HOME RUN

by Gerald Seymour

  There was no tension in his driving. He was controlled, at ease. It had not crossed his mind that he could be busted at Heathrow. He was Charles Eshraq, Stateless Person, but he would not be stateless for long . . . Charlie Eshraq had taken out two Guards with a handgun. He had blown away the executioner of Tabriz. He was the friend of Mr Matthew Furniss. He was going home with just two more items of business to deal with. And then . . . then he would be Charles Eshraq, Iranian citizen. Probably no longer the friend of Mr Furniss, certainly no longer the very close friend of the Misses Furniss. He thought of La'ayya and he patted the rucksack and made a wild calculation of what in perfumes and soap seven kilos of first grade heroin would buy. After the small matter of the armour-piercing missiles, of course. He was on the King's Road. He looked up into the mirror as he changed through his gears, as his foot eased on the brake. There was a Maestro behind him.

  If he was quick with a shower, he would be in time to get to the pub before closing. Charlie Eshraq would get a great welcome before "last orders". He would tell some good stories about dumb tourists losing passports or knickers in the Turkish resorts, and he'd get a good laugh and a good welcome.

  He parked.

  He didn't look at the car on the other side of the road. He didn't see the couple clinching. He didn't hear Amanda, codename Token and the only woman of April's team, bitching that codename Corinthian, who this year had failed to complete the eighth mile of the London Marathon, could keep his bloody hand out from under her blouse. And he didn't hear Token issue a violent warning when Corinthian whispered that it was just play acting in a good cause.

  Charlie humped his rucksack up the stairs to his flat. He threw, street value, more than a million pounds sterling of heroin down on to the floor.

  He went to the window and looked out on to the street below. A girl got out of a car opposite, slammed the door furiously and then got into the back seat. Charlie smiled to himself. He thought that La'ayya would have liked the King's Road, and he didn't suppose she'd ever see it.

  He ran his shower.

  Mattie was trussed tight.

  He had lost the feeling below the ankles, and the pain was cutting at his wrists.

  He was very alert now. Old training was surfacing, things that he had been taught ten years before, and twenty years.

  For Christ's sake, he had even lectured on it, back at the Fort at Portsmouth. He had been a student more than once on the Escape and Evasion courses, and he had been the instructor.

  He knew it all. He was lying on the hard and hurting steel ribbing floor of the pick-up. His captors had put a gag of thick leather in his mouth and lashed the thongs at the ends of the gag behind his neck.

  The training had told him that the optimum escape moment was at the very moment of capture. That's what he had told his students. Right, he had been looking for the optimum moment, been looking at it from the start, right into the barrel of an automatic pistol. The optimum moment was also the time of the maximum danger - that, also, he had told his students. The time of the lift was the time that the hit squad were most highly stressed, most irrational. He had looked up the barrel of the automatic pistol and been kicked in the head.

  His ear had bled, was now congealed. He rationalised that his bleeding ear would have been shot off, with half his head, if he had struggled at the roadside. He was an old man, and there were four of them and none of them looked half his age.

  Two of them were in the back section with him, and both now wore cotton hoods with eye slits, and both kept handguns trained on him, and neither had spoken.

  He was aware that, at first, the truck had travelled several miles, and that then the engine had been stopped for what might have been three hours. He knew that when they had stopped they had been in a garage or a farm shed because he had heard the doors being shut, and he had heard the echo as the engine was cut, and later restarted, which told him that the vehicle was in a confined space. He lay alone. The pain had come and gone and reached point after point that he thought would be unendurable. He weighed pain against anxiety. He worked to restore the circulation in his hands and feet, told himself over and over that another opportunity to escape would present itself.

  The truck doors opened, his bonds were examined by torchlight, and then the outer doors were opened and the truck headed off again, a long drive, over those awful bloody roads. It was part of his training to remember everything possible about his journey after capture, basic stuff that. Easy enough in the New Forest, or the back terrace streets of Portsmouth, damn sight harder after the shock of capture, after being kicked in the head, and when there were two handguns a couple of feet from his ear. A weekly game of squash did not leave a 52-year-old in ideal shape for kidnapping, but he understood that they had driven a good distance.

  He had been aware first that the pace of the truck had slowed, and he could hear other vehicle engines around him.

  He heard voices, Turkish spoken, and then the truck was accelerating. He thought they were back on a decent road surface. The truck lurched to a stop, Mattie slid forward and into the bulkhead and scraped his scalp.

  He heard the driver shout, "Asalaam Aleikum."

  He heard a voice outside, "Aleikum Asalaam."

  The truck gathered speed. The words were revolving in his mind.

  "Peace be on you."

  "On you be peace."

  Mattie had lived in Iran as a military liaison officer, and he had lived there as the Station Officer. Second nature to Mattie to recognise the greeting and the response.

  He was sagged on the floor of the truck. He was inside Iran, beyond the reach of help.

  From the Customs post a telephone call was routed through the office that had been made available in Tabriz to the investigator. The message was terse. The investigator was told that a Dodge pick-up had just passed through the frontier and had begun the 150-mile journey to Tabriz.

  In his former life, the news would have been cause enough to break out a bottle of French champagne . . . much that was missed from the former life. The investigator instead, in his turn, made a telephone call, to the Tehran office of the Mullah who was his protector, to the man who had authorised the kidnapping. Unable to celebrate with champagne, the investigator curled up on his camp bed, tried to catch a few hours of sleep.

  No, Dr Owens had not checked out, and that was an embarrassment to reception because they had been promised he was going and they had a client for the room, and it was still occupied with Dr Owens' possessions.

  No, Dr Owens had not brought back his car, and the hall porter had twice been phoned by the rental company.

  From the airport, after the Van flight arrived without Mr Furniss, it had taken the Station Officer a full hour to get through on a payphone from Ankara to Van. It took him another hour to reach the Embassy's Air Attache.

  No, of course he had confirmed there were no flights to Van that night.

  No, for crying out loud, this was not a trivial matter. He wanted a light aircraft, and he wanted the Air Attache to pilot it, soon as possible, like an hour ago.

  "I was half into bed, Terence. This is on the level?"

  "Sadly, yes . . . right on the level."

  It had been a ghastly flight in a light Cessna across a great expanse of raw countryside, buffeted by gale force winds. The Station Officer was a poor air traveller at the best of times, but now he noticed not at all the yawing progress of the aircraft. The Air Attache didn't speak to him, had his hands full. He took his cue from the furrowed anxiety of the young man strapped in beside him.

  When they'd landed, the Station Officer asked the Air Attache to go directly to the Akdamar, to make sure that the room in the name of Dr Owens stayed sealed.

  He went to the local offices of the jandarma. He said that he was from the British Embassy. He knew the registration number of the hired Fiat. It was close to dawn when the report came in, car discovered abandoned, indications of an accident.

  He was taken to the scene. He said
that Dr Owens, the driver of the damaged car, was a distinguished archaeologist and the guest of the Ambassador. He tried to minimize the concern that had brought him at night across the country, and a poor job he made of it. The headlights of the jeep had picked out the Fiat's rear reflectors. It was on the verge, off balance, it seemed, both right hand wheels sunk into the soft mud. They gave him a flashlight and let him make his own examination.

  To them it was a small matter. No big deal, death on the roads, not in eastern Turkey, and this wasn't death, this was just a missing person. True, there was nothing inside the car to suggest that Mr Furniss was hurt, no blood stain that he could see, no broken glass. But outside he saw the Fiat's skid tracks on the tarmacadam and he saw the dirt trail across what would have been the path of the Fiat. He saw the broken shields of the brake lights and the indicators and the stoved-in bumper. Pretty straightforward . . . A vehicle coming off the open fields in front - wide tracks, probably a tractor or farm lorry - a vehicle ramming from behind . . . and the unaccompanied Desk Head in between.

  The jandarma officer said, "It is possible that he has been concussed, that he has wandered off the road . . . "

  No chance.

  " . . . There is no other explanation."

  The officer drove him to the Akdamar.

  He gutted the room. Clothes everywhere, books and papers too, and many pages of scribbled notes, not in English certainly, must be some sort of code. He looked carefully at the disorder and decided that it was as Mr Furniss had left it, that it had not been searched. He packed everything into Mr Furniss' suitcase.

  The Station Officer paid Dr Owens' bill. He woke the Air Attache from a deep sleep in an unlit corner of the lobby.

  "Sorted out your little problem, Terence? Knickers all untwisted, eh?"

  "No, I am afraid the news is all bad."

  "Anything I can do?"

  "Just fly us home. No jokes. No japes. No funny faces.

  Just don't say anything at all. Please."

  Standing on the hotel steps, waiting once more for a taxi, the Station Officer felt an aching anxiety. Whatever else, Mattie Furniss was not gone walkabout in eastern Turkey nursing a concussion. He had been thinking, how would it have been if he had been there too? Would he be alive now?

  Where would he be? Come what may, he'd be crucified, he knew that, for leaving a Desk Head alone. Probably finished altogether.

  They took off, with the dawn rising behind them.

  A blustering wet early summer morning in London. The traffic clogged the Thames bridges. The commuters below the high windows of Century House swarmed in ant columns along the pavements.

  The first report from the Ankara Station Officer was deciphered then passed, marked URGENT, to the desk of the Night Duty Officer. The Night Duty Officer was ready to clock off, and he was enjoying his last cup of coffee when the message reached him. He signed for it, he read it, and he spluttered coffee over the morning newspapers. There was a procedure for catastrophe. Telephone the Director General's PA. The PA would alert the Director General wherever he was. The Night Duty Officer would then ring the Director General on a scrambled line.

  The Night Duty Officer read over the message in a clear and firm voice. That was a sham. His throat had dried, his fingers drummed on his desk. He knew Mattie, everyone at Century knew Mattie Furniss. He listened to the silence at the other end of the distorted connection.

  "Did you get that, sir?"

  A clipped voice. "Yes, I did."

  "What can I do, sir?"

  A longer silence. What could anyone do? And what the hell was old Mattie, a Desk Head, doing in Turkey? Last he'd heard of him he was in Bahrain and God knows what he was doing there. Not the Night Duty Officer's place to question

  . . . The Night Duty Officer had cause to think well of Mattie Furniss. His son had had pretty serious problems with his teeth, came up one day at lunch in the canteen, and Mattie had taken a note, and a week later he had the name of a specialist in Wimpole Street, and the specialist had sorted out the problem over the following nine months, and the bills hadn't been bad. The Night Duty Officer's wife always spoke well of Mr Furniss, and when the Night Duty Officer went home that morning he would not be able to tell her that Mattie Furniss was posted missing, and in a country he'd no business being in.

  The voice jolted him.

  "All the West Asia Desk Heads, and the DDG, in my office at nine - inform Downing Street that I'll be there in half an hour. I shall require to see the P M . "

  The telephone clicked, went dead.

  The truck had slowed, and there were the sounds of a city's traffic flow around him. He thought that they were close to a commercial area. He could hear the hawkers' shouts, and whenever the truck stopped he could smell the pavement food stalls. They had come down a fast road for two or more hours, that could only be the Tehran road from the border. If they were now in a city then they had reached Tabriz. A lifetime ago since he had been in Tabriz. That was wrong . . . A lifetime ago was being trapped and kidnapped on the road from Toprakkale. That was more than a lifetime ago.

  In the hours that he had lain in the truck no word had been spoken to him. His head, where he had been kicked, was not hurting any longer. His gag was constantly painful. His mouth was parched. His feet were dead, below the binding.

  The truck stopped, lurched forward and then swung to the right, revving in low gears, stopped again. The engine was cut. He heard everything. The click of the door, the squeaking of the driver's seat as the driver left it, and then it slammed shut. The same at the passenger side. He heard a low conversation beside the driver's cab, but too quiet for him to understand what was said. He saw his captors in the back of the truck move towards him. He didn't flinch. He was not afraid, not yet. Their hands came at his face. He could smell their breath through the masks they wore. He did not try to wriggle away from them, because he thought that would have invited a beating. They fastened a strip of cloth around his eyes.

  Mattie was lifted down from the truck. He felt a warm wind on his cheeks. The binding on his ankles was freed. The blood was pounding at the base of his shins, and squeezing down again into his feet. Hands held him upright. He could not have walked by himself, and he was half carried, half dragged up some steps and then manoeuvred into a doorway. They went up a full flight of stairs, and they crossed a small landing, and a door was opened. The strip of cloth was removed from his eyes.

  He stood in the centre of the room

  The gag was taken from his mouth. The strap was released from his wrists.

  The door closed behind him. He heard a key turn.

  He stared around him.

  The window was barred on the inside, had no glass, and beyond the bars the space had been boarded up with plywood.

  There was an iron bed frame, like the ones used by the junior boys in the dormitories of his old school. There was a flush lavatory in one corner and beside it a table on which was a plain ceramic water pitcher and a steel bowl. There was no other furniture in the room. He turned. The door was heavy wood, there was a spy hole at eye level. The walls were freshly whitewashed over plaster. The floor was tiled.

  If he had been planning a custody cell for a prisoner such as himself he would have created a very similar room. The kidnapping, the lack of any form of communication, the cell, they were all much as he would have planned them himself.

  Mattie Furniss, Desk Head at Century, long time officer of the Service, was a professional, and he could recognise the professionalism of his captors.

  He sat on the bed. He massaged his ankles and his wrists.

  He forced his mind to work at the detail of his cover. His cover was his only protection.

  The Prime Minister sat rigid at the edge of the sitting room chair. The coffee was untouched, the toast had cooled.

  "And he's just disappeared off the face of the earth?"

  "Not disappeared, Prime Minister. The signs all point to his having been kidnapped."

  "But to
have been there at all, that tells me he's not very important . . . "

  "In that theatre of operations, Furniss is of the utmost importance."

  "Then you had better tell me what he was doing all by himself - I suppose he was all by himself? You haven't lost a whole department, have you? - in such an obviously risky enterprise?"

  "In my opinion, Prime Minister, the performance of the Service on Iran had been second rate. Upon taking up my position at Century I determined to get that Desk back on course. I told Mattie Furniss, who is incidentally a quite outstanding servant of his country, what I wanted. Obviously affairs inside Iran are at a crucial point. We need to know, very precisely, who is going to come out as top dog in the new Iran. We are talking about a sophisticated and very capable regional super-power, one that controls huge resources of oil inside its own borders and one which has the capacity to destabilize every smaller state on its frontiers, possibly excepting Iraq. We earn very considerable sums of monies from the Gulf states, from the Kuwaitis, from the Saudis. All of those earnings are potentially at risk in the barely disguised warfare between moderate and radical factions for ultimate power in Tehran. The American government has wished to put its markers down in that battle, we more prudently want only to have a better perspective on the end result. For the time being at any rate. Obviously if the radical faction wins out we may have to kiss goodbye to billions invested in that region, billions of future sales. We are talking about the possible perversion of one of the great economic markets currently open to us, along with the loss of great numbers of jobs, if the radicals win and continue to export revolution and Islamic fundamentalism."

  "I don't need a Foreign Office tract, Director General. I just want to know what the devil this obviously senior man is doing all by himself in a very dangerous part of the world."