Gerald Seymour - A Deniable Death

The ring of the telephone would sign a warrant on a man’s life – condemn him.

Gibbons yearned for it to ring, as if he was pleading for permission to kill the man himself. There were a few still left at Vauxhall Bridge Cross – a little rheumatic in the joints, from a long-gone age – who would have understood his feelings. Not many. They were the unreconstructed warriors of the Cold War, and saw the bloody mess that was the Middle East as a self-inflicted wound that had bred many uncertainties. This band of brothers was left in the shadows of the corridors at the towers, and a younger generation – dressed down, more often than not, in jeans or chinos, shirts without ties or revealing blouses – preached an ethical manifesto, as if such a thing were appropriate in the new world order. Gibbons doubted it. Some shared his view; many did not. The arrangement for the communications was complex, but that was to hide them behind smoke. A message from the forward surveillance men would be sent on shortwave radio – brief transmission because to linger was to leave a footprint – to Abigail Jones and her back-up location. She would communicate with an Agency cell in Baghdad, who would onpass to the NATO base at Vicenza in the foothills of the Italian Alps. From there the message would go to technicians answerable to the Cousin in his service apartment behind Grosvernor Square. He would taste the message. A negative report would be transmitted electronically but an affirmative enough to kick-start the operation, would come through on the telephone. Complicated, but necessary for the process of denial.

He watched the telephone.

She had argued, but he had insisted. Len Gibbons had ordered Sarah to take his room key at the club and use the bed booked there. He had felt, increasingly that day, a point was about to be reached of success or failure, and he wanted to be present when the dice rolled, rattled, came to rest. He was now fifty-nine. His wife, Catherine, would have been disarmed to know that her bed partner, soul-mate, craved for a telephone to ring and therefore to consign a man to his death – not a fancy one in hospital with pain-relief drugs available, but in a street, spluttering blood as passers-by hurried on their way. She would not have believed it of him, that he tried to achieve anything so intrinsically vulgar as state-sponsored murder. She didn’t know him, which was as well. If his children, at college, had known their father plotted a killing they might have disowned him and slunk away, ashamed. The neighbours, in a quiet road of semi-detached mock-Tudor homes on a suburban estate in Motspur Park, on the Epsom to Waterloo line, would have winced had they known what was done in their name, as would the members of the gardening club, and the choir he hoped to join at some future date. He willed the phone to ring.

He had a sandwich to eat and a Coke to drink. He sat at his desk and his universe was the telephone in front of him and its silence.

It had been a dream but was unfulfilled. He would have liked to visit ancient, historic Rome. He dreamed of walking on the old stones and being among the floodlit temples and squares; it would have been a pilgrim’s journey for Gabbi.

He could not. Some of those attached to the unit who were sent abroad would have slipped out and taken a fast taxi into the centre of the old city, then walked to the tourist trail. He would not. The magnificence of a great civilisation was a forty-five minute ride down the road, a wonder of the world, but he was a mere functionary. So he did not leave his room, go to the lobby and shout for a taxi.

A message had been put under his door. He had not seen the courier. Neither had the courier seen Gabbi. From midnight, because time drifted fast, an executive jet aircraft was on standby. If it were needed, he would be told.

He sat in the darkness of his room, on the unmade bed, and waited.

She had said, with the light of the fire in her face, ‘It’s very important for the integrity of the survey, and its science, that we are able to work here undisturbed for three more days, maybe two, certainly one.’

He had said, the brightness of the flames bouncing on his jacket, ‘What is “undisturbed”? How is that important?’

Abigail Jones said, ‘The arrival here of a military unit would disturb the wildlife we’re observing, and would obstruct our efforts at serious study.’

The leader of a marsh tribe, the sheikh, said, ‘And your proximity to the border with the Islamic Republic of Iran, your work close to the border, does that require the co-operation of our Iranian friends?’

‘Better that co-operation is not requested.’

‘And better that information on your presence, as you seek the “integrity of the survey”, is not passed?’

‘Better.’

‘So many of my people here are confused by your presence. Some who came innocently close have been injured, and some resent strangers near to their villages. These are difficult times for them, times of great hardship. I try to give leadership, but there will be some – younger than myself, with hot tempers – who will say that the military will pay for information about this expedition that surveys our wildlife, and others will believe that the Iranian authorities would also pay handsomely for knowledge of armed men coming close to their border for the purpose of evaluating the flora and fauna of the marshes. I have to lead, and I cannot lead if I am an obstruction to the young.’

Harding came past her with more wood, from broken packing cases, for the fire. She heard the bleating of sheep. The animals were behind the wall of men waiting close to the sheikh. There would be a signal from their leader. A knife waited in the hands of a man near to the front. Abigail Jones thought the operation hung now on a sheep’s throat. If the signal were made that it be butchered, according to halal methods, negotiations had been concluded satisfactorily. If the sheep was led away, throat intact, and the knife was sheathed, the negotiations had failed and she doubted they would last there through the night. She was not about to back off, and there was in Abigail Jones a powerful sense of the value of retribution. She had served in Amman and Abu Dhabi, but also in Sarajevo as the second officer on the station. She knew the stories of the siege of Sarajevo and the atrocities inflicted, the massacre at Srebrenica and the close-run thing that had been the holding of the Muslim lines at Gorazde; she had been involved with the teams of special forces who hunted down the war criminals. There was, familiar to her, a small Serb town named Foc? a. She’d operated there openly and searched for the mean-minded bastards who had done the bulk of the killings: two had been arrested, not important enough to go to The Hague but convicted in local courts. She thought it good that they whiled away their days and nights in cold damp cells… There had been a fling with a Bosniak artist down in Mostar, who had thought she was an aid worker. He had painted well, but she no longer had any of his work – the last had gone to the Christian Aid shop down the road from her maisonette. ‘Retribution’ did not cause her any difficulty. He was a man who made bombs. That was enough.

She asked, ‘What is the cost?’

‘The cost of what?’

She slapped her hands together as if the play-acting was over and business was to be settled. She thought the change of mood necessary. ‘How much for allowing us to complete our survey without interference from the military at al-Amara and al-Qurnah, and without the knowledge of the Revolutionary Guard Corps across the border? What will that cost me?’

The sheikh wetted his lips and the sheep bleated harshly – she reckoned they had bloody good cause to. She might, then, have killed for a beer.