Gerald Seymour - A Deniable Death

‘What do you think?’

‘I think you’re crap. Try it again. I know you’re crap.’

He thought Foxy was close to hitting him, and they both lay motionless. Badger watched as the security man roved the area with his glasses. He didn’t know if Foxy had spoken the truth – that they had no chance, were small pawns and served other agendas.

‘I will do it, subject to satisfactory arrangements.’

He was asked what arrangements would have to be satisfactory.

The consultant had gone out of the building and loitered in front of the cafe. He was not overheard. He had dialled the number given him, had been held at the embassy’s switchboard for perhaps a half-minute, which he thought excessive, and when the call was answered he received no apology.

‘The patient must have a name. There must be a date of arrival and-’

He was interrupted. The life of the hospital and the medical school flowed past him; the rain fell and snow threatened. There was often snow when the Christmas market began in Lubeck, in the square in front of the Rathaus and beside the Marienkirche. Then it was prettier and the traders coined cash. He was not, of course, a Christian but his wife went to services most Sundays and took their daughter, and on special saints’ days he would attend with them. The patient would arrive as soon as it could be arranged, and the name would be given him when he saw the patient. Did anything else need to be ‘satisfactory’?

‘What would be the method of payment? These are expensive procedures. We require guarantees, money lodged in escrow, a banker’s draft, a credit card or-’

A hardening of a faraway distorted voice. Had he forgotten who he was? What he owed? Did greed govern him?

‘I’m not talking about myself. There are technicians, scans, X-rays. Assume that surgery is a possibility. Then you have theatre, and intensive care.’ His temper was shortening. ‘The patient cannot have that type of intervention, hours of it, then be put out into a winter’s night.’

He would be told about financial arrangements when the timing and date of the patient’s journey to north Germany were known.

The call ended. He pocketed his phone, went inside the building and sucked in a long breath. He wrapped a smile of confidence and competence around his face and greeted his first patient of the day.

His wife waved to him. From his car, he watched her go. All the sentries and security guards knew her. If they hadn’t, there would have been bedlam at his stopping so close to the main gates and inside the concrete teeth placed to prevent access to a car bomber. Gabbi watched her and, for a moment, almost unseen, his lips moved in to kiss her. She swung the stick in front of her legs and went to the guard who controlled the pedestrians’ entrance. With her free hand, she would have gestured towards the ID in the plastic pouch that hung from her neck. All the sentries and guards would greet her – they saw her coming and going, swinging the white stick and getting to work or heading home, as if there were no impediment in her life. He shared her with many. He left the ministry building and took a route from the city to the south.

There was a complex at Giv’at Herzl that had a small-arms firing range, soundproofed, at the rear.

Those who used the range, as many women as men, were from the National Dignitary Protection Unit and the Secret Service, and there were soldiers who did bodyguard duties for senior military staff. The instructors knew most of the client base. Some fired at circle targets, others used life-sized figures. Gabbi had asked for a figure, a head wrapped in a keffiyeh. He did the fast slide of the pistol from a waist holster, then the double-tap shots for the head. They did not consider chest shots, or those aimed at the stomach, to be of any value. The instructors taught that bullets should be aimed at the skull. That day, his weapon was the Baby Eagle, the Jericho 941F, with a nine-shot magazine, manufactured inside the country. The instructors would never have been told of the role he played in the affairs of Israel – would not have expected or wanted it. They had seen the clients come and go, and could make judgements on the work the shooters did, what they trained for. Gabbi used a different technique on the range from that employed by protection or those who hoped to be close enough to take down a suicide bomber. They fired in screened booths, and only the instructors would have seen Gabbi with his back to the target shape, then producing the weapon from under his lightweight coat, spinning, whipping the pistol up, aiming, steadying it, holding it cleanly, doing the squeeze – and it was double-tap. The instructors would tell him, each time he fired twice, where his bullets had struck.

They had nothing to teach Gabbi.

He would not have claimed his skills were too great for him to need practice. Sweat ran on him, clogging at the edges of the ear baffles. He was a man apart and did not laugh with others and had no friends there, but he had the instructors’ respect.

It was somewhere to go, somewhere to pass the time while he waited for the call – and he never tired of the cordite whiff or the rippling recoil through his wrists, forearms and elbows, and the kick of the Baby Eagle.

The instructors could have made a judgement on his work because he always fired at the head, was only interested in head hits that would drop a man dead.

Others would not have coped with the waiting, but Gabbi could.. . Later, after a wasted day, he would be at the ministry’s gate, watching for the woman, pretty, with the white stick, and would pick up Leah. All the shots he had fired had been at the head, and all would have killed.

Time to think, time to reflect and time to brood. Len Gibbons waited and the phones stayed silent.

Other officers in the Towers, with time on their hands, would have been with Sarah in the single room allocated him at the Club. Not Len Gibbons and not Sarah.

She had made fresh coffee, and brought with it a plate of biscuits. He owed his wife, Catherine, too much – not that it made a jot of difference in Sarah’s case as she rebuffed all advances from whichever direction and had done since a captain in the Life Guards had dumped her in favour of a girl from the Intelligence Corps – that had been after the first banns were read. He was hugely in debt to Catherine, and doubted he would ever pay it off. He was – to everyone who knew him in the Towers – Len Gibbons. When he was young, and Catherine was his new wife and the world had seemed at his feet, he could have anticipated that, within a few years, he would be Leonard Gibbons and on a fast track to the higher ranks. His career had come to a juddering halt and the scars were still on his back. But for that impact, he might have climbed to great things, and had not. By a thread, by a fingernail, he had survived – damaged – a professional debacle and she had stood by him when the scale of his failure had made him nearly suicidal. With her encouragement, he had hung on, and had known that on his record was the condemnation of what had been codenamed Antelope, that the best he could hope for was to be labelled ‘diligent’ or, worse, ‘conscientious’. The debt ran wider than his wife: it permeated the building from which he worked. He could, therefore, be given any bag of excrement and the safety of his hands would ensure that the job was done.

If he set his mind to it, he still had good recall of that bloody border, the watchtowers, the dogs and the guns.

He called through the door that the coffee was excellent, and thanked her for the biscuits. His phone stayed silent and he waited.

The Engineer explained to the brigadier the first principles of the bombs he had made, which were now stockpiled and kept in underground storage. They would use ‘low explosives’ and he spoke of TATP’s contents: triacetone triperoxide had minimal scent, emitted no vapours, and would go undetected by even the best-trained sniffer dogs. He told the brigadier – who sat stern, rapt, not interrupting, as if he recognised the privilege of access to a man of renown – about the blast effects of the larger-scale bombs he worked on. There was, first, the ‘positive phase’, when the windows of buildings adjacent to the bomb were blown in, then the ‘negative phase’, when the debris and glass shards were airborne and dragged out again to refill the vacuum created by the blast. Calm, emotionless, he told the officer – who would have responsibility for the defence of the province if the troops of the Great Satan were unwise enough to invade the Islamic Republic with ground forces – of the effects of explosives detonating: ‘blast lung’ injuries from the thrust into the ears, nose and throat; more injuries from the high-velocity impact of the ball bearings incorporated into the bomb and the glass splinters raining down on a street or flying inside buildings. Further injuries, as soldiers of the enemy were thrown across a street and careered into buildings or cars, their brains bouncing against the inner wall of their skulls.