have been smoothed sand, firing devices and patrols, and the bankruptcy of the regime was on show. He had found an apple tree. A few rotten fruits had survived the autumn and he imagined the bored young guard, a conscript, far from home, who had tossed down a core and bred the tree. The death strip was now in the possession of hikers and dog-walkers, and he had met children out with a teacher, a man with Schnauzers and a woman with a yellow Labrador. He had walked along the strip where the fences and towers had been dismantled two decades earlier, where few signs survived to corroborate his past and the Schlutup Fuck-up.

  The place, and Antelope, had governed his life, fashioned and shaped it, and had made him the man he was. So much had been expected – based on recommendations from young Gibbo – of a traitor working inside the Wismar telephone exchange. Few escaped their past, and actions of many years ago, and Len Gibbons was not among those who did. The pastor had introduced him – tantalisingly brief – to a man in the café, and had murmured that he was indeed from the exchange, allowed across the frontier to watch a football match between Dresden and Hamburg. Bundles of phone dockets were passed, with red crosses on them if they were between military units, and spools of tape. He had been with the man no more than fifteen minutes and had thought him brave, committed and, almost, a hero. He had seen him walk to the pastor’s car outside the café and be driven away. The pastor then had access to the East and became a regular and reliable courier, until his health was said to have failed. The question was raised: did the Service have potential couriers in the East, men and women who could be trusted? The question had been answered, and the Schlutup Fuck-up was born. They were old wounds but had not healed.

  It was an indulgence for Len Gibbons to have come here. He knew all the escape stories from this section of the Inner German Border: home-made balloons, gliders built in garden sheds, tranquilliser pills buried in meat and thrown to the dogs, then payment to the traffickers, who would attempt to hide a client under the back seat of a car, with sedatives for a child, and bluff a way past the border troops and the Stasi. One appealed to him hugely. The next day, while the hitman worked and while his own presence on the streets was unnecessary, he would go a little to the north to where he had walked for comfort and peace thirty years earlier, and he would think of Axel Mitbauer of the East German national swimming team. He would be there the next morning because it was unnecessary for him to witness a killing, merely to have a role in its organisation.

  He turned away. A car blasted its horn at him, but he ignored it and began to walk to Schlutup’s church, dedicated to St Andrew. He had spent much time there and thought that being there had sculpted him, made him the man he was – whom some hated, some despised and few admired.

  ‘You didn’t have to,’ Badger whispered.

  Low, but almost brusque from Foxy: ‘ “Didn’t have to”?’

  ‘About you and her. You didn’t have to tell me.’

  ‘Don’t remember telling you anything.’

  ‘Please yourself.’

  ‘I usually do.’

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nbsp; It was enough and couldn’t be put off longer. Did he regret the agony-aunt session now? They hadn’t spoken in the last quarter of an hour and the light had failed. Badger would have gone out, loosed the cable, then faffed about until he found the microphone. He would have come back, reeled in the cable and not thought too much about it. Foxy had made it a big deal: he had talked about danger, and the wire, and suggested the goon had seen and noted. God’s truth, Badger had observed nothing that rang alarm bells, and he’d thought he had a good nose for them.

  ‘And you don’t have to.’

  ‘ “Don’t have to”?’

  ‘You don’t have to go. I can do it.’

  ‘Far as I’m concerned you can barely wipe your arse. What I told you to do, do it and be ready. Then we shift straight out.’

  ‘It’s done and checked.’

  ‘Well, check it again.’

  Foxy started the slow wriggle backwards, using his elbows and knees to move himself, and his head went past Badger’s chest. Badger ducked – shouldn’t have spoken, but did anyway. ‘Is it her badmouthing you, sneering about heroes and Bassett, letting you know you’re second-rate, that hurts?’

  ‘You’re out of order, young ’un, and taking a liberty. I don’t remember telling you anything. Reckon I’ll be about fifteen minutes.’

  He was gone and Badger was alone. The space beside him gaped. He began to clear out the inside of the scrape and shove their rubbish into his bergen. He took out the Glock and could do the business by touch: he checked the magazine and felt that the safety was in place. He heard, very faintly, Foxy’s crawl towards the reed beds. He pulled their kit out of the hide, lay in silence on his stomach and waited.