The Corporal's Wife (2013) (40 page)

The Iranian embassy garden produced good roses, but he didn’t imagine that Petroc Kenning, going to a secure-circuit conference, London and Vienna, would have pinched Iranian property without reason. He knew the Iranians well. He found them formidable opponents – not as contrary as the North Koreans, with whom negotiation was impossible, but a competitive second. He disliked most the parading of piety, humility and the demand for prayers before meetings. He remembered the shock-horror when a secretary he had taken with him had worn the briefest bloody skirt. The sanctimonious beggars had feasted. He had heard it said often enough that, during the frostiest days of the Cold War, it was still possible to meet KGB and foreign ministry Soviets at a May Day knees-up or a Queen’s Birthday thrash, and down enough gin and vodka to float the proverbial aircraft carrier. Not with their neighbours down Jauresgasse. There was no compromise, a rigid denial of ambition for nuclear weapons, no worthwhile response to the offering of carrots, and only the shrug of the put-upon martyr if a stick was threatened. Hard work. So, it was amusing that roses had been stolen from their garden.

Two glasses drunk.

He was a little behind Petroc Kenning and the station chief as he escorted them to the front door, where the visitor’s car waited, but he was blessed with good hearing.

‘The babysitters shook him up. Don’t know the whole of it but they gave him a verbal third-degree, took him into the mountains, exposed him to some history and jolted him. He’s changed. Wants to co-operate now. God, I needed that. We’re back on course on that front. It’s the other end of the equation that concerns me. No names, no pack-drill. Tomorrow, listen to your radio. If the Iranians are bellowing, “Provocation!” I’m for the shit heap. If there’s nothing tomorrow, or the day after, I might just have squeezed home. “The nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life,” I think the great duke said, and that’s what I’m looking for. Actually, the one I like best is from Churchill: “People sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” We’ll be rooting for the “rough men”. If they screw up, and you hear it on the radio, I’m off to the Tower and they’ll say hanging, drawing and quartering are too good for me. It’s all about a red, red rose – I’ll tell you one day.’

He held it between his fingers, a fine strong bloom, handled it with care.

‘God speed.’

‘Thanks – it’s God’s help I’m needing, though.’

He was gone and the car pulled away.

The diplomat broke ranks. ‘How bad is it?’

The station chief grimaced. ‘On a scale of one to ten, try twelve. Thanks for doing the sherry.’

Zach couldn’t move. Rain had become sleet and now fell as light snow. He couldn’t move because she was asleep against his shoulder. The guys had their own places on their log benches and had brought out sleeping-bags from the camper.

The wagon was a dozen paces behind Zach. Inside, it would be warm and dry. There was a couch that could be pulled out to make a bed. None of them had used it. The snow had begun to settle on her head and on the part of the blanket over her shoulder. She could have been inside the wagon and so could he. If they had squeezed up, the guys could have been in there too.

The lights on the barns were hidden from him by the driving snow flakes. What was her future? He hadn’t asked her. Where did she want to go to? What work would she do? What was there for her in an unknown city among unknown people? He hadn’t asked. Bridges burned? He assumed so, but she had run from them, and now slept against him. Contradictions. There would be a time for answers. There had been two photographs in the room above the repair workshop, different men but each possessing a powerful personality, each confident, each her lover, now dead. If she allowed a man into her life he would have to stand against those two. The snow made a wet scarf across her head, his nose and upper cheekbones.

Zach didn’t understand the guys. Two sleeping-bags between the three. Low laughter, and murmured remarks he couldn’t make out.

The noises, above the laughter, were of metal on metal. The older scrape of parts being detached, and the newer sounds of pieces going together. He didn’t understand the mentality that made it acceptable to sit outside in the dark and snow to strip down the weapons on which their lives might depend and reassemble them. There was a clinical moment when each man finished the procedure, cocked the weapon, then pulled the trigger, a final sharp click. Laughter always followed.

To Zach, the three men had merged into a single shape. He had not taken the trouble to learn what motivated, excited and terrified them, or what they hoped for. He had assumed that each was gripped in a cycle of bills and failed relationships, and that each missed the companionship of the one family that had mattered to him. He had created for them stereotypical types. It had been laziness. Whether he came out of this place the next day and into the next night was in their hands. Fuck that.

She didn’t move. He was ignored.

They had stripped and reassembled the rifles, emptied and refilled the magazines – all by touch. Now they started on the pistols.

How long could the bloody night last? He couldn’t move and cramp twinged in his thigh. It would be cruel to wake her.

They were two camps, and only a contract held them.

Mehrak was in the day room. Maps lay in front of him, crudely drawn but bold lines, of the entrances to the sensitive rear areas of the Parchin complex and the Marivan testing range. They were not the routes that would have been used by officials of the International Atomic Energy Authority, but were for important Iranians. They led directly to the underground workshops where implosion and liquid fuel were studied. It was, Mehrak told them, where he had been with his brigadier, a pace behind, carrying the attaché case. The areas were considered too sensitive for admittance to be granted to any of the young officers who usually accompanied Reza Joyberi. No one bothered about the driver. On other sheets, A4 size, he had made similar plans showing the living quarters of the more highly rated scientists and engineers working on the projects. He knew of them, he said, because hospitality had been offered to the brigadier at both locations. He was complimented on his work. It was late in the evening and the house was quiet. A new rose had gone into the vase with the previous one. They laughed, but not with him. He had been told that his attitude was pleasing. It was a pretty flower, but it had no relevance. He made his request with a humility they would not have seen in him before.

‘Sidney has told me of his love for the castles here. I have an interest. I have visited the place of the Assassins, at Qazvin, and in Lebanon I was at Jrebda, Tibnine and Beaufort, which were for the Crusader armies and for Hezbollah today. Sidney spoke of a castle here for your king, for Richard of the Lion’s Heart. Tomorrow could I visit it with Sidney? After we have talked. I would appreciate it. Please?’

They thought him an idiot. He didn’t disabuse them. It was agreed. After work.

He thanked them in turn for their kindness – for fuck-all of nothing – climbed the stairs, went to his room and heard the key turn in the lock. He would undress and switch out his light, then crouch in the corner of the room away from the bed. He would contort himself and press his head to the pipes. Then he would learn the news of that day, and where they had lied.

‘Are you happy with this?’ Beth Skelton asked.

‘Of course I’m not,’ Joey Farrow answered.

‘And we’re in deep. Should we have talked it through more?’

‘Wasn’t you and me who put us there. We had no call to.’

They spoke in hoarse whispers. Her voice was sharp and his was blurred from the swelling.

‘They called them gangsters, but they’re not – are they?’

‘They smacked my face, Beth. My jaw might be broken, I’ve lost a tooth and the trip’s fucked.’

‘Wrong. What’s fucked is them, if they swallowed the fuel story.’

‘He said, “I’m British, with British colleagues. We’re fugitives and have no transport.” I don’t care. He wrecked me. He can take his chance.’

‘If they’re spies, and they’re British, aren’t we supposed to be on their side?’

‘No, we’re not.’

He walked ahead of her. They were the first hostile, contradictory words they had ever spoken to each other. Both were exhausted. Both were traumatised by the event and its aftermath. They had seen the smoke, taken it as a first marker point and had lugged with them as much as the rucksacks would hold. They had found the van, a shell, and had seen sufficient crime-scene TV movies to know about eradicating fingerprints and DNA traces. They had followed tracks on the salt, buffeted by the wind, until they had reached a path. An old tractor and trailer had come up behind them and they had hitched a ride.

They had been dumped at a police station in Marand. The yard had been full of paramilitary trucks, and guys in uniforms who were not police, carried weapons and were smartly turned out. A junior had spoken to them. He had seemed preoccupied with weightier matters until they had told their story. Then, action.

They had told the story again to more senior men, who spoke good English, and the control room down a corridor had heaved. A big guy was brought in by military helicopter.

Then they had been driven to where Alex had been, and their gear picked up. They went next to the tree cluster where the van was. They had been asked several times the make of the van, its colour and registration plate. They had gone over their descriptions of the three men, and in particular the one who had done the talking. They had repeated his words: ‘I’m British, with British colleagues. We’re fugitives and have no transport. To save ourselves we need to take your vehicle.’ They had been recorded.

A telephone connection had been made from the police station and the phone had been passed to them. They had been told they were connected to the New Zealand embassy in north Tehran. He was Perry something, the junior. The ambassador and principals were at a reception in town. He hadn’t sounded sympathetic. Joey had heard a hiss of breath over the teeth when he’d talked of the British involvement – as if the man had said, ‘Why didn’t you just shut the fuck up? Why did you open your big mouth?’

Now they were going to a car that would run them to the hospital where his jaw would be seen to, and maybe there’d be some dentistry. After the medical stuff was finished, they’d go to a hotel.

They would stay in Marand, in comfort, until the fugitives were captured. They would identify them. Then— It was obvious even to country kids from Alexandra, Central Otago. To Beth Skelton, she might as well have hitched the rope herself.

She said, ‘Better we’d given them the fucking phones, said “Have a nice day,” let them go and not made an issue of it.’

‘It’s where we are. Nothing I can do, kid. They have to take their chance.’

Life in the bunkers on Cyprus occupied by the Signals technicians was usually the definition of tedium. Not that evening.

More men and women – from the services, and civilians drafted there from GCHQ – had gathered inside the basement than were needed for the monitoring exercise. The senior personnel did not dismiss them. High drama was being played out in front of them, on their screens and through the headphones. Enough had a knowledge of Farsi to provide a subdued commentary.

A young woman had asked her supervisor the basic question: ‘They’re ours, the ones who are stuck in there?’

It was not expected of a supervisor that he should interpret what the dishes on the higher crags of the Troodos mountains produced. The transmissions were for passing to the UK, where analysts and clients were waiting for them. This supervisor, with an archive of experience, shared the emotions expressed by the rookie. He wasn’t sentimental, but every few minutes new transmissions came in, and the trap was closing. He had little knowledge of the type of men who might have been pitched onto Iranian territory, but could imagine their isolation and what faced them if they didn’t elude the net. Many around him would have felt as he did so he didn’t clear the area behind the technicians’ chairs or snap at his questioner.

‘I think we can assume that, Vicki. If it were Israelis, guys from one of the Iranian rebel factions or a team of our American friends, the instruction would not have been given to shift it on, unprocessed, to UK. They’ll be our people.’

He knew about the young couple from New Zealand, their camper van and its registration. He knew also the physical descriptions given of three men who had car-jacked them. The detail had been relayed from a small police depot in a town outside Tabriz and was now circulated to every unit of police and the Republican Guard Corps that had been drafted in: local commanders spoke confidently by radio of a cordon covering routes from Tabriz towards the frontiers of Turkey and Azerbaijan.

‘What chance would they have, boss?’

‘Not for me to say. We’ll do our job.’

Soon the shift would change, but he doubted that those who left the chairs facing the screens would drift to the bars and lose contact with the news filtering inside the bunker.

The Azerbaijani trader took meticulous care of detail. In the dark, with snow falling and settling, he was at the lock-up garage off Khayyam Street and would meet there, within the hour, the man who drove the Japanese-built four-wheel-drive. Together they would load a cargo of tea chests with seventy-nine two-kilo packages of heroin resin. His own car, a Paykan, was outside the garage and already had a layer of snow over the roof and windscreen. The brown envelopes were in the glove box.