A Deniable Death

Chapter 13

The sun had dipped and started its slide.

Badger moved. When he shifted it was better for some of the sores and worse for others. The flies still swarmed and it was not yet dark enough for the mosquitoes. He could see the face of his wristwatch.

‘Not long, thank God,’ he murmured.

‘What?’

‘I said, “Not long.” ’

When he was out of this hell hole, Badger reckoned, he’d want to shout. He would need – maybe at the airfield at Basra, or at Kuwait airport – to get up on a table in the spooks’ office or in a coffee lounge and bawl the roof off, yell, scream, shake the walls. He’d shout in the shower, and louder in the surgery when the medic examined the wounds that the biting creatures had given him. He craved to shout now at the goon who sat in the chair, facing the lagoon and the still water.

Another thing he’d do, when he was back at any imitation of civilisation, was take the gillie suit, and the vest he wore under it, the pants and the socks, maybe even the boots, and chuck it all into one of those oil drums used as an incinerator, spill some fuel in and throw into it a lit roll of newspaper. They’d burn: the lice and fleas, ticks, ants and little red spiders. It would be sheer pleasure to watch them. Through the day, the thought of stripping off that gear and of the flames leaping in the drum had been companionship for Badger. He envied little about Foxy but his ability to sleep wherever and whenever.

He squirmed a little. Any movement seemed to set off the irritation of the insect bites. The next evening, those that weren’t lodged in the gillie suit would turn up and find the meal ticket had moved on. His mind jostled between reality and fantasy, as it had done to kill the hours: fleas, ticks and ants who found the empty hide should consider themselves lucky not to have been in the suit when it went into the drum… Maybe he’d gone a little mad. Maybe ‘a whiff of insanity’ was part of a croppie’s job description. But it was good to let the madness take hold because then anxieties about it’s in your name and it’s done, can’t be undone were pushed back. He stretched his legs to the limit and his left thigh cramped.

‘About another hour, then I’ll be moving.’

‘That so, young ’un?’

‘The bird’s awake, seems it’s getting some life back.’

‘Should be hungry. It’ll need to go and feed.’

‘The further away the bloody better, and him with it.’

The goon, the officer, had finally stood. He took a last cigarette and tossed the empty pack onto the ground beside the quay. He stretched and walked to the far end of the short pier, but hardly looked right or left. His eye line stayed with the bird. Now it was upright and seemed to test the ground and the debris under its feet. It stamped a little and eased the weight from one leg to the other. Then its head lifted, its neck straightened and it croaked, a harsh sound. The wings opened and flapped.

‘Go on, you bastard. Get yourself up and away.’

It subsided again.

‘Whether he’s there or not,’ Badger muttered, ‘I reckon in an hour I can go and get it.’

‘You got eyes, young ’un?’

‘Yes.’

‘See anything with them, or are they crap?’

Badger bridled. ‘I can see better than you.’

There was a silence, and self-satisfaction on Foxy’s face. The silence meant there was something he should have seen but had not.

Badger backed off. He was not prepared to beg for an explanation. He bit his lip and looked again. The bird hopped twice, then came down heavily. The goon was most of the way through the last cigarette and kicked the packet along the edge of the quay. For the first time in that long day he did not seem totally engrossed in the bird. The woman – the mother of the Engineer’s wife – came out through the front door with a glass in her hand, went to the goon and gave it to him. They talked. The children might have had a meal or a story, might have watched the TV. They had been lively when they had come home from school in the middle of the day – one had played with a ball, the other a skipping-rope.

The shadows lengthened

The heat of the day dissipated.

His throat was dry.

Foxy was now fully alert and used his glasses to rake over the bird, the house and the goon. His view slid between the pier where the dinghy was tied, and the barracks and the bund line beyond.

‘Where all this began… I said that in an hour it’ll be dark enough for me to get forward and bring back the microphone and the wire. Are we arguing?’

‘Heard you the first time,’ Foxy said.

Many hours dead, one more to kill, then the journey to the extraction point.

He was breathing hard.

He threw down the cigarette, stamped on it.

There had been months of boredom in Mansoor’s recent life, weeks of tedium that had seemed to drift on with neither high spots nor low moments, merely ordinariness. He had to stifle the panting. Tension gripped him.

He could not show it.

His back turned now to the lagoon, as the light fell and shadows stretched far behind him, he walked with a clipped, slow step – as if he had no further interest in what he had turned away from – towards the door of the house. He took the mother back her glass, then called to the kids. One was playing football with two of the guards and the other had a toy pram. He took them inside and tried to suppress any hint of authority in his voice that might frighten them; he gave no appearance of uttering an order.

With the children inside, he told their grandmother to keep them there, to wait two or three minutes and then to close the door. He thought her a strong woman – anyone of her age would have lived through the battles in either Susangerd, Ahvaz or Khorramshahr and would not have survived if prone to panic: they had been vicious battles with few prisoners taken – women had been killed, women had been raped. She should close the door, bolt it, move the children to the back of the house, but leave the radio or TV on in the front and not draw those curtains.

He walked now across the dirt, saw the cigarette packet, picked it up and headed for the barracks. He did not speak to the two guards who were still sitting in the shade of the trees. He would not have trusted either to act out the relaxed and typical scene – its tedium – if he had spoken to them of a security alert. They would have run round like headless chickens. He kept to the tree line where the shadows were thickest and would go to the barracks by the side entrance. He would not be seen and would give no warning to a watcher.

The bird had moved, had stood.

The cable had been pulled up and had made a loop. He would not have seen it unless his glasses had been on the bird. The loop had raised a length of black-coated metal, which he estimated at between thirty and forty centimetres long.

Mansoor had been in Iraq. He had been there during the difficult days when the troops of the Great Satan had attempted to load maximum pressure on the resistance and on the al-Quds teams sent to guide and advise. He and his colleagues had been lectured that they must always be vigilant against surveillance: no use of mobile telephones, no meetings with sensitive personnel outside buildings where they could be identified by the drones in the skies – the precaution of changing meeting points so that patterns were not established and bugs installed – and he did not think his eyes had deceived him. He had seen a loop of wire and a length of tube, and they were among the dead leaves on the mud spit. How long had the debris been wedged there? Two or three days, no more. Had there been, three or four days before, a sufficient storm to flush out those leaves and dump them high and dry? There had not.

He went into the barracks and woke the men who were sleeping, tossed those who played cards from their chairs and switched off the television. He told the armourer what he wanted and how many rounds of ammunition should be issued to each man. The light was slipping and the high lamp on the post by the barracks, where it ran alongside the far end to the quay, had lit. Evening was coming, and he had only glimpsed the loop and the tube. He did not feel confident enough to demand reinforcements from Ahvaz, and did not wish to hand over the matter to a more senior officer.

He could hear, down the corridor, the chains rattling as the rifles – Type 56 assault weapons, made in the People’s Republic of China – were freed from the armoury’s racks.

‘Do I take a Glock?’

‘You won’t need one.’

‘It’ll be out of your weapon’s range.’

‘I won’t be behind you.’

Badger spat, ‘ “Won’t be behind you!” Great. I seem to remember I half carried you here.’

Calm, authority, a voice used to being heard, not contradicted: ‘You won’t need a Glock. And I won’t be behind you.’

‘I don’t understand what shit you are coming with.’

‘It’s about the quality of the eyes.’

‘Mine are as good as any – all the tests show it.’

‘It’s what you didn’t see, young ’un, when the bird moved.’

‘The bird moved, didn’t take off, settled. Perhaps, last light, it’ll get a frog and-’

‘You saw nothing. You don’t need the Glock and I’m not behind you. You’re not as good as you thought you were.’

‘Which means?’

‘I’m going forward – and I’ll decide when – and I’ll retrieve the microphone and the cable. Clear?’

‘It’s my job.’ The calm fazed Badger, made him uncomfortable – always difficult to argue when a man refused to be riled. He wondered if the older man was capable of getting across the clear ground, through the reed beds, then wading fifty yards and doing the reverse trip. Badger reckoned, when they came out, he would be carrying two bergens and likely have Foxy hooked on his back. ‘I’m going.’

‘I make that decision.’

‘No. I do that sort of thing. It’s for me to do.’

‘I’m going to tell you two things, and do me the courtesy of closing your mouth and listening. If I could square it with any last vestige of professionalism that I have, I’d get you to load up the bergens – now – and we’d sneak out. We’d leave in place the microphone and the cable. They’re found and the balloon goes up. The effect of that is that calls are made and they end up in Lubeck, having been processed through every floor of the Ministry of Information and Security. He will be pulled out, meaning that everything we did was for fuck-all of nothing, and he can make some more of his little toys. Hearing me?’

‘That they’ll find the gear within the next twenty-four hours? A big ask.’

‘You don’t know what to look for – and you’re blind. It’s already been found.’

He might have been punched in the crotch. Badger folded. He could still see the bird and it could not have been famished sufficiently to go hunt another frog for itself, and the feathers on its back were pink from the last of the sun that would be down, buried, in the next fifteen minutes. Changeover time coming. The flies would have been exhausted after bombing the scrim net for all the daylight hours and the mosquitoes would have rested and would be hungry for flesh and would be coming out, hunting. He stank. His stomach was bloated from the tablets, could hardly make wind, and precious little of his body was free of the bites and the scabs had bloody grown and the sores oozed. He looked for the goon and couldn’t see him, then for the cable and couldn’t find it.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

‘If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have said it.’

‘If they know about it, why you? Why is it your job?’

The shadows were on them and he couldn’t see Foxy’s face. He thought he heard a sob, not a choke, but something softer, sadder.

Foxy said, ‘It’ll take me a while, young ’un, to think through what I want to tell you.’

‘I’m the one who’s supposed to have all the answers,’ Abigail Jones said.

Corky was beside her. ‘Why haven’t they come? That it, miss?’

‘It’ll do.’

‘They have kit in front of them and can’t retrieve it till dark. Would that fit?’

‘Snugly, Corky. Hard, though, isn’t it? More than us, they want out. We want it badly, they want it more. A whole day to wait.’ It was unusual for her to muse in public, wear frustration on her sleeve. Normally she bottled such feelings, which might have been partly why she lived alone, when based in London, in her two-bedroomed maisonette. It cost her a fortune, and it would have been useful to have a guy living there, on her terms, to chip in with the expenses. She didn’t know one she could allow to copy her front-door key, and have access to her space. A man who had been a senior clerk in the old Bank of Iraq now looked after the incidental finances of the station in the Green Zone. He had supplied her with the dollar bills she had given to the sheikh. He also did invoices for food, fuel, clothing, and could switch handwriting patterns effortlessly. At the end of the tour she would take a bucketload of cash to a respected dealer in gold and precious stones and buy items of quality but not enough to attract the attention of a Customs nerd. She’d be wearing them, looking expensive, when she came back through Heathrow, and would sell the stuff on in London. That way, Abigail Jones could afford a maisonette with a view over the river. She’d learned the methods on her first trip to the Gulf and on the posting to Bosnia.

It was coming up on her fast, the bug-out from Baghdad. Soon enough there would be the round of parties – her people, Agency staffers, the embassy, hand-chosen Iraqi army officers and intelligence men, and a general melee of multi-national spooks. The best part would be the knowledge, shared in a tight circle, of the ‘taking down’ of an Engineer. It would be a pleasure to know he was dead, and that she had played her part in it. There would be an office car from Heathrow to her home, and she would sign the docket and have the driver lift the bags to the front door, then fish out her keys and step inside her home, alone. She wondered if that evening, when they hit the Basra road, Highway 6, there might be a swap of mobile numbers, done in the lead Pajero, if he would be there – giggles about where it had been last time and…

Corky said, ‘Because their gear is forward they need darkness to get it back. Shouldn’t be long.’

‘I have to say it, Corky – I’d have been tempted to ditch the stuff, and we’d have been out of here seven or eight hours ago, if they’d made good time.’

The crowd had gone, drifting away in the wake of the dust cloud from the big BMW in which the sheikh rode. There would have been what Corky called ‘dickers’ who watched them, but for now the wads of banknotes had bought emptiness round the perimeter. The light on her communications kit hadn’t flashed. No message from London, no acknowledgement and nothing to tell her that a hit was on course. Nothing from ahead, from beyond a horizon of dirt and soft-coloured reeds.

They had spent their day cleansing the building they’d used. Now it was as they had found it, every fag end picked up and bagged. The vehicles were loaded with the sleeping bags and mosquito nets, the spotter ’scope for bird-watching, the spare weaponry and ammunition. She had done the rounds and was satisfied. She had paused in the doorway of the room where he had slept and seen a smooth part of the concrete flooring where the dust had been swept away by the motion of his hips. She regretted nothing.

‘Only thing, miss, that’s worse than ditching gear and leaving it behind is doing that to a comrade, your mate.’

‘I think I understand that, Corky.’

‘You don’t, young ’un, interrupt or contradict me.’

Badger reckoned he was composed now, ready. ‘Heard you.’

‘You’ll watch my back and I’ll retrieve the stuff.’

Badger didn’t interrupt, or contradict.

‘I’ll go in about fifteen minutes when the light’s gone. It’s not acceptable to leave the gear, so we won’t. We get the stuff and leave the hide covered. We have to hope it’ll stay that way long enough. The goon’s watched the bird all day. He’ll have seen the cable and now he’s gone back to where his guys are. His own people are poor quality, but I doubt he is. You saw the limp, which means he’s been injured – I’d imagine it was a combat wound. He may act with his own people or, more likely, he’ll have sent for decent back-up from down the road. When it’s dark, I’m going.’

Badger lay on his stomach and listened. The sun tipped the tops of the reed beds in the west, and the skies over the palm trees across the lagoon and the house, where nothing moved and few lights showed.

‘When I come back to you, I may be coming fast, and we don’t fuck about, young ’un. We’re going for speed and distance, and I’m thinking that the first quarter of a mile is the critical bit. We manage that and use the comms. We try to find, without bloody drowning, the extraction point. That’s what’s going to happen.’

Still no contradiction, no interruption.

‘I’ll go forward to retrieve the stuff because I don’t know what’ll be waiting there. When I don’t know, I won’t ask anyone else to do what I should be doing. In case there are any misunderstandings between us, young ’un, don’t ever forget that I’m in charge. I lead and I decide. You don’t. Before you ask, my memory of the plug from the cable into the microphone is that it’s a straight socket, not robust. Giving the cable a yank will do the business and they’ll come apart – surprised the pigs didn’t manage it. I’m going, and you’ll have everything, the bergens and the rest, ready for a fast break-out.’

‘You’re not capable of it.’

‘I’m going forward – it’s the burden of leading.’

‘Because getting a cable and a microphone back from fifty yards is dangerous? That’s rubbish.’

‘It’s dangerous – which you’d know if you had eyes. And-’

‘And what?’

There was a pause.

‘It’s better that I do it.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Foxy – you’ve got a wife, a home, respect. Love.’

‘Wrong.’

‘My home’s police quarters, a dump. I’m a squatter. I don’t have a woman.’

‘You have Alpha Juliet and something might just-’

‘You have a wife – a wife. A home and a wife. Why-’

‘Try this proverb by John Heywood. He wrote it in 1546, which was the last year in the life of Henry the Eighth. “An old fool is the worst kind of fool – as in, he’s marrying a woman fifty years his junior.” Actually only eighteen years, but I’m the worst kind of fool.’

‘What’re you saying, Foxy?’ Badger cursed himself. He knew what Foxy meant and should have buttoned his lip.

A quaver in the voice. ‘There’s an ex-policeman who transferred a few years back to Ministry of Defence security at Bath. He told me. The guy she’s with is in Accounts. All of Naval Procurement knows, and probably most of Accounts, but I was one of the last. She’s shagging him. You want some more, young ’un? My wife isn’t likely to be at home, sitting in front of the TV with a supermarket meal for one, yearning for me to be home. She’s more likely to be in my bed, drinking my cellar dry with her legs spread. It hurts more than anything I’ve known. I pretend, I talk about her, and it’s all lies.’

‘You didn’t have to tell me, Foxy.’

‘They watch me at work, people who know I’m married to her and who’ve seen her picture. I know I’m drawn, pale, and they snigger that it’s because I’m getting it night after night. But they’re not from Naval Procurement – they know. It’ll be their daily soap-opera episode. She goes to Bassett – you know what I mean? Wootton Bassett. She sees them bring the soldiers back from Afghanistan, up the High Street, and uses it to taunt me. These are “heroes”, and I’m the old fool who gives lectures and is half buried in the bloody past. I think they have sex when she’s claiming to be sick and doesn’t go to work. She goes through Bassett on the way home. It’s like she thinks you’re not worthwhile unless you’ve earned a Bassett job for yourself. Don’t ever forget it. No fool like an old fool. I think that’s enough, young ’un.’

‘You didn’t have to.’

‘I’m grateful to you for listening.’

The light had slipped some more.

The binoculars no longer showed him the bird, and the dim lights on the far side of the lagoon only outlined the walls of the house. The big lamp, the high one in front of the barracks, had come on, but there seemed to be no movement. Badger wondered if that indicated the guards’ mealtime. He didn’t know whether he had missed things he should have noted, or whether Foxy had lost his marbles through heat and dehydration. No one, before, had confided in him like that. He felt uncomfortable. They would get to Kuwait City together, then split and be in different rows in the aircraft. They’d head for the Green Channel separately, and cars would take them in opposite directions. He thought also there was an evens chance that he’d be going into the water to get Foxy back. No one, before, had ever talked to him with such raw unhappiness.

He wriggled over to lie on his side, his back to Foxy, and started to search in the bergen beside him for what he might need when Foxy went to get the microphone and the cable.

They had reached Frankfurt. There was fog over Hamburg and the airport there was closed temporarily, but would reopen within two hours.

She was exhausted. They sat on the silent stationary aircraft, with a full cabin of other passengers, and waited for the announcement that the pilot would soon be starting up the engines. They were now on their fourth leg. Ahvaz to Tehran. Tehran to Vienna with the national carrier. Vienna to Munich with the Austrian airline. Munich to Hamburg. She was tense and quiet. There was little the Engineer could do to comfort her, and old inhibitions died hard in him: he thought it would be ‘unseemly’ if he held her hand, with every seat occupied and a feeling that he was watched. Paranoia – what else? She was dressed as he had never seen her before. She had been given, in the toilets off the VIP lounge at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International, different clothes to wear, which she had protested she had never seen before. Now she sat in a skirt that reached a little below her knee, a thick cotton blouse and a solid jacket of deep green silk. It had been suggested that she no longer needed to wear a headscarf. They had Czech passports. She had whispered hoarsely, ‘Do I have to renounce my nationality, of which I am proud, and my religion, to which I am devoted?’ He had said, hesitantly, that concerned officials in the ministry considered she would attract less attention if she was not an obvious Iranian citizen. ‘Is attracting attention so important? Are we ashamed of ourselves?’

Now her breathing was forced. He rang the bell above his seat, and when the stewardess came, he asked for water for his wife. It was brought, without grace.

Through the porthole windows, the Engineer saw that lights glistened on the apron and that rain spattered down. He looked at his wristwatch and made the calculations. He said that by now, at home, it would be dark. She swallowed hard and said she hoped the children were in bed and would sleep well and… There was little to talk of that could be, in any way, appropriate. His only previous flight abroad had been as the student who went to Budapest. She held on her lap a briefcase that contained a full digest of her medical history with X-rays and printouts of scans. Abruptly, the music cut and a woman’s voice boomed. To ribald cheering, the plane shook as the engines ignited.

‘I think it is an hour to Hamburg. We take the local train to the centre of the city, then the faster one to Lubeck.’

They were good boys, peasants, but not trained like the men of the al-Quds Brigade.

He had drilled into them three times what they should do, where each would be. They were from the ranks of the Basij and they looked at him with the sort of awe that was predictable in simple youths who found themselves under the command of a war veteran of an elite force.

They sat on the floor of the main communal area in the barracks and asked no questions but seemed to absorb what he told them.

‘It was always the duty of the defenders of the state’s frontiers to be on constant alert to prevent incursions from spies, terrorists, criminals, anyone who sought to undermine and betray the revolution of the imam. Perhaps, tonight, such a risk exists from our enemies, but we are ready.’ He dropped his voice, a trick he had learned many years earlier when he had been attached to Hezbollah, in the Lebanese Beka’a Valley, from a Syrian intelligence officer. ‘I could delay, do nothing, send for help from Ahvaz, and the senior men there would know I had no faith in you, that I did not think the Basij capable of confronting the spies, the terrorists, the criminals. If the threat is there, we will destroy it, and in the morning we will send for help from Ahvaz.’

He had made a plan, on the table using sand from a fire bucket and coloured sheets of cardboard, that showed the house, the quayside and the pier, the lagoon, the barracks and the bund line that ran along the southern edge of the water. He used grass where the reeds should be and blue card for the water. He had been through the plan three times. He thought his wife, working on the computer at the al-Quds camp, would hear him praised.

It was a simple plan, and he thought it a good one. The boys listened intently and held tight to their rifles.

The landfall was lost behind them, taken into the mist.

The ferry carried long-distance lorries and their trailers and was en-route from the Swedish port of Trelleborg, to the south of Malmo. It would reach its destination, Travemunde, after a 16.00 departure to sail across the Baltic, at 23.00 hours. It had been a close-run thing, but a representative in the Swedish capital had achieved, in eight hours, what had been asked of him. A passport had come from an embassy safe, and Gabbi’s photograph put in place. He was Greek Cypriot, living in Norway and working in the haulage industry. He was a driver’s mate for a shipment of bulk timber. To have created the passport, the biography and gained the necessary seat in the cab was a triumph for the representative, and the driver’s mate had a foot-passenger ticket to return on the ferry the following morning or on the additional sailing in the late afternoon. He would not have said it himself, but the representative, who had met him at Malmo’s airport, Sturup International, had told him that no other intelligence-gathering agency in the world could have put together such a package so quickly. They liked cargo ferries, from which cars and holidaymakers, passengers not connected with long-distance business, were barred. Customs and Immigration checks, and those for embarkation, were bare formalities and the representative had said it was a perfect route.

Gulls wheeled over him.

He stood at the rail, in fading light, and watched the long, straight line of the boat’s wake. He shivered, sucked in air and used his tradecraft. He wore a long-peaked baseball cap, a scarf covering his mouth, and gloves, and would spend the entire sailing on deck, not inside where it would be noticed if he kept on the cap, scarf and gloves – and on deck no cameras would record him. The wind was brutal and there was sleet in the air, but he stayed at the rail.

The men were in place where he had positioned them. He was ready. Mansoor’s last action was to take out from a shed behind the barracks a small inflatable dinghy capable of carrying four men.

He did not have night-vision – such equipment was kept by combat forces – but he had good eyes, and the moon would be up soon. He had good ears too.

He watched and listened. He did not know what he might see or hear, but he felt confident. If he saw and heard nothing, if he had imagined the loop of wire and the tubing on which the bird sat, then he had not called out a platoon from Ahvaz and could not be ridiculed.

The dark had come and sounds rippled from the lagoon, from the birds and frogs and the pair of pigs, and he believed – concentrating his gaze into the darkness – that the Sacred Ibis, a bird revered for three millennia, had not moved. It was the key.

He stood in the middle of the road and gave his memories full rein.

The road – once the northern trunk route from old West German territory to the German Democratic Republic – ran between Lubeck and Schwerin. East and West had met here, separated by a white line that had been painted across the tarmac. It was natural that Len Gibbons should come to the village that straddled the road and was called Schlutup.

He stared into the middle distance. The dusk was coming slowly and the wind whipped him. He saw only desolate heathland, where no trees grew: dead ground. It had been his place, his territory. He had been ‘Gibbo’ then, and considered bright enough in his twenty-ninth year to be sent from London to join the Bonn station and be given responsibility to run assets in the northern sector. Not as exciting as Berlin, but good work that would have been the envy of the peers who had joined the Service with him. The man had been codenamed Antelope.

Where he looked now there had then been the Customs post and the base from which the Grenztruppen and the Staatssicherheit had been deployed. It had been a complex of buildings, reached by a corridor between high wire fencing, a minefield, dogs, watchtowers – all the paraphernalia that awful state had needed to keep its citizens from flight – and now was levelled. The barracks of the border guards from which they deployed to the watchtowers and patrols in the killing zones had been flattened; the cells and interrogation rooms of the Stasi had been bulldozed. It had been Gibbo’s ground when he had run Antelope. He accepted that a bewildering coincidence had brought him back to Lubeck, extraordinary and unpredictable. He thought that the Fates had dealt him a fine hand, the chance to obliterate old memories and wounds. A successful killing would wipe clean the slate of the Schlutup Fuck-up.

They had travelled – himself, the Cousin and the Friend – on separate flights. His had taken him via Brussels and then a connection to Hamburg. The Cousin had also gone to Brussels, but had had a fixed-wing charter bring him on to the smaller airfield outside Lubeck. The Friend would have travelled in his own mysterious way, by his own routes and channels. Another hired aircraft, most likely, and documentation that would fool most experts and certainly would have been accepted by local officials. They had met by the canal in Lubeck, near to the gardens between the Muhlen and Dankwarts bridges and sat on a bench. The Israeli had smoked cigarettes and the American a small cigar – Gibbons had yearned to ditch his abstinence. The pieces of the jigsaw had come together.

It was where the story of Antelope had been launched by a pastor. The young Gibbons, fresh-faced and revelling in a job that brought him to the cusp of Cold War action, had been standing almost at the point where he was now and had been staring up that road past the barriers. Dogs had been leaping on their leashes at him and he would have been under the gaze of half a dozen pairs of binoculars. Three or four Zeiss and Praktica cameras would have been focused on him. He had known, then, so little of the East. He had once been on an Autobahn drive direct to West Berlin, and on the military train that ran across communist territory to Berlin from Helmstedt in the West. There was little to learn from watching the empty road, the ground where no cattle grazed and the expressionless faces of the guards, so he had turned and walked down the hill.

The pastor had approached him, sidled to his shoulder… The pastor had a friend who was trapped in the East. There was a cafe down the road from which the old border had run and they had gone there. The Pastor had refused alcohol and drunk tea. He had talked more of his friend. Where did the friend work? At the telephone exchange in Wismar – where else? Trumpets had blasted, excitement had gone rampant. Soviet military formations were close, naval forces had moorings on the Mecklenburgerbucht to the north and at Rerik and Warnemunde to the east, and the telephone exchange had the potential to offer up the pouches of gold dust so coveted by the Service. He had filed his report of the meeting for consideration in Bonn and London. With reservations, and instructions for due care on Gibbons’s part, Antelope had come alive.

He stood in the road and was oblivious of the traffic. The dusk had arrived sharply enough for the oncoming lights to dazzle him. Cars, vans and lorries swept past, the slipstreams buffeting him. He stood his ground. The jigsaw’s pieces had slotted together well. He had remarked, without apparent humour, that the marzipan factor had clinched the location, Lubeck. The Americans had the database, and were able to name an Iranian-born neurosurgeon resident in Lubeck who practised there. He performed complicated surgery either in the city’s medical schools, or in Hamburg; there was a home address on Roeckstrasse. The Israeli said that a man would come from Berlin and would have with him necessary equipment. The facilitator was in transit and would reach the city late in the evening, but had not volunteered details of the man’s travel plans. They had gone their ways and would meet again in the late evening. Hands had been shaken. A course of action had been launched and would not now be revoked. They had stood, and the Cousin had remarked, off-hand, ‘I say this, Len, with real pleasure. Your boys who went forward – that old guy and the youngster – they did us proud. My sincere congratulations to them.’ He’d answered that they were unable to beat it straight out because there was kit to recover, but about now they would be on the move and, yes, it had been a first-class effort. He had not thought about them before or since the Cousin had spoken of them.

It was, in a sense, a pilgrimage that Gibbons had made to Schlutup, straight from that bench in his hired VW. There was a small centre, deserted, but dominated by the church where the pastor retired now, had stood in while the incumbent was away. Then there were residential streets of bungalows with a sprinkling in the gardens of the winter’s first snow. He had parked and walked past a lake – ducks had scattered off it. He had remembered the lake, and there were concrete bunkers that British military engineers had put in place when the borders were defined and the barriers had gone up; the structures were now collapsed and overgrown. There was a paddock with horses. One was old, a skewbald, and had had its head down with tiredness. There was a trace in his memory of a young horse, roan on grey, possibly. He had walked onto the death strip where there would have been smoothed sand, firing devices and patrols, and the bankruptcy of the regime was on show. He had found an apple tree. A few rotten fruits had survived the autumn and he imagined the bored young guard, a conscript, far from home, who had tossed down a core and bred the tree. The death strip was now in the possession of hikers and dog-walkers, and he had met children out with a teacher, a man with Schnauzers and a woman with a yellow Labrador. He had walked along the strip where the fences and towers had been dismantled two decades earlier, where few signs survived to corroborate his past and the Schlutup Fuck-up.

The place, and Antelope, had governed his life, fashioned and shaped it, and had made him the man he was. So much had been expected – based on recommendations from young Gibbo – of a traitor working inside the Wismar telephone exchange. Few escaped their past, and actions of many years ago, and Len Gibbons was not among those who did. The pastor had introduced him – tantalisingly brief – to a man in the cafe, and had murmured that he was indeed from the exchange, allowed across the frontier to watch a football match between Dresden and Hamburg. Bundles of phone dockets were passed, with red crosses on them if they were between military units, and spools of tape. He had been with the man no more than fifteen minutes and had thought him brave, committed and, almost, a hero. He had seen him walk to the pastor’s car outside the cafe and be driven away. The pastor then had access to the East and became a regular and reliable courier, until his health was said to have failed. The question was raised: did the Service have potential couriers in the East, men and women who could be trusted? The question had been answered, and the Schlutup Fuck-up was born. They were old wounds but had not healed.

It was an indulgence for Len Gibbons to have come here. He knew all the escape stories from this section of the Inner German Border: home-made balloons, gliders built in garden sheds, tranquilliser pills buried in meat and thrown to the dogs, then payment to the traffickers, who would attempt to hide a client under the back seat of a car, with sedatives for a child, and bluff a way past the border troops and the Stasi. One appealed to him hugely. The next day, while the hitman worked and while his own presence on the streets was unnecessary, he would go a little to the north to where he had walked for comfort and peace thirty years earlier, and he would think of Axel Mitbauer of the East German national swimming team. He would be there the next morning because it was unnecessary for him to witness a killing, merely to have a role in its organisation.

He turned away. A car blasted its horn at him, but he ignored it and began to walk to Schlutup’s church, dedicated to St Andrew. He had spent much time there and thought that being there had sculpted him, made him the man he was – whom some hated, some despised and few admired.

‘You didn’t have to,’ Badger whispered.

Low, but almost brusque from Foxy: ‘ “Didn’t have to”?’

‘About you and her. You didn’t have to tell me.’

‘Don’t remember telling you anything.’

‘Please yourself.’

‘I usually do.’

It was enough and couldn’t be put off longer. Did he regret the agony-aunt session now? They hadn’t spoken in the last quarter of an hour and the light had failed. Badger would have gone out, loosed the cable, then faffed about until he found the microphone. He would have come back, reeled in the cable and not thought too much about it. Foxy had made it a big deal: he had talked about danger, and the wire, and suggested the goon had seen and noted. God’s truth, Badger had observed nothing that rang alarm bells, and he’d thought he had a good nose for them.

‘And you don’t have to.’

‘ “Don’t have to”?’

‘You don’t have to go. I can do it.’

‘Far as I’m concerned you can barely wipe your arse. What I told you to do, do it and be ready. Then we shift straight out.’

‘It’s done and checked.’

‘Well, check it again.’

Foxy started the slow wriggle backwards, using his elbows and knees to move himself, and his head went past Badger’s chest. Badger ducked – shouldn’t have spoken, but did anyway. ‘Is it her badmouthing you, sneering about heroes and Bassett, letting you know you’re second-rate, that hurts?’

‘You’re out of order, young ’un, and taking a liberty. I don’t remember telling you anything. Reckon I’ll be about fifteen minutes.’

He was gone and Badger was alone. The space beside him gaped. He began to clear out the inside of the scrape and shove their rubbish into his bergen. He took out the Glock and could do the business by touch: he checked the magazine and felt that the safety was in place. He heard, very faintly, Foxy’s crawl towards the reed beds. He pulled their kit out of the hide, lay in silence on his stomach and waited.