A Delicate Truth A Novel

into immediate effect. The decision to do so is of course his own.’
    But Jeb, having caught the drift of this message, and preferring not to wait for the rest, has vanished into the dark with his comrades.
     
    *
     
    Now with his night-vision glasses, now without, he peered into the density but saw no more sign of Jeb or his men.
    On the first screen the inflatable was closing on the shore. Surf was lapping the camera, black rocks were approaching.
    The second screen was dead.
    He moved to the third. The camera zoomed in on house seven.
    The front door was shut, the windows still uncurtained and unlit. He saw no phantom light held by a shrouded hand. Eight masked men in black were clambering out of the inflatable, onepulling another. Now two of the men were kneeling, training their weapons at a point above the camera. Three more men stole into the camera’s lens and disappeared.
    A camera switched to the coast road and the terrace, panning across the doors. The door to house seven was open. An armed shadow stood guard beside it. A second armed shadow slipped through it; a third, taller shadow slipped after him: Shorty.
    Just in time the camera caught little Jeb with his Welsh miner’s wading walk disappearing down the lighted stone staircase to the beach. Above the clatter of the wind came a clicking sound like dominoes collapsing: two sets of clicks, then nothing. He thought he heard a yell but he was listening too hard to know for sure. It was the wind. It was the nightingale. No, it was the owl.
    The lights on the steps went out, and after them the orange sodium street lamps along the metalled track. As if by the same hand, the two remaining computer screens went blank.
    At first he refused to accept this simple truth. He pulled on his night-vision glasses, took them off, then put them on again and roamed the computers’ keyboards, willing the screens back to life. They would not be willed.
    A stray engine barked, but it could as well have been a fox as a car or the outboard of an inflatable. On his encrypted cellphone, he pressed ‘1’ for Quinn and got a steady electronic wail. He stepped out of the hide and, standing his full height at last, braced his shoulders to the night air.
    A car emerged at speed from the tunnel, cut its headlights and screeched to a halt on the verge of the coast road. For ten minutes, twelve, nothing. Then out of the darkness Kirsty’s Australian voice calling his name. And after it, Kirsty herself.
    ‘What on earth happened?’ he asked.
    She steered him back into the hide.
    ‘Mission accomplished. Everyone ecstatic. Medals all round,’ she said.
    ‘What about Punter ?’
    ‘I said everyone’s ecstatic, didn’t I?’
    ‘So they got him? They’ve taken him out to the mother ship?’
    ‘You get the fuck out of here now and you stop asking questions. I’m taking you down to the car, the car takes you to the airport like we planned. The plane’s waiting. Everything’s in place, everything’s hunky-dory. We go now .’
    ‘Is Jeb all right? His men? They’re okay?’
    ‘Pumped up and happy.’
    ‘What about all this stuff?’ – he means the metal boxes and computers.
    ‘This stuff will be gone in three seconds cold just as soon as we get you the fuck out of here. Now move it.’
    Already they were stumbling and sliding into the valley, with the sea wind whipping into them and the hum from engines out to sea louder even than the wind itself.
    A huge bird – perhaps an eagle – scrambled out of the scrub beneath his feet, screaming its fury.
    Once, he fell headlong over a broken catch-net and only the thicket saved him.
    Then, just as suddenly, they were standing on the empty coast road, breathless but miraculously unharmed.
    The wind had dropped, the rain had ceased. A second car was pulling up beside them. Two men in boots and tracksuits sprang out. With a nod for Kirsty and nothing for himself, they set off at a half-run towards the hillside.
    ‘I’ll need the goggles,’ she said.
    He gave them to her.
    ‘Have you got any papers on you – maps, anything you kept from up there?’
    He hadn’t.
    ‘It was a triumph. Right? No casualties. We did a great job. All of us. You, too. Right?’
    Did he say ‘Right’ in return? It no longer mattered. Without another glance at him, she was heading off in the wake of the two men.



2
    On a sunny Sunday early in that same spring, a thirty-one-year-old British foreign servant earmarked for great things sat alone