A Line in the Sand

by Gerald Seymour

  "Is it that you're frightened of telling her?"

  "Who? What?"

  "Frightened of telling your wife what you did. Is that the problem?"

  "They never told me what I'd done. Said it was better I didn't know."

  "She doesn't know about before?"

  "She didn't need to know."

  "Lived with the secret, did you? Festering, is it?"

  "Get out."

  "My advice, Mr. Perry, is to come clean with her, then fall into line."

  "Tell them, back where you came from, no."

  "So much better, Mr. Perry, if you'd had the guts to be honest with your wife. Isn't she just common-law?"

  Fenton was on his way to the gate when his feet slipped on the wet brick of the path. He stumbled and cursed.

  Geoff Markham was going after him when his sleeve was grabbed. The rain ran on Perry's face. He hissed, "This is mine. It's all I have. I'm not running again. Tell them that. This is my home, where I live with the woman I love. I am among friends true, good friends. I won't spend the rest of my life hiding, a rat in a hole. This is where I stand, with my woman and my friends... Do you know what it's like to be alone and running? They don't stay with you, the raincoats, did you know that? With you for a week, ten days, then gone. A contact telephone number for a month, then discontinued. You are so bloody alone. Tell them, whoever sent you, that I'm sorry if it's not convenient but I won't run again."

  Fenton was at the car, crouched behind it to protect himself from the rain. Markham reached it and opened the door for his superior.

  He looked back. Perry's door was already shut.

  Chapter Two.

  Behind the cottage homes of brick and flint stone, where climber roses trailed and the honeysuckle was not yet in leaf, the ornamental trees in the gardens were shredded of colour and the sea was slate grey, with white flecks. Between the houses and through the trees, he saw it stretching away, limitless. A solitary cargo ship nudged along the horizon, maybe out of Felixstowe. The sea was like a great wall against which the village sheltered, a barrier that had no end to its width and to its depth.

  "God, don't spare the horses."

  It was the reason he'd been fetched out for the day. Fenton wouldn't have wanted to drive or have to face the vagaries of train timetables and a waiting taxi. Geoff Markham's function was to drive, not to play a part in what should have been a reassuring and businesslike making of arrangements for the removal van's arrival. He had the wipers going but the back window was a disaster, as if a filled bucket had been tipped on it. He reversed cautiously, couldn't see a damn thing in his mirror, then swung the wheel hard. The car surged forward. Fenton was writhing out of his dripping coat and nudged Markham's arm so that he swerved. He veered towards a woman in a plastic cape pushing her bicycle. Before he'd straightened up, the tyres sluiced the puddle over her legs. There was a shout of abuse. Fenton grinned.

  "First sign of life we've seen..."

  Markham should have stopped to apologize but kept going: he wanted away from the place. He knew nothing of the sea and it held no particular attraction for him. He thought it chill and threatening.

  They went past a small shop with pottery and postcards in the window from which faces peered. They would have heard the woman's protest. There was a tearoom beside the shop, shuttered for the winter. They swept past the village hall, a low-set building with an old Morris outside. Then there was a pub with an empty car-park.

  "Thank the Lord, the open road beckons. Could you live here, Geoff, in this dead end?"

  They'd both seen it. The estate agents' for-sale sign was propped in an untrimmed hedge beside a crazily hanging gate with the faded name on it, Rose Cottage. Beyond was a small overgrown garden, then a darkened cottage with the curtains drawn, no lights showing. The rainwater cascaded from the blocked gutters, and tiles were missing from the roof. It would be 'three bedrooms, bathroom, two reception, kitchen, in need of modernization'. And it would also be, down here on the Suffolk coast, ninety thousand pounds before the builders went in. But all that was irrelevant to Markham. He was wondering how Perry was facing up the devastation they'd left behind them.

  Sort of place, Geoff. where the major entertainment off-season would be screwing your sister or your daughter or your niece. Eh?"

  Not since he had come back from Ireland and gone to work on the Mid East (Islamic) Desk, had he heard his superior utter anything as crude. He was shocked, wouldn't have believed Fenton capable of such vulgarity. The bitter little confrontation with Perry had rattled him.

  They went up a long, straight road, first flanked by terraced houses, then, as he accelerated, by larger houses oozing prosperity, set back in gardens with tarpaulin-covered yachts in the driveways. The church was on their right. Geoff Markham was good on churches, liked to walk around them, and this one, through his side window, looked to be worth a quarter of an hour, a fine tower, solid as a fortress, a wide nave, safe as a refuge. Beyond it was a stark facade of flint ruins, the clerestory windows open to the concrete grey of the cloud. He turned his head to see the ruins better. There was a chuckle beside him.

  About as dead as the rest of the wretched place."

  Fenton, he knew, lived in Beaconsfield, not on his own salary but on family money; couldn't have managed Beaconsfield, the restaurants, the delicatessens and the bijou clothes shops where his wife went on a desk head's wage. Money was seldom far from Geoff Markham's thoughts, nagging like a dripping tap. Vicky and his future were about money. He was driving faster.

  It was strange, but he hadn't seemed to register the village when they came into it, less than an hour before. It had not seemed a part of the present and the future. The village was history, to be left behind once the removal van had arrived. But no removal van was coming, and the village its lay-out, entry and exit route, topography, community was as important as any of those isolated white-walled farmhouses in South Armagh, Fermanagh and East Tyrone.

  Fenton was again massaging his moustache and showed no interest in what was around him. Through the trees was the shimmer of silver grey from stretching inland water. The road in front was straight and empty, he had no need to concentrate. Markham's mind was on the landscape, as it would have been if he had been driving in Ireland.

  They reached the crossroads, and the main road for Ipswich, Colchester and London. He paused for traffic with the right of way, and the smile brightened on Fenton's face. He checked the distance they had come since leaving the house.

  "About bloody time. You never said could you live there? Damn sure I couldn't."

  It wasn't for Markham to pick a pointless argument with his superior.

  "I couldn't, but it's right for him."

  "Come again?"

  "He chose well, Perry did."

  "Don't give me riddles."

  Markham pulled out into the main road and slashed his way through the gears for speed.

  "He wants to make a stand, he won't run... It's good ground for him. One road in and the same road out. The sea is behind and it can be monitored. Natural barriers of flooded marshland to the north and the south with no vehicle access. If you were in a city street or a town's suburban road, you couldn't get protection like that. He chose well, if he's really staying."

  They would be back in London, on Millbank, in three hours. Then the bells would start clamouring and the calls would go out for the meeting.

  He went, like a sleep-walker, around the ground floor of his house, and seemed not to recognize the possessions they had collected over four years. Frank Perry felt a stranger in his house. He had made himself three cups of instant coffee, sat with them, drunk them, then paced again.

  Of course he knew the reality of the threat. Whatever had been done with the information he'd given in the briefings at the house behind Pall Mall, he would have made a lasting enemy of the authorities in Iran. He'd assumed that the information had been used to block sales of equipment and chemicals from the factories of the old Eastern bloc and
from Western Europe, from the works of his old company in Newbury. There would have been expulsions of Iranian trade attach, the loss of their precious foreign-exchange resources, and the programme would have been delayed. Of course the threat was real, and he'd known it.

  However hard he had tried to put the past behind him, it had stayed with him. Sometimes it was a light zephyr wind on his face; sometimes it was a gale beating against his back. For four years, it had always been there. He had never been able, and God he'd tried, to escape the past.

  Through those years, Frank Perry had been waiting for them. He couldn't have put features to their faces, but he'd known they'd come in suits, with polished shoes, with a briefcase that wouldn't be opened, with knowledge that would be only partially shared. They'd be so recognizable and predictable. From the moment he'd seen them run from the car to his front door he'd known who they were and what they would tell him. He had rehearsed, more times than he could count, what he would say to them, and had finally said it.

  He stopped pacing. He stared out of the window across the green. His fists were clenched. Everything he could see, the homes of his friends, the shop, the hall and the pub at the end of the road, were as normal and unremarkable as they had been before the men from London had come. It was hard for Frank Perry to believe that anything had changed, but it had and he knew it.

  His fingernails pressed hard into the palms of his hands. He would fight to hold everything that was precious to him.

  Meryl Perry held the umbrella over the child's head and sheltered him all the way from the car, through the gate, up the path to the front door. The child shivered as they waited for the door to be opened. The Carstairs lived in a fine house on the main street, the only road through the village. They both worked and had good positions; she would only just have reached home, and he wouldn't be back for an hour. The child bolted through the open door.

  "You're a saint, Meryl. Thanks ever so."

  "Don't worry about it, Emma, wouldn't let him get soaked."

  "You wouldn't, others might. Look, you're drenched. You're a sweetheart."

  "I'm doing tomorrow, and you're doing the rest of the week, right?"

  "Actually, Meryl, I was going to ask you can you do all this week? It's a real bash at work, and Barry's in too early to take them. I'll make it up the week after."

  "No problem, what friends are for."

  "You're brilliant don't know what I'd do without you."

  The door closed on her. Her ankles were sodden, her stockings clammy. She liked Emma Carstairs, and Frank was Barry's best friend. They had good times together. The school-run to Halesworth had been their first touch point She hadn't had friends, not like Emma and Barry, before she had moved to the village. She hurried back to the car, the rain lashing her while she furled the umbrella. Off again, taking Donna home. She turned by the village hall, then went back past the church and up the lane to the council houses. She dropped Donna at her front gate.

  "Thanks so much, Mrs. Perry."

  "You'd have drowned at the bus stop."

  "Vince didn't stop, nor that stuck-up Mary Wroughton."

  "Leave off, Donna probably they didn't see you."

  "I'd have ruined my hair, you're really kind."

  "And I'll see you next week, when Frank and I are out."

  "Always enjoy babysitting at yours, Mrs. Perry. Thanks again." The girl was out of the car and running for her front door. Her Stephen was scowling beside her, but he was eight and any child of that age objected to babysitters. She poked him, he put his tongue out at her, and they both laughed. He'd had behavioural problems in the city, but not since they had moved to the village; the best thing she could have done for Stephen was bring him here. She drove back into the village. There were no cars in front of Mrs. Fairbrother's, no guests checked in. Past the Martindales' pub, too early to be open. Vince's van was outside his terraced house, strange that he hadn't seen Donna at the bus stop. Dominic Evans, he was always nice to her, was running back into his shop with the ice-cream sign, probably going to shut up early, he was always helpful, and Euan. She parked as close as possible to their front gate and Stephen scampered for the door. Peggy's bicycle was askew against the Wroughtons' garage door. Meryl was locking her car, umbrella perched over her head, as Peggy came down the Wroughtons' path.

  "Meryl, hold on."

  "Yes, Peggy."

  "I've that typing for you you said you would?"

  "Of course I did."

  "For the Red Cross and the Wildlife."

  "No problem."

  "Can't thank you enough, don't know what I did before you came. Oh, Meryl, you couldn't manage the Institute's minutes? Fanny's got an awful cold I think there's a lot of it about."

  "Thanks, Meryl."

  "You should get on home, Peggy. You look like a hose has been turned on you."

  "I tell you, Meryl, those people seeing Frank when you were out they drove right through a puddle, could have avoided it. I used the F-word and all. Quite made my day, using the F-word."

  Stephen had left the door open and the rain was driving on to the hall tiles. She took off her coat and shook it hard outside. She called, "Frank, we're home."

  "I'm in the kitchen."

  There was no light on downstairs. Stephen would have gone straight to his room, for his books and his toys. She went into the kitchen. He sat at the kitchen table, but it was too dark for her to see his face.

  "You all right, love?"

  "Fine."

  "Had a busy day?"

  "No."

  "Visitors?"

  "No, no visitors."

  It was the first time in the four years she had known him that she could have proved he had lied. She said she would make a pot of tea, and switched on the light.

  Kicking a cat would have been too easy, and beating his balding head against a wall would have been poor satisfaction. Littelbaum wondered if they knew in Audobon, west Iowa, the good, solidly ignorant folk, as they scratched a living and paid taxes, where their sweat money went. Did they know in California or South Carolina where it ended? In Texas? In Montana? If it were not for the tax money, Saddam Hussein might have been in Dhahran and the ayatollahs might have made it to Riyadh. And they treated him, the representative of those tax-payers, like a dog's turd, but he kept smiling. All day he had waited at the guarded headquarters of General Intelligence, and been shuffled between various air-conditioned offices. They offered him fruit juice and cake, polite talk, and he had achieved nothing.

  The prisoner for Littelbaum he was a number, 87/41 had most probably been below him all through that day, in the basement holding cells. It was the fifth time he had tried to win access to the prisoner, without success. The man would be in the cells, and maybe his mother would not recognize him. Maybe he was without fingernails. Maybe a fine cord had been knotted tightly round his penis while water was poured down his throat.

  Littelbaum did not have the name of the man he hunted, nor the face. He had footprints. The prisoner might have told him the name, described the face.

  His driver took him back to the embassy. He could demand time of the ambassador and shout a bit, and the ambassador would shrug and mouth sympathy. He could send another protest signal to the Hoover building, and it would be filed along with the rest.

  Later, he would be in his windowless office behind the bombproof door guarded by the young Marine, and he would stand in front of the big wall map of the region, with his herringbone jacket loose on his shoulders, and look at the footprints, at the bright-headed pins. It took two weeks, from the event, for Littelbaum to be able to put another pin in the map, to mark another footprint. From the pins hung little paper flags, carrying a date. For two and a half years he had followed the footprints, and they made a pattern for him.

  There was a digital mobile telephone that made scrambled, voice-protected calls from and to an office in Tehran of the Ministry of Information and Security. The computers could not break through the scrambled conversation
s but they could locate and identify the position from which the call had originated or been answered. His pins, with their carefully dated flags, were scattered over the map surface of Iran and Saudi Arabia. It was two and a half years since the explosion at the National Guard barracks in Riyadh in which five of his countrymen had died; the pin was there and dated the day before it happened. Two years since the lorry bomb at the Khobar Tower airforce base outside Dhahran had killed nineteen Americans, and that date pin was there, the day before the massacre. Each atrocity enabled him to track a man without a name and without a face.

  It took two weeks for the computer to log the locations. There was a pin in the Empty Quarter, dated forty-three days back, and he had bypassed every bureaucratic instruction, ignored every standing order, worked the contact game, won the one-time favour, tasked the Marine Corps helicopters and the Saudi National Guardsmen, and still been too damned late. And there was a pin in international waters along the trade route between Abu Dhabi and the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas.

  No name, no face, only footprints for Duane Littelbaum to follow as if he were a shambling, slow-going bloodhound.

  Mary-Ellen brought him the day's communications from the cypher section, and coffee. Sometimes she put whiskey in it, which, in this arrogant, ungrateful, corrupt country, was almost a beheading offence. She was blue chip, with a Ph.D." old money off Long Island, and she seemed to regard it as her life's work to look after a middle-aged man from poor farm stock out of Audobon in west Iowa.

  It took sixteen days from the time the antennae or the dishes sucked in the streams of digital information for the computers to locate the positioning of the receiver, and transmit it to Duane Littelbaum. She passed him two pins and two dated flags. Mary-Ellen was too short to reach that far up the wall map into northern Iran. He grunted and stretched. He drove home the pins where there were two tight clusters.

  He drank the coffee.

  She said, and he did not need her to tell him, "It's where he always goes. He calls from Alamut, then the next day from Qasvin, then silence, then the call again, then the killing. It's what he always does..."