Fenton had listened and toyed unhappily with his lettuce leaves, probably left over from the previous week's catering. They had a table to themselves. He had attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, not university, and when his eyes wandered to the students sitting around them, he'd felt a sense of disgust.
"You have made a growth industry in the study of the Islamic faith, but the work is shallow. You seek to vilify Iran, to cast that great nation and its people in a mould of the "medieval"~ I tell you, Mr. Fenton, where there is the Sharia, the law of Islam, you would find it safe to walk in the streets. It is a code of fairness, charity and decency. Yes, there is a death sentence. Yes, there is very occasional amputation and the flogging of offenders but only after the most rigorous examination of the felon by the courts. I venture to say that there are many in the United Kingdom, so-called Christians, who yearn for the punishment of the guilty. But to suggest as you do, Mr. Fenton, that the legally elected government of Iran would seek clandestine vengeance abroad is just another example of a warped and closed mind. Let me tell you if a small incident or a trivial event occurred, if you made from it a fraudulent link with Iran, if you danced to the American tune, if you made lying public statements, then the consequences could be most grave. Do you dance to that tune, Mr. Fenton? Are you acting now as a lackey to those Islamophobic elements of the American establishment who wish to block the return of more normal relationships between Iran and the United States? A false and deceitful move would lead, Mr. Fenton, to the most desperate of consequences. Of course, I do not threaten you but I warn that your irrelevant and decadent country would be at war with a billion Muslims throughout the world. I do not think you would wish that."
So, earnestly, at the end of a meal that left him hungry, he had fled the canteen.
With a deep sigh, Fenton switched off the tape-recorder he had worn under his jacket. The two roads split ahead of him, and the directions they took were opposite and irreconcilable.
Was Islamic Iran a force for good, which he was too bigoted to appreciate, or a force for evil, which made a sewer of the streets of his country? He did not know which road led to truth. What he did know was that Abigail Fenton had punished him for her missed lunch with the price of a new handbag, a dress and a matching twin-set.
He rang Cox in the country, and hoped he was disturbing him. He told him what he had learned. Whichever way they twisted was fraught with problems. Cox said his confidence in Fenton's judgement was, as always, total. He'd always thought of Cox as a time-serving, networking fool; now he began to doubt that opinion.
He wandered towards Cathy Parker.
"I'm confused, Cathy."
"Goes with the rank, Harry."
"I don't know whether it's real can't quite bring myself to believe it the threat."
"Best, Harry, as the actress said to the bishop, just to lie back and enjoy the ride. Do you want to be told?"
"If it'll blow some clarity into a fogged old mind..."
"Bollocks, you're loving every minute of it."
He grinned. She laughed and started to map it out, what they had. A man had come in from the sea. A car had crashed, the man had moved on. An associate was missing from home but photographs had been found of a target and a location. Between each point she rapped her pen on the desk, as if to alert him, then her face lightened.
"I've found a marriage, 1957. The daughter of a British oil engineer to an Iranian doctor. There's a cousin down in Somerset..."
"What'll that give you?"
"Who knows? Might give me a face. I don't like to see you confused. Confusion is like haemorrhoids, Harry, embarrassing for you and therefore bloody unpleasant for the rest of us. I'm making it my business, by hand, to swab away your confusion."
"Do you believe in it, the threat?"
"I'd be a right idiot if I didn't."
"And the tethered goat, do you believe in that?"
She laughed into his face.
"I'm just the bottle washer it's your responsibility, Harry, not mine. You volunteered."
The blue Fiat 127 was behind a hedge, hidden from the road. Brought up in the provinces by a family without military or criminal links, she had compensated for her lack of experience in such areas by the simple application of common sense. Using basic logic she had thought through each of her moves. The car was the right colour to avoid attention; the station, with commuters not coming back from London until the middle evening, had been the right place to steal it from. Her own car was abandoned in woods: she had unscrewed the number-plates and buried them under fallen leaves. It would be days or weeks before it was found, reported. She had done each thing sensibly, and even if he had wanted to be could not have criticized what she had done.
She sat in the car, in the silence, in the dark, and her mind wafted between her two contrary worlds: Farida Yasmin or Gladys Eva. He would now be making the final checks on his rifle and would be smearing mud on his face. She shuddered, and tried to pray to his God, her God, to protect him. When she tried to pray, she was Farida Yasmin Jones. The man was guarded. Under her sweater, she was running her fingers over the skin of her stomach, as he had caressed the bird's feathers, as she had stroked his hair. The man was guarded with guns. It was the first moment that she had considered the realities of the guards, the guns. She thought of him shot, bleeding. As her fingers moved faster, pressed harder, she was Gladys Eva Jones. She thought of herself, waiting and alone. She thought of the boots on his neck where her fingers had been, and the pools of blood. Soon, he would be moving off, tracking beside the marshes towards the lights of the village.
Geoff Markham had crossed the orbital motorway and was coming through the dirty sprawl of east London's streets. Littelbaum had slept on the open road but the jerking drive through the traffic had wakened him, and he talked.
"Pathetic, really, a sign of age, that I cannot climb a narrow staircase without a palpitation. I'm fine now, I'm warm, and I've had my necessary sleep. I owe you an explanation why a hundred miles driving out of London, a quick climb of the church tower, and a hundred miles drive back has not been a waste of your time."
Markham stared into the weaving mass of cars, vans and lorries, in heavy concentration.
"I am not a criminologist, or an academic, most certainly not a clinical psychologist. I detest those shrinks who charge fat fees for profiling. I am simply, Mr. Markham, an ageing soldier of the Bureau. I have been in Tehran and Saudi Arabia for the last twenty years of my working life. I said, because I know those places and those people, I could smell him. It's not vanity, it's the truth."
Markham drove past the brightly lit shop windows festooned with bargain stickers and kept his silence. He had noted that not a word of sympathy had been expressed by the American for Frank Perry and his family, as if there were no room in the job for compassion.
"My tools of trade, Mr. Markham, are intuition and experience and I value them equally. Actually, there is little that's complicated. We are told he is late thirties. He would have been eighteen or nineteen years old when the Ayatollah returned from exile. Then comes the war with Iraq. The military are not trusted, the principal fighting is given to the fanatical but untrained youth of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They fought with a quite extraordinary and humbling innovative ness and dedication. They made up the rule books of combat as they went along. Any man, given the responsibility for a mission of this importance or the importance of the bombings in Riyadh or Dhahran, would have come through that route."
He saw the men who carried the clusters of shopping-bags and the women who pushed prams, and the voice in his ear dripped the story of a world they would not have comprehended. Markham would be joining the great uncomprehending masses because he did not believe he had the ability to affect events.
"Most of life is a linked chain. Think about it the Iranians could not match the quality of the Iraqi weaponry that had been provided by the Western powers. They had to learn to improvise and fight where that hardware was l
east effective. They chose the most unpromising ground. You won't have heard of these battles, Mr. Markham, but they were of primitive ferocity. Fish Lake and the Jasmin Canal, the Haur-al-Hawizeh marshes, the Shatt-al-Arab waterway and the Faw peninsula. The battleground for the best of the Revolutionary Guard Corps was water and reed-banks. By choosing to fight on such hostile and difficult territory, they nullified the sophisticated equipment of their enemy, and that's why I had to climb to the highest point, the vantage-position. I am not ashamed to say it, I was on my hands and my knees, petrified. I surveyed the battleground, and all I could see was water and marshes. It's where he would be, it is why I said it was like I could smell him... Don't waste fuel by sending up helicopters with infrared, the Iraqis did that, and don't waste people's time by commissioning aerial image-intensified photography, they did that as well. He will be hiding there and an army wouldn't find him. But he has to come out, Mr. Markham, and then, God willing, you shoot him."
One day, before the end of the week, he would tell Littelbaum,
insist on it, that he was Geoff, that he was a colleague and not a stranger. He didn't know whether the formality of the American was old-world Iowa courtesy, or the patronizing talk of a veteran to a youngster. But, as the bright lights of the city reflected up into his eyes from the roadway, he listened to every word and believed them. He thought the American brought as much soul to the business as he did when he played a board game with Vicky. It was, actually, distasteful, and near to being disgusting.
"You are a polite man, Mr. Markham. You haven't interrupted my rambling and polite enough to humour me by driving slowly. But if you had been less polite you would have interrupted to ask the question that is most pertinent. What sort of man is he? Let me tell you, he is a child of the revolution. When you were chasing girls, Mr. Markham, he would have been on the barricades facing the bullets of the Shah's Army. When you were studying at college, he would have been learning to survive against heavy artillery barrages and mustard-gas bombing. When you were playing at war in Ireland, he was killing with expertise in the harsh environment of Saudi Arabia... He will be a man who has never known youth, gaiety and mischief, as you have. He will be a man without love."
Ahead of them was the Thames House building, and the light was going over the river.
"It's been a grand day. I've said all I can my part in this is about played out. Would the Tower of London be open tomorrow? My Esther would be properly upset if I didn't send her some photographs of London history. There's not a lot of history in west Iowa.. . I won't be going down there again, not till it's finished. I don't believe in second-guessing the experts. It's in their hands now, the people with the guns. Remember what I said, a man without love, a man who won't walk away... I'll go down again if there's a body to view. I'd like that, if it can be done inside my schedule."
Markham swung the car down into the basement car-park. He turned off the ignition and stared to the front, before turning to face Littelbaum.
"Can I ask something, no, several things?" he said briskly.
"Haven't I given you the chance? I'm sorry. Fire away."
"It may sound like an idiotic question, Mr. Littelbaum, but do you think you change anything? Do you believe you do anything that's honourable and worthwhile? Do you care about people? Have you ever considered walking away and picking up work where there's something finite at the end? Is it a decent job?"
Markham looked into the American's old eyes and saw the light flash in them.
"That tells me you're thinking of bugging out.. . It's not for me to offer persuasion either way, but I don't think you're the sort to drop out. I've been through the bad times when it's just filing paper and getting a cold ass in a surveillance stake-out, and there's no big picture to tell me it's worthwhile. I've done that. I hung on in there. I got a grip and I hauled myself up, and I thought whining was poor sport. I believe in what I do. I think I serve my country's interests. There's plenty of places back where I come from that have banks and real-estate offices and insurance companies where I could have gotten work and I think it would have been slow death. But I'm a selfish man and I love what I do, and I aim to keep doing it.. . If they threw me out tomorrow I might just go find a veterinary surgeon and ask him to put me down. I can't think, Mr. Markham, of a better thing that a man can do than to serve his country and not have it bother him that no one knows his name and no one will ever learn what he did."
Littelbaum had reached for the door-handle.
Markham said, "Thank you.
"I've met your principal. I was at the meetings that evaluated the information he gave. He's a tough, proud, able man. Don't make a judgement on me because I'm not modern and emotionally incontinent. I hope, sincerely, he makes it through this. But, I'm honest with you, my country's interests are paramount to me. You can't go soft on this. I have to tell you, I have very little respect for quitters."
Only later were they able to put together the sequence of events.
They were all trained men, but their memories were hazy and fuddled. On one thing, they were all agreed, Dave Paget, Joe Rankin, Leo Blake and Bill Davies, the speed with which it happened, so fucking fast.
Dave Paget and Joe Rankin sat in the Wendy house, the door shut tight against the cold. It was fifteen minutes to the end of the twelve-hour shift. They were both, wouldn't have admitted it, knackered. When they cared to look at it, the television screen alternated between the view of the back garden and the view of the front approach to the house; on the console, the lights indicating the state of the sensor beams were steady on green. Joe Paget was finishing the last of the sandwiches, and muttering about where they would go to eat, where they'd find a new pub because last night's meal had been a bloody disaster. Dave Rankin flipped the pages of two magazines simultaneously, survival kit and holidays, talking to himself about thermal socks and about which month had the best weather in Bournemouth and Eastbourne, was engaged in a mindless interior dialogue. A red light on the console bleeped, indicating that a sensor beam was broken at the bottom end of the garden. Joe Paget said it was that bloody fox again, and Dave Rankin said that Bournemouth was as good as Eastbourne if it was out of season. Something moved, on the screen, at the far end of the garden... Leo Blake tried to slip quietly past the sitting-room door of the B and B but was ambushed by Mrs. Fairbrother. How long were they intending to stay? They were not the sort of trade she was used to. Did he realize how inconvenient it was to have him sleeping in their house through the day? She had a shrill, moneyed voice, and the bark hadn't been lost with the change in fortunes. He said that he didn't know, ducked past her and hurried out to his car... Bill Davies was reading his newspaper in the dining room, the radio and the Heckler & Koch resting on the blanket covering the table. He was warm, had an electric fire on two bars, and clean. Meryl had ironed his shirt, his underwear and his socks, and had attempted to press the creases out of his suit. Only his shoes were still damp and they were filled with the sports section of his newspaper. He had his feet up on the table. The television was on next door, in the living room, and they were all there. He glanced down at his watch; Blake would be relieving him in five or six minutes. His radio crackled to life, jolting him from the newspaper... Dave Paget and Joe Rankin were both numbed into silence. The first call out to the house was the warning, now they stared at the screen and were checking for the confirmation. Paget was very pale, Rankin was sweating. Their machine-guns were hooked over their necks and shoulders. Red lights began to replace green lights on the console. Twice the camera caught a movement, and twice lost it somewhere down at the bottom of the garden, where the shrubs were and the greenhouse. It wasn't like Hogan's Alley and it had fuck-all, sweet fucking nothing, to do with the shooting range. What the hell should they do? Quit the Wendy house? Crab towards the end of the garden where the beams were broken and the movement showed? Shout? Activate the bloody floodlights? Run for the house? There was no flicking instructor to tell them what to do. They saw him on the scre
en. He was coming up the side of the garden, a blurred white figure. They saw the rifle, outlined against a grey furred background, then it was gone. Paget swore, and Rankin gave the confirmation into the radio.
It might have been the rain, and the maintenance on the pool cars was worse than last year when it had been worse than the year before, but it took Leo Blake an age to start the damned engine. He sat in his car and revved, long enough for the curtain behind him to part, and he saw Mrs. Fairbrother scowling at him. Bloody car, and he'd have some bloody words for the maintenance people... Bill Davies burst the door open into the living room. The advertisements were playing between the soaps. The machine-gun dangled free on its strap and thudded against his body. He was shouting. They sat frozen. Perry was in his chair holding his coffee mug, Meryl had her needlework on her lap, Stephen was on the floor with his computer game. He was shouting, and they did not respond, and he was shouting louder. He grabbed his principal and hauled him up from the chair and the coffee flew in the air and down to the carpet. He was dragging his principal, helpless, like a sack of sand, out into the hall. The radio was blasting in his earpiece, and she hadn't come and neither had the kid. He snatched open the door of the cupboard under the staircase and pitched his principal inside. Perry cannoned against the vacuum cleaner, the brooms, the boots, the kid's old push chair and the junk. He went back, shouldn't have done, for her and the kid, broke the drill they practised. The principal should have been his only priority. He caught her arm and the kid's wrist she was screaming, and the kid and he threw them in the cupboard against his principal. He crouched by the door. God, if they would just stop screaming... Joe Paget stayed at the console and watched the screen. Dave Rankin ducked out of the Wendy house, launched himself on to the lawn, rolled, then crawled towards the kitchen door and the cover of the water-butt. Each had the selector off safety, had gone to single-shot, each had one in the breach, each had the finger on the trigger guard. Joe Paget told Dave Rankin, face microphone to earpiece, that the Tango was out of the beams, off camera. Where was the bastard? Where the fuck was he?... Leo Blake was going down the drive when he switched on the radio. He heard the chaos on the net, and the gravel spewed out from under his ....... Bill Davies had his principal buried deep in the cupboard and the kid was in there behind him. But the woman was still screaming. He held her, he had to. With one hand he aimed his machine-gun at the front door, with the other hand he clutched her to him. He held her against his chest to stifle the screaming, and she sobbed hopelessly... Joe Paget said that the Tango had gone up the side of the house, would be on the neighbour's patch, and the front was not covered. Dave Rankin swore, said he'd try to cover the front. His breath was heaving and, to Joe Paget, he was damn bloody close to going incoherent. Coming across him and Dave Rankin was Bill Davies crying out for cover at the front, and the woman's sobs were across everything. And the unmarked car at the main road was playing bolshie and saying they weren't supposed to move off station, and the unmarked car that was cruising was more than two minutes... Leo Blake came round the corner by the village hall and, with the green ahead of him, had to swerve to miss an old man with a terrier. Bill Davies heard the shoulder hammer into the front door where there was a new lock and an old bolt, and held his hand over her mouth and tried to muffle the sobbing that would pinpoint for the Tango where they were. The door sagged... ( .. Dave Rankin fell into the cold frame at the side of the house, crashed through the glass, sprawled and lost the momentum of his charge... Leo Blake drove straight across the grass of the green, wheels spinning, skidding, hit a young tree and flattened it with its post. He swung his wheel and had the front of the house in his full lights, and saw him... Bill Davies heard the door splintering... For a flickering moment, Joe Paget saw him again, white against grey, then lost him as the car's lights blacked out his screen... Leo Blake had the Tango in his lights. He could see the man's camouflage combat gear, his mud-smeared face, and the assault rifle. The man, as if it was his final desperate effort, threw his weight against the door. Blake shared the Heckler & Koch with Davies, and now only had the Glock in a shoulder holster. He'd forgotten it, its presence there was clean out of his mind. He dazzled the Tango with his lights. The Tango had the rifle up, aiming towards the car, but couldn't see through the lights. Blake knew the rifle, had fired the same weapon on the range, knew its killing power. He thought his last best chance was to charge the man with the lights on full beam. The Tango thrust an arm over his blinded eyes, then ran. The man sprinted, full stride, along the track in front of the houses. There was a moment when the back of the Tango was in front of the car, and then the man tried to sidestep towards the cover of a hedge. Clutching the wheel, Leo Blake felt the jolt as he clipped the Tango, and he was past him. The car surged on, spun, turned the full circle. Leo Blake saw, lying on the grass, the Kalashnikov. He switched off the engine. He tried to be calm, to report what he had done, what he had seen..
A Line in the Sand Page 25
