Home Run

3

He was dressed as a pasdar in the loose-fitting dun khaki uniform of the Revolutionary Guards, and he walked with a limp that would be noticed but which was not ostenta-tious.

He had left his motorcycle a hundred yards behind where t he man that he followed had parked his paint scraped Hillman Hunter. He had trailed the man through the alleyways of the closed bazaar, past the steel shuttered doors, and towards the Masjid-i-Jomeh. He walked on, ignoring the pain of the pebble taped under the ball of his right foot. He watched as the man passed the guards at the outer doorway of the mosque, entering the dark shadow beneath the linked domes. When the man was lost to him, Charlie veered away, and crossed between the sparse traffic to the far side of the street. For years now there had been heightened security at Friday prayers, all across the country, ever since the bomb hidden beneath a prayer mat had exploded at Friday prayers at Tehran University. Charlie watched and waited. The Guards at the entrance to the mosque had seen the young man who now sat on the cracked pavement across the street from them. They had seen his limp, and they waved to him, and smiled a comrade's greeting. A veteran, they would have supposed, of the great marshland battles on the perimeter of Basra far to the south, maybe a casualty of the fierce fighting around Halabja on the mountain road to Baghdad. Charlie knew that men in uniform, and with guns in their hands, and who were stationed far behind the lines, always had respect for a wounded veteran.

He would cross the street and listen to the Mullah's words from the loudspeakers high on the domes of the Masjid-i-Jomeh, and he would talk to the Guards.

Charlie had not been brought up to respect the faith of modern Iran. It had been his father's concession to his American-born wife. His mother had had no religion, Charlie had been raised without the teachings of the Ayatollahs, and without the teachings of the Christian priests who had served the expatriate community in Iran. The children he had played with, been taught with before he went to the American school, they had taught Charlie enough of the Moslem faith for him to be able to pass as a believer. He would want to talk with the Guards. Talking was what Charlie did well, and he was better at listening.

He listened to the Guards. He let them talk. Duty rosters,

"hypocrite" outrages, troop movements. To questions about himself he was modestly reticent, his wound was a small thing, he hoped that soon he would be fit to return to the service of the Imam.

Charlie saw the man come out of the mosque. At one moment he was listening attentively to their talk, at the next he had made his farewells, pleading weariness, he must rest, and he had drifted away.

He had known the name of the man for two years, and he had known his address for seven weeks, since he was last home. He knew the age of the man and the name of his wife, and the number of his children, and he knew the man's work.

He knew by heart the case histories of at least a dozen of those executed by this man since the Revolution. He knew that, depending upon the order of the Islamic Revolutionary Courts, sometimes the man made his executions by hanging and sometimes by shooting.

The man was at peace, safe after communication with his God, safe in his home city, safe in the service of his Imam.

The man had hanged a teenager of the Baha'i faith who had refused after torture to recant his heresy. He had shot the 94-year-old former Captain Iraj Matbu'i, who had been helped to the execution post, sentenced for leading the Gendarmes against the Mullahs in the Mashad revolt of 1935. In public, he had hanged Juliette Eshraq.

Charlie had known the man's name for two years, since he had first returned to Iran, since he had scraped away at the story of his sister's death. It had taken longer to find the names of the two Guards who had lifted her on to the table, beneath the crane, in front of the Guards' barracks in Tabriz. These two he had now hunted and killed. He knew the name of the investigator who had tortured his sister. He knew the name of the Mullah who had tried and sentenced his sister.

He saw the man climb into his old car. He rode behind him across the bridge, over the broad river that was swollen by the melting mountain snows from the north, along the straight road beside the cemetery and the gardens that once had been the city's pride. The midday heat, trapped in the valley, Mistered the squat concrete buildings. Charlie felt the warmth of the air on his face as he rattled in the wake of the Hillman Hunter, bouncing over the coarse paving of the old road.

The car ahead of him pulled off the road, no signal, wound up a dry dust lane. Charlie braked, cut his engine, dismounted and seemed to be adjusting his chain. He watched the children stream out of the house, and the man laugh with them, reach lor them, and lift them.

He had seen enough. Charlie remounted and powered the motorcycle away.

Young Darren had been left to sit in an Interview Room, watched over by an expressionless policewoman, and sweat.

His two juniors reported to the local detective, and in the Chief Superintendent's office, sitting back easily, feigning the indifference of rank, were the big shots from Constabulary Headquarters. The local detective liked what he heard. Young Darren had been lifted outside his address, taken on the pavement as his hands were busy with the keys and door handle of his car. Two arresting officers approaching from different directions, and the suspect taken unawares, and without the chance to dispose of the evidence.

The detective heard them out, then muttered a lukewarm congratulation. He could play politics with the best of them.

Nothing too fulsome, because that way he gave the impression that it wasn't a miracle that they had done it right. When they had finished, and bowed their way out of the presence, the detective addressed himself to his seniors. He had the file. He glossed through the prime detail. Cole, Darren Victor. Age, 24 years. Address… Previous: Possession (fined), Possession (fined), Possession (6 months). Common-law wife, two babies.

Income: No visible means. Upsum: Hick, second-rate villain, pusher and user… Young Cole was what would be expected in a country town. Small time, small beer, not the sort of chummy who would ever expect to be confronted in the interview room by big shots from headquarters.

They left the local detective with no doubts. He was working to them, they were in charge, they had taken over. He would do as he was told and be thankful for it. He didn't complain, had never in his police career tried to buck the system. He was to go back to Darren Cole's address with his two juniors and a dog, relieve the uniformed constable who had been left to watch over the woman and her brats, and take the place apart. He would not be required for the interview with chummy, and God help him if he came out of that house with at least one evidence bag not filled.

In the interview room they dismissed the policewoman. They introduced themselves, a Superintendent and a Chief Inspector. They sat and tilted their chairs back as if that were more comfortable. They looked at Darren Cole like he was filth, like they'd want a good wash after being in the same room with him.

Their chummy's eyes flickered, hovered from one to the other.

They let him soak it in, they wanted him soft.

"It's Darren, right? Darren Cole, is that right?" The Chief Inspector said softly.

Their chummy pursed his lips, stayed quiet.

The Superintendent said, "I am going to assume, Darren, that you are not wholly retarded. I'm going to give you the benefit that you are not completely dumb. Now it's not every day that the likes of my colleague and I miss our breakfast to get down here to talk with a shit bag such as yourself, Darren.

Have you got me?"

Young Darren nodded, nervous and showing it.

"Can we start again, Darren?" The Chief Inspector passed his pack of cigarettes across the table, and Darren Cole fished one clear and his hand was shaking as he held the cigarette to his mouth. It was lit for him. Neither of the big shots took a cigarette. "You are Darren Cole, is that right?"

A feeble reed reply. "Yes."

"Good boy, Darren… I said to my colleague that Darren Cole was cute enough to know what's good for him. I said that Darren Cole would know how to behave. You push scag, chummy."

"Might have done…"

"You push it regular."

"Maybe."

The Chief Inspector's voice hardened. "Regular."

"So, I do."

"You pushed to Lucy Barnes."

"I don't know the names."

"To Lucy Barnes."

"Perhaps."

"Getting silly again, Darren… To Lucy Barnes."

"Yes."

"You gave Lucy Barnes her scag."

Darren shrugged.

The Superintendent said, "Lucy Barnes is dead, chummy.

On the slab. Don't tell me that you didn't know. Christ, is this bloody cow town so bloody slow…?"

There was a quiet knock at the door. A uniformed policeman came in and handed the Superintendent a folded message sheet. He read it slowly, he smiled slowly, then he handed the message sheet to the Chief Inspector. Another smile and then the fast look of satisfaction between the two of them. Darren Cole saw the signs. He was shrivelling in his chair.

"The dog's been down at your place, Darren. I tell you what, when you get through this, when you've done whatever's coming your way, then I'd learn to hide things a little better.

I mean that approximately 400 grammes of what we are presuming to be a prohibited substance, namely heroin, could be better hidden than under the bloody mattress. That's making it easy for the dog, Darren, oh dear, oh dear me… "

"That's not very clever, chummy," the Superintendent shook his head.

They had the well oiled routine, they had been working in tandem for more than a decade. Straightforward, this one, a roll over.

"You are looking at a bad scene, Darren," the Chief Inspector said it as if it hurt him.

"I didn't know she was dead."

"You've only done an open prison, Darren. Closed prison isn't the same. The Scrubs, Pentonville, Winson Green, Long Larton, Parkhurst, they're not the same as where you were.

They are nasty news, Darren. Do you know what you're looking at, Darren?"

Cole did not reply. His head was sinking.

"You could be looking at a tenner, Darren, because of who and what Miss Lucy Barnes was. God's truth, Darren, a tenner. A very hard time in those places, Darren, if we weren't speaking up for you."

The voice was muffled through the hands, pathetic. "What do you want?"

"We don't want_yow, chummy, that's for sure, we want up the chain from you. We'd speak up for you, if you gave us the name of the dealer."

A long silence in the Interview Room.

The Superintendent said easily, "Just the name of your dealer, chummy."

Cole's head burst upwards. He was actually laughing. His shoulders and upper body were convulsed, like it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. His mouth was frothing.

"You trying to get me blown away? I don't get less than a lenner if I grass, I get stiffed. You get a name and they don't ever forget. Shove it, mister."

For the next hour Darren Cole stared fixedly ahead of him.

His mouth never opened.

The big shots from Constabulary Headquarters seethed, shouted, bribed, and won nothing. The local detective had a quiet chuckle around lunchtime when he heard how well they had done.

In cumbersome longhand, using a thick-nibbed pen, in handwriting that only Miss Duggan could decipher, Mattie wrote out the signals. There were those to the Station Chiefs around the Iranian frontiers and sea boundaries, where the watchers of events inside that closed country operated, and there were those that would be received inside Iran. The Station Chiefs in Dubai, Bahrain and Ankara were informed by coded teleprinter messages beamed by the aerials on the roof of Century House to a radio farm in Shropshire and then on to a booster clinging to the summit point of the Troodos mountains in Cyprus, that Codeword Dolphin was coming. Signals to inside Iran were drafted for transmission on the evening Farsi language commentary as broadcast by the World Service of the BBC from Bush House. Those signals would be received by a man who worked in the Harbourmaster's Office at the newly developed port of Bandar Abbas, by a man who had a carpet business in the close and covered alleyways of Tehran's bazaar, and by a man who repaired heavy goods vehicles in a yard behind the old railway station at Tabriz.

When she had sent down the messages and signals to the basement, his PA reverted to form. She began to fuss him with detail. Were Mr Furniss' inoculations up to date? When could he manage an appointment with the medical staff for malaria pills, stomach pills, sleeping pills for the aircraft? She would go to the third floor for his travellers' cheques, but would he sign this authorization? And for his tickets. Please sign here, here and here. And would he be wanting the car to collect him for the airport directly from home, or from Century? Should a final appointment be arranged with the Director General? And inside the passport was a folded slip of paper as a reminder not to forget the girls, nor Mrs Furniss, of course. "I don't suppose she was taken in for one moment by that cardigan I found in the Strand the last time you came back."

The routine of travel was no longer second nature to him.

He gave way before the organizational blizzard that was Miss Duggan. He sat on the two-seater sofa in the partitioned office, he had the ripple of her keyboard in his ears. Quietly he read his book. He was stocking his mind with detail. Wonderful people, the Urartians, an extraordinary and flourishing civilization of three hundred years, and then gone. A thousand years before Christ's birth, this stocky people had made their mark across the wedge that was now divided between Turkey, Iraq and north-eastern Iran. He was already an authority of some stature concerning their artefacts, their belts and earrings and bracelets, their cuneiform script that he had seen gouged out on the walls of ruins and caves. Most certainly he would get to the Van Kalesi. The Urartian fortress at Van, safely inside Turkey, was earmarked as the next stop after Tabriz. Very much indeed he would look forward to being there. He summoned up the memory of Van Kalesi, built of dressed stone blocks that weighed up to 25 tons apiece, the canal that brought water to Van from 40 miles away. A civilization reduced by the Assyrians to bronze trifles and pottery shards, and amusement for men such as Mattie Furniss. The book he now read described the excavation in 1936 of a Urartian fortress town in present day Soviet Armenia, the first time that he had come across a readable and unabridged translation of the report. The purpose of his reading was cover. Whenever Mattie travelled in the Gulf and Near Asia it was as an archaeologist. One day he would write his own book on the Urartians. Damned if he knew how he would get it published commercially, but if all else failed Harriet would probably pay for a private printing of his view of Urartian culture.

Miss Duggan was locking her papers into the wall safe, Time for lunch. Time for the canteen queue. He seldom took lunch in his office, he enjoyed the chance to spend the time with colleagues at the formica topped tables of the canteen.

The food was edible, the view across the river was always interesting. He put a marker in his book and followed her out.

Mattie was a popular figure at Century. Not just because of the long time that he had been with the Service, but because no man, young or old, senior or junior, could remember the least discourtesy or pomposity from the Head of Iran Desk.

He had not reached his rank by treading on the prospects of anyone else on the staff. He was generous to any colleague in difficulty, or who sought his advice. Many did. He would never have claimed to be popular, was not even aware of it.

He went down in the lift with Israel Desk.

"Sorry about what happened the other day up there, Mattie.

The DG's no right to speak like that in front of colleagues, nor privately. I didn't reckon at the time it would have helped you had I stood your corner, if it happens again I will. Chin up, eh, Mattie.. ."

Mattie could summon his fluent smile, as if little things like that didn't annoy him.

At the counter he took a full lunch on to his tray because Harriet was out that night, a committee on something or other, and at home he'd be doing for himself. Percy Martins was behind him. Percy Martins ran Jordan, Syria and Iraq.

He had done something worthwhile, and quite insane, a couple of years back and had himself promoted a light year beyond his ability, and the new DG hadn't yet got round to sorting it out.

"Thanks for that about the Sanandaj units, Mattie. We slid it down to the Baghdad chappies, by now it'll be into the Iraqi system. Very grateful… Sorry about your run in with the bossman. My own view is that he's no background and shouldn't have been let past the front desk. If there's any time you need speaking for then I'm your man.. . "

A tiny, warm smile, which said, "wouldn't be necessary, old fellow, but thanks all the same".

He found himself a table. He needed to be alone. He had his knife into the liver when the seat opposite was taken. Old Henry Carter.. . Good God, thought he'd gone in the first reshuffle. Henry Carter, bachelor, prissy old thing, but sharp, had been in place when Mattie was joining. He couldn't imagine what Henry Carter did round the place these days.

Used to be something about safe houses and de-briefs, never quite certain, and it was the way of the Service now that work was specialised that officers were not encouraged to gossip with men and women from unrelated sections. Such a hell of a quiet voice, and it was rude not to listen, but so damned hard to hear what the man was trying to say.

"I can see it in your face, you thought I'd gone. Should have done, I was supposed to have been pensioned off last year, but I managed twelve months' extension. They all think I'm a lunatic, still being here, but what does a retired spookie get up to? I dread retirement, it's the only thing in my life I'm actually frightened of, handing my I/D in and walking out of Century for the last time. Sorry about your problems, that man needs a brain scan… "

It must be all round the building, Mattie concluded, and that was extremely unprofessional… Two others came over and muttered at him, as if to a bereaved husband, before he had finished his treacle tart and custard. He felt that he was being set up as a faction leader. He would not tolerate that.

He would refuse most categorically to become a centre of resentment against new management.

Carter asked, "What are you going to do, Mattie, when you retire?"

"Write a book. The tale of a lost civilization."

"That's very good. Sub-title, A History of the Secret Intelligence Service."

The news from the National Drugs Intelligence Unit was spring water clear.

"Listen, my friend, I have a powerful breath on my collar.

If you can't get a dealer's name off a pusher in the backwoods, just let me know, one hour from now, and I'll send down one of my graduate trainees. Do I make myself plain, old friend?

The name of the dealer or you're off the case."

The telephone purred into the ear of the Superintendent.

He was flushed. His Chief Inspector was head down into his notes and not wishing to witness the discomfort.

"Our local hero, where is he?"

"Still down at the Cole residence."

"Get him here."

The Chief Inspector gagged. "You're not going to hand it over to him?"

"Right now, if it would concentrate that little bastard's mind, I'd hand it over to the dog."

The radio transmitters and the teleprinters were in the guts of the building, and that was where the decipher clerks worked, in a constant air-conditioned breeze. The signal from London was passed to the junior spook.

The junior spook had now to walk up two flights of stairs, and down a corridor that was shared with the Military Attache's office before getting to the secure area from which the Service worked. The original Embassy planners had made no allowances for the fall of the Shah of Iran and the conse-quent upgrading of the mission. That Bahrain would become a listening post, a base for watchers and analysts of events in the country across the Gulf waters, had not been foreseen. To rebuild the Embassy to satisfy the needs of the Service was out of the question. To have moved the Service personnel out of the Embassy and into quarters of their own would have increased their running costs, and denied them the Embassy security umbrella.

The tea boy had carried cups of tea and soft drinks up the Embassy stairs, down the Embassy corridors for 25 years. He had access to any part of the building with his thirst quenching tray except the secure upper corridor beyond the Military Attache's office. The tea boy saw the Station Officer going down the second flight of concrete stairs, his lightweight jacket slung on his shoulders, making for the golf course before the fight went. He recognised the voice of the junior spook. He heard him say, half way down the first flight of stairs, "Just through, 'Dolphin' is on his way. Here next week."

"What the hell for?"

"Something about reassessment of aims and means."

"That's bloody inconvenient… "

The junior spook hurried on up, past the first floor corridor and towards the secure upper storey.

An hour later, his cups, saucers, and glasses washed and laid out on a draining board with a tea towel covering them from flies, the tea boy left his place of work, and walked out into the dry glare heat of the late afternoon.

The local detective lit a cigarette. As an after-thought he tossed one to Darren across the width of the cell. They were alone. The smoke curled between them. There was the smell of damp and vomit from last night's drunks.

"Let's understand each other, Darren, so that no mistakes are made which might later be regretted. We've got you for a miner because you have volunteered the information that you pushed to Lucy Barnes. That and possession of 428 grammes of scag. That's all wrapped up. Trouble is that it's gone beyond that. You see, Darren, and you have to look at these tilings from our point of view, we find 428 grammes of scag tinder the mattress of the bed that you share with your lady love. I don't think I'd find it difficult to persuade any dozen good men and true, women would be easier, mind you, that your lady knew the stuff was there. I'm marching on, Darren, and you must stop me if you're not following me: so now we have an accomplice in your trading. That's not going to be nice for her, Darren. I'll put it another way: that's going to he very unpleasant for her. I reckon we do her for a fiver. ..

See it from our point of view, Darren – you haven't helped us, and we're getting you a tenner. You haven't helped us, and we're getting your lady a fiver. So, what happens to your kids, Darren? They get Care. They get Care orders. They get to be scooped up into council care. By the time your lady comes out they'll be fostered off, nice couple of kids, and God knows, it's not always a disaster, fostering. But she won't get them back, you won't get them back. That's looking at it from the bad side, Darren. Look at it from the good side. You know me, you trust me. You know I'm straight. What I say I'll do, I bloody well do. Straight swap, as far as I'm concerned.

I get the dealer's name and detail. You get a great write up from us for the judge and no charge against your lady, and no council care order for the kids. I'm leaving you a piece of paper, Darren, and a pencil, that's the brown item here with the lead in it, and I want you to write that name down, and every last thing you know about that man. Don't think you'll be helping me, Darren, think that you'll be helping y o u r s e l f… "

Half an hour later the detective carried upstairs four sheets ol paper covered by a sprawling hard worked handwriting, and a name.

"Bloody well done," the Chief Inspector said hoarsely.

"Won't be forgotten," the Superintendent said.

"If you don't mind, sir, I'll be off. Bit past the time I usually get home."

He started out of his sleep.

He heard the latch door close. He was awake, but there was a long moment when he could not gather where he was, when his own sitting room seemed a stranger. He heard the footfall beyond the door. It was all there in front of him, there was the vase on the mantelpiece that his parents had given them for Christmas two years back, there on the sideboard was the photograph of himself and Ann, marrying. There was her sewing basket beside the fire grate…

Park called out, "Is that you?"

He could hear her shrugging off her coat. He heard her voice. "Who else would it be?"

He had his mind clear. The wall clock told him it was seven.

Seven what? Which seven? He shook his head. Christ, and he had been so tired. The plate on which he had taken his lunch was on the arm of the chair, bucking as he moved. It must be evening. He must have been asleep six hours. All of April had a day off, courtesy of William Parrish, and none of the hours lost going through the Civil Service time sheets. He hadn't changed two bulbs, he hadn't fixed the washer on the kitchen sink tap, he hadn't tacked down the carpet in the hall, he hadn't even made their bed.

She came into the sitting room.

"What are you doing here?" As if she were astonished. "I didn't think you'd be here… "

"We were given a day off." He stood, he felt ashamed that she should see the plate on the arm of the new chair. She had bought the chair. He had said they couldn't afford it, she had said that she refused to live in a slum and that while she was working she would bloody well spend her money how she pleased.

"Why, why did you have a day off?"

" There was a trial finished yesterday. We had a good result.

We were given a day off."

She picked up the plate. There was no mark on the chair's arm but she flicked it with her fingers anyway. "There was a trial yesterday that ended at early afternoon, I know that because I heard it on the car radio coming home. I sat here until past nine… I am a dim little thing, aren't I, but I didn't understand how it would take you more than five hours to get from the Old Bailey, Central London, to here."

"We had a celebration."

"Nice for you." She headed for the kitchen. He followed.

She spat over her shoulder, "A pity about the tap."

''I m sorry.''

"David, if there is a choice between April, the Lane, or your home, me, I know where the apple falls. Please, don't tell me you're sorry."

She was a great looking girl. She had been a great looker when they had first met, when he was on uniform duty at Heathrow, and a great looking girl in white at their wedding day, and a great looking girl when he had come home to tell her, all excitement, that he had been accepted into the Investigation Division. She was still a great looking girl, shovelling his dirty plate into the dishwasher. Ann had bought the dishwasher. David had said they didn't need a dishwasher, Ann had just gone out and bought it in the sales. She was as tall as him in her heels, and she had flaxen blond hair that she drew up into a pony, and she had fine bones at her cheeks and a mouth that he thought was perfect. She worked in the outer office of a prosperous architect, and she dressed to impress the clients.

"So, you all went off to the pub, where there was, of course, no telephone… and I presume you took the opportunity to tell them how they were getting it all wrong."

"I told Bill what I thought we should be doing… "

"Great way to celebrate."

He flared, "I said that I thought we weren't winning. I said that we should be more aggressive, work overseas more, I said that the men we put away yesterday were laughing at us when they were sent down.. . "

"God, they must think you're a bore."

"Do you know that last year our cocaine seizures were up by 350%? Do you know that means that three and a half times as much stuff came in last year as the year before… "

"What I care about is that my husband works 70 hours a week, that he's paid what a probationer constable in the Met gets. I care, used to care, that my husband is never at home when I want him, and when I am privileged to see him all he wants to talk about is filthy, sleazy, nasty drugs."

His breakfast plate, and his breakfast mug followed his lunch plate into the dishwasher.

"It's a disease that'll kill this country – AIDS, that's nothing in comparison. Ann, there's a billion pounds spent on drugs in this country each year. It's the principal reason for mugging, burglary, assault, fraud… "

"I don't know anyone, David, who is a junkie. No one in our block is, that I know of. No one in my office. I don't see junkies when I'm shopping. Drug addiction is not a part of my life, except when you bring it into our home."

"It's not something you can just turn your back on," he said flatly. "Whether it's me you're married to or anyone else."

She turned. She came towards him. She put out her arms and looped them around his neck. Her mother had told her to come back, and not just to collect her suitcases, her mother had told her to try again. One last bloody time, she had told her mother, she would try again. "Are they all like you, in April?"

"Yes."

"All on 70 hours a week, seven days a week?"

"When it's hot, yes."

"Do all their wives bitch?"

" Those that have stayed, yes."

"I bought some steak, and a bottle."

She kissed him. He couldn't remember when she had last kissed him. He held on to her, and the telephone rang. He picked the telephone off the wall bracket.

"Yes, it is, hello Bill…"

He felt her arms coming away from his neck. He saw the sadness flood her face. He was listening. He saw her grab inside her bag, and slap the meat down on to the kitchen table.

"The Lane tomorrow. Eight sharp. Look forward to it…

Ann, she's great, she's in great form. Thanks, Bill, see you in the morning."

He could see that she was crying. Park did not know how to stop his wife's tears. He did not know how to tell her of his excitement because the April leader had called him for a meeting, eight o'clock in the morning, at Investigation Bureau's offices on New Fetter Lane, and promised a good one.

The teaboy's message was carried by a passenger from Bahrain to Abu Dhabi on the Gulf, and then flown on, having been passed to a member of an IranAir cabin crew, to Tehran.

The message reached the desk of a counter-subversion investigator in an office on the fourth floor of a small office block, close to Bobby Sands Street, once Churchill Street.

The block was not identified in any way, but was a part of the Ministry of Information and Intelligence. To the investigator the transcript of a briefly heard conversation was a source of amazement.

The investigator had read the message several times. He knew "Dolphin". There would have been a dozen men in the section who knew the codename of Matthew Cedric Furniss.

He had known the codename from far back, from times that were not referred to when he had worked for a different master, before the Revolution. He was astonished that the same codename was still maintained over so many years. In the Islamic Republic of Iran the British Secret Intelligence Service was hated with a loathing second only to that reserved for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Spies for the Great Satan. The investigator was not a man to initiate action, too great a survivor for that. To have survived a career with the Sazman-e Amniyat Va Attilaat-e Keshvar, the Organisation of National Security and Intelligence, to have found a safe haven in an organisation dedicated to rooting out all traces of S A V A K, that was survival indeed. His way was to assemble information and present it to those few people in the regime who had the power to act. To many, the investigator was a valued tool.

On his computer, IBM state-of-the-art, he punched up the entry on Matthew Cedric Furniss, and composed a brief note on the information that the British head of Iran Desk was travelling in the region to pass on a reassessment of intelligence aims and means.

The investigator always worked late in his office. He liked the cool and calm of the evening, the silent shadows in the corridors. He made his decision, he lifted his telephone. When he talked it was against the distant thunder of an air raid striking the west of the city.

He travelled on a false passport in his wife's maiden name, and with the occupation of "Academic".

Harriet had seen him off, which was unusual, but then it was wholly unusual for a Desk Head to journey abroad. They had had their little nuzzles at each other's cheeks, and he had told her to get back to the Bibury cottage and keep on giving that city farmer hell, double-time, over the rape of the footpath.

Actually Mattie was rather pleased to be airborne, in harness again, but he hadn't said that to Harriet. Good to be on the road, not pushing paper.