He had no photograph and no name. The Crow knew only that the man was from the subcontinent, had no facial hair and was in his early thirties. He had been given a sentence to start, and the contact would complete it.
He strained to hear, but there was only the low purr of the car’s engine along that side of the parking area. They could be in the gorse, or the bracken, or in the dunes where the birches grew, or behind the toilet shed. They might have weapons, high-velocity sniper rifles and low-velocity machine pistols, trained on the two cars. He approached, and knew a moment of maximum danger. He knew of no operative — as experienced as himself, or as inexperienced as he expected the contact to be — who did not dread the ‘cold’ meeting with a stranger. Then the chance of compromise was greatest, and of ambush, arrest and the nightmare of interrogation. It must be done. His heart pounded. The Crow was a survivor, long term with the Organization, had adapted from the disciplines of the old central authority of the sheikh and his inner circle and taken on the broken cellular system with cut-outs and fire-walls. But he felt the hammering tension in his chest as he opened the car door.
Cold wind hit him. Rain specked his cheeks. He shivered. He wondered if they watched him and if they had guns aimed on him.
He walked towards the other car, and the light around him was fast fading.
The window was lowered.
The Crow spoke in Arabic: ‘Where was the cave in which Gabriel appeared to the Prophet …?’
He said what he had been told to say, said it exactly in the Arabic that was so foreign to him. ‘The cave in which Gabriel appeared to the Prophet was in the mountain of Hira that is near to the holy city of Mecca.’
Sak hoped he had pronounced it correctly. He had rehearsed it endlessly while he sat in the car in the parking area on the heath.
He saw a man with lined skin, thin lips and scars on his face. The hands extended to him were rough, calloused. Sak had thought that the man he would meet, who held seniority, would have the appearance of a scholar, an intellectual, a thinker and a hero. His fingers were crushed briefly in the fists of a labourer — and the voice was frightening. The words had been croaked at him.
He had waited for three hours, had agonized at the isolation of the heathland. No children had come to play here, no hikers or dog-walkers, and the fears in his mind had multiplied like bad dreams. They had stacked up, one after another. His fingers were loosed. Three hours … The man turned away. Three hours, and the contact moment, already, was broken.
‘Please, what should happen?’
‘We rest, we wait.’ The man spoke over his shoulder. ‘We wait until they come.’
‘When will that be?’
‘They make their collection in the morning before dawn. They should be here at the end of tomorrow, but perhaps before.’
It was said like a dismissal, but Sak pressed: ‘For the night, do I come to your car? Do you come to mine?’
The man had not turned. ‘And you see my face better, you hear my voice better, I see your face and hear your voice? No … And we have no names, no life histories. We work and we part.’
Sak felt as if he had been kicked. The man went to his car, reached on to the back seat and lifted clear a big plastic bag, well weighted. When he returned to Sak he had adjusted his headscarf so that his cheeks and mouth were obscured. The bag was dropped through the window on to Sak’s lap.
He was abandoned. Often he would look across the empty space at the other car, but he never saw movement in it before the dusk thickened. He sat in the car, trembled and thought that, at last, the war he had been recruited to was real, touchable. He held the package close but didn’t open it.
They were out on their feet, Deadeye had reckoned, but they’d done well. Now Adrian and Dennis would be in the car, one sprawled out across the back seat, the other wedged against the wheel, the handbrake and the gear lever, and they’d have crashed. They’d brought Deadeye to within a half-mile of the river. Beside the car he had slipped on his camouflage coat, then threaded sprigs and branches into the cloth slots. He wore a woven mask over his face. Deadeye had checked his appearance in the side mirror of the car and been happy. He’d gone forward.
He’d recognized that limping walk.
He’d seen the agent sidle away from the cars and the Russians, had recalled the little bastard he’d jumped on the step of a City of London office block, and had watched him move upstream, then settle and take a position against the base of a tree trunk. Deadeye had seen a kingfisher flash past, low over the water, a spark of colour in the gloom.
Time to do the business.
He did a long loop behind the agent. He would approach from the far side, away from the Russians and the main man, the target, who was still at the bank, but whose cursing was now sporadic, not on automatic. Far back in the trees, Deadeye walked quiet and easy on the balls of his feet. Coming closer, losing the dense cover and the darkness, he was bent double, minimizing the shape and silhouette of his head and torso. He tested each footfall and had the sensitivity in his toes, through his boots, to find dead branches that a sprinkling of old leaves might have covered. Shape and silhouette were important, but sound was as big on Deadeye’s check-list.
When he was within fifty yards of the agent, Deadeye went down on his hands and knees. It would have been best to use the good old leopard crawl, but that would have disturbed too much of the detritus on the forest floor, and he’d have made a noise like a damn pig rooting. He still had the suppleness in his elbows, shoulders, pelvis and knees, good at his age, to match a crab’s advance, and his stomach was held at a constant couple of inches above the leaves and twigs beneath him. He couldn’t see the agent’s face, only the top of his arm and his kneecap.
He had learned to survive off cold meals-ready-to-eat, to wrap his faeces in tinfoil, to defeat the interest of sheep, cattle and farmers’ dogs, to be a hidden creature on the move.
He reached the agent, was behind him.
‘Don’t make a fracas, mate,’ Deadeye whispered.
The head twisted, eyes raked him.
‘Don’t jump, shout. Keep still.’ He pulled the mask netting off his face. ‘That’s right, mate, nothing sudden and nothing loud … like nothing’s happening.’
The package, light, narrow cloth straps and the box, which was the size of one for safety matches, had been snug in his pocket. He lifted it out.
‘Now, mate, without a fuss, swing yourself round a bit, body this side of the tree.’
The agent did. Well, that was a shock for Deadeye. He’d seen the man at a distance — in Berlin, in Warsaw, in Chelm that morning and in Wlodawa that afternoon — but it was the first time he’d been up close to him since the pavement in the City. God, he’d bloody aged. ‘That’s good, mate. Now your coat off, easy movements, nothing sharp.’
The agent had that haunted look in his eyes, a pallor on his skin, and the lines at his mouth were deeper set. Then the light was in the eyes, and they blazed.
‘Look, mate, I don’t have time to mess. Just get the coat off.’
The straps and the box, the tracker beacon were in Deadeye’s hand. The eyes were on him, recognition knotting the forehead, but the fingers fumbled for the jacket fastenings.
‘You were, I saw you — you …’ A stammering voice.
‘I was, mate — doesn’t matter. That’s right, coat off and shirt open.’
‘In London, you were … The gun. You tried to—’
‘Nothing’s what it seems, mate. I didn’t try much. It was you did the action. Now, arms out.’