A Line in the Sand

by Gerald Seymour

  "They called you last night, yes? Sorry it had to be the duty officer, but my guvnor tried to reach you in the afternoon and you weren't at home. Sorry it worked out like that."

  God help anyone called by the night duty officer the guvnor, the superintendent, would have been familiar with tact, might have thought through what was appropriate to say, and certainly would have had the file to dictate his tone. But not the NDO. It would have been blunt and to the point what the protection officer's name was, at what time he was arriving, and goodnight.

  Perry swivelled, looked behind him, back towards the kitchen door and the voices.

  Davies said, with confidence, "Just getting the lad off to school? It's Stephen, Mrs. Perry's lad, right? If you don't want me around for the moment that's no problem, Mr. Perry. I can wait till he's on his way, and then we'll do the business. I've got my car here, I can sit there."

  It was all about getting off to the right start. It didn't work if the principal refused to co-operate with the protection officer. He needed, from the beginning, to set the tone of the relationship. No call for diving in, breaking the routine of the family, jarring them, then having to mend fences because there was a lingering bitterness. Most principals, in his experience, were frightened half to death when he first came to their homes. The women were worse, and the kids were the big problem, always the headache. Best to go gentle. If his guvnor had called there would have been a few crumbs of detail on why the threat had ratcheted up, but there'd have been none from the night duty officer. The principals were never given the full picture, not even senior persons in government, certainly not judges and civil servant administrators and this principal, Perry, was only a civilian with a past and he would get no detail. The threat was not a matter for debate and discussion.

  He had worked late into the night in his room at the bed-and-breakfast, and early in the morning before his breakfast, on the file and the village. He'd had the electoral list, the large-scale map that showed every house, digests of police and local-authority files on residents, and had written names against houses. Only one property, currently for sale, was unoccupied. With that mass of information digested, he had made the plan of how they would work together, him and the principal.

  "I'll be in my car, Mr. Perry."

  Perry said, in a low voice, "My wife knows, the boy does not."

  "That's not a problem. We'll let him get off to school, then we'll talk."

  "He's being picked up, the school-run, in about five minutes."

  "You know where to find me, Mr. Perry."

  There was a shout from the kitchen, from the woman, about the door being open. Who was there? Perry turned and yelled back into the depth of the house that he wouldn't be a moment. There was defiance in his face; there usually was at the start from the principals.

  "I'll see you in a few minutes, Bill..."

  "Detective Sergeant or Mr. Davies, please, and you are Mr. Perry and your wife is Mrs. Perry it's the way we do it." He said it brusquely, coldly. There wasn't call in the job for familiarity. What they said at the Yard, in the SB protection unit, get too close and the principal starts to run the show. That would not happen with Bill Davies's principal. He had a job to do, he was a paid hand, and it mattered not a damn whether he liked or disliked the man. He would tell him later about the workmen and the technicians, who would be crawling round the house by late morning, up the walls, through the rooms, in the garden. There was no soft way of making a start.

  "The neighbours don't know."

  "No reason why they should we're used to discretion. The less they know the better."

  Perry frowned. He was a moment summoning up the question, then rushed it.

  "Are you armed?"

  "Of course."

  "Has the situation got worse?"

  "The doorstep isn't the place to discuss it. When you're ready, come and get me out of the car."

  The door closed on him. Of course he was bloody armed. Perry would have said all the brave things when the Thames House people had come on their visit and been rejected. Now, he would be realizing where the brave things had led him.

  Davies sat in his car. He had a good view of the house, and the green in front of it, the road and the homes on the far side of the house, the sea. The car was from the pool. It looked like any other Vauxhall sold for company fleet driving, but it had the big radio with a pre-set console linking Davies to the SB's operations centre, a fire extinguisher, and the box with the comprehensive first-aid equipment. In a metal container, reached by lifting the rear seat central arm rest, was a compact case holding a Heckler & Koch machine-gun, with ammunition and magazines, and a dozen CS gas grenades. In the boot was an image-intensifier sight for the

  H&K, a monocular night-sight, a bullet-proof square of reinforced material, which they called the ballistic blanket, the gas masks and the television monitor with the cables and the headset.

  Bill Davies waited. By his feet was the lunch-box given him by Mrs. Fairbrother at the bed-and-breakfast, and his Thermos, which she had filled with coffee black, no sugar. He had discarded the shoulder holster, left it locked in his bag in the room, gone for the waist-belt holster and put his loose change into his suit-jacket pocket; weight in the pocket so that the jacket moved decisively back if he had to draw his firearm fast. He saw the neighbour leave for work with his wife, bustling out of his weathered, brick-built house, before stopping and peering at him as he sat in the car. Finally, the child ran from the house and into a car.

  From the doorway, Perry waved for him to come inside. Davies, of course, had a trained eye for descriptions: Perry was of average height, average build, with fair hair and a face with no particular distinguishing marks. He was ordinary and unremarkable, the sort of man who was easy to miss in a crowd.

  He took his time, straightened his tie and checked in the mirror that his hair was in order, then eased out of his seat. He didn't hurry. He was not there to be at the beck and call of the principal. The Glock in the waist holster lapped against his hip as he walked towards the door. He would set the rules, start as he meant to go on. He went inside.

  Perry said softly, "I told my wife that the threat wasn't real."

  "Then you'll have to do a bit of explaining, sir."

  When the engine pitch changed he was sleeping. He stirred in the hard bunk bed, closed his eyes again, aware of the swinging turn of the tanker. Then he wiped his eyes, dragged at the floral curtain and peered through the porthole window. Beyond white-flecked sea was a horizon of dark land, browned cliffs, yellowed fields and the greys of a town's buildings. In the sea, bucked and heaved by the swell, was a small boat, its blue hull lost then found as the spray broke over a garish orange superstructure. The small boat closed on the tanker. He was awake, he remembered.

  The tanker slowed to allow the pilot's launch to come alongside, turning to shelter it from the bluster of the wind. He pressed his face against the weathered glass of the porthole and watched until the launch was under the sheer wall of the tanker's side. He imagmed the pilot jumping across a void of water from the deck of his boat to the rope ladder cavorting from the bottom of the fixed steps, and if the pilot slipped... In the night, when he went over the side, his God would protect him. From his porthole window, he could not see the pilot come aboard, but he watched the small boat heave away and head back at speed towards the land. He felt the turn of the tanker and heard the throbbing power as the engines regained cruising speed. By the time that the ship, guided by the pilot on the bridge with the master, rejoined the northern lane of the English Channel's traffic-separation scheme, he was asleep again. He needed the sleep because he did not know when next he would have the opportunity. He would sleep until the alarm on his watch woke him at noon, then pray, then sleep again until mid-afternoon, then pray, then sleep again until dusk, then pray, then ready himself.

  "They bought it I don't believe it, but it's authorized." The faithful Mary-Ellen tore the paper off the fax roll.

  "That'
s just incredible. They swallowed it. You've got the clearance, you're on the freedom bird tonight." She laid the sheet of paper down in front of him.

  "Have you enough socks?"

  The Special Agent (Riyadh) of the FBI and his personal assistant sat beside each other and made a list of what he should pack, and what he might need to buy in the embassy shop. She wrote down, and underlined, the names of the pills for his blood-pressure problem.

  When the list was complete, she made the airline reservation.

  "The authorization is for a week is that OK? Book you back in a week?"

  He nodded agreement.

  She chattered on, "Don't you worry about me. I'll be just fine. Be glad to see the back of you for a week. We're behind with accounts, filing, all that stuff might just get the place cleaned out. I'll have a dandy time here."

  But he was hardly listening. Duane Littelbaum would not have paused to consider whether his personal assistant could cope with a week of his absence. His wife, Esther, was out in west Iowa, between Audobon, which had been his home, and Harlan Valley,

  where she had been reared. She was in the world of cattle and corn, had brought up two daughters, and he hadn't lived with her, not properly, for a few months short of twenty-one years. It did not seem to matter to him, or to her. He went home, to the roadside house between Audobon and Harlan Valley, every leave that was given him and every Christmas. He wrote to his wife each weekend that he was away and never forgot a birthday. It was a detached marriage but it stayed alive.

  He had lived his life for the study of Iran.

  Those who did not know him, the embassy staffers who passed him in the corridors or saw him in the parking lot or at the ambassador's functions, would have reckoned him an academic, eccentric and gentle. They would have been wrong. He played the dangerous game of counter-terrorism. It was a solitary, work-driven life, where victims held little relevance, where the requirement for victory was paramount.

  Duane Littelbaum had a light, bouncing step as he left his office and went on down the corridor, cheerfully slapping the arm of the Marine at the grille. His stride was almost a skip of pleasure.

  His purpose in life, through all of twenty years, had been to put a smoking gun into an Iranian hand. If the chance came, he would act with a ruthlessness unrecognized by those who did not know him well.

  His finger hovered over the names he had written on his paper pad. Fenton stood over him.

  Geoff Markham recited, "Yusuf Khan, disappeared off the face of the earth. SB have beefed up Nottingham from Manchester and Leeds, but they don't have him. He's not been home since he was lost, and has not showed at work. The one associate we have listed is Farida Yasmin Jones, the convert, but that's a problem because she's dropped out, doesn't go to the mosque now and has moved out of her bed sit I can't trace her electricity, telephone and gas bills for a new address, like it's covering a trail and intentional which is to me both interesting and worrying. The protection officer given to Perry hasn't called back to his co-ordinator. It's a slow haul."

  "Keep pushing, keep kicking bums. I'll be at lunch."

  He nibbled at the fringes of impertinence.

  "That's nice, enjoy it."

  Fenton grinned.

  "I will. Need to get up to speed. I have a good feeling about this one. In my water, I've the feeling this might even be exciting. I'm preparing for a jump on to the learning curve."

  His superior had been transferred from the Czech! Slovak I Romanian/ Bulgarian desk only fourteen months before, which was why Cox had been able, effortlessly, to win promotion over him. Markham thought Fenton should have been on his learning curve a year ago. He stepped over the fringes.

  "I am sure that Mr. Perry would be pleased to hear that he's providing a bit of excitement."

  "You want to make anything of this job? My advice, take the heat."

  "I'll be here."

  "Where I would expect you to be."

  Markham did not look up. Fenton was going to the door, whistling happily, and he steeled himself.

  "Mr. Fenton."

  The whistling stopped.

  "Mr. Fenton, I know we're in unpredictable times, but I need to be out tomorrow afternoon, for one o'clock, be about an hour."

  Fenton would have been looking at the photo on his wall of Vicky, the one where she wore the short skirt. He asked, "Going to get a little cuddle in, to see you through the day?"

  "I am entitled to an hour at lunch, Mr. Fenton." Vicky would maul him if he didn't put his foot down. He said doggedly, "I'm not obliged to work right through a night, but I did."

  "No call for claws, Geoff. If you can be free then you will be."

  "Sorry, Mr. Fenton, it's not "if". I have to be out of here for one o'clock tomorrow."

  "Clock-watching, Geoff, does not fit the Service ethos. May be all right in a bank... but secret work, security work, makes a bad bedfellow with a clock face

  Fenton was gone. Geoff Markham sat at the console and hammered out the text, giant format, then printed it. He took a roll of Sellotape from his drawer and stuck the paper to the outside of his door.

  "This Project is so SECRET even I DON'T KNOW what I'm doing."

  The principal and his wife were subdued, out of sight, when the van arrived with the men from London. Davies jumped out of his car to meet them. He took the foreman down the narrow track at the side of the house and showed him the rear garden, the facade of old stone, and gave him the sketch map he'd drafted of the layout for the property, and its interior.

  Two more men were at the front now, unloading the cables and boxes from the van, and unhitching the ladders' stay ropes from its roof. He had his own key to the front door now, and took the foreman inside. He'd leave the kitchen, where the principal was with his wife, until last. The foreman hadn't wiped his boots and left a trail of wet earth round the rooms. They went through the house, and the foreman never lowered his voice as he discussed arcs of surveillance for the cameras and the sighting of the infrared beams and through which upper window-frames they would drill the cable holes, and which ground-floor windows and doors should be alarmed. They came to the kitchen last. She sat with her back to them, didn't acknowledge them. Perry tried to make small-talk but the foreman ignored him. It was usually like that, when the gear was put in, and there was no easy way of riding out the shock.

  Outside, the ladder scraped as it was extended. The kitchen window darkened as a man's body settled on the lowest rung to test its reliability. The wife had her head down and her lunch half eaten in front of her.

  Perry said, "I thought I had the choice on the new locks."

  "It's a bit more than locks, Mr. Perry. It's cameras and infrared and tumbler wires and-' "What's going on?"

  They were always worse, more aggressive, in front of the lady, as if they felt the need to make a stand and pretend they were in charge. The principal was not in charge, not any more, of his house, and certainly not of his life.

  "I can't tell you, Mr. Perry, because I don't know and if I did I couldn't tell you."

  He went outside. There was a light rain falling and the sky threatened more. Another ladder was up against the front wall, the cables dancing as they were unrolled. An electric drill was whining through the wood of an upper window-frame. It wasn't the job of the detective sergeant to feel sympathy, but already, inside their home, their lives were being violated and this was merely the beginning.

  There would be some who would say afterwards that this had been the War of Fenton's Belly. They were the bureaucrats of the first floor (Administration Sub-Branch Accounts), tasked with the study of expense receipts and entertainment bills. Five bills in a week for expenses and entertainment handed in by the head of Section 2, G Branch, and the handwritten demand for reimbursement. They would call, after the business was completed, for explanations and would receive only the vaguest information of what had happened, what had been at stake, and its outcome.

  Harry Fenton would have preferred to walk on nails
rather than go to Vauxhall Bridge Cross with an invitation to Penny Flowers to join him for lunch. He said it to whomever would listen, often enough, that the Secret Intelligence Service treated the Security Service as lesser creatures. He would not go cap in hand to Ms Flowers for help and information. So, the first step on his learning curve was to offer a good meal to the senior Mid-East (Terrorism) analyst of the Foreign and Commonwealth's research division. They ordered, and then she launched.

  "Iran is on the move. Don't believe all that garbage the Americans peddle about a dark, bloodstained hand, Islamic and Iranian, behind every vicious little guerrilla war in the world, it's just not true. Iran is going modern. There've been fair elections, a new moderate president, a breaking down of the taboos of Muslim life. Look, you want a drink in Tehran, you can get it you'll have to be discreet, but you can have it. Only three, four years ago, you'd have had a public whipping to sober you up. The woman's role, in government and the civil service, is advancing fast. Women now have power, and there are fashion boutiques for clothes to be worn at private parties. They are modernizing at speed, and if it was not for the bloody stupid American sanctions they would be going even faster towards a viable economic infrastructure I'm a fan."

  She chewed on the breadsticks with the same enthusiasm with which she talked. Fenton, watching her and listening, didn't think research analysts were overwhelmed with invitations.

  "There is much greater internal stability now. They've wiped out the Mujahiddin-e-Khalq. Very few bombs explode in Tehran. The Monarchist faction is gone. I accept that they are paranoid about opposition, and that'll last a bit longer, but if we break their isolation they'll get respectable quickly. The Americans forever bleat about state-sponsored terrorism when a bit of hush and encouragement will do a quicker job than a stick. We believe the importance of their guerrilla training camps is overemphasized. We think they offer more training in theological correctness than in bomb-making. Every time a bomb goes off in America they shout about Iran. Remember the knee-jerk accusation that Iran was responsible for Oklahoma City? Ouch .. . Remember every American commentator insisting that Iran had knocked TWA 800 into the sea. You.. . Remember, Iran had organized the attacks in Saudi, but it's nowhere near proven. We think they give encouragement, financial support, offer a safe haven to dissident groups, but that is way short of controlling them. The Americans need an enemy right now, Iran is available, but the facts don't support the need."