"That paper we got, the burned paper, what did Quantico scratch out of that?"
She shrugged, as if the Hoover building hadn't bothered to report back what the forensics at Quantico had learned.
"He's going for a killing, yes?"
"It's what the footprints say. He calls from Qasvin and the day before from Alamut, like it's his ritual. Then he moves and then he kills."
Hasan-i-Sabah had called for a volunteer to strike down a vizier. A young man without fear had stepped forward and Nizam al-Mulk was stabbed to death as he was carried in a litter to his wives' tent. Hasan-i-Sabah had inscribed, "The killing of this devil is the beginning of bliss."
The words had been written 906 years before, in the place where the man now sat. Every wall of the mountain fortress constructed by Hasan-i-Sabah was now broken. It was the eighth time he had climbed the mountain, taken the narrow path used only by the sheep, wild goats and foraging wolves over the scree slope. The drop beneath him did not frighten him, but if he had slipped on any of those climbs he would have died. He was two thousand metres above sea level, perched on a small rock high over the valley. It was where he found strength.
Among the fallen stones of the fortress, it was difficult for him to imagine it as it had been. In the valley had been the Garden of Paradise. In the fortress had been the discipline of self-sacrifice and obedience. The young men who gazed down on the garden and learned their skills in the fortress were the Fida'is. Their trade was killing. They understood their duty, and the personal sacrifice it required. They yearned for their reward, a place in the Garden of Paradise, where there were groves of sweet fruit trees, clear tumbling streams and women of great beauty. He had slept in a tent by a small fire, and at dawn had packed up and started his climb on the path over the scree. Whether in sunshine, or in the winter's mists, whether the snow had fallen and the path was treacherous, he made that pilgrimage to the destroyed fortress. He would reach it and sit for hours with the silence of the valley below him and consider the mission he had been given, the requirement for obedience and self-sacrifice, and the reward of a martyr's glory. When the sun lowered or the clouds darkened, he would make the call on the digital phone given him by the man who was like a father to him, like Hasan-i-Sabah had been to the Fida'is, and he would start the descent. He would reach the four-wheel-drive vehicle as darkness fell and drive back to the camp at Qasvin. From Qasvin, he would start on his journey as, long ago, the Fida'is had started theirs.
"What's the matter with it?"
He put down his fork noisily.
"Isn't it good enough for you?"
He pushed away the plate. Now he looked down at the table mat.
"It's not much it's what Stephen likes. A bit late to start complaining, you've had it before."
He'd cut through half a sausage and eaten it. He'd forked a few chips, and hardly any of the beans.
"What's the problem, Frank?"
Her boy had cleared his plate. He had a muted fear in his eyes, a child's loathing of adults' argument.
"All right, it's not much, but I had a long day. I did that typing... Come on, Frank, what's it about?"
He shook his head, jerked it from side to side.
"Are you ill? Do you want an aspirin?"
Again he shook his head, more slowly.
"For God's sake, Frank, what is going on?"
There was the violent scrape of Stephen's chair as the boy fled the kitchen, the clatter of his feet on the stairs. Then his bedroom door slammed.
"You know what? He did really well in his English assessment, better than he's done before. He was bubbling to tell you but he didn't have the chance, did he? Come on, Frank, you're always so good with him."
His head was sunk in his hands.
They hadn't spoken, not properly, since she had come home and had recognized the lie. She had been in the kitchen, doing the typing for Peggy before cooking supper, and he had been in the living room.
He still hadn't put a light on. He had turned his chair away from the unit fire and the television so that he could sit and stare out of the window. Dusk had come early and he hadn't drawn the curtains. He gazed out on to the green and the street-light on the far side. He had not listened to the news bulletin, as he usually did, or opened the paper she had brought him.
Meryl had never known him lie, and she felt a desperate anxiety. When she had met Frank Perry, four years before, she had been a single mother without a name for her son's father, working in a small company in east London, pushing paper, when he had come to advise on the engineering required for the heating system in the old factory floor. He'd made her laugh, and, God, it had been a long time since anyone else had. Next week, when Donna came to babysit, they were going out to celebrate the fourth anniversary, 3 April, since she and Stephen had come to the village with their cases, all that they owned, and moved into the house that she and Frank had found. Living here, with him, she would have said, had given her and Stephen the best years of their lives.
She touched and tugged at her fair hair nervously.
"Is it about me?"
"No."
She took Stephen's plate, stacked it under hers.
"Is it about him? Has he said something done something?"
"No."
"It's about you?"
"My problem," he said. His words were muffled through his hands.
"Aren't you going to tell me?"
"When I'm ready."
She was up from the table, carrying away the plates.
"Of course, we're not husband and wife. We're only man and woman with a bastard child. Makes a difference, doesn't it?"
"Don't talk such rubbish, don't hurt yourself."
"Frank, look at me. Is it what we don't talk about? Is it that forbidden area, the past? Two men came, and you lied. Did they come out of the past?"
He pushed back his chair, took the plates from her and put them in the sink. He held her close against him and his hands were gentle on her hair. He kissed her eyes as tears welled.
"Just give me time, please .. . I have to have time." He gave her his handkerchief, then went upstairs to Stephen's room to ask about his English assessment.
She tipped the food from his plate into the bin, wiped the table, then went back to typing the Institute's minutes and the details of the Wildlife Field Day and the Red Cross bring-and-buy morning.
She heard him talking with her boy. Because two men had come from the past and he had lied, she thought, somewhere in the darkness outside the window there was danger.
The previous evening, four men and a woman from the Mujahiddin-e-Khalq had been brought in a closed lorry to the camp at Qasvin. Normally it was the corpses of executed criminals -rapists, drug-dealers and murderers that were dumped at the Abyek camp, but because the four men and one woman were filth and apostates they were alive. He had heard them singing in their cell in the night, low, chanting voices.
They had headed north from the training base in southern Iraq and crossed the frontier in the mountains between Saqqez and Mahabad, and been ambushed by the pasdars. Most of the raiding party had fled, but five had been captured. After interrogation, trial and sentence, they had been brought to the Abyek camp at Qasvin.
Normally the corpses were propped against bare wood chairs or low walls of sandbags but once, when an airforce officer had been found guilty of spying for the Great Satan, he had been offered as live target practice.
It was not a camp like a military compound but was constructed as a small town, on the outskirts of Qasvin. It was a miniature Babel, for the recruits spoke in many dialects, with a sprawl of concrete houses and shops, a market that sold vegetables, meat and rice, and a mosque. For many years the Abyek camp had deceived the spy satellites of the Americans, but no longer. Now there was stricter security around the perimeter and greater caution on all methods of communication. Only the best, the most determined, of the Palestinians, Lebanese, Turks, Saudis, Algerians and Egyptians were brought to the camp to
finish their training.
Many came to watch, marshalled by their instructors into small groups of their own nationality. In front of them, in the sand scape that stretched to the perimeter wire and then the open country, were the low heaps of sandbags and the chairs. He wore a scarf across his face. Even the most dedicated and determined of the recruits might be captured, interrogated, might not have the resolve of those who had gone from the mountain at Alamut. He did not cock his Kalashnikov automatic rifle until the terrorists were brought out from their cell and were within hearing range of the metal scrape. They were not blindfolded.
They were led to the chairs and the sandbags. Their ankles were not tied. The airforce officer who had spied for the Great Satan had tried to run, which had made for a better shot. It would be good if some of them ran. They were between thirty metres and a hundred metres from him. They were denounced by the commander of the camp, who read from a page of text. There was a silence and the sun caught their bared faces. He shot two with a short burst and saw them spill over, dead. He fired a long burst into another, a dozen rounds, and watched as the body kicked in spasm. He used many shots on the fourth man, but his mind was clear enough to reckon when he had one bullet left. She was furthest away, the last. She stared back at him. None of the men had given him the satisfaction of running, and neither did she. He shot her in the forehead, and she fell backwards. There was applause. He cleared his weapon, and walked away.
As the recruits blasted at the corpses it hardened them to fire at real bodies he made a call on his digital telephone. He was ready to begin his journey.
"I cannot fashion it out of nothing. I can only pass on what I've been given by the Americans, and I've done that. I've gone to the edge of my remit. If you can't shift him, that's your problem."
Penny Flowers had cycled over from Vauxhall Bridge Cross to Thames House; a rucksack and a mauve helmet sat beside her chair. It was the end of her day and she was tired, Geoff Markham thought. She wanted out and the ride home. She was older than him, and more senior. She didn't acknowledge his presence. He sat at the far end of the table and took the minutes of the meeting.
"May I just go over the ground once more. Stop me if I'm wrong. We have FBI material.." on a raid into the Saudi deserts, following an intercepted but scrambled telephone link. They miss their target but retrieve sheets of burned paper, which are sent to their laboratories for examination."
Barnaby Cox was a high-flier, and Geoff Markham had heard it said often enough that promotion had come too fast for his slender ability. He headed G Branch, with responsibility for the prevention of Islamic terrorism and subversive activity in the United Kingdom. His route to survival, as Markham had heard it, was a dogged pursuit of detail and a fierce avoidance of decision-taking. The weight of responsibility had prematurely aged his features and greyed his hair.
"Which is what I told you yesterday afternoon, Barney. Their forensics came up with the name of Frank Perry, in capitals, roman characters, a date and time, and a wharf number in the port at Abu Dhabi, in arabic. There was a secondary call the next day from a position located as mid-Gulf, between Abu Dhabi and Bandar Abbas. The Americans checked the name Frank Perry with their own computers, drew blank, tried us. We registered, it's what I told you yesterday."
It was not Harry Fenton's style to show deference to the younger man who had leapfrogged him on the advancement ladder. Fenton was back on tried and trusted home territory. He had private means and didn't care about the pension, but he had failed that day and there was an exaggerated edge to his voice. Geoff Markham doodled on his pad, waiting for something of value to note.
"Unless I'm given facts from which a threat-level assessment can be made, there's not really much point in me sitting here. Resources don't grow on trees. Franldy, it's pathetic that a man at risk cannot be persuaded to move to a safer berth." The superintendent from Special Branch spoke. He had come into the room and jerked off his jacket, ready for a fight. He was already bored. Geoff Markham knew the spat for influence between the Branch and the Services was already explosive. It amused him to watch.
"Fatal, the use of businessmen, never worth it," Cox mumbled.
"He's simply a silly little man without the wit to know when he's being offered common sense," Harry Fenton said.
"But we, dammit, are obliged to react."
"I'll need some facts, if it's to come out of my budget," the superintendent shot back.
So, pass the load to Geoff Markham. The junior would write a report, and decisions could be suspended until it was circulated. Beside his doodles of Victorian gravestones, with a couple of church steeples, he wrote down Penny Flowers's extension number at Vauxhall Bridge Cross and the policeman's number at Scotland Yard. He left them, as a whisky bottle was lifted out of the cabinet, and went back to his cubbyhole between the partitions on the outer walls of the open-plan area used by
G/4.
There was a photograph, blown up by the copier, above his desk. The Ayatollah Khomeini glowered down at him, fixed him with a cold, unwavering stare. It was good to have the picture. It helped him to understand: the image on the wall was better than anything he read or was told. It was a snapshot to suspicion and hostility. He rang Vicky to tell her he couldn't make dinner. She was giving him the treatment, and he put the phone down on her, didn't bother to continue a scrap with her. He opened the file on his desk and gazed at the three useless sheets of paper that dealt with an identity change five years previously. Nothing was in the file about a life and a name before that change. They'd gone down to the country at half cock, under prepared the familiar story. He rang Vicky back, made his peace, and said at what time he would meet her.
He wrote on a sheet of paper the questions he would have to answer if he were to write a decent report. What was the history of Frank Perry? What had he done and when did he do it? What were the consequences of Frank Perry's actions? What should be the threat-level assessment? What was the source of the American information? What was the timetable for an attempt at a killing? The one thing he wouldn't write was that he'd rather liked Frank Perry.
The area was quiet, the partitioned sections either side of him empty. The face above him peered down. The eyes, long dead, preserved in the photograph, were without mercy. He rang Registry, told them what he needed. Geoff Markham lived a good safe life, and he wondered how it would be if he were alone and threatened by the enmity of those eyes.
He walked along Main Street. The rain had eased, left only a trace in the gathering wind. There were few street-lights and no cars moving. He did not know what he would tell her or when. He could recall each day and each hour, five years back, of the first month after he had left the cul-de-sac house in Newbury with his two suitcases; two days with the minders in an empty officer's quarters in the garrison camp at Warminster; four days with the minders in a furnished house at the Clifton end of Bristol; five days with the minders in a hotel on hard times outside Norwich, after which they had left. Two more days, alone, in that hotel, then three weeks in a guest-house in Bournemouth, then the start of the search for something permanent, and the absorption of the new identity, the move to a flat in south-east London. In those first days, he had felt a desperate sense of shamed loneliness, had yearned to call his wife and son, the partners at the office, the customers in his appointments diary. In those endless briefings on his new identity, for hour after hour, Penny Flowers had demanded he put the old life behind him. She had no small-talk, but emphasized coldly, and reiterated, that if he broke cover he would be found, and if he were found he would be killed. And then she'd gone with the minders, had cut him off, left him, and the night they had gone he, a grown man, had wept on his bed.
"Evening, Frank."
He spun, coiled, tense. He gazed at the shadow.
"Only me seen a ghost? Sorry, did I startle you? It's Dominic."
"Afraid you did obvious, was it?"
"Like I was going to shoot you. Just taking the dog out.. . I hear Peggy's lumber
ed Meryl with the typing for the Wildlife Field Day.
It's very good of her. I was doing the group's accounts this evening your donation was really generous, thanks. Prefer to say it myself than just send a little letter."
"Don't think about it."
"It's worth saying. It was a good day when you and Meryl came here wish all the "foreigners" slotted in as easily."
"We love it here."
"Can't beat friends, can you?"
"No, I don't think you can."
"Well, we've had our little piddle, time to be getting back, and sorry I startled you Oh, did Meryl tell you about the field day, for the Wildlife, in May? And the RSPB lecture we've got coming up? Hope you can come to both. We're doing the marsh harriers on Southmarsh for the field day any time now they're back from Africa. It's an incredible migration fierce little brutes, killers, but beautiful with it. Better be getting back. Goodnight, Frank."
The footsteps shuffled away into the night. Dominic seemed to love the dog as much as he did Euan. Perry walked on and took the path beside the course of the old river, now silted and narrow, and across the north edge of Southmarsh. He climbed, slipping and sliding, over the huge barrier of stones the sea had thrown up and went down on to the beach. His feet gouged in the sand, wet from the receding tide. From between the fast cloud that carried the last of the slashing rain moonlight pierced the darkness around him. The silence was broken only by the hissing of the sea on the shingle. He scanned for a ship's lights, but there was nothing. He did not know what he would tell her of the past, nor what she should know of the future.
He walked in the darkness, grinding his feet into the fine pebbles and the emptied shells. He turned his back to the sea. The great black holes of Southmarsh and Northmarsh were around the clustered lights of the village. He felt a sense of safety, of belonging. It was his home. He moved on, retraced his steps, and came back into the village. Brisk footsteps were hurrying towards him, a bouncing torch beam lit the pavement, then soared and found his face.
"Hello, Frank, it's Basil. Choir practice drifted on, why I'm late out, and same as you, I suppose I felt like a prisoner in the vicarage with that dreadful rain today. Got to get out, get a bit of air before bed."
A Line in the Sand Page 4