A Line in the Sand (52 page)

butcher',

out half the night and

and had been

all of the next morning with his

dogs to find the beast and limit its misery.

Chalmers was encouraged by the quiet of the reed-banks: there should ement and spats over nesting territory and the cries

have been mov

of

the birds.

from Germany who had demanded to shoot the stag with the

The client

only six years

greatest crown spread of antlers but that beast was

d

ol

and in the prime of its breeding life. The client had hissed the

sum

he was paying and what he needed as a trophy. Chalmers had told him e 'showed no respect for the

that if h

beasts' he could go back down

to

len with his rifle unused.

the g

The man had crumpled then, whined

about the money, and had been led forward to shoot an old beast at the

end of its life. They'd passed within thirty yards of the younger stag

towards the target beast, and at the end the client

as they'd moved

d

ha

thanked him for the best stalk of his shooting days. Chalmers had om him because he acknowledged neither gratitude nor

walked away fr

aise.

pr

thought the quiet was because the man was good, was among the birds He

in the reeds and on the water, and was still.

The guest, panting and unfit, had been in dead ground and had pulled a

343

packet of cigarettes from his pocket. Chalmers had snatched the

tte from the guest's mouth. He'd made the stalk last ten

cigare

hours,

two of them crawling against the rush of a stream-filled gully.

Finally, when the beast was seventy yards from them, he'd told the guest, 'you're not fit to shoot, you're a bloody ruin," and hadn't given him the rifle.

The birds were

The memories kept the cutting edge to his senses.

too

quiet. He knew that the man was good and that the man was there,

in

the marsh.

He waited, patient. He felt a respect, brother to brother, for the man

out there, in the water, the same respect that he felt for the big beasts he stalked and tracked.

sted through Monday."

"We've la

had to feed the boy and himself.

He'd

He'd heated the last of the

precooked meat pies in the fridge, and taken the remaining tub of

ream from the freezer.

ice-c

He'd found a science programme on the

television for Stephen, and they'd eaten off their laps.

e'd taken

H

e trays back into the kitchen, and gone upstairs.

th

She was on the

bed, in darkness. He sat beside her.

"They say he has a week. He can't endure more than a week. It's closing round him. We're on the fifth day. We have to hang on in there..."

"Where is he?" Fenton asked.

"I don't know."

rkham's voice, distorted by the scrambler, echoed

Ma

back at him.

"I only know that he's sitting out there in the bloody bog."

"Have you called him, has he sit-repped?"

"I wouldn't dare to call the ungracious little beggar, I'm only the fetcher and carrier I reckon he'd garrotte me if I disturbed him."

"Doesn't he know the importance of continuous contact?"

344

"He knows it if you told him it."

"Geoff, does he realize how much is riding on his back?"

"That, too, I expect you told him. I'll call you when he deigns to make contact.

"Bye, Mr. Fenton."

Fenton shivered. He was alone, but for the company of a third-year probationer who watched the telephones. It was always late at night, when an operation was running towards climax, that he shivered, not from cold but from nerves. In the day, surrounded by acolytes, the confidence boomed in him. But Parker had gone, the American with

her,

and the elder of the probationers, the old warhorse from B section.

Cox

had left early to prepare for a dinner party. It would be the end of

him if the boy, Chalmers, failed. He would be a casualty, washed

up,

sneered at, shown the early-retirement door.

Half-way across the world was another man who would be sweating on the

fear of failure. He did not know what an office high in the Ministry of Information and Security would be like, but he seemed to sense

that

man shivering in the same sweat as dribbled on his own back. He had talked of contftil but late at night, he reflected, there was not

a

vestige of control for either of them. It was always like that, never different, when the little people took charge and the power of the high

and mighty was stripped from their hands... He would sleep at Thames House that night, and the next, sleep there until it was over...

Because he had volunteered to take responsibility, the career of

Harry

Fenton lay in the grubby hands of Andy Chalmers.

"Home is where we are. Home isn't about people, isn't about things.

Home is where you are, and Stephen and me. There isn't anything for us

here.

e

You said home was about friends but there aren't any, they'v

gone. Anywhere we are together is home.

ot any

I can't take it, n

more."

345

She lay with her back to him. Her voice was low-pitched and flat

calm.

ng.

Perry thought she was beyond weepi

It was coming to the end of a complex day for the intelligence officer.

The

d

deman

for information, clarification of a situation, from Tehran

led to his walking along the corridor with the flowers on his arm

and

the grapes in his hand, one among many visitors.

The brigadier in Tebran had insisted. The intelligence officer,

ary, had left his embassy office in the middle of the day.

nervous, w

He

had not seen a tail but always assumed one followed him. He had

driven

to the

in

home

west London's suburbs of a colleague from Visa Section,

parked outside the front of the house, been greeted at the door and invited inside. Without stopping, he had gone out of a back door, crossed the rear garden to the gate, tracked along an alley between and taken his colleague's car.

garages

He had driven to the offices

and yard of the car-hire company at the extreme of south London, and asked about a BMW rented out to Yusuf Khan. A shadow of hesitation crossed the young woman's face, and he had eased his wallet from his pocket. A hundred pounds, palmed across the desk, in twenty-pound notes had lightened the shadow. He was shown, hurriedly, a

h

photograp

from an insurance file of the wrecked vehicle. He was told of the where the injured man was treated..

hospital

. Did she know about

a

passenger? The police had not spoken of one... It was already early evening by the time he reached the hospital. After checking for the of Delivery/ Post-natal, he headed for the casualty ward.

location

another visitor, one of many who anxiously came to see the

He was

sick,

the injured and the maimed. He had the flowers and the grapes, as if

they guaranteed him admittance.

He walked slowly down the centre of the ward, through the aisle

between

the beds, scanning the faces of the patients.

He seemed lost and confused but none of the harassed nursing staff came

346

forward to help him.

A corridor was ahead of him, signs for the fire escape, and to the side

a trolley carrying resuscitation equipment. He took a risk because Tehran required it of him. He edged forward with the fool's smile on

his face.

Only when he was beside the trolley did he see the policeman with

the

machine-gun on his lap.

"I am looking for my sister and her baby."

There was a door with a glass window in it. Behind it a second

policeman was reading a magazine that half hid the bulk of his

firearm.

He saw the bed, and the bandaged head of Yusuf Khan.

"Not here, no babies here thank God."

"This not the place for babies?"

He gazed at the bandaged head, the linking tubes, the opened eyes.

The

head shook, the tubes wavered, the eyes blinked with recognition.

"Absolutely, pal, this is not the place for babies."

He saw the tears gathering in the eyes, and he thought he saw a trace of guilt flicker there.

"I must ask again."

He walked away. He had seen what he needed to see. He laid the

flowers and the grapes on the ward sister's desk. When he left his colleague's house in west London, he sped back to central London and his office at the embassy, with the urgent report to be sent by secure coded communication to Tehran locked in his mind.

"Is that what you want, a van coming to the front door? All those bastards out in the road, watching. You want to give them that

satisfaction? Your things, everything that's personal to you your furniture, your clothes, your pictures, your life paraded for them.

ey'll spit at the car as it takes us away.

Th

Is that what you want?"

347

His hand was on her shoulder and his fingers massaged Meryl's bones and

muscles. She never looked at hiWi and she didn't speak.

The brigadier was a careful man. If his back was to be protected, it

s necessary for him always to be careful.

wa

He was that rarity in

the

the Ministry of Information and Security, an intelligence

service of

officer who had made the transition from the previous regime. He

had

crossed sides. The majority with whom he had worked as a captain

in

the SAVAK were long dead, hanged, shot, butchered, for their service to

the Shah. But three days before the mob the street scum from south Tebran had entered and sacked the SAVAK offices on Hafez Avenue, he had

taken a suitcase of files from his workplace and made contact with his

enemy. The files were his credentials. With them were his memories of

ocations and faces.

names, l

In the confused days that followed he

was,

the new men of Iran, a small, treasured mine of knowledge.

to

The

names of former colleagues, the locations of safe-houses and the

faces

as he bought himself

of informers, all had tripped off his tongue

rvival.

su

The new regime, of course, was innocent in the matters of security and

counter-revolution. The change coat prospered as his colleagues

died.

When the captured Americans from the embassy protested that they were employees of the Agency, the change-coat could identify them.

not

When

iddin rose in revolt against the Imam, he could put faces

the Mujah

to

ad been promoted to major and then colonel in the

names. He h

Vezarat-e-Ettelaat Va Ammyat-e Kishvar, and now held the rank, in

the

VEVAK, of brigadier, but he was too intelligent, too cautious a man to

e that his position would ever be secure and above suspicion.

believ

348

A

few detested him, a few more despised him, the majority, those who knew

his past, were wary of him.

The protective screens with which he surrounded himself were the

zealot's commitment to the new regime, coupled with a total, ruthless efficiency. No word of criticism for the mullahs in government and influence ever crossed his lips, no mistake in his planning of

operations was ever admitted. If the mildest words of criticism were ever spoken he would be denounced and pitched from his office. There were many, and he knew it, who would clamour to fire the bullet or tighten the noose around his neck.

Vahid Hossein had been like a son to him.. . The communication from London was on his desk. The hot, fume-filled night was around his high

office. Tears and guilt meant betrayal, were evidence that a coward, Yusuf Khan, had talked. It was his hope,

alone in the cigarette-smoke-filled office, that the man who had been like a son to him would be shot dead.

It would be worse if the great tanker, which was the pride of the

fleet, were intercepted as it slowed in the shipping lanes to launch the inflatable, was boarded and impounded. He weighed the

possibilities open to him, then wrote an instruction for the VEVAK

officer who worked as an official at the building of the National

Iranian Tanker Corporation. The ship was to sail in the morning.

There

was to be no attempt at a pick-up.

For his own survival, to avoid an inevitable fate, he cut the link to

Vahid Hossein. He did not hesitate.

"I want to go shopping, I want Stephen to go to school, I want you to

go to work, I want us go walking I don't want, ever again, Frank,

to

see a gun. I want to be happy again. There's nothing left for us here."

Downstairs the television droned on, under Davies's tuneless

ng

whistli

at

to himself. There was a muted cackle of laughter from the hut

349

e

th

back, and the revving of the engine of the car at the front to keep the

heater going. Everything they listened to, all around them, was

e guns.

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