A Line in the Sand (5 page)

He we

and

t to recognize the possessions they had collected over four

seemed no

years. Frank Perry felt a stranger in his house. He had made

himself

three cups of instant coffee, sat with them, drunk them, then paced again.

e knew the reality of the threat.

Of course h

Whatever had been done

with the information he'd given in the briefings at the house behind all, he would have made a lasting enemy of the authorities in

Pall M

Iran. He'd assumed that the information had been used to block sales ent and chemicals from the factories of the old Eastern bloc

of equipm

and from Western Europe, from the works of his old company in Newbury.

ould have been expulsions of Iranian trade attach, the loss

There w

of

cious foreign-exchange resources, and the programme would

their pre

have

en delayed. Of course the threat was real, and he'd known it.

be

wever hard he had tried to put the pas

Ho

t behind him, it had stayed

with him. Sometimes it was a light zephyr wind on his face; sometimes it was a gale beating against his back. For four years, it had always been there. He had never been able, and God he'd tried, to escape the

past.

Through those years, Frank Perry had been waiting for them. He

t have put features to their faces, but he'd known they'd come

couldn'

in suits, with polished shoes, with a briefcase that wouldn't be

opened, with knowledge that would be only partially shared. They'd be

so recognizable and predictable. From the moment he'd seen them run from the car to his front door he'd known who they were and what they would tell him. He had rehearsed, more times than he could count, 26

what

would say to them, and had finally said it.

he

stopped pacing. He stared out of the window across the green.

He

His

sts were clenched. Everything he could see, the homes of his

fi

o

friends, the sh p, the hall and the pub at the end of the road, were as

normal and unremarkable as they had been before the men from London had

me. It was hard for Frank Perry to believe that anything had

co

changed, but it had and he knew it.

s fingernails pressed hard into the palms of his hands.

Hi

He would

precious to him.

fight to hold everything that was

a over the child's head and sheltered

Meryl Perry held the umbrell

m

hi

all the way from the car, through the ga

to the front

te, up the path

or.

do

The child shivered as they waited for the door to be opened.

The

Carstairs lived in a fine house on the main street, the only road

through the village. They both worked and had good positions; she would only just have reached home, and he wouldn't be back for an

hour.

The child bolted through the open door.

"You're a saint, Meryl. Thanks ever so."

"Don't worry about it, Emma, wouldn't let him get soaked."

"You wouldn't, others might. Look, you're drenched. You're a sweetheart."

"I'm doing tomorrow, and you're doing the rest of the week, right?"

"Actually, Meryl, I was going to ask you can you do all this week?

It's

a real bash at work, and Barry's in too early to take them. I'll

make

it up the week after."

"No problem, what friends are for."

"You're brilliant don't know what I'd do without you."

27

The door closed on her. Her ankles were sodden, her stockings

clammy.

She liked Emma Carstairs, and Frank was Barry's best friend. They had

good times together. The school-run to Halesworth had been their

first

touch point She hadn't had friends, not like Emma and Barry, before she had moved to the village. She hurried back to the car, the rain lashing her while she furled the umbrella. Off again, taking Donna home. She turned by the village hall, then went back past the church and up the lane to the council houses. She dropped Donna at her front gate.

"Thanks so much, Mrs. Perry."

"You'd have drowned at the bus stop."

"Vince didn't stop, nor that stuck-up Mary Wroughton."

"Leave off, Donna probably they didn't see you."

"I'd have ruined my hair, you're really kind."

"And I'll see you next week, when Frank and I are out."

"Always enjoy babysitting at yours, Mrs. Perry. Thanks again."

The

girl was out of the car and running for her front door. Her Stephen was scowling beside her, but he was eight and any child of that age objected to babysitters. She poked him, he put his tongue out at

her,

and they both laughed. He'd had behavioural problems in the city, but

not since they had moved to the village; the best thing she could

have

done for Stephen was bring him here. She drove back into the village.

no cars in front of Mrs.

There were

Fairbrother's, no guests checked

in. Past the Martindales' pub, too early to be open. Vince's van was

outside his terraced house, strange that he hadn't seen Donna at the bus stop. Dominic Evans, he was always nice to her, was running back into his shop with the ice-cream sign, probably going to shut up

early,

he was always helpful, and Euan. She parked as close as possible

to

their front gate and Stephen scampered for the door. Peggy's bicycle 28

kew against the Wroughtons' garage door. Meryl was locking

was as

her

brella perched over her head, as Peggy came down the

car, um

Wroughtons'

path.

old on."

"Meryl, h

Peggy."

"Yes,

at typing for you you said you would?"

"I've th

f course I did."

"O

or the Red Cross and the Wildlife."

"F

"No problem."

you enough, don't know what I did before you came.

"Can't thank

Oh,

Meryl, you couldn't manage the Institute's minutes?

got an

Fanny's

ful cold I think there's a lot of it about."

aw

Meryl."

"Thanks,

d get on home, Peggy.

"You shoul

You look like a hose has been turned

on you."

"I tell you, Meryl, those people seeing Frank when you were out they ght through a puddle, could have avoided it. I used the

drove ri

F-word

d all. Quite made my day, using the F-word."

an

left the door open and the rain was driving on to the

Stephen had

hall

les.

ti

She took off her coat and shook it hard outside. She called,

"Frank, we're home."

"I'm in the kitchen."

There was no light on downstairs. Stephen would have gone straight to

his room, for his books and his toys. She went into the kitchen.

He

sat at the kitchen table, but it was too dark for her to see his

face.

29

ight, love?"

"You all r

."

"Fine

y day?"

"Had a bus

"No."

isitors?"

"V

visitors."

"No, no

was the first time in the fou

It

r years she had known him that she

could have proved he had lied. She said she would make a pot of tea, witched on the light.

and s

a cat would have been too easy, and beating his balding head

Kicking

um

against a wall would have been poor satisfaction. Littelba

wondered

new in Audobon, west Iowa, the good, solidly ignorant folk,

if they k

as

ey scratched a living and paid taxes, where their sweat money went.

th

Did they know in California or South Carolina where it ended? In

Texas? In Montana? If it were not for the tax money, Saddam Hussein might have been in Dhahran and the ayatollahs might have made it to

. And they treated him, the representative of those

Riyadh

tax-payers,

og's turd, but he kept smiling. All day he had waited at

like a d

the

headquarters of General Intelligence, and been shuffled

guarded

between

air-conditioned offices.

various

They offered him fruit juice and

cake, polite talk, and he had achieved nothing.

The prisoner for Littelbaum he was a number, 87/41 had most probably below him all through that day, in the basement holding cells.

been

It

fifth time he had tried to win access to the prisoner, without

was the

success. The man would be in the cells, and maybe his mother would not

recognize him. Maybe he was without fingernails. Maybe a fine cord had been knotted tightly round his penis while water was poured down his throat.

Littelbaum did not have the name of the man he hunted, nor the face.

He

30

had footprints. The prisoner might have told him the name, described the face.

His driver took him back to the embassy. He could demand time of

the

ambassador and shout a bit, and the ambassador would shrug and mouth He could send another protest signal to the Hoover

sympathy.

building,

and it would be filed along with the rest.

Later, he would be in his windowless office behind the bombproof door guarded by the young Marine, and he would stand in front of the big of the region, with his herringbone jacket loose on his

wall map

shoulders, and look at the footprints, at the bright-headed pins.

It

took two weeks, from the event, for Littelbaum to be able to put

another pin in the map, to mark another footprint. From the pins

hung

r flags, carrying a date. For two and a half years he

little pape

had

followed the footprints, and they made a pattern for him.

There was a digital mobile telephone that made scrambled,

voice-protected calls from and to an office in Tehran of the Ministry ation and Security.

of Inform

The computers could not break through

the

conversations but they could locate and identify the

scrambled

position

the call had originated or been answered.

from which

His pins, with

their carefully dated flags, were scattered over the map surface of abia. It was two and a half years since the

Iran and Saudi Ar

explosion

at the National Guard barracks in Riyadh in which five of his

countrymen had died; the pin was there and dated the day before it Two years since the lorry bomb at the Khobar Tower

happened.

airforce

e Dhahran had killed nineteen Americans, and that date

base outsid

pin

was there, the day before the massacre. Each atrocity enabled him to

track a man without a name and without a face.

It took two weeks for the computer to log the locations. There was a

pin in the Empty Quarter, dated forty-three days back, and he had

bypassed every bureaucratic instruction, ignored every standing

31

order,

worked the contact game, won the one-time favour, tasked the Marine Corps helicopters and the Saudi National Guardsmen, and still been too

damned late. And there was a pin in international waters along the ade route between Abu Dhabi and the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas.

tr

name, no face, only footprints for Duane Littelbaum to follow as

No

if

he were a shambling, slow-going bloodhound.

Mary-Ellen brought him the day's communications from the cypher

.

section, and coffee

Sometimes she put whiskey in it, which, in this

rogant, ungrateful, corrupt country,

ar

was almost a beheading

offence.

s blue chip, with a Ph.D."

She wa

old money off Long Island, and she

seemed to regard it as her life's work to look after a middle-aged man

from poor farm stock out of Audobon in west Iowa.

It took sixteen days from the time the antennae or the dishes sucked in

the streams of digital information for the computers to locate the ning of the receiver, and transmit it to Duane Littelbaum.

positio

She

passed him two pins and two dated flags. Mary-Ellen was too short to

that far up the wall map into northern Iran.

reach

He grunted and

stretched. He drove home the pins where there were two tight

clusters.

He drank the coffee.

She said, and he did not need her to tell him, "It's where he always He calls from Alamut, then the next day from Qasvin, then

goes.

silence, then the call again, then the killing. It's what he always does..."

aper we got, the burned paper, what did Quantico scratch out

"That p

of

at?"

th

rugged, as if the Hoover building hadn't bothered to report

She sh

back

forensics at Quantico had learned.

what the

32

s going for a killing, yes?"

"He'

hat the footprints say. He calls from Qasvin and the day

"It's w

before

from Alamut, like it's his ritual. Then he moves and then he kills."

bah had called for a volunteer to strike down a vizier.

Hasan-i-Sa

A