He sat alone and watched the skyline – and his phone, with the encryption software, bleeped. Not Sarah – asleep, no doubt, on a fold-away bed – but the Cousin. He glanced at the little screen: something about exfiltration in hand. He cleared it. Infiltration and exfiltration were history. The job had moved on. For a moment, Gibbons tried to remember the faces of the two men, but could not and gave up: they were from the past, not the present, and did not affect the future.
He smiled to himself. He had decided where he would be in the morning, when the strike went home.
Low voices alerted him. He didn’t understand the speech, but thought it was Russian.
There was a light knock on the door. He came off the bed, slipped on his trousers, went to the door and opened it. The synagogue’s caretaker shuffled away. Framed in the doorway, a man gave a warm smile and had a large old leather bag hanging from his shoulder. A hand was offered. He took it. He had never met the man, and offered a formal greeting that betrayed nothing.
The man spoke in their own tongue, used the word that in their language meant ‘engineer’ and smiled again. He had a light, tuneful voice.
The transport would be outside at seven that morning, in four hours. Gabbi nodded. There would be the two of them, for the wheels and the hit – not five, not ten or twenty-five. A sneer curled the man’s lip: it told Gabbi that this one – from Berlin Station – had had no dealings with the unit in the Dubai business. He was shown a photograph, taken in poor light, and it was explained that the woman was the Engineer’s wife. The shirt-sleeved man was the neuro-consultant. In the foreground of the picture there was a car with a rear door open. He was told the registration number and make, that only one security man was used for the escort. He looked hard at the photograph and saw the face, eyes, the shape of the spectacles, the cut of the hair and the clothing, and memorised it. His hand never touched the photograph, and when the man’s fingers held it, Gabbi made out the fine texture of the latex gloves he wore. It was assumed that the entry of the Engineer, his back to the street, would be a difficult interception, but when he left, it would be an easier shot, into the face and stomach. Then the man shrugged, as if he had realised he should not presume to lecture an expert in techniques. On the likely schedule, he would be on the return sailing of the ferry in late morning. He had faith in the arrangements woven around him and did not query them.
Gabbi was asked if he was comfortable. He said he was. Did he need to know more about the target, why the target was identified? He did not. Was he satisfied with the arrangements in place? He was.
Anything he needed would be brought to him. Gabbi said he had found a book of drawings by a girl who had been a witness inside the camp at Theresienstadt and had survived. He said he had had family there who had not lived. He did not say it was his wife’s grandparents who had been incarcerated in the camp and had died of starvation.
The bag was opened. A package in greaseproof paper, held together with thick elastic bands, was handed to him, with similar gloves. He knew the Beretta 92S, and a little grin flicked at his mouth when he was told that this particular weapon, and the ammunition it was loaded with, had been sold to the Egyptian armed forces: a small matter, but likely to cause confusion in an investigation. There were two magazines, eighteen bullets in all, and he would use two. It was wrapped again, and put on the table beside the bed.
The man reached forward, gripped Gabbi’s shoulders and gave him a light brush kiss on each cheek. Then he was gone and the door closed on him. Gabbi heard the slither of the caretaker’s slippers, then the thud of the outer door being shut. He went back to bed and hoped to catch more sleep.
His shoulder was shaken gently. The pilot, Eddie, jack-knifed up on the cot bed. His co-pilot hovered above him. ‘Thought you’d like to know that we’re fuelled, armed, all the checks done, ready to press the tit and lift. And likely we may be lifting.’
‘Why didn’t you wake me?’
‘You were sleeping like a baby – would have been a crime.’
‘Fuck you.’ The pilot rubbed the sleep from his eyes. ‘What we got?’
‘Could go around first light. As we thought. A covert team up on the frontier, and maybe there’s casualties coming with them. The other bird is getting herself to speed. We go together.’
He could hear the rotors of both birds turning over, and the ground-crew people would be crawling over the Black Hawks. It would likely be the last mission of interest that Eddie flew before the draw-down sucked him in. Then he might go home, or might be packed off with his guys and his machine to Afghanistan. He’d like to finish well. He tightened his boots.
‘Oh, and Eddie…’
‘What?’
‘We don’t exist, and any flight we make is classified as never happening. It’s likely the mullah-men will be powerfully angry if we do get called out and are up close on their ground.’
‘Fuck them.’
The birds’ engines sounded sweet and the windows shook. If an exfiltration needed a helicopter lift-out, they’d be in trouble, deep stuff, and it would be close run. It was good of the guys to let him sleep and recharge. Might have been their own survival instincts that had allowed it. Spooks, the pilot reckoned, were mad – not people you’d take home to your mother – and he’d go as far as he could to save them.
Badger hissed, ‘How you put yourself in this place, Foxy, I don’t know.’
The dinghy was holed: a bullet had pierced the metal hull about an inch below the waterline.
It went down a few yards short of the mud spit, where the water was up to Badger’s waist. He had time to hoist Foxy onto his shoulder, as he had before. The skin, against the stubble on his own face, was wet, clammy and seemed white in the darkness, as if there were night-lights under it – like the ones used in nurseries and hospital wards. He went over the spit and past the heap he had made of dead foliage then slipped back into the water.
‘Don’t ask me how I’m doing. Actually, I’m doing fine. Just don’t bother to ask.’
He could hear the jeeps’ engines on the bund line away from him, but he would have been masked by the reed beds. It was as well that he was. He could stand upright, which was best with the weight he carried. The level dropped and lapped at his knees, the birds thrashed for take-off and he plodded on, the mud under his boots clinging to them. He was taking deep breaths, struggling to suck the air deeper into his lungs. His legs were leaden. He had not begun: Badger was only at his start line. He came out of the water and was on the open ground. He went by the carcass of the bird, unrecognisable now as a creature of beauty. Badger didn’t do bird-watching, he wasn’t eco-obsessed, but he had learned to respect nature when he was in hides and when he hiked, testing himself, in Scotland or in the Brecons of Wales. He knew the range of the small songbirds that would come from the heather and bracken to filch crumbs, and the predator hobbies, peregrines and eagles; he knew also the divers on the lochs. There had been a poem drilled into them by a teacher about a bird a seaman had shot with a bolt. He was cursed for it, his mates too. That was what Foxy had done; he had killed the ibis, made it into rats’ food.
‘Shouldn’t have done it, Foxy. Look what it’s done to us, with you killing it… You could say something, Foxy, not play bloody miserable.’
He went as fast as he could, and his boots went into the side of the scrape where the hide had been. He lurched out of it, and Foxy’s weight shifted on his shoulder. Badger gasped and swore softly. It had been a sizeable piece of his life, important, and might be memorable, a bit of ground two yards square that had held them both, and the bergens, for hours, days and nights. He would remember it. Badger couldn’t have said then how long his life expectancy was, but the image of the scrape, the net and the camouflage, the smell of the bags, the piss bottles, Foxy’s body and breath, and Badger’s own would stay with him until the last. That might be when a firing squad was given the order or in a far distant bed in whatever home was then his. He went by the scrape and it was behind him. He would never see it again, but he wouldn’t forget it, ever.