A Delicate Truth A Novel

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 tread. Slow and easy. And if you see a falling stone, be sure and duck, now.’
    Was that a joke? He grinned anyway. The Toyota was driving down the hill, job done and goodnight. He put on the goggles and the world turned green. Raindrops, driven on the wind, smashed themselves like insects in front of his eyes. Jeb was wading ahead of him up the hillside, the miner’s torch on his forehead lighting the way. There was no track exceptwhere he trod. I’m on the grouse moor with my father, scrambling through gorse ten feet high, except that this hillside had no gorse, just stubborn tufts of sand grass that kept dragging at his ankles. Some men you lead, and some men you follow, his father, a retired general, used to say. Well, with Jeb, you follow.
    The ground evened out. The wind eased and rose again, the ground with it. He heard the putter of a helicopter overhead. Mr Crispin will be providing the full American-style coverage , Elliot had proclaimed, on a note of corporate pride. Fuller than you will ever be required to know, Paul. Highly sophisticated equipment will be standard for all, plus a Predator drone for observation purposes is by no means beyond his operational budget .
    The climb steeper now, the earth part fallen rock, part windblown sand. Now his foot struck a bolt, a bit of steel rod, a sheet-anchor. Once – but Jeb’s hand was waiting to point it out to him – a stretch of metal catch-net that he had to clamber over.
    ‘You’re going a treat, Paul. And the lizards don’t bite you, not in Gib. They call them skinks here, don’t ask me why. You’re a family man, right?’ – and getting a spontaneous ‘yes’ – ‘Who’ve you got then, Paul? No disrespect.’
    ‘One wife, one daughter,’ he replied breathlessly. ‘Girl’s a medical doctor’ – thinking, oh Christ, forgot I was Paul and single, but what the hell? – ‘How about you, Jeb?’
    ‘One great wife, one boy, five years old next week. Cracker-jack, same as yours, I expect.’
    A car emerged from the tunnel behind