A Line in the Sand

by Gerald Seymour

  "Oh, the curtains."

  "What's wrong with them?"

  "Dreadful of me not to have noticed. There are no net curtains. There should be your wife can knock some up."

  "She hates net curtains."

  "Your job, Mr. Perry, not mine, to make her like them. I'm sure that when you've explained it-' "Do you have net curtains at home?" He hadn't thought, and realized his stupidity as soon as the question was asked.

  "No call for them. I'm not at threat, I've not trod on anyone's toes. Net curtains, you see, absorb flying glass from an lED, that's improvised explosive device a bomb, to the layman."

  He was grateful for the time and advice. He wished him a safe journey back to London.

  "Final advice, be sensible, read the Blue Book, do what it says. Don't think that from now on, what I always say to my gentlemen, life ends, you've got to live under the kitchen table. If there were a specific danger, say threat-level two, they'd have moved you out of here, feet wouldn't have touched the ground or, God forbid, there'd be armed police crawling all over your home.. . Good day, Mr. Perry, thanks for your hospitality. Let my office know what locks you want, and don't forget about the net curtains. I'll call again in about six months, if it's still appropriate. Good day... It's not that bad or you'd have the guns here or you'd have been moved out..."

  After he had read the pamphlet, he hid it among his work papers where she never looked. Frank Perry still did not know what and when he would tell Meryl.

  A jam my old number, the Branch men in London called it, a proper trolley ride for the geriatrics, and let them try it. He cursed. He was fifty-one years old, working out the time to retirement, and too damned old for this caper. His problem, he was trying to do singlehandedly the work that should have been given to a four-man detail.

  It had been fine at the terraced house where he'd picked up his target easily enough. The target had walked, and the detective sergeant had trailed him on foot into the centre of Nottingham. Into a camping-equipment shop. The detective sergeant had fingered wet-weather coats while the target had selected then paid cash for a sleeping-bag, heavy-soled walking-boots, wool boot socks, camouflage trousers and tunic that were ex-military stock. He might have been old, near to retirement, but the detective sergeant still registered his target's height and the size of the boots, which were at least two sizes too small for the target's feet.

  All the university cities in the country had a pair of Branch men attached to the local police station. Used to be Irish work, not any longer. It was the Islamic thing that preoccupied the detective sergeant and his partner, Iranian students studying engineering, physics, chemistry, metallurgy, and the zealots who recruited among the campus kids. It was work for a dozen men in this city alone, not for two poor bastards. The Security Service provided the names and addresses, and bugger all else, leaving the detective sergeant to tramp the streets and type the bloody reports.

  The target was careful and had twice ducked into shop doorways and let him come past. His shoes, new, hurt his feet, and he was bursting for a leak. The detective sergeant was trained in surveillance, but it was damn difficult to make the tail when it was down to one man. They had ended in a bookshop. He'd eyed the paperback thrillers while the target had been searching, very specific, on shelves across the shop.

  He had not had this man before. There were usually so many targets that they came round on a rota every four weeks or so. It was only three months since the young fellow, wet behind the ears and up from London, had given the sparse detail of the Security Service interest in Yusuf Khan, Muslim convert, formerly Winston Summers. One of many, the tall, wide-shouldered Afro-Caribbean was under surveillance around one day in thirty, nine in the morning to seven in the evening. He did not know why this thirty-year-old cleaner at the university was on the list for sporadic surveillance... His was not to reason why, his but to do and bloody die and bugger all glory for his pinched feet and aching bladder.

  The target had taken a book, gone quickly to a vacant cash desk, and paid in notes and loose change before heading out into the street. The detective sergeant was good at his work and conscientious. He checked the shelves where the target had searched: UK Travel and Guides. The man was out on the street now. A woman was at the cash desk, with a child in tow, choosing a gift-token card. He'd lost half a minute before he'd used his shoulder, shown his warrant card, and demanded of the assistant what book her previous customer had purchased. The dumb girl had forgotten, had to check back in the point-of-sale computer.

  He stood on the pavement outside the shop and cursed.

  He could not see his target and narrow arcades led off both sides of the main street.

  He swore.

  He quartered the arcades and the precinct, checked the bus stops and the precinct, but could not find the bobbing head he sought, or the bright-coloured shopping-bags. As his son would say, when his birthday came round, when the detective sergeant had to dig in his wallet to pay for the amplifier or the tuner, "Pay peanuts, Dad, and you get monkeys." They paid for one man to do a surveillance once every thirty days and by eleven o'clock in the morning the monkey had lost its target.

  He would find a place to leak, then walk back to the dismal street of little terraced houses to sit in his car, fashion the excuses,

  compose his report, and have not an idea why Yusuf Khan, formerly Winston Summers, had purchased boots, camouflage trousers and tunic too small for him, heavy wool socks, a sleeping-bag, and a guidebook to the coastal area of north Suffolk. What the policeman knew of that area from a wet, cold and miserable caravan holiday twenty-two years back was endless grey seas and marshes. But it would go in his report for want of something better.

  "Were you followed?"

  Yusuf Khan did not think so.

  "Have you done anything to create suspicion?"

  Yusuf Khan knew of nothing.

  The intelligence officer was a man of sophistication and poise. He came from a childhood spent after the revolution in a villa of quality set in the foothills of the Albourz. The previous owner had fled in 1980 and his cleric father had been awarded the property, which looked down on to Tehran's smoggy sprawl. He w~s fluent in German, Italian, Arabic and English, and could pass in casual London society for Palestinian, Lebanese, Saudi or Egyptian. To the unaware he might be from the deep south of Italy, perhaps Calabrian or Sicilian. He had been three years in London and believed he understood the heartbeat of the British psyche ... and that understanding had led him to recruit Yusuf Khan, formerly Winston Summers, Muslim convert. He was a religious man himself, prayed at the given hours when it was possible, and the obsession of the converts to the Faith was something he found ridiculous but useful. He preyed on the converts, trawled for them in the mosques of the splinter communities who set themselves aside from the traditions of the Sunni and Shi'a teaching. He searched for them in the universities. The best he found, those who displayed a fervent adoration of the Imam Khomeini, he recruited.

  Yusuf Khan had been subject to police investigation in Bristol, following a knife attack on an Arab businessman who had kissed a white woman on the street outside a nightclub. Unemployed, embittered and alienated, living in the East Midlands city of Nottingham, attending the mosque of Sheik Amir Muhammad, Yusuf Khan had been identified three years earlier for the intelligence officer. Twenty-three months before, with the trust already built in their relationship, the intelligence officer had told Yusuf

  Khan how he might best serve the memory of the Imam. It had been a long evening of persuasion. The following day, Yusuf Khan had walked away from the Faith, taken a job as a cleaner at the university. He monitored the attitudes, friendships, conversations of Iranian students in the engineering faculty. He found and befriended a girl who was now converted to the Faith, and was useful. The trust grew.

  The intelligence officer met his man in the car-park of a restaurant by the river. There were too many high cameras in the streets of the city and at the entrances to the multi-storey ca
r-parks. The engine ran, the interior heated, the windows misted. They were unseen and alone.

  "You will not be missed from work?"

  His friend, the girl, had telephoned the university and reported his head cold.

  "You are certain that you have not created suspicion?"

  Yusuf Khan was certain.

  He was told that he should not go home again until after his part in the matter was finished, to where he should take a train, where he should hire a car, the grade of car, and where he should sleep before the given time. His list was checked, the clothing, the boots, the sleeping-bag, the rucksack of khaki canvas he had bought the day before and collected from left-luggage at the bus station. Everything was checked, the book, the maps, the photographs, and he was passed another tight-rolled bundle of banknotes. He was told of the affection for him of men in high places, far away, whose names he would never know, of their gratitude for what he did, and of how they spoke of him with love. The intelligence officer watched the swell of Yusuf Khan's pride and smelt the chilli on the man's breath. He reached into the back of the car, unzipped a big sausage bag, and revealed the contents. He saw the bright excitement in Yusuf Khan's face. He showed him the launcher wrapped in a tablecloth, the shells, the automatic rifle with the folded stock and the loaded magazines. He opened the canvas rucksack beside the bag, revealed the grenades. He held the man's hand, squeezed it to give him reassurance, and drove him to the railway station.

  He said that, in the Farsi language, the Imam was known as Batl Al-Mustadafin, and that was the Champion of the Disinherited, and therefore he was the champion of Yusuf Khan. He said that

  Yusuf Khan would deserve the love of all those who followed the word of the Imam Khomeini. The intelligence officer did not tell him that the cornerstone of his work in London was 'deniability'.

  When they reached the forecourt of the railway station, he told Yusuf Khan what the Ayatollah Fazl-Allah Mahalati had said. He spoke with fervour.

  "A believer who sees Islam trampled underfoot and does nothing to stop it will end up in the seventh layer of Hell. But he who takes up a gun, a dagger, a kitchen knife or even a pebble with which to harm and kill the enemies of the Faith has his place assured in Heaven..."

  He watched Khan into the station, carrying the rucksack and the sausage bag, which sagged under the weight of the weapons. On the way back to London he would call in at a small mosque in the town of Bedford, to a cultural association for which his embassy's support was well known, for a meeting that would help create the necessary factor of 'deniability'.

  "Don't mind me saying it, Frank, you look bloody awful had the tax man round? You look like I feel when he pushes his bloody nose in!"

  Martindale belly-laughed without enthusiasm. He kept the pub in the village, the Red Lion, and had enough cash-flow problems not to need the burden of his customers' difficulties.

  "Say nothing, admit nothing. If you have to say anything tell them the dog ate the receipts. Come on, Frank, don't bring your troubles in here. Trouble-free zone, this bar. Come on..."

  Frank looked into the thin face with its dour smile. He had been nursing a pint for half an hour. The regular gang was in and there had been whispering before the landlord had come over with the cloth to wipe the spotless table. It had been good of Martindale to fetch him up to the bar.

  Vince cuffed his shoulder.

  "Not right, not that you've got the tax man on your back, not you. What about a game of arrows, Frank? Tell you, each time you go for treble twenty you reckon that's the tax man's face. Last time they came sniffing round me, I told them to piss off. Oh, I can get down and do that chimney of yours next week, don't think I'd forgotten..."

  Vince was the local jobbing builder, a one-man band. The previous November's big storm had shifted some of the roof tiles, and he'd gone up a ladder in the wind and rain with the sure-foot grip of a mountain goat. If he'd waited for the storm to blow out, the rain would have been in the attic and dripped into their bedroom, and it would have been a hell of a big job. Vince talked too much, played at being a hard man but wasn't.

  It embarrassed Frank that he'd brought his problems into the pub. If a guy was asked here how he was, he was supposed to say he was fine. If he was asked if he was well, he was supposed to say he was in good shape. Everyone there had problems, came in for a drink to forget them.

  There was a short, awkward silence, then Gussie said, "Shall we throw together?"

  "Why not, Gussie?"

  "You've an education, do you know about Australia, Frank? I'm thinking of going there, next year. What a team, you and me you take first throw. If it dries up a bit, a couple of weeks, I'll be down to dig your garden you should be thinking of getting your vegetables in."

  Gussie passed him the darts. He was a big, strapping, amiable youth. Thick as a railway sleeper, not the full shilling, but he kept his mother and the younger children on the pittance he earned as a labourer in the piggery. He propped up the bar most nights and talked to the older men as a bread-winning equal. He dug the vegetable garden in less than half the time it would have taken Frank, and charged too little. Nice boy, but he'd never get to Australia.

  Paul took the empty glass from his hand.

  "No argument, my shout be a pint, right? You've had one quiet one, time now for three noisy ones right, Frank?"

  "That's very kind of you, Paul, thanks."

  "I'm thinking of co-opting you on to the village-hall committee, you being an engineer. Won't be any problem, they'll do what I tell them. Place'll fall down if we don't do something, and I'm the only one with the wit to realize it. I reckon we'd work well together, being friends. Of course, I'd take the main decisions. You up for it?"

  "Be pleased to help."

  Paul was not the chairman of the village-hall committee, or of the parish council, but his way always won through because he was better briefed than any of the others. His life was the village, as had been his father's and grandfather's. Inquisitive but harmless. If his ego was massaged, he gave his friendship without condition, and Frank Perry, former salesman, could manipulate vanity with the best of them. He even quite liked the man.

  He played darts with Vince, Gussie and Paul through the evening. He didn't talk much, but let the conversation ripple round him and warm him.

  "You heard, Paul, what's happened at Rose Cottage?"

  "Heard it was under offer do you know what they were asking?"

  Gussie chipped in, "I was told it was over a hundred grand, and there's more to be spent."

  "The last thing this place needs is more bloody foreigners no offence, Frank."

  "We only want people here who know our ways and respect them."

  As the games were restarted, as the pints kept coming, Frank threw more accurately it was his home, his friends were the publican, the jobbing builder, the piggery labourer, the big man of the village-hall committee and the parish council ... God, he needed friends because there was a blue-jacketed pamphlet hidden among his papers where Meryl wouldn't find it. He and Gussie lost both their games and it didn't matter to him.

  He stepped out into the night.

  They were going their own way, and behind him Martindale was switching off the bar lights. His friends shouted encouragement to him.

  "Good luck, Frank."

  "Keep smiling."

  "Frank, I'll be in touch about the hall, look after yourself."

  For a year he had been without friends. From the time the last of the minders had driven away, left him to his own devices, until the day he had come with Meryl and bought the house on the green with a view to the sea, twelve endless months, he had been without friends. He had lived in a one-bed roomed flat in a new block a couple of streets away from the centre of suburban Croydon. In all those months, trying to wear his new identity, he had never allowed himself more than half a dozen words on the stairs with any of the other tenants. They might have been good, kindly, warm people, but he hadn't felt the confidence to test them. Fear of a
slip, of a single mistake, had isolated him. The first Christmas had hurt. No contact with his son, he hadn't sent a present; no cards hanging from ribbons; no visit to his father and mother in the Lake District for the New Year. Through that twenty-four hours he had sat alone in the flat and listened to the televisions, the laughter, the cheerfulness echoing up the stairwell, and he'd seen people arriving, arms loaded with wrapped presents. His company had been a bottle. When he ventured out to pubs as the evenings lengthened, he always took a chair and table furthest from the bar and the camaraderie. He had learned that he mattered to no one. He had sunk, the signs were clear enough to him, and it had taken a supreme effort to shake off the loneliness. He had started to read the trade magazines and look for small freelance work. The second company he'd visited had employed Meryl. He could remember, so clearly, that he had bounced away from the company's offices with a contract in his pocket and her smile in his mind.

  He waved over his shoulder and their laughter, fun among friends, roared after him. He walked on and wondered where he would find an old wing-mirror to lash to a bamboo pole.

  "What makes you think, Mr. Markham, that you have any of the qualifications required for modern banking?"

  "I'm used to high-pressure work. It matters when I make decisions that I've chosen the correct option. I can work on my own, and I can work with a team."

  She sat wrong way round on the chair, leaned on the back of it, splayed her legs either side of the seat so that her skirt rode up.

  "Balls, about "high-pressure work", but the right sort of balls. Hit "team", it's an emphasis word, they like that. Why, Mr. Markham, do you wish to walk away from the security ha, ha of safe civil-service employment? You could join us, you could be found unsuitable and out on your ear with your bridges burned. Why?"