He didn’t help her, but sat down and swivelled away from the pictures of bomb damage. His shoes were on the corner of the desk and his chair tilted comfortably as he gazed at the map. Because Len Gibbons had never been to Iraq, let alone visited Iran, he had little understanding of the terrain, topography and general culture of the area. There were large yellow patches – desert – and a pair of narrow green strips that represented the cultivated, irrigated areas beside the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as they came to a confluence at al-Qurnah before going south as one. There was blue for what seemed to be great inland lakes with little symbols of marshland printed on them. Across the extreme eastern corner of the water-covered area was the bold mauve line of a frontier, and almost on that line, in what was marked as Iran, there was a bold cross in black ink.
She looked at him, and he nodded, all he would offer in the way of praise but Sarah would take no offence. He was, to her, a good man to work for, and she was on board for what the operation sought to achieve. She had no qualms about its morality. She stood for a moment, hands on hips, legs slightly apart, enough to tighten the skirt across her buttocks – but it would have taken more than that to awaken any interest in him. They shared the scent of pursuit and the excitement. She went to make a cup of tea, leaving him to stare at the map.
She could remember the day when his screen had exploded into life, when a sparse file had started to thicken. No one forgot such rare, febrile days.
It was three hundred and nineteen days after Rashid, the Engineer, had sneezed over his workbench that a man walked into the lobby of the British Consulate in the Gulf Emirates city of Dubai and requested a meeting with a diplomat.
The Engineer had gone to work late because he had spent the morning with a doctor in the town of Ahvaz. His wife had been examined because of the persistent, but still relatively mild, headaches that sapped her concentration at work. The doctor had prescribed aspirin and rest, so Rashid had taken Naghmeh back to their new home, then set off for his bench at the small factory. He did not know that an Iranian had requested asylum from the British authorities and would therefore be challenged to explain his value. He did not know that a spook attached to the staff, operating under consular cover, would say, ‘You claim you are a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps – you said your unit was from the al-Quds Brigade – but I have to ask what sort of information you might bring with you that would justify from us your asylum and safety. Facts, my friend, are the currency needed.’
And, of course, Rashid, the Engineer, did not know that a traitor who had been assigned as a guard to an inner perimeter of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps camp on the road south from Ahvaz, was now in flight, and faced – if again in the custody of al-Quds – either stoning to death or strangulation at the end of a rope. Perhaps Rashid, the Engineer, had seen this guard as his Mercedes swept him through the gates of the compound; perhaps the man had swung them open and saluted. Rashid did not know that the man had denounced him because death faced him in his own country: his crime had been to defile a commander’s daughter – the girl had been a willing party but now cried rape.
The man said, ‘I can tell you about the Engineer who made the bombs that killed so many of your soldiers, in Maysan and Basra Provinces, and many Americans. I can tell you who he is and where he is from, and where is the camp that he uses for the building of the bombs.’
And he was left in the bare interview room, with a well-muscled security guard, while the intelligence officer composed the signal to London that would ask whether such information was indeed sufficient currency for a promise of asylum – only a promise, of course… And Rashid, the Engineer, knew nothing of this.
It was fifty-one days ago – two years and six weeks after a sneeze – that the defining moment had been reached. Sarah did not have a photograph of the features of the bomb-maker to fasten to the wall on his right; instead a black outline of a head and shoulders was superimposed on a white background with a name: rashid armajanrashid armajan. The moment, savoured with strong coffee, had provided confirmation that the DNA sample extracted from the abandoned workings of an explosive formed projectile matched that of a target identified by a ‘walk-in’ at diplomatic premises on the Gulf. Meetings had started and Len Gibbons had bustled between them. He had contributed little but had taken brief notes. He had learned the requirement of his seniors and how it would be achieved. Matters had been moved forward at a location he could not picture and was marked in his mind only by a crude cross on a map, but that was immaterial to him. He could reflect, gazing at the featureless face and at the name in her bold handwriting, that the moment had brought him considerable satisfaction. The collection of a used cigarette end, smoked only a third down and tossed aside, had supplied the opportunity for the moment, had involved considerable resources, a budget allocation – all handled by Gibbons – and manpower deployment.
He told Sarah that the positioning of the sheet of paper on the wall was excellent, and almost smiled… The child molester from the al-Quds Brigade of the IRGC had said that the Engineer was a prolific smoker. That had been enough to determine Len Gibbons’s course of action in confirming the named target.
They had told Rashid and Naghmeh that the tumour inside her skull was now the size of a songbird’s egg. It cut across the nerve routes that controlled speech and mobility. Her condition had deteriorated over the previous weeks, with more intense pain in her head, increased dizziness, inability to move and great tiredness. She could no longer look after her children. The doctor in Ahvaz had realised the importance of her husband and had pulled strings to raise funds for the couple to fly to Tehran for more detailed scans and biopsies. They had stayed two nights at the medical school attached to the university. Rashid Armajan could not fault the treatment and respect they were shown: an official car had met them at the airport to drive them to their accommodation and had been available to take them back for the return flight. They had sat numbed and silent on the aircraft. The enormity of what they had been told had cudgelled them.
She had gone inside their house and would be with her mother and the children now. The Engineer walked on the concrete paving in front of their home. He could see out over the water in the lagoon to the reed beds. Where there were gaps in the reeds he could see more water and the berm, which was the border, hazed in the afternoon sunshine. He lit a cigarette and dragged on it. He smoked the Zarrin brand and had deflected or ignored his wife’s pleading that he should give up. His concession to her was that he did not smoke inside their home. Many men he knew believed, and told him so, that he gave up too much for her when he went outside each time he needed to smoke.
He supposed that the two medical men who had faced them across the table in the neuro wing made a habit of telling patients and their loved ones the brutal news of imminent death. It had been suggested to him that he alone should hear their verdict after the test results were back, but Rashid and his wife had refused that option. They were a partnership and a bond of love held them. They had been together when the assessment was given them. It had been done without sentiment: the condition was inoperable, given the equipment and talents available in Tehran; the condition would deteriorate rapidly and she had a few months to live. She would be dead within the year. He was forty-one and she a year younger; they had been married for fourteen years.
Tears welled in his eyes and cigarette smoke ballooned in front of his face. He wore better clothes than he would have chosen had he been in the camp at his workbench. Good trousers, a good shirt and a lightweight jacket. The sun was tilting and much of its ferocious heat was now dissipated by palm trees to his left, just short of the small barracks where his own security was housed and border guards were stationed.
An old man came towards him, bent in the back and shoulders, harmless and feeble. He carried a plastic bag in one hand and a broom of dried fronds. He crouched to pick up unseen pieces of rubbish, swept the pavement and gutter, then cleared the dried leaves that had fallen. Rashid thought he was an Arab – there were many in the region of Khuzestan. They did the menial work and had no education. In Ahvaz, some police and IRGC members thought of them as terrorists, but this was an old man and…
He threw down the cigarette, turned on his heel and fished in his pocket for the packet and his lighter. He looked for a kingfisher over the water and saw a heron poised and still; a hawk flew low past him. He would not accept what they had been told in Tehran. His wife and he had gripped the other’s hand and she had choked a little. He had sniffed hard. It was not right that a man who worked for the al-Quds Brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps should show emotion and fear of death. His own father, nineteen years before, had gone into an unmarked, unlisted minefield to rescue a pupil from his school who had wandered into it after a puppy. The dog had tripped an anti-personnel device. In the end, the puppy was dead, the pupil alive. His father had tripped another mine and had lived for four or five hours. He had shown no fear from beginning to end. The hawk had gone past the barracks and the heron was in a statue pose; another cigarette was thrown down, and another lit. He would not accept that the wife of an individual of his importance could be sent home to die because of the state’s medical inadequacy.
His status? He was not praised or decorated in public. If a security chief, a brigadier or general came to
