John Carré - A Delicate Truth

The Toyota had left the marina and was negotiating a grass roundabout of palm trees and pansies.

‘Boys and girls neat and tidy, everyone in place,’ Kirsty was reporting in a monotone over her cellphone.

Boys, girls? Where? What have I missed? He must have asked her:

‘Two parties of four watchers sitting in the Chinese, waiting for the Aladdin party to show up. Two walk-by couples. One tame taxi and two motorcyclists for when he sneaks away from the party,’ she recited, as to a child who hasn’t been paying attention.

They shared a strained silence. She thinks I’m surplus to requirements. She thinks I’m the Limey know-nothing striped-pants parachuted in to make difficulties.

‘So when do I get to meet up with Jeb?’ he insisted, not for the first time.

‘Your friend Jeb will be ready and waiting for you at the rendezvous as per schedule, like I told you.’

‘He’s why I’m here,’ he said too loud, feeling his gall rising. ‘Jeb and his men can’t go in without my say-so. That was the understanding from the start.’

‘We’re aware of that, thank you, Paul, and Elliot’s aware of it. The sooner you and your friend Jeb hook up and the two teams are talking, the sooner we can get this thing squared away and go home. Okay?’

He needed Jeb. He needed his own.

The traffic had gone. The trees were shorter here, the sky bigger. He counted off the landmarks. St Bernard’s Church. The Mosque of Ibrahim-al-Ibrahim, its minaret lit white. The shrine to Our Lady of Europe. Each of them branded on his memory thanks to mindless leafings through the greasy hotel guidebook. Out to sea, an armada of lighted freighters at anchor. The seaborne boys will operate out of Ethical’s mother ship , Elliot is saying.

The sky had vanished. This tunnel is not a tunnel. It’s a disused mineshaft. It’s an air-raid shelter. Crooked girders, sloppy walls of breeze block and rough-cut cliff. Neon strips flying overhead, white road markings keeping pace with them. Festoons of black wiring. A sign saying LOOK OUT FOR FALLING STONES! Potholes, rivulets of brown flood water, an iron doorway leading to God knew where. Has Punter passed this way today? Is he hovering behind a doorway with one of his twenty Manpads? Punter ’s not just high value, Paul. In the words of Mr Jay Crispin, Punter is stratospheric : Elliot again.

Pillars like the gateway to another world coming at them as they emerge from the belly of the Rock and land on a road cut into the cliff. A hefty wind is rattling the coachwork, a half-moon has appeared at the top of the windscreen and the Toyota is bumping along the nearside verge. Beneath them, lights of coastal settlements. Beyond them, the pitch-black mountains of Spain. And out to sea, the same motionless armada of freight ships.

‘Sides only,’ Kirsty ordered.

Hansi dowsed the headlights.

‘Cut the engine.’

To the furtive mutter of wheels on crumbling tarmac, they rolled forward. Ahead of them, a red pin-light flashed twice, then a third time, closer at hand.

‘Stop now.’

They stopped. Kirsty slammed back the side door, letting in a blast of cold wind, and the steady din of engines from the sea. Across the valley, moonlit cloud was curling up the ravines and rolling like gun smoke along the Rock’s ridge. A car sped out of the tunnel behind them and raked the hillside with its headlights, leaving a deeper darkness.

‘Paul, your friend ’s here.’

Seeing no friend, he slid across to the open door. In front of him, Kirsty was leaning forward, pulling the back of her seat after her as if she couldn’t wait to let him out. He started to lower his feet to the ground and heard the scream of insomniac gulls and the zip-zip of crickets. Two gloved hands reached out of the darkness to steady him. Behind them hunched little Jeb with his paint-dappled face glistening inside his pushed-back balaclava, and a lamp like a cyclopic eye stuck to his forehead.

‘Good to see you again, Paul. Try these for size, then,’ he murmured in his gentle Welsh lilt.

‘And jolly good to see you , Jeb, I must say,’ he answered fervently, accepting the goggles and grasping Jeb’s hand in return. It was the Jeb he remembered: compact, calm, nobody’s man but his own.

‘Hotel okay then, Paul?’

‘The absolute bloody pits. How’s yours?’

‘Come and have a see, man. All mod cons. Tread where I tread. Slow and easy. And if you see a falling stone, be sure and duck, now.’

Was that a joke? He grinned anyway. The Toyota was driving down the hill, job done and goodnight. He put on the goggles and the world turned green. Raindrops, driven on the wind, smashed themselves like insects in front of his eyes. Jeb was wading ahead of him up the hillside, the miner’s torch on his forehead lighting the way. There was no track except where he trod. I’m on the grouse moor with my father, scrambling through gorse ten feet high, except that this hillside had no gorse, just stubborn tufts of sand grass that kept dragging at his ankles. Some men you lead, and some men you follow, his father, a retired general, used to say. Well, with Jeb, you follow.

The ground evened out. The wind eased and rose again, the ground with it. He heard the putter of a helicopter overhead. Mr Crispin will be providing the full American-style coverage , Elliot had proclaimed, on a note of corporate pride. Fuller than you will ever be required to know, Paul. Highly sophisticated equipment will be standard for all, plus a Predator drone for observation purposes is by no means beyond his operational budget .

The climb steeper now, the earth part fallen rock, part windblown sand. Now his foot struck a bolt, a bit of steel rod, a sheet-anchor. Once – but Jeb’s hand was waiting to point it out to him – a stretch of metal catch-net that he had to clamber over.

‘You’re going a treat, Paul. And the lizards don’t bite you, not in Gib. They call them skinks here, don’t ask me why. You’re a family man, right?’ – and getting a spontaneous ‘yes’ – ‘Who’ve you got then, Paul? No disrespect.’

‘One wife, one daughter,’ he replied breathlessly. ‘Girl’s a medical doctor’ – thinking, oh Christ, forgot I was Paul and single, but what the hell? – ‘How about you, Jeb?’

‘One great wife, one boy, five years old next week. Cracker-jack, same as yours, I expect.’

A car emerged from the tunnel behind them. He made to drop into a crouch, but Jeb was holding him upright with a grip so tight he gasped.

‘Nobody can spot us unless we move, see,’ he explained in his same comfortable Welsh undertone. ‘It’s a hundred metres up and pretty steep now, but not a bother for you, I’m sure. A bit of a traverse, then we’re home. It’s only the three boys and me’ – as if there were nothing to be shy of.

And steep it was, with thickets and slipping sand, and another catch-net to negotiate, and Jeb’s gloved hand waiting if he stumbled, but he didn’t. Suddenly they had arrived. Three men in combat gear and headsets, one of them taller than the rest, were lounging on a tarpaulin, drinking from tin mugs and watching computer screens as if they were watching Saturday-afternoon football.

The hide was built into the steel frame of a catch-net. Its walls were of matted foliage and shrub. Even from a few feet away, and without Jeb to guide him, he might have walked clean past it. The computer screens were fixed at the end of pipe casings. You had to squint into the pipes to see them. A few misty stars glowed in the matted roof. A few strands of moonlight glinted on weaponry of a kind he’d never seen. Four packs of gear were lined up along one wall.