A Line in the Sand

by Gerald Seymour

  "What do they know?"

  "They haven't told me."

  "Why haven't they told you?"

  "They don't explain. They never explain."

  "What does it mean?"

  His voice rose.

  "If you want to go, go."

  "I don't want to go.

  "Can we, then, leave it?"

  "I'm just frightened. I'm frightened because we can't even talk about it. Is this our best effort at conversation?"

  "Everything I know I've told you. Let's drop it."

  "What sort of life " "Better than running out of suitcases. It's home. It's our place. It's among our friends. So leave it or go."

  He turned on the television. It was a quiz game and the audience bayed encouragement at the contestants going after giveaway money.

  Bitterly, Perry wondered how many of them could have answered real questions. Where was Iran? What was the government of Iran? What was WMD? What was the requirement of mixing machines in the programme for the development of chemical-agent warheads, and the requirement in the programme for the development of ballistic missiles? What did they do with a fucking spy in Iran?

  The telephone rang. The sound was suppressed by the shrieking of the studio audience. She heard it and jolted, but he didn't stir from his chair. He watched the ecstatic faces of the audience. The telephone rang a long time before she weakened and went to answer it.

  She went into the kitchen, and it was silent.

  He could not hear her voice.

  He hated the game show, the moronic questions, the cacophony of applause.

  The curtains were drawn, as the policeman had said they should be. He'd come into the darkened room and groped in the blackness towards the window and drawn the curtains, then groped back towards the standard lamp and switched it on. Before, they would not have drawn the curtains. Only their home tonight would have the curtains drawn. The drawn curtains separated them from the village, their neighbours and friends. Meryl had said that in the morning she would buy the lengths of net from which to make more curtains, and the boy had been told he was not to stand behind windows when the curtains weren't drawn, where he could be seen.

  She came back into the room. She was biting her lower lip. She was pale.

  She shouted, "Can't you turn that puerile bloody noise off?" He hit the mute button on the remote.

  "Who was it?"

  "One of your friends."

  "Who?"

  "Emma Carstairs."

  "What did she want?"

  She spoke deliberately, but without emotion and without feeling.

  "Emma has dropped out of the school-run with us. We won't be taking Sam, she won't be taking Stephen. Emma won't be coming to our house again, and Sam won't. It's dangerous to come to our house, your friend said, and she's not prepared to put Sam at risk."

  "That's ridiculous." He pushed himself up from the chair.

  "It's what she said."

  He blustered, "I'll speak to her, and Barry."

  She blocked his way.

  "She said she wouldn't speak to you. She said her decision was final. She said that if you rang her back she would put the phone down on you.

  "The bloody cow."

  "She said..."

  "What did she say.

  "She said that it was selfish of us to expose others to danger, then she rang off."

  "She's the only one, we're popular here, you see.

  He heard, beyond the drawn curtain, a car's engine crawl by and wondered if it were the armed police. He felt the same chilly sweat as when he had come off the feeder flight and joined the emigration queue at Tehran for the international leg, as he had shuffled forward a small step at a time, dying to urinate, trying to appear unconcerned. He'd wondered then, as he did now, if the fear showed. The last times the sweat had soaked his shirt under his jacket as he had presented his passport at the desk. Behind the emigration official were always the penetrating eyes of the pasdar men, in their washed-thin uniforms, who leaned forward and stared in suspicion at the offered passport. When it was handed back, there was never a smile, no farewell joke, and he had walked away towards the departure lounge, his legs weak, fearing that they played with him and would let him go a few paces before the shout for him to come back. Each time as he'd slumped into the aircraft seat, before the engines gained power, before the steps were taken away, wondering whether they would allow him to settle before coming on board to heave him off, he'd felt the cold sweat, because he knew the fate of a spy in Iran.

  Meryl had gone to the kitchen, and he heard her start to wash up the saucepans.

  "Who's the P0?"

  "An SB sergeant, Davies."

  "He's useless. Who's on the other shift?"

  "A DC, Blake."

  "Next to useless. Who's in charge?"

  "Box 500."

  "Totally fucking useless bloody lights, get on through."

  Paget was driving the escort car, with Rankin beside him, through heavy traffic into the road junction as the lights changed to red. The prison van they followed had gone on, shouldn't have. The dozy beggar driving it should have checked his mirror, seen whether the escort car was clear to follow, but he hadn't. No bloody option for Paget but to break the red light and follow across the junction. Rankin hit the siren button and the cars coming at them across the junction from right and left were braking and swerving to avoid them, all except one. The car heading straight for them was a battered old Cavalier with a toothy, grey-haired black at the wheel. They were two, three seconds from a disabling, side-on collision.

  Rankin had his window down, the siren scream in his ears, and the H&K up. The gun was racked, bullet in the breach, and Rankin's thumb was resting on the lever at safe. As the escort team, they should have been right up behind the prison van. The guy in it was important, a drugs supplier and a bad bastard, on the daily run between the Old Bailey and the Brixton gaol remand block. He had the contacts and cash resources to buy a rescue bid, which was why armed police escorted him each day from his cell to the court and back. The bullet was in the breach, Paget and Rankin were not there for the ride, and they knew it.

  The old Cavalier was coming right for them, on target for the driver's door. If the bad bastard had bought a rescue, the copper-bottomed certainty was that the armed escort car would be isolated and rammed, taken out. Rankin was close enough to see, through the Cavalier's grimy windscreen, the gold teeth in the black's wide open mouth and the big mahogany eyes. Rankin's aim, held steady in the swaying escort car, was on the black's forehead. His thumb hardened on the safe lever.

  If he shot to kill the law was bloody vague. Section 3 of the Criminal Law Act, 1967, would back him if it were a genuine escape attempt and crucify him if it was only a traffic accident. They were on collision course and closing, and Paget was wrenching the wheel to avoid the old Cavalier, might succeed, might not. It'd take Rankin about half a second to depress the lever from safe and put a double tap, two bullets, through the man's forehead. He'd get a commendation if it was a rescue bid and a murder charge if it was not..~ And they were through, the junction cleared. Paget was ~~celeratmg like a mad idiot, wrong side of the road, to get back up behind the prison van, and in their wake, the old Cavalier had careered into a traffic bollard. The H&K was back on Rankin's lap.

  "Where were we, Joe?"

  No fast breathing, no taut hands, like it was a weekend run-out with the wife.

  "We were on about who was in charge, Dave Box "What I said, totally fucking useless. Who's the principal?"

  "Civilian, ordinary, an obstinate sod because they offered him the chance to bug out and he wouldn't."

  "What's the opposition?"

  'fran -he's up the mullahs~ noses.~ "That's bloody choice, that's not clever. When do we get there?"

  "Go down tonight, recce, take over in the morning from the half-arsed locals."

  They had left a minor traffic accident behind them and were comfortably cosied up behind the prison van. Constables
Joseph Paget and David Rankin were a team and inseparable. The driver, Paget, was a toadlike man, short and squat, bald with a thick Zapata moustache, and he had been changing the oil, checking the tyre pressures and vale ting the interior during the long wait at the court, while his colleague had been given the new assignment's briefing. With the H&K resting loose on his thighs, Rankin was a wafer-thin willow of a man with a brush of cropped dark hair, the smooth-skinned complexion of a child, and a moustache identical to his colleague's. Anyone meeting them for the first time and noting their language and gait would have believed they made conscious efforts to ape each other. They were both forty-nine years old, lived in adjacent streets in north London, went on holiday together with their wives, and grumbled with each other like a married couple. They would retire on the same day. Both Joe Paget and Dave Rankin were considered expert marksmen. But they'd never done it. Been on the courses, been endlessly on the range, been on every exercise, but never actually done it. For all of their training and with a combined total of thirty-two years' service with firearms, neither had fired for real.

  They saw the prison van go through the big gates of the gaol, and swung away.

  They stopped at a news agent and Paget went in. He bought three books of crossword puzzles, some soft-drink cans and two packets of sandwiches.

  When he had come back up from the canteen and his supper, but before he went to Fenton's room to collect the American, Geoff Markham took a single sheet of white paper and the roll of Sellotape from his desk. He fastened the paper to the outer face of his door, then scrawled on it, with a black marker pen, DAY ONE. The FBI man had said it would be over within a week. It was near to the end of the first day.

  The American had gone off with Markham, and the fax purred on. to Fenton's machine. He thought of Markham, like a worrying dog at the heels of a sheep as he'd rounded up the American, made sure he had his coat, gently chided him for fastening the buttons of his waistcoat out of kilter and done them correctly himself. Sheep were stupid and wilful, a bloody nuisance, and necessary... He read the fax from Special Branch operations.

  Incredible, an eighth wonder, remarkable. SB had done a deal with the local force. Must have been the angle of the moon, or some such crap, for SB and a local force to have done a deal. He would have predicted an on-going, entertaining dispute. SB would provide the close-protection detail and had liaised with 5019 of Scotland Yard for a static uniformed presence. The local force would offer armed vehicles to watch the single road into the godforsaken dead end and to cruise the area.

  There was, had to be, a little scorpion's sting. At the tail of the message: "SB, on own behalf and that of local force, will negotiate with Security Service for budget funding during operation concerning Juliet Seven, with view to reimbursement of expendihire." It was the bare, basic level for protection, and it would cost a goddamn fortune, and the resources bucket was not bottomless. He pondered how to limit the extent of the commitment. He put on his coat, picked up his briefcase and switched off the light in his room.

  The budget ruled his life and would until the day he filed his application to join the Portcullis Society, until he joined the rest of yesterday's spooks at the Christmas reunion, reminiscing and carping about days gone by. The commitment could not be endless,

  and he cursed the bloody obstinate fool who had refused a most reasonable offer of help in moving on.

  As if with a sudden afterthought, Fenton went back into his darkened room and dialled the home number of their duty solicitor.

  "Harry here, G Section, sorry to, call you this late, Francis. Can I just run this past you? We have a man who we consider to be an assassination target. We've suggested he disappears and we've offered the means to do that. He won't take our advice, says he's staying where he is. Does the law provide us with powers to remove him forcibly from his domicile, against his will, and place him in protective custody?... I see.. . Assault, civil liberties, yes... Not on, eh?.. . It's just that these things are so bloody expensive. Thanks for your time, Francis, and regards to Alison..."

  When he crossed the silent, deserted work area, Fenton saw the sheet of paper fastened to young Markham's door. DAY ONE.

  There had to be a containment on the commitment or the operation would bleed his section dry. He went out into the night.

  He had walked quickly along the hedgerows and into what the map called Sixteen-acre Wood and, from the safety of the trees, watched her drive away. With his back against a big trunk, Vahid Hossein used the last light of the day to study and memorize the map.

  When darkness came, and he could no longer see the trellised patterns of the upper branches, he had again moved forward.

  The map was in his mind. He took a length of dead branch from the ground, and used it as a blind man would. He had friends who were blinded in the marshes by mustard-gas shells, and he used the stick in the darkness as they used their white wands in daylight. The stick told him where were the desiccated lengths of wood that he could have stepped on, broken, left a trail. He walked carefully from Sixteen-acre Wood into Big Wood, then on to Common Wood. From Common Wood he skirted open fields and then he sheltered by a road, and watched and waited and listened. The caution was instinctive. He had crossed the road and passed what the map called a tumulus but did not know what the word meant, and then he slipped into Fen Covert.

  It was in Fen Covert that he first smelt the salt of the sea, and that he first heard the screaming.

  The smell was soft, the same as the tang off the Shatt-al-Arab waterway and at the Faw peninsula. Then the screaming had come again.

  At the Shatt-al-Arab and the Faw, when the salt scent had been in his nose, he had heard the screaming of a man wounded or gassed and left behind in the retreat. It had been his duty, then, inescapable, to go back into the marshes to find a man with a shrapnel-severed leg or with the gas droplets on his skin and in his eyes. He moved towards Fen Hill, cat-like and quiet, where the scent was stronger and the screaming louder. Ahead of him, dappled by thin moonlight, was the open expanse called Southmarsh on the map.

  At the slight slope of Fen Hill he angered himself. His mind had been on the scent and the screaming, and on the ribbon of lights that he estimated to be three kilometres away, when he set up a pheasant. If he had been among the marsh reeds of the Shatt-al Arab or the Faw, he would have given his enemy his position. It would have been a fatal error. He stopped, and stood motionless against a tree-trunk so that his body made no silhouette, smelling the sea and listening to the screaming.

  The distant sound of a car's horn, among the ribbon of lights, carried over the Southmarsh.

  He found the rabbit, its throat caught by a snare. He did not use his torch, but felt it first with his stick and then with his hand. His fingers brushed the fur of the animal's back and then came to the restraining wire. The movement of his fingers, caressing it, had quietened the terror of the rabbit. He held it by the fur at its neck and loosened the fine wire. He could not see it, could only sense it hanging supine from his grip.

  Because of his mistake in disturbing the pheasant, his anger and self-criticism, he felt a need to reassure himself. He killed the rabbit with a chop from the heel of his hand against its neck, one blow. He reset the snare and covered the ground where his feet had been with loose brushwood because at first light someone would come to check the snare. He pocketed the rabbit, dead and warm, and moved on.

  He came to rest in the heart of a thick tangle of bramble on the edge of Foxhole Covert. Not for hunger, but to purge himself of his mistake, he tore a leg from the rabbit carcass, pulled the skin from it, and ate it. He chewed on the raw sweet meat. It was important to him to feel no revulsion, to be strong. He chewed at the leg until his teeth scraped on the bone, then put the carcass beside him and the cleaned bone, and wiped the blood from his mouth. The act of killing and the eating gave him strength.

  The sausage bag was beside him. Through the bramble branches he saw the close-set lights across the Southmarsh. He had
the photograph of the house and the man. His hand, stained with the rabbit's blood, rested on the bag and sometimes found the shape of the launcher and sometimes the outline of the automatic rifle. He thought that it would be as easy for him to kill the man as it had been to chop the rabbit's neck and eat its leg.

  He tried, lying on his back in the silence, to think of his wife, Barzin, and of the home that they shared, and of the rooms they had decorated and of the possessions they had gathered together, and of the shy, darkened love between them, but the bare thighs of the girl in the car intruded and disturbed him. He could not shake from his mind the white skin of the girl and the outline of her breasts. Vahid Hossein tried, but he could not.

  The bell rang three times.

  Meryl said she would answer it. She said coldly that she didn't want to see him cowering in the shadow of the unit hallway again when the door was opened. The detectives had said they'd use three short blasts on the bell when they wanted entry to the house.

  Blake was at the door and seemed surprised that she opened it. His face fell a little when he saw her. She thought he would be one of those creatures who expected only to deal with the man of the house. Blake said, fumbling for the words, that there were more personnel down from London, uniformed, armed and static, and that they needed to look over the house. She thought him supercilious. He did not ask whether it was convenient, but stood aside for them as they came out of the darkness. They shouldered past her, as if she did not exist, and pushed the door shut behind them.