Home Run

8

"We put the dog onto his bag – hung on like it was marrow-bone."

The room was crowded.

There were men from the Immigration Control, and from the uniformed Customs strength, and Park stood dead centre.

Parrish and Harlech were hanging back by the door. Park listened carefully. He had learned long before that the initial brief was the important one, and he would make his Case Officer decisions from that first information.

"We've him sat in a room now. He thinks there's something wrong with his documentation. I tell you what, he doesn't look fussed, not like I'd be if I had the sort of quantity in my case to make the dog go clean off its whistle. OK, your airport dog will get a good sniff every so often, so they're not as you might say blase, but, Jesus, I've seen nothing like it."

Parrish had not yet recovered his sanity from the style of the journey down from the Lane to Heathrow. He still looked like a man clutching a spar in a high sea. Harlech was pale from sitting in the passenger seat where he could not escape from the swerving and the overtaking and the raw speed; Harlech would tell the rest of them later that Keeper's drive down was the worst experience in his life. Harlech had been the late duty, Parrish had been clearing his desk and checking the overtime sheets, and Keeper had just been using up time, polishing his shoes for the third time that day, when the telephone call had come through from the airport.

"We got his ticket off him, and the baggage tag was stapled.

We collected the bag off the trailer and let the dog close.

Damn near pulled the handler off his feet." The senior uniformed officer had been Park's guv'nor at the airport. He didn't like the boy, but he'd seen his quality and he had written a fulsome recommendation for transfer to ID. "… The bag is a rucksack, the ticket is from Istanbul. Listen, the dog tells you a fair amount when it gets going. The way that dog went then, our chummie is carrying one hell of a load. We haven't opened anything up, we haven't touched anything. So, it's your baby."

Parrish wasn't saying anything, still shaking his head like he were trying to get rid of the bad dream of the Escort's wheel caps touching the wheel caps of a taxi. Park would not have been able to remember when he had last been so elated at the contact with a suspect. He was the Case Officer. Like the man said, his baby.

"I'd let him run." He knew that there were two other cars on the way to Heathrow, April team members summoned without apology from home. "Just as soon as we've the back-up."

The lift of Bill Parrish's eyebrows told him of the concern.

Normal practice would have been to bust the chummie, and if the chummie wasn't to be busted, then the second most obvious procedure would have been to open the rucksack, empty the contents and substitute dross for the real thing.

Parrish's raised eyebrows were a warning to him.

"Sorry, Bill, but what I'm saying is to let him run."

It was Parrish's style to trust to the flair of the young men in the ID. If he had a deep disliking inside the civil service office where he worked it was for those of his contemporaries, the old lags, who believed that only age and experience counted when decisions were taken. Parrish backed his youngsters, he gave them their heads, and he sweated blood over it. He went to a telephone. He leafed through his diary. He dialled the home number of the ACIO. He was brief. He didn't tell the ACIO that the dog had gone berserk when confronted with the rucksack, that they were sitting on a major haul. He reported that there were thought to be traces of narcotics in the suspect's baggage. He said that a man of Iranian birth, and travelling on a UK-issued Stateless Person's document, the right sort of age, would now be carrying the April team's tag of Tango One. He said that Tango One would be released from the airport as soon as he was satisfied that a sufficient number of personnel had gathered for effective surveillance.

Perspiration on his forehead, not blood… by Christ, there would be blood if Keeper fouled up. Nothing in this world surprised him, not since an archbishop had been stopped by his Customs colleagues at Rome and waved his arms about in protest and thereby dislodged three packets of heroin that had been stuck in his belt under his cassock. Nothing surprised him, not even that a young man should try to walk through Heathrow with a heavy load of stuff in a rucksack. Most of them tried the clever way. Most of them used carefully hol-lowed out Samsonite cases, or chess pieces fashioned from solidified cocaine, or they stuffed it up their backsides, or they swallowed it in cellophane packets. They'd try any bloody thing. It did not surprise Parrish that Tango One had it loaded in a rucksack where even the most casual search would have found it. And yet, what did they stop? They stopped one PAX in a hundred, or one in two hundred. A fair risk, a chance worth taking…

"It's okayed, David. You can let him run… "

He took Keeper out into the corridor, out of range of the men in the room.

Only Harlech heard the ferocity of his whisper into Park's car. "If you screw up, David, I'm gone, and the ACIO who has backed you will be gone with me, and we'll bloody well hang on to your legs to make sure, damned sure, that you go down with us."

"I hear you, Bill."

"Too right, you'd better hear me."

The telephone rang, and it was passed to Parrish, and he listened and then told Park that the two other April cars had arrived, were outside Terminal 3, v/aiting for instructions.

They set off down the corridor. The man from Immigration, and Parrish and Keeper and Harlech, and a uniformed Customs man caught them up carrying a khaki rucksack. Parrish would have sworn that he could see flecks of the dog's saliva on the rucksack's flap. The rucksack was grimed with dried mud. They didn't open it. That sort of bag was much harder to unpack and repack than a suitcase. No need, really, because the dog had told them what they would find. They transferred from Customs and Excise territory to Immigration. A new set of corridors, another set of duty rosters pinned to notice boards.

In the door of the room where Tango One had been sat, and where he was watched, there was a one way window.

Keeper went close to it, nose against it, stared through the glass. There was the slightest quickening of his breath. He had the break and he had the luck, and he had not really believed in either. He looked through the window at Charlie Persia. Charles Eshraq, now Tango One. He saw a well-built young man with a strong head of dark hair, and a beard of a couple of months, and he saw that the man sat quietly and flicked ash from his cigarette into the tinfoil ashtray. He saw that the man was calm. He wouldn't go in himself. He motioned Harlech to the window. Wrong for either of them to show their faces. He gave a wry smile to Parrish.

"Better we hang together than hang separately, Bill."

Parrish wasn't in the mood for banter. He shouldered past Harlech, opened the door.

Park stood close to the door. He could hear everything.

Something massively reassuring about old Parrish's competence when it came to keeping the suspect at ease.

"I am really sorry about the delay, Mr Eshraq."

"What was the difficulty?"

"No real difficulty other than you happened to hit a desk man who was less than knowledgeable about Stateless Persons documentation."

"Is that all?"

"They're changing the form of the documentation and that young fellow had it in his head that the change had already taken place.. . You know what it is, late at night, no one to set him right until they called me."

"It's taken a long time."

"I'm very sorry if you've been inconvenienced… can I just have the details, Mr Eshraq? Everything that happens in Civil Service work, there has to be a report. Name…?"

"Charles Eshraq."

"Date of birth, and place of birth…?"

"August 5, 1965, Tehran. It is in the document."

"Never mind… Address in the UK…?"

"Flat 6, 24, Beaufort Street, SW3."

"Very nice, too… Occupation, Mr Eshraq?"

"Freelance travel courier."

"Get all the sunshine, do you?"

"Eastern Mediterranean mostly, yes."

"We've delayed you horribly, were you being met?"

"No, I have my wheels in Long Stay parking."

"Christ, I wouldn't leave anything decent in there, I hope it's alright."

"It's only a little Suzuki jeep."

"Can we give you a lift over?"

"Thanks, but I'll take the bus. I'm not in a hurry."

"Well, it's quite a fine night. Again, my apologies. I suppose you've some luggage?"

"Just a rucksack."

"Let's go back to baggage reclaim then, Mr Eshraq."

Harlech and Park ducked away and into an empty office.

Through the door he saw Parrish leading the Tango One out into the corridor. He told Harlech for Christ's sake not to let himself be seen but to watch chummie on to the bus and then wait to be collected by Corinthian by the bus stop. Then he sprinted to get to the Escort in the Customs parking lot.

Keeper found the others, detailed Corinthian to collect Harlech and then join Statesman at the gates of the Long Stay parking lot, one a hundred yards to the west and the other a hundred yards to the east. "Target in a Suzuki jeep, Keeper's Escort not far behind. Take nothing for granted. He says he lives in Beaufort Street in Chelsea, but he's so fucking cool this one he may just fancy his chances at Windsor Castle.

As soon as the line of flight is established, usual procedures to apply."

Then he hammered under the tunnel to get to Long Stay parking to give himself time to locate the Suzuki before his Tango One.

He had been held up at Immigration before, but never for so long.

It was not a surprise to him. The Immigration men always took a hard look at stateless persons' documentation. He had learned in Britain that foreigners were always given a hard time at the airport, almost part of an immigration policy.

What had been a surprise was the courtesy of the senior man who cleared the matter up. That man was one in a thousand, and not a well man by the look of him. Wouldn't last, that was certain. He checked his mirror and saw that a dark coloured Ford, possibly a new Escort, was immediately behind him.

He had lived in London for four years, but it had never felt like home to him. He did not think that any of the exiles who had come first to London would have thought of the city as anything other than a temporary refuge. But it had effectively swallowed them all. They would still all dream of going home.

They would dream, but Charlie was going, and he realized that this was his last journey back from the airport. "Get all the sunshine, do you?" Oh yes, he would be getting all the sunshine. He was off the motorway, and heading past the old Lucozade building. Temperature 5. He looked up into his mirror and saw that he was followed by a Vauxhall, almost certainly a Vauxhall.

There was no tension in his driving. He was controlled, at ease. It had not crossed his mind that he could be busted at Heathrow. He was Charles Eshraq, Stateless Person, but he would not be stateless for long… Charlie Eshraq had taken out two Guards with a handgun. He had blown away the executioner of Tabriz. He was the friend of Mr Matthew Furniss. He was going home with just two more items of business to deal with. And then… then he would be Charles Eshraq, Iranian citizen. Probably no longer the friend of Mr Furniss, certainly no longer the very close friend of the Misses Furniss. He thought of La'ayya and he patted the rucksack and made a wild calculation of what in perfumes and soap seven kilos of first grade heroin would buy. After the small matter of the armour-piercing missiles, of course. He was on the King's Road. He looked up into the mirror as he changed through his gears, as his foot eased on the brake. There was a Maestro behind him.

If he was quick with a shower, he would be in time to get to the pub before closing. Charlie Eshraq would get a great welcome before "last orders". He would tell some good stories about dumb tourists losing passports or knickers in the Turkish resorts, and he'd get a good laugh and a good welcome.

He parked.

He didn't look at the car on the other side of the road. He didn't see the couple clinching. He didn't hear Amanda, codename Token and the only woman of April's team, bitching that codename Corinthian, who this year had failed to complete the eighth mile of the London Marathon, could keep his bloody hand out from under her blouse. And he didn't hear Token issue a violent warning when Corinthian whispered that it was just play acting in a good cause.

Charlie humped his rucksack up the stairs to his flat. He threw, street value, more than a million pounds sterling of heroin down on to the floor.

He went to the window and looked out on to the street below. A girl got out of a car opposite, slammed the door furiously and then got into the back seat. Charlie smiled to himself. He thought that La'ayya would have liked the King's Road, and he didn't suppose she'd ever see it.

He ran his shower.

Mattie was trussed tight.

He had lost the feeling below the ankles, and the pain was cutting at his wrists.

He was very alert now. Old training was surfacing, things that he had been taught ten years before, and twenty years.

For Christ's sake, he had even lectured on it, back at the Fort at Portsmouth. He had been a student more than once on the Escape and Evasion courses, and he had been the instructor.

He knew it all. He was lying on the hard and hurting steel ribbing floor of the pick-up. His captors had put a gag of thick leather in his mouth and lashed the thongs at the ends of the gag behind his neck.

The training had told him that the optimum escape moment was at the very moment of capture. That's what he had told his students. Right, he had been looking for the optimum moment, been looking at it from the start, right into the barrel of an automatic pistol. The optimum moment was also the time of the maximum danger – that, also, he had told his students. The time of the lift was the time that the hit squad were most highly stressed, most irrational. He had looked up the barrel of the automatic pistol and been kicked in the head.

His ear had bled, was now congealed. He rationalised that his bleeding ear would have been shot off, with half his head, if he had struggled at the roadside. He was an old man, and there were four of them and none of them looked half his age.

Two of them were in the back section with him, and both now wore cotton hoods with eye slits, and both kept handguns trained on him, and neither had spoken.

He was aware that, at first, the truck had travelled several miles, and that then the engine had been stopped for what might have been three hours. He knew that when they had stopped they had been in a garage or a farm shed because he had heard the doors being shut, and he had heard the echo as the engine was cut, and later restarted, which told him that the vehicle was in a confined space. He lay alone. The pain had come and gone and reached point after point that he thought would be unendurable. He weighed pain against anxiety. He worked to restore the circulation in his hands and feet, told himself over and over that another opportunity to escape would present itself.

The truck doors opened, his bonds were examined by torchlight, and then the outer doors were opened and the truck headed off again, a long drive, over those awful bloody roads. It was part of his training to remember everything possible about his journey after capture, basic stuff that. Easy enough in the New Forest, or the back terrace streets of Portsmouth, damn sight harder after the shock of capture, after being kicked in the head, and when there were two handguns a couple of feet from his ear. A weekly game of squash did not leave a 52-year-old in ideal shape for kidnapping, but he understood that they had driven a good distance.

He had been aware first that the pace of the truck had slowed, and he could hear other vehicle engines around him.

He heard voices, Turkish spoken, and then the truck was accelerating. He thought they were back on a decent road surface. The truck lurched to a stop, Mattie slid forward and into the bulkhead and scraped his scalp.

He heard the driver shout, "Asalaam Aleikum."

He heard a voice outside, "Aleikum Asalaam."

The truck gathered speed. The words were revolving in his mind.

"Peace be on you."

"On you be peace."

Mattie had lived in Iran as a military liaison officer, and he had lived there as the Station Officer. Second nature to Mattie to recognise the greeting and the response.

He was sagged on the floor of the truck. He was inside Iran, beyond the reach of help.

From the Customs post a telephone call was routed through the office that had been made available in Tabriz to the investigator. The message was terse. The investigator was told that a Dodge pick-up had just passed through the frontier and had begun the 150-mile journey to Tabriz.

In his former life, the news would have been cause enough to break out a bottle of French champagne… much that was missed from the former life. The investigator instead, in his turn, made a telephone call, to the Tehran office of the Mullah who was his protector, to the man who had authorised the kidnapping. Unable to celebrate with champagne, the investigator curled up on his camp bed, tried to catch a few hours of sleep.

No, Dr Owens had not checked out, and that was an embarrassment to reception because they had been promised he was going and they had a client for the room, and it was still occupied with Dr Owens' possessions.

No, Dr Owens had not brought back his car, and the hall porter had twice been phoned by the rental company.

From the airport, after the Van flight arrived without Mr Furniss, it had taken the Station Officer a full hour to get through on a payphone from Ankara to Van. It took him another hour to reach the Embassy's Air Attache.

No, of course he had confirmed there were no flights to Van that night.

No, for crying out loud, this was not a trivial matter. He wanted a light aircraft, and he wanted the Air Attache to pilot it, soon as possible, like an hour ago.

"I was half into bed, Terence. This is on the level?"

"Sadly, yes… right on the level."

It had been a ghastly flight in a light Cessna across a great expanse of raw countryside, buffeted by gale force winds. The Station Officer was a poor air traveller at the best of times, but now he noticed not at all the yawing progress of the aircraft. The Air Attache didn't speak to him, had his hands full. He took his cue from the furrowed anxiety of the young man strapped in beside him.

When they'd landed, the Station Officer asked the Air Attache to go directly to the Akdamar, to make sure that the room in the name of Dr Owens stayed sealed.

He went to the local offices of the jandarma. He said that he was from the British Embassy. He knew the registration number of the hired Fiat. It was close to dawn when the report came in, car discovered abandoned, indications of an accident.

He was taken to the scene. He said that Dr Owens, the driver of the damaged car, was a distinguished archaeologist and the guest of the Ambassador. He tried to minimize the concern that had brought him at night across the country, and a poor job he made of it. The headlights of the jeep had picked out the Fiat's rear reflectors. It was on the verge, off balance, it seemed, both right hand wheels sunk into the soft mud. They gave him a flashlight and let him make his own examination.

To them it was a small matter. No big deal, death on the roads, not in eastern Turkey, and this wasn't death, this was just a missing person. True, there was nothing inside the car to suggest that Mr Furniss was hurt, no blood stain that he could see, no broken glass. But outside he saw the Fiat's skid tracks on the tarmacadam and he saw the dirt trail across what would have been the path of the Fiat. He saw the broken shields of the brake lights and the indicators and the stoved-in bumper. Pretty straightforward… A vehicle coming off the open fields in front – wide tracks, probably a tractor or farm lorry – a vehicle ramming from behind… and the unaccompanied Desk Head in between.

The jandarma officer said, "It is possible that he has been concussed, that he has wandered off the road… "

No chance.

"… There is no other explanation."

The officer drove him to the Akdamar.

He gutted the room. Clothes everywhere, books and papers too, and many pages of scribbled notes, not in English certainly, must be some sort of code. He looked carefully at the disorder and decided that it was as Mr Furniss had left it, that it had not been searched. He packed everything into Mr Furniss' suitcase.

The Station Officer paid Dr Owens' bill. He woke the Air Attache from a deep sleep in an unlit corner of the lobby.

"Sorted out your little problem, Terence? Knickers all untwisted, eh?"

"No, I am afraid the news is all bad."

"Anything I can do?"

"Just fly us home. No jokes. No japes. No funny faces.

Just don't say anything at all. Please."

Standing on the hotel steps, waiting once more for a taxi, the Station Officer felt an aching anxiety. Whatever else, Mattie Furniss was not gone walkabout in eastern Turkey nursing a concussion. He had been thinking, how would it have been if he had been there too? Would he be alive now?

Where would he be? Come what may, he'd be crucified, he knew that, for leaving a Desk Head alone. Probably finished altogether.

They took off, with the dawn rising behind them.

A blustering wet early summer morning in London. The traffic clogged the Thames bridges. The commuters below the high windows of Century House swarmed in ant columns along the pavements.

The first report from the Ankara Station Officer was deciphered then passed, marked URGENT, to the desk of the Night Duty Officer. The Night Duty Officer was ready to clock off, and he was enjoying his last cup of coffee when the message reached him. He signed for it, he read it, and he spluttered coffee over the morning newspapers. There was a procedure for catastrophe. Telephone the Director General's PA. The PA would alert the Director General wherever he was. The Night Duty Officer would then ring the Director General on a scrambled line.

The Night Duty Officer read over the message in a clear and firm voice. That was a sham. His throat had dried, his fingers drummed on his desk. He knew Mattie, everyone at Century knew Mattie Furniss. He listened to the silence at the other end of the distorted connection.

"Did you get that, sir?"

A clipped voice. "Yes, I did."

"What can I do, sir?"

A longer silence. What could anyone do? And what the hell was old Mattie, a Desk Head, doing in Turkey? Last he'd heard of him he was in Bahrain and God knows what he was doing there. Not the Night Duty Officer's place to question

… The Night Duty Officer had cause to think well of Mattie Furniss. His son had had pretty serious problems with his teeth, came up one day at lunch in the canteen, and Mattie had taken a note, and a week later he had the name of a specialist in Wimpole Street, and the specialist had sorted out the problem over the following nine months, and the bills hadn't been bad. The Night Duty Officer's wife always spoke well of Mr Furniss, and when the Night Duty Officer went home that morning he would not be able to tell her that Mattie Furniss was posted missing, and in a country he'd no business being in.

The voice jolted him.

"All the West Asia Desk Heads, and the DDG, in my office at nine – inform Downing Street that I'll be there in half an hour. I shall require to see the P M. "

The telephone clicked, went dead.

The truck had slowed, and there were the sounds of a city's traffic flow around him. He thought that they were close to a commercial area. He could hear the hawkers' shouts, and whenever the truck stopped he could smell the pavement food stalls. They had come down a fast road for two or more hours, that could only be the Tehran road from the border. If they were now in a city then they had reached Tabriz. A lifetime ago since he had been in Tabriz. That was wrong.. . A lifetime ago was being trapped and kidnapped on the road from Toprakkale. That was more than a lifetime ago.

In the hours that he had lain in the truck no word had been spoken to him. His head, where he had been kicked, was not hurting any longer. His gag was constantly painful. His mouth was parched. His feet were dead, below the binding.

The truck stopped, lurched forward and then swung to the right, revving in low gears, stopped again. The engine was cut. He heard everything. The click of the door, the squeaking of the driver's seat as the driver left it, and then it slammed shut. The same at the passenger side. He heard a low conversation beside the driver's cab, but too quiet for him to understand what was said. He saw his captors in the back of the truck move towards him. He didn't flinch. He was not afraid, not yet. Their hands came at his face. He could smell their breath through the masks they wore. He did not try to wriggle away from them, because he thought that would have invited a beating. They fastened a strip of cloth around his eyes.

Mattie was lifted down from the truck. He felt a warm wind on his cheeks. The binding on his ankles was freed. The blood was pounding at the base of his shins, and squeezing down again into his feet. Hands held him upright. He could not have walked by himself, and he was half carried, half dragged up some steps and then manoeuvred into a doorway. They went up a full flight of stairs, and they crossed a small landing, and a door was opened. The strip of cloth was removed from his eyes.

He stood in the centre of the room

The gag was taken from his mouth. The strap was released from his wrists.

The door closed behind him. He heard a key turn.

He stared around him.

The window was barred on the inside, had no glass, and beyond the bars the space had been boarded up with plywood.

There was an iron bed frame, like the ones used by the junior boys in the dormitories of his old school. There was a flush lavatory in one corner and beside it a table on which was a plain ceramic water pitcher and a steel bowl. There was no other furniture in the room. He turned. The door was heavy wood, there was a spy hole at eye level. The walls were freshly whitewashed over plaster. The floor was tiled.

If he had been planning a custody cell for a prisoner such as himself he would have created a very similar room. The kidnapping, the lack of any form of communication, the cell, they were all much as he would have planned them himself.

Mattie Furniss, Desk Head at Century, long time officer of the Service, was a professional, and he could recognise the professionalism of his captors.

He sat on the bed. He massaged his ankles and his wrists.

He forced his mind to work at the detail of his cover. His cover was his only protection.

The Prime Minister sat rigid at the edge of the sitting room chair. The coffee was untouched, the toast had cooled.

"And he's just disappeared off the face of the earth?"

"Not disappeared, Prime Minister. The signs all point to his having been kidnapped."

"But to have been there at all, that tells me he's not very important… "

"In that theatre of operations, Furniss is of the utmost importance."

"Then you had better tell me what he was doing all by himself – I suppose he was all by himself? You haven't lost a whole department, have you? – in such an obviously risky enterprise?"

"In my opinion, Prime Minister, the performance of the Service on Iran had been second rate. Upon taking up my position at Century I determined to get that Desk back on course. I told Mattie Furniss, who is incidentally a quite outstanding servant of his country, what I wanted. Obviously affairs inside Iran are at a crucial point. We need to know, very precisely, who is going to come out as top dog in the new Iran. We are talking about a sophisticated and very capable regional super-power, one that controls huge resources of oil inside its own borders and one which has the capacity to destabilize every smaller state on its frontiers, possibly excepting Iraq. We earn very considerable sums of monies from the Gulf states, from the Kuwaitis, from the Saudis. All of those earnings are potentially at risk in the barely disguised warfare between moderate and radical factions for ultimate power in Tehran. The American government has wished to put its markers down in that battle, we more prudently want only to have a better perspective on the end result. For the time being at any rate. Obviously if the radical faction wins out we may have to kiss goodbye to billions invested in that region, billions of future sales. We are talking about the possible perversion of one of the great economic markets currently open to us, along with the loss of great numbers of jobs, if the radicals win and continue to export revolution and Islamic fundamentalism."

"I don't need a Foreign Office tract, Director General. I just want to know what the devil this obviously senior man is doing all by himself in a very dangerous part of the world."

"It was I who made the decision that Furniss should travel to the Gulf and Turkey… "

" You made that decision?"

"… to the Gulf and Turkey to visit our watchers and also to hold meetings with some of our principal operatives inside Iran."

"I suppose this decision flies in the face of long established practice at Century. This is symptomatic of your new broom, is it, Director General?"

"… in order that those with day-to-day responsibility for Iranian intelligence should know more fully what was required of them."

"Day-to-day Iranian intelligence. Yes, well, you haven't said so in so many words but I take it we may assume that Iranian intelligence will be exactly what Mr Furniss will be dealing with, even now."

"It hardly bears thinking about, Prime Minister."

"You sent him, you'd better think about it. You're running a tight ship, Director General. Do all your people go overseas with a Union Jack sewn on the breast pocket? Does his passport say 'Iran Desk, Century'?"

The Director General said, and his eyes gazed back into the Prime Minister's sarcasm, "Naturally he is travelling under a well-established alias. He is an archaeologist, rather a distinguished one, I gather. A specialist on an early Turkish civilization, I believe."

"I dare say he is, but archaeologists do not ordinarily disappear an hour's driving time from the Iranian border. Or do they, Director General? I have very little information on archaeologists. It sounds to me as though Furniss' cover was blown, as I think you put it, long before he got anywhere near Turkey. You wouldn't have to be terribly bright to wonder what a specialist in an early Turkish civilization was doing hopping round the Gulf in his Olympic blazer. And if he is inside Iran, if he is identified, then he is going to have a difficult time?"

"Yes, Prime Minister."

"Well, thank you, Director General. I think that's enough excitement for this morning. Keep me posted, please, and kindly resist the temptation to send in a team of Israeli snipers to se o e if they can find him. I think you have enough of a mess on your hands as it is."

The car drove away down the lane. Harriet Furniss watched The car drove away down the lane. Harriet Furniss watched it go. The wind was up, and a gale was forecast, and she thought that the blossom would not be much longer on the trees. He had been very nice to her, the young man, and he had emphasized at least three times that it was the Director General who had personally sent him. Not that it mattered, whether the young man was pleasant or unpleasant, the message would have been the same.

Mattie was missing. It was believed that Mattie had been kidnapped. Mattie was an archaeologist… so pathetic. A woman could have run Century better, and still had time for the housework. She was very deliberate in her movements, she bent down to her garden kneeler and went on with the weeding of the border that she had been at when the young man had arrived. There was a surprising amount of groundsel in the border this year… She was numbed. Cleaning the groundsel out of the bed was her safety… She was crying softly. She loved that man. She loved the calmness and the kindness and the patience of Mattie, and she loved his gentleness. No, he was not as clever as she was. No, he could not paint as she could. He did not enjoy the theatre or music as she and the girls did, but she loved that massive and reassuring strength. He was the man she had depended on throughout her adult life. She could not remember the last time that he had raised his voice to her… Those fools in London, fools for what they had done to her Mattie.

She spent the whole morning on the border. She filled a wheelbarrow with weeds. She cried her heart out for the whole morning.

Khalil Araqi walked 200 yards from the hotel's rank, flagged down a taxi and asked for the McDonalds in the Strand. He then walked back up the Hay market, and all along the length of Regent Street, and to any casual observer he would have been seen to spend a long time looking in shop windows. The stops in the windows and doorways of the stores enabled him to check frequently that he was not tailed. He followed exactly the instructions that he had been given in Tehran. He did not expect to be followed, and he could detect no one following him. On the corner of Brook Street and Bond Street, after he had waited at the kerb side for three, four, minutes he was picked up by car. He was taken by the student of the English language south and west across the city. Araqi had been to London before, but that was many years earlier. He gazed around him. He was at ease. His confidence in the planning behind his mission was complete.

They parked 500 yards beyond the mews.

The student followed Araqi back up the road, well behind him. There was a narrow entrance to the mews cul-de-sac, and Araqi's eyes roved to find the lighting above so that he could estimate the fall of shadows at night inside the cobbled entry. Briskly, Araqi walked the length of the cul-de-sac, keeping to the right hand side, keeping away from the 5 series BMW. There were cars parked outside each of the brightly painted front doors.

He was satisfied.

When he had driven back to within ten minutes' walk of the hotel, the student gave Araqi a brown paper package. The student did not know what was in the package, nor that it had been brought by a courier from West Germany, passing the previous evening through the port of Felixstowe.

The student was told at what time, outside the garage on Park Lane, he should collect Araqi that night. For the rest of the day, Araqi worked on the assembly of an explosive device by which a mercury tilt system would detonate one kilo weight of military explosive.

The PA stood in front of the desk.

"You won't shoot the messenger, sir?"

The Director General winced, his head dropped.

"Tell me."

"We've got Mr Furniss' bag back from Turkey. All his kit that the Station Officer, Ankara, collected from his hotel.

There's a report which I couldn't make head or tail of but which Miss Duggan has typed up for you. You'd better read it… sadly, it gets worse. Mr Furniss' passport was with his things. That's the passport in his wife's maiden name. What it would appear is that Mr Furniss does not have supporting documentation of his cover."

"That just about caps it."

The Director General had served half a lifetime in the Foreign and Commonwealth with Benjamin Houghton's father. He and Houghton's father were golfing partners of old and they had once courted the same girl, she'd turned them both down. He had made certain when he came to Century that young Benjamin would be his Personal Assistant. The boy was cheeky and casual and very good. He would go a long way, if he cared to stay the course.

"Just thought you should know, sir."

And Houghton was gone, almost indecent haste. Just the same at the meeting with the Deputy Director General and the Desk Heads. They'd all been exasperatingly aloof, distinctly themselves. Bastards.

The Director General began to read Furniss' report, apparently based on the observations of an agent travelling quite widely inside Iran. Very recently, too. Not world shaking, but good, incisive stuff. His PA came through on the internal phone. A meeting with the Permanent Under Secretary, Foreign and Commonwealth, at two. A meeting with the Joint Intelligence Committee at three. A meeting of the Service's Crisis Management Committee at four, with the possibility of a teleprinter link to Ankara. The Prime Minister at six.

"Would you like me to raffle the ballet tickets, sir?"

"No, dammit. Call Angela and ask her to take one of the children. And you can, too, cancel anything you had planned for this evening."

He didn't notice the builders' van parked opposite the block of flats, across the playground from the concrete entrance way. He stared up at the side windows of the flat. There were no lights on, and it was a damp clouded morning. There should have been lights on in the flat. He knew the children did not go to a pre-school, and he knew that the flat should have been occupied at that time in the morning.

He did not hear the click of the camera shutter, and he did not hear the suppressed whisper of Harlech as he reported Tango One's arrival into a lip microphone. To have heard the camera noise and the voice whisper Charlie would have to have been hard up against the grubby side of the builders' van. Charlie stood in the centre of the playground. Kids played on the swings and larked in the sand pit, their mothers sitting and nudging their pushchairs and pulling on their cigarettes, huddled in conversation. There was a Corporation cleaner out with a broom and a bin on wheels rounding up the swirl of crisp packets and fag wrappers and coke tins.

There was a soccer kick-about and the goal posts were snapped off young trees.

He climbed three flights of concrete stairs. Charlie saw the plywood hammered across the door of the flat. He ran down the stairs, fighting a fierce anxiety. All around him was the normality of the estate. The young mothers heaving their lung smoke into their kiddies' faces, the cleaner whose work would never be completed, the kids who played their eternal soccer.

The flat of Leroy Winston Manvers seemed to Charlie as dead as the broken goal post trees. He was irresolute. Inside Iran, inside his own country, closing with the silenced pistol on two Guards, riding behind the executioner of Tabriz, he would not have known the feeling of sudden apprehension. That was his own ground, the estate in Notting Hill in West London was a foreign country to him.

He looked around him. There were the parked cars, and the builders' van, and the people… there was a stunning ordinariness about the estate on a grey morning.

He snapped his back straight. He walked forward. He went to a group of young mothers. He pointed up to the flat with no lights.

A snort of rich laughter. They were the women who would have been at the front for a public hanging in Tabriz, they would have thought that a good show. Bright laughter, enough to make them choke on their fags. A cigarette was thrown down, not stamped out.

"Got busted, didn't he. Old Bill took away plenty. He won't be back."

Charlie felt winded, the control ripped from him. He took off, and he had the hoots of their mirth behind him.

Half an hour later, when the mothers had retrieved their young and scattered, the builders' van pulled lethargically away from the estate.

"What he is not going to do is dig a hole in the ground and bury his stuff. He is going to find another dealer. He's sitting on a pile. He's got to find somewhere else to drop it."

Parrish thought he agreed. He thought Keeper had taken a good attitude.

"Where is he now?" he asked quietly.

"Top end of Kensington High Street, his motor's on double yellows. Harlech says he's looking pretty pissed off. The sign on the door where he's gone says it's an Import-Export company. Haven't any more yet."

"Tally ho, Keeper."

Park grinned. "For the moment it's fine, but it's just a beginning."

"Home Office files, a stateless person has to have a guarantor."

"Nice one, Bill."

"What would not be nice would be for you to lose track of a load of stuff. Got me? That would not be nice."

The load of stuff was still in the flat in Beaufort Street, Park would have sworn to that. The Suzuki had the canvas back off, and the stuff wasn't in the cab. There was a watch on the front and back of the flat, 24 hours, and the tail was solid on the jeep when it went out, just as it had been solid when Tango One had come out earlier in the morning and gone down to the delicatessen for a pastry and a coffee.

Park would be going down to the Home Office. Parrish would be linking the radios. That was the way Parrish liked it best, left in the Lane with just the typists and clerical assistants to spoil him and share their lunches with him, and keep him fuelled up with coffee. The youngsters all out, raring to go and gone. It took a fair amount to wind up old Parrish, it took the whole of his team out and hunting to wind him right up.

He was in one hell of a great mood that morning, and thumping out on two fingers his progress report for the ACIO.

Of course he was excited, of course it had been one hell of a risk to let Eshraq and the stuff loose.

"You're very kind. I thank you."

"For nothing."

Mahmood Shabro walked through the outer office with Charlie. He was no fool, he saw the way his new secretary glanced up from her desk at the boy. He saw the trace of the smile at Charlie's lips. He took Charlie to the outer door.

"You pass to Jamil my best wishes."

"I will, Mr Shabro. I will see him tomorrow, if he can manage that."

He had not asked why Charlie should wish an introduction to his brother, the renegade and the fly one from whom he kept a secure distance.

"Look after yourself, my boy."

The outer door closed on Charlie's back. He stood in the centre of the outer office for a moment.

"I think Charlie has disappointed you, my dear."

She shrugged. "He might have rung."

"He should have rung."

"I mean… I don't just go, go out, with anyone. I'm not that type… "

She was efficient, she had his outer office organised, she was starting to learn the detail of his work. He wanted to keep Polly Venables. It was a peculiar request that Charlie had made to him that morning for an introduction to his brother.

His brother was involved in politics, and his brother had no visible means of financial support. Nevertheless, he had arranged the meeting.

"It would not be wise for you, Polly, to concern yourself too greatly with Charlie."

Park strode out of the Home Office building.

It had taken only an hour. He had in his briefcase a photocopy of the paperwork completed at the time of issue of a stateless person's travel document to Charles Eshraq, refugee from Iran.

The name of the guarantor was Matthew Furniss, Foreign and Commonwealth Office.