let her take him.
‘It is intended the patient would travel.’
‘There are more experienced consultants in Frankfurt, Vienna, Paris and London, men better qualified than I.’
‘We would not have the discretion that we gain from you, the confidentiality. There will be no electronic messages, only brief telephone communication. I will come to visit you, Soheil, when the travel arrangements are complete. I am so glad that I can report your co-operation.’
The call ended. He understood. Discretion and confidentiality were the keys. Perhaps it was a prosecutor with blood on his hands, who now faced his God, would imminently be with Him, and was important enough to demand the full resources of the state to buy him a few more months, or a general in the Revolutionary Guard Corps, or an imam. He could not run from them. He held tight to the little girl’s hand as they crossed the bridge and headed for the fine villa that was their home.
His daughter – also perhaps vulnerable and a weapon to be used against him – sprinted ahead. He shouted at her to slow down, and she turned, wide-eyed, shocked by his anger. He accepted that even here, in his adopted town, he could not be free of them – ever.
He let himself into the office, closed the door behind him and locked it.
She was at her desk. Len Gibbons noted that, in his absence, she had turned her room and the one allocated to him into something that was as much a home as a workplace. She had arranged two small vases of flowers, one on his desk, which he could see through the open connecting door, and one on hers, and a tray for tea-making lay beside the electric kettle, with a biscuit tin. On a wall away from the photographs of bombs, the featureless picture of a target and the enlarged map of the marsh region between the confluence of the rivers and the frontier, she had hung a picture. He smiled as he dumped his bag down and shrugged off his coat. There was a big sky in which birds flew and a long meadow between forests, in which an elephant wandered, a scarlet parrot perched and a deer grazed. In the background, far down the meadow, a robed man led two naked – or near naked – figures.
‘Enlighten me, Sarah.’
‘It’s the Garden of Eden. God’s there with the two innocents. It’s by Jan Brueghel the Elder, painted in 1607. Adam and Eve before the apple upset the cart. Appropriate, I thought. How did it go?’
‘Well.’
‘Are they all right?’
‘We call them Foxy and Badger. They’re probably just about all right.’
He was leaning over his desk, checking the notes she had left him and pitching them into the shredder.
‘Is “all right” good enough?’
He looked up sharply. ‘Has to be. We make do with what’s given us. I must cut my cloth according to my means. Very thoughtful of you, Sarah, as always, and such an appropriate image.’
They were in business class. Foxy said that ‘they’ would have pulled a heavy one – a favour required – with the carrier. They would be up for around six hours on a non-stop flight to Kuwait City. Badger said nothing.
They took off.
Gibbons had seen them into the terminal, then shaken their hands and left. They had carried their bags of one change of clothes – dirty – and washbags to Check-in. Badger reckoned he was expected to carry Foxy’s while the older man did the talking at the desk. He did his own talking, interrupted to make the point, left the bag on the floor and Foxy had had to go back for it.
They went up into the night, and Badger felt more gut knots than he’d ever known. Beside him Foxy was biting hard at his lip and was close to drawing blood. Badger didn’t like to be afraid: it unsettled him.
Chapter 4
A wall of heat hit them. Badger saw Foxy recoil from it. It seemed to suck the energy out of his own chest, his lungs – and he had walked only a few paces. The sun’s light smacked upwards from the expanse of concrete, its force mocking the effectiveness of his sunglasses. Everything that was beyond a hundred metres away was distorted and bounced like a mirage. He could barely make out the distant terminal buildings, but the flags topping them hung limp. Foxy seemed to stagger – as if the wall not only surrounded him but punched hard.
Badger heard him: ‘Fucking place, fucking weather. By the by, here, you’re Badger and I’m Foxy. I don’t want any mucking with proper names. Enough on our plates without chucking identification around. To whom it may concern, and us, those are our names… Nothing fucking changes.’
A fuel truck drove slowly towards their helicopter and a Humvee had parked on the far side of the cockpit – it would be for the crew. There were two Pajeros in front of them. A woman stood tall in front of one, scratching at her loose robe. She wore a head scarf close round her hair and Badger thought it was against the sun, not for modesty. There were two men in each vehicle; the windows were up and the engines were turning over, which meant they had air-conditioning.
Badger assumed Foxy was talking to him, not to himself: ‘Nothing changes except the flags… My place was about a quarter of a mile the far side of the terminal. Any time after about seven in the morning and before five in the afternoon you could hardly walk that quarter-mile without dehydration. You’d need a couple of litres straight down, and if you walked it before seven and after five you had to wear a flak jacket and helmet and be listening for the mortar’s whistle, or there were rockets incoming. I loathed it then and I loathe it now.’
Badger said, ‘Nobody cares, Foxy.’ He had stamped on the moan. Not the first, and it wouldn’t be the last. During the long relay of their journeys, he had felt no inclination to humour the man. He’d seen Foxy crumple, as if the wind was squeezed out of him, when the request for permission to call home was curtly refused; he’d had to make do with a text of about five lines, and show it to Gibbons before he sent it. A poignant moment: Badger had been close by when the message was punched out and the mobile switched off. The Boss had taken it and put it, with Badger’s, into a plastic bag, which he had pocketed. There was no one that Badger would have called. He had had his boots in the car and been able to bag them, but Foxy had only been carrying a pair of heavy trainers, which would not have been waterproof. Badger should have been sympathetic about it, but was not, and should have been grateful that Foxy had negotiated the fee with the Boss at the eleventh hour but he had not thanked the older man for winning payment over and above their salaries.
There had been the flight to Kuwait City, where they’d been met by a corporal, American, from a logistics unit, who had escorted them out of the civilian area to a military annex. They had spent three hours in a departure hut with air-conditioning chilling them and had been offered upright chairs. Foxy had sat in one with his back straight, but Badger had made a space on the floor, wedged his bag against the wall, lain down with his head on the bag and slept. Later, the same corporal had driven them in a minibus to the pad where the helicopter waited. There had been machine-gunners on the cabin doors, weapons armed, and they’d done contour flying, hugged the dirt, woven and come up where there were cables slung between pylons, but otherwise kept low. Badger had never been in a war zone, too young for the Northern Ireland experience, and he noticed that Foxy stared straight ahead, looking ill at ease.
Roads with occasional cars and ancient lorries. Homes were single-storey and surrounded by dumped vehicles and giant refrigerators. Kids waved, women ignored them and men looked away. Goats and thin sheep stampeded. A checkpoint where the Iraqi flag – red, white and black – fluttered briefly as the helicopter drove draught across it, and there were local soldiers or policemen. The gunner cleared phlegm from his throat and spat.
The sand stretched away until it reached green corridors that would have been vegetation alongside rivers. They went up one of the beds and were over mud and exposed wrecks. It was like the life had been taken from a waterway. They had not been issued with headphones and were given no commentary on the route, the security scene, the duration… nothing. Might have been junk and on the way to a refuse pit. They had come fast over a perimeter fence, and the huge scale of the base, the empire it had become, was exposed: a place built to survive for ever. As far as he could see, there were prefabricated constructions, hangars and maintenance bays, blast walls and stores warehouses. They had hovered, then the skids had touched and the heat wall had clutched them. When his feet had hit the concrete, Badger had wiped a handkerchief across his face. His body under the loose T-shirt was wet, but Foxy still wore his blazer and tie.
