Gerald Seymour - A Deniable Death

The rain had started to patter on his shoulders. There were, of course, the two guys who had gone forward, identified the destination and hit trouble, but an alarm had not been raised and the hit was in place. The target faced Judgment, was adjacent to Vengeance. The two guys were blanked out of his mind, deniable, and he laughed again, then walked away, leaving the derelict with the last of his pastry. He would have time for a quick walk around Lubeck, the renovated historic buildings, before driving away.

He laughed because he thought vengeance a fine rich dish, best served as a surprise.

He sat in the van, and did not smoke or drink take-out coffee. Instead he read. Gabbi’s choice was to be among favourites.

Just as his driver, who had brought him the weapon during the night, did not know his name, so Gabbi would have been kept in ignorance of the driver’s – except that his wallet had been flipped open, a euro note extracted, and he had seen the plastic-fronted pouch inside it with the ID that would take the man, in the name of Amnon Katz, into the car park of the Embassy of Israel, 14193 Berlin. Little escaped Gabbi. Probably, when he was back in Tel Aviv tomorrow, and had his debriefing, the day after tomorrow, he would mention that the embassy’s man had not satisfactorily hidden his identity or troubled to disguise his workplace.

He thought the man with him, Amnon Katz, squirmed too often in his seat. Maybe the people who should have escorted him were on holiday or had made excuses. After the chaotic affair of the Emirates killing, intelligence-gathering officers had sought to distance themselves from the work of his unit. He had Amnon Katz, who had been calmer in the night and had spoken coherently. Perhaps he had not slept. Perhaps he had a knotted stomach. Perhaps he had doubts, now that he was up against the place where a man would be killed. They had a view of the steps leading up to the main door of the block and of the lit windows on the first floor. A saloon car was parked at the kerb. The top of a man’s scalp showed above the driver’s seat headrest. There was no other security in sight. He coughed hard, cleared his throat. He had not drunk any coffee because it would be unprofessional to be stuck outside on a cold pavement and need to piss. He could feel the weapon lodged in his trouser belt, under the overalls. He reached to open the van’s passenger door.

The man, Amnon Katz, gave him his hand. For encouragement? Gabbi ignored it.

He closed the door quietly behind him and went to the back of the van. He took out a road-cleaning brush and a couple of bin liners, and smiled ruefully. He would be fucked if there were no leaves to collect and no rubbish to sweep up. He had a shovel and thick, industrial gloves.

He did not look behind him but walked towards the parked car and the steps. The wind blew harshly down the road in the centre of the teaching-hospital complex and buffeted his face. His baseball cap was well down over his eyes and a scarf closely wrapped at his mouth. The cameras would be rewarded with little. And the van? He heard its engine start. It reversed, and would be driven away. Somewhere behind him, watching him, was the stubbily built man with the old face, the bright eyes of youth and the coldness at the mouth who had met him off the ferry. Gabbi trusted that man, and regarded him as a friend. He was the one who would take him away when it was done.

He began to sweep the gutter – slush from the salt put down, a few leaves, some soil washed off the frozen shrub beds. He went slowly, had no wish to be close to the saloon car in front of him. He had seen his target go inside, with his arm around his wife’s shoulders, but the target’s back had been to him and he had seen little of the face. The condition of the wife, and the verdict she would be given, did not concern him. Each time Gabbi pushed the broom, he could feel, against his belly, the stock of the pistol – and now his mind was closed.

They sat very still, and close. The Engineer did not speak and neither did his wife, Naghmeh.

They were in the waiting room. The door to the office was shut but they heard his voice and thought he made telephone calls. Men in loose-fitting, unbuttoned white coats crossed the waiting room, knocked and went inside, then nurses in starched white trousers and figure-hugging white jackets. There was a woman at a desk close to the door, a gatekeeper. She did not make eye contact with either of them but kept her face bent over her screen. Soft music played from high speakers. There were magazines but they did not read them. They had nothing to talk about. His wife would not have wished to hear about the progress he was making in extending the range of electronics that could transmit the signal to the receiver fitted in the device, and do it from further outside the bubble that protected the enemy’s convoys from remote detonations. He had no interest now in which block of land beside which length of raised road leading to which village would be granted the necessary funding for a mine-clearance team to begin work.

Their lives were on hold and they barely dared to breathe. Neither could read the faces of those who went into the consultant’s room or left it. He could not be pessimistic or optimistic, and she could do no more than hold his hand.

It was sudden.

The door opened. He was shirt-sleeved, but with a tie in his collar, well shaven and looked to have slept. His face gave no clue. The Engineer had heard it said that an accused could always tell, from the moment he was brought back into the courtroom and confronted the judge, whether he would hang or take the bus home to rejoin his family. He felt his wife’s hand stiffen in his. She clung to him and their fingers locked.

There were X-rays in a pouch in the consultant’s hand and he spoke quietly to the gatekeeper, who nodded. Neither gave evidence of what was said, and he waved for them to follow him inside.

They crossed the waiting room shakily, did not know what awaited them.

Presence and courage radiated from her, as they had on the previous evening. In his experience, talking to patients was more difficult than performing complicated surgery on them, and he had been told that his manner was not always satisfactory: he should curb brusqueness when the news was bad and elation when it was good. He was tired and had slept poorly. Lili would have fled to her mother, taken their daughter with her, would have poured into her parent’s ear a litany of his craven acceptance of a call to old loyalties. She might come back to him, might see that his affluence would not easily be replaced on a divorcee’s circuit, if he made a call and grovelled – he accepted that their lives were altered, that a crack had appeared that would not easily be repaired. She might not come back.

They intruded into his life.

If they had not come to Lubeck, he would have slept well and been against the warmth of his wife’s body. He would have been woken by his daughter climbing across him… but he had woken cold. She looked into his face. He indicated the chairs, but they stood in front of him, silently demanding his answer.

He said, ‘There is much to talk of and I ask you not to interrupt me but to listen carefully to what I say. I have identified a glioblastoma, grade two, which is confirmation of what you have already been told by your consultants at home. The tumour is close to what we call an “eloquent” area…’

Having intruded into his life they had derailed it. He held up the scan images. ‘I want to show you what we have learned.’

‘Time to go. Hit the road, guys.’

She thought she sounded authoritative and that her voice had a crisp bite. The light was up. Dawn slipped into day. Abigail Jones’s last birthday had been her thirty-third, which should have marked her out as being at the peak of her powers. She did not believe the crap about veterans’ experience outweighing youth’s innovations. All she had worked at now hung precariously on that day’s events. She couldn’t escape it. The sun was low, bright on her face. It threw grotesque shadows.