A Deniable Death by Gerald Seymour Page A

know, you’ll know.’
    ‘If I don’t like what I hear it’ll be goodbye and I’ll be at the bus stop, waiting for transport home.’
    ‘With a broken leg, perhaps a broken neck – whatever needs to be broken to prevent you walking out of here. Walking out – you lost the chance hours ago. Does the rain stop? Do they grow rice here? You’ll know soon enough and then, I guarantee, you’ll be frightened – and so will your young colleague.’
    ‘He’s not a colleague – I know damn-all about him.’
    ‘You will. You’ll learn everything about him. Everything . And be frightened together. Fear is good. It bonds men and makes them effective. I think we’ll go on, and then you’ll understand why we’re in this shit-heap, and what’s required of you. Be brave, Foxy.’
    Never before had he been spoken to by a foreign-agency officer as if he were of similar importance to a drinks waiter. His shoulder was smacked, water spilled from the glass, and the Israeli smiled coldly. He must have flinched, and he thought Badger would have seen him take that step back. They were led again into the briefing room. He believed the Friend. He didn’t want to, but he believed that the time for quitting was long past, and that fear would be justified.

Chapter 3
    To Foxy, it was choreographed: nothing was here by chance. It was as if they had both – himself and Badger – been manoeuvred towards the proposition. And it had been done quickly, like he supposed a good hanging was, with a pretence of casualness.
    ‘Times have changed. Things are different,’ the Cousin said.
    ‘Who can be trusted? Never many, but now the number has shrunk,’ the Friend said.
    ‘What I’ve learned, you want a job done well, you get your own people to do it. Then you know you’re in the best hands,’ the Boss, Gibbons, said.
    They had been together in the afternoon, and the Cousin had talked – an accent that was distant tyres on gravel, pronounced but not harsh – and had shifted awkwardly on the chair. He seemed to come alive when he spoke of the marshlands east and west of al-Qurnah, and north and south of the town, the drought there, the dried, cracked mud and stagnant pools where water no longer flowed because of the great dams built far to the north in Turkey, Syria and Iran. He spoke of a cradle of civilisation and the location of the Garden of Eden – did it well – of cultures that stretched back several millennia and a people who had been bombed, gassed, hit with napalm jelly and driven from their homes. Then on to ‘rat-runs’ and the smugglers’ trails along which the padded crates brought the bombs into Iraq. Through doors left ajar, and along corridors with stone floors, came the wail of a kettle boiling. That would have been the signal to the triumvirate – Boss, Friend, Cousin – that business should have been done.
    Praise from the Boss: ‘You’re both the best in your field, excellent and professional.’
    Admiration from the Friend: ‘Your files tell us you’re of high quality. This is not work for men at the second level.’
    The proposition from the Cousin: ‘We can identify, gentlemen, the target’s location. He’s about two kilometres inside Iran. He’s protected – but he’s about to travel away from his guards. We don’t know where or when he’s going. We think – are pretty sure – that you are the guys who’ll give us the answers. That’s what we’re asking of you. Be there, watch, listen, and tell us what you see and hear.’
    He was the older man. Predictable that their eyes should bead on him first. He could see , had adequate eyesight and wore glasses only for close work or with binoculars; he could listen because Six and the Agency, and whatever gang the Israeli was signed up to, would have top-of-the-range audio equipment; and he was almost fluent in Farsi, not interpreter standard but the level down from that. It would have been the language that had ticked boxes when they had trawled