A Line in the Sand

by Gerald Seymour

  She saw the twitch of his nostrils.

  "I went out last night with some girls from work. One of them's getting married next weekend. We went out for some drinks no, I don't drink alcohol, but I can't tell them it's for my belief. I have to tell a little lie, I say I don't drink for a medical condition. They've told me to be like everyone else, and that way I can better serve my Faith and the revolution of Iran. I have to use women's soap and eau-de-toilette if I'm to be like everyone else. They tell me that God forgives little lies."

  Because of the persecution of his Faith, throughout history, her Faith, it was acceptable for the Shi'a peoples to tell the khod'eh, the half-truth, in defence of the true religion.. . He believed, as did his wife, so Barzin told him, that the place for a woman was in the home and rearing children. She would be in their home, cleaning it, always cleaning it because they had no children to divert her. His mother had been different: dressed in good he jab she had come out of her home to help his father on his sick visits. His wife, Barzin, only undressed in his presence if the room were darkened.

  When she changed the gears, her body shook and her breasts swung loosely, and he had flushed the most when he had seen the cherrystone shape of her nipple he would have picked the fruit from a tree in the Albourz hills and sucked it, turned the stone on his tongue and cleaned it, then spat it out and then he stared straight ahead at the spinning wheels of the vehicle in front, and the grinning idiot face of a child in the vehicle's back window.

  She knew.

  "I had the call, I was out of my room in four minutes.

  I told you, I didn't have the chance to dress properly, decently. My name's Farida Yasmin."

  It was said that the Imam Khomeini, on the drive from his French home in the village of Neauphle-le-Chateau to the airport at orly for his flight home and the triumphal return, had never looked from his car's windows on to the decadence of the Parisian streets, had kept his head lowered to avoid the sight of impurity.

  "You've seen the man's photograph, Perry's? Of course, you have. I took it. You've seen the picture of his house? Yes? I took that as well. I think I'm to be trusted."

  He jolted. Under the law that was the basis of the state, the sharia, the testimony of a woman was worth half that of a man. They were not of half value, the crucial photographs of the man and his house. She was beside him and her thighs were bare and her breasts bounced under a thin sweater. It was written that exposure of the flesh 'without Islamic cover can invite foul looks from men and invite the devil's lusting'. He was dependent on her.

  She told him when she had seen the man and about his house. In the planning of an attack he had never before talked to a woman as his equal.

  She looked into his face, caught his eyes.

  "What happened to my friend, to Yusuf?"

  He said what he knew, and offered her no sympathy. She was strong. He had known so many who had died young, gone early to the Garden of Paradise. She looked ahead.

  "You talk well, Geoffrey," the man said.

  "You say the right things, but I am not yet convinced of your commitment to them."

  "We get a lot of sincerity these days," the woman said.

  "What we have to look for is when the sincerity is larded on like greasepaint."

  Markham swallowed hard.

  "Anyway, that's as maybe, that's our problem to evaluate, not yours.. ." The man hesitated, as if for effect.

  The interview had lasted twenty-five stilted minutes. He had used all the words that Vicky had written out for him, woven them into answers, and twice he had seen the little mocking glint in the woman 5 eyes.

  "Let's press on. Let's explore a bit more... We're not with the civil service, we're not able to rely on government's safety net,

  we're in a hard, commercial environment. A man works for a company, does all that it asks of him, takes his work home and frets over it, is a good colleague and a pimple-faced creep who knows nothing of anything hands him a letter of dismissal, without warning, and a second letter of redundancy terms, and he's cleared his desk and gone in ten minutes, on the scrap-heap for the rest of his life. Could you be the pimple-faced creep and do that?"

  The woman leaned forward.

  "Are you up to that, Geoffrey, screwing good employees' lives?"

  He took a deep breath.

  "I've done it, I know about it. It got to be pretty much every day. I was in Northern Ireland, I ran informers that's playing God. You make a mistake with an informer and you get him killed it's not just killed like in a road accident, it's torture first with electricity and beatings and cigarette burns, and then it's the terror of a kangaroo court and then it's a bin-bag over the head and a kick so that he goes on to his knees, and the last thing he hears is a weapon being cocked... They're not good guys, they're scum-bags, and they're so damned scared that they get to lean on you like you're a crutch. You know how it will end and they do, but you don't let them quit. It's expensive when they quit, and they're damn all use once they're out of it. So you keep your player in place, and you sleep at night and put him out of your mind. It's your work and you don't worry about it... I've played God with people who won't be getting a good pension and won't have only their ego bruised I've played God with men who'll have the back of their heads blown off and whose women will be spat on as the wife of a traitor and whose parents will disown them and whose kids will be ostracized for their lifetime. Does that answer your question?"

  The bleeper went at his waist. The woman stared at him, her mouth slack. The man looked blankly down at his notepad.

  He read the message: "MARKHAM/G RE JULIET 7 GET BACK SOONEST.

  FEN TON

  He said, "I'm sorry, I'm called back."

  The woman asked, "To play God?"

  The man looked up from his notepad.

  "You'll hear from us."

  Markham was out of the chair.

  "Thank you for your time."

  He left the office and waved down a taxi.

  He was dropped on the corner, and went into the building that had housed the last ten years of his life, past the desk where they had the hidden guns, through the security locks, and ran up the stairs with the laminated windows.

  He came to the door of Fenton's office and heard the American's quiet voice.

  "You'll have a week, and you should take this as the first day of the week. In a week either he'll have reached his target and goner or you will have him dead or in your cells. A week, not more, believe me. Your countdown, gentlemen, has started. And -can I say? you've had the luck of a break the like of which I've never had. The question is, can you use your luck?"

  The police, uniformed and wearing bullet-proof vests, their handguns on their hips but their machine-guns secreted in cases, filed into the cubicle area at the far end of the ward for the hospital's emergency cases. Away from the sight of the patients, close to the bed, they unpacked the cases, produced and loaded their machine-guns. The nurses came and went, checking the purring equipment and dials on the rack beside the bed, and glanced at them with raw distaste. They found chairs, and settled in. Their role, the guns across their laps, was simple. The problem was away down the corridor where the detectives met the duty physician and the arguments began.

  He turned his head and saw the cottage with the for-sale sign, and thought what it would cost to buy and repair. It was the sort of home that Lily would have loved, and the village was the sort of place where the boys would have flourished. But it was an empty thought because his job was in London, and it was beyond the bounds of possibility that he could have afforded it. It was the sort of place that some high-flying bastard out of London bought as a second home, for occasional weekends, and they were the people he detested.

  They were out of the village, and soon into the narrow roads. Davies had the map on his knee. Perry drove.

  If there was just the one protection officer, the principal always drove. He had jerked his coat back so that the butt of the Glock was clear for his hand to re
ach. He had the road-map open and on it were marked the regional hospital, fifty-two miles away, and the two local hospitals with Casualty and Emergency, twenty-four and thirty-one miles away; by now all of them would have been discreetly requested to hold plasma stocks of the principal's blood group. Also on the map were airforce bases to the north and the south-west, and a telephone exchange in the destination area; all designated as safe areas of refuge.

  "It's nice countryside it's fabulous, isn't it?"

  "Yes, it is."

  Bill Davies knew the countryside round the Prime Minister's bolt-hole, Chequers, and round the Oxfordshire home of a onetime Northern Ireland minister, round the estate of a Saudi fat-cat, and the countryside round Windsor Great Park where the Jordanian king had a mansion. He knew about the countryside and loathed it. He called it a hostile environment.

  They'd come out of the village on the one long, straight road and were now in the close, high-hedged lanes. His eyes were on the hedges, on the ditches, on the concreted culvert entries, on the trees back from the lanes. It was the nature of the job, and he regarded himself as professional and dedicated to it, that the warning time might be two seconds or three, and the principal wasn't trained to drive, wouldn't have known how to perform the bootlegger turn, wouldn't have known how to get to maximum speed. He'd half frozen just before the last junction, his hand hovering over the Glock, when they'd come to a Transit van half filling the road with the bonnet up and a man working on the engine. They'd had to slow almost to a stop before passing it. His eyes raked ahead.

  "You get out into the countryside much, with your family?"

  "Not often."

  "You've got a family?"

  "Yes."

  "Boys, girls, both?"

  "Boys."

  "What age are they?"

  "If you don't mind, Mr. Perry..."

  He stared through the windscreen. He should have cleaned it. They all wanted to talk, to unburden themselves with their protection officer and it was the route to disaster. He was not tasked to offer a sympathetic ear.

  Ahead, there were men and warning bollards and a heap of excavated road tarmac. The road was clear beyond, but one of the workmen held the stop sign facing them. Perry was slowing, but

  Davies shouted for him to keep going and they went through to a volley of rich local obscenities. Friends fell Out, and the rule was to keep it as a job. The tools of the job were the H&K in its case with the magazine attached, at his feet, and the Glock on his hip. He loved the job. The pity was he might just love the job more than he loved Lily.

  "How long have you been at it, doing this?"

  "Quite a time."

  "Good shot, are you?"

  "Adequate."

  "Don't you have to be better than adequate?"

  "It's about planning, Mr. Perry, boring planning. Planning is the best defence against attack if there is an attack then the planning has failed."

  "What do you know about the Iranians?"

  "Enough to respect them."

  It was final, and dismissive with it. What he knew, and wouldn't say, was that the Iranians were a different league from the Provos.

  The Provos would back off from a guarded target, find something softer. He had studied the case histories of Iranian hits: not many killers made it away, for too many the reward was martyrdom. The message from the case histories would make any conscientious bodyguard nervous. He read all the detail he could find on political killing. It was his job.

  They were outside a school, and in a line of cars waiting at the gate. It was a school like any other, an old brick turn-of-the-century building and a mass of raised prefabricated huts, like the school his children went to.

  Parents were milling at the gate and inside the playground where kids ran and screamed, skipped and swarmed after a football. If he could, he went to Donald and Brian's school to pick them up, but it still wasn't often enough.

  "Am I allowed to go and get them?"

  "Don't see why not."

  Sarcasm, like that was his defence.

  "You don't think I'll be shot?"

  "Shouldn't think so."

  He could have told him, but didn't, that the Irish were gold medal standard at killing off-duty policemen, prison warders and magistrates on the church steps or in hospital wards, or at the school gate. They had no qualms about blasting a man when he wasn't taking the necessary precautions.

  He said he would come with Perry, into the asphalt playground, that they must lock the car because of the H&K, that he must have Perry and the car in his sight at all times.

  They walked through the gate. The loose change clinked in his suit-jacket pocket. Beneath it the holster was tight against his upper thigh. He hung back and watched his principal before turning twice, in complete circles, to observe the faces of the mothers and fathers, the grandparents, the kids chasing the football. He saw the way that men and women came to his principal, slapped his back, shook his hand and laughed with him. The other boy, the one they were getting home, stood by the principal. They came round Perry like they were flies to jam and he heard the roar of the laughter.

  A kid, would have been the same age as his Brian, kicked the football high in the air.

  The swarm followed the spiralling ball.

  He'd ring that night, find out how Donald's game had gone, when he'd done the shift with Juliet Seven.

  The ball landed and bounced. The bounce would take the ball over the playground fence, out into the road and the traffic.

  He jumped. It was his instinct to keep a bobbing, chased ball out of the traffic. He was grinning at his own athleticism, his back arched with the leap, his fingertips pushing the ball back towards the pack of kids. There was the lightness, emptiness, at his waist.

  The gun, the 9mm Glock pistol, fell from the waist holster. As he landed he snatched for it. It was beyond his grasp. It fell away from him. The gun clattered on the asphalt playground, cartwheeled, and came to rest away from the grope of his hands. The kids' shouts and yells died and the black shape of the Glock lay on the asphalt beside the white-painted lines of a net ball court.

  The parents' laughter and talk withered. He walked forward, half a dozen paces. He saw the rolling, abandoned football and the young, old, numbed faces. He picked up the gun, and the screaming started. He saw the parents grabbing kids, going down on to the asphalt and sheltering them with their bodies, hugging them, guarding them. He held the gun in his hand, the tool of his job, and did not know what he should say. Perry stared at him, blank and uncomprehending. A great space was widening around him. Through a glass window, he saw the grey, lined face of the head4eacher as she lifted the telephone. He put the gun into his waist holster.

  The first cars were already charging away from the school gate. He took a deep breath, then strode towards the school building and the sign for the head-teacher's room.

  It took fifteen minutes to sort it. He showed his warrant card, made a telephone call to turn back armed-response vehicles and another to verify his identity for the head-teacher. His explanation to her of his principal's need for police protection was economical and bland.

  He walked back across the empty playground.

  They were all gone, his principal's friends and their children.

  He slipped down into the front passenger seat.

  Davies said stiffly, "I owe you an apology, Mr. Perry. That was unforgivable, unprofessional. You are perfectly entitled to ring my guvnor to request a personnel change."

  "But I'm a beggar, Bill, so I can't be a chooser. What I'd get might be worse than you." The principal laughed, with a hollowed echo.

  "Thank you. If you don't mind, it's Mr. Davies.. . I don't know what the consequences will be."

  "None.." forgotten.. . just a little dose of excitement. I have to tell you, I saw the gun. The gun was real, but it's the only part of anything that seems believable."

  "It's all real, Mr. Perry, and you shouldn't forget that."

  The mobile telephone we
nt in his inside pocket. Could Bill Davies talk? No. When could he talk? In fifteen minutes. Would he call back soonest, when he could talk? In the guttering light they drove back to the village.

  It was the second time he had asked the distance to the village she said it was six and a half kilometres by road. He told her to stop, then told her when he would see her again at this precise place. He took her map, large-scale at four centimetres to a kilo metre and the sausage bag. There were trees close to the road and he went for them. He did not look back and he did not wave. Farida Yasmin Jones wondered what she would have to do to earn his trust and watched him until the trees hid him.

  Chapter Seven.

  "Well, are you...?"

  "God, it's not that simple."

  "It's black and white... Are you going?"

  "I'm trying to be sensible."

  "Are you staying?"

  "I said I wasn't going, I said I was staying."

  "What, then, is the problem?"

  The boy was upstairs. Davies had gone and Blake was in the car outside. They had come home. Perry had told Meryl that the policeman had dropped his gun in the playground. They had been responsible for a moment of blue panic. That was one problem. Davies had come to the front door fifteen minutes later with another problem.

  "I want to stay."

  "So stay."

  "I don't want to go."

  "So don't go."

  "But I'm not told anything."

  "Neither am I."

  Davies had stood on the step. She would have seen the technique he used. He stood on the step, his body blocking the open doorway and he had motioned Perry to stand back in the hallway. He had reached forward to the switch and turned off the hall light. Perry had been in the shadow, she behind him, their bodies protected by the policeman's. Davies had told them, calm and businesslike, that again he was offering his apologies for what had happened in the playground and repeated that Mr. Perry was perfectly entitled to request a change in personnel, and Perry had shaken his head.

  Then the second problem was explained. Like a doctor at a bedside with a bad diagnosis to deliver, clearly and concisely, Davies had said that there was an upgrade in the threat-assessment level. The property was to be protected by armed uniformed officers, that premises for them would be delivered in the morning, that there would be additional personnel, mobile, assigned to the village. Davies hadn't said it, it was in his face, but they were going up the tough road; the easy road was to pack the suitcases. They had paced around the kitchen and worried at the problem. They had broken off the talk to eat with the boy before sending him upstairs, and starting at it again.