The Pure

under his breath.
    ‘See behind me?’ said Uzi. ‘Recycling. They only empty it every two weeks.’
    The first two men struggled and made muffled cries as Uzi and Avner hoisted them on to their shoulders and slid them down into the bottle bank. The third was limp, resigned, and sobbing. The bottles clashed and clattered as the men struggled in the dark, panicking.
    ‘Study hard,’ said Uzi into the echoing space. ‘Don’t forget there’s an exam coming. Be careful of falling bottles. And remember: next time, don’t fuck with Tomislav Kasheyev.’
    He slammed the lid and, without looking back, climbed into the van and lit a cigarette. Avner joined him and rolled the vehicle back into the shadows, away from the CCTV. There he prised off the remaining false number plates before revving the engine and driving off into the night.

 
13
    That night, Uzi couldn’t sleep. He knew he would be cursed in this way; he’d always suffered from insomnia after operations. The adrenaline. For a long time he lay with his head pressed into the pillow, in a mumbled conversation with the Kol. Then he sat up in front of his computer, scratching his fingertips, smoking spliff after spliff and eating strawberry mousses, watching the flickering screen. Before slamming the lid on the Polish men’s tomb he had stuck a disposable camera, the size of a fingernail, to the inner wall with adhesive pads. It was this that transmitted the images he watched on his computer screen all night; grainy images, in greens and blacks, three parcels slumped amongst the jagged fragments of glass, writhing occasionally and lying still again. He felt like a child watching caterpillars in a jar. Several times he had an impulse to go back and release them. But he didn’t.
    As morning broke, the bottles began to fall. One parcel in particular, which happened to be lying in an unfortunate position, became all but submerged within a single hour. Some of the bottles broke; Uzi couldn’t see any blood. He couldn’t afford to follow his urge to go back and release them. He knew that the gags would be growing less effective by now, having been soaked in saliva and chewed for hours on end. He knew their ordeal would be over soon.
    Sure enough, at around midday the bottle bank was suddenly illuminated. Two minutes later, a policeman in a reflective jacket climbed in and fumbled tentatively through the glass towards those strange, brown mermen, who by now were jerking and flailing madly, hoping to be rescued. Uzi waited until he had seen the policeman pulling away the packing tape from their faces. Then he clicked the red button in the corner of the screen, and when asked ‘are you sure?’ clicked ‘yes’. The picture went black. Several miles away, with a fizzing sound that nobody had noticed, the camera had destroyed itself.
    Uzi wasn’t worried that the operation would come back to bite him. He had seen the terror in his victims’ eyes. He knew there was no way they would dare to retaliate, or get the police involved. They had been humiliated, and the word would soon get around. He was safe. Instead, what haunted him over the next few weeks as he sat in a cramped shed at the entrance to Hasmonean Girls’ School in Hendon, equipped with nothing but a two-way radio and a CCTV screen, waiting for his wounds to heal, was – as usual – the Brussels kill, his first for the Office. He had taken life before he joined, of course he had, but only in the midst of combat. That Brussels kill had been his first, as they say, in cold blood. And it haunted him more than any other.
    Strangely enough, it wasn’t really Uzi – Adam – that had killed the whore, Anne-Marie, that night. Or, at least, he wasn’t the only one to blame. She had stumbled across information that would have burned a sensitive operation involving bugs, the UN, illegal arms shipments and Iranian sanctions; Adam could barely remember the details. But it was compromising enough for the Office to sentence her to death, and to order Adam and Avner to carry it out. It was their first operation together, and by that stage they had already become friends, so far as their world allowed. Neither of them could stomach the notion of killing this innocent woman with their bare hands. They were not Kidonim, black ops assassins, but they had been through a rigorous training. They knew countless techniques for squeezing the life out of someone quickly and silently, and disposing of the evidence