A Line in the Sand

Chapter Three.

The atmosphere hung like gas, poisoned, in the house, and had for three days and three evenings. It clung to the rooms, eddied into each corner, was inescapable. They went their own ways, as if the atmosphere dictated that they should separate themselves from each other. The stench of the silence they carried with them was in the furniture, in their clothes, and had seeped to their minds.

He stood on the green, beyond his front gate, and gazed out over the rooftops towards the expanse of the gunmetal grey sea.

Stephen came down the stairs each morning, gulped half of his usual breakfast, and waited by the door for his mother to take him to school, or by the gate for the other half of the school-run to collect him. He came home in the afternoons and bolted for his room, came down for supper, then fled upstairs again. The atmosphere between his mother and his stepfather had filtered into his room. Twice, from the bottom of the stairs, Perry had heard him weeping.

It was a bright morning, there would be rain later, and the wind brought a chill from the east.

Since he had pleaded for time Meryl had not spoken of his problem. She was brisk with him, and busy. She called shrilly to him for his meals, dumped his food in front of him, made sharp, meaningless conversation while they ate. It was as if they competed to be the first to finish what she had cooked so that the charade of normality might be over more quickly. If he spread work papers on the table in the kitchen then she was in the living room with her embroidery. If she had an excuse to be out, she took it, spent all of one of the three days helping with the nursery class and staying late at school to scrub the floor. He knew that she loved the house and the village, and that she feared that both were being pulled, by the poison, from her. They slept at night in the same bed, back to back, apart. The space between them was cold. She had looked into his face once, the only time that her eyes had flared in anger, when she'd pushed him aside and run up the stairs to her son's room, in answer to his weeping.

He watched the gulls flying lazily over the sea, and felt jealous that such matters did not trouble them.

His life, many times, in those three days, played in Frank Perry's mind. He remembered his many friends at Shiraz, where the gases were mixed, before the project's move to Bandar Abbas, where the warheads were constructed, and more friends there. They had entertained him and kissed his cheeks when he gave them gifts, and were deceived. At the thought of his betrayal, he screamed silently across the winter-yellowed grass of the green, and the rooftops where the first smoke of the day crawled from the chimneys, and the open depth of the sea. It was not his fault: he hadn't been given a chance to do otherwise.

Emma Carstairs drove up, smiling and chirpy. She pushed the door open and belted her horn. Stephen ran past, without looking at him, and dived for the car as if to escape.

Frank heard Meryl's brisk shout behind him. The car drove away. There was a call for him. The Home Office in London. He went back into the house and heard her washing up the breakfast things. She hadn't asked him why the Home Office had rung. He picked up the telephone.

He felt like a Philby or a George Blake. Bettany, who had rotted in gaol on an Official Secrets Act sentence, would have felt like this when he'd made his first communication with the Soviets. He took the phone card from his wallet. Geoff Markham had come out of Thames House, doubled back behind the building, scurried up Horseferry Road for the first bank of telephones. The brewery answered, through to Marketing, a shout for Vicky. He felt he was breaking faith, and the furtiveness exhilarated him. He told her that the bank was giving him an interview for a place in investment brokerage; his application had been short listed down to the last three. She squealed, she said he was brilliant. He gave her the details. She growled that she would bloody murder him if he blew it and started on about her teaching him interview technique. She had wanted him out of what she called that creepy job and into proper work since they'd first shared a bed. He rang off. He wouldn't have dared make that call inside Thames House. He felt elation that he had been short listed and the same sense of shame as when he'd sent off the application to the bank with the necessarily limited personal background. It was what Vicky had told him to do she had torn the job advertisement from the Situations Vacant.

He took the back-streets to the bridge, crossed over. The great building, the home of the Secret Intelligence Service, the green and cream and tinted-glass monstrosity, was enemy territory to most of his seniors at Thames House. When Cox or Fenton went across the river to Vauxhall Bridge Cross, they always said, after they'd legged it back, that they felt they ought to wash their hands. He asked for Ms Flowers, and the security staff at Reception looked at him and his Security Service ID as if they were both worthless.

She took him into a bare interview room on the ground floor. She laid a file in front of her on the table, and leaned her elbows over it, covered it with her bosom.

He talked.

"We went down under prepared to see him, went with big holes in what we knew. We knew that his new name and identity were blown open how and where is what we did not know. We told him his life was under threat, but we didn't know the extent of the threat… It was difficult to assess who was the blind and who the one-eyed. We're sending him the Blue Book. We need help and have to have answers to questions."

She snorted derisively.

"Ask away. Whether I'll answer, that's a different matter. And you should know the importance we give to the Iranian weapons programme. Attention, among the ill informed was directed towards Iraq, which is just comic cuts, cartoon-strip stuff. Iran is the big player. Iraq has no global following, Iran is a focus point for billions of Muslims. Iran matters." She guarded the file with her elbows.

"Who was Frank Perry?"

"His name was Gavin Hughes. He was a pushy young salesman in an engineering manufacturing company at Newbury. He sold commercial mixing machines, mostly for export."

"What was the Iran link?"

"The Iranians wanted mixing machines for their programme WIVID development. You know what that is, don't you? Weapons of Mass Destruction, microbiological, chemical and nuclear."

"But the export to Iran of those machines is blocked by legislahon, enforced by Customs and Excise. Isn't that right?"

"The machines are dual-purpose you were informed of that, and the Customs interest. The same machine can be legally exported to mix chewing-gum or toothpaste to industrial quantities, and illegally exported to mix explosives and the chemical precursors for nerve gases and bio-toxins, which are the anthrax or suchlike end of the business. His company's machines, with falsified export declarations, were for the equipment of military factories."

"What was his importance?"

"He's a sharp salesman, as I said, everybody's good guy. People warm to him, people want to be his friend. The man who is liked and makes friends, he gets access. The access was disproportionate to the importance of the product he supplied. No need to go to Tehran to meet him, have him down to Shiraz or Bandar Abbas, sort the problem out there and save time. He's a popular man and not stupid. He doesn't push his luck, just keeps his ears and eyes open, and he oils the friendships with gifts. It gets so that he's hardly noticed when he's there. I'm not exaggerating he was remarkable, one of the most valuable assets we've ever had."

"Who was the controller running him?"

"Ran him a bit myself at the end, when it was leading up to the sensitive time. We were into him about eighteen months before it finished. We'd picked up the illegality bit. He faced a Customs and Excise investigation and he'd have gone to prison. We had him well stitched, and he knew it. He was always very co-operative. You don't need to know who recruited him, did the heavy stuff and pulled him on-side they wouldn't give you the time of day."

"What happened "at the end"? What finished it?"

"We and other agencies became aware of the pace of the development of chemical warheads. We needed to obstruct, or at least impede, that progress. Necessary action was taken."

"What was the action taken?"

"You should never try to run, Mr. Markham, before you've learned to walk. That's not your concern.

"Sorry, but it is my concern if I'm to be in a position where I can assess the contemporary threat level."

"If you've ever rammed a stick into a wasps' nest then you make the wasps angry. They want to sting you. At which point you're advised to get the hell out. That'll have to be good enough for you.

"How would the Iranians have known that he was the source of information?"

"They're not idiots, certainly not in our eyes. At the same time they were clearing up the debris, he'd disappeared, left home and work. Yes, they could put that together. They would have been very angry.

"Has he been looked after?"

"What you already know new life, no Customs and Excise feeling his collar, new identity. We treated him well and expensively."

"That's a minimum of five years ago. Would their anger have lasted?"

"With the action that was taken, yes. The anger might have matured, but it wouldn't have diminished."

"What are we supposed to do now?"

"God, why'd you ask me? Water under the bridge, as far as we're concerned. He's no earthly use to us or anyone now, just another engineer doing whatever engineers do."

"But if he was brilliant and remarkable, we owe him."

"Understood you've done that, offered help. I know his reaction too. He's made his bed. We don't acknowledge debt to civilians, businessmen. They work for us, we explain the risks, they stand on their own feet. Actually, we were surprisingly generous in this case. Nothing is owed."

"One last thing. What was the quality of the information on the renewed threat?"

"There's an American in Riyadh, a funny little fellow from the FBI. He's their Iran guru. He dug up Perry's name, a little consolation on a failed raid. If you call him, don't have a pending appointment and don't expect him to draw breath and let you get a word in. Get the message Perry or Hughes is a spent cartridge, he's of no importance. At the reception they'll show you the lavatory. The American in Riyadh is Littelbaum…"

The electric fan always distorted the television picture, and the cranking air-conditioner set in the wall did the damage to the sound. Mary-Ellen was responsible for catching the local-language news programme because Littelbaum found it hard to remember schedules. He was at his desk, the fan blast riffling the papers in front of him. This small section of the embassy building that he used with Mary-Ellen and the larger area in an adjacent corridor, the Agency's place, were not served by the building's main air-coolant system. The pipes had been cut off and sealed. A security review, two years back, had decided that the Bureau and the Agency should be protected from the possible hazard of lethal gases being fed into the system, so they had their own air-conditioners, a nightmare of noise and unreliability that needed the back-up of electric fans.

The local-language news bulletin was usually a catalogue of the King's palace meetings and the public appearances of the prime princes. The picture was awful, the sound worse, and the content negligible, so he let her monitor it. Even above the clatter of the air-conditioner and the whine of the fan, he heard her gasp. Littelbaum swung in his chair.

The man's head was down, his voice a monosyllabic whisper. Goddammit… The man was dressed in a white robe, like a long shirt. dress, was round-shouldered as if the hope had gone from him. Under the loosely draped gutra, the scarf covering his head, his eyes had lost their light. Damn, shit, damn… The man mouthed a rehearsed confession. Littelbaum listened as he confessed to terrorism and subversion of the kingdom. He was shrunken, as if dehydrated, from when Littelbaum had last seen him, dragged in the sand towards the waiting helicopters. The bastards, the lying, deceiving, double-talking bastards… He grabbed his herringbone jacket, and ran, a fast waddling gait, for the door, the corridor, the grille gate where the Marine stood guard, the elevator, and the ambassador's floor.

He stood to his full squat height, and his body shook with anger as he hammered his complaint.

"It is just obstruction. I have been blocked at General Security six times and I have made two dozen, more, calls to General Security, the ministry, God knows who else. I have not only been denied the chance to talk to this man myself, I have not been permitted to read the interrogation dossier. They are supposed to be fucking allies -I know, sir, about their delicate sensibilities, and I know they are a proud and independent people, and please don't tell me to humour them, but I don't give a shit what happens in this country. The place is a cess-pit, it is corrupt, devious, lying, complacent. Americans died in Dhahran and Riyadh. If this man is on TV and making a confession, then he has been tried, convicted, condemned. Three Americans died in Riyadh, nineteen in Dhahran. Finding the killers of Americans is my job. This man, sir, was in contact with an organizer who I am paid to track and find. This man could give me the name and the face of that organizer, but I am blocked. When he has been, one-way ticket, to Chop-chop Square, I have lost the chance to get from this man that information. I was so goddamn close. So what the fuck are you going to say to our good sweet allies? I have been working more than two years for this one chance so I can hunt the bastard down. What are you going to say?"

The ambassador wrung his hands and said he would make telephone calls, which was what he always said. Littelbaum went back to his section. The fan blew the papers on his desk and Mary-Ellen put a decent slug of 'brown' in his coffee.

The coffee, laced with whiskey, might just make him forget that he had no face and no name to work towards, and that he did not know where the footprints led.

The wind whipped about her and could not move her. The sea swell bucked beneath her and did not shake her.

She was out of the Kharg Island terminal, the property of the National Iranian Tanker Corporation. Her call sign was EQUZ. Her length, bow to stern, was 332 metres; her beam, port to starboard, was 58 metres; her draught, the waterline to the lowest point of the hull, was 22.5 metres. She was loaded with 287,000 tonnes of

Iranian crude. Her speed through the water, regardless of weather conditions, was a constant 21 knots. She had been at sea for thirteen days, routed from Kharg Island, past the port of Bandar Abbas, through the Straits of Hormuz, north up the Red Sea to the canal, away from Port Said and into the Mediterranean. After navigating the Straits of Gibraltar, her last reported position had her giving a wide berth to the sea lanes leading to Lisbon. She was two days' sailing from the western approaches of the English Channel. Her crew complement was always thirty-two Iranian and Pakistani nationals, and the master would give that number, in truth, to the immigration authorities at the Swedish refinery. She was a monster, carving her way forward, moving remorselessly towards her destination.

"Just read it, Mr. Perry, it's all in here. I can't say it's anything that pushes back the frontiers of science. It just states what's sensible."

When she walked out of the front door Meryl had been crying. She'd tried not to cry in the house, but she'd cried when she was on the step, and going down the path. Perry had seen her dab her eyes when she reached the car and then he'd closed the door. He was not ready to tell her. It would have been easier if she'd confronted him. He had been leaning against the hall wall, head in the coats, when the bell had rung. A card had been proffered, Home Office Central Unit, and a smiling, middle-aged man had been following him into the house.

"It's all in the pamphlet what we call the Blue Book, because it's blue. Vary your route to and from your home, keep a constant watch for strangers whom you might suspect of showing a particular interest in the house. You haven't a garage, I see. Car parked on the street, that's a problem. Well, you look like a handyman, get an old car wing-mirror, lash it to a bamboo pole and check under the car each morning, under the main chassis and especially that naughty little hidden bit above the wheels, doesn't take a moment. Imagine anywhere under the car, or under the bonnet, where you could hide a pound bag of sugar, but it's not sugar, it's military explosive, and a pound of that stuff will destroy the car, with a mercury tilt switch. Always best to be careful and do the checks, doesn't take a minute."

They wandered through the house, as if the man were an estate agent and the place was going on the market but it wasn't, he was staying. No quitting, no running. The furniture was eyed, and the ornaments and the pictures, and the fittings in the kitchen. He'd made them both a mug of tea, and his visitor had taken three biscuits from the jar, munched them happily and left a trail of crumbs behind him.

"It's mostly about the car. You shouldn't think you're alone. I don't get many days in the office. So many Army officers who were in Northern Ireland, they all need updating. I've a lovely list of gentlemen I visit, and judges and civil servants. You shouldn't get in a flap nothing's ever happened to any of my gentlemen. But what I tell all of them, watch the car… I'll be leaving brochures of the locks on offer, doors and windows, all fitted at our expense. You know, we spend five million pounds a year on this, and me and my colleagues, so don't get depressed and think you're the only one. They didn't tell me, never do, who you'd rubbed up the wrong way… They came down the stairs. The biscuits were finished and the mugs were empty. The man darted back into the living room. There was a grimace on his face, as if he had forgotten something and that was a personal failure.

"Oh, the curtains."

"What's wrong with them?"

"Dreadful of me not to have noticed. There are no net curtains. There should be your wife can knock some up."

"She hates net curtains."

"Your job, Mr. Perry, not mine, to make her like them. I'm sure that when you've explained it-' "Do you have net curtains at home?" He hadn't thought, and realized his stupidity as soon as the question was asked.

"No call for them. I'm not at threat, I've not trod on anyone's toes. Net curtains, you see, absorb flying glass from an lED, that's improvised explosive device a bomb, to the layman."

He was grateful for the time and advice. He wished him a safe journey back to London.

"Final advice, be sensible, read the Blue Book, do what it says. Don't think that from now on, what I always say to my gentlemen, life ends, you've got to live under the kitchen table. If there were a specific danger, say threat-level two, they'd have moved you out of here, feet wouldn't have touched the ground or, God forbid, there'd be armed police crawling all over your home… Good day, Mr. Perry, thanks for your hospitality. Let my office know what locks you want, and don't forget about the net curtains. I'll call again in about six months, if it's still appropriate. Good day… It's not that bad or you'd have the guns here or you'd have been moved out…"

After he had read the pamphlet, he hid it among his work papers where she never looked. Frank Perry still did not know what and when he would tell Meryl.

A jam my old number, the Branch men in London called it, a proper trolley ride for the geriatrics, and let them try it. He cursed. He was fifty-one years old, working out the time to retirement, and too damned old for this caper. His problem, he was trying to do singlehandedly the work that should have been given to a four-man detail.

It had been fine at the terraced house where he'd picked up his target easily enough. The target had walked, and the detective sergeant had trailed him on foot into the centre of Nottingham. Into a camping-equipment shop. The detective sergeant had fingered wet-weather coats while the target had selected then paid cash for a sleeping-bag, heavy-soled walking-boots, wool boot socks, camouflage trousers and tunic that were ex-military stock. He might have been old, near to retirement, but the detective sergeant still registered his target's height and the size of the boots, which were at least two sizes too small for the target's feet.

All the university cities in the country had a pair of Branch men attached to the local police station. Used to be Irish work, not any longer. It was the Islamic thing that preoccupied the detective sergeant and his partner, Iranian students studying engineering, physics, chemistry, metallurgy, and the zealots who recruited among the campus kids. It was work for a dozen men in this city alone, not for two poor bastards. The Security Service provided the names and addresses, and bugger all else, leaving the detective sergeant to tramp the streets and type the bloody reports.

The target was careful and had twice ducked into shop doorways and let him come past. His shoes, new, hurt his feet, and he was bursting for a leak. The detective sergeant was trained in surveillance, but it was damn difficult to make the tail when it was down to one man. They had ended in a bookshop. He'd eyed the paperback thrillers while the target had been searching, very specific, on shelves across the shop.

He had not had this man before. There were usually so many targets that they came round on a rota every four weeks or so. It was only three months since the young fellow, wet behind the ears and up from London, had given the sparse detail of the Security Service interest in Yusuf Khan, Muslim convert, formerly Winston Summers. One of many, the tall, wide-shouldered Afro-Caribbean was under surveillance around one day in thirty, nine in the morning to seven in the evening. He did not know why this thirty-year-old cleaner at the university was on the list for sporadic surveillance… His was not to reason why, his but to do and bloody die and bugger all glory for his pinched feet and aching bladder.

The target had taken a book, gone quickly to a vacant cash desk, and paid in notes and loose change before heading out into the street. The detective sergeant was good at his work and conscientious. He checked the shelves where the target had searched: UK Travel and Guides. The man was out on the street now. A woman was at the cash desk, with a child in tow, choosing a gift-token card. He'd lost half a minute before he'd used his shoulder, shown his warrant card, and demanded of the assistant what book her previous customer had purchased. The dumb girl had forgotten, had to check back in the point-of-sale computer.

He stood on the pavement outside the shop and cursed.

He could not see his target and narrow arcades led off both sides of the main street.

He swore.

He quartered the arcades and the precinct, checked the bus stops and the precinct, but could not find the bobbing head he sought, or the bright-coloured shopping-bags. As his son would say, when his birthday came round, when the detective sergeant had to dig in his wallet to pay for the amplifier or the tuner, "Pay peanuts, Dad, and you get monkeys." They paid for one man to do a surveillance once every thirty days and by eleven o'clock in the morning the monkey had lost its target.

He would find a place to leak, then walk back to the dismal street of little terraced houses to sit in his car, fashion the excuses, compose his report, and have not an idea why Yusuf Khan, formerly Winston Summers, had purchased boots, camouflage trousers and tunic too small for him, heavy wool socks, a sleeping-bag, and a guidebook to the coastal area of north Suffolk. What the policeman knew of that area from a wet, cold and miserable caravan holiday twenty-two years back was endless grey seas and marshes. But it would go in his report for want of something better.

"Were you followed?"

Yusuf Khan did not think so.

"Have you done anything to create suspicion?"

Yusuf Khan knew of nothing.

The intelligence officer was a man of sophistication and poise. He came from a childhood spent after the revolution in a villa of quality set in the foothills of the Albourz. The previous owner had fled in 1980 and his cleric father had been awarded the property, which looked down on to Tehran's smoggy sprawl. He w~s fluent in German, Italian, Arabic and English, and could pass in casual London society for Palestinian, Lebanese, Saudi or Egyptian. To the unaware he might be from the deep south of Italy, perhaps Calabrian or Sicilian. He had been three years in London and believed he understood the heartbeat of the British psyche… and that understanding had led him to recruit Yusuf Khan, formerly Winston Summers, Muslim convert. He was a religious man himself, prayed at the given hours when it was possible, and the obsession of the converts to the Faith was something he found ridiculous but useful. He preyed on the converts, trawled for them in the mosques of the splinter communities who set themselves aside from the traditions of the Sunni and Shi'a teaching. He searched for them in the universities. The best he found, those who displayed a fervent adoration of the Imam Khomeini, he recruited.

Yusuf Khan had been subject to police investigation in Bristol, following a knife attack on an Arab businessman who had kissed a white woman on the street outside a nightclub. Unemployed, embittered and alienated, living in the East Midlands city of Nottingham, attending the mosque of Sheik Amir Muhammad, Yusuf Khan had been identified three years earlier for the intelligence officer. Twenty-three months before, with the trust already built in their relationship, the intelligence officer had told Yusuf

Khan how he might best serve the memory of the Imam. It had been a long evening of persuasion. The following day, Yusuf Khan had walked away from the Faith, taken a job as a cleaner at the university. He monitored the attitudes, friendships, conversations of Iranian students in the engineering faculty. He found and befriended a girl who was now converted to the Faith, and was useful. The trust grew.

The intelligence officer met his man in the car-park of a restaurant by the river. There were too many high cameras in the streets of the city and at the entrances to the multi-storey car-parks. The engine ran, the interior heated, the windows misted. They were unseen and alone.

"You will not be missed from work?"

His friend, the girl, had telephoned the university and reported his head cold.

"You are certain that you have not created suspicion?"

Yusuf Khan was certain.

He was told that he should not go home again until after his part in the matter was finished, to where he should take a train, where he should hire a car, the grade of car, and where he should sleep before the given time. His list was checked, the clothing, the boots, the sleeping-bag, the rucksack of khaki canvas he had bought the day before and collected from left-luggage at the bus station. Everything was checked, the book, the maps, the photographs, and he was passed another tight-rolled bundle of banknotes. He was told of the affection for him of men in high places, far away, whose names he would never know, of their gratitude for what he did, and of how they spoke of him with love. The intelligence officer watched the swell of Yusuf Khan's pride and smelt the chilli on the man's breath. He reached into the back of the car, unzipped a big sausage bag, and revealed the contents. He saw the bright excitement in Yusuf Khan's face. He showed him the launcher wrapped in a tablecloth, the shells, the automatic rifle with the folded stock and the loaded magazines. He opened the canvas rucksack beside the bag, revealed the grenades. He held the man's hand, squeezed it to give him reassurance, and drove him to the railway station.

He said that, in the Farsi language, the Imam was known as Batl Al-Mustadafin, and that was the Champion of the Disinherited, and therefore he was the champion of Yusuf Khan. He said that

Yusuf Khan would deserve the love of all those who followed the word of the Imam Khomeini. The intelligence officer did not tell him that the cornerstone of his work in London was 'deniability'.

When they reached the forecourt of the railway station, he told Yusuf Khan what the Ayatollah Fazl-Allah Mahalati had said. He spoke with fervour.

"A believer who sees Islam trampled underfoot and does nothing to stop it will end up in the seventh layer of Hell. But he who takes up a gun, a dagger, a kitchen knife or even a pebble with which to harm and kill the enemies of the Faith has his place assured in Heaven…"

He watched Khan into the station, carrying the rucksack and the sausage bag, which sagged under the weight of the weapons. On the way back to London he would call in at a small mosque in the town of Bedford, to a cultural association for which his embassy's support was well known, for a meeting that would help create the necessary factor of 'deniability'.

"Don't mind me saying it, Frank, you look bloody awful had the tax man round? You look like I feel when he pushes his bloody nose in!"

Martindale belly-laughed without enthusiasm. He kept the pub in the village, the Red Lion, and had enough cash-flow problems not to need the burden of his customers' difficulties.

"Say nothing, admit nothing. If you have to say anything tell them the dog ate the receipts. Come on, Frank, don't bring your troubles in here. Trouble-free zone, this bar. Come on…"

Frank looked into the thin face with its dour smile. He had been nursing a pint for half an hour. The regular gang was in and there had been whispering before the landlord had come over with the cloth to wipe the spotless table. It had been good of Martindale to fetch him up to the bar.

Vince cuffed his shoulder.

"Not right, not that you've got the tax man on your back, not you. What about a game of arrows, Frank? Tell you, each time you go for treble twenty you reckon that's the tax man's face. Last time they came sniffing round me, I told them to piss off. Oh, I can get down and do that chimney of yours next week, don't think I'd forgotten…"

Vince was the local jobbing builder, a one-man band. The previous November's big storm had shifted some of the roof tiles, and he'd gone up a ladder in the wind and rain with the sure-foot grip of a mountain goat. If he'd waited for the storm to blow out, the rain would have been in the attic and dripped into their bedroom, and it would have been a hell of a big job. Vince talked too much, played at being a hard man but wasn't.

It embarrassed Frank that he'd brought his problems into the pub. If a guy was asked here how he was, he was supposed to say he was fine. If he was asked if he was well, he was supposed to say he was in good shape. Everyone there had problems, came in for a drink to forget them.

There was a short, awkward silence, then Gussie said, "Shall we throw together?"

"Why not, Gussie?"

"You've an education, do you know about Australia, Frank? I'm thinking of going there, next year. What a team, you and me you take first throw. If it dries up a bit, a couple of weeks, I'll be down to dig your garden you should be thinking of getting your vegetables in."

Gussie passed him the darts. He was a big, strapping, amiable youth. Thick as a railway sleeper, not the full shilling, but he kept his mother and the younger children on the pittance he earned as a labourer in the piggery. He propped up the bar most nights and talked to the older men as a bread-winning equal. He dug the vegetable garden in less than half the time it would have taken Frank, and charged too little. Nice boy, but he'd never get to Australia.

Paul took the empty glass from his hand.

"No argument, my shout be a pint, right? You've had one quiet one, time now for three noisy ones right, Frank?"

"That's very kind of you, Paul, thanks."

"I'm thinking of co-opting you on to the village-hall committee, you being an engineer. Won't be any problem, they'll do what I tell them. Place'll fall down if we don't do something, and I'm the only one with the wit to realize it. I reckon we'd work well together, being friends. Of course, I'd take the main decisions. You up for it?"

"Be pleased to help."

Paul was not the chairman of the village-hall committee, or of the parish council, but his way always won through because he was better briefed than any of the others. His life was the village, as had been his father's and grandfather's. Inquisitive but harmless. If his ego was massaged, he gave his friendship without condition, and Frank Perry, former salesman, could manipulate vanity with the best of them. He even quite liked the man.

He played darts with Vince, Gussie and Paul through the evening. He didn't talk much, but let the conversation ripple round him and warm him.

"You heard, Paul, what's happened at Rose Cottage?"

"Heard it was under offer do you know what they were asking?"

Gussie chipped in, "I was told it was over a hundred grand, and there's more to be spent."

"The last thing this place needs is more bloody foreigners no offence, Frank."

"We only want people here who know our ways and respect them."

As the games were restarted, as the pints kept coming, Frank threw more accurately it was his home, his friends were the publican, the jobbing builder, the piggery labourer, the big man of the village-hall committee and the parish council… God, he needed friends because there was a blue-jacketed pamphlet hidden among his papers where Meryl wouldn't find it. He and Gussie lost both their games and it didn't matter to him.

He stepped out into the night.

They were going their own way, and behind him Martindale was switching off the bar lights. His friends shouted encouragement to him.

"Good luck, Frank."

"Keep smiling."

"Frank, I'll be in touch about the hall, look after yourself."

For a year he had been without friends. From the time the last of the minders had driven away, left him to his own devices, until the day he had come with Meryl and bought the house on the green with a view to the sea, twelve endless months, he had been without friends. He had lived in a one-bed roomed flat in a new block a couple of streets away from the centre of suburban Croydon. In all those months, trying to wear his new identity, he had never allowed himself more than half a dozen words on the stairs with any of the other tenants. They might have been good, kindly, warm people, but he hadn't felt the confidence to test them. Fear of a slip, of a single mistake, had isolated him. The first Christmas had hurt. No contact with his son, he hadn't sent a present; no cards hanging from ribbons; no visit to his father and mother in the Lake District for the New Year. Through that twenty-four hours he had sat alone in the flat and listened to the televisions, the laughter, the cheerfulness echoing up the stairwell, and he'd seen people arriving, arms loaded with wrapped presents. His company had been a bottle. When he ventured out to pubs as the evenings lengthened, he always took a chair and table furthest from the bar and the camaraderie. He had learned that he mattered to no one. He had sunk, the signs were clear enough to him, and it had taken a supreme effort to shake off the loneliness. He had started to read the trade magazines and look for small freelance work. The second company he'd visited had employed Meryl. He could remember, so clearly, that he had bounced away from the company's offices with a contract in his pocket and her smile in his mind.

He waved over his shoulder and their laughter, fun among friends, roared after him. He walked on and wondered where he would find an old wing-mirror to lash to a bamboo pole.

"What makes you think, Mr. Markham, that you have any of the qualifications required for modern banking?"

"I'm used to high-pressure work. It matters when I make decisions that I've chosen the correct option. I can work on my own, and I can work with a team."

She sat wrong way round on the chair, leaned on the back of it, splayed her legs either side of the seat so that her skirt rode up.

"Balls, about "high-pressure work", but the right sort of balls. Hit "team", it's an emphasis word, they like that. Why, Mr. Markham, do you wish to walk away from the security ha, ha of safe civil-service employment? You could join us, you could be found unsuitable and out on your ear with your bridges burned. Why?"

"My present work, and you'll respect that I'm bound by confidentiality, has been challenging and responsible but, the nature of the beast, it's limited. I'm capable of spending more time in the fast lane. I don't expect to be found unsuitable."

"Great, that's what they want, arrogance and they want the rounded man. Mr. Markham, what are your hobbies, recreations? Shit!"

It was the telephone.

"So, they don't want to hear about Herefordshire churches… No?"

The telephone stayed ringing.

"Hill-walking give them long-distance hill-walking, exploring the inner man. You can't move for bloody bankers on Snowdonia or Ben Nevis, for Christ's sake, and skiing."

He couldn't ignore, any longer, the ring of the telephone bell.

"I'll field it."

It was Fenton, opening with a caustic, savage quip about clock-watching. Had he gone on the stroke of five? He was to get back in, soonest. There was no apology for the time of night at which he was summoned back. He left Vicky. If he'd stayed longer she'd have killed him or lifted the skirt higher. He drove into central London, against the homeward traffic from the theatres and the restaurants. He parked on a double yellow as the Big Ben clock hammered out the midnight chimes.

Fenton showed him the single sheet of paper, a Special Branch detective sergeant's report of a routine surveillance. Markham knew Yusuf Khan: convert, zealot in the Hizb-ut-Tahrir, pupil of Sheik Amir Muhammad, cleaner at Nottingham University, knew him as well as he knew a hundred others from the files. The report was the familiar story of a fuck-up. The target had been followed, lost, not found again. While he was followed, before he was lost, he'd been on a shopping jaunt. A cleaner, no skills, at the university took home not more than 125 a week after stoppages. Three weeks' wages gone in an outdoors shop, cash and out of generosity because the boots wouldn't have fitted. And the book… There was a giant wall map in Fenton's room, floor to ceiling, which Montgomery would have appreciated or perhaps Wellington. Fenton used a snooker cue to do the business. Its end rapped the area covered by the guidebook, north Suffolk, then stabbed a line where land became sea, and rested there. The guidebook covered a 'dead-end place', a 'one-street hole'. He held in his hand the routine report from Special Branch, and he felt the night cold.

"I'd ring her if I were you, Geoff, and postpone the nookie and don't get to be a timekeeper." Fenton smirked.

"Go to work, because

I want it on my desk at lunch-time the threat, what it is, where it's coming from."

He had said it himself: "He chose well, if he won't run." The cue end was beside the name of the village, which a man wouldn't leave, where a home was protected only by a door with a new lock and an old bolt.

The wind whipped about him and snatched at his coat. He was alone in the darkness. The sea cried beneath him and he sat on the deck far forward of the lights of the tanker's bridge. The night hours were precious to him, when he could escape from the claustrophobic confines of the cabin, which was like a prison cell during daylight because he had been told he must not attract the crew's attention. He stayed there until darkness came, and then he slipped out, glided silently along the hushed corridors of the accommodahon block and eased open the watertight door that led to the wide length of the deck space above the crude's tanks. In the night, in the darkness, with the great throbbing power beneath him, he felt the strength of his people and of his God.

Frank Perry had walked for nearly an hour past the green, down to the darkened boatyard with the stilted walkways over the river mud, then out on the raised path towards the Northmarsh.

He was at the place where the tidal river merged with the inland water mass and the slow-swaying reed-beds. There was a crescent moon up and a shallow light on the beds. The silence was broken only when he disturbed a swan that clattered, screaming, away. He rehearsed what he would say, what he would tell her, and he peed the beer out of his bladder and into the still water at his feet. If they had had their way, Fenton and the younger man who had not spoken, then he, Meryl and her boy would by now have been rootless flotsam. Maybe they would have been in an hotel, or an Army camp, or in an empty chalet complex that was available because the holiday-makers had not yet come. There would be nothing to hold on to but the handles of packed suitcases, for ever. If he had moved her on, if they were now in an unknown bed, listening for danger in the night, alone, perhaps she would have stayed with him for three months, a year, but finally she would have gone… It was his home, and her home and her son's home, and he prayed, mumbling, that she would understand… He would stay where he was safe, where she was, where his friends were, and her friends… He was drunk. He had accepted two more pints than was good for him. It was so long since he had been drunk, the Christmas before last, lights on the tree, Stephen in bed with his new toys around him. They'd shared a bottle of whisky, sprawled on the sofa, her head on his waist, and stayed there until the bottle was finished, then helped each other up the stairs, tittering. He had thought himself blessed.

But he could remember as clearly when he had thought himself cursed. It was the second night after the minders had checked him into an Army barracks, and at his insistence they had permitted him a single phone call. They'd huffed, complained, left him in no doubt that they were doing him a great favour, and would only drop the rule book that once. Perry had rung his father. Every moment of the call was seared sharply in his memory.

"Hello, Dad, it's Gavin. Dad, please don't interrupt me and don't ask me questions. And don't try to trace this number because it's ex-directory and you'll only waste your time. I've had a difficulty overseas and I'm changing my identity. I don't exist any more. I have a new name and am starting out on a new life. I've left home. They don't know where I am. I won't be able to make contact again. It's for the best. If I came to see you and Mum I'd be endangering you as much as myself. Don't, please, think badly of me. There were good times and we should all cling to them. I don't know what the future holds, but I won't ever forget your and Mum's love for me. Forgive me, Dad. I'm not Gavin any more. He's gone. Look after yourself, Dad, and kiss Mum for me." He'd rung off.

The minders had been round him and they'd nodded coolly as he put down the phone, implying that he'd done well without bothering to say so. His father had never spoken, there had been only the silence in his ear. That silence on the line had been the moment when he'd known he was cursed… He would not quit again. He listened to the retreating cry of the swan, watched its ghostliness over the reed-beds and the quiet water, and turned for home.

His car was parked in front of the house. He paused beside it, then crouched and felt with his fingers into the hidden space above the front near side wheel for a bag of sugar.

"Got a flat one? Got a puncture?"

Jerry Wroughton stood in his door holding his cat, a spiteful little beast that killed song-birds. His neighbour always put it out last thing at night.

He lied, "Thought I had false alarm."

The cat was dropped and ran to the cover of darkness. Wroughton asked, "Are you all right? You've not looked yourself the last few days, Frank."

"Haven't I?" He straightened and rubbed the dirt off his hands.

"What I wanted to say, and Mary, if there's anything wrong, and we can help, you've only to shout."

"Do I look that bad?"

"You said it, chief. Pretty grotty. Just yell, it's what neighbours are for."

"Thanks, Jerry, I'll remember that you're very kind, both of you. I appreciate it."

He went inside, locked the door and pushed the bolt over. He went to bed, alone, his back to hers, cold. He would tell her in the morning. It could wait until then.