Chapter 12

When it had the light to see where it flew, the bird left its perch on a broken tree. Its place, a favourite for two years, was now dried out, and the mud under it had become a wizened mosaic so it could no longer wade there and hunt. It had not fed for three days, but the bird was a creature of close-governed habits and its instincts preserved its loyalty to that place. Hunger drove it to abandon its perch.

It laboured into the air, weakened by lack of food. It was up before the dawn light had spread, and before the eagles had soared high to search for prey. It worked hard to get elevation and to feel the draught of wind under its broad wings.

It went over areas of sunbaked mud, once covered with a film of water, and over what were now narrow drains and had once been deep waterways, and skirted a collection of huts that would have been in danger of annual flooding when the bird was young but now were marooned. Below it a few skinny, undernourished water buffalo meandered in search of lakes and lagoons.

The ibis flew towards water, to the east where it would find food: small fish, frogs, mice or immature rats, beetles, spiders, butterflies and moths. The bird was female. The last year, her eggs had addled. Hunger had driven her from the stick nest in the tree and she had spent too many hours away, looking for the food that would sustain her. The ground had been arid and without life, and the village where in previous years she had scavenged was now deserted. Once she had seen the carcass of her mate but she had not fluttered down to feed off it, had left the mess of bones and feathers for the crows to peck at.

She had broad wings, white with black-tipped feathers. As she flew, climbed, a rhythm returned to the flaps that took her forward. It tired her to fly any distance, but she would go as far as her strength permitted in her search. A column of smoke spiralled near to some buildings and she saw people there, swung away and did a half-circle around them: she had no love of people.

When the sun edged over the horizon, she felt the first of the day’s warmth on her wings and back, white-feathered, and on her neck and head, black-feathered and with a black beak. The sun encouraged her to beat her wings harder, and soon she found a rivulet to follow. Then it became a stream, and a different smell seemed to come from the ground. There were reed banks.

She flew lower.

Beyond the reed banks there were expanses of water, not clear and dark as it would have been if the level was deep beyond the length of her wading legs. She looked for water that reflected the skies and in which she could see the mud bottom, not thick weed.

She saw a building that had small lights around it, the green of the reeds and a bare space of dried dirt on which debris had accumulated, and she saw a little promontory just above the water and at the end a mass of dried leaves. She made a clumsy landing because of the time she had been flying. She settled, had barely steadied herself, then readied to strike. She was listed as a bird deserving the status of ‘conservation concern’ and ‘threatened’. In the last survey of the marshlands, while warfare raged around the dedicated lovers of the ibis, it was estimated that only twenty-six adults lived in this habitat. She hit with her beak. The strike was brutal, fast: she had a frog.

It was a fat frog and it struggled, but its existence was already forfeit. It was put down on the reed fronds, and held by the beak until the claws at the foot of the bird’s left leg could pinion it down.

It was eaten, swallowed whole and alive. Digestion would take time, and the water level around the place where she settled was good for her wading.

She squatted, preened herself, pecked at insects real and imagined. She gazed around her and felt comfortable.

Badger watched. He had had the glasses on the bird as it circled the landing place twice, each time lower on the circuit. He wondered what species it was, but thought it pretty – and effective in the art of killing.

The bird, hunched down, lancing its body feather with its beak, was welcome – a relief to Badger from the options, from breaking disciplines and scratching bites. The mosquitoes had gone now, the flies were gathering, and the wind coming from Foxy was foul. Twice he’d elbowed the man’s ribcage to stop the snoring, but then the options had been uppermost.

A man of ethics? A police officer bred on morality? Badger didn’t know if he was or not. He believed in getting a job done and not much more. He had never fabricated evidence, had never claimed not to have seen another constable strike a man with a baton, and had never fiddled expenses. He had never done anything he would be ashamed of, had never risked his career with a criminal action. The rip-off culture at the police station in Bristol where he had started out had passed him by. Almost, in fact, he had been bollocked for insufficient arrests, relying on cautions and verbal warnings rather than hoicking the arrest statistics for the division. He had a moral code, not flaunted when he was in uniform or out of it, not based on any religious teaching and not worn on his sleeve. The code gave him – he recognised it now – a sort of naivete. Maybe the naivete had come on heavier since he had gone into rural surveillance and after he’d nagged Human Resources for the chance to go on the CROP course. Options? They had nagged at him through the night, while Foxy slept, and the one factor making the matter bearable was that nothing had materialised for him to report. He was watching the bird scrabble with its big feet for better grip on the reed fronds he had put there. More serious than ‘options’, it was kicking at the camouflage he’d made.

The bird hacked hard, thrust dried stuff back and seemed anxious to work down to a hard surface. The glasses showed him the slim, long body of the microphone and, once, the drive of the right foot lifted the cable… If the bird kept going, the microphone would be pushed into the water. Down to options that mattered. Out of his mind went I was, sir, only following orders that I believed to be legitimate. No more baggage about I’m not prepared to be involved, Foxy, in extra-judicial murder. I’m not some fucking Israeli. I will not allow any message that contributes to the target’s killing to be transmitted. Pushed down the agenda was I’m walking out now and having no further part in this, and at the bottom of the heap was I’m a moron and ignorant, and I didn’t understand. More important, top of the pile, was how to stop a pretty bird – a bloody nuisance bird – kicking out the microphone and drowning it. Couldn’t stand up and shout, couldn’t go walkabout to look for a stone and lob it. Once more it scratched. The shape of the microphone was clear now and the cable was well visible and… It stopped, seemed to compress itself down.

The door opened – the front door.

The goon was walking from the barracks towards the house. Lights had been switched on inside and, faintly, a radio played. The door was wide open and the kids spilled through it. Then the case was lifted out. Maybe it was the Engineer who brought it, maybe the older woman.

The case didn’t bulge. It had a green ribbon tied to its handle. Badger saw that the small girl was crying and the boy went to the water’s edge, threw in a pebble from the track, watched it bounce. The bird was hunkered low on what was left of the foliage. Maybe it thought this was a place to stay, where frogs were available on order. Maybe it was not about to shift out. He jabbed Foxy.

Him and Foxy? Between them now a sort of tolerance existed, like a ceasefire. Not peace and not war. When the car came, the suitcase was loaded and they drove away, the mission was done, whether they had anything to radio or not. He doubted he and Foxy would speak much on the way back to extraction, or while they were driven to the base, and not at all when they were helicoptered to Kuwait City. Likely they’d be in different rows on the flight, which Foxy might demand and he himself might insist on. There might be a handshake at the terminal but it would be transitory and neither would go on the other’s Christmas-card list. They’d never meet again.

One jab was enough. He passed him the headset. When the bird had kicked, noise, explosions, had been in his ears, but the bird’s chest – small mercy – did not cover the microphone tip and he could hear the little girl crying.

There was more wind, then a murmur about needing to piss, then the question: how much water was left? None. Then the statement: without water they were screwed. The headset went on Foxy’s ears and Badger whispered about the bird. ‘… and can’t do much about it. The goon has it in his glasses, looks excited enough to do a jerk-off. What is it? Not anything I’ve ever seen.’

‘It’s called an African Sacred Ibis. Pretty rare. Big in Egyptian mythology. Do me a favour, just shut up.’

Foxy looked wan, weak, about played out. A day wouldn’t have gone by in the last ten years without him shaving and examining his moustache in a mirror, without him putting on a clean shirt and polished shoes. He looked sad and a frown cut his forehead. Then he grappled in his pocket for the notepad and flicked the switch to light the screen.

The wife came, and the children ran to her. The Engineer peered up the track and past the barracks, then looked down, savage, at his wristwatch. The goon gazed at the bird. She had the children against her knees and bent awkwardly, held them tight and tried to comfort them. What comfort, Badger wondered, could she offer?

The car would come and the bird would fly. The noise of the car and the crying of the boy would be too much for it. Many weeks, several months, Mansoor had dreamed of seeing the bird, Threskiornis aethiopicus, merely fly low over the reeds and be in the lenses for a few seconds, half a minute, but it was down and he had a fine view of it, and could not believe that the moment would last, but she comforted the child.

He heard her. He had no children. He did not know if it was his fault that his wife was barren or hers. She said, in their bedroom at the back of the house that was owned by his father, in a low voice, so she should not be overheard, that he was responsible for her inability to become pregnant. He could not believe that. He refused, of course, to go to a doctor and have tests done on his wife, Safar, and himself. So, with no child to look after, she went each morning on a shuttle bus from their home in Ahvaz to the Crate Camp Garrison on the road to Mahshar, came back each evening and helped his mother to prepare a meal, then did cleaning and went to bed. They had sex every weekend, quietly so as not to disturb his parents, but her period never missed. He saw how Naghmeh, wife of the Engineer, comforted the children. He had looked away from the bird that was on what seemed to be flood debris that had snagged at the end of a mud spit.

‘You should not be frightened.’ She held tight to the children. ‘There is nothing for you to be frightened of.’

He thought she did not cry because it would have frightened the children.

‘We go to see a very clever doctor, and he will make me better.’ He looked up but the bird had not moved.

He did not know if he would ever see her again.

‘We will bring you back sweets, because you will be very good when your grandmother cares for you…’ If she died in Germany, the children would go to her mother, and their father would be found an austere room in the Crate Camp Garrison. He would visit them only at the end of the week and on public holidays, and would bury himself in the papers and circuit boards on his workbench. ‘The reward for being good and brave is very special sweets.’

Then Mansoor would be recalled to the ranks of the al-Quds Brigade and most likely a desk would be found for him, papers to process and a keyboard to hit. He might be in Tehran or Tabriz or in the mountains on the Afghanistan border… if she did not come back. She had quietened and calmed them. The car was late. It reflected on him. It should by now have been at the house.

‘We are going to a far-away country, to Germany. There is a town in Germany where they make wonderful marzipan…’ The sun edged higher and he saw that Naghmeh no longer shivered. Its first warmth fell on him – and on the bird. It was a clear two hundred metres from him, but he could sneak the binoculars to his eyes and see its markings. It had been venerated in ancient Egypt, had been thought so valuable that it was sacrificed to appease gods, and in one archaeological site the mummified remains of a million and a half ibises had been uncovered. He believed himself blessed, and turned away from it. The weapon hanging from his neck clattered against the magazines in the pouches of his tunic. ‘… which is made from almonds and sugar.’

She looked up at him sharply. He had not seen it before. She seemed to despise him. It might have been the weapon that caught her attention, or the magazines into which the bullets were pressed, or the two grenades at the webbing on his waist, or the flash of the al-Quds shield sewn on his olive sleeves. It might have been because she knew his father helped to hang men, or because his wound crippled him – or because he had produced no children. He wanted them gone, but the car had not come.

‘The best marzipan is made in the town we go to, Lubeck, and there we will go to the shops and buy marzipan sweets for you, because you will be good and you will look after your grandmother. Your father says Lubeck is a very pretty town, and is famous for the marzipan we are going to bring home. You will be very good.’

He walked away from her and the children, and went to the Engineer. He shrugged and said that the car was not late for its departure time, but should by now have arrived. If a few minutes more passed without it coming he would get on the radio and demand an answer. The Engineer looked at him as if he was dog’s mess on a shoe heel. The sun rose, carrying the day’s warmth with it, and the bird was still on the mess of leaves. He thought he heard a car, far away.

It was repeated by Foxy, the third time. ‘I heard it. I don’t doubt what I heard. “The best marzipan is made in the town we go to, Lubeck.” She said that. Also she said, “Your father says Lubeck is a very pretty town, and is famous for the marzipan we are going to bring home.” About as clear as it could be.’

‘You going to send it?’

‘Of course I’m fucking well going to send it.’

It was like a new man had materialised beside Badger. A bloody kid had scored a goal. Foxy had learned where a targeted man could be killed, and Badger wondered if that counted for more than scoring the goal.

‘Illegality, deniability, extra-judicial killing.’

Dismissively: ‘Do me a favour, young ’un, and pass the kit.’

His hands burrowed into the bergen beside him and Foxy was flicking his fingers in front of his face, as if time was not to be wasted. Badger felt dazed. A moment of truth had come, missile speed, from the clear blue skies above the scrim net. There were the seconds when a crisis developed – armed police had told him – when anticipation and training were overtaken by actuality. One thing to think about it, talk about it or practise it, another when it happened. It had been Badger’s job to look after the communications: the comms should have been ready, kept in place for immediate transmission, only needing the battery to be activated. They were not. Foxy’s snapped fingers and the irritation said they were there, flying high, and his voice had been quiet but he had made no effort to hide his elation: I heard it. I don’t doubt what I heard… Of course I’m fucking well going to send it. Badger had the comms gear in his hand and was levering it out of the bergen.

‘What’s the matter, young ’un? Just shift it.’

He had to push aside a bottle half filled with urine, and two sheets of the tinfoil that was there in case the Imodium wore off. He brought the kit up under his stomach and then his chest.

Badger could have done it himself – could have thrown the button, let it warm, made the link, sent the stuff, 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 in the liberation of the city after nearly a year of Iraqi occupation. He had been told they could rejoice in martyrs’ deaths. He struggled to remember them, to picture their faces and hear their voices. His father had told him once that there was never a good or bad time for confession. It had involved him taking a handful of piastres from his mother’s purse to buy sweets from another kid at school. His father had told him that confession was a fine purging agent. He had gone to his mother, interrupted her work on medical case histories and seen her brow furrow with annoyance. He had said he had taken some money and bought sweets. She had shrugged and returned to her work.

Now he said, ‘There was no headache.’

‘What, in God’s name, were you up to?’

‘I did not want to be there.’

‘That is pathetic. It was important – we talked about it.’

Something of his pain would have been in his face. He was wrapped in a bathrobe, had come to their bedroom to find clothing for the day: he wore a suit, shirt, tie and polished shoes when he saw patients; he dressed down only for days with his students. He sat on the side of the bed. He took a deep breath – he was not Steffen but Soheil. He was not from Lubeck and German, but from Tehran and Iranian. He spoke the truth, bared himself.

He spoke of a phone call from Berlin, a meeting with an Iranian, who might have been an intelligence officer of the VEVAK. He said he had cleared facilities for a patient to come for consultation, and had been rude to his staff who had queried why he had agreed to see a nameless patient with no medical history. He said he was trapped, that his past and origins had claimed him.

The sheet dropped. Her hands reached out and gripped his shoulders. ‘You are German! You do not have to-’

‘Wrong.’

‘You are German. You are Steffen Weber.’

‘I was, but am not now. I am Soheil – I am my father and mother’s child.’

‘You do not know who you are treating? You do not know who their secret police are bringing?’

‘I do not.’

Her back arched, and he saw the upper curve of her chest, which had been on show at the Rathaus. It would have been covered only with a loose wrap on the ride home.

She shook him. ‘Call the police or the security people. This is not a banana country. You cannot allow thugs to manipulate you.’

‘I-’

She flared, ‘Are you married to me? Yes. Are you their servant?’

He could not answer her. He pushed himself up from the bed and went to the wardrobe. He took out a suit and a folded shirt, fresh socks and laundered underwear, a quiet tie and shoes that glinted with the polish the maid had applied. He closed the wardrobe, turned and knew what he would see.

His wife, Lili, held the sheet high, covering herself. He thought that a woman would always cover her body if confronted by a stranger. He went to dress. He faced a long day in Hamburg before he returned to the medical school at Lubeck for his evening appointment with a patient whose name he had not been told. He did not think, then, that her marriage to a stranger could be saved.

He reached the door and said. ‘They would hunt me, track me, find me if I refused. They will have chosen me because of my birthright. I assume that the patient is someone of military importance or in intelligence gathering. If you wish, Lili, to condemn me, you could lift the telephone and speak to the police or the security apparatus. I ask you not to… They have a long arm and a long reach, and I would spend the rest of my life searching the shadows at my back.’

He closed the door after him.

Sarah knew.

The telephone on the desk had rung. He had been sitting on his desk, feet dangling, when it had screamed for his attention. He had picked it up.

She knew the story.

His face had seemed to contort as he’d listened. A greyness came to his skin, followed by pallor, and Gibbons’s tongue had flipped over his lips. She understood that a location had been given. Then Gibbons shook, as if throwing off an unwanted skin, a burden, and his back straightened. His only question: which airport were they going out from, City, Heathrow or military? It was as if, by the time he hung up, he had regained control.

She was in the outer office and it was not her place to pressure him for the information so she’d kept her head down.

He called to her that the town named as the target’s destination was Lubeck. She asked if the transport was taken care of, and he nodded, but without excitement. Well, perhaps anticipation of ‘excitement’ was unrealistic, she thought, as she looked through the open door at Len Gibbons, whose office – and professional life – she ran. She knew why the name of Lubeck had stopped him dead in his tracks. She knew the story.

The story held in the Towers’ archive was titled The Schlutup Fuck-up, and not many knew it, but she did.

When Sarah had gone to work for Gibbons her friend, Jennifer, had quietly let her know about the Schlutup Fuck-up and its effect on his career, the struggle the man had put in to shift it off his shoulders. A veteran in the archive and able to ferret in restricted areas, Jennifer had unearthed the story. To Sarah’s knowledge, Len Gibbons had never been back to that northern corner of Germany, up by the Baltic coast and close to the Trave river. Small wonder the poor wretch had blanched. The pain of the Fuck-up would have been acid-etched in his mind.

She disguised her privileged knowledge with apparent indifference: ‘Will you be wanting me to come with you, Mr Gibbons?’

‘I don’t think so, Sarah, but thank you. A pretty ordinary place, Lubeck, and unlikely to present problems. Not a place to be mob-handed on the ground.’

She wondered how he would be – in a modern world of supposed integrity – when he was there, in Lubeck, and deniability might be hard to rustle up. And she wondered, all those years ago, how much tittering there had been behind hands in the previous home of the Service, and how much a Fuck-up of dynamic proportions would harden a man – a man such as Len Gibbons. He had not mentioned the men in Iraq, not expressed praise or admiration for their work, nor sympathised with the conditions they would have operated under, nor referred to the back-up team. She could do jargon with the best of them: Sarah considered the lack of praise, admiration, of any acknowledgement for what others had achieved to be part of the ‘collateral’ of the Schlutup Fuck-up and the scars it had left.

‘Whatever you say. I asked…’

‘Good of you. Pretty straightforward stuff, and an experienced team around me.’

It was a cold morning in the city but the early sun gave beauty to the skies. The blue was cut by the exhaust fumes spewed from the engines of a Boeing 737, bound for the Swedish ferry-port city of Malmo. Gabbi did not query whether the most effective route had been chosen for him, or the quickest, or the one that would provide greatest security. He would land by noon, would be met and driven to the departure point. Layers of people worked on the problems and came up with answers that he would not second-guess. It gave Gabbi satisfaction to reflect that so many laboured behind him. He was launched, and had no thought for those who had gained the information that had set him on his way.

The car had taken them.

There had been a further delay when Mansoor had looked down at the nearside rear tyre of the Mercedes and thought it too smooth, barely within legal limits, not fit for carrying passengers of such status. He had queried the tyre’s safety. He had almost accused the driver of taking a good tyre to the market in Ahvaz, selling it and replacing it with an inferior one, then pocketing money. They had argued, until the Engineer had clapped his hands and demanded that he and his wife left.

The dust cloud thrown up behind the car had thinned, and the children had left cheerfully enough with their grandmother for school.

The bird had stayed. He had as good a view of it as he could have hoped for. He did not tire of watching it. His father would not have understood, or his wife or his mother. Himself, until he had been allocated to the security of the Engineer, he would not have believed that a man could watch a bird that sat across a hundred and fifty metres of water from him, and pray that the moment would not pass. The focus of the glasses was on the feathers of the wings and neck, the clean lines of the beak – and on the expanse of mud behind it that was broken only by the debris of dead reeds.

‘What’s special about that bird?’

‘It’s endangered, rare – his obsession.’

‘We’re screwed. We can’t move while he’s there.’

‘State the obvious, young ’un.’

‘We can’t leave it but we can’t go to get it.’

He couldn’t leave the scrape and move in the gillie suit across bare ground to the reed beds, then go into the water, wade to the mud spit and give the bloody bird a shove while binoculars were on him. He couldn’t tug out the microphone because the cable would be out of the water and visible. He couldn’t leave it there either, because that would break the disciplines. It would be the equivalent of leaving a semaphore sign that ‘UK was here’ when the microphone was found – as it would be.

‘Then we stay put. Night follows day, right? We go at dusk.’

‘That’s a whole day to kill.’

‘So sleep a bit, think of water.’

‘We haven’t got any.’

‘You ever get tired of stating the obvious, young ’un? Apparently not.’

‘I have to go forward and collect the stuff. I have to get…’ Badger didn’t finish. Foxy had grunted, sighed, turned his back on him. Maybe it was nine hours before he could move out to collect the kit. He could reflect and evaluate. He could count the flies that swarmed above the scrim net. He could watch the goon in the plastic chair and wonder how a grown man had such an empty skull that he needed to sit with a rifle across his knees and watch a bird that was not much different from the herons Badger had seen in Wales, and half as interesting as the eagles he knew from Scotland. He could think of Alpha Juliet and holding her, of sending the call-sign code back for a meeting at the extraction point, and… Time for interrogation.

Badger asked, What was our justification for coming here?

He answered himself: They said it was a rogue state and reckoned there were weapons that could nuke us, gas us, poison us.

Were we surprised that they wanted us out so shot at us and blew us up?

He answered himself, Gob-smacked.

Did no one question the inevitable bit? That clever bombs might be provided by a neighbour and laid by a local? he asked. Did no one reckon it might be none of our business?

He answered: Plenty did, but they were ignored, out of step with policy.

Us coming here, was it done in my name? Badger asked.

He answered, and his words rang in his mind, Who needed the opinion of a moron? The big people knew what was in your best interest.

The big people – were they right to say that the man I fingered was our enemy?

Irrelevant. It’s done, can’t be undone.

Badger asked, Do I take pride in what I did – getting here, surviving here, fulfilling the mission – or am I ashamed?

He paused, then answered, A luxury and an indulgence. A waste of space – and breath. Done and impossible to undo. You are, Danny Baxter, the little fellow who is told what to do and does it. A man will have his head blown off and a good woman who clears minefields – who is dying – will be widowed. You are a part of it, and it’s done in your name. Perhaps they’ll give you a fucking medal to polish.

The sun was higher, and his need for water was cruel. His stomach was distended by the Imodium tablets, and the sores were suppurating. Their mission was complete… except that the bird sat on the microphone. There was nothing else for Badger to look at. He could see the bird’s back and fancied that a small loop of the cable had hitched up and was near to its folded legs.

The goon sat in his chair. A guard had brought him coffee and a plate of sandwiches.

Hours to kill before he went into the water. They had done their work and should by now have been with the guys in the Pajeros and Alpha Juliet. Congratulations should have been gruffly conferred and he might have had cream on the scabs and sores. He worked out which route he would take, and considered how dark it should be before he moved. The time dragged and Foxy slept. Then the pigs came and an otter passed by. Ducks were there, and coots, and the hours crawled. Badger’s body was racked with pain. He knew each step he would take when he went into the water.

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