A Deniable Death by Gerald Seymour

principal architects of the hidden tunnels and underground strong points from which a blood-letting had been wreaked on the Israeli Defence Force among the bare, harsh hills in the south of Lebanon where the common border was. A target did not have to be a fighter. To be a strategist or a tactician was cause enough for a file to be lifted down and put into the tray of High Priority when an asset told of an extra-marital affair, the name of a mistress and her travel bookings. Few informants were governed by ideology and principle; many were alert to good payment.
    The target would have left the girl in bed. She would have screwed him until he’d wondered whether he was close to a coronary. Then he would have pushed her off, showered and walked to the Internet café. There, he would have finalised a meeting with a colleague now based in Tunis and another in Rome, and walked back to the hotel.
    When Unit 504 went to war it was not with a straitened budget.
    An aircraft loitered outside Maltese air space and held together the facets of the operation. The controller in the air was in communication with the slight young man who stood near to the taxi rank in front of the hotel, like any other hopeful stud waiting for his girl. At the end of the esplanade a motorcycle engine was ticking over, the rider helmeted, with a second helmet on his lap. Along the coast – two or three kilometres – a high-powered launch was moored as a concrete jetty. Further out to sea, on the edge of the radar horizon, a merchant ship registered in the port of Haifa was on course for a rendezvous. On occasion, the unit used a mobile phone loaded with enough military explosive to destroy the side of a man’s head when he answered a call, or they might have built a bomb into the headrest of the driver’s seat in a car, or put one under the nearside front wheel. They might attack with a commando squad of up to eight men, or there would be a single assassin with a short range ‘Barak’ SP-21 short recoil-operated and locked-breech pistol with fifteen 9mm rounds in the magazine; only two would be used. The target came close.
    He was careless enough not to see the young man, wearing a nondescript grey T-shirt, lightweight windcheater and faded jeans, ease away from the lamp-post and wave to somebody down the road, behind his target, who did not look over his shoulder so did not see that no one was there. Carelessness killed.
    Two shots to the head, one through an eye socket and one into the brain via the canal behind the ear as the target stiffened, went rigid, then sagged to the ground.
    The target was in death spasms. Tourists and hotel staff ran up, then stood, petrified, as the blood came close to their feet. The young man was gone, and the motorcycle – stolen three days earlier – powered away. In the marina a launch revved its engines.
    The older men who had planned the killing believed that a message was given when a body bled on a pavement, and that such a message was always worth sending.
     
    ‘You’re good?’ the Friend asked.
    ‘Fine, thank you,’ Foxy answered. ‘Looking forward, though, to finding out what’s asked of me.’
    ‘We wouldn’t be in this circus ring if it wasn’t considered important.’
    ‘It’d be more respectful if a man of my experience was brought inside the loop rather faster than this.’
    Foxy had done enough buffet lunches to be able to balance a glass of mineral water and a plate of sandwiches. The Friend smiled with ice in his eyes. He’d met Israeli counter-terrorist officials at Special Branch meetings, with suicide bombers on the day’s agenda, and had thought them unemotional, uncommunicative, untrusting and, above all, arrogant. He’d heard it said by a Branch veteran that the answer was to get them into a bar and force drink down their throats until they pissed their pants without knowing it. Then they might behave as human beings, as colleagues.
    ‘You’ll hear soon enough. When you need to