So cold. Near his feet there was an old, pockmarked railway sleeper, with heavy chains nailed to it. It would have been a tiny part of the underwater system with which the East German state had sought to defend itself. Pathetic people, wiped from history… Eleven summers before Len Gibbons had come here, a teenage international swimmer from the east, Axel Mitbauer – 400-metres freestyle – had gone into the water up the coast, having anointed his body with petroleum jelly, and had swum fifteen and a half miles before reaching a bobbing buoy in the Lubeck Bight. Gibbons always took that story as proof of the superiority of his country, his creed, his calling. He still felt it as strongly as he had when he had last been on this beach those years before. He had never worn patriotism on his sleeve, but it was warming to be on a winner’s team.
The wind whipped him. Pretty shells crunched under his feet. He looked at his wristwatch. It might already have happened, or would be about to happen. He thought it time to start the journey home. He had done well. It was a triumph and would be recognised as such by the few inside the loop. Good to have been at this place of failure when a success was acted out.
Deutsche Presse-Agentur Lubeck 24.11.2011 09.12 Police report fatal shooting on the campus of the university medical school.
The Cousin heard it on a news flash on the local station – he had tuned in on his car radio for that purpose. ‘That’s my boy,’ he murmured. He ignored the No Smoking sign in the car, lit a cigarillo and drove a little faster down the wide highway. He felt good – like after the best sex or a decent dinner – and he’d stay with the station for updated news.
Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Lubeck 24.11.2011 09.29 Eyewitnesses at the university medical school of the UNESCO heritage city of Lubeck report two dead and one injured in a gun attack outside the neuro-surgery unit of the teaching hospital. A confirmed fatality is Steffen Weber, a consultant at the hospital, who was shot on the building’s steps. An unidentified gunman fled from the scene of the attack. Police have now cordoned off the hospital grounds.
The swap had been done, vehicles switched – the clothing and the weapon would go back to Berlin for disposal – and the Friend drove carefully within the speed limit towards the ferry port on the road to Travemunde. He knew these people, had had experience of them for more than thirty years of his working life. He had been on the periphery of the teams that had gone into Beirut for the revenge killings after the Munich Olympiad, and those hitting targets in North Africa, Rome, Paris, London and Damascus. He would have said he could read the feelings of the trigger men, whether they fired pistols at close range or detonated bombs remotely. This one was extraordinary. The man beside him was quiet, relaxed and had yawned a couple of times. He showed no sign of having spent a bad night on a cot bed in an outer office at a local synagogue. It was on the radio, made a news flash and interrupted an item about the preparations for the Christmas fair and the hope of a boost to the city’s economy.
‘They have not spoken of him yet.’
‘They will. Give them time.’
Deutsche Presse-Agentur Lubeck. 24.11.2011 09.43 A Lubeck police spokesperson said that Steffen Weber, consultant in neuro-surgery, was pronounced dead at the scene after being shot on the steps into the building where he had his office. Also killed, she said, was a foreign national, as yet unnamed, and a driver from the Iranian embassy in Berlin was wounded – but with no life-threatening injuries. The unidentified gunman is believed to have escaped from the hospital grounds in a commercial black Nissan van driven by an accomplice.
She sat on a hard chair in a corridor. Her husband’s body and that of the consultant were beyond swing doors. Twice she had tried to breach them and twice she had been gently, but firmly, refused entry. No one spoke to her. If she spoke to them, her language was not understood. Many hurried past and the swing doors flapped open for them, but not for her. There were policemen, doctors in gowns, nurses. She was not offered tea, coffee or water. She was forgotten. A woman came past her, escorted by uniformed men and bureaucrats in suits. She was blonde, expensive and boot-faced. Naghmeh assumed her to be the wife of the man who had tried, and failed, to shield her husband. Her head hurt, where her hair had been wrenched and there was blood on her face and hands, but no one seemed to see it.
Deutsche Presse-Agentur Lubeck, 24.11.2011 09.58 A police spokesperson has confirmed that the fatalities following a shooting in the grounds of the university medical school were a neuro-surgery expert, Steffen Weber, married with one child, and a foreign national, believed to be an Iranian male, who was escorting his wife from the building following a consultation with Dr Weber. An Iranian embassy driver was shot twice as he attempted to block the gunman’s escape. Across the street at the time of the shooting was twenty-three-year-old Manfred Hartung, a student: ‘The two men and the woman came down the steps from the doors. They were smiling and radiant, laughing. The driver of the waiting car opened the back door for the lady, and a short man, young, wearing workman’s overalls, laid a shovel on the pavement and stepped forward. I saw he held a handgun. He aimed at the man who held the woman’s arm, but the other attempted to put his body in the line of fire. The gunman shot four times. Two bullets hit the one I now know to have been a doctor, and when he fell, two more were fired at the man who was with the woman. The first put that man onto the steps and the woman fell over him, but the gunman pulled back her hair with one hand, placed his weapon against the man’s forehead and fired again. The driver put himself in the way of the gunman and was shot at close range. It was very fast, like a film, and I doubt it lasted more than fifteen seconds. It was an assassination. The gunman did not run but walked at a brisk pace up the road and a van drove him away.’
The talk was of cuts, small neat slashes to the budget on which his empire depended. The director general had Human Resources, Finance, Overseas Stations and Purchasing in his office and they nit-picked around costs and outgoings. Fiefdoms were defended and.. . He had the text on the television screen that was on the wall behind his department managers. The politicians demanded savings but were wary of the power he exercised. If he were to leak that the nation’s security was threatened by penny-pinching, the Westminster crowd would capitulate. He played the game, went through the processes. Something would be offered, but not much. They were on the matter of foreign travel – business class or cattle truck – and he read the text reporting an incident in a distant town in northern Germany. It was enough for him to collate the sums: three plus three made six.
Take the bastard down, Len, he had said, and the head had ducked in understanding. Gibbons, always described as ‘a safe pair of hands’, had delivered and might get a minor gong out of it for long service, but not much more, and there would be no meeting in this office with congratulations bouncing off the walls and no pumped handshake. It was deniable, and would be kept that way, but he felt a frisson of excitement and his blood flowed faster. Matter closed, business completed. He switched off the television screen. A good outcome.
‘Miss, are we fucked?’
Not a question that Abigail Jones needed to answer. Pretty bloody clear. She strained to hear better. Sounds filtered in her ears. There was the light wind that ruffled her hair, the fullness of her skirt, the scarf at her throat, and sang a little against the radio antennae on the Pajeros. Harding had a hacking cough. Hamfist had the habit, when tension rose, of slapping the palm of his hand across the stock of his weapon and making a rhythm of it. Corky kicked stones he found on the bund line. Some went off in ricochets and a few cannoned against the bulletproofed sides of the Pajeros. Shagger sang a hymn, barely audible – it would have been one he’d learned as a kid in chapel, in Welsh.