Free A Deniable Death by Gerald Seymour Page B

Then, as if satisfied that he had eye contact with the Major, the Boss softened. ‘Thank you very much, Major, for that comprehensive and thorough study of our target. It’s time for a break, and a sandwich.’
    A frown settled on Badger’s forehead, and he thought vaguely that part of an agenda had slipped by him, as if it flowed through a separate channel. His mind moved on because he had seen TV clips of the hospitals, clinics and rehabilitation centres where the amputees were taken, and of men struggling to hop along a corridor of parallel supports. He thought that after the sandwich he would be told what the mission was and what was expected of him.
     
    She told her mother what had been agreed.
    The children were at school and would not be home for two hours; her husband had been driven at dawn to the laboratory workbench. In darker moments, she would have said she competed with soldering irons, circuit boards, little silver detonators, alarm devices and . . . Mansoor, who oversaw the security at their home, had seen her husband taken away and the escort car that had followed, and would now be in his room in the barracks. She walked with a stick, held in her right fist, and her mother supported her left arm. She did not care that the sun was high and burned her face. Perspiration dribbled under the loose black robe and the scarf was tight round her head; she could feel, inside the material and pressed against the bone, the size of the growth.
    She said her husband refused to accept the verdict of the doctors in Tehran.
    Her mother walked with her, would not interrupt.
    She said that her husband had demanded of senior officials that she be allowed to leave the country and visit a more advanced centre of medicine, that funds be made available for such a journey and that arrangements be made for her to travel.
    They walked past the lagoon in front of their home. Birds flew low over the water and skimmed the tips of the reeds. The light played on the ripples where fish fed at the surface. She said that her work with the mine-clearance programme was not finished, and that if she was snatched away the deadly beasts would continue to take lives and maim children . . . She told her mother that Rashid could barely contemplate life without her. She urged her mother, now in her sixty-fifth year, to look after the children if . . . Then she smiled and declared she had faith in the consultant she would see.
    Where? She did not know.
    When? She had not been told.
    Her mother cried softly, and the wife of the bomb-maker – who organised the clearing of old minefields for which there were no charts – tried to hold her smile. It had to be soon, she said, that the arrangements were made because she did not believe she had much time. She was in God’s hands. And with her would be her husband, the only man she had loved, a good man.
    She thought the ibis the most beautiful bird that flew over the reeds as it turned towards the raised island beyond them. To Naghmeh, it was frail and vulnerable, so delicate, and she scanned the skies for the eagles that swooped on the ibis.
     
    In his experience, men who had been at risk of assassination for months or years became careless.
    When they first believed themselves important enough to be targets of their enemy, they would slink in the shadows, but few could sustain the effort. Also, when the target was away from his base and the familiar streets where the safe-houses were, he would consider himself untouchable and go to cafés or restaurants if he were flush with his organisation’s cash. He would sleep with his mistress in a hotel, hire a car and . . . To bring his mistress from Sidon in Lebanon and fly her on a budget airline to Malta International and have her share his double room in a waterfront hotel in Sliema was careless.
    The man was not a fighter but a strategist and a tactician, and some in the higher echelons of Unit 504, intelligence gathering, believed he was among the