Sarah had come off the phone and read to Len Gibbons the dishes on the takeaway menu from the trattoria at the top of Haymarket. Beyond the drawn blinds, the evening had closed quickly and he thought the central heating in the suite needed a tweak – there might be a frost before morning. He was on expenses and there was a quite generous allowance for evening meals on duty, but he had never been one to abuse a system’s finances. Just a pasta dish with some chicken and tomato sauce, a bottle of Italian mineral water and… The matter of the Engineer had seemed to be stymied, and the momentum had seemed to have died.
He had not made the presentation, but had sat silently on a hard chair in the corner while men and women of greater rank did the talking. His own section head had read verbatim from Len Gibbons’s brief. The great and the good, two weeks and a day before, had cringed.
‘What – go on to Iranian territory? State-sponsored terrorism, by us, inside Iran’s frontiers? Ask our Special Forces to violate that hornets’ nest? They’d be entitled to refuse point blank. It would be an act of war, and the consequences of failure too awful to consider. I couldn’t urge my minister to permit this action, however much of our blood is on this reptile’s hands. Out of the question even to consider assassinating an Iranian on his own territory. Simply not possible.’
But a woman from the Foreign and Commonwealth office rapped her pencil on the table for attention. She did liaison between the Towers and government, had grey hair styled close to her skull, a lined face and wore a blouse that some might have described as stuffy with jewellery that had probably come from a grandmother. Len Gibbons noticed her beacon eyes, jutting jaw and narrowed lips. She spoke rather quietly: ‘Any former students of ancient history here done Mesopotamia? No? Well, there was a king of Babylon, Hammurabi, powerful enough to have left a Code behind him, written in Akkadian. It was passed to the writers of Leviticus, Exodus and Deuteronomy. Broadly, all those years ago, it was stated, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ Legitimisation for an act of revenge. Would it not send a message if it were done with discretion? Done “somewhere”, wherever “somewhere” might be. My summary: we couldn’t approve any act of extra-judicial murder and would wish to separate ourselves from any such folly. We would not wish to hear any more of this nonsense. And I’m as busy as the rest of you and have other matters more pressing to concern myself with.’
He thought she caught his glance and that she winked fractionally at him, the barest flutter of an eyelid.
All except his section head and himself had left the meeting convinced that a plan of outrageous folly and illegality had been roundly squashed by the lady from the FCO.
Back in his office that evening, the daylight ebbing, his screen had lit with a message relayed from another floor of the Towers. A man had, apparently, been selling dates at a border settlement. It was a good part of the world for dates and they were a local favourite: many sellers roamed communities for the opportunity to trade.
The Engineer saw the date seller when he came out of his home and walked towards the palm tree that threw shade on the chair that the security officer, Mansoor, used. The man carried a pair of baskets, each slung from the ends of a pole that he balanced on a shoulder. The Engineer saw that Mansoor had a handkerchief on his lap and it was loaded with dates. The seller had scored once at least. When he himself was approached he waved the wretch away. He had never, of course, heard of Abigail Jones – known to a choice company as Echo Foxtrot, a code-sign for the Eternal Flame – and had never, of course, imagined that an itinerant date seller could earn five hundred American dollars for each day he spent loitering at the border settlement.
He had come back from their doctor’s surgery at the hospital in Ahvaz and had received the answer that had been telephoned from the headquarters building – in the former Tehran embassy complex of the Great Satan – of the al-Quds Brigade. He had told his wife the news he had been given and they had clung to each other. She had wept on his chest and he on her shoulder, and then he had sat her by a window where a light curtain would shield her from the sun. He had come out to smoke a cigarette and inhale the relief.
The date seller had heard part of what he said to Mansoor, but the Engineer could not know that: ‘A second doctor, abroad, more experienced with the brain… as soon as arrangements can be made because time for her is so short and…’ He could now cling to hope, and the security officer nodded, sucked another date, then spat out the stone.
He had never spoken to Echo Foxtrot – the Eternal Flame. Had he, Len Gibbons would have congratulated her without reservation, and if the information had come at a cost of five hundred American dollars a day then it was cheap. The Yanks would likely have paid five times that for it and thought it a bazaar bargain.
It was the end of their day. She would guard the phones during the night and use the collapsible bed, and he would go to his club: not the Travellers or the Reform or the Garrick, but one that specialised in discounts for couples from the old empire. Sarah had cleared away their supper and the tinfoil would go into a rubbish bag, which he’d take down to the security desk when he left for his accommodation. His last job before shutting down for the evening was to make phone calls. The list in front of him was written in her neat hand. The number of the American who would be waiting in his office on a side-street off Grosvenor Square and, further west, that of the Israeli in the fortified wing of their place in Kensington abutting the park. Both men would be similar to himself: facilitators, not movers and shakers. They were functionaries, the oil in the wheels that made things happen. After that – their photographs were on his desk and later they would go on the wall – two more men would be contacted.
It was rare for Len Gibbons to entertain ideas that were not necessary to the business in hand. He lifted the photographs in turn, one of a younger man and one of an older, and held them where she could see them. Ridiculous, unnecessary, but he did it. ‘For you and me, Sarah, our moment in the spotlight is nearly over. We’ll be moving into the wings and it’ll be their turn to hog the stage… If they’re any good, we’ll win. If they’re not, we’ll… I hate to think of the end game if they’re not good enough and where they’ll be. Anyway…’
‘I’m sure they’re good men,’ she said gently. ‘The best available.’
He reached for his phone. ‘Which they’ll need to be.’
He was a star, his exceptional abilities accepted by all who came into professional contact with him. He knew the range of his talents and treated less skilled ‘croppies’ with disdain, something near to contempt: he had childhood friends, no boozing pals. The best relationship currently in his life was with his ‘oppo’, Ged. There were some on the team who murmured, behind their hands, that Ged deserved beatification for tolerating ‘stags’ with that ‘cocky little prick’, but everyone acknowledged that Danny Baxter – called Badger to his face – was the bee’s bollocks when it came to the arts of working in a covert rural observation post, where he and Ged huddled against the elements on a freezing night, halfway up a valley’s slopes in the hide they’d built.
Aged twenty-eight, and still nominally a policeman, Badger had been transferred the previous year to the surveillance teams of Box – their call-sign for the Security Service. There was always work for the men, precious few women, who were best at ‘shitting in a bag’ and whose creed was to take in and take out: then excrement went into nappy bags, their urine into plastic milk bottles, and they left behind no sign of their presence. Badger and Ged’s stag in the hide had less than fifteen minutes to run. Their effectiveness was already stretched to the limit and they had been there since a little before first light. The darkness was well set now and the rain was coming down hard. It buggered their efforts to keep the ’scope’s lens clear, and the audio stuff was on the blink. He’d give the guy on maintenance, back in the police station at Builth, serious hassle for the audio’s failure and won no friendships there, but he couldn’t give a damn.