The Corporal's Wife (2013) (39 page)

‘Might be best to be in a box.’

He didn’t know how much she understood.

‘Worse to be on your back on a stretcher, and fucked.’

Zach reached out his hand. She took it.

‘A good funeral is what you want, and a piss-up after for your mates, except we’re beyond that.’

It was like they were teenagers at the cinema, the first time they’d touched. Maybe they’d go for a polystyrene plate of chips afterwards.

‘What you don’t want is amputation or your face buggered so you’re blind.’

‘Or to lose a bollock – worse, lose two.’

The question Zach didn’t dare to ask was whether all of them would make it out. Best not to ask because a cheerful, evasive answer was worse than silence.

‘Don’t even joke about it. A long old day tomorrow.’

Tomorrow Zach thought, would be different from any other day he had experienced. He shivered, and the cold seemed to grip all of him except the hand that held hers. He valued the comfort he gave and took.

Chapter 13

He heard what was said, and kept quiet.

The guys had done more of ‘where I would rather be’ orchestrated by Wally, but without enthusiasm: red bills coming through the door, putting buckets in the hall because rain was forecast and the roof leaked, dealing with the ex who flaunted a new man, traipsing to school after hours because the head teacher had an issue with a kid’s behaviour – all seemed like flat beer, and was too close, Zach reckoned, to experience. Depression was growing among them.

The darkness was heavy. Far in the distance there was a sodium-tinted glow, which would be the lights of Khvoy – where they had to be early tomorrow afternoon. Beyond those lights there was no horizon. There would have been hills at the border, or near to it, and there were dank skies, which merged together, with no clear line that might have given a sense of distance. His thoughts rambled. Easier if he could have seen the furthest point they would be heading for. The clouds had thickened and the first shower had started, not heavy but sufficient to dampen his hair.

There were pin pricks of light to the right of the viewing point – farmers’ houses. Zach gave a morose chuckle, stifled it. The farmers would leave lights burning outside their barns to ward off the wolves that would edge forward to steal calves or young goats. Zach knew about wolves – wild, hungry and continually searching for food – because he had concocted a peasant’s tale about them and had deluded young guys who had manned a road block. He had spied on them, gone back to his own crowd and reported the result of his deceit. He had told the guys the layout of the chicane across the road. He hadn’t seen the men further down the road. It had been espionage, and the penalty for espionage was . . . He was as guilty of espionage as the Israeli who had driven the van from the border to the slip road behind the disused fuel station on the outskirts of the capital. He could no longer remember what he had volunteered for.

A light came on. The guys cursed.

The camper’s side door was pushed shut. The light died.

She hissed at them from behind him that she needed to pee. Coffee did that. They had stolen coffee and milk from the built-in refrigerator, and the guys had found sugar. There had been enough gas to heat the milk. He heard, clear enough, what she’d said: ‘Just so you know, people here have gone out of their way to treat Joey and me with kindness and courtesy. They’ve made us welcome. You’re screwing us up. So, fuck you.’ Better if it had been dark and he hadn’t seen the loathing in her eyes, the hate in the boy’s, and the courage. Now, Joey had an injured face and his holiday was wrecked. What other option had there been? Zach didn’t know. Wise people, old people and the people who wanted to flatten you always said, ‘What’s done cannot be undone.’ There can be no turning back of the clock. Two men killed at the road block, and a tourist, had been hurt. Zach tortured himself.

She came to the log.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

‘I’m fine. I had to . . . you know.’

‘You should go back inside, where it’s warmer.’

‘I think not.’ She had brought a blanket with her, had wrapped herself tight in it. ‘What’s wrong, Zach?’

She had read him. ‘Where to start.’

‘Because you took me with you?’

‘You, Farideh, are not my problem.’

‘Do you wish you’d never heard of me?’

‘I haven’t said nor thought that.’

‘Do you wish you’d never seen me?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Because of what happened on the road?’

‘I’m not a fighting man. I came because I was flattered – I was told my skill as a linguist had identified me. I didn’t think about it – my life was empty and I wanted it filled.’

‘You think you were tricked?’

‘What I think isn’t important.’

‘You blame yourself for the deaths at the road block?’

‘I’m not a fighting man. I don’t have the mentality for it.’

‘Which makes you superior or inferior?’

‘Different.’

‘In four years, Zach, I loved two men. Does that make me a whore?’

‘Of course not.’

‘One was a political activist who made war on the regime and sacrificed his life. The second was a soldier. He wanted a soldier’s life and earned a soldier’s death. Both were different.’

‘Have you any love left in you?’

She faltered: ‘I don’t know . . .’

He said, ‘It started as a mission in the interests of national security. A defector has come in. He demands his wife joins him. The defector is valuable enough to be listened to. We’re sent. The wife will come out, but not for her husband. We’re at the bottom of the food chain. She doesn’t want to join her husband, says she detests him. Our job is to bring her out and for me that’s psychological fulfilment. For the guys it’s a big payday – so, fuck the fine point of whether we’re fulfilling the end game. She comes, we get the rewards promised us. Is there any love left in you?’

A small voice, and he had to lean nearer to hear: ‘I hope so.’

‘We take you out. Will you make another life?’

‘Of course.’

She was close to him. He put out his arm and she wriggled nearer. Because of the cold, Zach told himself. A long night faced him, and he couldn’t hurry it. It seemed natural that he should protect and warm her.

The photographer was a freelance. He relied on sources in the police force, the ambulance service and fire teams, who provided him with the type of blood-lust images the customers appreciated.

He had been told where on the line to the south-east of the capital he should drive to, and had found the knot of investigators and the team about to recover the decapitated body. He had also been told the cadaver’s identity, and had been shown an identity card taken from the dead man’s wallet. On it, there was a head-and-shoulders picture of the dead man.

The photographer was familiar with the agencies beside the track and was helped by one – a particular friend – who moved the tarpaulin hiding the corpse so that he could take a picture of the waist, buttocks, legs and feet of the suicide. In the same shot, but between the rails, the ‘shape’ had thin dark hair.

His regular point of contact was the picture desk of the Islamic Republic News Agency. Any photographer needed luck in placing his material, and he was rewarded that afternoon. There had been no spectacular accident on any of Tehran’s main arteries, no public hanging . . . IRNA took the pictures of the self-inflicted death on the Tehran to Isfahan railway line. The
Kayhan News
was a principal client of the agency.

In the late evening, before midnight, the presses rolled. Prominent on an inside page was a large picture of the body on the stones, the smaller image of the ID card and the name of the young man who had been a member of the surveillance team of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Beside the body, ignored – why should it not have been? – there was a scrap of crumpled paper, which might have fallen from the hand at the moment of impact. Suicides were increasing in Iran and a paper with a conservative leaning, the
Kayhan News
, regarded the 17 per cent spike as a sign of growing decadence in the effete liberal society pushing for greater power and the lack of God-fearing discipline in current society.

As head of security, Hossein always worked late into the evening. The embassy in Vienna was on Jauresgasse. The buildings used by the Iranian delegation were of a traditional style, nineteenth-century Hapsburg, gutted and partially flattened by Red Army artillery in the last weeks of the Second World War and rebuilt with meticulous standards of imitation. The embassy housed two teams: one dealt with affairs linked to Austrian matters, good trade and access to high technology through local commerce. Of primary interest to Hossein, though, was Western hostility towards the legitimacy of an Iranian nuclear programme, and the enmity it directed to his country. In the capital, across the Danube, were the offices of the International Atomic Energy Authority. There, the world ranged itself against Hossein’s government. He accepted that experts from Iran would travel to brief the ambassador and that they would be holding in their heads, and their laptops, sensitive information concerning the programme and its possible uses. Such persons were vulnerable as targets of Zionist assassination plots and were also likely to be worth the efforts of the American, British, German and French agencies. Their minds could be addled with promises of wealth, and their vanity exploited. Hossein believed that his reputation would be compromised should any man – on his territory – be killed or persuaded to defect. He worked hard: failure would end his career.

His office was on the ground floor of the building. One window looked out onto Jauresgasse and the other gave him a view across a small garden and the railings blocking off the pavement and Reisnerstrasse. Perhaps only the role of security officer to the delegation at the UN headquarters in New York carried greater prestige and a greater chance of personal catastrophe. Hossein was tough mentally and prided himself on his ability to cope with pressure.

He was a lonely man, but by choice. His wife and their children were in Tehran. They would have been a responsibility and a diversion had they lived in Vienna. He wrote and phoned most weeks, and twice a year he flew back to Iran, arms filled with presents. At home he sensed the weight of the sanctions on his country’s economy. He was briefed on the killing of experts by the Zionists and the state of siege in which his country existed. His commitment never wavered. His belief was constant that the place for traitors, saboteurs and enemies was, first, in the interrogation rooms at Evin, and, second, on the table or chair under the bar and the ropes in the execution yard. He was busy that night.

The situation regarding a defector crossed his desk.

There were, of course, no
actual
defectors from Iran. There were incidents in which men involved in work on the nuclear programme, in the armed forces or the Revolutionary Guard Corps were abroad, travelling on state business or to the
hajj
, and were kidnapped. All Iranian embassies in the capitals of influential nations were alerted to the ‘disappearance’ of a corporal of the al-Qods section of the IRGC, who drove for a high-ranking officer. His wife had fled and was believed to be in the hands of a foreign intelligence agency. Why? So often, the mother-fuckers were vomited out again when their use was exhausted. The likelihood of the British taking the wretch to their own country was considered slim: he would be held for debriefing, it was thought, in a friendly but myopic country.

A villa in Austria used as a safe house? Possible. The chance of locating it? Impossible. But he was alerted. The message was filed. There was a shadow near the tinted-glass window that overlooked Reisnerstrasse.

The shape paused, then lunged through the railing. The bush convulsed, then fell back. The shadow retreated.

He was imbued with suspicion.

Hossein hurried from his office to the control area where the cameras were monitored by a member of staff answerable to him. He demanded a replay of the one that covered the angle of the two streets fronting his office.

Extraordinary.

A man of around his own age, but taller and leaner, wearing a good suit and tie, dark glasses, a scarf high around his face, masking his mouth and nose, leaned through the railings and snipped off a cluster of the last red roses of the year. He laid it on the pavement then stood tall again, cut away more flowers, retrieved the first and was gone.

Confusing.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office liked to remark that the British establishments were cheek by jowl with those of their Iranian fellow diplomats.

A sherry was taken.

The Briton in the Viennese capital did not seek to be privy to Petroc Kenning’s mission, but it was an opportunity for him to meet the young man from London and to socialise with the station chief, who shared floor space with the more conventional first secretaries and chargés. The laughter flowed between them. His PA had gone in search, as requested, and had returned with the sherry and a glass vase. Into it had gone the rose clusters, and now it dignified his desk. This officer complained frequently that the younger breed coming into the Service were duller and less eccentric than those of his own generation. He liked the man: a rare creature who behaved like an undergraduate on his way to the Girton Spring Ball in nicking a rose from the garden of an illustrious vice-chancellor, getting a pretty girl to wear it low on her chest . . .