‘She says her committee don’t believe they can carry on without her. The mine programme will fold if she isn’t there. She’s the icon figure who demands action – she repeats that. He nods, doesn’t answer, only says something about belief in God.’
They had developed the hide through the morning. It was as good as anything Badger could remember. Normaclass="underline" go in at night and do the construction stuff under cover of darkness, be cosy and covert when the light came. Abnormaclass="underline" to burrow out the scrape and cover it, do the work in the sun’s glare, and have a man with security responsibilities sitting in a chair two hundred yards away. Something to be proud of. He had called the tune, and Foxy had stayed with the earphones clamped on, hadn’t acknowledged that the work was well done – was brilliant. They were on the extremity of the reeds where they were thin, and had taken over a narrow strip of the bare ground, the dried-out mud. He had worked a shallow dip for them no more than fifteen inches deep, and had made a rim wall of the soil. All of it was covered with debris he had painstakingly collected further into the reeds, the same dead fronds that hid the microphone on the mud spit. More fronds masked the cable where it came up out of the water and ran across the mud towards them. A work of art, a collector’s piece. Often the guard raised his binoculars and scanned. Then Badger had been statue still on his stomach, and the gillie suit was embedded with more reeds… There’d been no praise. He thought of Alpha Juliet. Difficult not to think of her. Impossible to imagine why she had done it, but he was glad she had.
‘He’s called Mansoor – that’s what she calls him. He says he hopes God will watch over her. She says her committee depends too much on her. She says it’s time to go and prepare the children’s food for when they come back from school. I think he’s near to tears. Right, she’s gone, and…’
He was no longer listening. Fran had been good enough to run for a few months, but he’d left and she wouldn’t have cried. There had been two girls while he was still at school, and he’d shagged one while her parents were out at the supermarket, every Friday evening, for a month, the other in the woods near the nuke-weapons factory at Burghfield… And a woman PC called Brenda, who ran the organisation side of the team that did surveillance on the gypsy camp where the tinkers who did the country-house burglaries up and down the Thames-valley corridor came from. Nothing important to him. She had been, Alpha Juliet – and there was no one to tell him why she was locked into his mind.
He wasn’t handsome, had fuck-all talk. He felt the warmth of her, and the moistness… He couldn’t have said that any woman before had mattered in his life. The heat burgeoned and his throat was crisp, dried. His eyes ached from the glare of the water, and the man sat in front of the house, the rifle across his legs. Badger’s head turned slowly as he watched, through his glasses, the reed beds, the spit where the microphone was disguised and the open ground into which he had scraped the hide. They were pressed hard together, his hip into the slack part of Foxy’s stomach wall, and Foxy’s hip bone sharp against his thigh.
Foxy whispered, ‘It surprised me, how well my Farsi’s lasted.. .’
If the man was fishing for a compliment, Badger wouldn’t take the bait. He answered, ‘It’s what you’re here for – what you’re paid for.’
‘You know why we’re here?’
‘Are you going to tell me?’
‘We’re here because they – the spooks – don’t have an asset to put in here. They would have wanted a local, some guy who could wander around and chat in the coffee house or the garage and talk to the goon guards. They don’t have one. So it’s us. There isn’t a turned Iranian they could put in and trust, and there isn’t a lieutenant of the Republican Guard, who thought Saddam was the bee’s bollocks, or a slimy little sod from the Ba’ath Party they can rely on. They’ve reached down to the bottom of the barrel, and it’s us they’ve pulled out. It’s crazy, daft, idiotic.’
‘You volunteered so stop whining.’ So close together, like lovers, that the words barely needed articulation. Badger’s murmur in Foxy’s ear, and the two camouflage head kits were almost meshed.
Foxy’s response: ‘We’re the end of the road for them or the barrel’s scrapings, whichever. And they’ll feel good. They ’ve done something – put two arseholes, daft idiots, into harm’s way. It’ll go on the papers they write and they’ll get congratulated. What chance is there that the target will walk out of his front door and shout in Farsi I can understand and no fancy dialect, to the bloody sky, “Heh, anyone there? If you are, and you’re upset about the growth in my wife’s head, you need to know I’m off in the morning to Vienna, Rome, Kiev, Stockholm, any place where there’s someone with good knife skills. Hear that?” We’ll see him go, perhaps. Where to? We’ll see farewells, tears et cetera. Where are they headed? We’ve no chance.’
‘You could have refused.’
‘And they’d have let me walk away? Grow up, young ’un. They’d have made sure it haunted me the rest of my days. No more work. Considered “unsuitable”, branded “lack of commitment”. You’re held by the short and curlies. Didn’t the lady tell you? Or wasn’t she talking too much?’
‘Best you shut your mouth.’
‘But they can have their lunch and their gin, and can congratulate themselves that they tried, were audacious, and when we crawl out of here and get back, don’t expect a load of back-slapping and gratitude. They won’t remember your name. It has no chance.’
Badger murmured, ‘Saying that because you’re scared shitless? Or do you mean it – “no chance”?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think you’re crap. Try it again. I know you’re crap.’
He thought Foxy was close to hitting him, and they both lay motionless. Badger watched as the security man roved the area with his glasses. He didn’t know if Foxy had spoken the truth – that they had no chance, were small pawns and served other agendas.
‘I will do it, subject to satisfactory arrangements.’
He was asked what arrangements would have to be satisfactory.
The consultant had gone out of the building and loitered in front of the cafe. He was not overheard. He had dialled the number given him, had been held at the embassy’s switchboard for perhaps a half-minute, which he thought excessive, and when the call was answered he received no apology.
‘The patient must have a name. There must be a date of arrival and-’
He was interrupted. The life of the hospital and the medical school flowed past him; the rain fell and snow threatened. There was often snow when the Christmas market began in Lubeck, in the square in front of the Rathaus and beside the Marienkirche. Then it was prettier and the traders coined cash. He was not, of course, a Christian but his wife went to services most Sundays and took their daughter, and on special saints’ days he would attend with them. The patient would arrive as soon as it could be arranged, and the name would be given him when he saw the patient. Did anything else need to be ‘satisfactory’?
‘What would be the method of payment? These are expensive procedures. We require guarantees, money lodged in escrow, a banker’s draft, a credit card or-’
A hardening of a faraway distorted voice. Had he forgotten who he was? What he owed? Did greed govern him?
‘I’m not talking about myself. There are technicians, scans, X-rays. Assume that surgery is a possibility. Then you have theatre, and intensive care.’ His temper was shortening. ‘The patient cannot have that type of intervention, hours of it, then be put out into a winter’s night.’