A Delicate Truth A Novel

and puts on his jacket.
    ‘Cheese all right?’
    Cheese will be fine, says Jeb. But plain mousetrap, he can’t handle blue. Kit thinks that’s all he’s got to say, but he’s mistaken. Jeb needs to make a mission statement before Kit goes off to find cheese:
    ‘It was one big load of lies, see, Paul,’ he explains, just as Kit is preparing to go downstairs. ‘ Punter was never in Gibraltar. It was all made up, see. And Aladdin , well, he was never going to meet him, not in those houses or anywhere else, was he?’
    Kit is wise enough to say nothing.
    ‘They conned him. Ethical did. Conned that minister of yours, Mr Fergus Quinn. Jay Crispin, the great one-man private-intelligence service. They led Quinn up the garden path and over the edge, same as where he led us, didn’t he? Nobody wants to admit they handed over a couple of million dollars in a suitcase for a load of old cobblers, well do they?’
    Kit supposes not.
    Jeb’s face has gone back into darkness and he is either silently laughing or – only Kit’s guess – silently weeping. Kit dithers at the door, not wanting to leave him, but not wanting to fuss over him either.
    Jeb’s shoulders settle. Kit decides it’s all right to go downstairs.
     
    *
     
    Returned from his foray in the bowels of the club, Kit heaves the bedside table to the middle of the floor and sets a chair either side of it. He lays out a knife, bread, butter, Cheddar cheese and two pint bottles of beer and a jar of Branston Pickle that the night porter insisted on including in exchange for his twenty-pound tip.
    The bread is white and pre-sliced in anticipation of tomorrow’s breakfast. With a slice laid flat on his palm, Jeb spreads butter, adds the cheese and trims it till it tessellates on the bread.Then he spoons pickle on top, takes up another slice of bread and makes a sandwich and cuts it methodically into quarters. Regarding such precision as unnatural in a Special Forces soldier, Kit puts it down to Jeb’s troubled state of mind and busies himself with the beer.
    ‘So down the hill we go to the terrace then, don’t we?’ Jeb resumes, when he’s taken the edge off his appetite. ‘No point in not, really, is there? Well, we had our reservations, naturally. Fix, find and finish? Well, maybe we hadn’t begun, what with Andy having done a job with Elliot way back, and not possessing a high opinion of him, frankly, not of his abilities, and not of the intelligence at his disposal either. Source Sapphire her name was, according to Elliot at the pre-operational briefing.’
    ‘What briefing was that then, Jeb?’ Kit interrupts, momentarily resentful that he wasn’t invited.
    ‘The briefing in Algeciras, Paul,’ Jeb replies patiently. ‘Pre-op. Just across the bay from Gibraltar. Just before we’re to get ourselves into position on the hillside. In a big room above a Spanish restaurant, it was, and us all pretending to be a business conference. And Elliot up there on the platform, telling us how it’s going to be, and his ragtag team of American freebooters sitting there in the front row, not talking to us because we’re regular and Brits. Source Sapphire says this, source Sapphire says that. Or Elliot says she does. It’s all according to Sapphire , and she’s right there with Aladdin on the fancy yacht. She’s Aladdin ’s mistress and I don’t know what else she isn’t, all the pillow talk she’s hearing. Reading his emails over his shoulder, listening to his phone calls in bed, sneaking up on deck and telling it all to her real boyfriend back in Beirut, who passes it on to Mr Crispin at Ethical, and Bob’s your uncle, like.’
    He loses the thread, finds it, and resumes:
    ‘Except Bob isn’t anybody’s uncle, is he? Not Bob. Maybe as far as Ethical is concerned, he is. But not for our own Britishintelligence. Because British intelligence won’t buy into the operation, will it? Same as the regiment won’t – or nearly won’t. The regiment doesn’t like the smell of it – who would? But it doesn’t like missing out either. And it doesn’t like political pressure. So it’s a good old British compromise: a deniable toe in the water but not the whole foot. And me and the boys, we’re the toe, like. And Jeb here will be in charge because good old Jeb’s the steady one. Maybe a bit on the pernickety side, but with those daredevil mercs around, all the better for it. Granny Jeb, they used to call me. Not that I minded, if it meant not taking