Home Run

5

She was different, but she was the only girl amongst them.

He had been given short shrift by the boys. She wore no make-up, and her dark hair was combed away from a centre parting, and she had discarded the headscarf that would have been obligatory out on the street, and she wore the jeans and the blouse that would have to be covered by a chador.

"I might have been away, OK, I've been away, but that wasn't my decision. I was taken away. Now I am able to make my own choice, and that choice is to come back and live my life inside Iran."

They had all been his friends, the boys and the girl, at the American School. The name of the girl was La'ayya. Charlie sat on a straight-backed chair and the girl lounged on the wide sofa. This was the reception room of the villa of her parents, Before the Revolution there would have been framed photographs of La'ayya's father, about his official business, and with minor members of the First Family. The images of the other life were gone, along with the servants and gardeners.

Her parents were taking the last of the snow on the ski slopes above the Caspian Sea. The girl was alone in the villa that was set back from the wide street, where the cherry blossom was starting to bloom, and she was amused, and not frightened as the boys had been.

"I went with my mother to California. I loathed it. I was sent to London, where we have friends. I live there, but I hate that city too. I am Iranian and I want to make my life in the country that is my home."

He had said the same to the boys. None of them had wanted to hear him out. He had been given little chance to talk in any one of the boys' homes before being shown the door, but the girl was in no hurry to expel him. She had always had more guts than any of the boys in his class. Now she smiled frankly at him.

"You don't believe me?"

"I'm not a fanatic, Charlie. I don't pray for the eternal life of Khomeini. I just exist here. If anyone tells me that they want to live here when they have the chance to live in California or London then I think that either they are addled in the head, or they are lying."

"But you haven't thrown me out, the madman or the liar.

The others were fast enough."

"Your father was killed, and your sister, and you talk about coming back as if it were the matter of crossing a street…

Let me tell you why the boys are frightened of you. When you left there were 22 of us in the fourth grade. The boys that you have been to see and me, we are the only ones still living in Tehran. There are eight in exile, and eight have been killed."

"A war doesn't last for ever, not for ever, a war finishes.

The Imam finishes. There is a new country to be built. There will be a new Iran, and that will be my country… "

Her eyebrows flickered. "You believe that?"

"It is why I am coming home."

And then the keenness of the girl. "And what part in your new order would I play, or the boys who rejected you?"

He was thinking that he needed a place to store the weapons that he would carry back on his next journey which would be the last journey, that he might need a driver or a minder at his back.

He said, "I would want someone who will share my vision."

She laughed. She sounded as though she mocked him. "You know nothing of Iran… "

"I know that I want to live out my life in my own country."

She stood. She played the hostess. She walked towards the door. "I am in love with life, Charlie. I too have friends, relations, who were taken to the Evin gaol, and to the Qezel Hesar gaol and to the Gohar Dasht gaol, and I don't wish to follow them. Nor, Charlie, do I believe a single word, not one, that you have told me."

She had been leggy and spindly when he had last seen her.

He thought that now she was beautiful.

"When I come back I will come here, to see you, to show you my truth."

She grimaced. "And we could go for a drink in the cocktail lounge of the Hilton… Trouble is, Charlie, that the Hilton is now the Independence Hotel, Oppressed Area Base Three of the Mobilisation Volunteers of Beitolmoqaddar, it is now the property of the Deprived People's Organisation. Goodbye, Charlie. It was amusing to see you, but not sensible."

"I did not believe you would be afraid."

There was the first moment of bitterness in her tongue. Her voice was sharp. "That's California talk, or London talk. You insult me. You know nothing of my Iran, you know nothing of my life You come here and you tease me, you laugh at me, and for whatever reason you also lie to me."

"What would you like me to bring you?"

"If you contact me then you put me at risk."

"Just tell me what you would like."

"Soap," she said simply.

She let him out of the house.

He thought she was very pretty, very sad. She closed the door before he had reached the pavement. He walked away down the street, and his feet trampled the early fall of the cherry blossom.

The first time he had come to the Manzarieh camp in Niavaran the- statue of Lord Baden Powell, Chief Scout, had been at the gate and he had been employed in the secret police of the former monarchy. He had been sent to the Empress Farah University for Girls to arrest a student who was believed to be a member of a Tudeh cell. The hostel for the College girls was now sealed from the outside by heavy coils of barbed wire, guarded by troops of the Mobilisation of the Deprived Volunteers, separated from the main expanse of open ground by electrified fences. And much that was different in the appearance of the investigator and his transport. The dark grey suit and the BMW coupe had given way to plain grey trousers, and sandals on his feet, and a long shirt outside his waist band; his cheeks were laced in stubble, and he drove a humble Renault 4. It was not quite necessary for him to have renounced all of his previous life, the SAVAK trappings, but the investigator was a cautious man.

In what had once been the Dean of Studies' office, the investigator was made welcome and given tea. Each time that he came to this room it was to seek advice on the suitability of a candidate for operations overseas. It was the responsibility of the Director of the Revolutionary Centre to consider the target, the location, the method of attack, and then to recommend a volunteer. The investigator had been many times to Manzarieh because the regime was often anxious to exercise the long arm of its discipline against traitors in exile.

The students at Manzarieh were trained in the teachings of the Qur'an, the ideology of the Imam, and close quarters killing. Prayers at dawn, noon and dusk, learning the trade of killing for the rest of the day. To brief the Director he took from his attache case his notebook. The Imam glowered down from the wall at him. He tried never to think about it, but he had been at the meeting where the assassination of the Imam in exile had been discussed. If the investigator had a nightmare in his life it was that a minute of that meeting should have survived, a minute with a list of those attending.

His voice was a forgettable monotone.

"The exile is Jamil Shabro. In spite of warnings telephoned to his home in London he has continued to vilify the Imam and the Islamic government of Iran. I will leave with you a resume of his most recent speech. It is our suggestion that explosives be used. One restive tongue is cut out, but a hundred others are silenced by fear."

The Director gazed down at the photograph of Jamil Shabro. "London

… London is so very open to us."

"There is another matter… "

The investigator reached again into his attache case. He produced a second file. On the outside, written large in the investigator's hand in the Farsi language, was a single word which if translated back to the English would have been written as Dolphin.

He saw the high steel gates open, and he saw the car's bonnet pushing into the narrow space, and he saw the Guard who had opened the gate duck his head in respect.

The width of the street was 40 paces. The traffic was solid.

The Mercedes could not nudge into the flow. It was as it had been the last time that he had stood on that pavement.

The building behind him was abandoned, its garden was overgrown and the oleander bushes had been allowed to grow wild and provide a screen of evergreen cover. He had been in the garden, and he had seen the place where he could stand on the wall of the old and demolished conservatory and see over the outer wall of the derelict building. The driver of the Mercedes hammered at his horn, and made space.

He saw the Mullah. He saw a man who was still young.

The face of an academic. Charlie saw the thin glasses, and the sallow face, the clean turban, and the shoulders of his camel hair cape. The Mullah sat alone in the back of the long Mercedes, and Charlie noted once more that the car windows distorted the width of the face inside. He noted also that the carriage of the Mercedes was low over its tyres. The Mercedes was armour-plated along its sides and its windows were of reinforced glass.

The gates creaked shut. The Guard was again positioned outside them, his rifle slung on his shoulder. The Mercedes had moved on.

Charlie drifted away.

He walked for a long time. He liked to walk because when he walked he could rehearse what he had learned in the previous hours.

He had that morning found the investigator. He had not seen him, but he had discovered his place of work.

Charlie was staying in a small hotel. In London it would have been a guest house behind Paddington Station. In Tehran it was down an alleyway crowded from dawn and beyond dusk with food stalls and metal craftsmen. A well scrubbed little establishment, and cheap. There was a telephone in the hallway of the hotel. All morning he had telephoned different numbers at the Ministry of Information and Intelligence. He had been passed from one number to another. Fifteen calls, and always the same question. He had asked to be put through to the man. Fourteen times he had been denied. The fifteenth time, he had been told to hold. He had heard the extension ringing out. He had been told that the man was not in his office… and he had rung off.

An hour later, more depth disguising his voice, he rang again.

He had said that he had an appointment at the building, but had lost the address. Now he knew.

The procession passed him.

Students marching, goosestepping.

Boy children striding and overstepping, uniforms too large.

Women shuffling their feet under the full flow of their chadors, the widows of the war.

Men carrying buckets, and money being thrown from the pavement into the buckets, screwed up bank notes.

Portraits of the Imam carried high, the streets filled with the shouting of the slogans.

Charlie put some notes into the bucket when it reached him. Not to have contributed would have attracted attention.

He found a taxi.

An age it took, to wind through the clogged streets, through the drab and smog-blanketed mass of the city. He would never be at ease in the south of Tehran. It was the shrine of the Imam, the working class ghetto of those who shouted loudest lor the war, for the death of their enemies. South Tehran was the bedrock of the Revolution. He kept his peace in the taxi until he was dropped.

He stood outside the main entrance to the Behesht-i-Zahra cemetary. It was a pilgrimage for Charlie Eshraq. Each time he came to Tehran he came to the cemetery. He had to wait at the gate as a line of taxis drove through. There was a coffin on the roof of each taxi, martyrs were being brought back from the front line, with a horde of family mourners alongside them for an escort. He followed. For hundreds of yards Charlie walked amongst the graves. A rippling sea of flags. Small wooden and glass-fronted box shapes, on stilts, in which were placed photographs of the dead. He saw a bulldozer excavating the yellow earth from a pit the size of a swimming pool, waiting for the dead from the next battle. He saw the raven women and old men and small children threading between the death markers.

He hurried on. His country's youth was laid to rest here amidst the keening cries of women, the drone of the bulldozer, and the coughing of old taxi engines. The Gateway to Heaven Cemetary, and there was a queue to get there. Deep inside the Gateway was the Fountain of Blood. The water spouting from the fountain ran red. Charlie thought that was sick. He thought it was as sick to colour the cemetery fountain water as it was to issue young soldiers going to the front with plastic keys, made in Taiwan, so that if they were killed in battle they could get through the Gates, make it to Paradise. On his first journey here he had given a bribe to a clerk in the Administration Office. A hundred dollars in small notes, and that had produced the burial charts, the names against the numbers.

He could not forget the way to this outer plot… far beyond the flags and the stilted boxes and their photographs, were the bare concrete slabs on which, while they were still wet, a number had been scratched. He would not forget the number of his father's grave.

His father had said that a professional soldier, a soldier who foreswore politics, had nothing to fear from the Revolution and his father lay in a grave marked only by a scratched number.

He had no idea where his sister was buried, or his uncle who had been clubbed, butchered, shot on the roof of the Refah school where the Imam had made his first headquarters after his return from exile. This was the only grave that he knew of, and each time in Tehran he was drawn to it.

Mattie Furniss could not abide sloppiness. It bred complacency, and complacency was fatal to field operatives.

He was not good at delivering an old-fashioned dressing down, but he felt it time to let the Ankara Station Officer know that he was quite dissatisfied with what he had seen.

The Ankara station was not located in the Embassy building. The Service had several years before taken a long lease on the third floor of an office building in the government sector of the Turkish capital, where the high-rise blocks seem to stretch without end. The cover of the office was that the Service staff working there were employees of a British firm of structural engineers.

They had an hour before an appointment at the Turkish National Intelligence Agency, the only occasion on this trip when Mattie went official. An hour, and he intended to use it well.

"Don't interrupt me, Terence, that's a good fellow, and do not imagine for a single moment that I get pleasure from what I am about to tell you… It's the oldest scenario in the book.

A chap gets abroad, and all that he's absorbed when he was on courses at home goes out of the window. We'll start at the beginning, the car that picked me up and brought me here.

The driver, he was not alert. We were cut up by a car full of men, and your driver just sat there, never considered the prospect of kidnapping, of having to take evasive action, your driver was dead from the neck up. It is the third time I have been to this office, and each time your driver has taken the same route. Your car is not fitted with a rear-seat passenger mirror as it should be. Your driver came into the hotel this morning to wait at Reception for me, and when he had met me, taken me out to the vehicle he made no effort to check for an IED…"

"Mr Furniss, this is Turkey, not Beirut. We don't have Improvised Explosive Devices on every street corner."

"Hear me out, Terence… Your car is not armour-plated, your tyres are not run flats, and I would hazard a guess that the petrol tank is not self-sealing… "

The Station Officer said, "Run flat tyres cost three thousand pounds each, Mr Furniss. I don't have a budget for that sort of carry on."

"I will take it up with London… this room has been furnished by someone who has ignored every precaution in the book. Windows without the blinds drawn, anyone from that building, that one over there, can see you inside, could shoot you. That painting, is that shatter-proof glass? An elegant cocktail cabinet, but glass-fronted. Has no one told you that glass splinters and flies when explosives are detonated?"

"This is not a High-Risk posting, Mr Furniss."

' Neither is Athens, nor is Brussels. We were scraping chaps off the walls there who a few moments before would have happily said those cities were not High-Risk."

"I'll get them fixed, sir."

"Very wise… Now I'd like to turn to matters Iranian…"

Mattie Furniss set out in detail the kind of information he would be requiring in future from the Station Officer on the Iranian theatre. He painted a picture that filled the young and fast promoted Terence Snow with bleak despair. He required minutely recorded and frequent de-briefs of Iranian refugees who had successfully legged it through the mountains and the river gorges, past the patrols, and into north-east Turkey. He had no use for the opiate dreaming of the exiles in Istanbul, he wanted fresh, raw intelligence.

They walked down the staircase together. Mattie said that the next morning he planned to head off towards the World War One battlefield at Gallipoli. He said that his father had been there, a gunner, never talked much about it. And then his voice lit up, and he said that they would follow that visit with a couple of days pottering amongst the excavated ruins of Troy. Did Terence know that all of the finest examples of Trojan jewellery had been lodged in the Berlin museum, and then pillaged by the Soviets in 1945? No, he did not.

"And then I think we'll go up to Van together."

Good grief. Three days non-stop tutorial. Terence's spirits sank. "I'll enjoy that, Mr Furniss."

The council flat was home to Leroy Winston Manvers and his wife and his four children. The door was sledge-hammered, off its hinges, and the wind brought the rain in from the walkway outside. It was three in the morning and the dog had failed.

The dog was a decent enough looking spaniel, and the handler was quite a good-looking girl, a bit butch in her dark slacks and the tightness of her navy regulation sweater. Park hadn't noticed her. Great while the dog was still searching, the dog had kept the adrenalin moving for them all. But the dog had failed and was sitting quietly at the feet of the handler, and all the rest of the team were looking at Park, because he was the Case Officer, and the decisions were his. Couldn't talk in the living room. Leroy had the sofa with the children in blankets beside him, and his wife hugging her knees in the only other easy chair. Park was in the corridor, standing over the dog and the team were milling around him, still hanging on to the pick-axe handles and the sledge-hammers that had taken the door off, what they called the keys. Pretty calm Leroy looked to Park. Vest and underpants, hair dreadlocked, and the composure that Keeper could best have wiped with a pick-axe handle.

Parrish was there, but out on the walkway. April's team leader was taking a side seat, leaving the tactics to the Case Officer.

Keeper did not believe that the stuff was not there.

The flat had been under 24-hour surveillance for a full week. The flat had had the works – check on all movements and photographic record. Each pusher visit logged. Each movement out by Leroy tailed. Each meeting listed. Eighteen hours a bloody day, Keeper had done in one or other of the surveillance vans. He could have kicked the tail off the dog, because the stuff had to be there.

"Are you sure}" A venom when he spoke to the handler, like it was her fault.

"Not me, dearie, I'm not sure," the handler said. "And she's not saying there's nothing there, she's just saying she can't find anything. That's different to being sure it's clean."

The straight search had already been done. Leroy and family in the main bedroom while the living room and the kitchen and the kids' rooms were gone over. Leroy and family in the living room while the bathroom and the main bedroom were gone over. All the beds stripped, drawers out, cupboards opened, everything gone through, but that shouldn't have been necessary because the dog should have led them to it.

What to do? To start again? To begin from the front door again?

The two constables were watching him. Customs had their own Search Warrants, and their Writs of Assistance that meant they could do just about anything short of shoving a broom handle up Leroy's backside, but they were obliged to lake the constables with them. Supercilious creatures, both of them. They were armed, the April team were not. The constables were there to see there was no Breach of the Peace, that April didn't get shot up.

He could pack it in. He could take Parrish into the kitchen, and he could tell him that in his humble opinion Leroy Winston Manvers just happened to be clean, and they could all go home to bed. It didn't cross David's mind that he should do any such thing.

Back at the Lane they had a photographic record of the nine known small-time pushers visiting Manvers within the last seven days. No way the place was clean…

"Take the place apart," he said.

He showed them how. Down on his hands and knees in the hall, both hands on the carpet, and the carpet ripping off the holding tacks. Crowbar between the floor boards, and the scream of the nails being prised up and the boards splintering. Parrish in the doorway looked away, like he was contem-plating a cash register of claims for compensation if the search didn't turn something up. Plus Racial Harassment, and the rest of the book, all coming his way. But he didn't intervene.

The sounds of a demolition job inside the flat. One of the team watched Leroy every moment, watched his face, tried to read apprehension, tried to find a clue from his face as to whether the search was warming, and not just lifting boards.

There was the shout, a coarse whoop of celebration, and Duggie Williams, codename Harlech, was lifting out from under the kitchen floor an insulated picnic box. The top came off. There were at least a dozen cold bags, and there were the packets at the bottom.

The dog handler said, "It's not her fault, dearie, don't go blaming her. I've always told you that she can't cope with frozen stuff."

By the time they had finished, and sealed the flat, and taken Leroy off down to the Lane, and dumped his wife and kids on the Council's night duty Housing Officer, going home didn't seem worth it to Park. The last two nights she'd left the spare bed made up for him.

Not worth going home anyway, because he wanted to be up early and talking with Leroy Winston Manvers.