HOME RUN

by Gerald Seymour

  "I hold him responsible."

  "Tell the Director General that, Miss Duggan, and he might just chuck you down the lift shaft." He held the door open for her.

  She gripped the hand rail in the lift.

  He led her down the corridor, and made way for her so that she could go first into the outer office. He knocked.

  "Miss Duggan, sir."

  She walked in. She hesitated. She heard the door shut behind her.

  She hated the tall and thin-boned man who rose from his chair, a leather backed chair, and beamed at her, and waved her to a sofa. He was certainly responsible.

  "Good of you to call by, Miss Duggan . . . distressing times for all of us. Would you like sherry?"

  She shook her head.

  "I am sure that even with Mr Furniss away you are extremely busy, Miss Duggan. I'll come straight to the point."

  The Director General had come in front of his desk and he perched himself on the edge of it.

  "Presumably, Miss Duggan, you are pretty well up in Mr Furniss' activities for the Service?"

  She nodded her head emphatically. That was one of Mr Furniss' little jokes. The worst time of the year was when she took her holiday at Weston-super-Mare, just one week, and she wasn't there to run his office.

  "First of all, Miss Duggan, we are all, every one of us, doing our best to get Mr Furniss back, that goes without saying . . . "

  She glowered at him. He should never have been sent. Desk Heads were never sent abroad.

  " . . . All of the very considerable resources of the Service are engaged in that. Now . . . "

  She blurted, "It was a folly sending him in the first place."

  "This is not a kindergarten, Miss Duggan. The Service is an active arm in the defence of this country. If the risks are too great for individuals then they are at all times entitled to transfer wherever they wish."

  She might have slapped his face. There was a haggardness at his eyes. There was a thinness at his lips.

  "We have been through the discs from Mr Furniss' personal computer, and we can find no record of an individual with whom we believe Mr Furniss to be associated. To maintain private files is in breach of all standing instructions. It is a sufficient misdemeanour to have you summarily dismissed.

  Do you hear me, Miss Duggan?"

  She nodded.

  "Miss Duggan, who is Charlie Eshraq?"

  She told him.

  It is the age of light speed communications, but the tit pushers and the button thumpers still rule.

  The information was first gathered by the Anti-Terrorist squad. They in their turn fed the information into the central computer of Criminal Records. A lead from Criminal Records, and that same information was passed to the National Drugs Intelligence Unit. For further detail the National Drugs Intelligence Unit punched into the jointly operated CEDRIC computer.

  What followed started the sprint down the corridors, the raw excitement.

  She was jolted out of her sleep by the ringing of the telephone.

  He wasn't going to wake. An earthquake wouldn't have moved him. The curtains were still open, but the darkness had come down outside, and she could see the rain pelting the window panes. The telephone was on his side, but he wasn't going to pick it up. Ann leaned across him. Her breast, out of her slip, was crushed into his face, and he didn't stir. She wriggled, she kissed her man. He looked ten years younger, at peace. She reached for the telephone.

  Softly, "Yes?"

  "David?"

  "This is Ann Park."

  "Bill Parrish - could I speak to him?"

  She looked down. She saw the calm in his sleep, and she saw the livid bruise on his forehead.

  "He came home injured. . . . Why wasn't I told?"

  "Because I'm not a nanny, Mrs Park. Please get him to the phone."

  "Damn you, he's asleep."

  "Tickle his toes, whatever you do. Wake him up."

  "Mr Parrish, have you any idea what life is like for me because you can't manage your bloody office for ten minutes without my David?"

  "I went to your wedding, and I'm not daft . . . just wake him up."

  "He's exhausted and he's hurt, and he needs the rest."

  "Don't accuse me, young lady, of not caring. Have you forgotten Aberystwyth . . . ?"

  She would never forget Aberystwyth. They hadn't been married then. A stake-out on the Welsh coast, waiting for a yacht to come in from the Mediterranean and drop a load off on a beach. A ruined cottage had been the base camp for the April team, and David was the new boy, just selected, and the wedding had been postponed until after the knock. Bill Parrish had broken every rule in the C & E's book. Parrish had told his Keeper to get his fiancee up to a camp site four miles from the cottage, and he'd made damned sure that David slipped away to the tent where his Ann was every single night. She had cooked their supper over a calor gas burner, cuddled him and the rest in her sleeping bag, and sent him back to the stake-out each dawn. It had been heaven for her, and Bill Parrish had fixed it, and it had never happened again.

  "He wouldn't do it now," she said. "Why can't you get someone else?"

  "We're all in the same boat, and it's the way we work, and if we don't work like that then the job doesn't get done."

  "Oh boy, have I heard that before."

  "Do me a favour, wake him up."

  Her voice was breaking. She was across David and she could hear the constant rhythm of his breathing. "You're destroying us, you're breaking us apart."

  "He'll be collected in half an hour. Tell him there's movement on the target."

  She put the phone down. She woke him. She saw the flare in his eyes when she told him what Parrish had said. She watched him dress fast. She fed him some scrambled egg and toast in the kitchen, and all the time he was looking out of the window, waiting for a car's headlamps. When she saw the lights she could have cried. She cleared away the plate. She heard the doorbell. He grabbed for his anorak, shrugged into it, opened the door.

  Ann still wore her slip. She stood in the kitchen, and she could see through to the front door. There was a girl standing there. A boyish, stocky girl, with her hair cut short, and a windcheater like a sleeping bag. She saw her husband go out.

  They walked across to the car. She could see them. When the tail lights had gone, then Ann Park cried.

  Token talked, Keeper listened.

  "It's the oldest one I know. There was a notepad beside the telephone in Shabro's flat. The Anti-Terrorist people had a look at it, and there was an indent. A name and a number.

  They checked, there's quite a bit on the name at Criminal Records, all drugs-related, so they fed it over to CEDRIC.

  He's hot. He's been busted for possession and went inside, but that was years back. More important, just a couple of years ago he was in the slammer and went to the Bailey. He should have got a Fifteen for dealing, but the bastard had a nobble. Four of the jurors came out for him. The trial had cost nearly a million, had run for four months. Public Prosecutions didn't go back for another bite. His name was written on the notepad in Shabro's house. It's Shabro's writing. The top note wasn't in Shabro's pockets. If that doesn't add up to Tango One finding himself a dealer in lieu of Manvers, I'll do a streak round the Lane. Cheer up, David, it's going to work out.

  We've got taps on him, and we've got surveillance on him.

  . . . Your Missus, David, what was up with her?"

  Two guards carried Mattie back up the two flights from the cellar.

  He was not unconscious - that had been before, many times. He was conscious and the water dripped from his head.

  To himself, he was now detached from the pain in his feet, and he was aware of what went on around him. He could hear no traffic in the street outside. He thought that it must be very late in the night. He had no sense of how many hours he had been in the basement, nor could he remember how many times he had lost consciousness, and how many times he had been dunked in the zinc bathtub.

  He thought that h
e was still in control of himself. He could understand that there was no longer any more point in them beating him because the pain had begun to cancel itself out.

  He was carried because he could not stand on his feet. His head was sagging, and he could see his feet. His shoes were gone. His feet were grotesque, bloody and swollen. He could not count how many times in that long day they had thrashed the soles of his feet with the heavy electrical flex, and how many times he had lapsed, thank the Good Lord, into unconsciousness.

  They took him into his room, and they let him fall from their arms and on to his bed. He lay on his bed, and the pain came out of the numbness of his feet. The pain came like maggots tunnelling from rotting meat. The pain spread from the soft ripped flesh at the soles of his feet and into his ankles, and into his shins and calves, and into his thighs, and into his guts.

  It was just their beginning.

  Through the long day, into the long night, the investigator had not asked Mattie a single question. Softening him. Beating him and hurting him. Just the start, unless he would scream for the pain to stop. The questions would follow when they thought it opportune, when they judged it best to peel from his mind the names held there.

  The pain throbbed in him, welled in him. He lay on the bed and he writhed to escape from the pain, and with his eyes clenched tight he could see all the time the sweat forehead, the exertion, of the man who swung the electrical flex back over his shoulder and then whipped it back on to the soles of his feet.

  They had given him nothing. Not even the dignity of refusing their questions.

  11

  "How are we this morning, Mr Furniss?"

  Nothing to say. Mattie took in the greater heat in the airless cellar.

  "The doctor came, yes?"

  Nothing to say. It was a ritual. Of course the investigator knew that the doctor had been to examine him, because he had sent the doctor. The doctor had been sent to make certain that no serious damage had been done to the prisoner. A slob of a man, the doctor, and his eyes had never met Mattie's because the bastard had betrayed his oath. The doctor had glanced at the feet, taken the pulse, above all checked that his heart would last, stretched up the eyelids to see the pupils, and checked with a stethoscope for Mattie's breathing pattern.

  "How are your feet, Mr Furniss?"

  Nothing to say. He could stand, just. He had leaned on the shoulders of the guards who had brought him down, but his feet could take some weight.

  "Please, Mr Furniss, sit down."

  He sat, and the pain sang into his legs as the weight came off the feet.

  "Mr Furniss, it has been broadcast on the World Service of the BBC that Dr Matthew Owens, an archaeologist, is missing in Turkey . . . " The smile was winter water. The voice was powder snow soft. "They are trying to protect you, and they cannot. Do you understand that, Mr Furniss?"

  Nothing to say.

  "They cannot protect you."

  Stating the bloody obvious, dear sir. Tell me something I don't know. . . . Through all his mind was the memory of the pain, and the memory of the dying that seemed to come each time he had lapsed towards unconsciousness. That was yesterday. The art of resistance to interrogation, as taught by Professor Furniss, was to take it one day at a time, one step at a time. Yesterday had been endured, survived . . . but they had not questioned him. Yesterday was gone, so forget yesterday's pain. Yesterday's pain was what they wanted Mattie to remember. The "old school" had been put through the full works on the Resistance to Interrogation courses at the Fort - the old school in the Service reckoned that they were a tougher breed than the new intake - resist at all costs, never crack, hang on to the bitter bloody end, and some fearful disasters there had been on simulated interrogation sessions. Queen and Country, that's what the old school believed in.

  If he cut the pain from his memory, then the mind was voided, then filled with other matter. The other matter was the names. He tried to find the guards beyond the brilliance of the light in his eyes.

  "What were you doing in Van, Mr Furniss?"

  "I've told you, repeatedly, I was visiting the fortress of Sardur the Second."

  "That is particularly idiotic, Mr Furniss."

  "I cannot help the truth."

  "It is idiotic, Mr Furniss, because you deny reality. Reality is this cellar, reality is the power at my disposal. Yesterday was amusement, Mr Furniss, today is the beginning of reality.

  If you go on with this fabrication, then it will go badly for you, Mr Furniss."

  Stick to the cover, cling to the cover at all costs.

  "A long time ago, yes, it is possible that you saw me in Tehran. I've been out of that sort of thing for years. I am an academic now. I am an authority on the Urartian civilization."

  "That is your sole interest."

  "The Urartians, yes."

  "In Turkey?"

  "The Urartian civilization was based in north-eastern Turkey and across the frontier of modern Iran as far as the western shore of Lake Urmia. That was the scope . . . "

  "Did the Urartians, Mr Furniss, travel to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain? Is it necessary for an academic, an authority in this rather limited field, to be escorted around the Gulf by the various Station Officers of the Secret Intelligence Service?"

  The light was in his face. The guards were behind him. He could just make out the rhythm of their breathing. They would have been told to be still, to offer to the prisoner no distraction from the questions of the investigator.

  "I am an academic."

  "I think not, Mr Furniss. I think you are Dolphin. Desk Head for Iran at Century House in London. You were a regular soldier and posted to Iran to liaise over arms sales to the former regime. You were the Station Officer in Tehran from 1975 to 1978. In 1982 and 1983 you were the senior Station Officer in Bahrain with responsibility only for Iranian affairs. In 1986 you spent four months in Ankara. You were promoted to Desk Head on January 1st, 1986. You are a senior intelligence officer, Mr Furniss. Understand me, I do not want to hear any more about your hobby. One day, perhaps, I shall have the pleasure of reading your published work. For today we shall put away hobbies, Mr Furniss, and just talk about what you were doing on this journey around our borders."

  The names were in his head, swirling. He was a man under water and trying to hold his breath, and his breath was the names. In time, as night follows day, the lungs would force out the breath, the pain would spit out the names. Even the old school knew that. It was a question, simply, of how many nights. How many days. The agents should have been warned by now . . . But was it known who held him? Would Century flush out its best men before they had confirmation that Mattie was in Iran?

  What would he have done himself, in their place? He thought of the complications of the structure for getting the necessary signals inside Iran. He knew how complicated it was, he had set the system up. Far more complex than bringing the agents out to the prearranged rendezvous meetings that he had just had. Oh, a lifetime of complications if the agents were to be aborted, and no going back. London would not be hurrying to destroy its network. He swept the names from his mind. He lifted his head. There was escape from the white bright light only in the face of the investigator.

  "It is quite scandalous that an innocent scholar . . . "

  The investigator gestured with his arm. The guards came forward, ripped Mattie up from his chair.

  Charlie made his call. The same telephone box, after the same night's sleep under a cardboard blanket.

  After the call, after he had helped the dossers pile away the packing cases, he went to the left luggage inside the ticket hall of the Underground station, and he took out his rucksack.

  They had a fine view of the Greek's house.

  Parrish had smoothed it. Keeper reckoned that Parrish was gold-plated when it came down to sweet talking for window space. It was a great window. The early summer foliage was not yet thick enough on the trees to obstruct the vision across the garden and across the road and across the Greek's gard
en and on to the front porch of his house.

  It was an old Victorian house that Parrish had fixed, weathered brick three stories high with an ivy creeper thick enough to have held the walls together. They had chosen the top floor for the camera position and from there their sight fine went well clear of the high paling fence opposite. Keeper and Token knew her life history by now. She came upstairs on the hour, every hour, with a pot of tea and biscuits. She was a widow.

  Her late husband had been a brigadier general. She had lived alone in the house for nineteen years, and every year she resisted another try by the developers to put a cheque in her hand - this year it was for three quarters of a million pounds

  - so that they could bulldoze her property and replace it with a block of flats. She didn't think her cats would want to move.

  She had no love for her neighbour across the road. His dogs were a threat to her cats. Anything that threatened the owner of the dogs was fine by this lady. From the upper window they could see the dogs. Dobermanns, lean and restless, wandering, and cocking their legs against the wheels of the midnight blue Jaguar outside the front porch. She was an artful old girl, the general's widow. Keeper had seen her giving them both the coy look, and checking the ring on his finger, and observing that Token's finger was bare.

  He was comfortable with Token. She let him talk about Colombia, about targetting the problem at its source. There had been other cars come and go at the house across the road.

  They had photographed all the movements, but they hadn't seen the Greek. They had the mug shots done by the plods of when he was last in custody. It was a hell of a house that the bastard lived in. Half an acre, heated swimming pool, hard tennis court, five, maybe six bedrooms.

  The general's widow was telling them that when her husband had first purchased The Briars they had been able to look across fields, real countryside . . .