The Corporal's Wife (2013) (10 page)

He took his phone from his pocket and snapped through the list of names. He called his driver. His corporal’s phone was switched off, he was told, and the message urged him to ‘try later’.

The last time his driver had been late to collect him, eleven months ago, there had been a blow-out of a rear tyre. Two calls had warned him of the delay, and he had been held up for only nine minutes. Other than that, he could not recall being left to stand on a pavement or step. The man should have been back from the Gulf trip the previous evening – at the very least he should have been warned. He made another call, to his driver’s home: it was not answered. The pretty little wife would be at work. He had been at the corporal’s wedding but, when asked, his driver would give no reason as to why there were no children. He swore softly.

He walked down the steps and away from the station to join the taxi queue. He gave the name of the garrison camp in the heart of the city. Yes, a pretty girl, and her husband had failed him.

The agent of the Ministry of Security and Intelligence followed Farideh. Each time she moved or sat, so did he. He was Kourosh – his parents had named him after the first king of Persia, dead now for two and a half millennia. He worked in the teams dedicated to the discovery of spies sent by the Agency or the Mossad into Iran, and he was besotted with her.

She thought he was a mistake.

She had been in the room above the garage, which she kept almost as a shrine to Johnny, whom they had hanged. She had not made love with Kourosh: probably, one day, she would, but not yet. No one in her office would have believed that Farideh, wife of a corporal in the al-Qods division, toyed with a counter-intelligence officer. She was sitting. He was on the far side of the table. She allowed her opened hand to rest on the polished wood. He laid his on it. Her
chador
hung on a hook behind the door and she wore tight jeans with a blouse. He had been permitted to open two buttons, but not a third. She stood. So did he. She went to the sideboard, where the kettle was. He held the glasses; she poured the tea. He stirred in the sugar, and she went back to the table with her glass. He brought his and they sat down. He gazed into her face, mesmerised. He was like a puppy, she thought, wanting to please, clumsy, and devoted. An MOIS investigation had identified Johnny as a ‘provocateur’, an ‘enemy of the state’. It had provided the prosecution with evidence that had been sufficient to hang him.

It almost amused her that she could bring the agent here, where she had been with Johnny and make a fool of him. She had met him through Mehrak.

After a meeting, the brigadier’s driver had been asked to take two MOIS officials back to their headquarters; he would return later for his own officer. There had been talk in the Mercedes of a light-fitting, which was sparking, in an official’s home. Her husband – always one to ‘brown nose’, as Johnny would have said with contempt – had said he knew a man who could do the work: she had his phone number at home. They were not far away so he had diverted there. Mehrak had stood on the pavement and shouted for her – it had been high summer, three months ago, and the windows were open. She had just washed her hair when she came to the window – no scarf or veil – and it had hung across her face. Mehrak had told her to bring his book of phone numbers from inside their front door, and to cover herself. She had come to the pavement, with a towel over her head, and given him the book. He had relayed the number to the officer, who had written it down, and she had taken the book back upstairs. She had exchanged little more than a glance with Kourosh of the ministry.

She sipped the tea, so did he. She licked her lips and saw his eyes flicker. She would sleep with him, one day.

Some of Johnny’s books – novels and from the university course he had abandoned, were on a shelf. The clothes he kept for when he needed to alter his appearance were in the chest-of-drawers, and there were documents, too, forged or stolen. Records stood in a rack, American jazz – he had played them on the old turntable, not loudly, the sound muffled by the repair work below. There was a photograph of him, young, with his family, and a picture of a woman, who wore a veil below a single slit that showed only her eyes. There was a third photograph: a young man, his hair flopping on his forehead, stubbled cheeks, a tribesman’s clothes – he carried an assault rifle. She had loved him as she had loved Johnny and he had been, to her, the Captain, and was dead.

Kourosh was in the division of counter-espionage that specialised in surveillance.

She came to the repair yard two or three times a week, squeezing inside the gates. The agent must have devoted three days, minimum, to following her. He must have watched her leave home in the morning, take the bus, go to the office that employed her, visit the market, and see her father at his linen stall, then go to the garage. He must have waited for her . . . and done it again and again, so that he had established a pattern in her life and in her husband’s. She had come one evening three months ago and her friends, the old men, had been quiet and had watched her nervously. One had pointed to the stairs, then shrugged.

They were, to her, Excellency and Highness. Long ago, they had driven and maintained the vehicles used by the extended family of the Peacock
Throne. They had slid away from view when the
bazaaris
had turned against the royal family – holed up in useless luxury in the Niavaran Palace – and had paid discreet cash for the yard and made a new life. Johnny had used them to keep his 125cc bike, a Norton, on the road when the spares it required had dried up. Johnny was their hero. He had not betrayed them, or her, when facing torture and when execution was close. Johnny was their first love. They had bowed and scraped to excellencies and highnesses, and now they kept old motorbikes and scooters on the road. They had the room above the yard and it had been Johnny’s place. She had been there with Johnny, and later with the Captain, and one day she might allow the agent to lie beside her and loosen more buttons. But he had been a mistake.

Farideh yearned for love. She did not know how, in that city of fourteen million souls, she might find it – never with her husband. It had been love with Johnny and had started to be love with the Captain, in a squad with special duties and on assignment in Afghanistan. It was Excellency who had told her, four months after his arrest, that Johnny had been hanged. It was Highness who had gone each month to the Captain’s home, saying he had been asked to look for a reliable scooter at a good price. Twenty months ago, at the door, he had faced an elderly red-eyed woman who had spoken of her son’s death in a distant war. Love had eluded Farideh again.

She finished her tea.

She tapped the back of his hand briskly and gave him a brush kiss on each cheek. They always left separately. From the upper window she had a partial view of the gate; she saw him go through it and walk away. Farideh shrugged into her
chador
, knotted her scarf under her chin and buttoned the veil over her face. She gathered up her shopping, switched off the lights, looked a last time at the shadowed pictures of Johnny and the Captain, then went down the stairs. She kissed Excellency and Highness through the veil, her smile hidden. Both men worshipped her and, if she wasn’t careful, she might reward their affection by killing them.

She thought her husband would be home, from wherever he had been, and hurried to the bus stop.

‘Where does he live?’

Mehrak said that Brigadier Reza Joyberi’s home was in Shahrak Shahid Mahallati district, a compound of the regime’s élite, and gave the address. The house faced north towards the mountains.

‘Does he have guards there?’

Mehrak said there were men, without uniform, in cars in the district but there was no road block and no specific security at the property. He said that the brigadier always carried a holstered handgun.

‘His main workplace is where?’

An enlarged map of Tehran lay on the table between Mehrak and PK, and he named the garrison barracks, rather than the headquarters of either the Revolutionary Guard Corps or the al-Qods.

‘The main volume of his work now?’

He had responsibility for the security of the nuclear installations at Isfahan and Bushehr, Mehrak said, and for the research divisions at the technology university. There was a committee that reported on the security of the establishments against aerial or ground attack; it was led in rotation by the main personalities. Brigadier Joyberi would take over in three months. His tone was flat, emotionless. There was – Mehrak lit another cigarette – anxiety about the explosions at munitions bases near the capital and the deaths of prominent people; the Zionists were blamed.

‘What actions will be taken, Mehrak, to counter infiltration at these places?’

He assumed he was being filmed and recorded because his questioner took only sparse notes, insufficient for a transcript. Each time he scratched in his memory for detail, he seemed to see the brigadier’s face. Sometimes it was wreathed in smiles and there would be a joke in the car between them. Sometimes he had laughed with the brigadier until his sides ached. On other occasions his boss’s face had been cold, set, his eyes distant, especially when Mehrak took an envelope and an air ticket – it had happened four times – and was told which bank in Dubai to visit. Why him? The brigadier would have thought him too stupid, too loyal, to be concerned about the undeclared accounts held abroad.

Auntie sat behind him, and Nobby was against a side wall. The window was behind him and he could hear the drone of tractors. Inside the house, a vacuum-cleaner was in use, and he smelt food cooking.

As best he could, Mehrak answered the questions put to him.

‘Thank you, Tadeuz, very helpful.’ The Cousin grimaced.

‘Something for us to chew on.’ The Friend rarely offered praise. ‘A little something, but
something
.’

A routine meeting was winding down. The Friend and the Cousin had come from their respective embassies – Kensington and Mayfair – and were admitted to an area of Vauxhall Cross set aside for liaison sessions. Tadeuz Fenton had brought a sparse meal to the table, and sensed the boredom of the American and the Jew. He imagined that the Agency and the Mossad would have shared a taxi over Westminster Bridge and decided
en route
what the British deserved to be given. On matters Iranian, they were the big players, the stars, and liked to hint at involvement in explosions that wasted military gear and commanders’ lives in what was referred to as a zone of crisis. Politeness was maintained, but Tadeuz Fenton had known from the first meetings he had attended, in the fortress block of Grosvenor Square, that sharing was proportionate to what he had to offer. Papers were shuffled, phones checked, briefcases locked. The talk had been vague, of schisms in the upper echelon of politics.

He smiled. ‘I don’t like to run before I can walk, and wouldn’t want to raise premature hopes, but we believe we have an individual under our control who is – or has the potential to be – rather choice.’

The Mossad man, the Friend, reacted, indifference gone. ‘Would that be inside or outside Iran?’

‘Outside. Picked up on a sting, a honey trap. Sadly our main man in theatre was on home leave and we didn’t have the officers in place to do the coercion, pile on the pressure and ship him back. We’ve brought him out of the Gulf . . . but, as I say, early days.’

Tadeuz Fenton didn’t fish, but knew several who did. They tied flies, then floated them down a pool in a remote river, hoping a salmon would bite. He yearned for the moment.

The Cousin beaded his eyes on him. ‘What is it, Fenton?’

‘There’s a brigadier, the al-Qods crowd, Reza Joyberi—’

‘You’ve not gotten hold of him? You surely . . .’

‘I wish. Not a man of that stature.’ Tadeuz Fenton could smile graciously and deprecate himself, which played well with Americans. The Israeli hadn’t responded. They seldom did – but the United States didn’t have Iranian missiles aimed at Massachusetts or California and the British weren’t facing a rocket programmed to land on Coventry Cathedral. The Mossad man, the Friend, had good reason to be serious. ‘We have a Joe who is close, very close, to Joyberi. We have him out of their reach and have today begun a detailed debrief. As soon as we extract worthwhile material, which I hope to start producing in the next few hours, it will, of course, be shipped to both of you.’

The cousin interjected, ‘Joyberi’s a big cat, and anyone near him is high value.’

The Friend said, ‘We’d want access to him, and soon. And, immediately, we wish to be inside the loop. Top of our list would be – if relationships deteriorate to the point of military intervention – where they would strike at our interests.’

‘I second that. Sounds good, Fenton. Getting stuff out of that place is near impossible. Congratulations.’

Tadeuz Fenton ushered them to the door. He thought he had justified his place – hanging by his fingernails – at the top table. ‘As soon as it’s available it’ll come your way – and I’ll work on the access thing. I’m optimistic of a good result.’

He took them into the wide lobby and saw them out through security. Had he left hostages to fortune? No. Open and shut, simple stuff. And he had enhanced respect.

Where there had been confusion there was now a nagging, uncomfortable clarity. Iranian investigators worked in Dubai and fed back what they had learned.