been transferred. Was it possible that the asset, Antelope, could deliver his stolen material to a courier regarded as honest and reliable by the spy masters? Over the following five months, three couriers were identified, then names and addresses given for the pastor to pass them to the asset.
The man came out of the church in a small group, talking earnestly. Gibbons stayed back, let no light fall on his face. The silhouette of his body was masked by the trunks of the plane trees. Then, the man had always shaved closely and his hair had been cropped short. Now he wore an old coat against the evening chill, and his hair was in a ponytail held by an elastic band. His beard grew randomly across his face. The last he had heard of the man, still recognisable, was that he had started a sentence of six years’ imprisonment at Hamburg’s Fuhlsbuttel gaol. The end of the first week of October was Republic Day in the East. On that day the decision to arrest a pastor had been taken after joint consultation between British and German intelligence officers: the British in Bonn had gone cap in hand to their ally and grovelled on the failure of an operation that had cost the freedom, perhaps the lives, of four couriers. The information had been unwillingly accepted that Antelope was a sting operation conducted by the Stasi from Berlin, that a treacherous telephone operator in Wismar had never existed. Maybe the gullibility of Gibbons’s seniors had saved his own skin. Others would have gone with him to the guillotine had he been too heavily punished for the capital crime of naivete. He had survived by a thread, but was an altered man.
He did not spring forward to greet the man: How the devil are you? Looking well, considering. In work, or dependent on hand-outs? Do you still believe in the clapped-out empire that faded to dust overnight? Was it all worth men’s lives, the ones you condemned to years in cells or for hanging? He watched the man, once a pastor, go out through the gate, and those around him laughed at something he said… All so long ago, but relevant to Len Gibbons.
That night, he had met the man, had walked away with a package in his hand, then lit a cigarette, which was the signal. German police, plain clothes, had come forward and snapped on the handcuffs. He had killed, in his soul, any last trace of humanity. He no longer believed in mercy. Now, a servant of the Service, he obeyed orders. It was why he had been chosen. All agencies in this field of work needed men like Len Gibbons.
He turned on his heel and went back to the car park where he had left the VW.
Foxy reached the mud spit. He had fallen once. The booted foot had tripped against the one that wore only a sock and he’d gone down into the water where it was shallow. His head would have gone under if his hands hadn’t found the bottom, but water – foul-tasting – splashed onto his face.
He was there. Foxy sucked in air. There was a flap in his face, desperate. The bird’s wings beat, but it failed to launch itself. There was no one for Foxy to ask what the fuck was happening. He had no idea why the bird just flapped its wings hopelessly. He might have figured it out if his mind had been clearer.
It gave a croak, like a death rattle, and he had his hand up, protecting his eyes from the wings. The cable whipped against his cheek. His fingers found it and ran along its length, then collided with the bird’s body. It went into spasms of action, then was still. The beak hit him.
The African Sacred Ibis was snagged by the cable. He let go of it and the bird rose a foot off its perch. The cable tautened. The ibis croaked, and the claws on its feet came against Foxy’s hands and ripped at them. The flesh tore. The beak came back at him, was used as a spear. He grasped the cable again and the bird hung from his arm.
Foxy lashed out with his free hand. It didn’t matter to him that the bird was endangered, that its presence was a jewel in the eco-system of the marshes. He struck out, used full force. He couldn’t see it beyond the vague shapes of the wings as they beat at him but he recalled a long, slender neck – he had seen it when the bird had flown in, and while it had cleaned the feathers on its chest. He knew that his target was the neck, and the blow was hard.
He was Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes: he had taken on the full might of an African Sacred Ibis, worshipped as a deity in the civilisation of the Pyramids and pharaohs, and had broken its neck.
It hung from his hand. There were no reflexes, no shuddering death throes. Foxy had killed it. It hung from the entanglement of the cable. It had seemed large when the wings had beaten, the feet slashed and the beak stabbed, but now it was shrivelled.
He heard only the lapping of water, maybe against the reeds behind him or away to his right. He heard rippling. Maybe the wind had risen with the darkness. He tried to pull the cable free but it gouged against his palm and the limp carcass prevented him tugging it free. Foxy knelt on the mud spit. He could hear his heart, his breathing and the rippling of water, but could see nothing except the patch of white, the wing feathers and the back of the bird. He started to disentangle the corpse from the cable. It would have realised it couldn’t lift off and had sat still, hoping that the approaching beast would somehow avoid it. Only at the last, when the cable around its left leg and body had tightened, squeezing air out of it, had it reacted.
Foxy didn’t know how long it had been since he had left the hide, not even how long he had been on his knees on the mud spit. A degree of tenderness held him as he slackened the cable and started to free the bird’s body. He found the microphone wedged among the reeds and branches Badger had used to give it stability. When he had freed the bird he laid it down and put reed fronds over it. He took a deep breath, and slipped the microphone into the poacher’s pouch inside the gillie suit. Then he began to coil the loose cable.
He didn’t know why, then, the frogs’ croaking was silenced, but he could hear the water rippling.
‘Did you think it would be like this?’
‘I did not,’ the Engineer answered.
A shuttle bus had brought them from Hamburg airport, and they had been dumped with their bags on the pavement outside the Hauptbahnhof. The rush-hour crowds surged past and towards them. His experience of a European main-line terminus had been in Budapest as a student in his early twenties. He knew crowds from Tehran, but there he had command of language and the status of chauffeur-driven transport; Naghmeh flinched away from the press of people around her.
He had seen her gaze, mouth slack and eyes wide, at the prostitutes outside the station and under the street-lights, waists exposed in the cold, skirts barely covering their upper thighs, their faces painted. He had said nothing; neither had she. They had come inside the high arched building and loud music had greeted them. He had known it was Beethoven. She had asked why they played it so loudly in the station.
‘It keeps away the drug addicts – I read that. Users of heroin do not like such music,’ he had said.
‘Why do they allow those people on the streets in a public place?’
He had studied the board, searched for the train going to Lubeck. She leaned on his arm, needing its support. He said it was the way matters were handled in Germany, France, Spain and Britain. She had snorted.
Had he known it would be like this?
He did not lie: he had not.
‘Do they have no respect for us?’
‘I cannot argue with them. We are here. We will take the train to Lubeck. At Lubeck we will go to the hotel. I can do no more. Would you have me rant at the embassy, call the ministry or the commanding officer of the al- Quds? Would you have me complain?’
She looked into his face but could not meet his eyes, which were locked on the departures board. ‘We should not have come.’
He said what platform the train would leave from and started towards the steps going down to it, pulling their bag.
‘Did you hear me? We should have stayed where our own God is.’
He told her how long it would be before the train left for Lubeck. It was heresy to suggest they might turn back, and they went slowly down the steps.
He had started on the return.
Impossible to go quietly now. Each stride forward taxed him to his limits. He gathered in the cable and looped it on an arm. Badger would maybe have to pull him the last few yards into the depths of the reed bed, and he might need, there, to flop and rest. Before he accepted any help, or rest, though, he would get there. He had a stubborn pride.
The light came on.
He was too exhausted, his mind dulled, to realise in the first seconds what the light that trapped him meant.
No panic, not in the first moments after the beam caught him. For Foxy, it was a time of innocence. To him it lasted an age but it would not have been longer than five seconds. Then the panic broke, and he started to thrash.
