He told Sarah that the positioning of the sheet of paper on the wall was excellent, and almost smiled… The child molester from the al-Quds Brigade of the IRGC had said that the Engineer was a prolific smoker. That had been enough to determine Len Gibbons’s course of action in confirming the named target.
They had told Rashid and Naghmeh that the tumour inside her skull was now the size of a songbird’s egg. It cut across the nerve routes that controlled speech and mobility. Her condition had deteriorated over the previous weeks, with more intense pain in her head, increased dizziness, inability to move and great tiredness. She could no longer look after her children. The doctor in Ahvaz had realised the importance of her husband and had pulled strings to raise funds for the couple to fly to Tehran for more detailed scans and biopsies. They had stayed two nights at the medical school attached to the university. Rashid Armajan could not fault the treatment and respect they were shown: an official car had met them at the airport to drive them to their accommodation and had been available to take them back for the return flight. They had sat numbed and silent on the aircraft. The enormity of what they had been told had cudgelled them.
She had gone inside their house and would be with her mother and the children now. The Engineer walked on the concrete paving in front of their home. He could see out over the water in the lagoon to the reed beds. Where there were gaps in the reeds he could see more water and the berm, which was the border, hazed in the afternoon sunshine. He lit a cigarette and dragged on it. He smoked the Zarrin brand and had deflected or ignored his wife’s pleading that he should give up. His concession to her was that he did not smoke inside their home. Many men he knew believed, and told him so, that he gave up too much for her when he went outside each time he needed to smoke.
He supposed that the two medical men who had faced them across the table in the neuro wing made a habit of telling patients and their loved ones the brutal news of imminent death. It had been suggested to him that he alone should hear their verdict after the test results were back, but Rashid and his wife had refused that option. They were a partnership and a bond of love held them. They had been together when the assessment was given them. It had been done without sentiment: the condition was inoperable, given the equipment and talents available in Tehran; the condition would deteriorate rapidly and she had a few months to live. She would be dead within the year. He was forty-one and she a year younger; they had been married for fourteen years.
Tears welled in his eyes and cigarette smoke ballooned in front of his face. He wore better clothes than he would have chosen had he been in the camp at his workbench. Good trousers, a good shirt and a lightweight jacket. The sun was tilting and much of its ferocious heat was now dissipated by palm trees to his left, just short of the small barracks where his own security was housed and border guards were stationed.
An old man came towards him, bent in the back and shoulders, harmless and feeble. He carried a plastic bag in one hand and a broom of dried fronds. He crouched to pick up unseen pieces of rubbish, swept the pavement and gutter, then cleared the dried leaves that had fallen. Rashid thought he was an Arab – there were many in the region of Khuzestan. They did the menial work and had no education. In Ahvaz, some police and IRGC members thought of them as terrorists, but this was an old man and…
He threw down the cigarette, turned on his heel and fished in his pocket for the packet and his lighter. He looked for a kingfisher over the water and saw a heron poised and still; a hawk flew low past him. He would not accept what they had been told in Tehran. His wife and he had gripped the other’s hand and she had choked a little. He had sniffed hard. It was not right that a man who worked for the al-Quds Brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps should show emotion and fear of death. His own father, nineteen years before, had gone into an unmarked, unlisted minefield to rescue a pupil from his school who had wandered into it after a puppy. The dog had tripped an anti-personnel device. In the end, the puppy was dead, the pupil alive. His father had tripped another mine and had lived for four or five hours. He had shown no fear from beginning to end. The hawk had gone past the barracks and the heron was in a statue pose; another cigarette was thrown down, and another lit. He would not accept that the wife of an individual of his importance could be sent home to die because of the state’s medical inadequacy.
His status? He was not praised or decorated in public. If a security chief, a brigadier or general came to Ahvaz, Rashid Armajan would be an invited guest. He would sip coffee or juice and describe his newest work, the research he did and the effectiveness of the killing devices he created. He built the best. He was, almost, the father of the EFP. Many coalition troops had gone home in bags from Iraq because of explosive force projectiles that had come from his workbench. The software firing mechanisms he put in place were ahead of and defeated the electronic counter-measures they employed. He was proud to be supreme in his field. Now that Iraq was almost purged of foreign military, he concentrated on developing the roadside bombs, of great sophistication, that would be issued to units of the Revolutionary Guard Corps if his country were invaded by Americans, their poodles or the Zionists. He was also called upon to instruct leaders of the Afghan resistance in the manufacture of simpler devices, and he had heard they had learned well what he had taught them; the best of his work, as used in Iraq, would repel any invader of his beloved country. He thought his status should afford his wife the help she needed. Another cigarette was thrown down, another pack opened. He heard his name shouted.
It was part of the Engineer’s status that he was allocated a personal security officer. He turned. The officer was ten or a dozen years younger and walked with a limp, but would not use a stick or crutch. He had no love for the man, objected to his constant presence round their home. He would have thought the secrecy surrounding his name, his work, made protection unnecessary, but the man was evidence of status. A stream of apologies babbled from the officer’s mouth: he had been told that the Engineer and his wife were due back on the last flight of the evening from Tehran.
He said they had caught the first, that two passengers had been dumped off the manifest. His face would have shown the grimness of his news. He walked back towards the house and heard the officer, Mansoor, yell abuse at the old Arab man.
His status permitted him to demand better. He did not know that a cigarette end had already been picked up and placed in a plastic sachet to be taken across the frontier along one of the many smugglers’ routes that passed through the marshes.
He did not know that the cigarette end, with his spittle on the filter, would be flown to Europe for examination, or that men and women, privy to the result, would clap and cheer.