Gerald Seymour - A Deniable Death

She said, ‘They’re fine for the moment. Nothing hostile.’

‘They can see guns and it’s daylight, miss. They’ll chance nothing till it’s dark. They thieve, miss. Always have.’

‘To pull back is a last option.’

‘It’s the worst option, miss. Here, at least, we might be inside the Golden Hour, or on the edge of it. We have to sweat it out.’

‘Would they know about the Golden Hour?’

‘They know that back-up’s guaranteed. Act of faith to them. Where they are, they’d need the faith.’

Badger listened as Foxy murmured translations and interpretations: ‘He’s the security man, the chief. Has a limp so he’s been hurt somewhere. If he was hurt in an accident, it would have been on their roads. If he’s a military casualty it would likely have happened inside Iraq or up in Lebanon. He’s mumbling, doesn’t know what to say, except that she should have faith in God.’

A benchmark of the work of a croppie, as Badger knew it, was to have binocular or ’scope vision, camera lenses or a directional shotgun microphone aimed at a target, eavesdropping, watching, noting, and be able to strip away the armour with which people tried to shield themselves if they expected to be observed. Few did. Not many understood the qualities he brought to his work, and the capabilities of the gear. It was a basic intrusion and he didn’t care. His life was spent watching men and women, noting small private happiness, tension and moments of pleasure. He was a voyeur: he might have been standing on a street in darkness and gazing at the gaps in bathroom curtains as a target prepared to wash, or looking into lit homes and seeing bitter domestic arguments. He might have been watching a killer burn a victim’s clothing, the sharing of the cash, the arming of a group on their way to a hit, a man weeping or a guard fumbling for words to a terminal patient. The gear enabled croppies to peer inside minds and souls. It didn’t bother him. It was his work.

‘She says her committee don’t believe they can carry on without her. The mine programme will fold if she isn’t there. She’s the icon figure who demands action – she repeats that. He nods, doesn’t answer, only says something about belief in God.’

They had developed the hide through the morning. It was as good as anything Badger could remember. Normal: go in at night and do the construction stuff under cover of darkness, be cosy and covert when the light came. Abnormal: to burrow out the scrape and cover it, do the work in the sun’s glare, and have a man with security responsibilities sitting in a chair two hundred yards away. Something to be proud of. He had called the tune, and Foxy had stayed with the earphones clamped on, hadn’t acknowledged that the work was well done – was brilliant. They were on the extremity of the reeds where they were thin, and had taken over a narrow strip of the bare ground, the dried-out mud. He had worked a shallow dip for them no more than fifteen inches deep, and had made a rim wall of the soil. All of it was covered with debris he had painstakingly collected further into the reeds, the same dead fronds that hid the microphone on the mud spit. More fronds masked the cable where it came up out of the water and ran across the mud towards them. A work of art, a collector’s piece. Often the guard raised his binoculars and scanned. Then Badger had been statue still on his stomach, and the gillie suit was embedded with more reeds… There’d been no praise. He thought of Alpha Juliet. Difficult not to think of her. Impossible to imagine why she had done it, but he was glad she had.

‘He’s called Mansoor – that’s what she calls him. He says he hopes God will watch over her. She says her committee depends too much on her. She says it’s time to go and prepare the children’s food for when they come back from school. I think he’s near to tears. Right, she’s gone, and…’

He was no longer listening. Fran had been good enough to run for a few months, but he’d left and she wouldn’t have cried. There had been two girls while he was still at school, and he’d shagged one while her parents were out at the supermarket, every Friday evening, for a month, the other in the woods near the nuke-weapons factory at Burghfield… And a woman PC called Brenda, who ran the organisation side of the team that did surveillance on the gypsy camp where the tinkers who did the country-house burglaries up and down the Thames-valley corridor came from. Nothing important to him. She had been, Alpha Juliet – and there was no one to tell him why she was locked into his mind.

He wasn’t handsome, had fuck-all talk. He felt the warmth of her, and the moistness… He couldn’t have said that any woman before had mattered in his life. The heat burgeoned and his throat was crisp, dried. His eyes ached from the glare of the water, and the man sat in front of the house, the rifle across his legs. Badger’s head turned slowly as he watched, through his glasses, the reed beds, the spit where the microphone was disguised and the open ground into which he had scraped the hide. They were pressed hard together, his hip into the slack part of Foxy’s stomach wall, and Foxy’s hip bone sharp against his thigh.

Foxy whispered, ‘It surprised me, how well my Farsi’s lasted.. .’

If the man was fishing for a compliment, Badger wouldn’t take the bait. He answered, ‘It’s what you’re here for – what you’re paid for.’

‘You know why we’re here?’

‘Are you going to tell me?’

‘We’re here because they – the spooks – don’t have an asset to put in here. They would have wanted a local, some guy who could wander around and chat in the coffee house or the garage and talk to the goon guards. They don’t have one. So it’s us. There isn’t a turned Iranian they could put in and trust, and there isn’t a lieutenant of the Republican Guard, who thought Saddam was the bee’s bollocks, or a slimy little sod from the Ba’ath Party they can rely on. They’ve reached down to the bottom of the barrel, and it’s us they’ve pulled out. It’s crazy, daft, idiotic.’

‘You volunteered so stop whining.’ So close together, like lovers, that the words barely needed articulation. Badger’s murmur in Foxy’s ear, and the two camouflage head kits were almost meshed.

Foxy’s response: ‘We’re the end of the road for them or the barrel’s scrapings, whichever. And they’ll feel good. They ’ve done something – put two arseholes, daft idiots, into harm’s way. It’ll go on the papers they write and they’ll get congratulated. What chance is there that the target will walk out of his front door and shout in Farsi I can understand and no fancy dialect, to the bloody sky, “Heh, anyone there? If you are, and you’re upset about the growth in my wife’s head, you need to know I’m off in the morning to Vienna, Rome, Kiev, Stockholm, any place where there’s someone with good knife skills. Hear that?” We’ll see him go, perhaps. Where to? We’ll see farewells, tears et cetera. Where are they headed? We’ve no chance.’

‘You could have refused.’

‘And they’d have let me walk away? Grow up, young ’un. They’d have made sure it haunted me the rest of my days. No more work. Considered “unsuitable”, branded “lack of commitment”. You’re held by the short and curlies. Didn’t the lady tell you? Or wasn’t she talking too much?’

‘Best you shut your mouth.’

‘But they can have their lunch and their gin, and can congratulate themselves that they tried, were audacious, and when we crawl out of here and get back, don’t expect a load of back-slapping and gratitude. They won’t remember your name. It has no chance.’

Badger murmured, ‘Saying that because you’re scared shitless? Or do you mean it – “no chance”?’