A Deniable Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Revolutionary Guard Corps if his country were invaded by Americans, their poodles or the Zionists. He was also called upon to instruct leaders of the Afghan resistance in the manufacture of simpler devices, and he had heard they had learned well what he had taught them; the best of his work, as used in Iraq, would repel any invader of his beloved country. He thought his status should afford his wife the help she needed. Another cigarette was thrown down, another pack opened. He heard his name shouted.
    It was part of the Engineer’s status that he was allocated a personal security officer. He turned. The officer was ten or a dozen years younger and walked with a limp, but would not use a stick or crutch. He had no love for the man, objected to his constant presence round their home. He would have thought the secrecy surrounding his name, his work, made protection unnecessary, but the man was evidence of status. A stream of apologies babbled from the officer’s mouth: he had been told that the Engineer and his wife were due back on the last flight of the evening from Tehran.
    He said they had caught the first, that two passengers had been dumped off the manifest. His face would have shown the grimness of his news. He walked back towards the house and heard the officer, Mansoor, yell abuse at the old Arab man.
    His status permitted him to demand better. He did not know that a cigarette end had already been picked up and placed in a plastic sachet to be taken across the frontier along one of the many smugglers’ routes that passed through the marshes.
    He did not know that the cigarette end, with his spittle on the filter, would be flown to Europe for examination, or that men and women, privy to the result, would clap and cheer.
     
    Sarah had come off the phone and read to Len Gibbons the dishes on the takeaway menu from the trattoria at the top of Haymarket. Beyond the drawn blinds, the evening had closed quickly and he thought the central heating in the suite needed a tweak – there might be a frost before morning. He was on expenses and there was a quite generous allowance for evening meals on duty, but he had never been one to abuse a system’s finances. Just a pasta dish with some chicken and tomato sauce, a bottle of Italian mineral water and . . . The matter of the Engineer had seemed to be stymied, and the momentum had seemed to have died.
    He had not made the presentation, but had sat silently on a hard chair in the corner while men and women of greater rank did the talking. His own section head had read verbatim from Len Gibbons’s brief. The great and the good, two weeks and a day before, had cringed.
    ‘What – go on to Iranian territory? State-sponsored terrorism, by us, inside Iran’s frontiers? Ask our Special Forces to violate that hornets’ nest? They’d be entitled to refuse point blank. It would be an act of war, and the consequences of failure too awful to consider. I couldn’t urge my minister to permit this action, however much of our blood is on this reptile’s hands. Out of the question even to consider assassinating an Iranian on his own territory. Simply not possible.’
    But a woman from the Foreign and Commonwealth office rapped her pencil on the table for attention. She did liaison between the Towers and government, had grey hair styled close to her skull, a lined face and wore a blouse that some might have described as stuffy with jewellery that had probably come from a grandmother. Len Gibbons noticed her beacon eyes, jutting jaw and narrowed lips. She spoke rather quietly: ‘Any former students of ancient history here done Mesopotamia? No? Well, there was a king of Babylon, Hammurabi, powerful enough to have left a Code behind him, written in Akkadian. It was passed to the writers of Leviticus, Exodus and Deuteronomy. Broadly, all those years ago, it was stated, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ Legitimisation for an act of revenge. Would it not send a message if it