They’d bung him, cart him to a safe-house and turn him. The Engineer would sing. ‘I understand. Thank you.’
‘That was indiscreet, and I’d get my wrist slapped. It’s time to get back inside, and tomorrow’s a hell of a day. What a dreadful wind.’
‘You did absolutely right, Mr Gibbons.’ He and the Major were in the hall, out of earshot.
‘An untruth, but justified. He seemed to swallow “approach”. ’
The Major murmured in his ear, ‘He’s a young man, hasn’t been where killing and mayhem are. Maybe he’s good at his job, but he’s not hardened in the way the older man is. He’s going to be staring through a ’scope and binoculars at a target and he’ll bond with him after a fashion. They all do. He’ll get caught up in the trivia of the target’s life, and the medical condition of the wife. There are kids, aren’t there? He’ll see them. He’ll get to be, by proxy, a part of that family… at home, at his work. He’s looking at a man who’ll be arrested and sent to gaol. We’re talking ‘interdiction’, zapping the bastard. Our Badger might not cope too well with that. You did right.’
‘Which was why I did it. Serious business, killing a chap, don’t you know.’ A smile flickered at Gibbons’s mouth.
Some days it was hard for him to remember his name. That day, his identity hovered between Gabbi who worked, occasionally, as an investigator into tax avoidance from an office near the Ministry of Finance, and Zak, and Yitzak, which was how the sailors on a freighter had known him, as well as the embassy people who had seen him out of the airport at Catania, in Sicily. He had many names. In the last year he had used Amnon, Saul, Peter, David and Jakob, and had seemed to have many places of work. On occasions his hair was blond but it could also be jet black or mouse, and cut short or topped with a flowing wig. The debrief would be the next day, and he had gone home and would sleep until he was woken by the clatter of keys in the door, the tap of her stick and her footfall.
He had been met at a military airfield. No trumpets. He had come down the short steps of an executive twin-engine plane and the unit’s driver had had the front passenger door open. The woman, in an adjutant’s role, was on the apron, her hand out for the passport with his last, now discarded, name and the photograph with the light hair. She had also taken from him the unused float for incidental expenses on Malta, and a mobile phone that had been operational. She had returned his own and asked if he was well. He’d said he was, and she had told him at what time he was expected at the unit in the morning. He had been driven to their home in the suburb of Ramat Gan. He’d made one call on his own mobile and had left voicemail for Leah, telling her he was back.
In the apartment – one living room, one decent bedroom, a small bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen – he sprawled on the sofa with the bamboo frame. He had eaten yoghurt from the refrigerator and some cheese, and drunk juice. He might read later if he had slept and she hadn’t come back from her desk at the defence ministry in the Hakira district. On the stairs to his second-floor door he had met Solly Stein and his wife, Miriam. They would have noted he was back and would have known that the apartment had been empty for four days. They would have thought he had been away on Revenue business, chasing a fat-cat crook who was – perhaps – a politician. The apartment was always empty when he was abroad because Leah slept at her mother’s. Solly Stein did not know, never would, that the hand of their neighbour across the second-floor landing, the one Miriam held as they’d talked briefly – the weather, the price of milk – had the previous day fired two killing shots into the head of a Hezbollah strategist. If they had known, she would have kissed his cheeks.
He did not endure agonies of conscience as he lay on the sofa. He never had. Nor was he cold, unfeeling. He had been told that the resident psychiatrist attached to the unit regarded him as unique among his colleagues. Without remorse, rabid xenophobia, regret or triumphalism: like a man who worked in an abattoir and earned a monthly wage. An enigma, and not understood, but depended upon. There were some in clinics and others who beat their women, and a few who thought themselves so above the law that they hit banks and were now locked up.
He heard the tap of her stick against the door, must have dozed but was immediately awake. He rolled off the sofa and his bare feet slithered across the tiled floor. He heard the key go into the lock. She knew what he did, but never spoke of it, or of her own work at Camp Rabin, in Military Intelligence. She had been blinded in Lebanon by the shrapnel scattered in the explosion of an Iranian-built missile. The wounds inflicted were beyond the skill of surgeons, and she lived in a world of black and grey shadows. They hugged and the love shone.
‘You’re good?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘I brought supper.’
‘Wonderful.’
They clung and kissed.
‘Are you home for long – if you can answer?’
It was possible, in what she did at the ministry, that she helped choose the targets allocated to him. She might have worked on the selection of individuals of Hamas, Hezbollah or the Fateh Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade who were thought of sufficient importance.
‘Perhaps, and perhaps not. Soon I will know. I am home tonight.’
They were lovers, and she was Leah. She could not have said what name, in their bed, he would answer to.
The pool in the Zone had a bad end-of-season look about it. If she had been a holidaymaker and paying good money to lie beside it, with her book, she would have thought the place was up for sale, or that the maintenance money had run out, or that this was yesterday’s destination.
There was a better-kept pool in the embassy’s garden but she preferred the dowdiness of this one. The weeds that grew between the tiled and paved surfaces gave it more of an office feel and negated any guilt at apparently skiving off for the day. She was happy, anyway, to be far from her office in the secure section, distanced from the interminable gossip of the diplomats and their support staff. Her guards were not permitted at the pool and had to sit in an air-conditioned shed by the entrance to that sector of the Zone. The book, actually, was interesting.
On one side of her, quietly snoring, a towel across his face, was Hamfist, his flak vest beside him with the rucksack in which his gear was stowed, and an AK-47 assault rifle, with a magazine loaded and another taped to it. Her mobile lay on her thigh, the back smeared with sun cream. She took breaks from the book to make calls and check texts. Hamfist was a Scot, a ‘clumsy sod’ – as she called him – with any refined equipment other than one that fired a high-velocity shell. He had been in a Scottish infantry unit, had done nine years that included a spell in al-Amarah up on Highway 6. He had come through a mild load of post-traumatic stuff – better than the clap – but civilian life had not welcomed him. Instead he had signed for Proeliator Security and close protection for a Six officer. She thought he took more pride in wearing the newly washed and ironed T-shirt with the logo of the Jones Boys Band than almost anything else. She read about the birds in the marshes, on either side of Highway 6, that stretched in places to the border dividing Iran from Iraq. Pretty birds, majestic birds, endangered birds, some so small she’d need a telescope to spot them.
On her other side was Corky, not from the south-west of Ireland and County Cork but from the Andersonstown quarter of west Belfast, but there was no logic in acquired military names. He had been mentioned in despatches for his reaction in an ambush in Basra seven years back, and was in awe of her, but he allowed her to help him choose birthday and Christmas gifts for a son in Colchester aged eleven, and a daughter in Darlington, aged five. Her phone vibrated, and she raised her eyebrows – gold, the colour of her hair – lifted it, read the message and cleared it. She had organised the paperwork by which part of his salary was paid by Proeliator Security to each of the mothers. He had the same gear as Hamfist except that his rifle was an M16A1, with a muzzle velocity of 3,200 feet per second and a catastrophic hydrostatic shock effect on tissue when it hit, which Cork swore by. He wore a rumpled T-shirt, camouflage trousers, big wraparound shades, his boots, and was always a tousled mess.