A Deniable Death Read Online Free PDF

were done with discretion? Done “somewhere”, wherever “somewhere” might be. My summary: we couldn’t approve any act of extra-judicial murder and would wish to separate ourselves from any such folly. We would not wish to hear any more of this nonsense. And I’m as busy as the rest of you and have other matters more pressing to concern myself with.’
    He thought she caught his glance and that she winked fractionally at him, the barest flutter of an eyelid.
    All except his section head and himself had left the meeting convinced that a plan of outrageous folly and illegality had been roundly squashed by the lady from the FCO.
    Back in his office that evening, the daylight ebbing, his screen had lit with a message relayed from another floor of the Towers. A man had, apparently, been selling dates at a border settlement. It was a good part of the world for dates and they were a local favourite: many sellers roamed communities for the opportunity to trade.
     
    The Engineer saw the date seller when he came out of his home and walked towards the palm tree that threw shade on the chair that the security officer, Mansoor, used. The man carried a pair of baskets, each slung from the ends of a pole that he balanced on a shoulder. The Engineer saw that Mansoor had a handkerchief on his lap and it was loaded with dates. The seller had scored once at least. When he himself was approached he waved the wretch away. He had never, of course, heard of Abigail Jones – known to a choice company as Echo Foxtrot, a code-sign for the Eternal Flame – and had never, of course, imagined that an itinerant date seller could earn five hundred American dollars for each day he spent loitering at the border settlement.
    He had come back from their doctor’s surgery at the hospital in Ahvaz and had received the answer that had been telephoned from the headquarters building – in the former Tehran embassy complex of the Great Satan – of the al-Quds Brigade. He had told his wife the news he had been given and they had clung to each other. She had wept on his chest and he on her shoulder, and then he had sat her by a window where a light curtain would shield her from the sun. He had come out to smoke a cigarette and inhale the relief.
    The date seller had heard part of what he said to Mansoor, but the Engineer could not know that: ‘A second doctor, abroad, more experienced with the brain . . . as soon as arrangements can be made because time for her is so short and . . .’ He could now cling to hope, and the security officer nodded, sucked another date, then spat out the stone.
     
    He had never spoken to Echo Foxtrot – the Eternal Flame. Had he, Len Gibbons would have congratulated her without reservation, and if the information had come at a cost of five hundred American dollars a day then it was cheap. The Yanks would likely have paid five times that for it and thought it a bazaar bargain.
    It was the end of their day. She would guard the phones during the night and use the collapsible bed, and he would go to his club: not the Travellers or the Reform or the Garrick, but one that specialised in discounts for couples from the old empire. Sarah had cleared away their supper and the tinfoil would go into a rubbish bag, which he’d take down to the security desk when he left for his accommodation. His last job before shutting down for the evening was to make phone calls. The list in front of him was written in her neat hand. The number of the American who would be waiting in his office on a side-street off Grosvenor Square and, further west, that of the Israeli in the fortified wing of their place in Kensington abutting the park. Both men would be similar to himself: facilitators, not movers and shakers. They were functionaries, the oil in the wheels that made things happen. After that – their photographs were on his desk and later they would go on the wall – two more men would be contacted.
    It was rare for Len Gibbons to entertain