Across the bridge, he headed for the Underground station. He preferred to mingle with the masses that crowded the trains. He bought the two tickets and passed one over his shoulder, no turn of the head, no smile, to Sarah and felt her take it quickly, discreetly. Descending on the escalator he had the briefcase held tight across his chest, his coat sleeve hanging far enough forward to mask the chain linking the handle to the handcuff attachment on his wrist. Inside the briefcase were the maps, charts and lists for coded contact that would assist towards the state-sponsored killing of an individual whose life was considered forfeit… all, of course, deniable.
He wore the years well, fifty-nine, and was physically fit, mentally alert, with good colour in his face. His trade demanded ordinariness rather than eccentricity, and there was little about him that those on the platform would remember: no sign of the hairstyle under the trilby and behind the beige scarf, no sight of his shirt or tie because the raincoat was buttoned high. The briefcase bore no EIIR, embossed in gold, which would have shown he was a servant of the state. If any had noted him, glanced quickly at the trilby, they might have thought him a rather boring man whose employment shelf life drifted to a close. They would have been wrong. God, in the Towers, had known Gibbons the length of his professional career, would have judged him a man of insight and acumen, but handicapped by a throw of the dice: those damned events that could derail any intelligence officer’s career. He might appear a buffoon, might cultivate that image, might use it as a cover to divert attention from the reality of a stiletto-sharp mind. He trekked into the heavier rain as the afternoon closed dankly on Central London.
The Underground behind them, they passed the entrance to the Ritz Hotel, then skirted the south side of Piccadilly Circus – neither looked up at the Eros statue – and turned down into Haymarket. She came level to his elbow and murmured the number they should look for. He nodded. They were a team. The rain’s drips fell regularly from his hat brim and her hair was soaked, but they made no small-talk about the awfulness of the weather. Probably her mind was swamped as his was with the enormity of what they hoped to achieve in the next hours and days – not weeks.
There was a doorway and, inside, newspapers were scattered instead of a mat. A man in commissionaire’s uniform sat at a desk but they were not challenged and declined to use the lift. Instead they walked up two flights and slipped along a corridor of closed doors, none of which boasted the legend of a company or business. She had a Yale and two mortise keys out of her handbag and he stood at the side while she unfastened the door. Gibbons did not know when the Service had last used the premises, whether they were regular or occasional visitors. He assumed that a front company held the lease and that all connections to the Towers were well disguised. Old procedures died hard. No interior lights were switched on until Sarah had gone to the windows of both main rooms, the kitchenette behind a partition, the toilet and shower room and pulled down the blinds. There was a room with a desk, a chair, and a small settee for him, and a room with a desk, chair, portable TV and a folded single bed for her; there were cupboards for each of them, a safe with a combination lock. Now, the reserve on his face faded: that buzz, the adrenalin flush and the excitement surge replaced it. He was a bureaucrat and a small cog – by fate of circumstance – between large wheels and he accepted that, but he took pride in what he did. Usually he succeeded in providing what was asked of him. Bare walls confronted Len Gibbons and a wintry smile settled on his lips. She had emptied his case of photographs and the big folded map, and had the roll of Sellotape in her hand. She did not bother to ask him where she should display the images.
A ceiling light lit the desk on which were his phone, lap-top, notebooks, pencils and the paraphernalia that travelled with him. She chose the wall in his direct eye-line as the place to stick up the photographs. Some were classified and others were not. She fastened them in the same haphazard jumble in which they had been displayed before. There were pictures of armoured vehicles, all shapes and sizes, all wrecked – some turned right over, some on their sides and some left as debris because the wheels had gone, or the tracks. The craters in tarmacked roads leading straight across flat sand landscapes were great gouges – in some a soldier could have stood, the top of his helmet hidden. Still-frames, a quarter covered with Arabic text, showed a moment of detonation that had been downloaded from websites. There were clear portraits, taken with a macro-lens in extreme close-up, of the gear used in the bombs and their sophistication. He liked to know his enemy and thought it important to display the enemy’s work and skills, to have them present around him at all times… There were photographs from the party last Christmas at a rehabilitation home where young men with military haircuts, all amputees, waved stunted limbs defiantly at the camera. .. and there was one magnified picture of a procession, slow and black, in the High Street of a country town. He had been with the operation from the beginning and thought now that, if his Maker was willing, it approached the end. At the beginning, two years and three months before, a man had sneezed.
He might have caught the mild dose of influenza from his wife or children. He had sneezed and gone back to his labour on the electronics bench.
He did not know that the sneeze would kick-start an operation launched from a far-away city. He had been bent over the bench and was wearing the magnification optics he used when working on the software he adapted with kit brought in from the United States. From the land of the Great Satan, he could obtain dual use passive infra- red devices or high-powered cordless phones with a range of near to seven miles from a base station, and dual-tone multi-frequency gear: the PIR, HPCP and DTMF, and the zappers for unlocking car doors and… The Engineer used them to provide the electronic signal to improvised explosive devices and to his design of explosive formed projectiles. From the safety and security of his workshop he created the bombs that would be carried along the rat- runs that criss-crossed the border of his country with Iraq to kill and maim. The sneeze had been perfunctory, and he was able to get his handkerchief out from his trouser pocket to smother the second. He had not stopped in his work and had not thought through the consequences of that minor eruption in his nose.
Had he done so he might have realised that a fine film had scattered from his face. Some minuscule droplets had wafted down on to the bench and a few had come to rest on the circuit he was putting together.
He had gone on with his work methodically and carefully. He had built the explosive formed projectile. He had a production line in a small factory area behind his workshop and the shaped copper charge was manufactured there to high-precision standards by experienced technicians. By his late-morning break, he had completed the electronics of a killing kit capable of defeating the electronic counter-measures of his enemy, and had begun on another, using the same procedures and techniques. They could almost have been described as a signature. The device onto which he had sneezed was now sealed, boxed and ready for transportation.
He did not know that the device had failed to detonate. A ‘trigger man’, as the Great Satan’s troops described the bomb layer and the peasant charged with firing the device, had panicked when an attack helicopter had flown low over the sand scrape in which he had hidden himself, some three hundred yards back from Highway 6, the convoy route. He had broken cover and run. Later, to gain the reward of ten American dollars, he had fabricated a story of an advancing foot patrol, the need to destroy the firing software, its burial and his flight. The Engineer did not know that the sight of the man emerging from his hiding place and sprinting towards nowhere had alerted the Apache crew: a follow-up had been mounted and the abandoned device retrieved. That had been four weeks and two days after the Engineer had sneezed at his workbench and given forensic scientists something akin to gold dust: a sample for DNA analysis.
At a laboratory in the west of England, a woman in a white suit with a face mask over her mouth and her hair in a shower-cap, would say: ‘Christmas has come early. It has to be the man who put it together.’ There had been a meeting of ammunition technical officers and explosive ordnance disposal experts and the intelligence had been fed to them. One, who had been to the Palace for a gallantry decoration and was said to have exhausted more lives than any streetwise tom-cat, had said, allowing himself a gallows-humour grin: ‘We chance our bollocks when we’re out in the donkey shit trying to defuse these things in the hope that we can get fingerprints, anything, a speck of blood, because the trigger rag-head cut himself on a thorn – and that’s just to identify a foot-soldier. Here we have the DNA of the top man in the chain. We’ve got it on a plate. That’s a hell of a start.’ The chair of a committee of intelligence officers and agent handlers, gaunt from the weight of responsibility, had briefed: ‘I’m assured that only a small number of men, experts in micro-engineering, are capable of making these things. As you all know, but it’s worth repeating ad nauseam, four in every five of our own and US casualties are laid at the door of these wretched things.’
The Engineer knew nothing about the basic information his sneeze had provided. He had gone on working through a full day until a car had taken him home. He had eaten with his wife and he had told his children, Jahandar and Abbas, the ancient Persian fairy story of Simorgh, and of God’s three sons, Prince Jamshid, Prince Q-mars and Prince Korshid. He had not known of the chasm he had made in his personal security when he sneezed… Neither did he know that fifty-one days later a slim file would be handed to a journeyman intelligence officer charged with the co-ordination of an intelligence trawl.
She had to stand on tiptoe to fasten the top corners of the map to the wall with lengths of Sellotape.
