Home Run

7

"The fascinating thing about this region, Terence, is that it was never touched by the European civilizations. Here what you have are the unadulterated remnants of the Hittites and the Urartians and the Armenians."

As far as the Station Officer from Ankara was concerned, Van was one of the most forgettable cities it had been his misfortune to visit. His eyes streamed and he had an aggravating catarrh from the street dust thrown up by the traffic. To Terence Snow, Van was quite stunningly ordinary.

"It's all lying around here to be picked up. Get a spade, dig in the right place, and you'll find the artefacts of old Sarduri, king here in ninth century BC. Fascinating… "

The Station Officer's chief preoccupation was how to attract the attention of a taxi that would stop where they stood a hundred yards down the street from the hotel where the orderly tourists waited in line, and his second anxiety was how he was going to extricate himself altogether from this cultural excursion and get back to Ankara.

"Do you know, Terence, that within half an hour's drive of here there are cave paintings made 15,000 years ago? I cherish that sort of knowledge. I believe it gives a man a sense of his own mortality, which is absolutely healthy."

"Yes, sir…"

The morale of the Station Officer had been on the wane almost since their flight out of Ankara had been airborne.

They had flown over the huge, bleak wilderness of the interior.

Never mind the history, he reckoned that Van was a quarter of an hour beyond the outside rim of civilization, ancient or modern. No car at the airport, though it had been booked from Ankara. No rooms for them at the Akdamar hotel, booked and confirmed by telephone. True, he had the car now, and he had two singles in the Akdamar, but they had taken sweat and fury and the last iota of his patience. When he was back in Ankara he'd dine out on the baroque excrescence where they had laid their heads in their first night in the city.

Warmly commended by the hall porter in the Akdamar but unlisted by any of the guide books. No hot water, no breakfast, no toilet paper. .. And these people thought they were ready to sign on for the European Economic Community.

What really pissed him off was the certainty that his Desk Head was completely at ease in this godforsaken town.

He was angry just being there. He was frustrated by his inability to wave down a taxi. He was careless. He was playing host to the man from London and he was not running his checks. He had not seen the man who had followed them from the hotel steps, and who now lounged against a wall behind them.

"Have you ever bought jet here, Terence? It's really quite excellent. You can alter the stones, make a very pleasant necklace with the local stuff."

The Station Officer's wife might well have thrown him out of their flat if he had come home to her with a peace offering of Van jet. He smiled. He couldn't help liking Mattie, everyone in the Service liked the man, but, Christ, you had to wonder whether he wasn't just a wee bit soft in the head.

"No, sir, I never have."

They had spent two days talking to refugees from Iran. The Station Officer would have had to hand it to Mattie, that the old blighter was ever so casual, ever so easy in his approaches, and he had them eating from his hand as he milked them.

The Station Officer appreciated that the talk was for his benefit, that he was being shown what was expected of him in the future. The Desk Head had been talking about him coming up to Van or Hakkari or Dogubeyezit at least once a month henceforward, to where the refugees crossed. The Station Officer wasn't good with the refugees. Frankly, they embarrassed him. They were young, they were still in shock, they were exhausted from their hike across the mountains and from the long nights of fear from the Iranian and the Turkish military patrols. Bloody unpleasant as it was, the Station Officer would have to admit that the Turkish authorities had no choice but to police their frontier and turn back those trying to cross out of Iran. They had three quarters of a million Iranians, draft dodgers and riff-raff, settled in their country.

They had problems of gang crime and heroin trafficking from the refugees. They had every right to turn the refugees round and send them back whence they came. Bit bloody stark though, when he thought of the young, exhausted faces he had seen these past two days…

"That's our boy, Mattie."

The taxi had swerved over to them. From afar there was a chorus of protest reaching out from in front of the hotel.

Mattie didn't seem to hear.

They went fast.

The Station Officer damn near cracked his head open on the taxi's roof when they flew over the potholes. They skirted the huge inland sea of Lake Van, azure blue, with a ferry boat on it making a postcard, and they rattled north. Through Caldiran and on to the Dogubeyezit road, and the surface worse, and the driver not attempting evasive action. The Station Officer was rubbing his forehead, and saw that Mattie had his eyes closed, as if he were catnapping. He lit a cigarette.

He thought he understood why Mattie Furniss was a Desk Head, and why he had no enemies in Century. They were on their way to meet a field agent, a man from inside, a guy who was taking one hell of a risk to travel outside, and Mattie had his eyes closed and was beginning to snore. The Station Officer reckoned that was true class. He had been fussing about a taxi, and Mattie hadn't given a damn, because he would have believed that a field agent who had crossed out of Iran wasn't going to be going home when his contact was a quarter of an hour late. He was being given a lesson in how to soak up the punishment of getting to the sharp end and meeting up with agents whose necks were on the line. Sit back and let it happen, and don't bother if you start to snore, well done, Mattie… He checked behind. No tail. Should have done it earlier, should have checked when he was still hot from not being able to find a taxi. He could see a long way back down the road, and the road was clear. After two days with his Desk Head he could have drafted a tourist pamphlet on Van's history. He knew that Xenophon had led his Ten Thousand in battle at Van, that Alexander had been there, and Pompey, and the Mongols of Tamerlane; that Van had not come into the Ottoman empire until Sultan Selim the Grim had done the necessary butchering in AD 1514. He wondered if, in 25 years' time, he would be able to sleep in the back of a taxi on the way to brief a field agent, and seem as antediluvian to a young Station Officer.

When Mattie started awake, and looked around him and had his bearings, and had apologised with a shrug as if it were rude to sleep, then the Station Officer invented an important meeting in Ankara the next day and asked whether it would be alright for him to catch the morning flight. No problem.

He hadn't the spunk to tell Mattie outright that it was his wife's birthday, and that they were throwing a thrash for her at his flat.

They stopped the taxi at the front of the coffee shop. There was a repair yard at the back, and a shed of rusted corrugated iron. The yard was a cemetery for disabled vehicles, some cannibalised, all defunct. The Station Officer saw the lorry with Iranian registration plates.

It was a good place for a meeting. Any long-distance Iranian driver might have cause to stop at the yard.

He thought the agent must be an old friend of Mattie's.

The Station Officer stood back and watched the beaming welocome of the man who pumped Mattie's hand, and then held his arm. The Station Officer had joined the Service straight from Cambridge, he was well thought of and young for the Ankara post, but by now he thought that he knew nothing… He saw a field man take hold of a Desk Head's arm and cling to it as if Mattie's arm were a talisman of safety.

He saw the controlled affection in the way Mattie tapped with the palm of his hand at the knuckle of his agent, the close gesture of warmth. He could not have told his wife, but the Station Officer fancied that if he ever faced a crisis of his own, then he could be certain of Mattie Furniss' support. He had no agents of his own behind lines, he was an analyst. He had men in place, inherited of course, in the Ministry of the Interior and the Army and the Jandarma and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but that was in Ankara, not behind the lines and in Iran. Mattie had his arm around the agent's shoulder and he was walking him round the lorry, out of sight from the road, and from the mechanics who laboured in the shed with their oxyacetylene cutters… He knew nothing… He would not have known of the perpetual, grey fog fear that blanketed a field agent, and he would not have known of the kind strength that was given the field agent by his controller.

He was not included. He was left for an hour to kick his heels.

He was sitting on an old upturned oil drum when Mattie came back to him.

"Did you get all you wanted, sir?"

"Stiffened his backbone, told him what we need. Usual carrot and stick job… Your meeting in Ankara tomorrow, won't go on too long I hope."

"Shouldn't think so, sir."

"Don't want it to interfere with your party."

Mattie was walking away, and the Station Officer had seen the dry vestige of the smile.

The bus churned through the miles as the road climbed towards Zanjan. Through the dusted window Charlie could see the small oases, surrounded by poplar trees, and the mud brick villages on either side of the route. It had been night when he had travelled from Tabriz to Tehran, but high sunshine now and he could see into the spreading distance.

There was no heat haze, the altitude of the road was too great for mists. He was looking south of the road, he wanted to see the ruins that when he was still a child Mr Furniss had first told him about. The Mausoleum of Sultan Oljaitu-Khocabandeh in the sprawl of ruins near Soltanieh. Charlie, eight years old, and meeting the friend of his father at their villa. Mr Furniss always had good stories to tell the boy. The Mausoleum of Sultan Oljaitu-Khocabandeh had stayed in Charlie's mind.

A man, a Sultan of the Mongols, had died 550 years before, and he had sought immortality, and his resting place was a monument that reached 170 feet above the ground.

That was the ultimate folly. There would be no photographs of Charlie Eshraq ever raised on a wall. None of his sayings ever daubed on high banners. When he died… whenever… Charlie wanted a grave like his father's. A corner of a cemetery with a number scratched into the wet cement slab, and weeds at the edge. He thought that made him his own man.

When they passed it, the Mausoleum was clear from the windows of the coach, and Charlie wiped hard at the window although most of the dirt was on the outside of the tinted glass. He saw the great octagon shape of the building and the cupola dome. He saw the goats grazing at its base.

The sight of the Mausoleum was only of a few seconds. No other passenger on the bus bothered to look at it. He thought that he hated men who built mausoleums to their memory, and who had their photographs overlooking public squares, and who demanded that their sayings be scrawled on banners.

The hate was active in his heart, but did not show on his face.

He appeared relaxed, dozing. He was leaning on his rucksack on the seat next to him. He had no fear that the rucksack of a pasdar would be searched at a road block. He had the correct papers. The Guards would be friendly to a pasdar returning to Tabriz, they would not search him.

He hated the men who built mausoleums, and despised them.

He remembered what Mr Furniss had said to him, when he was eight years old.

"A man who is afraid of death, dear boy, does not have the courage to live."

In the car taking him from the airport to the Guards Corps headquarters in Tabriz, the investigator listened to the radio.

The pasdaran operating from speedboats had rocketed a Singa-pore flagged tanker en route to Kuwait, and crippled it. Many soldiers had been martyred after the Iraqi enemy had once again dropped mustard gas on their trenches, and of course there had been no condemnation from the United Nations Security Council that was in the pocket of the Great Satan.

Spies, belonging to the Zionist regime of Baghdad, had been arrested in Tehran. Mojahedin-eKhalq counter-revolutionaries had been captured at the western borders carrying 250 kilos of explosive. The Islamic Revolution Committees' Guards had carried out exercises in Zahedan and displayed their ever-increasing readiness to destroy outlaws and smugglers.

A bomb had exploded in Tehran's Safariyeh Bazaar, no casualties reported. A grenade and machine-gun attack on the Guards Corps Headquarters in Resselat Square in Tehran had been repulsed. The Speaker of the Majlis had spoken at a military meeting of the success of the Republic's home-produced ground-to-air missile in bringing down an enemy MIG-25 over Esfahan. Thirteen foreign cargo ships inspected at sea, and allowed to continue…

The war was endless. He had been at war all of his adult life, he had worked ten years for the S A V A K, and ten years for the Ministry of Information and Intelligence. All his time at the S A V A K, reading the files, assessing the statistics of opposition, he had known the certainty of ultimate defeat, so he had built the bridges, covertly prepared for the transfer of power, avoided the firing squads that had been the fate of most of his colleagues. He had changed sides, and he could not now predict the shape of things after this next defeat.

Military defeat seemed to him most probable, but would it alter the power structure in Tehran and if so, how? The investigator could read between the lines of a news bulletin.

Ever increasing references to battles, losses, insurrections, threats from outside the country, they were all to prepare a crushed people for even greater sacrifices. To himself, he would wonder how many more sacrifices the people, however willing, could sustain… There had been a time when he had believed in the ultimate victory. When the MKO had shown their naivety and attacked in force, and been thwarted, beetles under hobnails, then he had thought that victory was close. But the war went on, and the bombs went on…

He had chosen the radicals. He had banked on their success over the moderates.

The man from Manzarieh Park who flew to London that morning, IranAir, he would strengthen the hand of the radicals, and the matter of the Englishman, Furniss, if that were successfully accomplished, that would be muscle in their arm.

Coming into the city of Tabriz, the driver had slapped a police light on the roof of the car, and had hammered the vehicle's siren.

They came to the square outside the Guards Corps Headquarters. There was heavy security at the gate, even the instructor travelling in an official car was asked to produce identification. There had always been security at this building, since a bitch girl had thrown a grenade at the gate and the Guards. An office had been prepared for the investigator, direct telephone lines had been installed, and a telex link with Tehran. He at once examined again the arrangements for the movement of the transport, and he summoned the men who would travel for their final briefing. Later he would oversee the preparations at the villa.

"You'll be alright, sir?"

"Of course I'll be alright, Terence, and do stop nannying me. I will not drink the water, I will eat only in the restaurant, I forswear salads, and yes thank you, before you ask, I do have ample loo paper. All in all, even without you as nanny, guardian or devoted student, I shall be in bliss. I will be pottering on the battlements of the Van Kalesi. I will be climbing the stone steps on which the feet of Sardur the Second stood. I will stand in the rooms that were his home 750 years before the birth of Christ. I don't know when I shall have that chance again. Not now that you are trained to undreamed of heights, Terence. I fancy I am redundant here.

What do you say?"

The Station Officer smiled wanly and slapped the inside pocket of his jacket. "I'll get your report off as soon as I'm in the office."

"Yes. It will give them something to chew on. It is a perpetual source of amazement to me how much a field man can provide if he is directed in the right way. I mean, you might not suppose that running a repair depot in Tabriz gives you the chance to observe much that is important to us, and you would be wrong. They'll be pleased with that."

They would be pleased with what they had because they were now beggars searching for crumbs. Sad but true, that the Desk Head, Iran, had been able to sprint round the Gulf and up to north-eastern Turkey and brief his three field men without the anxiety of knowing that he had missed an opportunity of meeting other operatives working inside. Iran Desk had access to the reports of only three agents in place.

Not the sort of thing he would have discussed with Master Snow, of course, and the young man was left, most probably, in cheerful ignorance of the poverty of information from Iran.

Mattie knew. He knew that Iran Desk was damn near dead.

Eight years after the Revolution, eight years after the purges had started, Mattie Furniss was wafer thin on the ground. No question, not in the land of the Mullahs, of volunteers queueing up to offer their services to the Secret Intelligence Service of the United Kingdom. Looked at logically, he was rather lucky to have had a single agent remaining. The Americans never told him much about their operations inside Iran, and what they did tell him he took with a fistful of scepticism. For all the money they had to spend, which he did not himself have, he doubted they had many more agents than he. The wear and tear of terror, of arrests, firing squads, had left him short handed. He was down to three agents… and to Charlie Eshraq. Thank the good Lord for Charlie Eshraq.

"I'll meet you off your plane, sir."

"That's kind of you, Terence. Run along now, and give your lovely wife the excellent evening she deserves."

Mattie watched the Station Officer slip away into his taxi.

He thought Terence Snow had much to learn, but at least he was capable of learning it. More than could be said for the buffoons in Bahrain… His report was gone, a weight off his mind. He would write a fuller report when he was back at Century. He had sat up half the night writing it, and sipping sweetened yoghurt, alternately with water, bottled, and the substance of the report pleased him. In Mattie's experience the preliminary report was the one that would do the business.

His longer paper would circulate wonderfully swiftly and be back in the files within 48 hours.

At the reception desk he ordered a hire car.

In the lounge he introduced himself to a group of tourists, and chatted easily with them to pass the time before the car arrived. Americans, of course. Such stamina for travel, it always impressed him. From Milwaukee and Boise, Idaho, and Nashville. They were going to Lake Van in the afternoon in the hope of seeing pelican and flamingo and they told Mattie that if they were lucky, and if their tour literature was to be believed, then they might also see Greater Reed Warblers and Redshanks and Potchards. He was mightily impressed with the power of their field glasses and camera lenses, and humbly suggested that it would be prudent not to point these implements at anything military. In the morning they would be heading on for Ararat. They gave Mattie a catalogue of their expectations and he did not disabuse them. It seemed only too possible that they would indeed light upon Noah's Ark. Such very pleasant people. It was the pity of Mattie's life that he so rarely mixed with the likes of them. And it was an immediate pity that they would be off to capture Mount Ararat first thing in the morning, and would not be able to share with Mattie the glory of the Van Kalesi, fortress of Sardur the Second.

In good humour, and thinking well of Terence, Mattie Furniss bought a card to post home.

George's wife was out of earshot, being wonderfully brave as they would afterwards say, a thoroughbred performance, shaking hands and thanking other mourners for coming.

Four of the Secretary of State's staff had come to the service, showed support, and a pretty impressive turnout altogether.

The photographers and reporters were kept back from the porch of the building by police and a crash barrier. George walked away with the Home Secretary at his side.

"Are you backing off?"

"Most certainly not."

"I expected results by now."

"We're working very hard."

The Secretary of State snorted. "There have been no charges."

"There will be, very soon."

"She was just a child, destroyed by scum…"

Typical of the man, the Home Secretary thought, that he should pick a fight outside the chapel in which his only child had just been cremated. The Home Secretary would not tell him what he deserved to be told, not at this moment. Nobody had made little Lucy take the damn stuff, she was a volunteer, she hadn't had to be press-ganged. If that pompous sod had spent less of his time working the constituencies, burnishing his image, if he had spent a little more time at home. If that poor suffering mother hadn't been so mountainously self-obsessed they certainly wouldn't be here now.

"I can tell you, George, that in addition to the pusher of the heroin your daughter used, we now also have in custody the dealer, that's the next step up in the chain, and we have the beginnings of a line to the distributor. The distributor… "

"I know what a distributor is, for heaven's sake."

"No, I'll tell you, George, what the distributor is. The distributor is bringing into the United Kingdom anything upwards of half a million sterling, street value, of heroin.

He is a practised criminal with too much to lose to make the sort of mistakes that enable us to pick him up the instant you flick your fingers and call for action. Are you with me, George?"

"But you're going to get to him? If you wouldn't do it, make it happen as a simple duty, you will by God surely do it, whatever it costs your vast empire, as an act of friendship."

"It will be done."

"I will hold you to that."

The Secretary of State turned and stalked back to his wife's side, seeming impatient now to be away. The Home Secretary was breathing hard. God, and he'd been very close to losing his temper. He thought that if that man ever became Prime Minister then he might just as well pack up the black car and return to his farm. He thought that mucking with pigs would be preferable to sitting in Cabinet with an elevated Secretary of State for Defence. He watched them go, sitting back in the limousine with their faces lit by flashbulbs.

The border was a small stream, knee deep and a body's length across and cutting through a gully of smoothed rocks. The water was ice cold, biting at his feet, sloshing in his boots.

The crossing point was at the apex of a salient of Iran territory to the west of the village of Lura Shirin. Each time he had taken this route he had travelled alone. He was north of the sector through which the refugees usually tried to escape, with the help of Kurdish villagers who would lead them to the frontier if the money were right. With his life, Charlie Eshraq trusted no other person. He had heard from the exile community in Istanbul many stories about the crossing of the frontier. In the cafes, in the bars, he had spoken with those who had come through, stripped of their money by the guides, their nerves shredded by the patrols on either side. He knew that the Guards Corps regularly patrolled the Iranian side and were committed to hunting down those that they hated most, the draft dodgers. He knew that Turkish paratroopers were set out in strength on the west of the border with night vision equipment and with helicopter gunships. He knew that a boy, running from conscription, running from a place in the trenches outside Basra, could evade the Guards Corps patrols only to be caught by the Turks and handed back. The first time he had crossed he had chosen a route that was well away from the paths used by the Kurdish guides.

When he had forded the stream, he felt a small sense of sadness. He remembered the wetness in Majid Nazeri's eyes, and he thought of him polishing the motorcycle. He thought of the girl. He knew he would not be happy until he was back.

He moved forward as quickly as he dared. It was a steep rock climb up a feeder gully, the rucksack was heavy on his back. His hands were cold and slippery and he worked hard to get away, up out of the stream bed. He wanted to be over the line of the ridge before the sun had risen behind him, before he could be silhouetted on its back.

Araqi flew to London on a jumbo of IranAir. During the flight and on disembarkation he wore the blue livery of a cabin steward. By chance he was known to one of the Guard Corps who travelled the route as a sky marshal. They silently acknowledged each other and made no occasion to exchange greeting. Araqi knew the skymarshal, one of four on the aircraft, because they had been together at Manzarieh Park.

He would not see the skymarshal after the crew had left the aircraft because it was the job of the guards to stay with their charge at all times. The skymarshal would sleep on board, while Araqi travelled with the incoming and outgoing crews to the hotel in West London where there was a permanent block booking for IranAir personnel.

Araqi rode in the airline bus to the hotel. Whereas many of the crew, excepting the Captain and Second Officer, would double up, he had been allocated a room to himself. It was a small point, but it should have been noted by the Anti-Terrorist squad personnel that watched over matters Iranian in the British capital. A number of factors led to this oversight: there was intelligence on the movement of an Active Service Unit from West Belfast; there had been a diversion of manpower following the planting of incendiary devices in two Oxford Street department stores by the Animal Liberation Front; the squad's guard was perhaps a degree down since there had been no Iranian terrorist action in the United Kingdom for eleven months; and to cap it there were casualties from the virulent influenza sweeping the city. Later there would be an inquiry as to how that small point had been missed, but that would be the familiar if painstaking slamming of the stable door.

The materials would be delivered to Araqi; he would manufacture the bomb, he would put it in the killing place, and (hen he would get himself back to the hotel and leave the country in the same way as he had arrived. Those were his concerns. The provision of the explosives and the reconnais-sance of the target would be handled by others, they were not his concern.

Araqi was a dedicated man. He had brought with him the map of the world from the aircraft's inflight magazine, and he had in his case a small compass. So when he knelt in prayer he could be certain that he faced the shrine of the black Kaaba building at Mecca.

After his prayers, behind his locked door, waiting to be contacted, he read verses from the Qur'an.

He recognised the wide sweep of the shoulders, and the wisping hair that ranged over the collar of the old linen jacket.

And the voice was unmistakable. Ancient Britons nearly always shouted when they spoke to a person whose native tongue was other than English. The whole of the reception area was aware that Mr Furniss was visiting one more fortress, would be handing over the car at noon the next day, and would then be checking out.

To Charlie Eshraq, tired and dirty himself, it was quite wonderful to have walked into the Akdamar, in search of a hot bath, and found Mr Furniss.

He stood back. There were mud stains on the trousers of Mr Matthew Furniss, as if he had been kneeling in the earth, and his shoes were mud-caked. He waited until Mr Furniss had finished at his desk, and slung his camera bag on his shoulder, and had headed for the staircase. He thought that he knew which camera would be in the bag. It would be the old Pentax, everything manual, that had photographed him on the grass lawn behind the cottage. His mother, in California, had a picture of her son taken on the lawn at Bibury with that camera. He followed his father's friend up the stairs and on to the first floor.

When Mr Furniss had stopped outside a door, when he was scrabbling in his pocket for his room key, Charlie spoke.

"Hello, Mr Furniss."

He saw the man swivel. "I'm Dr Owens," he said. Charlie saw the astonishment and the recognition. "Good God… "

"It is a real surprise."

"Fantastic, dear boy. Quite amazing. What on earth are you doing here?"

"Looking for a bath, Mr Furniss."

"You'll be extraordinarily lucky to find some hot water, but you're very welcome to the bath."

"And you, Mr Furniss, what are you doing here?"

He should not have asked that question. The question was cheek. He saw the fun streak in Mr Furniss' eyes. Mr Furniss had long ago told Charlie that he could make an old man feel young.

"Turning over some old stones, what else?"

So natural… the door was opened. Charlie was hugged, like a son, and his back was slapped as if he were a large dog.

The room was chaos. The only patch of order was the bed which had been made. No one had tidied the clothes, clean or dirty, and the guide books, and the handwritten notes, and the drawings of sections of the Van Kalesi lay scattered on and about the dressing table.

"An extreme form of liberation, dear boy, a man staying in a hotel on his own… Good heavens, Charlie, you've just walked out today? Forgive me meandering on. You must be done in. Can I send for something for you to eat and drink?

Meantime, run a bath. What would you like most?"

After a stone-cold bath and a trolley of food, Charlie set out to tell Mr Furniss all that he was clearly impatient to hear.

Charlie told him first of his crossing of the frontier. The bus ride from Tabriz around the shores of Lake Urmia to Rezai-yeh. Moving at night, on foot, into the hills and then on into the mountains. Crossing… Slipping the Turkish army patrols, getting to the main road. Hitching to Van.

And then he talked of unit movements between Tehran and Tabriz. He talked of a meeting on the bus with a sergeant in artillery who complained that on the front line Dezful sector the 105mm howitzers were restricted to seven shells a day.

He talked of the Mullah that he had shadowed, and how the bazaar gossip had told him that the Mullah was climbing high in the faction that was radical. He talked of a mechanic in the Engineers who had told him in a cafe that an armoured regiment positioned at Susangerd was about to be mothballed because every one of the 72 British-built Chieftain tanks had a mechanical failure and the unit was without spare parts. He talked of the feelings that had been expressed to him about the Mojahedin-e Khalq and their operations into Iran from behind the shelter of the enemy Iraqi army. "… they're dead. They cannot exist inside the country. They do nothing outside the border areas, believe me. There is no resistance inside the country. The resistance has been crushed… "

For two and a half hours Charlie talked and Mr Furniss covered every sheet of the hotel notepaper that was left in the room. The interruptions were few. When they came they were nudgings of Charlie's memory, prompting him to recall further what he had seen, what he had heard.

"First class, dear boy… "

"What are your own movements now, Mr Furniss?"

"Tragic but true, business has overtaken recreation. I've fixed myself a military pass into the Toprakkale army zone.

Quite pleased about that. It's a closed area, but there's a fort inside the perimeter. I meant to go this afternoon, but it'll have to wait until tomorrow. Always work first, eh?"

"Is that why you are in Van, to visit ruins?"

Charlie smiled at Mr Furniss' frown. Then the grin, as if the mischief were shared. He believed he could see a glow of happiness in the older man's face.

"Did you use my little cracker?"

"I did it just as the instructions told me."

"Tell me, Charlie."

"The motorcycle, the drawing up alongside, slamming it on the roof. I saw his face before I drew away from him. He didn't know what it was, but he had fear. There was nothing he could do because he was boxed around by lorries. He couldn't stop, he couldn't get out. He had nowhere to go."

"I will never forget what a fine child was your sister."

"When I go back again, inside, I have to have armour-piercing."

"One step at a time, dear boy."

"What else, sir?"

"Well, just remember what a fine girl Juliette was. Put the rest of it out of your mind. You've done enough."

"With armour-piercing weapons I can take out the Mullah who sentenced her, and I think that I can get also to the investigator who tortured her. I have identified both of them."

He saw that Mr Furniss was staring out of the window. He thought he understood why Mr Furniss had turned his head away. The view from the hotel room window was nothing more than a mass of different, improvised roof tops. It had been Mr Furniss who had told him the detail of his father's execution and the hanging of his sister. Each time, then, Mr Furniss had turned away his face.

"But if I don't have the armour-piercing it would be much harder. In fact, I don't know how it could be done."

"I think it would be better, Charlie, if you didn't come down to Bibury again… more professional that way."

"Is that going to be a problem, that sort of weapon?"

"Dear boy, I've told you where to go. You can buy anything if you have the money. Do you have the money?"

"The money is no problem, Mr Furniss."

Parrish wasn't surprised to find that Keeper had beaten him into the Lane.

He poured himself coffee from the percolator.

"Nothing…?"

Park shook his head.

"… What have we got?"

"Surveillance on Manvers' place. The name and type at ports, airports… nothing's showing."

"Something'll show, it always does."

"Well, not yet it hasn't."

"What I always say… Fortune favours the patient."

"It's bloody hard," Park snapped. "I don't think I was cut out for Fortune."

Mattie was tired. He had slept badly because the young man with a blanket bed on the floor had tossed, rolled, right through the night, and then been gone at first light.

He was elated. This visit to the ruins in Toprakkale military was the zenith of his whole journey. But he was running late.

That was inevitable, given the fascination of the ruins, and he had to get the car back to Van, pack up his bags, settle his hotel bill, and catch the flight to Ankara.

Because he was exhausted, excited and in a hurry, he was not aware of the Dodge pick-up closing on him from behind.

He had not thought twice about the tractor hauling a trailer from a sheep pen by the roadside ahead of him. He had not planned his route from Van to Toprakkale, merely followed the map. He did not react well… The tutors at Portsmouth would have been disgusted. All those hours teaching him AOPR: Awareness, Observation, Planning, Reaction. If it had been Mattie's class and a youngster had let himself into that mess at the training centre, Mattie would have roasted him in front of all the others.

A straight stretch of road was all he saw. The road ahead empty except for the tractor and its long trailer stacked high with bales of fodder. It was empty behind him, and he wasn't checking, except for the pick-up.

Mattie should have been in a performance car. He should have been using a professional driver. He should have seen the block ahead, and the block behind.

The tractor stopped.

And that should have triggered the alarm bell for Mattie.

He should have gone off the road, risked a soft verge. He should have tried the "bootlegger turn", hand brake on and wheel spin to throw him round.

He was like a lamb to the slaughter. He pumped the brake gently, he brought the Fiat 127 to a stop. He pressed the horn, once, politely.

There was a violent shuddering crash as the Dodge pick-up smashed against the boot of the Fiat. Mattie was flung back, skull against the head rest. He twisted, heart-racing, sickening fright welling into him, to look behind.

Men running from the pick-up towards him, one from either side, and a man coming at him in front, charging towards the car. He saw the handguns and the machine pistol.

Three men coming at him, all armed. His engine had cut when he had been rammed.

The door beside him surged open. Christ, and he hadn't even locked his door…

He shouted loudly, in English, "I haven't got much money, I'll give you…"

He was pulled out, thrown onto the road surface, a boot went into his face, his wrists were heaved to the small of his back and he felt plastic ties going sharply into his flesh. He was dragged towards the rear door of the pick-up.

Mattie understood. He would have been a bloody fool not to have understood.

He was lifted and thrown hard into the back of the truck.

The doors slammed. Light died.

The Immigration Officer gazed from the young man standing in front of his desk back down to the Travel Document.

"Stateless Person…?"

"The government of Iran does not recognize my old passport. I hope soon to have British citizenship, and a British passport."

The Immigration Officer squinted down at the writing.

"And you are…?"

"Charles Eshraq."

The eyeline, at measured speed, moved again from the Travel Document to the young man who wore a smart navy blazer with a travel company's logo over the breast pocket.

"Sorry… "

"I am Charles E..S..H..R..A..Q."

When he worked fast at the desk top that was out of sight of the man standing in front of him, the Immigration Officer could still maintain an air of impenetrable boredom. His fingers were flicking at the pages of the book with the print-out of entries. It was sharp in his mind. He and the rest of his shift had had the briefing when they had come on duty in the late afternoon. The queue was stretching out behind the man.

That was alright, too, they could all wait. He had the Iranian, he had Charles/Charlie, born August 5, 1965, and he had a Customs ID call. The name in the Suspects' Index was Charlie Persia, probably a nickname, followed by the reference letter

"o". " o " was Customs referral. The Immigration Officer pressed the hidden button on his desk top.

The Supervisor hovered behind him. The Immigration Officer pointed to the travel document, Charles Eshraq. Place of Birth: Tehran. His finger slid across to the Suspects' Index, Charlie Persia, assumed Iranian. Date of Birth: early, middle 1960s.

"Would you mind stepping this way, sir?" The Supervisor asked, and his hand rested easily on Charlie's sleeve.

"Is there a problem?"

"Shouldn't think so, sir. Just routine. This way, please, sir."