Gerald Seymour - A Deniable Death

Gone2work. A cryptic text to Len Gibbons had shown up on his mobile. It was as if one of the last pieces of the jigsaw had slotted together. Not the final one, but one of the most important.

He was not a grandstander. He didn’t expect a seat where he could sit and watch the deed done. It was still dark on a late November morning at the leisure resort of Travemunde, up the river and north of Lubeck, facing into the Baltic. The text had been sent by the Cousin. The message told Gibbons that the consultant had left home, had arrived at the university and gone into the block where his offices were. Good enough. It seemed to indicate that no security alert had been launched.

Further up the floodlit quay, out towards the groyne on which the lighthouse flashed, there were piers on wood piles and cormorants gathered on the hand rails – black, with long necks, big beaks and the lungs to give them diving time when they hunted. They had been perched on those hand rails when he had been here thirty-something years before. Then there had been a winter morning when he had waited for the first ferry to return across the river from the village of Priwall and bring with it the workers who had jobs at Travemunde or Lubeck. He had last been here a few weeks before the collapse of the Antelope operation. It was, for Len Gibbons, almost a pilgrimage and he might have brought flowers with him if a kiosk had been open. Had he done so, it would have been because he cared to remember the lives that had been lost because of his trust in a man he had met once and so briefly and seen once from a distance. To make this journey, come here and wait in the bone-piercing cold, with the wind snapping off the sea, was of greater significance to him than when he had loitered outside the church of St Andrew and watched the man who had been a pastor.

The ferry came towards him. As he remembered it, there was a cafe on the far side of the river. He would buy himself a hot breakfast – eggs, sausage, a heated pastry and coffee. He was savouring the thought when the phone bleeped again.

Both arrived, all in place. Warm congrats, your favourite Cousin.

He read it twice, then deleted it. Not quite the final piece, but so close.

He had believed in confusion and a complex chain of command, had dared to hope that the terse message, passed through many links in a chain, reporting the capture of Foulkes did not mean that a protective net would be tossed over the target. The Engineer and his wife were now at the consulting rooms and the building was not flooded with detectives and armed uniforms. By a miracle, word from that distant corner of Iran had not seeped out, A cargo ship, monstrous in the dark, passed in front of the ferry.

He shivered, from the cold, nerves. He could absorb the Baltic’s November chill. Len Gibbons had done time as maternity cover in Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn, and a decade earlier he had been the second man in Stockholm. Had it not been for the Schlutup Fuck-up he would never have been sent as a fill-in to the former Soviet satellite, and if he had gone to Sweden it would have been as the station officer. The boat laden with containers had passed, the ferry had come in and the ramp was down. He walked on board, as he had done three decades before. Then he had left the pastor on the quay. Now he stood with a few hardy spirits on the deck.

The ramp was raised, and he felt the shudder of the engines below his feet. His mobile bleeped again. His ‘Friend’ was in place.

Len Gibbons switched off the phone, opened its back section and removed the chip. He dropped the phone first into the white wake of the water that was pushed aside by the ferry’s passage, then the chip. It floated for a fraction of a second, then was swamped. He had broken all contact with the conspiracy. In a minute they were at the Priwall ramp.

He felt calm, comfortable, and satisfied with a job well done. He had brought them together and they would face each other within the hour. He had no doubt that the assassin in the pay of a semi-friendly government would show the necessary skills and take the life of an engineer who served a semi-hostile state.

Late that afternoon he would drop off his hire car, fly from Hamburg to Brussels, take the last Eurostar connection into London, then a bus to the Haymarket. He would climb the stairs of what would be, probably, a deserted building, but Sarah would be there, and he’d give her the present he would buy before leaving Lubeck. Perhaps she’d blush a little, and murmur something about his ‘thoughtfulness’. The office would be cleared and ready for them to move out. She would have known the outcome of the operation by listening to any news bulletin, and he might invite her for sherry in his club’s bar. Then they would go their separate ways.

The following morning he would leave his train at Vauxhall and walk to the Towers. It would be well known that a prominent Iranian weapons scientist had been ‘taken down’ in the German city of Lubeck the previous day – it would have been broadcast widely and reported in the newspapers. A minimal minority would find the opportunity, out of sight, to press his hand. Only later would rumour and gossip spread: he would then be a noted man, respected. He chuckled.

He came off the ferry at the side of the ramp. The cars sped past and threw up the puddles’ water. He went to the cafe for his hot breakfast.

It was right that he had made the pilgrimage.

The Cousin, too, had no more use for a mobile phone. The main part, not the inner brain, was tossed casually into the back of a corporation rubbish cart as it cleaned streets before the rush-hour began; the brain was wrapped in the paper bag that had contained the pastry he had bought from a stall by the Muhlenbrucke. He dropped it into a bin in the park off the Wallstrasse. He felt bullish.

Like Gibbons and their Friend, the Cousin expected to stay in the city for the next hour, no longer. There was nothing he could do in that time, and his connections were now broken. He would then drive south, fast, to Hannover. He would leave his hire car there and pay his bill – false name and cards – and a military driver would take him far to the southwest, towards Kaiserslautern. By late evening he would be on a military flight out of the Ramstein USAF base. Those who disapproved of extra-judicial killing would not know about it, and those who did not would pump his hand and slap his back.

He was in the park, and shared a bench with a derelict guy. He bought the man coffee from a stall and a pastry with a custard centre. The derelict had few teeth and bobbed his head in gratitude. The Cousin felt no need to communicate any more than his general sense of well-being. It was not every day there was a chance to waste the bastards who had done the damage in Iraq, and were in the process of getting devices into Afghanistan. Christmas was coming early.

The images in his mind were of bombs detonating in those far-off places. He had forgotten them since he had left the rendezvous city of London. As if why they were in Lubeck, and what they were doing, had no relation to the deserts and mountains where the young guys were sent. As if he, the Friend and Gibbons had lost sight of the reasons and been buried in the detail of it. He laughed, and the derelict cackled with him. The Agency man came from small-town Alabama where there were good fire-and-brimstone preachers. Ten years earlier he had visited an elderly uncle; it had been the fourth Sunday after the planes had been flown into the Twin Towers. He could not remember where the text had come from, which Old Testament chapter, but the preacher that morning had said, ‘ “If I whet my glittering sword and my hand take hold on Judgment, I will render Vengeance on my enemies and will reward them that hate me.” ’ Fine stuff. Allelujahs to go with it, and plenty.