Home Run

16

Houghton did the opening, not that successfully, and the first cork careered into the ceiling of the Director General's office and chipped the plasterwork.

Champagne, and a good vintage, the PA had been sent out with a wad of notes from the Director General's wallet. Must have run all the way back with it.

The occasion called for the best.

"I said he'd surprise us all… not quite true, I said he'd surprise a lot of people. I had faith in him. Always the way, yes? Just when life seems darkest the sun blesses us. I tell you what – Furniss is a real hero. You can have your soldiers doing daft things and getting medals for what they've achieved in the heat of battle, no harm in that, but Furniss has done it on his own. Can you just imagine how the chaps are going to be feeling back in Tehran, all of those unshaven baskets? They'll be slitting each other's throats… A toast to Mattie Furniss

… I'll bet he feels like a million dollars right now."

The Deputy Director General muttered, "He hasn't been on a Fun Run, Director General."

Ben Houghton said, "I can't get a link through to him. We expect that the Turkish military will have taken him down to Yuksekova, they've a base there. Crisis Management have been trying to patch through a fine, but they can't make it through. Pretty soon now he'll be airlifted to Ankara."

The Director General beamed, "There's a hand that I am much looking forward to shaking."

"The debrief comes first," the Deputy Director General said. "He'll be sanitized until his debrief is complete, that's the way things are done."

"So when do I get to congratulate him?"

"When he's debriefed, and after the debrief there'll be the Inquest."

"You are one hell of a killjoy, you know that. You're a real damp rag."

"It's no more or less than Mattie would expect. We debrief him on what's happened, who held him, and then we hold the Inquest as to how he was in a position that left him so vulnerable. Mattie'll know the form. My view, he's likely to be scarred for rather a long time, that's just my personal opinion."

"He's done bloody well."

"Of course he has."

"And I'll not have him harassed."

"No question of him being harassed, Director General, just debriefed."

The Deputy Director General proffered his glass to young Houghton. He refilled his own glass, and then the Director General's and the DDG had the last of the bottle. If the Director General ever stumbled under a Number Nineteen Omnibus, and the Deputy Director General moved into this office, that young man would be out on his neck, damn fast.

The DDG knew the answer, but he still asked the question.

"Have we spoken to Mrs Furniss?"

Ben Houghton said, "She's been out ever since the news came through, no answer on either of her phones. She hasn't been forgotten."

"Well done, Furniss. This calls for a second bottle, I think, Ben. Damned shame that we aborted the network, but at least we can move Eshraq."

The Deputy Director General frowned, then the smile caught his face. "Forgive me, I may have sounded churlish

… Good old Mattie… he's been terrific. I don't think it would be out of order for you to meet him off the plane if that's what you'd like… Director General. Again, forgive me, but I want you to understand that labelling Furniss a hero may well, will almost certainly, be somewhat misplaced. He will have talked, and this whole expedition has cost us a network. Realistically it all adds up to Dunkirk, not to the Normandy landings."

"I'm wagering that he'll have surprised you."

"Also, we may not have aborted our people in time. I can show you the photographs from Kermanshah when the M K O moved out and the Mullahs came back in, if you would like to see them. The hangings were photographed. Mattie getting himself captured was only one inevitable step away from a death sentence for our field agents, even, you may console yourself, if the signals to bring them out had been sent without delay."

"They may well come out, and Mattie may well not have talked, in which case perhaps, who knows, they can go back in again."

"We're not talking about Bond or Biggies, Director General, we are talking about one man against a very sophisticated team of torturers. We are talking about a regime that will do unspeakable things to their own people, and who won't have cared a toss what is done to a foreigner."

The Director General said, "I am at a loss to know what you want."

"I would want to know whether Eshraq is compromised before we let him go back."

"My money is on Mattie, and I'll drink to him."

And between the three of them they killed the second bottle.

It might have been the sense of guilt that had dogged the Station Officer ever since he had left Mattie Furniss unprotected in Van, but he most certainly made wheels turn now.

From the moment that the Military Attache at the Embassy had passed on the news of the refugee Furniss falling into the hands of a patrol near the border in Hakkari province, Terence Snow had wheedled facilities from his contacts. An official in the National Intelligence Agency had earned a handsome gift.

Mattie sat beside the road.

He had a paratrooper's smock draped over his shoulders, and a medic had cleaned his feet and then bandaged them, and a colonel had loaned him a stick to help himself along.

The road was the airstrip. It ran along a shallow valley between Yuksekova and Semdinli. The road was widened and reinforced and provided a facility for fixed wing to land in all weathers, night and day, and had been built to further military operations against guerillas of the Kurdish Workers' Party.

There were lights laid out, fired by portable generators, and the area where Mattie sat was illuminated by the headlights of military jeeps and trucks. He sat on an old ammunition box. He was a source of interest to the soldiers, they were crowded behind his back, silent and watchful. They gazed at him with a fascination because they knew that he was an Englishman, and they knew that he had walked out of Iran, and they knew from the medic that the soles of his feet were cut and horribly swollen from beatings. He had lost that sense of exhilaration that had gripped him when he had stood on the ridge looking down into Turkey. He was overcome with exhaustion. Of course he was. He could still see in his mind the picture, cruelly sharp, of the Revolutionary Guards coming down the slope and the boys being escorted at gunpoint up the slope. And there was Charlie, and there were his agents.

He wanted only to sleep, and he declined food. The last food he had eaten, before the ridge, had been the boys' food freely shared with him.

The Hercules C-130 came down on to the road, a noisy and jolting landing, and the reverse thrust was on from the moment the wheels touched. The aircraft taxied towards the knot of soldiers, and when it turned Mattie had to shield his face from the flying grit thrown up from the hard shoulder by the four sets of propellors. The pilot kept the engines idling while Mattie was helped up the rear loading ramp. It was only when the aircrew had fastened his seatbelt for him that he realized that he had forgotten to thank the paratroop officers for their hospitality. He waved as the loading ramp was raised, but he couldn't tell whether they would have seen. On full power the Hercules lifted off, then banked heavily to avoid a shoulder of the Samdi Dag, then climbed for cruising altitude. They were three hours in the air. He was offered orange juice from a paper carton and a boiled sweet to help his ears during the descent to Ankara, otherwise the aircrew ignored him. They were taking him back from a nightmare, returning him to the world that he knew.

They were on a military airfield. They were parked beside an executive eight seat jet. On the jet were the roundels of red and white and blue.

The Station Officer made no secret of his emotion. He hugged Mattie.

"God, Mr Furniss, you've done magnificently well… and the Director General said for me to tell you… " H e recited,

"Warmest personal congratulations on your epic triumph."

"Very decent of him."

"You came through, Mr Furniss, I can't tell you how pleased I am, how proud I am to know you."

"Steady, Terence."

"You're a hero, Mr Furniss."

"Is that what they think?"

"Of course. They had the whole army out trying to catch you and you got clean through them. You beat the bastards."

"Yes… What about my agents?"

"All I know is that the abort signals were sent."

"But are they out?"

"That I don't know. I'm very sorry, Mr Furniss, but I've been ordered not to attempt any sort of debrief on you. That's the usual form, I suppose."

Snow took Mattie's arm and led him to the steps of the executive jet, and a nurse came down them and took over and grabbed firmly at his arm and hoisted him on board, and when he ducked into the interior there was an R A F corporal to salute him, and through the open door of the cockpit he saw the pilot leaning sideways so that he could wink at Mattie, and give him the thumbs-up. He was strapped into a seat, back to the driver, always the way of R A F flights, and Snow was opposite him, and the nurse was peeling off the bandages from his feet, even before they took off, and there was a look on her face that suggested that no one could be trusted with medical hygiene but herself. The plane had come from Cyprus, from the Sovereign Base at Akrotiri. They roared away into the night, lifted sharply, as if the pilot would have preferred to be at the controls of a Tornado strike plane.

Terence Snow kept his silence. That was the way of things when a Service man came back from captivity. Nothing should interfere with the debrief, standard operating procedure.

When the nurse had unwound the bandages of the Turkish army medic, when she had examined the puffed, welted soles of Mattie's feet, then he saw the frown settle on her already stern forehead, and he saw the Station Officer wince. The nurse took off his shirt, tugged it off him, and her lips pursed when she saw the bruising at the base of his shoulders. The swollen feet and the bruised shoulders brought a gentleness to the nurse's fingers, and a gaze of youthful worship from the boy. He could have wiped the gentleness out of her fingers, and the adulation from his eyes. He could have told them that he was a fraud. He could have shouted inside that small aircraft cabin, going home at 550 surface miles per hour, that the Service's hero had cracked and talked.

They put down at the Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton in the small hours of the morning.

He was helped down from the aircraft and into a waiting ambulance, a lone vehicle on the huge airfield. He was driven to the Base hospital.

The Director General was waiting for him, and his hand was pumped.

"Bloody good show, Furniss. Welcome home. It's a Red Letter day for all of us."

They ran an electrocardiogram test. They asked him for a urine sample and then put him in the lavatory where there was a bag under the seat because they required his stool to check for typhoid or dysentery. They X-rayed his feet and his chest and his shoulders. They did blood tests on him for signs of vitamin deficiency. They were brisk and methodical and quick, and Mattie saw that the form they filled in with the results of the examination and the tests was blank at the top, at the space provided for the patient's name. Over the new bandages on his feet they gently fitted plastic slippers, and they told him he should see his dentist within the next week.

The Director General was waiting for him in the reception area. He beamed at him. Mattie grinned back, ruefully, like a man embarrassed by all the attention.

"Well, Furniss, I don't know what the devil you've been up to since we last saw you. I expect it will make a superlative story and one which the Prime Minister will not want to see published, dear me, no, but you'll dine with us when you're up to snuff, I do look forward to that. Messages of deep esteem from Downing Street. Should have said so at once. And Mrs Furniss. I expect you'd like to put through a call before you leave here. Snow, arrange that will you? Then you'll be off to Albury for a day or so, Furniss, just to get it all off your chest, but you know all about that."

"My field agents…?"

"Steady down, old chap. You worry about yourself, leave the others to us. Carter's coming down, he'll tell you what you need to know about your agents. It's been a wonderful show, Furniss. I said you would surprise us all. But I mustn't keep you from the telephone… . Well done, Furniss, first class. The Service is very proud."

From the road outside they could hear the telephone ringing.

The telephone had rung three times while Parrish and Park had sat in the car.

It was ringing again as the woman drove past them and then swung sharply to pull into the drive at the side of the cottage.

And as soon as she had her door open she was hearing the telephone ringing, because she was out of her car like a rabbit, and she hadn't bothered to close the car door, and she'd left her keys in the front door.

Park started to move, but Parrish's hand rested lightly on his arm.

"Give her a moment."

It had been Parrish's initiative, the drive to Bibury. No warning, just pitching up at Park's address, waiting for Ann to leave, then coming to the door. Park had already started on the spare bedroom ceiling, and he hadn't been given time to clean the paint off his fingers.

"We'll just give her time to answer. I'm out of line, but I might just be past caring. It's all too ambiguous for a simple soul like me. I have a direct order that Tango One is not to be lifted, and yet I am ordered to maintain a low level surveillance on him – I don't know what that adds to… I am told that we will get no help in locating Mr Matthew Furniss but the ACIO is not telling me that I cannot approach Furniss. If it adds up to anything it is that on the top floor of the Lane they haven't a clue what we're supposed to be doing. I'm pushing my luck, David, because I don't appreciate being pissed on. So, if I get my wrist slapped, and you get your butt kicked, then it's all in a good cause… Come on."

They stepped from the car.

"I'll do the talking," Parrish said. "You can give her the keys."

He smiled, a real hangman's smile. He reached for his wallet in his inside pocket. When he knocked on the door he had the wallet open so that his identification card was visible.

She came to the door.

She was radiant.

Park handed her the keys, and Parrish showed the ID and she grinned at the keys, like a small girl.

"Mrs Furniss?"

"Thrilling, isn't it? Do come in. It's quite wonderful. I suppose they sent you down when I wasn't answering the phone.

I've been at my elder daughter's… You've come all the way from Century, a wasted journey? You'll have a cup of coffee before you go, of course you will. I suppose really I should be opening the champagne, the DG said that he opened champagne last night. He said the whole Service was proud of Mattie, that's a splendid thing to have said of your husband… "

"When will Mr Furniss be home?"

"You will have coffee, I'm so excited, do come inside…"

She had stepped aside, then stopped, spun. "You should know when he's coming home."

Parrish asked calmly, "Did you look at my ID?"

"You're from Century, yes?"

"Customs and Excise, ma'am, Investigation Division."

Her voice whispered, "Not Century?"

"My name is William Parrish, and I am investigating heroin trafficking from Iran. My colleague here is Mr Park."

Her hand was across her mouth. "I thought you were from my husband's office." She stiffened. "What did you say you want?"

"I'd like to know when I can interview your husband."

"What about?"

"In connection with a guarantee given by your husband to a man now under investigation."

She barred their path. "We don't know anyone like that."

"Your husband knows a Charles Eshraq, Mrs Furniss. It's about Eshraq, and your husband standing guarantee to him that we've called."

She stared up from her eyeline that was level with the knot of Parrish's tie. "Have you been through Century?"

"I don't have to go through anyone, Mrs Furniss."

"Do you know who my husband is?"

Park could have smiled. Parrish wasn't smiling. He would be later, right now he had his undertaker's calm.

"Your husband is the guarantor of a heroin trafficker, Mrs Furniss."

"My husband is a senior civil servant."

"And I serve my country too, Mrs Furniss, by fighting the importers of heroin. I don't know what threat your husband safeguards us from, but where I work the threat of heroin coming into the UK is taken pretty seriously."

She was shrill. "You come here, you barge into my house, you make preposterous allegations about a boy who is virtually a son to us, on the morning that my husband has just returned home after breaking out of an Iranian torture gaol."

"So he's not here at present?"

"No, he isn't here. I should think he will be in hospital for a long time. But if he were here, Mr Parrish, you would be terribly sorry you had had the disgraceful manners to break into this house.. .. "

Parrish said, "Maybe it's not the best time… "

She went to the hall table. She picked up the telephone.

She dialled fast.

Her voice was clear, brittle. "This is Harriet Furniss, Matthew Furniss' wife. I want to speak to the Director General… "

Park said, "Come on, you disgraceful person, time we barged out."

They left her. When they were at the gate they heard her voice rise in anguished complaint. They reached the car.

"Shall I serve my country and drive?"

"I tell you what, Keeper, that wasn't one of my happiest initiatives, but we did shake the nest."

He had spoken to the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister had asked after Mattie Furniss and said he must be a quite remarkable man, and the DG bathed in reflected glory. He looked forward rather keenly to the first of the debrief papers that would be coming through in a couple of days, and he would certainly send a digest across to Downing Street. Now he was making a tour, being seen, as he put it to Houghton.

They were in that section of the third floor occupied by Assistance (Photographic) when he was passed a telephone by Ben Houghton. For a moment he was puzzled. He had spoken to the woman at breakfast time.

He listened.

"No, no, Mrs Furniss, you were quite right to reach me

… intolerable behaviour. Rest assured, Mrs Furniss, you won't be troubled again."

The four wooden packing cases and the two cardboard boxes were the first items to be loaded into the container. The lorry had backed into Herbert Stone's driveway. He gave the driver a manifest for the packing cases that listed Machine Parts for Agricultural Equipment. Later the container would be filled with more machine parts for tractors and refrigeration units.

The haulage company was a regular carrier of machine parts to Turkey.

When the lorry had left he went inside his house, and into the quiet of his work room. He telephoned the number Charlie Eshraq had left him and told him that the soap was on its way, and he gave him the name of a contact, and where he should go and when.

"I tell you, Bill, it wasn't sensible behaviour."

"If you want London to become like Amsterdam, Chief, then sensible behaviour would be the order of the day."

"And I don't want a press office handout."

"My guys have worked their balls off, we just don't like to see it go down the plug hole."

Parrish had been at the Lane for one and a half years longer than the Chief Investigation Officer, and for two and a half years longer than the ACIO. He rarely spoke his mind. When he did he could get away with murder.

The ACIO said, "If you'd come to us first, Bill, cleared it with us…"

"You wouldn't have let me go."

The CIO was hunched forward in his chair, elbows on his desk. "There's another way of looking at it, Bill. We are stretched so damn thin that in effect we are a fraud. We intercept a minute proportion of what's brought in. I know that, you know that… When you are losing the battle, as we are, then we need friends where friends matter… "

"You have to go for the throats of the bastards and hang on."

"It's a great world that you live in, Bill, and it's not a world I see much of across this desk."

"So, who are the friends we need?"

"They're the high and the mighty… and right now they're peeved with you."

"I just gave the nest a little shake."

"Very self-indulgent of you, Bill, and no help to me, because I am summoned to a meeting this afternoon with the faceless wonders at Century House. What do I tell them, Bill?"

"To get fucked."

"But my world isn't your world, more's the pity, and I'm looking for friends… I have one man in Karachi, one DLO on his ownsome, and when he goes up to the North-West Frontier, who escorts him? The spook escorts him, and drives the Landrover. Why does my D L O ride in the spook's Landrover? He rides in it because I don't have the funds to provide a Landrover of our own. I have one DLO in Cyprus, and how does one man get to know what's coming out of Jounieh, how does he know what's sailing from any Lebanese port? Cyprus is awash with spooks… I am trying to cultivate friends, Bill, not shake the nest and telling them to get fucked."

"I promised Park, and he's the best I have, that I wouldn't let your friends the faceless wonders stand in our way,"

"Then you opened your big mouth too wide. Tell us about your Keeper, Bill. We begin to hear quite a lot about Master Park. Is he ready for a move upwards, do you think?"

"We're going to have a celebrity on our hands," the Director General mused.

"How so?"

"I anticipate great mileage out of Furniss. They'll want him at Langley. The Germans'll want him, and I dare say even the French will recognize that they could learn a thing or two."

The Deputy Director General said coolly, "I'd put that out of your mind for a start. If I were in this office, I would make double damn certain that no one outside this building gets to know that we allowed a Desk Head to plod about on a hostile frontier without a semblance of security. It'll get out sooner or later, of course. As like as not Tehran will be drafting a press release even as we sit here: Why We Let British Spy Go, and, by the way, not a few people will be wondering already."

The Director General scowled. "I don't mind telling you that I told Furniss that the whole Service was proud of him."

"Not clever… I'm going to run a fine toothcomb over Terence Snow. The report on how Mattie came to get himself kidnapped is pretty conclusive. Indeed, I doubt that he has any sort of future here. He'll have to go back to Ankara in the short term. There may just be a way he can be useful to us in the short term."

"You're a hard man."

"I am what the job requires."

The snort of the Director General, "And Furniss, has he a future?"

"Very probably not, I am afraid."

The Deputy Director General reported that a man had been sent down to Bibury with the instruction to break the bones of any Customs Investigation creature who came within a hundred yards of the Furniss cottage, and he said that he would be at the Director General's side at the meeting with the Customs hierarchy.

"What sort of people will they be?"

"I expect you'll be able to charm them, Director General.

Think of them as glorified traffic wardens."

He had no doubt that his life depended upon the success with which he stood his ground against the inquisition of the clerics.

Ranged on the far side of the table to him were four of them. They were the power and the glory of the Revolution of today, and once he would have called them fanatics and bigots. They were the ones who had been to maktab where the Mullahs taught the Qur'an to boys aged four, and then they had become the talabeh who were the seekers after truth as handed down from the wisdom of the Ayatollahs. They had taken child brides because it stated in the book that a girl should not experience her first bleeding at her parents' home.

They had spent time in the holy city of Qom. It was the failure of the S A V A K that these creatures still existed. They were his masters. He claimed that he had already bled the British spymaster dry before his escape. He told them of the young Eshraq, and they were quiet as he explained the mission of Eshraq, heading back towards Iran, and they heard of the precautions that were in hand to prevent the traitor crossing over the frontier with armour-piercing missiles. He said that Eshraq's first target was the Mullah who sat immediately in front of him. He saw the way that the others turned sharply to the one amongst them who had been singled for attack, and he told them that he, himself, was the target that would follow.

For more than an hour and a half he defended himself, and at the end he told them of his arrangements to prevent Eshraq crosssing the border.

It was implicit in his argument that if he were removed, if he were sent to Evin, then the shield in front of his masters would have been dismantled.

The life of Charlie Eshraq would safeguard the investigator's life. Nothing more, nothing less.

He had flown back to Tehran from the Gulf that morning to resume work at the new power station to the west of the city.

He browsed in the bazaar. He was on the Bazar e Abbas Abad, amongst the carpet shops.

He paused. He could not linger for more than a few seconds.

In front of him were the heavy steel shutters, and fastening them to the concrete paving was a powerful padlock. His eye caught that of the man who stood in front of the next cavern of carpets, open – and the man ducked back into his shop.

There was no sign, no explanation of why this one business should be shut. If there had been illness, if there had been bereavement, then he would have expected an explanation from the merchant's neighbour.

He walked on. He walked into the warmth of the sunlight beyond the bazaar's alleys. He took a taxi back to his hotel, and in his basin he burned the message that he had been paid to carry.

Henry was late getting down to Albury.

Everyone who knew Henry Carter, which wasn't many, had told him that he should dump the Morris 1000 Estate on the nearest Corporation tip and failing that at the side of any road, and buy something reliable. Trouble again with the carburettor.

He was late getting down to Albury, and Mattie had already arrived, and the men who had brought him from Brize Norton were fretting to be on their way. He ignored the show of annoyance as he struggled through the front door with his bag and his Wellington boots and two weatherproof coats, binoculars, camera with a long lens, and tape-recorder. Typical of the sort of youngster they recruited into the Service now, neither of them offered to help, and they scarcely bothered to report that Mattie was in one piece, sound asleep now, before they were off.

There weren't many of them, the old brigade, left at Century these days, and it was obvious that the Director General would have wanted one of the long servers to be down at Albury to take Mattie's debrief. He would not have called himself a friend of Mattie Furniss, rather a colleague.

He looked back through the front door. He had heard the call. He was festooned with his gear. He saw the bird. Picus Viridis. The Green Woodpecker was halfway up a dead elm across the lawn. There would be gaps in the debrief for him to set his camera on a tripod, and to rig his microphone. He went inside. It would be something of a reunion for him, coming back to the country house in the woodland of the Surrey hills. Mrs Ferguson greeted him. She was rather a dear woman, the housekeeper, and there had been a time when he had actually thought of making a proposal of marriage to her, but that was quite a long time ago and he had been at the house for weeks on end. It was her cooking that had settled it. It was awful. She pecked his cheek. He saw George behind her, hovering at the kitchen door. George touched his cap.

He wore a cap always now, since the baldness had set in, wore it even in the house. A loyal fellow, George, but lazy, and why not, with so little to do. Through the kitchen he could see that the outside door was closed, and the door shook and there was ferocious scratching from the far side of it.

"Am I not to be greeted by old 'Rotten'?"

George grinned. "Your gentleman doesn't like dogs, and he certainly doesn't like Rottweilers."

Not many did. Henry had a fear of some men, and of most women, but of no animal, not even an animal that weighed more than a hundred pounds and was famously unpredictable.

"Then make sure the brute's kept clear of him."

He had to smile… Wouldn't do for Mattie Furniss to have fought his way out of an Iranian prison only to find himself savaged by the safe house Rottweiler. He looked around him. He could see the glimmer of fresh paint on the woodwork and the carpet in the hall had been cleaned. Things were looking up.

"Where is he?"

"He's just come down. Been asleep ever since he got here.

He's in the library."

He left George to carry the bag and his kit upstairs. He hoped that he would have his usual room, the one that overlooked the vegetable garden where the songbirds gathered to feed off the groundsel and dandelion seeds.

He walked through to the library. His feet echoed on the bare board floor. It had been a bare board floor since the pipes had burst in the freeze of three winters before and the carpets had been ruined and not replaced. He opened the door. He was almost obsequious. He went on tiptoe into the room. To call the room the library was somewhat overstating the case.

Of course, there were books on the shelves, but not many, and few of them would have held anyone's interest. The books had been a job lot when a local house had been cleared out on the death of a maiden lady without surviving relations.

Mattie was in a chair by the empty hearth.

"Please, don't get up, Mattie."

"Must have just nodded off."

"You deserve a very long rest… I mean, what a change … where were you, Mattie, 24 hours ago?"

"Walking out of Iran, I suppose. It's pretty strange."

"You've spoken to Mrs Furniss?"

"Had a few words with her, thank you. Woke her up at first light, poor thing, but she was in good form… Flapping a bit, but don't they all?"

"There's grand news through from the medics. A very good bill of health, no bugs."

"I just feel a bit shaken."

Henry looked into Mattie's face. The man was completely shattered.

"I'll tell you something for nothing, Mattie… In twenty years' time, when the DG's been forgotten, when no one at Century will know my name, they'll still talk about 'Dolphin's Run'. Dolphin's run out of Iran is going to go into the history of the Service."

"That's very decent of you, Henry."

"Don't thank me, you did it. The fact is that the Service is buzzing with collective pride. You have given us all, down to the tea ladies, one hell of a lift."

He saw Mattie drop his eyes. Perhaps, he had been over the top, but he knew the psychology of the debrief, and the psychology said that an agent back from abroad, where he'd had a rough time, needed praise, reassurance. A colleague of Henry's, with a brood of children, had once likened the trauma of return to a woman's post-natal depression. Henry couldn't comment on that, but he thought he knew what the colleague had meant. He had told the Deputy Director General when he had been given his marching orders, before finding that his carburettor was playing up, that he would take it gently.

It would have been scandalous to have taken it otherwise, after a man had been tortured and broken… oh yes, the DDG had been most sure that Mattie would have been broken.

"Thanks, Henry."

"Well, you know the form. We'll hammer through this over the next few days, and then we'll get you back home. What you've been through is going to be the basis of study and teaching, no doubt, at the Fort for the next decade… Shall we get down to things some time this evening? Mattie, we're all very, very excited by what you achieved."

"I think I'd like to be outside for a bit. Can't walk too comfortably just yet, perhaps I'll sit in the garden. Can you keep that ghastly dog at bay?"

"By all means. I'll ask George to put him in the kennel.

And I'll see if Mrs Ferguson can find us something rather special to drink this evening. I don't think we can hold out much hope for the meal itself."