HOME RUN

by Gerald Seymour

  "It was I who made the decision that Furniss should travel to the Gulf and Turkey . . . "

  " You made that decision?"

  ". . . to the Gulf and Turkey to visit our watchers and also to hold meetings with some of our principal operatives inside Iran."

  "I suppose this decision flies in the face of long established practice at Century. This is symptomatic of your new broom, is it, Director General?"

  ". . .in order that those with day-to-day responsibility for Iranian intelligence should know more fully what was required of them."

  "Day-to-day Iranian intelligence. Yes, well, you haven't said so in so many words but I take it we may assume that Iranian intelligence will be exactly what Mr Furniss will be dealing with, even now."

  "It hardly bears thinking about, Prime Minister."

  "You sent him, you'd better think about it. You're running a tight ship, Director General. Do all your people go overseas with a Union Jack sewn on the breast pocket? Does his passport say 'Iran Desk, Century'?"

  The Director General said, and his eyes gazed back into the Prime Minister's sarcasm, "Naturally he is travelling under a well-established alias. He is an archaeologist, rather a distinguished one, I gather. A specialist on an early Turkish civilization, I believe."

  "I dare say he is, but archaeologists do not ordinarily disappear an hour's driving time from the Iranian border. Or do they, Director General? I have very little information on archaeologists. It sounds to me as though Furniss' cover was blown, as I think you put it, long before he got anywhere near Turkey. You wouldn't have to be terribly bright to wonder what a specialist in an early Turkish civilization was doing hopping round the Gulf in his Olympic blazer. And if he is inside Iran, if he is identified, then he is going to have a difficult time?"

  "Yes, Prime Minister."

  "Well, thank you, Director General. I think that's enough excitement for this morning. Keep me posted, please, and kindly resist the temptation to send in a team of Israeli snipers to se

  o e if they can find him. I think you have enough of a mess on your hands as it is."

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  The car drove away down the lane. Harriet Furniss watched The car drove away down the lane. Harriet Furniss watched it go. The wind was up, and a gale was forecast, and she thought that the blossom would not be much longer on the trees. He had been very nice to her, the young man, and he had emphasized at least three times that it was the Director General who had personally sent him. Not that it mattered, whether the young man was pleasant or unpleasant, the message would have been the same.

  Mattie was missing. It was believed that Mattie had been kidnapped. Mattie was an archaeologist . . . so pathetic. A woman could have run Century better, and still had time for the housework. She was very deliberate in her movements, she bent down to her garden kneeler and went on with the weeding of the border that she had been at when the young man had arrived. There was a surprising amount of groundsel in the border this year . . . She was numbed. Cleaning the groundsel out of the bed was her safety . . . She was crying softly. She loved that man. She loved the calmness and the kindness and the patience of Mattie, and she loved his gentleness. No, he was not as clever as she was. No, he could not paint as she could. He did not enjoy the theatre or music as she and the girls did, but she loved that massive and reassuring strength. He was the man she had depended on throughout her adult life. She could not remember the last time that he had raised his voice to her . . . Those fools in London, fools for what they had done to her Mattie.

  She spent the whole morning on the border. She filled a wheelbarrow with weeds. She cried her heart out for the whole morning.

  Khalil Araqi walked 200 yards from the hotel's rank, flagged down a taxi and asked for the McDonalds in the Strand. He then walked back up the Hay market, and all along the length of Regent Street, and to any casual observer he would have been seen to spend a long time looking in shop windows. The stops in the windows and doorways of the stores enabled him to check frequently that he was not tailed. He followed exactly the instructions that he had been given in Tehran. He did not expect to be followed, and he could detect no one following him. On the corner of Brook Street and Bond Street, after he had waited at the kerb side for three, four, minutes he was picked up by car. He was taken by the student of the English language south and west across the city. Araqi had been to London before, but that was many years earlier. He gazed around him. He was at ease. His confidence in the planning behind his mission was complete.

  They parked 500 yards beyond the mews.

  The student followed Araqi back up the road, well behind him. There was a narrow entrance to the mews cul-de-sac, and Araqi's eyes roved to find the lighting above so that he could estimate the fall of shadows at night inside the cobbled entry. Briskly, Araqi walked the length of the cul-de-sac, keeping to the right hand side, keeping away from the 5 series BMW. There were cars parked outside each of the brightly painted front doors.

  He was satisfied.

  When he had driven back to within ten minutes' walk of the hotel, the student gave Araqi a brown paper package. The student did not know what was in the package, nor that it had been brought by a courier from West Germany, passing the previous evening through the port of Felixstowe.

  The student was told at what time, outside the garage on Park Lane, he should collect Araqi that night. For the rest of the day, Araqi worked on the assembly of an explosive device by which a mercury tilt system would detonate one kilo weight of military explosive.

  The PA stood in front of the desk.

  "You won't shoot the messenger, sir?"

  The Director General winced, his head dropped.

  "Tell me."

  "We've got Mr Furniss' bag back from Turkey. All his kit that the Station Officer, Ankara, collected from his hotel.

  There's a report which I couldn't make head or tail of but which Miss Duggan has typed up for you. You'd better read it . . . sadly, it gets worse. Mr Furniss' passport was with his things. That's the passport in his wife's maiden name. What it would appear is that Mr Furniss does not have supporting documentation of his cover."

  "That just about caps it."

  The Director General had served half a lifetime in the Foreign and Commonwealth with Benjamin Houghton's father. He and Houghton's father were golfing partners of old and they had once courted the same girl, she'd turned them both down. He had made certain when he came to Century that young Benjamin would be his Personal Assistant. The boy was cheeky and casual and very good. He would go a long way, if he cared to stay the course.

  "Just thought you should know, sir."

  And Houghton was gone, almost indecent haste. Just the same at the meeting with the Deputy Director General and the Desk Heads. They'd all been exasperatingly aloof, distinctly themselves. Bastards.

  The Director General began to read Furniss' report, apparently based on the observations of an agent travelling quite widely inside Iran. Very recently, too. Not world shaking, but
good, incisive stuff. His PA came through on the internal phone. A meeting with the Permanent Under Secretary, Foreign and Commonwealth, at two. A meeting with the Joint Intelligence Committee at three. A meeting of the Service's Crisis Management Committee at four, with the possibility of a teleprinter link to Ankara. The Prime Minister at six.

  "Would you like me to raffle the ballet tickets, sir?"

  "No, dammit. Call Angela and ask her to take one of the children. And you can, too, cancel anything you had planned for this evening."

  He didn't notice the builders' van parked opposite the block of flats, across the playground from the concrete entrance way. He stared up at the side windows of the flat. There were no lights on, and it was a damp clouded morning. There should have been lights on in the flat. He knew the children did not go to a pre-school, and he knew that the flat should have been occupied at that time in the morning.

  He did not hear the click of the camera shutter, and he did not hear the suppressed whisper of Harlech as he reported Tango One's arrival into a lip microphone. To have heard the camera noise and the voice whisper Charlie would have to have been hard up against the grubby side of the builders'

  van. Charlie stood in the centre of the playground. Kids played on the swings and larked in the sand pit, their mothers sitting and nudging their pushchairs and pulling on their cigarettes, huddled in conversation. There was a Corporation cleaner out with a broom and a bin on wheels rounding up the swirl of crisp packets and fag wrappers and coke tins.

  There was a soccer kick-about and the goal posts were snapped off young trees.

  He climbed three flights of concrete stairs. Charlie saw the plywood hammered across the door of the flat. He ran down the stairs, fighting a fierce anxiety. All around him was the normality of the estate. The young mothers heaving their lung smoke into their kiddies' faces, the cleaner whose work would never be completed, the kids who played their eternal soccer.

  The flat of Leroy Winston Manvers seemed to Charlie as dead as the broken goal post trees. He was irresolute. Inside Iran, inside his own country, closing with the silenced pistol on two Guards, riding behind the executioner of Tabriz, he would not have known the feeling of sudden apprehension. That was his own ground, the estate in Notting Hill in West London was a foreign country to him.

  He looked around him. There were the parked cars, and the builders' van, and the people . . . there was a stunning ordinariness about the estate on a grey morning.

  He snapped his back straight. He walked forward. He went to a group of young mothers. He pointed up to the flat with no lights.

  A snort of rich laughter. They were the women who would have been at the front for a public hanging in Tabriz, they would have thought that a good show. Bright laughter, enough to make them choke on their fags. A cigarette was thrown down, not stamped out.

  "Got busted, didn't he. Old Bill took away plenty. He won't be back."

  Charlie felt winded, the control ripped from him. He took off, and he had the hoots of their mirth behind him.

  Half an hour later, when the mothers had retrieved their young and scattered, the builders' van pulled lethargically away from the estate.

  "What he is not going to do is dig a hole in the ground and bury his stuff. He is going to find another dealer. He's sitting on a pile. He's got to find somewhere else to drop it."

  Parrish thought he agreed. He thought Keeper had taken a good attitude.

  "Where is he now?" he asked quietly.

  "Top end of Kensington High Street, his motor's on double yellows. Harlech says he's looking pretty pissed off. The sign on the door where he's gone says it's an Import-Export company. Haven't any more yet."

  "Tally ho, Keeper."

  Park grinned. "For the moment it's fine, but it's just a beginning."

  "Home Office files, a stateless person has to have a guarantor."

  "Nice one, Bill."

  "What would not be nice would be for you to lose track of a load of stuff. Got me? That would not be nice."

  The load of stuff was still in the flat in Beaufort Street, Park would have sworn to that. The Suzuki had the canvas back off, and the stuff wasn't in the cab. There was a watch on the front and back of the flat, 24 hours, and the tail was solid on the jeep when it went out, just as it had been solid when Tango One had come out earlier in the morning and gone down to the delicatessen for a pastry and a coffee.

  Park would be going down to the Home Office. Parrish would be linking the radios. That was the way Parrish liked it best, left in the Lane with just the typists and clerical assistants to spoil him and share their lunches with him, and keep him fuelled up with coffee. The youngsters all out, raring to go and gone. It took a fair amount to wind up old Parrish, it took the whole of his team out and hunting to wind him right up.

  He was in one hell of a great mood that morning, and thumping out on two fingers his progress report for the ACIO.

  Of course he was excited, of course it had been one hell of a risk to let Eshraq and the stuff loose.

  "You're very kind. I thank you."

  "For nothing."

  Mahmood Shabro walked through the outer office with Charlie. He was no fool, he saw the way his new secretary glanced up from her desk at the boy. He saw the trace of the smile at Charlie's lips. He took Charlie to the outer door.

  "You pass to Jamil my best wishes."

  "I will, Mr Shabro. I will see him tomorrow, if he can manage that."

  He had not asked why Charlie should wish an introduction to his brother, the renegade and the fly one from whom he kept a secure distance.

  "Look after yourself, my boy."

  The outer door closed on Charlie's back. He stood in the centre of the outer office for a moment.

  "I think Charlie has disappointed you, my dear."

  She shrugged. "He might have rung."

  "He should have rung."

  "I mean . . . I don't just go, go out, with anyone. I'm not that type . . . "

  She was efficient, she had his outer office organised, she was starting to learn the detail of his work. He wanted to keep Polly Venables. It was a peculiar request that Charlie had made to him that morning for an introduction to his brother.

  His brother was involved in politics, and his brother had no visible means of financial support. Nevertheless, he had arranged the meeting.

  "It would not be wise for you, Polly, to concern yourself too greatly with Charlie."

  Park strode out of the Home Office building.

  It had taken only an hour. He had in his briefcase a photocopy of the paperwork completed at the time of issue of a stateless person's travel document to Charles Eshraq, refugee from Iran.

  The name of the guarantor was Matthew Furniss, Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

  9

  "Good morning, Mr Furniss." The voice was a wind whisper in trees.

  Mattie started up from the tiled floor. He had been doing his press-ups.

  "It is excellent to stay in good health, Mr Furniss."

  His jacket and his shirt were on the bed, his shoes were placed neatly under the bed. He was sweating under his vest and his hair was dishevelled. Of course they had watched him through the spyhole in the door. They would have waited until he was stripped down for his exercises before making the entry. The fitting of the plywood screen on the window had tiny gaps in it, and he had known hours before that it was daylight. He did not know how many hours because his watch had been taken from his wrist when he was still semi-concussed in the truck. He had sat for what he reckoned had been hours on his bed, sometimes he lay and tried to sleep, waiting for them to come, and when the hours had drifted away he had decided to do his exercises. Of course they had watched him.

  "It is my great pleasure to meet you, Mr Furniss."

  Mattie spoke fluent Farsi, but the man spoke almost unaccented English. It was another tiny shaft into the shell of his spirit.

  He was stumbling to his feet, and breathing hard. He would have liked to have
stood his ground in the centre of the room, but his muscles were blood alive and his lungs heaved. He sat down heavily on the bed, and he started to pull his shirt over his shoulders.

  "You are . . . ?"

  "I am the investigator in your case, Mr Furniss."

  "Do you have a name? A name would be a small courtesy.

  And let me tell you my name. I am not your Mr Furniss. I don't need an investigator, thank you. I am Dr Owens, University of London, and I insist on being released immediately and on transport, at once, to my hotel. This has gone on long enough."

  "Excuse me."

  The man glided across the room and bent down close to Mattie and with sure movements he threaded the laces from Mattie's shoes and pocketed them, and then his hands came to Mattie's waist and he unbuckled the belt from the trousers and pulled it clear. There was a small expression of regret in the hazel eyes. Mattie read him. Not regret that he had to take away his prisoner's laces and belt, but irritation that it had not already been done.

  It was the first time that he had been spoken to since his capture. The tray on which food had been brought to his room was on the floor beside his shoes. Neither of the men had spoken when the food was brought. The door unlocked, the tray put down just inside the door, a second man standing behind the one who had carried the tray.

  It was as Mattie would have done it himself.

  He had his shirt buttoned. He had his shoes loose over his socks. He smoothed down his hair.

  He supposed that he was surprised that the investigator was not wearing a suit and tie. He noted the American jeans, faded, and the long tailed shirt, out of the trouser waist, and the sandals, no socks. He saw the harsh, short cut of the man's hair. He thought the man was a little younger than himself, he had spotted the grey pepper pot flecks over the temples of his head, and care lines below his eyes. Pretty horrible eyes.

  Eyes without life.

  "I should explain. You are in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mr Furniss. You are of interest to the struggling masses of our people in their fight to rid themselves of American and Zionist and British domination. That is why you are here."