She said that her husband had demanded of senior officials that she be allowed to leave the country and visit a more advanced centre of medicine, that funds be made available for such a journey and that arrangements be made for her to travel.
They walked past the lagoon in front of their home. Birds flew low over the water and skimmed the tips of the reeds. The light played on the ripples where fish fed at the surface. She said that her work with the mine- clearance programme was not finished, and that if she was snatched away the deadly beasts would continue to take lives and maim children… She told her mother that Rashid could barely contemplate life without her. She urged her mother, now in her sixty-fifth year, to look after the children if… Then she smiled and declared she had faith in the consultant she would see.
Where? She did not know.
When? She had not been told.
Her mother cried softly, and the wife of the bomb-maker – who organised the clearing of old minefields for which there were no charts – tried to hold her smile. It had to be soon, she said, that the arrangements were made because she did not believe she had much time. She was in God’s hands. And with her would be her husband, the only man she had loved, a good man.
She thought the ibis the most beautiful bird that flew over the reeds as it turned towards the raised island beyond them. To Naghmeh, it was frail and vulnerable, so delicate, and she scanned the skies for the eagles that swooped on the ibis.
In his experience, men who had been at risk of assassination for months or years became careless.
When they first believed themselves important enough to be targets of their enemy, they would slink in the shadows, but few could sustain the effort. Also, when the target was away from his base and the familiar streets where the safe-houses were, he would consider himself untouchable and go to cafes or restaurants if he were flush with his organisation’s cash. He would sleep with his mistress in a hotel, hire a car and… To bring his mistress from Sidon in Lebanon and fly her on a budget airline to Malta International and have her share his double room in a waterfront hotel in Sliema was careless.
The man was not a fighter but a strategist and a tactician, and some in the higher echelons of Unit 504, intelligence gathering, believed he was among the principal architects of the hidden tunnels and underground strong points from which a blood-letting had been wreaked on the Israeli Defence Force among the bare, harsh hills in the south of Lebanon where the common border was. A target did not have to be a fighter. To be a strategist or a tactician was cause enough for a file to be lifted down and put into the tray of High Priority when an asset told of an extra-marital affair, the name of a mistress and her travel bookings. Few informants were governed by ideology and principle; many were alert to good payment.
The target would have left the girl in bed. She would have screwed him until he’d wondered whether he was close to a coronary. Then he would have pushed her off, showered and walked to the Internet cafe. There, he would have finalised a meeting with a colleague now based in Tunis and another in Rome, and walked back to the hotel.
When Unit 504 went to war it was not with a straitened budget.
An aircraft loitered outside Maltese air space and held together the facets of the operation. The controller in the air was in communication with the slight young man who stood near to the taxi rank in front of the hotel, like any other hopeful stud waiting for his girl. At the end of the esplanade a motorcycle engine was ticking over, the rider helmeted, with a second helmet on his lap. Along the coast – two or three kilometres – a high-powered launch was moored as a concrete jetty. Further out to sea, on the edge of the radar horizon, a merchant ship registered in the port of Haifa was on course for a rendezvous. On occasion, the unit used a mobile phone loaded with enough military explosive to destroy the side of a man’s head when he answered a call, or they might have built a bomb into the headrest of the driver’s seat in a car, or put one under the nearside front wheel. They might attack with a commando squad of up to eight men, or there would be a single assassin with a short range ‘Barak’ SP-21 short recoil-operated and locked-breech pistol with fifteen 9mm rounds in the magazine; only two would be used. The target came close.
He was careless enough not to see the young man, wearing a nondescript grey T-shirt, lightweight windcheater and faded jeans, ease away from the lamp-post and wave to somebody down the road, behind his target, who did not look over his shoulder so did not see that no one was there. Carelessness killed.
Two shots to the head, one through an eye socket and one into the brain via the canal behind the ear as the target stiffened, went rigid, then sagged to the ground.
The target was in death spasms. Tourists and hotel staff ran up, then stood, petrified, as the blood came close to their feet. The young man was gone, and the motorcycle – stolen three days earlier – powered away. In the marina a launch revved its engines.
The older men who had planned the killing believed that a message was given when a body bled on a pavement, and that such a message was always worth sending.
‘You’re good?’ the Friend asked.
‘Fine, thank you,’ Foxy answered. ‘Looking forward, though, to finding out what’s asked of me.’
‘We wouldn’t be in this circus ring if it wasn’t considered important.’
‘It’d be more respectful if a man of my experience was brought inside the loop rather faster than this.’
Foxy had done enough buffet lunches to be able to balance a glass of mineral water and a plate of sandwiches. The Friend smiled with ice in his eyes. He’d met Israeli counter-terrorist officials at Special Branch meetings, with suicide bombers on the day’s agenda, and had thought them unemotional, uncommunicative, untrusting and, above all, arrogant. He’d heard it said by a Branch veteran that the answer was to get them into a bar and force drink down their throats until they pissed their pants without knowing it. Then they might behave as human beings, as colleagues.
‘You’ll hear soon enough. When you need to know, you’ll know.’
‘If I don’t like what I hear it’ll be goodbye and I’ll be at the bus stop, waiting for transport home.’
‘With a broken leg, perhaps a broken neck – whatever needs to be broken to prevent you walking out of here. Walking out – you lost the chance hours ago. Does the rain stop? Do they grow rice here? You’ll know soon enough and then, I guarantee, you’ll be frightened – and so will your young colleague.’
‘He’s not a colleague – I know damn-all about him.’
‘You will. You’ll learn everything about him. Everything. And be frightened together. Fear is good. It bonds men and makes them effective. I think we’ll go on, and then you’ll understand why we’re in this shit-heap, and what’s required of you. Be brave, Foxy.’
Never before had he been spoken to by a foreign-agency officer as if he were of similar importance to a drinks waiter. His shoulder was smacked, water spilled from the glass, and the Israeli smiled coldly. He must have flinched, and he thought Badger would have seen him take that step back. They were led again into the briefing room. He believed the Friend. He didn’t want to, but he believed that the time for quitting was long past, and that fear would be justified.
Chapter 3
To Foxy, it was choreographed: nothing was here by chance. It was as if they had both – himself and Badger – been manoeuvred towards the proposition. And it had been done quickly, like he supposed a good hanging was, with a pretence of casualness.
‘Times have changed. Things are different,’ the Cousin said.
‘Who can be trusted? Never many, but now the number has shrunk,’ the Friend said.
‘What I’ve learned, you want a job done well, you get your own people to do it. Then you know you’re in the best hands,’ the Boss, Gibbons, said.
They had been together in the afternoon, and the Cousin had talked – an accent that was distant tyres on gravel, pronounced but not harsh – and had shifted awkwardly on the chair. He seemed to come alive when he spoke of the marshlands east and west of al-Qurnah, and north and south of the town, the drought there, the dried, cracked mud and stagnant pools where water no longer flowed because of the great dams built far to the north in Turkey, Syria and Iran. He spoke of a cradle of civilisation and the location of the Garden of Eden – did it well – of
