throat hurt from lack of water. The irritation of the tick scabs and mosquito bites was acute, and the plastic bags were by his knees. The quiet came and – almost forgotten because of the sow and the boar – the smell returned. Time was running out, their covert rural observation post was near to compromised, and they had nothing to report.
There had been a re-evaluation, he was told. When he had been called to the unit’s offices, he had brought his bag.
He was taken by one of their drivers to the airport.
It had been decided Gabbi should fly that evening to Europe. A neurosurgeon at Tel Aviv’s Assuta Hospital – the most expensive and discreet in the country – had been asked, late, to advise. The medical opinion was that several European capitals had capacity beyond the best in Tehran, that a consultation at any one of a dozen locations might take little longer than the time needed for an examination, consideration and the decision to operate or not. It was explained that the couple could, within a dozen hours – twenty-four at most – be back at whichever airport they had flown into and looking for a flight home. The unit planned on the basis that information on a destination would be fed to them, and any who were privy to the surveillance mission mounted from the south-eastern Iraqi marshlands and harboured doubts did not share them.
He did not know whether Leah had worked on this last stage of preparation. She had been normal in bed the previous night, and over a light breakfast, then had left on the bus. He had planned a gym work-out, and the phone had rung: the call to come in, and the instruction that he should bring a bag. She might have known, she might not.
He would go to Rome. He had collected his passport: the Republic of Ireland was the flavour of that month. The days of big operations, he had been told, were over. There would never again be deployed as many as had gone down to the Gulf with tennis recquets and wigs. Nor did they look for the spectacular of the exploding headrest on a car seat, the detonating mobile phone when held against an enemy’s face, or the poison squirting into an ear. One bullet, two maximum, was the day’s order.
On arrival in Rome, he would be booked into an airport hotel, within sight of the terminals, and the call would come to send him forward or bring him home. He was not one to complain about the vagueness of the plans. He accepted what was put before him. If Leah had known, her kiss that morning as she went to work would have been no different.
They would not hold the El Al flight for him if he was late: to delay take-off could only draw attention to him. The car went fast on the airport road. A poem was in his mind:
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!
He was the servant of the state, and did not doubt what the state asked of him.
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d, As home his footsteps he hath turn’d, From wandering on a foreign strand?
He would not challenge what was asked of him, and did not believe he could look into a face, see life and humanity, and hesitate. He liked the poetry of Walter Scott, but most of all he loved ‘Patriotism’, and he had faith. He did not query where the road took him.
When he’d boarded he would have forgotten the poem and would be engrossed in a business magazine.
The arrangements were in place.
It was a black-tie evening.
The consultant had used his authority to make the booking for scan facilities and X-ray without the usual requirement of a patient’s name. It had, predictably, been queried. He had snapped back that there was more to medicine than filling in forms, and had seen a long-serving assistant wilt. He did not feel able to tell his staff that an unidentified Iranian, with the co-operation of the Berlin embassy and the likely support of an intelligence agency, suffering potentially terminal illness, was to be inflicted on them, so he had blustered and been unnaturally rude. His status at the university medical school was such that no complaint would be lodged.
Her parents would mind Magda for the evening. The black-tie occasion was a celebration of a local politician’s birthday, an influential woman from the ruling party with the ability to dispense patronage. He and Lili would be with the great and the good of the city. In such company, his given name was Steffen and his family name was that of his wife. He was Steffen Weber, and soon there would be a prefix to his name, the title ‘Professor’. He changed in the bedroom. Lili was at her dressing-table and sat in her underwear to apply her cosmetics. He could have said that until the last week he had been successfully absorbed into the German dream – the downturn in the economy seemed not to affect him – but he had brought the mood home.
If he had talked to her, it would have been a burden shared. He had not. He carried it alone. Easiest would be to look the patient in the face – he did it often enough – assume a look of principled sympathy, and say it straight: ‘I am so sorry, there is nothing I can do. I regret that the question of surgery does not arise.’ Those patients hurried away, and he had a cup of coffee, then carried on with his day. That evening in the Rathaus, there would be good food, fine wine and a string quintet. He would be among the elite and accepted… He sensed a shadow hung over him.
Dust trailed behind the big car. Abigail Jones had heard all four of her Boys arm their weapons.
It was a defining moment. The crowd ahead parted, the car was driven through it and came to stop in front of her – had to, or the BMW 7 Series would have gone right over her, squashing the life from her body. The driver braked with a certain flamboyance, and the tyres scattered dirt, some falling on her. It was about appearances and postures, and she took her time. She did not stand until the man had emerged from the darkened interior. It was a start, a good one. She had demanded that a leader come and he had. He was gross at the waist, wore a bulging thobe, long but cut like a white nightshirt, a ghutra on his head, chequered cloth with woven ropes to hold it in place, and sandals. He carried a mobile phone in one hand, his beads in the other. An assault rifle hung from a shoulder, and over the shirt he had a well-cut and discreetly patterned sports jacket that would have come from a London tailor, or from Paris. What else for Abigail to learn? He used a potent eau-de-Cologne. He had brought a youth with him, perhaps a son or nephew, who carried a briefcase – and two men for security, along with the driver.
As he approached her, she stood. Did it easily – did not betray exhaustion, dehydration or stiffness. It was Corky who had read it. The Irishman scurried forward with two old packing cases from the buildings. He put them down as if they were good-quality chairs, and used his sleeve to wipe them… The defining moment. She knew it, and her Boys. It was down to her skills as to whether they stayed or whether they were hoofed and in the process lost the mass of their gear. If they were hoofed, the guys up ahead were beyond reach.
She smiled – always did that well. Seemed to show frankness and honesty.
She called him ‘Sheikh’ and invited him to sit.
It was over water.
‘You’ve had a drink.’
Only the quality of the microphone and its cable link were more important to them than water.
‘I haven’t.’
The light was sinking. Badger had been out of the hide and had gathered more dead fronds from inside the reed beds. He had waited until a rare cloud was over the last of the sun’s brilliance, then had scattered pieces over the cable. He could not affect, without going far out into the water, the part of the cable that floated. Why not wade out? Too knackered. Badger had never known such tiredness. He could hike in bad weather, trek on moss and bog, and lose sleep. He didn’t have the strength he’d needed those hours before when he’d scraped out the hide, moved the surplus earth into the reed bed, then gone out into the lagoon – his gillie suit absorbing water, weighing enough, almost, to drag him down – and built up the flotsam on the mud spit to hide the microphone.
‘We’re not due to have a drink for three-quarters of an hour – forty-three minutes, actually.’
‘Don’t make accusations, young ’un, that you can’t prove.’
He came back, groped his way into the hide, and the cloud was now off the sun. One last beam of gold light penetrated the scrim, and he’d seen the glisten at Foxy’s mouth, the dribble on his cheek.
The diarrhoea had weakened Badger. He had come back to the hide, crawling, feeling faint, worse shape than he’d known, and the job of hiding the cable only half complete. The exchange was in cutting whispers, neither voice raised.
‘You’ve been at the water. It’s on your bloody face.’
‘You can’t prove it.’
