‘We shouldn’t be doing this, Paul. We’ll be shooting at ghosts in the dark. Elliot doesn’t know the half of it. I think you agree with me.’
‘Nine?’
‘What the hell is it now? They’re going in! What’s the problem now, man?’
Jeb staring at him. Shorty staring at him over Jeb’s shoulder:
‘Nine?’
‘What?’
‘You asked me to be your eyes and ears, Nine. I can only agree with Jeb. Nothing I’ve seen or heard warrants going in at this stage.’
Is the silence deliberate or technical? From Jeb, a crisp nod. From Shorty, a twisted smile of derision, whether for Quinn, or Elliot, or just all of it. And from the minister, a delayed blurt:
‘The man’s in there, for fuck’s sake!’ Gone again. Comes back. ‘Paul, listen to me closely. That’s an order. We’ve seen the man in full Arab garb. So’ve you. Punter. In there. He’s got an Arab boy bringing him his food and water. What the hell more does Jeb want?’
‘He wants proof, Nine. He says there isn’t enough. I have to say, I feel very much the same.’
Another nod from Jeb, more vigorous than the first, again backed by Shorty, then by their remaining comrades. The white eyes of all four men watching him through their balaclavas.
‘Nine?’
‘Doesn’t anybody listen to orders over there?’
‘May I speak?’
‘Hurry up then!’
He is speaking for the record. He is weighing every word before he speaks it:
‘Nine, it’s my judgement that by any reasonable standard of analysis we’re dealing with a string of unproven assumptions. Jeb and his men here have great experience. Their view is that nothing makes hard sense as it stands. As your eyes and ears on the ground, I have to tell you I share that view.’
Faint voices off, then again the deep, dead silence, until Quinn comes back, shrill and petulant:
‘Punter’s unarmed, for fuck’s sake. That was his deal with Aladdin. Unarmed and unescorted, one to one. He’s a high-value terrorist with a pot of money on his head and a load of priceless intelligence to be got out of him, and he’s sitting there for the plucking. Paul?’
‘Still here, Nine.’
Still here, but looking at the left-hand screen, as they all are. At the stern of the mother ship. At the shadow on her near side. At the inflatable dinghy lying flat on the water. At the eight crouched figures aboard.
‘Paul? Give me Jeb. Jeb, are you there? I want you to listen, both of you. Jeb and Paul. Are you both listening?’
They are.
‘Listen to me.’ They’ve already said they are but never mind. ‘If the sea team grabs the prize and gets him on to the boat and out of territorial waters into the hands of the interrogators while you lot are sitting on your arses up the hill, how d’you think that’s going to look? Jesus Christ, Jeb, they told me you were picky, but think what’s to lose, man!’
On the screen, the inflatable is no longer visible at the mother ship’s side. Jeb’s battle-painted face inside its scant balaclava is like an ancient war mask.
‘Well, not a lot more to say to that, then, is there, Paul, I don’t suppose, not now you’ve said it all?’ he says quietly.
But Paul hasn’t said it all, or not to his satisfaction. And yet again, somewhat to his surprise, he has the words ready, no fumble, no hesitation.
‘With due respect, Nine, there is not, in my judgement, a sufficient case for the land team to go in. Or anyone else, for that matter.’
Is this the longest silence of his life? Jeb is crouching on the ground with his back to him, busying himself with a kit-bag. Behind Jeb, his men are already standing. One – he’s not sure which – has his head bowed and seems to be praying. Shorty has taken off his gloves and is licking each fingertip in turn. It’s as if the minister’s message has reached them by other, more occult means.
‘Paul?’
‘Sir.’
‘Kindly note I am not the field commander in this situation. Military decisions are the sole province of the senior soldier on the ground, as you are aware. However, I may recommend. You will therefore inform Jeb that, on the basis of the operational intelligence before me, I recommend but do not command that he would be well advised to put Operation Wildlife into immediate effect. The decision to do so is of course his own.’
But Jeb, having caught the drift of this message, and preferring not to wait for the rest, has vanished into the dark with his comrades.
*
Now with his night-vision glasses, now without, he peered into the density but saw no more sign of Jeb or his men.
On the first screen the inflatable was closing on the shore. Surf was lapping the camera, black rocks were approaching.
The second screen was dead.
He moved to the third. The camera zoomed in on house seven.
The front door was shut, the windows still uncurtained and unlit. He saw no phantom light held by a shrouded hand. Eight masked men in black were clambering out of the inflatable, one pulling another. Now two of the men were kneeling, training their weapons at a point above the camera. Three more men stole into the camera’s lens and disappeared.
A camera switched to the coast road and the terrace, panning across the doors. The door to house seven was open. An armed shadow stood guard beside it. A second armed shadow slipped through it; a third, taller shadow slipped after him: Shorty.
Just in time the camera caught little Jeb with his Welsh miner’s wading walk disappearing down the lighted stone staircase to the beach. Above the clatter of the wind came a clicking sound like dominoes collapsing: two sets of clicks, then nothing. He thought he heard a yell but he was listening too hard to know for sure. It was the wind. It was the nightingale. No, it was the owl.
The lights on the steps went out, and after them the orange sodium street lamps along the metalled track. As if by the same hand, the two remaining computer screens went blank.
At first he refused to accept this simple truth. He pulled on his night-vision glasses, took them off, then put them on again and roamed the computers’ keyboards, willing the screens back to life. They would not be willed.
A stray engine barked, but it could as well have been a fox as a car or the outboard of an inflatable. On his encrypted cellphone, he pressed ‘1’ for Quinn and got a steady electronic wail. He stepped out of the hide and, standing his full height at last, braced his shoulders to the night air.
A car emerged at speed from the tunnel, cut its headlights and screeched to a halt on the verge of the coast road. For ten minutes, twelve, nothing. Then out of the darkness Kirsty’s Australian voice calling his name. And after it, Kirsty herself.
‘What on earth happened?’ he asked.
She steered him back into the hide.
‘Mission accomplished. Everyone ecstatic. Medals all round,’ she said.
‘What about Punter?’
‘I said everyone’s ecstatic, didn’t I?’
‘So they got him? They’ve taken him out to the mother ship?’
‘You get the fuck out of here now and you stop asking questions. I’m taking you down to the car, the car takes you to the airport like we planned. The plane’s waiting. Everything’s in place, everything’s hunky-dory. We go now.’
‘Is Jeb all right? His men? They’re okay?’
‘Pumped up and happy.’
‘What about all this stuff?’ – he means the metal boxes and computers.
‘This stuff will be gone in three seconds cold just as soon as we get you the fuck out of here. Now move it.’
Already they were stumbling and sliding into the valley, with the sea wind whipping into them and the hum from engines out to sea louder even than the wind itself.
A huge bird – perhaps an eagle – scrambled out of the scrub beneath his feet, screaming its fury.
Once, he fell headlong over a broken catch-net and only the thicket saved him.
Then, just as suddenly, they
were standing on the empty coast road, breathless but miraculously unharmed.
The wind had dropped, the rain had ceased. A second car was pulling up beside them. Two men in boots and tracksuits sprang out. With a nod for Kirsty and nothing for himself, they set off at a half-run towards the hillside.
‘I’ll need the goggles,’ she said.
He gave them to her.
‘Have you got any papers on you – maps, anything you kept from up there?’
He hadn’t.
‘It was a triumph. Right? No casualties. We did a great job. All of us. You, too. Right?’
Did he say ‘Right’ in return? It no longer mattered. Without another glance at him, she was heading off in the wake of the two men.
2
On a sunny Sunday early in that same spring, a thirty-one-year-old British foreign servant earmarked for great things sat alone at the pavement table of a humble Italian café in London’s Soho, steeling himself to perform an act of espionage so outrageous that, if detected, it would cost him his career and his freedom: namely, recovering a tape recording, illicitly made by himself, from the Private Office of a Minister of the Crown whom it was his duty to serve and advise to the best of his considerable ability.
His name was Toby Bell and he was entirely alone in his criminal contemplations. No evil genius controlled him, no paymaster, provocateur or sinister manipulator armed with an attaché case stuffed with hundred-dollar bills was waiting round the corner, no activist in a ski mask. He was in that sense the most feared creature of our contemporary world: a solitary decider. Of a forthcoming clandestine operation on the Crown Colony of Gibraltar he knew nothing: rather, it was this tantalizing ignorance that had brought him to his present pass.
Neither was he in appearance or by nature cut out to be a felon. Even now, premeditating his criminal design, he remained the decent, diligent, tousled, compulsively ambitious, intelligent-looking fellow that his colleagues and employers took him for. He was stocky in build, not particularly handsome, with a shock of unruly brown hair that went haywire as soon as it was brushed. That there was gravitas in him was undeniable. The gifted, state-educated only child of pious artisan parents from the south coast of England who knew no politics but Labour – the father an elder of his local tabernacle, the mother a chubby, happy woman who spoke constantly of Jesus – he had battled his way into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, first as a clerk, and thence by way of evening classes, language courses, internal examinations and two-day leadership tests, to his present, coveted position. As to the Toby, which might by the sound of it set him higher on the English social ladder than his provenance deserved, it derived from nothing more elevated than his father’s pride in the holy man Tobias, whose wondrous filial virtues are set down in the ancient scripts.
What had driven Toby’s ambition – what drove it still – was something he barely questioned. His schoolfriends had wished only to make money. Let them. Toby, though modesty forbade him to say so in so many words, wished to make a difference – or, as he had put it a little shamefacedly to his examiners, take part in his country’s discovery of its true identity in a post-imperial, post-Cold War world. Given his head, he would long ago have swept away Britain’s private education system, abolished all vestiges of entitlement and put the monarchy on a bicycle. Yet even while harbouring these seditious thoughts, the striver in him knew that his first aim must be to rise in the system he dreamed of liberating.
And in speech, though he was speaking at this moment to no one but himself? As a natural-born linguist with his father’s love of cadence and an almost suffocating awareness of the brand-marks on the English tongue, it was inevitable that he should discreetly shed the last tinges of his Dorset burr in favour of the Middle English affected by those determined not to have their social origins defined for them.
With the alteration in his voice had come an equally subtle change in his choice of clothing. Conscious that any moment now he would be sauntering through the gates of the Foreign Office with every show of being at his managerial ease, he was wearing chinos and an open-necked shirt – and a shapeless black jacket for that bit of off-duty formality.
What was also not apparent to any outward eye was that only two hours previously his live-in girlfriend of three months’ standing had walked out of his Islington flat vowing never to see him again. Yet somehow this tragic event had failed to cast him down. If there was a connection between Isabel’s departure and the crime he was about to commit, then perhaps it was to be found in his habit of lying awake at all hours brooding on his unshareable preoccupations. True, at intervals throughout the night, they had vaguely discussed the possibility of a separation, but then latterly they often had. He had assumed that when morning came she would as usual change her mind, but this time she stuck to her guns. There had been no screams, no tears. He phoned for a cab, she packed. The cab came, he helped her downstairs with her suitcases. She was worried about her silk suit at the cleaner’s. He took the ticket from her and promised to send it on. She was pale. She did not look back, even if she could not resist the final word:
‘Let’s face it, Toby, you’re a bit of a cold fish, aren’t you?’ – with which she rode away, ostensibly to her sister in Suffolk, though he suspected she might have other irons in the fire, including her recently abandoned husband.
And Toby, equally firm of purpose, had set out on foot for his coffee and croissant in Soho as a prelude to grand larceny. Which is where he now sat, sipping his cappuccino in the morning sunshine and staring blankly at the passers-by. If I’m such a cold fish, how did I talk myself into this God-awful situation?
For answers to this and allied questions, his mind turned as of habit to Giles Oakley, his enigmatic mentor and self-appointed patron.
*
Berlin.
The neophyte diplomat Bell, Second Secretary (Political), has just arrived at the British Embassy on his first overseas posting. The Iraq War looms. Britain has signed up to it, but denies it has done so. Germany is dithering on the brink. Giles Oakley, the embassy’s éminence grise – darting, impish Oakley, dyed in all the oceans, as the Germans say – is Toby’s section chief. Oakley’s job, amid a myriad others less defined: to supervise the flow of British intelligence to German liaison. Toby’s: to be his spear-carrier. His German is already good. As ever, he’s a fast learner. Oakley takes him under his wing, marches him round the ministries and opens doors for him that would otherwise have remained locked against one of his lowly status. Are Toby and Giles spies? Not at all! They are blue-chip British career diplomats who have found themselves, like many others, at the trading tables of the free world’s vast intelligence marketplace.
The only problem is that the further Toby is admitted into these inner councils, the greater his abhorrence of the war about to happen. He rates it illegal, immoral and doomed. His discomfort is compounded by the knowledge that even the most supine of his schoolfriends are out on the street protesting their outrage. So are his parents who, in their Christian socialist decency, believe that the purpose of diplomacy should be to prevent war rather than to promote it. His mother emails him in despair: Tony Blair – once her idol – has betrayed us all. His father, adding his stern Methodist voice, accuses Bush and Blair jointly of the sin of pride and intends to compose a parable about a pair of peacocks who, bewitched by their own reflections, turn into vultures.
Little wonder then that with such voices dinning in his ear beside his own, Toby resents having to sing the war’s praises to, of all people, the Germans, even urging them to join the dance. He too voted heart and soul for Tony Blair, and now finds his prime minister’s public postures truthless and emetic. And with the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he boils over:
The scene is the Oakleys’ diplomatic villa in Grunewald. It is midnight as another ball-breaking Herrenabend – power dinner for male bores – drags to its close. Toby has acquired a decent crop of German friends in Berlin, but tonight’s guests are not among them.
A tedious federal minister, a terminally vain titan of Ruhr industry, a Hohenzollern pretender and a quartet of free-loading parliamentarians have finally called for their limousines. Oakley’s diplomatic Ur-wife, Hermione, having supervised proceedings from the kitchen over a generous gin, has taken herself to bed. In the sitting room, Toby and Giles Oakley rake over the night’s takings for any odd scrap of indiscretion.
Abruptly, Toby’s self-control hits the buffers:
‘So actually screw, sod and fuck the whole bloody thing,’ he declares, slamming down his glass of Oakley’s very old Calvados.
‘The whole bloody thing being what exactly?’ Oakley, the fifty-five-year-old leprechaun enquires, stretching out his little legs in luxurious ease, which is a thing he does in crisis.
With unshakable urbanity, Oakley hears Toby out, and as impassively delivers himself of his acid, if affectionate, response:
‘Go ahead, Toby. Resign. I share your callow personal opinions. No sovereign nation such as ours should be taken to war under false pretences, least of all by a couple of egomaniac zealots without an ounce of history between them. And certainly we should not have attempted to persuade other sovereign nations to follow our disgraceful example. So resign away. You’re exactly what the Guardian needs: another lost voice bleating in the wilderness. If you don’t agree with government policy, don’t hang around trying to change it. Jump ship. Write the great novel you’re always dreaming about.’
But Toby is not to be put down so easily:
‘So where the hell do you sit, Giles? You were as much against it as I was, you know you were. When fifty-two of our retired ambassadors signed a letter saying it was all a load of bollocks, you heaved a big sigh and told me you wished you were retired too. Do I have to wait till I’m sixty to speak out? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? Till I’ve got my knighthood and my index-linked pension and I’m president of the local golf club? Is that loyalty or just funk, Giles?’
A Delicate Truth Page 5