John Carré - A Delicate Truth

Kit regrets he has no food with him, but offers to pop downstairs and see if he can rustle something up with the night porter. Jeb receives this suggestion with another prolonged silence:

‘Seemed a bit out of it , poor chap. Gave me the impression he’d lost his train of thought and was having a spot of trouble getting it back. Know the feeling well.’

But in due course, good soldier that he is, Jeb braces himself, and digs in his pocket and hands over the bedroom key. Kit gets up from the bed and puts on his jacket.

‘Cheese all right?’

Cheese will be fine, says Jeb. But plain mousetrap, he can’t handle blue. Kit thinks that’s all he’s got to say, but he’s mistaken. Jeb needs to make a mission statement before Kit goes off to find cheese:

‘It was one big load of lies, see, Paul,’ he explains, just as Kit is preparing to go downstairs. ‘ Punter was never in Gibraltar. It was all made up, see. And Aladdin , well, he was never going to meet him, not in those houses or anywhere else, was he?’

Kit is wise enough to say nothing.

‘They conned him. Ethical did. Conned that minister of yours, Mr Fergus Quinn. Jay Crispin, the great one-man private-intelligence service. They led Quinn up the garden path and over the edge, same as where he led us, didn’t he? Nobody wants to admit they handed over a couple of million dollars in a suitcase for a load of old cobblers, well do they?’

Kit supposes not.

Jeb’s face has gone back into darkness and he is either silently laughing or – only Kit’s guess – silently weeping. Kit dithers at the door, not wanting to leave him, but not wanting to fuss over him either.

Jeb’s shoulders settle. Kit decides it’s all right to go downstairs.

Returned from his foray in the bowels of the club, Kit heaves the bedside table to the middle of the floor and sets a chair either side of it. He lays out a knife, bread, butter, Cheddar cheese and two pint bottles of beer and a jar of Branston Pickle that the night porter insisted on including in exchange for his twenty-pound tip.

The bread is white and pre-sliced in anticipation of tomorrow’s breakfast. With a slice laid flat on his palm, Jeb spreads butter, adds the cheese and trims it till it tessellates on the bread. Then he spoons pickle on top, takes up another slice of bread and makes a sandwich and cuts it methodically into quarters. Regarding such precision as unnatural in a Special Forces soldier, Kit puts it down to Jeb’s troubled state of mind and busies himself with the beer.

‘So down the hill we go to the terrace then, don’t we?’ Jeb resumes, when he’s taken the edge off his appetite. ‘No point in not, really, is there? Well, we had our reservations, naturally. Fix, find and finish? Well, maybe we hadn’t begun, what with Andy having done a job with Elliot way back, and not possessing a high opinion of him, frankly, not of his abilities, and not of the intelligence at his disposal either. Source Sapphire her name was, according to Elliot at the pre-operational briefing.’

‘What briefing was that then, Jeb?’ Kit interrupts, momentarily resentful that he wasn’t invited.

‘The briefing in Algeciras, Paul,’ Jeb replies patiently. ‘Pre-op. Just across the bay from Gibraltar. Just before we’re to get ourselves into position on the hillside. In a big room above a Spanish restaurant, it was, and us all pretending to be a business conference. And Elliot up there on the platform, telling us how it’s going to be, and his ragtag team of American freebooters sitting there in the front row, not talking to us because we’re regular and Brits. Source Sapphire says this, source Sapphire says that. Or Elliot says she does. It’s all according to Sapphire , and she’s right there with Aladdin on the fancy yacht. She’s Aladdin ’s mistress and I don’t know what else she isn’t, all the pillow talk she’s hearing. Reading his emails over his shoulder, listening to his phone calls in bed, sneaking up on deck and telling it all to her real boyfriend back in Beirut, who passes it on to Mr Crispin at Ethical, and Bob’s your uncle, like.’

He loses the thread, finds it, and resumes:

‘Except Bob isn’t anybody’s uncle, is he? Not Bob. Maybe as far as Ethical is concerned, he is. But not for our own British intelligence. Because British intelligence won’t buy into the operation, will it? Same as the regiment won’t – or nearly won’t. The regiment doesn’t like the smell of it – who would? But it doesn’t like missing out either. And it doesn’t like political pressure. So it’s a good old British compromise: a deniable toe in the water but not the whole foot. And me and the boys, we’re the toe, like. And Jeb here will be in charge because good old Jeb’s the steady one. Maybe a bit on the pernickety side, but with those daredevil mercs around, all the better for it. Granny Jeb, they used to call me. Not that I minded, if it meant not taking unnecessary risks.’

Jeb takes a sip of his beer, closes his eyes, and plunges quickly on.

‘House number seven it’s supposed to be. Well, we thought: let’s take six and eight too while we’re about it, one house per man and me the back-up, it’s all a bit daft anyway, what with Elliot at the controls there. All a bit Mickey Mouse, frankly, half the equipment not working the way it ought, what’s the difference? There’s no way they’d teach you that in training, is there? But the targets weren’t going to be armed, were they? Not according to Elliot’s brilliant intelligence. Plus we only wanted one of them, and the other we can’t touch. So go into the three houses simultaneously for the surprise, we say, and do a room-by-room. Catch your man, make sure he’s the right man, bundle him over the balcony to the shore party, keeping your feet at all times planted firmly on the Rock. Simple really. We had the layout of the houses, each the same as the other. One nice living room with big balcony on the seaward side. One master bedroom with sea views and one cupboard-sized second bedroom for a child. Bathroom and kitchen-diner below, and the walls paper-thin, which we knew from the estate agent’s particulars. So if you don’t hear anything apart from the sea, assume they’re hiding or not there, employ extreme caution at all times, plus don’t use your weapon except in self-defence and get the hell out in double-quick time. It didn’t feel like an op, why should it? More a silly ghost walk. The boys go in, one house each. I’m outside keeping an eye on the open staircases down to the seashore. “Nothing there.” That’s Don in six. “Nothing there.” That’s Andy, house eight. “I’ve got something.” That’s Shorty, in seven. What have you got, Shorty? “Droppings.” What the hell d’you mean, boy, droppings? “Come and see for yourself, man.”

‘Well, you can fake an empty house, I know that, but house seven was truly empty. Not a skid-mark on the parquet floor. Not a hair in the bathtub. Kitchen the same. Except for this one plastic bowl on the floor, pink plastic, with bits of pitta bread and chicken meat in it, torn up small like you would for’ – he is searching for the right small creature – ‘for a cat, a young cat.’ But cat’s not right: ‘Or a puppy or something. And the bowl, the pink bowl, warm to touch. If it hadn’t been on the floor, I suppose I would have thought different. Not cats and dogs but something else. I wish I had now. If I’d thought different, maybe it wouldn’t have happened, would it? But I didn’t. I thought cat or dog. And the food in the bowl warm too. I pulled my glove off to put my knuckles on it. Like a warm body, it was. There’s a small frosted window overlooking the outside staircase. The latch is loose. You’d have to be a midget to squeeze through a space like that. But maybe it’s a midget we’re looking for. I call up to Don and Shorty: check the outside staircases, but no going down to the shore, mind, because if anyone’s going to tangle with the boat party it’ll be me.