A Line in the Sand

Chapter Five.

The door opened, and he held up his warrant card. In better times Lily had said it was a rotten photo that didn't do him justice; that morning, like as not, she would have said it flattered him. He was tall, had no surplus weight, with a pale face and cheeks drawn in under the bones. His nose and chin were over-prominent, his hair was dark, cut short, and his light blue eyes were dominant. He said briskly, "Morning, Mr. Perry. I'm Detective Sergeant Bill Davies."

He could hear a child's and a woman's voice in the depths of the house. He saw Perry's jaw fall and then tighten. There was never a right time to start the process of protection. He thought of himself as a shadow cast over the principal's life; he could have come in the late afternoon as the family was preparing for supper and television, or in the evening when they were readying for bed, or early in the morning when they were starting a day at the breakfast table, but there was never a best time to arrive on a stranger's doorstep.

"They called you last night, yes? Sorry it had to be the duty officer, but my guvnor tried to reach you in the afternoon and you weren't at home. Sorry it worked out like that."

God help anyone called by the night duty officer the guvnor, the superintendent, would have been familiar with tact, might have thought through what was appropriate to say, and certainly would have had the file to dictate his tone. But not the NDO. It would have been blunt and to the point what the protection officer's name was, at what time he was arriving, and goodnight.

Perry swivelled, looked behind him, back towards the kitchen door and the voices.

Davies said, with confidence, "Just getting the lad off to school? It's Stephen, Mrs. Perry's lad, right? If you don't want me around for the moment that's no problem, Mr. Perry. I can wait till he's on his way, and then we'll do the business. I've got my car here, I can sit there."

It was all about getting off to the right start. It didn't work if the principal refused to co-operate with the protection officer. He needed, from the beginning, to set the tone of the relationship. No call for diving in, breaking the routine of the family, jarring them, then having to mend fences because there was a lingering bitterness. Most principals, in his experience, were frightened half to death when he first came to their homes. The women were worse, and the kids were the big problem, always the headache. Best to go gentle. If his guvnor had called there would have been a few crumbs of detail on why the threat had ratcheted up, but there'd have been none from the night duty officer. The principals were never given the full picture, not even senior persons in government, certainly not judges and civil servant administrators and this principal, Perry, was only a civilian with a past and he would get no detail. The threat was not a matter for debate and discussion.

He had worked late into the night in his room at the bed-and-breakfast, and early in the morning before his breakfast, on the file and the village. He'd had the electoral list, the large-scale map that showed every house, digests of police and local-authority files on residents, and had written names against houses. Only one property, currently for sale, was unoccupied. With that mass of information digested, he had made the plan of how they would work together, him and the principal.

"I'll be in my car, Mr. Perry."

Perry said, in a low voice, "My wife knows, the boy does not."

"That's not a problem. We'll let him get off to school, then we'll talk."

"He's being picked up, the school-run, in about five minutes."

"You know where to find me, Mr. Perry."

There was a shout from the kitchen, from the woman, about the door being open. Who was there? Perry turned and yelled back into the depth of the house that he wouldn't be a moment. There was defiance in his face; there usually was at the start from the principals.

"I'll see you in a few minutes, Bill…"

"Detective Sergeant or Mr. Davies, please, and you are Mr. Perry and your wife is Mrs. Perry it's the way we do it." He said it brusquely, coldly. There wasn't call in the job for familiarity. What they said at the Yard, in the SB protection unit, get too close and the principal starts to run the show. That would not happen with Bill Davies's principal. He had a job to do, he was a paid hand, and it mattered not a damn whether he liked or disliked the man. He would tell him later about the workmen and the technicians, who would be crawling round the house by late morning, up the walls, through the rooms, in the garden. There was no soft way of making a start.

"The neighbours don't know."

"No reason why they should we're used to discretion. The less they know the better."

Perry frowned. He was a moment summoning up the question, then rushed it.

"Are you armed?"

"Of course."

"Has the situation got worse?"

"The doorstep isn't the place to discuss it. When you're ready, come and get me out of the car."

The door closed on him. Of course he was bloody armed. Perry would have said all the brave things when the Thames House people had come on their visit and been rejected. Now, he would be realizing where the brave things had led him.

Davies sat in his car. He had a good view of the house, and the green in front of it, the road and the homes on the far side of the house, the sea. The car was from the pool. It looked like any other Vauxhall sold for company fleet driving, but it had the big radio with a pre-set console linking Davies to the SB's operations centre, a fire extinguisher, and the box with the comprehensive first-aid equipment. In a metal container, reached by lifting the rear seat central arm rest, was a compact case holding a Heckler amp; Koch machine-gun, with ammunition and magazines, and a dozen CS gas grenades. In the boot was an image-intensifier sight for the

H amp;K, a monocular night-sight, a bullet-proof square of reinforced material, which they called the ballistic blanket, the gas masks and the television monitor with the cables and the headset.

Bill Davies waited. By his feet was the lunch-box given him by Mrs. Fairbrother at the bed-and-breakfast, and his Thermos, which she had filled with coffee black, no sugar. He had discarded the shoulder holster, left it locked in his bag in the room, gone for the waist-belt holster and put his loose change into his suit-jacket pocket; weight in the pocket so that the jacket moved decisively back if he had to draw his firearm fast. He saw the neighbour leave for work with his wife, bustling out of his weathered, brick-built house, before stopping and peering at him as he sat in the car. Finally, the child ran from the house and into a car.

From the doorway, Perry waved for him to come inside. Davies, of course, had a trained eye for descriptions: Perry was of average height, average build, with fair hair and a face with no particular distinguishing marks. He was ordinary and unremarkable, the sort of man who was easy to miss in a crowd.

He took his time, straightened his tie and checked in the mirror that his hair was in order, then eased out of his seat. He didn't hurry. He was not there to be at the beck and call of the principal. The Glock in the waist holster lapped against his hip as he walked towards the door. He would set the rules, start as he meant to go on. He went inside.

Perry said softly, "I told my wife that the threat wasn't real."

"Then you'll have to do a bit of explaining, sir."

When the engine pitch changed he was sleeping. He stirred in the hard bunk bed, closed his eyes again, aware of the swinging turn of the tanker. Then he wiped his eyes, dragged at the floral curtain and peered through the porthole window. Beyond white-flecked sea was a horizon of dark land, browned cliffs, yellowed fields and the greys of a town's buildings. In the sea, bucked and heaved by the swell, was a small boat, its blue hull lost then found as the spray broke over a garish orange superstructure. The small boat closed on the tanker. He was awake, he remembered.

The tanker slowed to allow the pilot's launch to come alongside, turning to shelter it from the bluster of the wind. He pressed his face against the weathered glass of the porthole and watched until the launch was under the sheer wall of the tanker's side. He imagmed the pilot jumping across a void of water from the deck of his boat to the rope ladder cavorting from the bottom of the fixed steps, and if the pilot slipped… In the night, when he went over the side, his God would protect him. From his porthole window, he could not see the pilot come aboard, but he watched the small boat heave away and head back at speed towards the land. He felt the turn of the tanker and heard the throbbing power as the engines regained cruising speed. By the time that the ship, guided by the pilot on the bridge with the master, rejoined the northern lane of the English Channel's traffic-separation scheme, he was asleep again. He needed the sleep because he did not know when next he would have the opportunity. He would sleep until the alarm on his watch woke him at noon, then pray, then sleep again until mid-afternoon, then pray, then sleep again until dusk, then pray, then ready himself.

"They bought it I don't believe it, but it's authorized." The faithful Mary-Ellen tore the paper off the fax roll.

"That's just incredible. They swallowed it. You've got the clearance, you're on the freedom bird tonight." She laid the sheet of paper down in front of him.

"Have you enough socks?"

The Special Agent (Riyadh) of the FBI and his personal assistant sat beside each other and made a list of what he should pack, and what he might need to buy in the embassy shop. She wrote down, and underlined, the names of the pills for his blood-pressure problem.

When the list was complete, she made the airline reservation.

"The authorization is for a week is that OK? Book you back in a week?"

He nodded agreement.

She chattered on, "Don't you worry about me. I'll be just fine. Be glad to see the back of you for a week. We're behind with accounts, filing, all that stuff might just get the place cleaned out. I'll have a dandy time here."

But he was hardly listening. Duane Littelbaum would not have paused to consider whether his personal assistant could cope with a week of his absence. His wife, Esther, was out in west Iowa, between Audobon, which had been his home, and Harlan Valley, where she had been reared. She was in the world of cattle and corn, had brought up two daughters, and he hadn't lived with her, not properly, for a few months short of twenty-one years. It did not seem to matter to him, or to her. He went home, to the roadside house between Audobon and Harlan Valley, every leave that was given him and every Christmas. He wrote to his wife each weekend that he was away and never forgot a birthday. It was a detached marriage but it stayed alive.

He had lived his life for the study of Iran.

Those who did not know him, the embassy staffers who passed him in the corridors or saw him in the parking lot or at the ambassador's functions, would have reckoned him an academic, eccentric and gentle. They would have been wrong. He played the dangerous game of counter-terrorism. It was a solitary, work-driven life, where victims held little relevance, where the requirement for victory was paramount.

Duane Littelbaum had a light, bouncing step as he left his office and went on down the corridor, cheerfully slapping the arm of the Marine at the grille. His stride was almost a skip of pleasure.

His purpose in life, through all of twenty years, had been to put a smoking gun into an Iranian hand. If the chance came, he would act with a ruthlessness unrecognized by those who did not know him well.

His finger hovered over the names he had written on his paper pad. Fenton stood over him.

Geoff Markham recited, "Yusuf Khan, disappeared off the face of the earth. SB have beefed up Nottingham from Manchester and Leeds, but they don't have him. He's not been home since he was lost, and has not showed at work. The one associate we have listed is Farida Yasmin Jones, the convert, but that's a problem because she's dropped out, doesn't go to the mosque now and has moved out of her bed sit I can't trace her electricity, telephone and gas bills for a new address, like it's covering a trail and intentional which is to me both interesting and worrying. The protection officer given to Perry hasn't called back to his co-ordinator. It's a slow haul."

"Keep pushing, keep kicking bums. I'll be at lunch."

He nibbled at the fringes of impertinence.

"That's nice, enjoy it."

Fenton grinned.

"I will. Need to get up to speed. I have a good feeling about this one. In my water, I've the feeling this might even be exciting. I'm preparing for a jump on to the learning curve."

His superior had been transferred from the Czech! Slovak I Romanian/ Bulgarian desk only fourteen months before, which was why Cox had been able, effortlessly, to win promotion over him. Markham thought Fenton should have been on his learning curve a year ago. He stepped over the fringes.

"I am sure that Mr. Perry would be pleased to hear that he's providing a bit of excitement."

"You want to make anything of this job? My advice, take the heat."

"I'll be here."

"Where I would expect you to be."

Markham did not look up. Fenton was going to the door, whistling happily, and he steeled himself.

"Mr. Fenton."

The whistling stopped.

"Mr. Fenton, I know we're in unpredictable times, but I need to be out tomorrow afternoon, for one o'clock, be about an hour."

Fenton would have been looking at the photo on his wall of Vicky, the one where she wore the short skirt. He asked, "Going to get a little cuddle in, to see you through the day?"

"I am entitled to an hour at lunch, Mr. Fenton." Vicky would maul him if he didn't put his foot down. He said doggedly, "I'm not obliged to work right through a night, but I did."

"No call for claws, Geoff. If you can be free then you will be."

"Sorry, Mr. Fenton, it's not "if". I have to be out of here for one o'clock tomorrow."

"Clock-watching, Geoff, does not fit the Service ethos. May be all right in a bank… but secret work, security work, makes a bad bedfellow with a clock face

Fenton was gone. Geoff Markham sat at the console and hammered out the text, giant format, then printed it. He took a roll of Sellotape from his drawer and stuck the paper to the outside of his door.

"This Project is so SECRET even I DON'T KNOW what I'm doing."

The principal and his wife were subdued, out of sight, when the van arrived with the men from London. Davies jumped out of his car to meet them. He took the foreman down the narrow track at the side of the house and showed him the rear garden, the facade of old stone, and gave him the sketch map he'd drafted of the layout for the property, and its interior.

Two more men were at the front now, unloading the cables and boxes from the van, and unhitching the ladders' stay ropes from its roof. He had his own key to the front door now, and took the foreman inside. He'd leave the kitchen, where the principal was with his wife, until last. The foreman hadn't wiped his boots and left a trail of wet earth round the rooms. They went through the house, and the foreman never lowered his voice as he discussed arcs of surveillance for the cameras and the sighting of the infrared beams and through which upper window-frames they would drill the cable holes, and which ground-floor windows and doors should be alarmed. They came to the kitchen last. She sat with her back to them, didn't acknowledge them. Perry tried to make small-talk but the foreman ignored him. It was usually like that, when the gear was put in, and there was no easy way of riding out the shock.

Outside, the ladder scraped as it was extended. The kitchen window darkened as a man's body settled on the lowest rung to test its reliability. The wife had her head down and her lunch half eaten in front of her.

Perry said, "I thought I had the choice on the new locks."

"It's a bit more than locks, Mr. Perry. It's cameras and infrared and tumbler wires and-' "What's going on?"

They were always worse, more aggressive, in front of the lady, as if they felt the need to make a stand and pretend they were in charge. The principal was not in charge, not any more, of his house, and certainly not of his life.

"I can't tell you, Mr. Perry, because I don't know and if I did I couldn't tell you."

He went outside. There was a light rain falling and the sky threatened more. Another ladder was up against the front wall, the cables dancing as they were unrolled. An electric drill was whining through the wood of an upper window-frame. It wasn't the job of the detective sergeant to feel sympathy, but already, inside their home, their lives were being violated and this was merely the beginning.

There would be some who would say afterwards that this had been the War of Fenton's Belly. They were the bureaucrats of the first floor (Administration Sub-Branch Accounts), tasked with the study of expense receipts and entertainment bills. Five bills in a week for expenses and entertainment handed in by the head of Section 2, G Branch, and the handwritten demand for reimbursement. They would call, after the business was completed, for explanations and would receive only the vaguest information of what had happened, what had been at stake, and its outcome.

Harry Fenton would have preferred to walk on nails rather than go to Vauxhall Bridge Cross with an invitation to Penny Flowers to join him for lunch. He said it to whomever would listen, often enough, that the Secret Intelligence Service treated the Security Service as lesser creatures. He would not go cap in hand to Ms Flowers for help and information. So, the first step on his learning curve was to offer a good meal to the senior Mid-East (Terrorism) analyst of the Foreign and Commonwealth's research division. They ordered, and then she launched.

"Iran is on the move. Don't believe all that garbage the Americans peddle about a dark, bloodstained hand, Islamic and Iranian, behind every vicious little guerrilla war in the world, it's just not true. Iran is going modern. There've been fair elections, a new moderate president, a breaking down of the taboos of Muslim life. Look, you want a drink in Tehran, you can get it you'll have to be discreet, but you can have it. Only three, four years ago, you'd have had a public whipping to sober you up. The woman's role, in government and the civil service, is advancing fast. Women now have power, and there are fashion boutiques for clothes to be worn at private parties. They are modernizing at speed, and if it was not for the bloody stupid American sanctions they would be going even faster towards a viable economic infrastructure I'm a fan."

She chewed on the breadsticks with the same enthusiasm with which she talked. Fenton, watching her and listening, didn't think research analysts were overwhelmed with invitations.

"There is much greater internal stability now. They've wiped out the Mujahiddin-e-Khalq. Very few bombs explode in Tehran. The Monarchist faction is gone. I accept that they are paranoid about opposition, and that'll last a bit longer, but if we break their isolation they'll get respectable quickly. The Americans forever bleat about state-sponsored terrorism when a bit of hush and encouragement will do a quicker job than a stick. We believe the importance of their guerrilla training camps is overemphasized. We think they offer more training in theological correctness than in bomb-making. Every time a bomb goes off in America they shout about Iran. Remember the knee-jerk accusation that Iran was responsible for Oklahoma City? Ouch… Remember every American commentator insisting that Iran had knocked TWA 800 into the sea. You… Remember, Iran had organized the attacks in Saudi, but it's nowhere near proven. We think they give encouragement, financial support, offer a safe haven to dissident groups, but that is way short of controlling them. The Americans need an enemy right now, Iran is available, but the facts don't support the need."

She was grey-haired, severely dressed, with only a small sterling-silver brooch for ornament, but there was a twinkle of light in her face.

"Of course, Iran has ambitions. Iran demands recognition as a regional power and believes she has the economic, cultural and military clout to deserve that status. The current leaders detest the image abroad of a pariah state, and they say they received no credit for a statesmanlike neutral posture during Desert Storm. They deny they export revolution. They say that all they export is oil, carpets and pistachio nuts. They say they practise good neighbourliness. At the bottom line they cannot afford to offend the West because the West is the purchaser of their crude, and without that revenue the country simply folds. Actually, they rather respect the British, admire us, give us credit where it may not be due. They have a saying, "If you stub your foot on a stone you can be sure an Englishman placed it there." London's awash with Iranian dissidents but they're alive, aren't they? They're not being shot dead and blown up. We don't think they want to offend us, quite the opposite. Believe me, the Shah was more neurotic about British intelligence and meddling than the present lot. The Shah said, "If you lift Khomeini's beard you will find printed under it, "Made in Britain'." Go to the trade fairs, go to the Queen's birthday party at our summer residence, you'll find great friendship for the British."

They ate pasta. The end of the Cold War had been a career disaster for Harry Fenton. He was of the old school at Five; a former tank squadron commander in Germany eyeballing Soviet armour, he had found it a straightforward move into counter-espionage when soldiering lost its glitter attraction. He'd been on major spy investigations and found that work totally fulfilling. But the bloody Wall had come down, the enemy was now to be treated as an ally and, after years of dogged resistance, he'd been shuffled to the Islamic Desk. For the first time since that move he felt a fris son of excitement.

"Another hoary old favourite is Weapons of Mass Destruction, which gets everyone in a proper lather. Our assessment goes against the grain. They're way behind in the production of a microbiological capability. Research facilities, yes, but they're not there. On the chemical front, and they have cause to develop such hideous weapons after the gassing the Iraqis gave them, they were making fast progress until five years ago. Then we don't know why everything seemed to stop. It was peculiar and I don't have the answer. They're back on track now but they lost several years.

"Top of the list for horror stories is the ayatollahs' nuke, makes the Americans wet their Y-fronts, but we think it's ten years away, that it was ten years away five years ago, that it'll be ten years away in five years' time. Yes, they have missiles for delivery, they can reach the Saudi oilfields, but they've nothing that matters to put in the warheads. Anyway, they're not idiots, they cannot compete on military terms with the Americans and they know it. They're not going to hit Saudi and get a bashing they can't defend themselves from. Is this a disappointment to you? God, look at the time! My little white neck will be on the block when I wobble in smelling of your booze as if it matters."

She nodded enthusiastic agreement when he pointed to the empty first bottle, then raised his hand to the waiter for another to be brought. She had lamb and he had veal.

"Bear with me. I'm getting there… As I said, the dissidents here are still alive. How long since we last expelled one of their lOs for sniffing round a target? Six years. OK, OK, there are plenty of disparate groups, factions of their intelligence agencies that are not under specific control, they moonlight, but not on a big one. Would they come into Britain and attempt to assassinate a guarded target? No. Absolutely not. Am I a kill-joy? But I would urge considerable caution on you in the event that my assessment is wrong. Please, if I am wrong, don't go into the pulpit and denounce that country because you would set back years of quiet diplomacy and cut the legs off those we believe are moderates. We're not dealing with school-brat vandals, who should be made an example of, but with a nation state we have to live with… Damn good lunch, thanks."

He walked back to Thames House and put his head round Cox's door.

He had, of course, a network of high-level contacts; he had been with a senior and respected official of Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and very illuminating it had been.

The eyes of Cox, the bureaucrat, beaded on him.

"Do they believe Iran is on the march, coming to Suffolk?"

"They don't, no and if they are on the march then the FCO pleads for a soft line."

"Difficult to take a soft line with an assassin."

Fenton boasted, "I've several more sources that I'll be milking. If there's more to know, I'll find it."

"The motivation that makes people fight in a holy war is that death does not represent the end of life for a human being…"

The words were in his mind. He had prayed for the last time that day, the fifth time, an hour and a half after dusk. He had slept well and was rested. He had eaten a small portion of the rice and boiled chicken brought him by the master. He had sat for many minutes on the lavatory in the corner of the cabin until he was satisfied that his bowels and bladder were cleaned, emptied, because that was important. He had stripped, washed himself with soap in the tiny shower cubicle that had been installed for the privacy and personal use of the master's wife. He had dried himself, then shaved.

"On the contrary, immortal life begins after death, and the kind of salvation that a man has in the next world is dependent on the kind of life he lives in this world…"

In his mind were the words of the ayatollah who taught at a college in the city of Qom. He stood naked in the cabin. The clothes he had worn when he had boarded the tanker off the port of Bandar Abbas, and on the voyage, with the wedding ring and the gold chain from his neck, were now folded in the cupboard with the chadors and rou push trousers left by the master's wife. He was a tall man, 1.87 metres. He was well muscled yet weighed only 86 kilos. His hair was dark, close, short-cut, but with a neat parting that he combed to an exact line. He was pale-skinned for an Iranian, as if he did not come from the Gulf but from the sunbathed countries and islands of the Mediterranean; it was a reason he had been chosen. The texture of his skin was the gift of his mother, along with the jutting chin and the determination. From his father, he took his eyes, deep-set, shrouded in secrecy. He was thirty-six years old.

"Taking part in a holy war is a way of assuring oneself that one's immortal salvation in the next world is guaranteed…"

His English-born mother had been the daughter of an oil worker at Abadan, who had married the young Iranian medical student against the bitter opposition of her family. She had not wavered and had been cut off from all contact when her father and mother had returned to their Yorkshire home. There had never been reconciliation. She had embraced the Faith, become a good Muslim wife. The determination of his mother to follow the road of her love lived on in the jaw shape of her son. Her husband, his father, had qualified as a doctor and they had settled in Tehran with their child.

He could remember the unannounced visitors coming late at night to the house, and the murmur of voices. As the blinds went down in the surgery room, he, the child, kept watch for the SAVAK thugs, the scum men of the Shah's secret police. At night, behind the lowered blinds, his father treated the patriots who had been tortured by the SAVAK in the cells, and who had been beaten by the SAVAK in street demonstrations. He could remember when the SAVAK had broken into their home, and taken his father away. He could remember when his father had come home, bleeding and bruised, and he'd learned to despise and hate the countries that had supported the corrupt Shah and trained the SAVAK policemen. Now they were dead, suffocated in the rubble of their Tehran home after the explosion of an Iraqi Scud missile.

"It is natural that a man would wish to be killed seventy times and still come back to life to be killed all over again… He stood naked. What he would wear that night was laid out on the tidied bunk bed. When the revolution had come, when the tanks were on the streets, and the rule of the Shah was in its death throes, he had dropped out of school. Going forward with the Molotovs, running across open streets to retrieve those shot by the soldiers, he had been noticed. He had felt no fear and it was seen. When the Imam Khomeini at last came home he was, at seventeen years old, given a Kalashnikov rifle and drafted into a south Tehran komiteh. He had been on the roof of the Alawi Girls' School when the last chief of the SAVAK was half hanged, cut down, beaten so that his leg bones splintered, mutilated with knives, lit by television lights, killed, and he had felt no pity. He had been inducted into the pasdars, joined with pride the unit of the Revolutionary Guard Corps that safeguarded the Imam at his simple home in Jamaran. He had gone into the embassy of the Great Satan, into the Den of Spies, into the rooms where the shredders had failed and the files on collaborators and traitors were to be found, and he had hunted them. The war had come. The military could not be trusted. The war with Iraq was his transient route from teenager to man. He had become an elusive, skilled master of the flooded death ground that was the Faw peninsula and the Haural-Hawizeh marshland. He had come home, his first leave in two years, to find the dried heap of rubble with the small tunnel through which the bodies of his parents had been extracted. After praying at their grave in the Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery, he had taken the next bus back to the front line.

The Scuds were fired with American help. American satellite photography was passed to the Saudis, who forwarded the images to Baghdad. The hatred grew. When the war was over and the Imam had sued for peace and had spoken of taking a decision more deadly to him than drinking hemlock, when he had come home, he had been taken under the wing of a brigadier in the Ministry of Information and Security, as if by a foster-parent. And his talents were let loose, and killings followed in his footprints. From what he had seen, suffered, experienced, survived, there was no place in his mind for fear.

"This is the perception which creates the desire for martyrdom among Muslims…"

He began to cover his nakedness. He wriggled into ankle-length thermal under-trousers, then a thermal vest. He struggled into the rubber suit. He had worn such suits in the probing fast craft they had used in the swamps of the Faw peninsula, and he had been in such a suit when he had first gone ashore on the coast of the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. He put his watch back on his wrist. Later, he would synchronize the time on it with the time on the master's watch. Later, the master would send a radio message of seeming innocence to his employer, the National Iranian Tanker Corporation, in Tehran, and his watch would be synchronized with a clock at the NITC, and the clock there with the master clock in the room at the Ministry of Information and Security where the brigadier waited. Later, the master clock would be synchronized on a secure voice-link with the embassy in London. Finally, the intelligence officer at the embassy would synchronize his watch with that of the courier on the shore… Everything was planned to the smallest detail, as always. He waited for the master to come to take him to the stern deck. On his bare feet, below where the wet suit sealed his ankles, he slipped a pair of casual trainer shoes. He waited for the master and thought of his wife, Barzin, and their small home, and he wondered whether she missed him. They had no children perhaps it was his fault and perhaps it was hers but the doctors they visited would not tell them. She asked nothing of him except that he should serve the revolution of the Imam. The tanker churned its way north up the Channel. He took comfort again from the words of the ayatollah from the college at Qom. He was Vahid Hossein. He was the Anvil.

It was a pretext, but the first and there would be more.

The rain, as promised, had come on harder. Davies sat in the car. He didn't need to wind down the window and let in the damp air. He had the monitor screen on the floor in front of the empty passenger seat, and the headset over his ears. Two cables led from the car to a small junction box screwed to a side wall of the house. He was parked right up against the wall, filling the alley. He could see, in black and white, on his screen, the neighbour on the front doorstep, and hear distorted speech from the button microphone secreted in the porch.

The pretext seemed innocent enough.

"Sorry, Frank, for disturbing you. You got a Philips screwdriver? Can't seem to find one anywhere."

"Sure, Jerry, won't take me a minute."

"Everything all right?"

"Everything's fine. Just wait there, I'll get it."

He saw the neighbour's grimace. He'd have expected to be invited inside, but the principal had learned fast and left him at the door. The neighbour's eye line roved over the front of the house and checked the cables, the broken plants where the ladder had been, and looked into the camera. He wouldn't have seen the button microphone because the men from London were skilled in positioning them had to be because not even the principal knew about the audio surveillance. People didn't mind outside cameras but they were generally difficult about microphones. He could hear, adequately, anything said in the front of the house, ground floor, and on the stairs; it was good technology and necessary.

"There we go, one Philips screwdriver."

"Brilliant."

"No hurry for it back."

"Great. Frank, Mary said you had a new alarm system fitted today."

"Yes."

"Something I don't know?"

"I doubt it, Jerry."

"Don't think me inquisitive, Frank, not me, but there hasn't been a burglary this end of the village in four years, not since the Doves' place. Mary said you'd put in the full works, chaps like chimps running up ladders. Friend to friend, what do you know that I don't, eh?"

"Just taking sensible precautions, Jerry. You're getting soaked."

"Frank, no pissing, who's that joker in the car?"

"I'm right in the middle of a bit of work. Bring it back when you've finished with it, no hurry."

The door closed and the neighbour retreated. He'd have been sent by his wife, neighbours always were. He'd report that he hadn't really learned anything. That wouldn't satisfy the wife, and she'd be round in the morning to beg a half-pint of milk or borrow a half-pound of flour. And they'd fret through the evening, the neighbour and his wife, about the cables and the camera, and whether a wave of thieving was about to strike their small corner of heaven.

The boy came home, and the woman who drove him gave Davies a grinding glance before she pulled away. He doubted this little place could survive without knowing every soul's business. His lunch-box was finished, except for the apple he always kept till last. It would be another hour before Leo Blake turned up to do the night shift. He polished the apple on his sleeve and listened. He'd made his suggestion, how they should tell the boy. They might have been at the bottom of the stairs or just inside the kitchen. His mother did it. There were faint voices.

Frank used to work for the government abroad. He'd made some enemies. He did secret work, and it was still secret, and Mummy's secret and Stephen's. Frank's going to be protected by the police just for a few days… "Are we going to have to go? Will we have to leave here?"

"No." Her clear voice.

"There's nothing to worry about we aren't leaving our home."

Davies put the apple core in his lunch-box.

The evening had come.

The car was parked in a deep lay-by used in the summer by tourists for picnics. It was hidden from the road by trees and evergreen bushes. Yusuf Khan had reclined his seat and dozed. The small bedside alarm clock in his pocket, synchronized to the watch of the intelligence officer, would rouse him thirty minutes before it was time to move.

It was the most comfortable car seat he had ever sat in, a BMW 5-series with a 2.6-litre injection engine, high power, high technology, high luxury. His own, left behind in Nottingham, was an eleven-year-old Ford Sierra, 1.6-litre, under-powered and under-maintained; the carburettor had choked on the 150-mile journey to the north-west. They had needed to call out a mechanic to fix it and had sweated to get to the hospital in time to see the target, Perry, the car he used, and the logo of the salesroom that had sold it to Perry. Farida Yasmin's car was a nine-year-old Rover Metro, cramped and with a small engine, good enough to get them to the car salesroom in Norwich where a story had been told and information received, and good enough to get them into and out of the village by the sea where the photographs had been taken that had lit up the eyes of the intelligence officer.

Yusuf Khan's car was unreliable, Farida Yasmin Jones's car was too small. The cash float given him by the intelligence officer included enough for him to hire a fast, reliable, comfortable vehicle when he had come off the train. It was fantastic, the BMW, but difficult to handle: once, he had been off the road and a tyre width from a ditch because he had underestimated the speed into a corner. There was caked mud on the driver's-side doors. He didn't use the radio because all the stations on the pre-tune buttons played degenerate, corrupting music.

He imagined the man he had been sent to meet, who would come out of the darkness. The sausage bag was behind his reclined seat, on the carpeted floor. He felt a sense of pride that he had been shown such trust, and Yusuf Khan dozed, waiting.

He tried to concentrate but the words mocked his efforts. They registered then they blurred, their message was lost.

Markham sat on the rug in front of the electric fire in Vicky's apartment. She didn't like the word flat, it was an apartment but the problem with it was the size. Smart but small, as his was dingy and small. Neither's home was big enough for two, so he read the books she'd bought in her lunch-hour and left for him in a neat pile. Everything about the room was neat, organized, like his Vicky.

Vicky was with a girlfriend at aerobics, and then they would be going on for a pizza. The books, they'd have cost her a small fortune, were on business management, self-expression, leadership and finance he'd have gone down to a library and borrowed, if he'd had time. He tried to remember what she had told him. For the interview he was Geoffrey. not Geoff, his father was in banking, not a high-street deputy manager out on his neck last year with downsizing, his mother organized one of the princess's causes, wasn't a two-days-a-week helper in a charity clothes shop; he was ambitious, he carried ambition round in wheelbarrow loads… But the thoughts strayed back to Frank Perry. There had been enough of them in Ireland, bloody-minded Presbyterian hill farmers, running beef stock over poor land, doing evenings in the part-time military, who were threatened by the Provos' policy of ethnic cleansing. The obstinate old beggars had stayed put and taken a sub-machine-gun out in the tractor cab when they went to muck-spread, wouldn't have considered quitting and running. He'd admired their courage.

What Vicky had drilled into him… He wanted responsibility. What Geoffrey Markham wanted more than anything was the responsibility of handling the investment of clients' savings.

Nothing rash, but the careful placing of their money and the safeguarding of their pension schemes. He was not frightened of responsibility. Nor, if the markets slumped, of crisis.

And Geoff Markham couldn't cling to the interview's strands. Always bloody damn frightening when a player went missing, and Yusuf Khan was missing like he had been bloody frightened in Ireland when a Provo player disappeared and they had no word, had to wait for the Semtex to detonate or the blood to drip on the pavement and they had lost the trail of the girl who was the only associate thrown up by Rainbow Gold.

Wavering back with his concentration… And he expected to work hard, play hard, had always believed physical fitness went hand in hand with psychological stability weekend hiking, after-work weights and tennis… He was to decline the offer of a drink, old trick, with a friendly refusal, and he was to be polite but not smarm deference… And they shouldn't know it was the only shortlist interview in his locker. He was to wear the new tie she'd bought him, and his best suit but he could take the jacket off if they suggested it, though not loosen the tie. And be sure to thank them for fitting him in during a lunch-hour… The interview was the next afternoon and he couldn't read the pages in front of him, or remember what she'd told him.

Rainbow Gold was gone cold on them. Without this job there was no home for him and Vicky, no bright ambitious future. An armed protection officer was at Frank Perry's home.. Of course Geoffrey Markham wanted a career in banking.

It might have helped relieve the frustration of his work if Markham had had a really good friend at Thames House. It had been better in the early days when the probationers had hung around together and made a social life inside their own restricted, secretive clan. He had no friends now. The probationers who had lasted were dispersed in the building and inter-Section friendships were discouraged. The society was a mass of hermetically sealed cells; it was not appropriate for East bloc personnel to fraternize with Irish or narcotics personnel loose talk followed, the old hands said. The former friends were married off anyway, had babies and didn't go to the pub after work but hurried home. He'd taken Vicky to one insider dinner party, which had been a disaster: she'd thought the men were under-achieving and the women were little mice. Actually, thinking about it, the Fentons of Thames House were the lucky ones. They had no expectation of changing the world and used the system as a personal fiefdom for fun and entertainment. Set around with rules, regulations and procedures, Geoff Markham believed himself a small, irrelevant cog. He would never matter and never be noticed. He wanted out.

He jolted awake at the sound of Vicky's key in the apartment door.

At the end of his twelve-hour shift Bill Davies handed over to DC Leo Blake, checked him through the inventory, took him over the camera controls, the radio channels and the chart with the red lines marking the infrared beams.

"How is he?"

"Fine, so far."

"And her?"

"She's not spoken, not a bloody word."

"Come again his call sign?"

"He's Juliet Seven."

"Bit light-handed, aren't we?"

"Maybe, maybe not."

Davies crawled out of the driver's seat, and wished his colleague a good night, with a wry smile. He saw Blake already pulling up the arm rest in the centre of the back seat.

In the small hours, and Davies couldn't blame him, Blake would be cuddled up with the cold grip stock of the H amp;K, what the trade called the Master Blaster. Davies had been promised that the next day he would be given a realistic threat-level assessment, but Blake, who was going to be alone through the night, wasn't waiting for it.

He drove back towards the bed-and-breakfast and the room where he would use one twin bed for the night and Blake would use the other for the day, and he'd have to square that with Mrs. Fairbrother, lie his way out of it. He'd have a shower, then find a pub in another village for his supper. It made it a proper bastard when there wasn't a decent threat-level assessment.

The master hugged him, gripped the thick rubber arms of the wet suit, kissed his cheeks and pressed against his life jacket The second officer and the engineer officer flanked him. He had not seen them since he had come aboard fifteen nights before. While he was kissed, the master went again through the timetable of the drop-off and the schedule of the pick-up.

He broke free, stepped into the Zodiac inflatable and settled on its floor of smoothed planks. The whole craft was only four metres in length and he crawled forward so that the engineer officer had the space at the back beside the outboard engine. The engineer officer reached out to him, squeezed his arm and said that the wind was growing, which was good.

It was good, too, he had been told, that they were able to make the drop-off from the tanker when it was fully loaded and lower in the water. The master and the second officer turned the wheel of the crane, and the cable was drawn up further on the drum. The four ropes from the inflatable to the cable hook took the strain, then lifted them. The pilot, on the bridge with the navigation officer, would have no view of the stern deck and the crane, and what the crane lifted.

They swayed up above the rail and then the crane's arm lurched them out into the darkness. They clung to the holding ropes of the inflatable. He had no fear. He was in the hands of his God, ten metres above the water. If the crude holds had been empty, it would have been a 21-metre drop.

They went down the black-painted cliff of the hull slowly. The tanker was now past the Bassurelle light ship, close to the sand ridge that divided the Channel into the northern and southern traffic-separation schemes, and under the monitoring watch of the radar at Dover Coastguard to the west and Griz Nez Traffic to the east. The tanker, on the pilot's direction, would hold steady course and steady speed at 14 knots and would arouse no suspicion from the men who watched the sweep of the radar screens. They bounced on the water, sank as the sea splashed over their feet, and surged up. As the cable tension slackened, the moment before they were dragged along and then under, the engineer officer unfastened the cable hook from the ropes. They were clear. The cable swung loose over their heads and clattered against the plate steel of the hull. They were tossed in the white foam water of the engine's screws and he did not understand how they were not dragged down into that maelstrom. The tanker ploughed on, a great bellowing shadow in the night.

He had been told that it was good when the wind increased and the swell was greater, and that British seamen used the word 'poppling' to describe such waves. He knew the English language, had learned it from his mother, but he had not known that word. When the sea pop pled it was impossible for the men watching the radar screens to see the signature of a craft as small as a four-metre inflatable. The outboard engine coughed to life at the second pull. Three kilometres back, they could see the lights of a following ship. The bow rose from the water as their speed grew.

They crossed the sand ridge. Higher waves there, more spray slashing them.

They approached the westerly funnel of the traffic-separation scheme. There was a line of navigation lights ahead. The engineer officer throttled back, paused and meandered. The inflatable was lifted, fell, and corkscrewed in the waves before he was satisfied. He was like a kid crossing the wide freeway road going south out of Tehran for Shiraz or Hamadan, but waiting for the gap in the traffic, then running. The engine screamed, they bounced forward.

They went for the darkened space of the beach between the lights of New Romney and Dymchurch, near Dungeness. He could have gone by plane or ferry or on the train through the tunnel, but that would have exposed him to the gaze of immigration officers and security policemen. No papers, no passport photographs, no questions, no stamps. He saw, ahead, the white ribbon of the surf on a shingle shore.

The engineer officer, perhaps because tension now caught him, or because there were only sparse minutes before they parted, told of how he had been on the tankers when the Iraqi planes had come after them with Exocet missiles, and of the terror on other tankers when the missiles detonated and the fireballs erupted. He said that he hated those who had helped the Iraqi fliers, and he had reached forward, with emotion, grasped the hand offered him, wished his passenger well, and God's protection. In the last minute before they reached the beach, he told the engineer officer of a birthday party at a seashore restaurant and the bus that carried the guests there, a long time ago.

They hit the shore.

The bottom of the inflatable squirmed on the pebbled beach. He tore off the life jacket the cold whipping his face. He slid over the ballooned side of the craft, into the water of a gentle, shelving beach. He ran forward, kicking his stride against the sea, struggling until he was clear. He heard the roar of the inflatable's engine. When he was at the top of the beach, and looked back, he saw the disappearing bow wave of the inflatable. He was alone.

He walked forward blindly, then stopped and stood stock still against a small wind-bent tree-trunk. Seven minutes later, on the hour, as if by synchronization, the brief, twice-repeated flash of a car's headlights pierced the darkness.

He couldn't sleep. Watched by the red eye of the alarm, he lay on his back.

Frank Perry knew that he had to live with the past because the consequences of his former life were inescapable. There was no dusty cloth with which to wipe clear the words written on the blackboard. The past could not be erased. He had attempted it. Quite coldly, he had changed his attitudes. The salesman, Gavin Hughes, focused on work, had never noticed the people around him. He was now more temperate and more caring. He had thrown himself into the life of the small village community, had time for people and seemed to value their opinions, as if that hard-won popularity was a substitute for his past. He was, he knew it, a more decent man, and it was natural to him that he should help others with the experience of his engineering background, and cut the churchyard grass and attend meetings of the community's groups.

But in his mind the words stayed on the blackboard, and a newfound decency was insufficient to expiate the past. A man had been sent on a long journey, had travelled with a knife or a gun or a bomb, to kill him. Those who had sent the man would not know, or care, that Frank Perry was a changed man.

He heard the boy toss in the adjacent room, and he heard a car door opening, the sound of a man urinating, the door closing again. Meryl was silent beside him, staring at the ceiling. Like sinners, neither of them could sleep.