The Corporal's Wife (2013) (22 page)

He and his colleagnes were the cream. They were feared, they had access, they received all the small envelopes they could handle. Traders who knew where they worked seldom charged them for any item without first adjusting the price to include the expected discount. In his home he had flat-screen TVs, a desk-top computer and a quality phone for his wife. His and her parents received the best, and he could walk along his street with a swagger. He had all he needed for a life of relative comfort – except the wife of the brigadier’s driver.

It was a pursuit that could have destroyed him. The corporal’s wife was a dream. When the fools who would be put across the border into Afghanistan were gathered together, their eyes glowed with excitement at trying on the waistcoat into which the explosive sticks, the clusters of nails and the detonators were sewn, and they heard of virgins who awaited the
shahid
after he had blown apart his body. They were a tool, the more accurate equivalent of artillery shells. He had seen those eyes, and the light in them, and had sensed the longing for martyrdom. He was no different from the men he despised. She dangled him and could destroy him.

He had heard in the command centre that she was to be arrested that evening and that she had thrown off her tail. Kourosh had known where she would be. He had gone to warn her that her arrest was imminent, to give her a chance to flee the city or to stay hidden in the workshop’s upper room. He had never been able, fully, to undress her. He thought that in reward for his warning she would allow him to unfasten all of her buttons and zips. He would be watched by the man who had been hanged in the Evin and the man who had been shot in Afghanistan, which would heighten his excitement. He had heard.

At the top of the stairs, barely daring to breathe, he had seen the side of a man’s body – anorak, jeans, a roughened hand with an old ring on it and a pistol he recognised as a SIG Sauer P226.

He knew the route they would use and that they would go that day.

As a counter-intelligence officer, Kourosh could analyse accents and this one, with its pure Farsi, intrigued him. He knew Kurdish speech textures from investigations of the usual ethnic allies employed by the Mossad, and the Azeri intonation from the Arab south-west of Iran where the American Agency infiltrated. The Pakistanis had links with Baluch people across Iran and in its far-eastern border area. He hadn’t seen the man who had spoken and couldn’t fault his speech, but recognised him as a foreigner. There had been an increase in British-originated signals from Dubai in the hours after the driver’s disappearance, and it had been reported from a military base to the north that a British transport aircraft had landed during the night. He assumed the speaker’s nationality.

He had thought that Farideh would be grateful for his warning. She would have sent away the old men who tinkered with out-of-date machines, and would have demonstrated her gratitude on her back. He was out of the alley and in the street. He was a product of the revolution and hunted its enemies.

In the road, horns exploded around him. He heard the scream of tyres, abuse directed at him and fingers raised in insult. For a moment he was rooted to the spot . Then he began to walk.

He crossed the street decisively.

Beyond Enghelab and the park was the office from which he worked. He had seen past the SIG Sauer P226 to the bed, smooth and not creased. He should have been welcomed onto it. He could have screamed. His wallet bounced in an inner pocket of the anorak. Her picture was inside it, hidden.

Kourosh returned to his office.

She was in a huddle with the two men. They were whispering. He heard nothing clearly.

Time gone could not be reclaimed, and time lost was risk heightened. The old men had their arms round her shoulders, made a wall and gave her the illusion of safety. She didn’t argue with them, and he couldn’t see her face. Once, he had turned to Mikey and grimaced, but Mikey’s hand had stayed on his arm and the grip had tightened: she needed a moment to clear her head.

But she
loathed
her husband. And she was
innocent
of any crime.

He thought he had made the pitch well. But he would be blamed for failure, not the guys. Nobody had said her marriage was a sham. Nobody had said either that she had a shag nest above a garage, with pictures on display of the men who had mattered to her. He was angry, and knew it was because he was frightened. Nobody had told him anything.

They would quit. Soon he’d be revving the engine, Ralph or Wally would be dragging back the gates and he’d reverse out. He’d do the first leg of the drive, and the space allocated to her would be empty. He wondered, as he waited for an answer, what the boys on the site had said about him. They’d remember the beers in the pub, that the man who had paid had worn a suit. Rumour would have run wild. He’d drive the first leg and get clear of the streets.

On the open road, Ralph would take over. They’d pull in at a lay-by that had cover and Mikey would set up the satphone. There were two call options. If she wasn’t with them, it would be ‘Foxtrot gone to ground,’ no explanation.

He’d be blamed. Who else? Not the guys. He didn’t see the two who had come as far as
I
ncirlik holding up their hands, admitting inadequate briefing – least of all her. It hurt to wait, but Mikey made him, and gave them time.

‘So, what’s a nice girl like you doing in . . . ?’

She didn’t reply. She was not a girl and Mandy Ross was rarely described as nice.

The house was outside
Dogubeyazit
but close enough to catch a signal for her laptop. She sat near the fire, and shivered. Dunc was on a chair nearer to the window, his mobile cradled in his hands. Nothing to do but wait.

She would have regarded ‘nice girl’ as an insult. She ran agents. In the world in which she stalked, looking for recruitment opportunities, there was little call for the proprieties. The men and women she searched for were usually damaged, always without adequate defences, and her art was to persuade them that
they
needed
her
more than the reverse. Four years ago, at the behest of Mandy Ross, a twenty-three-year-old Iranian, his family in exile in northern England, had gone back to his country of birth ‘to renew ties with his family’. He had trembled with fear at the thought of it, but had acquired the visa and climbed on to the plane. It had been hoped that he would initiate a courier chain into the military establishment. After contact had been lost it was eventually reported that he had died under interrogation. Two years ago, a Peruvian trainee accountant with a love of backpacking had been paid to take a hiking holiday close to the uranium mines at Saghand and Yazd. He had a camera and . . . How close should he have been to the mines? Close enough to be shot dead by a sentry at a perimeter fence – tidier than capture. She embraced ‘tidiness’. She could have read a book or the morning’s London newspapers on her laptop, could even have done her expenses, but she gazed into the fire, watching the smoke surge up the chimney. Several times she heard Dunc clear his throat, and waited.

She was thirty-seven, had one son and the same husband she had hitched up with in her second year at university. He taught mathematics in a select-entry day school in Surrey; her son went to the same school and her husband ran their home. Theirs might have been called a ‘semi-detached’ marriage, except that they holidayed together. Her love was for Vauxhall Cross. Now she covered the southern Caucasus and Iran from the north to the Gulf. She rejoiced in the creed of Tadeuz Fenton: an enemy, at last, had been produced, a worthwhile target. Often, late at night, she would dream of knotting her fingers in a mullah’s beard and tugging hard enough to drag it out at the roots. On weekdays she left home punctually at six forty-five a.m. and returned after nine thirty p.m. Her son and husband would be watching television or sharing a textbook. Her work took first place.

The signing up of the shooters had been down to her. The best on offer. Contego Security was a likely dustbin for men who would go the extra miles to find danger and not want a king’s ransom for their efforts. She didn’t dress to flatter herself, or to enhance her career. That day, in the extreme corner of Turkey, she wore identical clothing to what was appropriate when she strode along the Albert Embankment to work: blouse, trouser suit and low-heeled shoes.

Dunc was fidgeting with his phone. The silence was broken only by the spitting of logs on the fire. The view was constant: fields, foothills, the great Mount Ararat and the lesser peaks. The sole movement came from the horses, grazing scattered fodder.

There had been twenty-three, and now there were twenty. Three more packages of refined heroin had been creamed off.

It was not an ambush but an arrangement.

Safe passage cost three packages. At the turning for Kashmar, the vehicles had left the main road, which linked Birjand to Mashhad. The rendezvous had been in a quarry where stone for the road’s repairs had been excavated. There was privacy for the men who had brought the packages with the armoured convoy, and for the officers of the Revolutionary Guard Corps who had the power to guarantee the onward passage of the heroin, towards the Turkish border. They would not be interrupted by police, Customs or the counter-narcotics squads. The team from the IRGC would satisfy themselves on the quality of the product, then remove it, and the resin would be resold for the domestic market at a good profit for the paramilitary force. There were ironies that would have been lost on the men tasked to make the deal. In the last several years, Iran had spent seven hundred million American dollars in the war against drugs, erected fences and barriers, sewn minefields along the 900-kilometre border with Afghanistan; three hundred troops, police and Customs men were killed each year in skirmishes with the smugglers, and almost five hundred traffickers inside Iran were hanged after arrest and conviction. But the scale of addiction among Iranians was so great that there was money to be made in feeding it.

A portable stove heated the water for tea.

The city, further down the road, was celebrated for the production of fine raisins and good rugs. It marketed excellent saffron – and high-grade heroin for distribution to those who could pay. The representatives of the IRGC dealt with many commodities and contracts – televisions and computers, the contract to widen the highway, the construction of a new sewage works or the sale of narcotics.

There was much to talk of as the tea was sipped and the three packages lay at the feet of a major. The rumour, travelling at runaway speed, spoke of a defection. A brigadier was involved. His driver was gone. The brigadier was of the al-Qods, the élite. The al-Qods were all-powerful, had no friends, possessed powerful steel-gloved fists. Would a driver know anything about trafficking? They speculated. There was an assumption among them that a driver, however humble, would be trusted. He could hold more detailed knowledge than a colonel, a major or a captain.

Hands were slapped after the tea had been drained. The traffickers could – had it suited their needs – have pumped a magazine of bullets into the officers of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. If there had not been three packages on offer and an arrangement that was profitable and regular, the officers could have organised the execution of these criminals in the gaol at Kashmar or in view of a yelling mob. The arrangement suited.

There was a last round of brush-kisses. The two groups went on their way.

The remaining twenty packages would be linked with others, some with protection and some not, and the common goal would be the high passes of the border with Turkey. There the protection would end and the cover of darkness would be needed.

He had helped and was praised.

A hard session was over and PK had congratulated him. Sidney had brought in sweet biscuits, and the coffee the woman had made was as sharp as he would have drunk at home. He had talked about the brigadier and a conference he had hosted eleven months ago when al-Qods officers, attached to embassies in Europe, had met at the Hamadan barracks. Who were the targets? Who did best at turning exiles? What tactic imposed the greatest pressure on an exile who had family in Iran?

The men at the conference had worn small badges on their lapels. He had identified some and could quote what had been said. There had been a tour of the city on the last afternoon and they had walked in the parks. It had been warm and the men were relaxed. Mehrak had escorted his brigadier. With formality gone, the men had spoken their minds. Berlin and Rome needed more funds. Madrid had too few staff. There were better opportunities to move in the north of England without attracting Special Branch and Security Service surveillance. He had talked and been praised – and had realised that he might as well have been a bear dancing to a whistle in Turkey, lumbering and humiliated.

PK had gone. The coffee and biscuits had replaced him.

The images swam in his mind. The brigadier had laughed with him when he’d told jokes.

He had betrayed him, turned his back on his senior officer. He could see the face, hear the laughter – and the silence of his wife.

He weighed them. He had to choose between two roads: one led to a prisoner’s freedom, the other to a noose. Brigadier Reza Joyberi had laughed when Mehrak joked. His wife, Farideh, had not cried out when he had slapped her face. She had slept with her back to him.