HOME RUN

by Gerald Seymour

  It was Keeper's opinion that Leroy Winston Manvers had come clean in his pain, had told all. Charlie Persia was the name that the distributor traded under. He believed that. The face and the gasping admissions of Leroy Winston Manvers had a truth about them. He knew from forensic's analysis that the packets found in the Notting Hill council flat were of Iranian origin. He took as his base position that Charlie Persia was Iranian, had carried the good, hard stuff to London. He waited on a phone call to take him forward now that the computer had come up blank. He needed a break. He needed luck. And he was pacing because his phone call had not been returned, and because he did not know where else the break would come from.

  It had been luck that had heaved Park out of uniform at Heathrow Airport and into the ID on the Lane. He would never have argued with that. He had spotted the girl coming off the Varig from Rio, and she looked like a towrope, and her accent was an East London slur, and her clothes weren't good enough for a return ticket to Rio, and she had been the only passenger he had stopped all that morning off the overnight intercontinentals. She had had an airline ticket and

  £1500 for couriering a kilo of cocaine, fastened in a sanitary towel between her legs. That was a break, that was noticed.

  Luck was different, luck could only be taken advantage of. A slack half hour between the clearing of the Customs hall and the arrival of the next jumbo and he had gone out into the concourse to get himself an afternoon paper, and he had seen the man waiting at the barrier, in position to meet a passenger off the incoming flight. At Heathrow they had the police mugshots of all convicted pushers and dealers. Not everyone looked at them, but the young David Park had made a point of studying them every week. He recognised the face, eighteen months at Isleworth Court and he could only have been out a few weeks. That was luck, recognising the chummie. He had tipped off the local ID based at the airport. The "greeter"

  had been watched, the meeting had been observed, the passenger had been challenged and asked to return to the Customs area . . . a few grammes more than a kilo stuffed into the cavities in a pair of platform shoes, and back to Isleworth Court for the "greeter", and seven years for the courier. Luck, but there were those in the ID command who said that a man earned his luck, and his luck had been noticed, noticed enough for his application to join the Investigation Division to be processed at speed.

  When the telephone on his desk rang out Park was at the far end of the room and he charged for it. God, and he needed the break and the luck when CEDRIC had gone down on him.

  Ann . . . would he be in for supper? He didn't know . . .

  Should she cook for two? Probably best not. . . Did he know what time he would be home? Could she clear the line, he was waiting on a call.

  He pounded on over the carpet. The carpet was a disgrace, and so were the blinds that sagged unevenly across the windows, and so was the crack on the upper wall behind his desk that had been there for a year and not repaired. Without luck he was going to stay grounded.

  The telephone call, when it came, left him flattened. The Anti-Terrorist branch at Scotland Yard had the most complete records on Iranians living in London. A Chief Inspector told him that they had no record of any exile who went under the name of Charlie Persia . . . sorry not to be of help.

  The folder on his desk contained a single typed sheet which was the preliminary report from forensic. Another sheet was his own hand-written record of the interview with Leroy Winston Manvers. He was certain that his man took the name of Charlie. He thought the man was most probably an Iranian.

  He had written TANGO One on the outside of the folder.

  Tango was ID's word for a targeted suspect.

  For the moment, he was damned if he knew how he would put a face into the Tango One folder.

  * * *

  The investigator worked iate into the evening. He had no family, he had no call to go back to the cramped one-bedroomed flat that had been his home since his former life.

  Beneath his window the Tehran streets had emptied. The recruit from Manzarieh Park would be flying out in the morning, that part was simple, but the arrangement of the detail of the collections that he would make upon his arrival, and the back-up that he would receive on the ground, all of that required care. It was, of course, his intention that no "smoking pistol" would remain behind. He was working at long range, and great distances always posed problems.

  When he had finished with the matter of Jamil Shabro, traitor and collaborationist, he switched his attention to the business of the British intelligence officer, Dolphin/Matthew Furniss, in the city of Van.

  He had on his desk all the sightings marking Furniss'

  progress across Turkey, just as he had them for his journey around the Gulf. The man came like a lamb to him, to within reach.

  As the crow flies, the ebony scavenging crow, the city of Van was sixty miles from the nearest crossing point into Iranian territory.

  The watch on Furniss had been kept to a bare minimum.

  He had been shadowed from airport to hotel, from hotel to airport. Away from his hotel, in between his flights, he had been free of his tail. That was of no matter to the investigator, not at this moment.

  He worked late because, early in the morning, he would fly to Tabriz to put in place the final pieces of a mosaic of which he was proud.

  7

  "The fascinating thing about this region, Terence, is that it was never touched by the European civilizations. Here what you have are the unadulterated remnants of the Hittites and the Urartians and the Armenians."

  As far as the Station Officer from Ankara was concerned, Van was one of the most forgettable cities it had been his misfortune to visit. His eyes streamed and he had an aggravating catarrh from the street dust thrown up by the traffic. To Terence Snow, Van was quite stunningly ordinary.

  "It's all lying around here to be picked up. Get a spade, dig in the right place, and you'll find the artefacts of old Sarduri, king here in ninth century BC. Fascinating . . . "

  The Station Officer's chief preoccupation was how to attract the attention of a taxi that would stop where they stood a hundred yards down the street from the hotel where the orderly tourists waited in line, and his second anxiety was how he was going to extricate himself altogether from this cultural excursion and get back to Ankara.

  "Do you know, Terence, that within half an hour's drive of here there are cave paintings made 15,000 years ago? I cherish that sort of knowledge. I believe it gives a man a sense of his own mortality, which is absolutely healthy."

  "Yes, sir . . ."

  The morale of the Station Officer had been on the wane almost since their flight out of Ankara had been airborne.

  They had flown over the huge, bleak wilderness of the interior.

  Never mind the history, he reckoned that Van was a quarter of an hour beyond the outside rim of civilization, ancient or modern. No car at the airport, though it had been booked from Ankara. No rooms for them at the Akdamar hotel, booked and confirmed by telephone. True, he had the car now, and he had two singles in the Akdamar, but they had taken sweat and fury and the last iota of his patience. When he was back in Ankara he'd dine out on the baroque excrescence where they had laid their heads in their first night in the city.

  Warmly commended by the hall porter in the Akdamar but unlisted by any of the guide books. No hot water, no breakfast, no toilet paper . . . And these people thought they were ready to sign on for the European Economic Community.

  What really pissed him off was the certainty that his Desk Head was completely at ease in this godforsaken town.

  He was angry just being there. He was frustrated by his inability to wave down a taxi. He was careless. He was playing host to the man from London and he was not running his checks. He had not seen the man who had followed them from the hotel steps, and who now lounged against a wall behind them.

  "Have you ever bought jet here, Terence? It's really quite excellent. You can alter the stones, make a very pleasant necklac
e with the local stuff."

  The Station Officer's wife might well have thrown him out of their flat if he had come home to her with a peace offering of Van jet. He smiled. He couldn't help liking Mattie, everyone in the Service liked the man, but, Christ, you had to wonder whether he wasn't just a wee bit soft in the head.

  "No, sir, I never have."

  They had spent two days talking to refugees from Iran. The Station Officer would have had to hand it to Mattie, that the old blighter was ever so casual, ever so easy in his approaches, and he had them eating from his hand as he milked them.

  The Station Officer appreciated that the talk was for his benefit, that he was being shown what was expected of him in the future. The Desk Head had been talking about him coming up to Van or Hakkari or Dogubeyezit at least once a month henceforward, to where the refugees crossed. The Station Officer wasn't good with the refugees. Frankly, they embarrassed him. They were young, they were still in shock, they were exhausted from their hike across the mountains and from the long nights of fear from the Iranian and the Turkish military patrols. Bloody unpleasant as it was, the Station Officer would have to admit that the Turkish authorities had no choice but to police their frontier and turn back those trying to cross out of Iran. They had three quarters of a million Iranians, draft dodgers and riff-raff, settled in their country.

  They had problems of gang crime and heroin trafficking from the refugees. They had every right to turn the refugees round and send them back whence they came. Bit bloody stark though, when he thought of the young, exhausted faces he had seen these past two days . . .

  "That's our boy, Mattie."

  The taxi had swerved over to them. From afar there was a chorus of protest reaching out from in front of the hotel.

  Mattie didn't seem to hear.

  They went fast.

  The Station Officer damn near cracked his head open on the taxi's roof when they flew over the potholes. They skirted the huge inland sea of Lake Van, azure blue, with a ferry boat on it making a postcard, and they rattled north. Through Caldiran and on to the Dogubeyezit road, and the surface worse, and the driver not attempting evasive action. The Station Officer was rubbing his forehead, and saw that Mattie had his eyes closed, as if he were catnapping. He lit a cigarette.

  He thought he understood why Mattie Furniss was a Desk Head, and why he had no enemies in Century. They were on their way to meet a field agent, a man from inside, a guy who was taking one hell of a risk to travel outside, and Mattie had his eyes closed and was beginning to snore. The Station Officer reckoned that was true class. He had been fussing about a taxi, and Mattie hadn't given a damn, because he would have believed that a field agent who had crossed out of Iran wasn't going to be going home when his contact was a quarter of an hour late. He was being given a lesson in how to soak up the punishment of getting to the sharp end and meeting up with agents whose necks were on the line. Sit back and let it happen, and don't bother if you start to snore, well done, Mattie . . . He checked behind. No tail. Should have done it earlier, should have checked when he was still hot from not being able to find a taxi. He could see a long way back down the road, and the road was clear. After two days with his Desk Head he could have drafted a tourist pamphlet on Van's history. He knew that Xenophon had led his Ten Thousand in battle at Van, that Alexander had been there, and Pompey, and the Mongols of Tamerlane; that Van had not come into the Ottoman empire until Sultan Selim the Grim had done the necessary butchering in AD 1514. He wondered if, in 25

  years' time, he would be able to sleep in the back of a taxi on the way to brief a field agent, and seem as antediluvian to a young Station Officer.

  When Mattie started awake, and looked around him and had his bearings, and had apologised with a shrug as if it were rude to sleep, then the Station Officer invented an important meeting in Ankara the next day and asked whether it would be alright for him to catch the morning flight. No problem.

  He hadn't the spunk to tell Mattie outright that it was his wife's birthday, and that they were throwing a thrash for her at his flat.

  They stopped the taxi at the front of the coffee shop. There was a repair yard at the back, and a shed of rusted corrugated iron. The yard was a cemetery for disabled vehicles, some cannibalised, all defunct. The Station Officer saw the lorry with Iranian registration plates.

  It was a good place for a meeting. Any long-distance Iranian driver might have cause to stop at the yard.

  He thought the agent must be an old friend of Mattie's.

  The Station Officer stood back and watched the beaming welocome of the man who pumped Mattie's hand, and then held his arm. The Station Officer had joined the Service straight from Cambridge, he was well thought of and young for the Ankara post, but by now he thought that he knew nothing . . . He saw a field man take hold of a Desk Head's arm and cling to it as if Mattie's arm were a talisman of safety.

  He saw the controlled affection in the way Mattie tapped with the palm of his hand at the knuckle of his agent, the close gesture of warmth. He could not have told his wife, but the Station Officer fancied that if he ever faced a crisis of his own, then he could be certain of Mattie Furniss' support. He had no agents of his own behind lines, he was an analyst. He had men in place, inherited of course, in the Ministry of the Interior and the Army and the Jandarma and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but that was in Ankara, not behind the lines and in Iran. Mattie had his arm around the agent's shoulder and he was walking him round the lorry, out of sight from the road, and from the mechanics who laboured in the shed with their oxyacetylene cutters . . . He knew nothing . . . He would not have known of the perpetual, grey fog fear that blanketed a field agent, and he would not have known of the kind strength that was given the field agent by his controller.

  He was not included. He was left for an hour to kick his heels.

  He was sitting on an old upturned oil drum when Mattie came back to him.

  "Did you get all you wanted, sir?"

  "Stiffened his backbone, told him what we need. Usual carrot and stick job . . . Your meeting in Ankara tomorrow, won't go on too long I hope."

  "Shouldn't think so, sir."

  "Don't want it to interfere with your party."

  Mattie was walking away, and the Station Officer had seen the dry vestige of the smile.

  The bus churned through the miles as the road climbed towards Zanjan. Through the dusted window Charlie could see the small oases, surrounded by poplar trees, and the mud brick villages on either side of the route. It had been night when he had travelled from Tabriz to Tehran, but high sunshine now and he could see into the spreading distance.

  There was no heat haze, the altitude of the road was too great for mists. He was looking south of the road, he wanted to see the ruins that when he was still a child Mr Furniss had first told him about. The Mausoleum of Sultan Oljaitu-Khocabandeh in the sprawl of ruins near Soltanieh. Charlie, eight years old, and meeting the friend of his father at their villa. Mr Furniss always had good stories to tell the boy. The Mausoleum of Sultan Oljaitu-Khocabandeh had stayed in Charlie's mind.

  A man, a Sultan of the Mongols, had died 550 years before, and he had sought immortality, and his resting place was a monument that reached 170 feet above the ground.

  That was the ultimate folly. There would be no photographs of Charlie Eshraq ever raised on a wall. None of his sayings ever daubed on high banners. When he died . . . whenever . . . Charlie wanted a grave like his father's. A corner of a cemetery with a number scratched into the wet cement slab, and weeds at the edge. He thought that made him his own man.

  When they passed it, the Mausoleum was clear from the windows of the coach, and Charlie wiped hard at the window although most of the dirt was on the outside of the tinted glass. He saw the great octagon shape of the building and the cupola dome. He saw the goats grazing at its base.

  The sight of the Mausoleum was only of a few seconds. No other passenger on the bus bothered to look at it. He thought that he hated men w
ho built mausoleums to their memory, and who had their photographs overlooking public squares, and who demanded that their sayings be scrawled on banners.

  The hate was active in his heart, but did not show on his face.

  He appeared relaxed, dozing. He was leaning on his rucksack on the seat next to him. He had no fear that the rucksack of a pasdar would be searched at a road block. He had the correct papers. The Guards would be friendly to a pasdar returning to Tabriz, they would not search him.

  He hated the men who built mausoleums, and despised them.

  He remembered what Mr Furniss had said to him, when he was eight years old.

  "A man who is afraid of death, dear boy, does not have the courage to live."

  In the car taking him from the airport to the Guards Corps headquarters in Tabriz, the investigator listened to the radio.

  The pasdaran operating from speedboats had rocketed a Singa-pore flagged tanker en route to Kuwait, and crippled it. Many soldiers had been martyred after the Iraqi enemy had once again dropped mustard gas on their trenches, and of course there had been no condemnation from the United Nations Security Council that was in the pocket of the Great Satan.

  Spies, belonging to the Zionist regime of Baghdad, had been arrested in Tehran. Mojahedin-eKhalq counter-revolutionaries had been captured at the western borders carrying 250 kilos of explosive. The Islamic Revolution Committees' Guards had carried out exercises in Zahedan and displayed their ever-increasing readiness to destroy outlaws and smugglers.

  A bomb had exploded in Tehran's Safariyeh Bazaar, no casualties reported. A grenade and machine-gun attack on the Guards Corps Headquarters in Resselat Square in Tehran had been repulsed. The Speaker of the Majlis had spoken at a military meeting of the success of the Republic's home-produced ground-to-air missile in bringing down an enemy MIG-25 over Esfahan. Thirteen foreign cargo ships inspected at sea, and allowed to continue . . .