‘I understand why you travel in secrecy, then, and have no identity.’
‘To what purpose to be the best while my wife is dying?’
‘You are right to go in secrecy, without a name. Iraq and Afghanistan?’
‘More sophisticated in Iraq, but we teach the Afghan resistance about basic devices. There, they do not need such advanced devices as I made for the Iraq theatre, my best work, but I have influence on what is used in Afghanistan.’
‘And we see on the television many funerals in NATO countries because of the bombs beside the road. If they knew of you they would kill you. Do I approve, disapprove, of what you do? I do not interfere in matters I cannot influence. You should have no fear that I will allow any feelings to dictate my decisions concerning your wife. Thank you for allowing me to breathe the smoke.’
The moon was at its height and there was good light over the clear ground. Badger caught two rats on the periphery of his vision, extreme right side of the 150-degree arc he was capable of. When the moon went down past the horizon, Badger would take the two bergens and leave nothing to show he had been present, a witness to the place. The rats came from the reed beds to his right and straight towards him.
There were people who did not like rats, and people who were scared shitless by them. There were people who saw rats as vermin, to be slaughtered.
Badger did not feel strongly about them. They scurried towards him and the one behind gave slight squeaking sounds. He couldn’t have said if it was twenty minutes, half an hour, longer or shorter, since he had last heard the scream – it had been weaker the last time. The lights in the house were out, but the security ones were lit. There was no movement beyond the pacing of the two guards who watched the single-storey building, and another guard – uniform and assault rifle – who sat under a tree. One more leaned against the outer door of the barracks. He could see the guard at the door clearest because he was in the range of the most powerful light, which beamed down from the lamp-post.
They came towards him.
The smaller one, greyer than the other, came to Badger’s side, skipped onto the small of his back and was over him and gone without a backward glance. He had barely felt its weight. The other had a more russet coat and a longer tail, well scaled and as long as its body. It was down to training that Badger could observe and note every moment of an event that seemed, at the time, insignificant. They said that, in the world of the jihadists and of the high-value targets in organised crime, the little moments that seemed to hold no significance were those that might put a puzzle piece in place. Unlikely that there would be importance in the movement of a rat across his body, but he noted it. It came on a slightly altered track and had veered towards his shoulders. It came onto Badger’s arm, went over his armpit with a brief sniffing stop, was on his right shoulder, then the nape of his neck. It paused there, was close to his ear, and there were the sounds, faint, of its breathing. It went forward, crossed the crown of Badger’s head and a claw seemed to catch in the netting of his headpiece. It came down onto his forearms, then his hands, covered with camouflage cream, which held the binoculars. It stopped there, he saw the glint of its eyes, a yellowed amber. Perhaps it was aware, at that moment, of larger eyes watching it or felt the beat of Badger’s heart, but it was not fazed. It moved off him and went by the image-intensifier, laid on the ground, and was gone. He had had many such encounters and The scream came.
It didn’t matter to Badger that the sound was even fainter than before. He clutched the binoculars, had nothing else to hold on to.
The rats, together again, were exposed on the open ground in front of him and the moonlight was on them. The difference in colour was lost, their size seemed to merge and the length of their tails. Badger could have sworn that both rats stiffened at the scream, like it was a sound alien in their world.
He listened for the scream to come again, shared the pain a little. And he saw the faraway lights across the lagoon. Then his attention was taken by the rats: they had found the carcass of the bird. It was tugged between them and feathers flew. He watched them maul and mangle it, but another scream did not come.
He understood that he had fainted. He had no sense of time gone. His first image was of the bucket. The goon held it, swung it, and the water doused him. It would have been the second or third bucket because water cascaded off him towards a growing pool in the corner. It was aimed at his head and came in a wall towards him, splashing hard. It went up his nose, into his mouth and some forced a passage into his eyes, which were slitted with the swelling.
Foxy must have lifted his head. An automatic reflex gesture, not one he controlled. His vision was distorted, and although he looked up into the face of the goon he couldn’t see the expression: anger, frustration, panic that his prisoner might have croaked on him? There was laughter. Foxy didn’t know whether it was humour, or manic.
A barrage of questions was thrown at him, none new. He didn’t know how long his fainting had protected him. The questions bludgeoned him, but he had no chance to reply. He thought the goon as weak as himself and… The cigarette was on the table, laid across the packet. A match was out of the box, and on the piece of wood he had been clubbed with. He would have fainted as the cigarette was about to be lit – as if he had been granted a stay, because the pain was not worth inflicting if he was unconscious.
Questions, and their answers: I am Sergeant Joseph Foulkes of the Metropolitan Police Service. I am on a deniable mission put together by the Secret Intelligence Service of Great Britain. As an expert in covert rural surveillance, I was tasked to observe Rashid Armajan, the Engineer. I have a good working knowledge of Farsi and deployed a microphone directed at Armajan’s home. I heard it said that Armajan, the Engineer, travelled to the German city of Lubeck with his sick wife. I relayed that information to my back-up team who are across the frontier in Iraq. I do not have a schedule, but in the next few hours an operation will be launched to kill Armajan in Lubeck. I am told that the killing is justified because of Armajan’s talent in constructing the electronics of roadside bombs. They were the answers he had not given, would give. There was a threshold.
He saw the cigarette picked up, the filter lodged in the goon’s mouth. A match was raised and the box was lifted.
He had been to the threshold of pain, and could not go there again. Through the swollen lids, tears ran… They would be in an officers’ mess, after dinner had been served with drinks: What I heard, not for repeating, we had their stellar IED boffin in our sights in Europe after a clandestine operation on the Iran border, and that guy, Foulkes – self-styled surveillance wizard – was captured, interrogated, only had to hang on a few hours, keep his mouth shut, but spilled the lot. We didn’t get the boffin, which would have been worth popping corks for. A variety of the theme would have passed between beds and cubicles in a ward at Selly Oak where the military casualties were cared for: What I was told, the bastard was damn near in the gun sight, but this guy talked… And in a gymnasium at the place south of London where they taught the amputees a degree of mobility: He talked a good talk about himself, but he spat it out and didn’t give our people the time they needed. That was what they would say and where they would say it.
The match flashed and the cigarette was lit. The goon had taken a handkerchief from his pocket, stained, and Foxy knew it would be used to wipe a place on his privates, make it dry, so that the cigarette was not extinguished by the water that had been thrown at him.
Foxy did not cringe and didn’t attempt to bury himself in the angle between the concrete of the floor and the cement blocks of the wall. He knew the threshold would be crossed when he was burned. Everything he would say when the pain scorched his skin was in his mind.