A Delicate Truth Read Online Free PDF Page A

hasn’t been paying attention.
    They shared a strained silence. She thinks
     I’m surplus to requirements. She thinks I’m the Limey know-nothing
     striped-pants parachuted in to make difficulties.
    ‘So when do I get to meet up with
     Jeb?’ he insisted, not for the first time.
    ‘Your friend Jeb will be ready and
     waiting for you at the rendezvous as per schedule, like I told you.’
    ‘He’s why I’m here,’
     he said too loud, feeling his gall rising. ‘Jeb and his men can’t go in
     without my say-so. That was the understanding from the start.’
    ‘We’re aware of that, thank you,
     Paul, and Elliot’s aware of it. The sooner you and your friend Jeb hook up and the
     two teams are talking, the sooner we can get this thing squared away and go home.
     Okay?’
    He needed Jeb. He needed his own.
    The traffic had gone. The trees were shorter
     here, the sky bigger. He counted off the landmarks. St Bernard’s Church. The
     Mosque of Ibrahim-al-Ibrahim, its minaret lit white. The shrine to Our Lady of Europe.
     Each of them branded on his memory thanks to mindless leafings through the greasy hotel
     guidebook. Out to sea, an armada of lighted freighters at anchor.
The seaborne boys
     will operate out of Ethical’s mother ship
, Elliot is saying.
    The sky had vanished. This tunnel is not a
     tunnel. It’s a disused mineshaft. It’s an air-raid shelter. Crooked girders,
     sloppy walls of breeze block and rough-cut cliff. Neon strips flying overhead, white
     road markings keeping pace with them. Festoons of black wiring. A sign saying LOOK OUT FOR FALLING STONES ! Potholes, rivulets of brown flood water,
     an iron doorway leading to God knew where. Has
Punter
passed this way today? Is
     he hovering behind a doorway with one of his twenty Manpads? Punter
’s not just
     high value, Paul. In the words of Mr Jay Crispin,
Punter
is
     stratospheric
: Elliot again.
    Pillars like the gateway to another world
     coming at them as they emerge from the belly of the Rock and land on a road cut into the
     cliff. A hefty wind is rattling the coachwork, a half-moon has appeared at the top of
     the windscreen and the Toyota is bumping along the nearside verge. Beneath them, lights
     of coastal settlements. Beyond them, the pitch-black mountains of Spain. And out to sea,
     the same motionless armada of freight ships.
    ‘Sides only,’ Kirsty
     ordered.
    Hansi dowsed the headlights.
    ‘Cut the engine.’
    To the furtive mutter of wheels on crumbling
     tarmac, they rolled forward. Ahead of them, a red pin-light flashed twice, then a third
     time, closer at hand.
    ‘Stop now.’
    They stopped. Kirsty slammed back the side
     door, letting in a blast of cold wind, and the steady din of engines from the sea.
     Across the valley, moonlit cloud was curling up the ravines and rolling like gun smoke
     along the Rock’s ridge. A car sped out of the tunnel behind them and raked the
     hillside with its headlights, leaving a deeper darkness.
    ‘Paul, your
friend
’s
     here.’
    Seeing no friend, he slid across to the open
     door. In front of him, Kirsty was leaning forward, pulling the back of her seat after
     her as if she couldn’t wait to let him out. He started to lower his feet to the
     ground and heard the scream of insomniac gulls and the zip-zip of crickets. Two gloved
     hands reached out of the darkness to steady him. Behind them hunched little Jeb with his
     paint-dappled face glistening inside his pushed-back balaclava, and a lamp like a
     cyclopic eye stuck to his forehead.
    ‘Good to see you again, Paul. Try
     these for size, then,’ he murmured in his gentle Welsh lilt.
    ‘And jolly good to see
you
,
     Jeb, I must say,’ he answered fervently, accepting the goggles and grasping
     Jeb’s hand in return. It was the Jeb he remembered: compact, calm, nobody’s
     man but his own.
    ‘Hotel okay then, Paul?’
    ‘The absolute bloody pits. How’s
     yours?’
    ‘Come and have a see, man. All mod
     cons. Tread where I