At Close Quarters

5

"It was good of you to come. We appreciate it."

She was a small woman, brightly dressed, and with heavy make-up that he presumed was to hide the ravage of her bereavement. She stood in the front doorway and the rain lashed down onto the head and shoulders of young Holt. Strange, really, that in all the time he had known Jane he had never been asked to her parents' home in South London. He saw the water dribbling down from the black mock-Tudor beams and down the whitewashed stucco. He hadn't a hat and so his head was soaked.

Gently he said, "Do you think I could come in, Mrs Canning?"

Her hand jerked to her mouth, and she was all movement, embarrassment.

"Whatever'll you be thinking of me? Of course come in… Father, it's Mr Holt here."

Jane's father took his coat off to the kitchen, and Jane's mother led him into the front room. A friendly room full of the furniture that dated back to the beginning of a marriage. Worn armrests on the sofa and the chairs, a burn mark in the carpet by the fire, plants that needed cutting back. On the mantelpiece was a photograph of his girl, a posed portrait that was all shoulder and profile. He stood with his back to the fire, with his back to the photograph of Jane, and his damp trouser legs steamed. He wondered what it was like for them to meet the man who loved their daughter and who had slept with their daughter. Around the room he counted four more photographs of her, of his girl. Jane's mother had sat down in her chair, the most used chair, and she had her knitting bag on her lap and was routing for needles and wool. She could see each one of the five photographs from her chair. She asked him to sit, and he said that he had been in the train a long time and that he preferred to stand. He reckoned that her clothes were a brave gesture, a Post-Office-red skirt and a white blouse and a vivid scarf knotted at her throat. He admired a woman who would dress like that for her daughter's funeral. Jane's father came into the room wiping the raincoat's damp off his hands onto a handkerchief. He wore his best suit and a starched white shirt and a tie that was either dark navy or black. Jane's father seemed exhausted, as if the strain of the past ten days had sapped him.

"Nice of you to come, young man – she never told us your proper name, you were always just called Holt by her," Jane's father said.

"That's what I am, really, what everyone calls me.

Please just call me that… It means a lot to me that I can be with you today."

He meant it sincerely. He had been two days in London, telling his story. He had spent a long weekend at his parents' home, walking alone on the soaked wilderness of Exmoor. He wanted to be with Jane's mother and father on the day of the funeral. Jane's father asked him if he would like coffee and he said no, he was fine, and he asked him if he wanted to sit, and again he declined, and Mrs Canning knitted and Mr Canning searched for flaws on his finger nails.

"I wanted to be with you today because quite soon, I think Jane and I would have told you that we were going to become engaged to be married…"

She didn't look up. Her husband still explored the tips of his fingers.

"I loved her, and I like to think that she loved me."

"You've got to put it all behind you," Jane's mother said.

"When I arrived in Moscow and found her waiting for me at the airport I don't think that I've ever felt such happiness."

"Jane's gone, Mr Holt, and you're a young man and you've a life ahead of you."

"Right now I don't see it that way."

"You will, and the sooner the better. Life's for living."

Holt saw her bite at her lower lip.

Jane's father's head rose. His mouth was moving as if he were rehearsing a question, unsure of the form of words. The question when it came was little more than a whisper. "Was she hurt?"

Eight high velocity shots fired at a range of less than ten paces, that's what the post mortem had said. He could feel the lifeless hand, he could see the table-tennis-ball-sized exit wounds.

"She wasn't hurt, there was no pain. What did they tell you, Foreign and Commonwealth?"

"Just that it was a grubby little business. This man was a heroin addict and an army deserter – they told us what was in the newspapers – that he had gone to the hotel to rob it. They said it was just a one in a million chance that he should have chosen that particular moment for his robbery, when our Jane and the ambassador and yourself were coming out of the hotel.

They said the Soviet authorities were very sympathetic.

They told us that the man was shot dead while trying to escape."

He saw the sallow face of the man with the windcheater and the rifle and the crow's foot scar on his cheek.

Holt said, "There's probably not much more that anyone can tell you."

Jane's mother stared at her knitting, her face puckered in concentration. "We were so proud, both of us, when Jane joined the Service, began to work for her country.

It isn't easy for a girl to get a good position in it, and I think they thought she was outstanding. I'm not saying she told us much about it, a very discreet little soul, but we knew she was working in Intelligence. She probably told you more."

He remembered the photography over Charkov. He remembered his remark about the camera. He remembered the last words he had heard her speak."Don't be childish, Holt."

"She was very much admired by all her colleagues."

Jane's father pushed himself up from the chair. "Like Mother said, you've your life ahead of you. It was good of you to come today, but we shan't expect to see you again."

Holt saw the black car outside. He saw Jane's mother putting her knitting and her needles back into the embroidered bag. He saw Jane's father straighten his tie.

"I loved her, Mr Canning. We were going to be married."

He saw the trace of impatience.

"Get on with your career, get on with the living of your life.. . Pity it's raining, Mother."

Holt followed Jane's mother fast down the short path and through the front gate to the car. Jane's father carefully locked the door behind him. He sat with them in the back as they were driven to the crematorium that was away to the west, close to the river. They didn't talk on the journey, and Holt wondered whether they held their peace because of him or because of the driver.

As soon as they had arrived at the crematorium, Holt removed himself from their side. There were cameras there, television and press photographers, and he felt that by hanging back he drew away from them the attention of lenses and the clicking shutters. Holt was good raw meat for the cameras. It had been leaked that they were close, that he had seen the killings. He tried to keep his head up, his chin jutting. He walked past the sprays of flowers and the wreaths. He saw the signature of the Foreign Secretary, and of the head of the Soviet Desk at FCO and there were four bundles of flowers which were simply signed with Christian names.

Inside the porch of the chapel Holt saw a tall, austere man shaking the hands of Jane's mother and father.

There had been FCO people outside, but Holt understood. The Director General of the Secret Intelligence Service could not stand in front of the cameramen, nor could his people sign their names on the wreaths. He wondered what had become of Jane's camera, what had happened to her photographs from the plane. He felt a surge of anger, as if these nameless men and the Director General of the Service were responsible for her death.

It was a short service. He sat alone behind her parents.

He couldn't find his voice when they sang the 23rd psalm. He watched the coffin roll away from him, he watched the curtains close. He was crying in his heart.

He remembered her voice, her grey eyes, her soft hair, and her lifeless hand. He remembered the man with the rifle. He saw her parents walk back up the chapel aisle and they didn't turn to him. He sat in his seat and stared at the closed curtain.

"You're young Holt, yes?"

He turned. The chapel had emptied fast. The man was thickset with a fine head of grey hair and the brush of a military moustache was squashed between nose and mouth.

"I am."

"We have to be moving. They'll be queuing up outside for the next one, damn conveyor-belt operation.

Do you have wheels?"

He had steeled himself to spend the day with Jane's mother and father. He had made no arrangements to get himself away, and now it had been made plain to him that he was not expected back to the semi-detached home in Motspur Park.

"I don't."

"Have you the afternoon to spare?"

His studio flat in London was rented out. The tenant had signed for a year. Ahead of him was only a train journey back to Devon, plenty of trains, they ran all afternoon and evening. His father would come down to Exeter to collect him. An usher appeared beside the man, trying to hurry them.

"For what?"

"My name's Martins, Percy Martins, I'm from the Service. Your initial debrief by the FCO people landed on my desk."

He looked up at Percy Martins. He saw clear pale blue eyes that never wavered from his glance. "What is there to talk about?"

"What you saw, what happened."

Holt felt the control going, voice rising. "I thought everyone knew what bloody happened. I thought they all swallowed the Soviet crap."

"Not swallowed by everyone – come on."

Holt followed obediently. He noticed that Martins walked out of the chapel well ahead of him, so that he would not be included when Holt was again the cameramen's target. Holt reached a small estate car.

Martins was already behind the wheel, engine started, pushing the door open for Holt.

"My son is at university in York. He's playing a match in London today, that's where we're going. My wife'll kill me if I get home tonight and haven't seen him. We can talk when we're there."

He drove fast and in total silence, occasionally peering down at the dashboard clock. On the M25 nothing passed them. Holt thought it must be a hell of an important game, a league decider or a cup final. He felt no urge to speak, was relieved to be left to his own company.

He had had enough talking. Two whole days in London going through the programme that he had confirmed for the ambassador, and working over and over his description of the shooting, and each time he had questioned what appeared to be the general acceptance of the Soviet version of the killings he had just been shushed and assured that all was being put into place.

They came to the playing fields. During the drive it had stopped raining, but now it had started again. Percy Martins flung himself out of the car and scampered round to the boot to fetch a pair of Wellingtons.

Holt saw that the back of the car was filled with fishing gear. An outsize rod bag, a cavernous landing net, a solid tackle box. He had to run to catch the man.

It was the farthest soccer pitch.

"Who's playing?" Holt said, when they reached the muddied touchline.

"York chemists against a gang of lawyers from University College, London."

"Is your boy good?"

"Bloody awful."

"Which one is he?"

"The one who can't kick with his left foot and hardly with his right."

"So what the hell are we doing here?"

They were the only spectators. There was no protection from the weather. Holt thought it was the worst game of football he had ever watched.

"As I told you, the report on your debrief landed on my desk."

Holt turned into the rain. He had to shout over the wind. "Why are you buying all this bullshit about a criminal robbery?"

"It suits us."

"Who can it suit?"

"Everybody – nearly everybody, anyway."

"Who is everybody?"

"Good question. Look at it, young Holt. There is a shooting in the Soviet Union, a highly embarrassing shooting, and they haven't a clue who is responsible.

Best way to calm the matter down is to come up with a plausible story that cannot be disproved, that has the culprit removed and that does not show the Ivans in a particularly poor light. Just a bit of bad luck, wasn't it?

Wrong place at the wrong time. They might just as easily have been walking along the. pavement and a car had blown a tyre and swerved into them. Professionally speaking one has to see it as a successful exercise in damage limitation…"

"And everyone's so supine that they accept this con-venient lie."

"I'm not everybody."

"Why aren't we saying out loud that this killing was the work of an Arab – that our ambassador and Miss Canning were set up by the Soviets to be murdered?"

"I think you've jumped too far. I believe you are right in thinking the killer was Arab, but not that the Soviets set it up. Highly embarrassing, as I said. In my opinion, this was an act of terrorism in Soviet territory. They can't admit that, can they? Oh Christ Almighty…"

One of the players had tried to kick the ball that wallowed in ankle deep mud, missed and fell on his back, and left the ball to be slotted into the net.

"That's my son and heir. God, he's pathetic, his mother's boy.. . FCO wouldn't see they've much choice but to go along with Ivan's version."

"So I've been brought to this absurd game to be given a lecture in Anglo-Soviet relations."

"You're being asked to help. Jane Canning was a member of the Service, and we will not take her death lying down."

Holt saw that the player who had given away the goal had been dismissed to the wing. The young man was pencil thin and pale. He was beginning to feel sympathy for the kid, particularly if his father was a pompous ass called Percy Martins.

"What does that mean in practice – not taking it lying down?"

"What it says. Holt, you were in the Crimea, in the centre of the Crimea is Simferopol. In Simferopol is a military academy which takes groups of foreign cadets for periods of up to… "

"Where is this getting us?"

"Listen, will you?… Among the foreign cadets are always Syrian-sponsored Palestinians. The shooting was at lunch time; that same Saturday evening a Syrian Air Force transporter put down at Simferopol and then flew on to Damascus… "

"How do you know that?"

"Listen… and that's none of your business. It is quite credible that a Palestinian, at least an Arab, shot the ambassador and Miss Canning and was flown back to the Middle East the same evening. It is even credible that the Soviets knew nothing of the plan."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"We need your help in identifying the man who killed Armitage and a member of our Service, your girl."

"And then?"

"That's none of your business either."

"I'd want him killed."

"So tell me what he looked like, everything."

Desultory cheers, H'ray, H'ray, H'ray; the game was finished. Martins's son tramped off the field. He didn't so much as look at his father. Martins made an attempt to greet him, but the young man kept walking. Holt thought Martins too proud to chase after him. And then it was too late. The two teams disappeared into the pavilion. Martins and young Holt paced the touchline.

They were still there after the groundsman had come out to unhook the goal netting and to gather up the flag posts. They were still there when the two buses with the chemists from York and the lawyers from London drove away from the pavilion. Holt poured out every detail from his memory on the man who had held the Kalashnikov assault rifle. The way he moved, height, weight, age, the clothes, the wig, the shape of the eyes, movement, features. Again and again, the crow's foot scar. Still talking when it was too dark for Holt to see Martins's face beside him.

Finally they walked back to the car.

"You never even spoke to your son."

"Watched him play, didn't I? That's what I promised his mother – how close would you have to be to him to see the scar?"

"Well, I was ten paces and could see it as clearly as I described it to you. I mean, you wouldn't miss it if you met him. You'll go after him?"

"She was one of ours."

Martins dropped Holt off at Paddington station, thanked him again and said he'd be in touch in a day or so. Then he crossed London and the Thames and parked his car in the basement at Century House. It was not unusual for him to be returning to his office as the commuters were heading for home. Martins lived in a torpid cul-de-sac in Putney, but his home was the seventh floor of Century. No need for him to ring his wife and tell her that he would be back late. She took it for granted that he would work eleven or twelve hours six days a week and that he would fish on the seventh.

He had been 27 years in the Service. He had served in Amman and Cyprus and Tel Aviv. He was a graduate, years before the fighting ripped the city apart, of the American University of Beirut.

The debrief had taken days to reach him. It bore a string of FCO staff's initials and in Century it had come by way of the Soviet Desk. The seventh floor was Middle East. Martins was the Middle East Desk's third in the chain. The head of the Desk was twelve years his junior, his immediate superior was 14 years younger.

Martins would climb no higher. Sometimes it rankled, most times in fact. His solace was his work.

On his desk was the debrief and transcripts of messages sent from an Antonov en route to Damascus. These had been intercepted by the Dhekelia listening post in Cyprus and deciphered at the Government Communications HQ in Cheltenham. It was indeed none of young Holt's business that the messages sent from the Antonov within minutes of its leaving Soviet airspace were in the code systems of Syrian Air Force Intelligence and not those of the regular Air Force.

For the next two hours he wrote down in neat longhand everything that Holt had told him. By the time he had completed seven foolscap sheets he believed he could build a picture of a face, a working likeness of a man. He was satisfied that he knew exactly where the crow's foot scar should be placed.

Later, at a time when the train carrying Holt was west of Taunton, Inter City 125 and hammering, Percy Martins took the lift two floors up the 19-storey building to a small cubby-hole of a room where a technician had been whiling away the hours making a balsa wood 1:50-scale replica of a vintage Churchill tank. It would be a late night. The technician would work with Martins to make a likeness of the face of an assassin.

The following evening the actual size portrait and the four typed sheets of briefing were carried in a large buff envelope in the nearly empty briefcase of a government messenger en route to Tel Aviv. For the duration of the flight, a little over four hours, the briefcase was attached to the wrist of the messenger by a length of fine steel chain. It would have been impossible for the messenger to eat the airline meal without his chain being noticed so he went without food.

At Tel Aviv the messenger was met by the Service's station officer. A docket was signed. The papers were exchanged. The messenger flew back on the return flight after killing four hours in the transit lounge, and twenty minutes in the restaurant.

Before dawn a light burned in the upper room at the rear of the British embassy on Hayarkon. This upper room had no view of the stretching Mediterranean sea.

The walls of the room were of reinforced concrete, the windows were of strengthened glass. The room was reached by an outer corridor in which had been placed a gate of heavy steel vertical bars. Behind the locked door of the room, the station officer examined the face that had been built for him, and read Martins's brief.

The killer of Sir Sylvester Armitage and of Jane Canning was believed to be Arab, most probably Palestinian. The distinguishing feature of the Arab was a crow's foot scar of approximately one inch in diameter on the upper left cheek. The station officer smiled at what he called Martins's fingerprints all over the brief, his unlovely grammar, but the substance of it was good.

Near the bottom of the third page was the text of the message – underlined in red, typical Martins touch – from the Antonov transporter after it had entered Turkish airspace.

" The target is taken."

It was left to the discretion of the station officer as to whether he went for help to the Mossad, Israel's external Intelligence gathering organisation, or the Shin Bet, the state's internal counter subversion and counter terrorism apparatus, or to Military Intelligence. Since the trial of Nezar Hindawi and the severing by Britain of diplomatic relations with Syria, co-operation between London and Tel Aviv was unprecedentedly close. He had no doubt that he would get the help Martins requested.

As the low-level sunbeams rose above the squat, dun-coloured apartment blocks of Tel Aviv, the station officer dialled the private telephone line of the man whose friendship he valued most in Military Intelligence. He liked the hours they worked. He locked his room behind him, and with the photofit in his bag he drove to the Ministry of Defence on Kaplan.

As the crow flies, and nothing larger than a crow can make the flight without plucking up a barrage of ground-to-air missiles, it is 125 miles from Tel Aviv to Damascus. The principal cities of the old enemies are adjacent in the currency of modern warfare. Behind the frontier that divides them, Syria and Israel have massed divisions of armour and mechanised infantry, regiments of artillery, squadrons of interceptor aircraft. The two client states scowl at each other from the cover of curtains of state-of-the-art United States and Soviet equipment. Two great coiled armies awaiting the order to commence the blood-letting, poised to exploit the moment of maximum advantage.

In the waiting time, as the troops idle away the hours in their fox holes and base camps, the tanks are kept armed and fuelled, stacks of ammunition lie beside the heavy howitzers, the aircraft are loaded with their missiles and cannon shells and cluster bombs.

They wait, two nations obsessed with the need for one gigantic heave to ultimate victory.

For the Israelis the waiting is harder. They are the smaller nation and they are crippled by the cost of the feud.

For the. Syrians the waiting is easier. They have a surrogate force obedient to their discipline. They have the Palestinians of the Salvation Front. The Palestinians from their bases in Lebanon or from the camps around Damascus can be organised to strike at Israel, to harass Israel, to wound Israel. And the Palestinians are expendable.

It was a dry, dust-laden morning. It was a morning when the flies with persistence crawled at the eyes and into the nostrils of the men who paraded in the dirt yard of the Yarmouq camp. The sun climbed and shortened the shadows, and the stink of the shallow latrine pits lay across the camp.

The recruits had been standing on parade in the growing heat for a little more than an hour because the guests from Damascus were late and there was no explanation for the delay, and no one dared to stand the men down. They had come from the refugee centres in West Beirut, from Sidon and Tyre, and from camps in Jordan and South Yemen. They were aged between 17 and 19. They had joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, because they believed that that organisation would give them the greatest chance to hurt the Zionist state. Some wore uniforms and boots that were Syrian army surplus, some wore jeans and T-shirts and pullovers. Some had already shaved their heads, some wore their hair to their shoulders. All held their unloaded rifles as if it were second nature to them.

They were children suckled on conflict.

The commander was at the gate, fretting with his watch.

Abu Hamid stood in front of the squad of eighty recruits. His uniform fitted him well. He wore the tunic and top, camouflaged in pink and green and yellow, of a Syrian commando. He carried, loosely over the crook of his arm, a Kalashnikov assault rifle. Occasionally he barked an order at the recruits, ordered them to straighten up. He felt a new degree of authority. No one at the camp other than the commander knew his part in what had happened in Yalta, but there were other signs of the favour that had fallen into the path of Abu Hamid.

Two days later than the others who had flown back from the Soviet Union, Abu Hamid had reached Yarmouq and when he had rejoined his colleagues he had been driven to the camp in a Mercedes Benz car by a chauffeur who wore Air Force uniform. Three times since then he had been off camp, and back late in the evening with the smell of imported whisky on his breath, and his girl had been allowed to the camp, and he had been promoted, which was why he now stood in front of the recruits.

The cars, when they arrived, billowed a dust storm.

Abu Hamid yelled for his men to stand still, he aped the instructors at Simferopol. He saw the commander fawning a greeting to an officer who wore the insignia of a brigadier general.

The breath came in a sharp gasp from Abu Hamid's throat. He thought that every recruit behind him gawped at the officer who now climbed from the official car that had followed that of the brigadier general into the camp. The officer strode forward. He carried his cap in his left hand.

The officer's walk was normal. His torso was ordinary. He had no fingers on his right hand, a stump at the knuckle. It was his head that captured attention.

There was nothing sharp in the definition of his features.

The skin across his cheeks and his nose and his upper lip and his chin seemed fragile and tightly drawn, the opaque skin of a butterfly's or a moth's wings. The skin had a lifeless quality, dead skin that had somehow been reprocessed for further use, and stretched over the bones of the face and the muscles by a human hand and not by nature. The nose of the officer seemed a squashed bauble, and his mouth was a parched slit. The earlobes were gone. The eyebrows were gone. What hair there was seemed to have been planted behind a line drawn vertically down from the scalp's crown to the deformed ears. The hair was bleached pale.

A soft, small voice. A voice that he recognised. A voice with the lilt of a persuasive song.

"Good morning to you, Hamid."

He swallowed hard. "Good morning, Major Said Hazan."

He stared blatantly into the broken face. He saw the cracked, amused smile that rose in the expanse of skin.

He saw the medal ribbons on the chest of the uniform tunic.

' Major Said Hazan waved Abu Hamid forward. The commander was ignored as the major introduced Abu Hamid to the brigadier general. The ranking officer knew what Abu Hamid had achieved, it was there in his eyes for Abu Hamid to see, a shared secret.

Abu Hamid escorted the brigadier general and Major Said Hazan along the four rows of recruits. Only one cloud in Abu Hamid's mind that morning. Of course, he had expected that military security would check all the weapons issued to the recruits to ascertain that no live rounds would be carried on parade.

He had not expected that his own AK-47 would be scrutinised, that he would have to clear the breach and show that his magazine was empty. One small cloud…

After the inspection the brigadier general called for the recruits to come close to him.

"… In today's world no man can be neutral. A man is either with the oppressed or he is with the oppressors. We have to fight to our last breath. It is better to die with honour than to live with humiliation… "

When he was cheered, when the fists of the recruits were aloft, the brigadier general smiled his satisfaction.

Abu Hamid clapped his hands, waved three of the recruits towards the administration building.

His remaining recruits formed a circle, facing inwards. A photographer edged forward, stretching on tiptoe to see into the circle. A European photographer.

Abu Hamid saw the brigadier general gesture to the photographer to push harder. A dozen live chickens were brought to the circle, thrust into the ring. Abu Hamid shouted, "Death to all enemies of the Palestinian Revolution."

The circle closed. The chickens were caught, torn apart, wing from breast, leg from body, head from neck.

Hands groping into a bedlam of movement. The raw meat of the chickens, the warm flesh of the chickens was eaten, the blood drunk. Young faces frothing pink meat, spewing red blood.

It was a tradition of the Popular Front, designed as the first measure in the breaking down of the human inhibition against killing. For the first ritual a live chicken sufficed to play the part of an enemy of the revolution.

The photographer was on assignment from a news magazine in the German Democratic Republic. He took a roll of film on each of two cameras. Among his images was the man who wore a khaffiyeh headdress across his face, and who chewed at a chicken wing.

The brigadier general congratulated Abu Hamid on the dedication of his recruits, and Major Said Hazan clasped his shoulder in farewell. Abu Hamid was bathed in pleasure.

The Prime Minister's cars swept into Downing Street.

There were a few older men and women on the head of government's staff who could remember when a prime minister travelled with only a single detective and the chauffeur for company.

But over the wreckage of a seaside hotel from which a Cabinet had been pulled by firemen or dragged by police minders, a spokesman of Irish liberation had declaimed, "You have to be lucky every time, we have to be lucky once".

The Prime Minister detested the paraphernalia of the bodyguards, and the closed circuit cameras, and the alarm systems in Downing Street.

The Director General, who waited in the outer office, knew well the Prime Minister's impatience with security.

He saw the Prime Minister, hemmed in by Branch men, in the brief moment between the car and the doorway as he gazed down from the window above the street. The flash of the face that was reddened from the sunshine of the Asian tour and the jetlag. The Director General had the automatic right of access. He reported directly to the Prime Minister.

"It was a pretty dreadful funeral," the Prime Minister said, and shrugged off an overcoat. "Lady Armitage was first class, could have been welcoming us to a cocktail party, but there was a granddaughter there who cried her eyes out, noisily, rather spoiled things. What a thing to get back to, fourteen hours in the air and straight to church…"

The Director General knew the form. He allowed the talking to go on. Neither of the previous Prime Ministers he had served had exactly rushed to allow him to throw into the fray whatever hand grenade he was waiting to communicate.

"… Do you know the Soviet ambassador read the second lesson, and read it pretty well. I thought that was a very spirited gesture. .. "

"He was badly overdue a spirited gesture, Prime Minister," the Director General murmured.

"I don't follow you."

"The deaths of Sylvester Armitage and Miss Canning are a considerable embarrassment to the Soviets. The killings were an act of political terrorism," the Director General said flatly.

"My brief from FCO said quite clearly that our diplomats were shot down by a common criminal."

"Which is regrettably untrue."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that the Soviet Union lied. Prime Minister, we are still looking for the last piece of evidence, but our belief is that the assassinations were the work of a Palestinian terrorist who was on a course in a military academy in the Crimea. We believe he flew out of the Soviet Union on the same day as the killings."

"Where does he lead us?"

The Director General said heavily, "The road goes directly to Damascus."

"Where he is beyond our reach."

The Director General produced a small leather notebook from his inside pocket. "'They must never be beyond our reach', Prime Minister. May I quote you your words? I keep this with me always. You said two years ago, when speaking of the threat of terrorism, 'We need action, so that the terrorist knows he has no safe haven, no escape'. Your very words, Prime Minister.

As I remember, you were heavily applauded."

"What do you have?"

"A face; we hope soon to have a name."

The Prime Minister's head was shaking, the eyes ranged anywhere in the room but back to the Director General's face. "We cannot just storm into Damascus, of all places."

"Miss Canning was a member of my team. I have never taken anything you have said, Prime Minister, to be empty rhetoric."

"He'll be beyond reach," the Prime Minister said.

"He'll have to hide well."

"There is something I have to know."

"Yes, Prime Minister?"

"Were the deaths of the ambassador and your Miss Canning condoned by the government of the Soviet Union?"

"We think that they knew nothing of it – may not know it now. Hence the embarrassment, hence the deception."

"I find it beyond belief that Syria, a client state, for God-'s sake, would instigate a terrorist outrage inside the Soviet Union."

"They may be a client state, Prime Minister, but not subservient. Their missile systems, for instance, won't allow Soviet personnel near Soviet hardware. Most certainly they do not take orders. They had a target – a motive too if you accept their twisted logic – and they would have believed with some justification that they could get away with it."

"I repeat myself… We cannot just storm into Damascus."

"And I repeat myself… We need action, so that the terrorist knows he has no safe haven… I will keep you fully informed."

The flies surged in the room, careless of the swatting irritation of the commander.

He gestured that Abu Hamid should sit. He brought him a can of Pepsi from the fridge. The sounds of the camp drifted through the windows.

"What do you want of me?"

"Major Said Hazan," Abu Hamid said.

"You have pleased him."

"His face."

"What of his face?"

"What happened to his face, his hands?"

"You are not a child to be frightened, Hamid. You are a fighter."

"Tell me what happened."

"He was a pilot, MiG-21. In combat over the Golan Heights in 1973 he was shot down, hit by a Sidewinder air-to-air missile fired from a F-4 Phantom. There was fire in the cockpit. He had to level out before he could eject. He is not a man to panic, he waited. He would not know the meaning of panic. When it was safe to eject, then he did so. His parachute brought him down behind his own lines. His face was rebuilt in Leningrad.

Perhaps in the hospitals there they are not experienced in such injuries."

Abu Hamid drained the Pepsi. "I just wanted to know."

The commander leaned forward, his face close to Abu Hamid's. "You should understand, Hamid, that a man, with his face and his hands on fire, who does not panic, does not eject until the right time, that man is to be treated with caution."

"What are you telling me?" Abu Hamid's finger flicked at the scar hole on his cheek.

"That Major Said Hazan works now for Air Force Intelligence, that he has great influence…"

"I have performed a service for him. I am his friend."

"Be careful, Hamid."

"He told me today that I would be rewarded for what I did. He himself signed the chit for my girl to come to the camp. On his orders cars have been sent for me, bills have been paid."

"Then you are indeed his friend," the commander said softly.

He was a clever young man, with a bachelor's degree in physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the reserve of the Israeli Defence Forces he held the rank of sergeant, in civilian life he was a research scien-tist for a company specialising in the manufacture of military electro-optics. He was said to have the most complete knowledge among all the reservists of the labyrinthine computer files held by Military Intelligence on Palestinian personnel.

The computer failed to throw up any reference to the crow's foot scar. The failure told the sergeant that the man of the photokit likeness had not been in IDF custody since the scar was acquired. A disappointing start… He was left with the computer and with thousands of IDF and Mil Int photographs. There were few concrete items in the information he had that would help him to reject material unlooked at. A flight to Syria told him that his subject would not be a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's Force 17. A man of Force 17 would never fly via Damascus. But the men had flaking allegiance. A fighter who was now in the Popular Front, or the Domestic Front or the Struggle Front, could have been in Force 17 a few years before

… It would be a long slog with the green screen, and the photograph bank.

The sergeant reckoned from the age of the subject, and from the fact that he had been taken to Simferopol for a platoon leader's course, that it was possible he had been in Beirut when the Palestinians evacuated in the summer of 1982. There were 1787 photographs available from the days when the Palestinians had trooped down to the docks and boarded the boats that would sail them to exile. The photos were blown up from American newsreel coverage that had been purchased unedited by the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation. The sergeant put up every print onto a screen for magnification. Each photograph was studied meticulously.

For five days the photographs flashed in front of him in his room, the blinds drawn over the windows, a cone of light from the projector to the screen.

He had a dogged persistence.

After 1411 failures his squeal of triumph was heard in the adjacent rooms and corridors. He had found a thin young man riding on the top of the cab of an open lorry, a short-haired young man with a thinly grown moustache. A young man who had a rifle aloft in one hand, and whose second hand was raised in the V-Victory salute. He saw the wound on the upper left cheek. Standing close to the screen, a magnifying glass in his hand, he found the lines of what the report called the crow's foot… Back to the computer. The number of the photograph fed in. The search for cross reference information. Long moments of stillness and then the rush began.

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Of the six men shown in the photograph, two had subsequently been identified.

One man in the photograph named after his capture in the security zone… but later released when 1190

Palestinians and Lebanese Shi'as were freed in exchange for three IDF soldiers. The sergeant cursed.

The second man who had subsequently been named

… captured, a dinghy chased to the shore by a patrol boat. A night gun battle on the beach close to Nahariya, lit by helicopter flares. Four infiltrators dead, one captured. Link with Popular Front.

Late in the night, while the prison slept, two army interrogators drove into the floodlit courtyard of the Ramla gaol. A convicted prisoner was roused from his cot, taken to a room where no prison warder was permitted to be present.

The prisoner was shown the photograph. He knew the man. He remembered his name.

Four days later an East German news magazine appeared. The eighteenth page of the magazine showed a scrum of Palestinian recruits struggling for the privilege of ripping a chicken to pieces. One man in the photograph wore a khaffiyeh scarf around his throat, where it had slipped when he bit into the feathered wing of the chicken.

The face was in tight focus.