like passing down a death sentence. The kit would have been snatched from his hands. Foxy would not give up the glory moment. He could see the man: another cigarette, another glance at his watch, another spin on his heel to show anger that the car hadn’t come. The goon was on a radio or a mobile, had it clamped to his face, his weapon and binoculars bumping on his chest as he bent some poor bastard’s ear about the car being late. She stood with her mother and the kids were calm. The bird was still in place.
Emotion melded with the professionalism dinned into him.
His eyes flitted from the distance view of the woman and her husband to the near ground where the bird squatted, part covering the microphone. The length of cable that was exposed before it went into the water snaked out from under its tail feathers.
There was a soft whine in his ear as the comms kit gathered power. A red light glowed, and he sensed Foxy’s exhilaration. He felt a sort of flatness.
They had the link. Foxy murmured his call sign, Foxtrot and something Badger didn’t catch. A query on Alpha Juliet, a pause. Badger sensed that Foxy was at bursting point, and it flushed out of him.
The town was named. It was spelt out. Lima – Uniform – Bravo – Echo – Charlie – Kilo. They were ‘leaving any time now, route unknown’. Badger turned his head away from the house, the family, its guards and the bird, and stole a look at Foxy’s face. Something almost manic, something of achievement not reached in a lifetime before, and he could see a clenched fist, the knuckles whitened. Then, an afterthought, Foxy said something brief about recovery of kit, a further transmission about extraction, and cut it.
The car came. It was the Mercedes. The goon bawled at the driver, who pointed to a tyre and bawled back. The case was carried to the car and the boot was sprung open. The kids had started to cry again. The bird was sitting on the microphone. He could imagine that pandemonium had broken out on receipt of their report, and he had done nothing about agendas, had failed to scour the options.
He and Foxy had done something huge and the response would be awesome. He knew it. Foxy might have forgotten himself: an arm had snaked out and was around Badger’s shoulders. ‘We did it. Against everything, every count of the odds, we did it. We scored.’
There was a photograph. The frame was expensive enough to have a hallmark stamped in it, which guaranteed its pedigree. It was on a table beside the bed.
The photograph had a message handwritten in heavy black ink: Ellie, With love to my darling girl, Foxy. The picture in the frame was of Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes with camouflage cream daubed on his face and wearing a gillie suit, but not headgear. He was grinning. It was a portrait of a man of action.
Neither of them, in the bed, were embarrassed or distracted by its presence. It was face down.
‘I’m not having him giving me a cold eye, the old bugger,’ Piers had said.
‘About all he’s capable of, these days, is watching,’ Ellie had said.
He’d arrived late at night, and his car was parked down the side of the garage, well inside the gate. It was pretty much hidden from a casual glance. She’d thought that a bottle of wine, on the carpet in front of the fire in the sitting room – Foxy’s chair pushed back to make more room – would ease them into what was a momentous time in the relationship. It was the first time he had been there. They’d been at his place and in the pubs there, where she was anonymous, on the far side of the motorway beyond Bassett.
It hadn’t worked out as she’d planned. Time had not been wasted on Foxy’s rug in front of a fire blazing with logs that Foxy had cut, and none of the wine had been drunk from the bottle that Foxy prized. Straight up the stairs, past the collection of cartoons, police stuff, that Foxy had collected, into the bedroom and onto Foxy’s bed. They’d stripped, and the light had been on, and he had crawled over her and looked up into Foxy’s face. His hand had come from between Ellie’s legs, reached for the frame and flipped it. Her hand had come off the small of his back and given it a shove. Now it was mostly hidden by the clock radio that had woken Foxy when he was at home. It had been Ellie’s decision that Piers come to the house.
Where was he? She didn’t know. What was he doing? She’d only had a text. What had she been told? Pretty much nothing, and the guys who’d brought the car back had just been peasants. Would he just turn up? Always rang first, something about getting the wine to room temperature or decently chilled.
They’d slept, knackered, and the dawn had come and she’d woken him.
Rain beat on the mullions. It was a grey dawn, a miserable one.
‘Not to worry,’ Ellie said. ‘You’re back here tonight.’
‘Am I? You sure?’
‘Too bloody right.’
It was eleventh-hour stuff, and she had jack-knifed up when the chimes had gone. She’d had to rummage in the robe to get the receiver, would have shown a mass of leg and didn’t care. The haggling, pure bazaar, had gone on through the night and into the small hours.
She had nothing in her hand except money. Probably they could have ignored the bartering and come and taken the money by force, and would have lost a few, or several in the fight. She and her guys, if still upright, would have been unable to prevent it. So, money had been on the table and the sheep had gone quiet – they might have thought, as the night wore on, that their throats were safe. And had been wrong.
There had been a bare apology, first light and a grey mist over the desert dirt, and she had been listening to the fucking thing, and then had run to the front Pajero, and her laptop.
The sheep had been skinned, then skewered and cooked over the fire. Bowls of rice were passed round, and bread brought from a village. The sheep had been slaughtered when the deal had been closed. Not an easy one for her: no chance of getting on a satphone and calling up her station chief in the Baghdad compound and asking him what ceiling she could reach to: he was outside the loop and would want to stay there. It was her decision alone, and she had pledged the lot. Her bundle of dosh, each last dollar, would go into the sheikh’s pocket. It carried no guarantee of honesty – he could trouser what she gave him, then drive away, call his friend, who would be a full colonel, and pass on information about Jones and her Boys to another colonel on the far side of the frontier. No guarantees, except – she had the laptop out and it was powering up – she had dropped in an aside. Ground troops of the coalition no longer did grunt work in the field, but the firepower of the air force was still available. She might be able to call out an F-16 Fighting Falcon with a load of missiles and maybe a pair of CBU-87 bombs.
She had power up and the satellite signal was locked.
It would have been in her eyes – lit by the fire: she had co-ordinates of where the sheikh lived and where his extended family were gathered, and the implication would have been that a bomb could go astray and she would give not a flying fuck if it did…
Abigail Jones opened a link to the Agency in the communications area of the station, in the fortified, sanitised sector of the capital. She was answered. Could she identify herself? She was Alpha Juliet. She gave her message, spelled it out again, but with a codified alteration. Kilo – Tango – Alpha – Delta – Bravo – Juliet. She added one word, ‘Enroute’, then ‘0647’. The cut-out process had begun. She didn’t know to whom she spoke, and a technician didn’t know who had sent him that brief message, or the identity of the receiver at the Vicenza base. Cut-outs bred deniability and fogged a trail.
She turned off the laptop and walked back towards the fire. Abigail Jones might have welcomed the thought that word of this would seep through the firewalls of need-to-know inside the Towers. It would be the same for her as for old Len Gibbons; whispers, nods and no complete picture. She would be noticed in the atrium hall, the canteens and corridors. She felt a little whiff of pride.
Shagger broke the indulgence. He asked, ‘When do they come out?’
‘They have to retrieve the gear, then shout and start moving. I don’t have a time yet. Now let’s get these bastards on the road, and what’s left of that mutton. The big part’s done and we know where he’s headed. It’s a fantastic result.’
He came into their darkened bedroom, hoping she was still asleep, but Lili’s voice was sharp: ‘Steffen? How is your headache?’
When he had come home from the Rathaus, alone, her parents were already in bed. He had gone to the remaining guest room, where he had tossed and turned. He had heard the crunch of tyres, long after midnight, on his drive, then laughter – hers and a man’s – talking and finally the key in the door. The car had driven off. Perhaps a man she had known from childhood had brought her home.
The bedside light came on and she sat up, her back against the pillows, the sheet tight to her throat. She wore nothing.
He had been nine when his father and mother had been killed in the battle for Khorramshahr. They had died
