Foxy growled, ‘Because I’m smart enough to listen – and while you’re chatting her up in the vehicle, then screwing her, I’m talking to her guards, rather sad guys who are growing old but don’t know how to, who’ve gone out of the military family and can’t replace it. They like to talk. I don’t suppose you did much talking or listening while you were screwing her.’
‘It’s illegal?’
‘Of course it is.’
‘Under international law?’
‘Under international law, and likely under the law practised on the High Street in Wolverhampton, Warrington or Weymouth.’
‘That wasn’t explained,’ Badger said, flat.
‘You seemed up for it, a chirpy volunteer.’
‘I was.’
‘Sow the seed and reap the whirlwind.’
‘Yes. Thank you, Foxy.’
‘Pity you never had an education, young ’un, and ended up so ignorant.’
It was time to open the last water bottle.
He packed the case. She sat on the end of the bed.
There was little talk between them. She spoke only when she needed to indicate to him which clothing he should take from the wardrobe, and which underwear from the chest. Earlier she had asked him what she should take, and he had replied that it would be better if she did not parade her faith: she should be modest but within limits. She had allowed him to choose what was appropriate. It was the only time in their married life that he had decided what she should wear. He was concerned that she had lost the will… Her last decision had been concerning the children. He was quiet as he moved about the room and his voice was subdued. The children, Jahandar and Abbas, were in his and Naghmeh’s bed: he and his wife would sleep that night till dawn, when the car would come, with their children between them. It had been her decision. He had not argued.
The blinds were up and some of the glow from the security lights played through the open windows. She should have had the windows closed, the air-conditioning switched on, the flies and mosquitoes kept out – she would have slept better. He had not challenged her. A mosquito flickered close to Jahandar’s face but she did not swat it away. He had suggested Naghmeh undress and get into bed, but she had shaken her head. It was because he, in the consulting room at the hospital in Tehran, had demanded more expert attention. Perhaps he refused to accept the inevitable, perhaps he denied dignity to her and heaped stress on her.
It was past midnight.
He closed the suitcase and applied the small padlock. He carried it outside the bedroom and put it by the front door. He looked out. There was purity in the silver strips of the moonlight, and crudeness in the bellowing of the frogs. It was said that the marshes, the waters and the reed beds were the cradle of civilisation. He felt humbled – and unworthy. It was the place of great artists and great scholars, great scientists and great leaders: he was the maker of bombs that killed young men.
He went back into their room.
She asked, ‘How will it be in that town?’
‘It is where they make the sweet that is marzipan, with the almond taste. They have been making it there for two hundred years. I saw it on the net. It is very famous, the marzipan they make there. We will bring some back for the children.’
He could say no more. He would have choked on his sobs. He turned from her so that she should not see tears on his face, and she held him.
It should have been a night of triumph but, with the food barely eaten, conversations hardly started, introductions not completed, the consultant had pleaded a headache.
He could not have said that his wife, Lili – elegant in a gown of understated expense – showed any sympathy. He said he wanted to go home, to the villa on Roeckstrasse. There was no headache. It did not concern him that she had entered this reception in her social diary some four months earlier, that friends and peers were there, and that it was an opportunity for her to show off her husband in an atmosphere of wealth and privilege. He held her hand tightly, said that the headache destroyed his enjoyment of the occasion and demanded that she accompany him home. She stood her ground, dug her stilettos into the Rathaus floor.
He did not belong. Never would and never could. In the afternoon, or early evening, of the following day it would be demonstrated to him that his life was not berthed in the pretty, affluent city of Lubeck, capital of the historic Hanseatic League of celebrated traders, home of the writer Thomas Mann, given the accolade by UNESCO of a World Heritage Site. It was not his home. It was where he lived courtesy of marriage, and where his name had been altered to make it more acceptable, his ancestry disowned. The next afternoon he was to be ‘called back’, as if a long unused door had been opened again. His home was not Lubeck – the restaurants, the beer, the river trips, the quaint passageways and homes so lovingly restored from war damage, the boutiques and the university – but was across continents. The man who had come from the embassy in Berlin, his cheeks encrusted with stubble, had dragged him back from the dream. He had no place here. He was from Tehran. His father and mother were martyrs of the war with Iraq, had given their lives to the Islamic Republic, killed in the front line while helping the wounded. He had been educated in Tehran; the state had trained him. A professor of oncology at the University of Medical Sciences had given him love and a family. He had shown his devotion to the state by working in the slums of south Tehran. He thought that a rope was tied around his ankle and he had been allowed a degree of freedom, as a horse was allowed to graze. Then the rope had been jerked and he was dragged back into a compound.
His wife, Lili, had started a strident conversation with the wife of a property developer who had big sites and big contracts for holiday homes up the river and at Travemunde on the coast. His headache mattered little. He could forget it, manufacture a smile and return to her shoulder, or he could walk out on her.
He went to his car. He had turned a last time in the hope that she would be hurrying after him, but her back was turned and her laughter rang out. He drove towards home and did not know how, if ever, he would regain his liberty. He did not even know the name of the fucking patient… and there was no headache, only anger.
The ring of the telephone would sign a warrant on a man’s life – condemn him.
Gibbons yearned for it to ring, as if he was pleading for permission to kill the man himself. There were a few still left at Vauxhall Bridge Cross – a little rheumatic in the joints, from a long-gone age – who would have understood his feelings. Not many. They were the unreconstructed warriors of the Cold War, and saw the bloody mess that was the Middle East as a self-inflicted wound that had bred many uncertainties. This band of brothers was left in the shadows of the corridors at the towers, and a younger generation – dressed down, more often than not, in jeans or chinos, shirts without ties or revealing blouses – preached an ethical manifesto, as if such a thing were appropriate in the new world order. Gibbons doubted it. Some shared his view; many did not. The arrangement for the communications was complex, but that was to hide them behind smoke. A message from the forward surveillance men would be sent on shortwave radio – brief transmission because to linger was to leave a footprint – to Abigail Jones and her back-up location. She would communicate with an Agency cell in Baghdad, who would onpass to the NATO base at Vicenza in the foothills of the Italian Alps. From there the message would go to technicians answerable to the Cousin in his service apartment behind Grosvernor Square. He would taste the message. A negative report would be transmitted electronically but an affirmative enough to kick-start the operation, would come through on the telephone. Complicated, but necessary for the process of denial.
He watched the telephone.
She had argued, but he had insisted. Len Gibbons had ordered Sarah to take his room key at the club and use the bed booked there. He had felt, increasingly that day, a point was about to be reached of success or failure, and he wanted to be present when the dice rolled, rattled, came to rest. He was now fifty-nine. His wife, Catherine, would have been disarmed to know that her bed partner, soul-mate, craved for a telephone to ring and therefore to consign a man to his death – not a fancy one in hospital with pain-relief drugs available, but in a street, spluttering blood as passers-by hurried on their way. She would not have believed it of him, that he tried to achieve anything so intrinsically vulgar as state-sponsored murder. She didn’t know him, which was as well. If his children, at college, had known their father plotted a killing they might have disowned him and slunk away, ashamed. The neighbours, in a quiet road of semi-detached mock-Tudor homes on a suburban estate in Motspur Park, on the Epsom to Waterloo line, would have winced had they known what was done in their name, as would the members of the gardening club, and the choir he hoped to join at some future date. He willed the phone to ring.
