A Delicate Truth (7 page)

Faint voices off, then again the deep, dead
silence, until Quinn comes back, shrill and petulant:

‘
Punter
’s unarmed, for
fuck’s sake. That was his deal with
Aladdin
. Unarmed and unescorted, one
to one. He’s a high-value terrorist with a pot of money on his head and a load of
priceless intelligence to be got out of him, and he’s sitting there for the
plucking.
Paul?
’

‘Still here, Nine.’

Still here, but looking at the left-hand
screen, as they all are. At the stern of the mother ship. At the shadow on her near
side. At the inflatable dinghy lying flat on the water. At the eight crouched figures
aboard.

‘Paul? Give me Jeb. Jeb, are you
there? I want you to listen, both of you. Jeb and Paul. Are you both
listening?’

They are.

‘Listen to me.’ They’ve
already said they are but never mind. ‘If the sea team grabs the prize and gets
him on to the boat and out of territorial waters into the hands of the interrogators
while you lot are sitting on your arses up the hill, how d’you think
that’s
going to look? Jesus Christ, Jeb, they told me you were picky,
but think what’s to lose, man!’

On the screen, the inflatable is no longer
visible at the mother ship’s side. Jeb’s battle-painted face inside its
scant balaclava is like an ancient war mask.

‘Well, not a lot more to say to that,
then, is there, Paul, I don’t suppose, not now you’ve said it all?’ he
says quietly.

But Paul hasn’t said it all, or not to
his satisfaction. And yet again, somewhat to his surprise, he has the words ready, no
fumble, no hesitation.

‘With due respect, Nine, there is not,
in my judgement, a
sufficient case for the land team to go in. Or
anyone else, for that matter.’

Is this the longest silence of his life? Jeb
is crouching on the ground with his back to him, busying himself with a kit-bag. Behind
Jeb, his men are already standing. One – he’s not sure which – has his head bowed
and seems to be praying. Shorty has taken off his gloves and is licking each fingertip
in turn. It’s as if the minister’s message has reached them by other, more
occult means.

‘Paul?’

‘Sir.’

‘Kindly note I am
not
the
field commander in this situation. Military decisions are the sole province of the
senior soldier on the ground, as you are aware. However, I may
recommend
. You
will therefore inform Jeb that, on the basis of the operational intelligence before me,
I
recommend
but do not
command
that he would be well advised to put
Operation Wildlife
into immediate effect. The decision to do so is of
course his own.’

But Jeb, having caught the drift of this
message, and preferring not to wait for the rest, has vanished into the dark with his
comrades.

Now with his night-vision glasses, now
without, he peered into the density but saw no more sign of Jeb or his men.

On the first screen the inflatable was
closing on the shore. Surf was lapping the camera, black rocks were approaching.

The second screen was dead.

He moved to the third. The camera zoomed in
on house seven.

The front door was shut, the windows still
uncurtained and unlit. He saw no phantom light held by a shrouded hand. Eight masked men
in black were clambering out of the inflatable, one
pulling another.
Now two of the men were kneeling, training their weapons at a point above the camera.
Three more men stole into the camera’s lens and disappeared.

A camera switched to the coast road and the
terrace, panning across the doors. The door to house seven was open. An armed shadow
stood guard beside it. A second armed shadow slipped through it; a third, taller shadow
slipped after him: Shorty.

Just in time the camera caught little Jeb
with his Welsh miner’s wading walk disappearing down the lighted stone staircase
to the beach. Above the clatter of the wind came a clicking sound like dominoes
collapsing: two sets of clicks, then nothing. He thought he heard a yell but he was
listening too hard to know for sure. It was the wind. It was the nightingale. No, it was
the owl.

The lights on the steps went out, and after
them the orange sodium street lamps along the metalled track. As if by the same hand,
the two remaining computer screens went blank.

At first he refused to accept this simple
truth. He pulled on his night-vision glasses, took them off, then put them on again and
roamed the computers’ keyboards, willing the screens back to life. They would not
be willed.

A stray engine barked, but it could as well
have been a fox as a car or the outboard of an inflatable. On his encrypted cellphone,
he pressed ‘1’ for Quinn and got a steady electronic wail. He stepped out of
the hide and, standing his full height at last, braced his shoulders to the night
air.

A car emerged at speed from the tunnel, cut
its headlights and screeched to a halt on the verge of the coast road. For ten minutes,
twelve, nothing. Then out of the darkness Kirsty’s Australian voice calling his
name. And after it, Kirsty herself.

‘What on earth happened?’ he
asked.

She steered him back into the hide.

‘Mission accomplished. Everyone ecstatic.
Medals all round,’ she said.

‘What about
Punter
?’

‘I said everyone’s ecstatic,
didn’t I?’

‘So they got him? They’ve taken
him out to the mother ship?’

‘You get the fuck out of here now and
you stop asking questions. I’m taking you down to the car, the car takes you to
the airport like we planned. The plane’s waiting. Everything’s in place,
everything’s hunky-dory. We go
now
.’

‘Is Jeb all right? His men?
They’re okay?’

‘Pumped up and happy.’

‘What about all this stuff?’ –
he means the metal boxes and computers.

‘This stuff will be gone in three
seconds cold just as soon as we get you the fuck out of here. Now move it.’

Already they were stumbling and sliding into
the valley, with the sea wind whipping into them and the hum from engines out to sea
louder even than the wind itself.

A huge bird – perhaps an eagle – scrambled
out of the scrub beneath his feet, screaming its fury.

Once, he fell headlong over a broken
catch-net and only the thicket saved him.

Then, just as suddenly, they were standing
on the empty coast road, breathless but miraculously unharmed.

The wind had dropped, the rain had ceased. A
second car was pulling up beside them. Two men in boots and tracksuits sprang out. With
a nod for Kirsty and nothing for himself, they set off at a half-run towards the
hillside.

‘I’ll need the goggles,’
she said.

He gave them to her.

‘Have you got any papers on you –
maps, anything you kept from up there?’

He hadn’t.

‘It was a triumph. Right? No casualties.
We did a great job. All of us. You, too. Right?’

Did he say ‘Right’ in return? It
no longer mattered. Without another glance at him, she was heading off in the wake of
the two men.

On a sunny Sunday early in that same
spring, a thirty-one-year-old British foreign servant earmarked for great things sat
alone at the pavement table of a humble Italian café in London’s Soho,
steeling himself to perform an act of espionage so outrageous that, if detected, it
would cost him his career and his freedom: namely, recovering a tape recording,
illicitly made by himself, from the Private Office of a Minister of the Crown whom it
was his duty to serve and advise to the best of his considerable ability.

His name was Toby Bell and he was entirely
alone in his criminal contemplations. No evil genius controlled him, no paymaster,
provocateur or sinister manipulator armed with an attaché case stuffed with
hundred-dollar bills was waiting round the corner, no activist in a ski mask. He was in
that sense the most feared creature of our contemporary world: a solitary decider. Of a
forthcoming clandestine operation on the Crown Colony of Gibraltar he knew nothing:
rather, it was this tantalizing ignorance that had brought him to his present pass.

Neither was he in appearance or by nature
cut out to be a felon. Even now, premeditating his criminal design, he remained the
decent, diligent, tousled, compulsively ambitious, intelligent-looking fellow that his
colleagues and employers took him for. He was stocky in build, not particularly
handsome, with a shock of unruly brown hair that went haywire as soon as it was brushed.
That there was gravitas in him was undeniable. The gifted, state-educated only child of
pious artisan parents from the south coast of England who knew no politics but Labour –
the father an elder of his local tabernacle, the mother a chubby,
happy woman who spoke constantly of Jesus – he had battled his way into the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, first as a clerk, and thence by way of evening classes, language
courses, internal examinations and two-day leadership tests, to his present, coveted
position. As to the
Toby
, which might by the sound of it set him higher on the
English social ladder than his provenance deserved, it derived from nothing more
elevated than his father’s pride in the holy man Tobias, whose wondrous filial
virtues are set down in the ancient scripts.

What had driven Toby’s ambition – what
drove it still – was something he barely questioned. His schoolfriends had wished only
to make money. Let them. Toby, though modesty forbade him to say so in so many words,
wished to make a difference – or, as he had put it a little shamefacedly to his
examiners, take part in his country’s discovery of its true identity in a
post-imperial, post-Cold War world. Given his head, he would long ago have swept away
Britain’s private education system, abolished all vestiges of entitlement and put
the monarchy on a bicycle. Yet even while harbouring these seditious thoughts, the
striver in him knew that his first aim must be to rise in the system he dreamed of
liberating.

And in speech, though he was speaking at
this moment to no one but himself? As a natural-born linguist with his father’s
love of cadence and an almost suffocating awareness of the brand-marks on the English
tongue, it was inevitable that he should discreetly shed the last tinges of his Dorset
burr in favour of the Middle English affected by those determined not to have their
social origins defined for them.

With the alteration in his voice had come an
equally subtle change in his choice of clothing. Conscious that any moment now he would
be sauntering through the gates of the Foreign Office with every show of being at his
managerial ease, he
was wearing chinos and an open-necked shirt – and a
shapeless black jacket for that bit of off-duty formality.

What was also not apparent to any outward
eye was that only two hours previously his live-in girlfriend of three months’
standing had walked out of his Islington flat vowing never to see him again. Yet somehow
this tragic event had failed to cast him down. If there was a connection between
Isabel’s departure and the crime he was about to commit, then perhaps it was to be
found in his habit of lying awake at all hours brooding on his unshareable
preoccupations. True, at intervals throughout the night, they had vaguely discussed the
possibility of a separation, but then latterly they often had. He had assumed that when
morning came she would as usual change her mind, but this time she stuck to her guns.
There had been no screams, no tears. He phoned for a cab, she packed. The cab came, he
helped her downstairs with her suitcases. She was worried about her silk suit at the
cleaner’s. He took the ticket from her and promised to send it on. She was pale.
She did not look back, even if she could not resist the final word:

‘Let’s face it, Toby,
you’re a bit of a cold fish, aren’t you?’ – with which she rode away,
ostensibly to her sister in Suffolk, though he suspected she might have other irons in
the fire, including her recently abandoned husband.

And Toby, equally firm of purpose, had set
out on foot for his coffee and croissant in Soho as a prelude to grand larceny. Which is
where he now sat, sipping his cappuccino in the morning sunshine and staring blankly at
the passers-by. If I’m such a cold fish, how did I talk myself into this God-awful
situation?

For answers to this and allied questions,
his mind turned as of habit to Giles Oakley, his enigmatic mentor and self-appointed
patron.

Berlin.

The neophyte diplomat Bell, Second Secretary
(Political), has just arrived at the British Embassy on his first overseas posting. The
Iraq War looms. Britain has signed up to it, but denies it has done so. Germany is
dithering on the brink. Giles Oakley, the embassy’s
éminence grise
–
darting, impish Oakley, dyed in all the oceans, as the Germans say – is Toby’s
section chief. Oakley’s job, amid a myriad others less defined: to supervise the
flow of British intelligence to German liaison. Toby’s: to be his spear-carrier.
His German is already good. As ever, he’s a fast learner. Oakley takes him under
his wing, marches him round the ministries and opens doors for him that would otherwise
have remained locked against one of his lowly status. Are Toby and Giles spies? Not at
all! They are blue-chip British career diplomats who have found themselves, like many
others, at the trading tables of the free world’s vast intelligence
marketplace.