‘There is, of course, a solution to the problem of regime collapse and vengeance turned on former influential people. I can go abroad. I am authorised to fly to Damascus. Under deep cover I can travel to Dubai or Abu Dhabi. The American consulate in Dubai is in the World Trade Center, and the embassy in Abu Dhabi is located between Airport Road and Coast Street. They would not, if I walked in cold off the street, treat me like a friend, but they would show me respect, and I would avoid the rope suspended from the streetlamp. If you were to take a similar course when you go abroad, you also would be safe from the rope. Could you do that, brother, to save your neck?’
He saw that a trap yawned in front of him.
First there had seemed to be sympathy, then there had been honesty and, last, conspiracy. He was not one of them. He did not wear uniform, and was inside no inner circle. They were military men and he was a scientist in the field of miniaturised electronics. They used him. A trip wire might have lain across his path. If he had snagged it he would have gone into the prepared pit.
The Engineer said, ‘I am completely devoted to the Islamic Republic, its leaders and its future.’
He was rewarded with a smile, slow but broadening.
He went on, ‘I am devoted to my God, my country and my work.’
‘I hope your journey is fruitful, brother. We will be waiting to welcome you home and pray God for the best outcome.’
The brigadier was gone from his side. He realised he had been taunted, also that he had been warned against making unwise contacts outside Iran. He could not remember when, before, he had felt such keen anger towards a senior officer of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They mocked and threatened him. While they strutted on parade grounds, lined up their men across wide streets, then ordered baton charges or the firing of live rounds to disperse crowds who protested that an election had been stolen, he – the Engineer, Rashid Armajan – had been creating the weapons that defeated an enemy that was a super-power. He could not tell the brigadier to go fuck his own mother because that man had to initial the final authorisation for the journey in search of a consultant. He felt blood on his lip, and realised how hard he had bitten it, how much pain he had absorbed. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief and hoped no stain remained.
They were called into the next session, and the brigadier did not catch his eye as they went back into the operations area.
Badger had rested, but not slept. He had eaten some biscuit and drunk sparingly, had defecated into a bag and urinated into a bottle. He had done all of that within six inches of Foxy, without disturbing the leaves spread over the hide. He had thought more about the woman in the plastic chair across the expanse of water than he had about Alpha Juliet.
She was still there. She might have moved, or not, in the three hours he had had his eyes squeezed shut while the sun was still crystal bright.
Her children were close to her. Their toys were out. He thought the kids more subdued, less raucous, than the previous day. Once, the girl fell and screamed and her mother did not move, but the old lady came out, waddled to the child, swept her up and cuddled her.
The smell hung rancid between them, around them, with no wind to drift it.
‘Anything happened? Anything said?’
A slight shake of Foxy’s head, insufficient to rustle the dead stuff over him.
‘Nothing?’
The slightest nod.
The flies crowded above them and surged on his hands as Badger lifted his binoculars and adjusted the focus so that he could see the mess of reed leaves and stems where the microphone lay, then sweep on from the bund line to the barracks and a few of the soldiers playing basketball, then across the palm trees. He saw the head goon sprawled on a sunbed, and picked up the house and the kids, then the old lady who banged dust from rugs. He went by the flowerbed, abandoned, and reached the chair.
It annoyed Badger that he had twice asked the question and not been answered, annoyed him that he had felt it necessary to make bare, semi-civilised talk – like it was a weakness in him. He had ticks on his legs – could have been three bites or four. If he scratched hard, broke the surface and drew blood, the itch would be worse. They had to be endured. He would not fidget, give Foxy the pleasure of seeing his discomfort.
He wasn’t proud of himself. He didn’t ask, just pulled the headset from under Foxy’s head covering. To achieve that he needed to get his fingers across Foxy’s face, touch his cheeks, then go up to the crown and drag forward the arch linking the earpieces. His wrist was gripped.
‘On induction courses, do they teach wet-behind-the-ears recruits, rookies, that courtesies matter?’
He had a hold on the headset.
‘If they don’t, they should run one for beginners in basic manners. Fucking ask.’
He didn’t. A stand-off moment. Badger had hold of the headset and Foxy had hold of his wrist. Three seconds, five, ten. Badger let go and Foxy let go, and managed to choreograph it so that neither was the outright winner nor loser. He was given the headset and slotted it under his camouflage covering with small, slow movements. He thought he had lost high ground, which seemed – hard up against his oppo – to matter. What also mattered was his own inadequacy. He could watch the front of the house across the lagoon, and track the movement of the wife, her mother, the kids, the officer and the other guards, but if she spoke, and he was the one on stag, he must break into Foxy’s rest time. It hurt him that he was reliant on the older man, hurt more than the tick bites bothered him.
She was very still.
There were birds on the water in front of her and they fed, ducking and diving. An otter swam close to the main wall of the reeds: the first he had seen that day. He knew otters from the islands off the west coast of Scotland. Only a glimpse, and then it dipped, showing an arched back and a stubby tail.
He didn’t think she watched the birds or had seen the otter. On his earlier watch, a pair of pigs had crossed in front of him, would have swum over the sunk cable from the microphone, with just their snouts above the water.
The light had changed and was no longer on her face, but the sun’s force was now more to her left side and her cheeks were not in its glare. Badger couldn’t say whether there were still tears. Maybe earlier she had looked too closely into the sun’s reflection from the lagoon and her eyes had watered. A woman who ran a mine-clearance campaign might be made of stern material – or might weep in private because of what had happened to her, to her man and her children. He didn’t know.
Foxy farted. The foul smell hung around them, the residue of the last Meal Ready to Eat they had shared – beef in some congealed liquid. If someone had walked over them, he or she might have thought they’d picked up pig shit on a boot.
He reflected: there was no other way to do the job that the Boss, Mr Gibbons, had set them. They had to be there, marooned and… He watched her.
She was not the woman of a drugs-dealer he had once kept pinged, day after day, while she lounged in a summer garden close to her pool, wearing not much on a rare warm week, and she was not one of the women from the tinkers’ camp who had pegged out washing, lounged and smoked while the men planned thieving, and she was not the woman with the mousy hair and pale face, mistress to the man whose wife was under the patio extension and who would be led away, handcuffed, as the digger moved in. He had pinged many women who were consorts of a target and had not felt any of them were special or worth interest.