A Line in the Sand

by Gerald Seymour

  "Evening, Mr. Hackett."

  "Please, Frank, not the formality, not among friends even those, forgive me, whom I do not see on Sundays!"

  "A deserved slap on the wrist."

  "Not to worry it's what people do that matters, not where they're seen to be. If all my worshippers were as involved in the welfare of the village as you and Meryl, I'd be a happier man... You look a bit drawn, had bad news?"

  "Everything's fine."

  "Before I forget, I hear Meryl's visiting Mrs. Hopkins. She's very kind, a great help to that lady, awful when arthritis cripples an active woman and I've got you down for churchyard grass-cutting this summer, on my rota."

  "No problem."

  "Well, bed beckons.

  "Night, Frank."

  "Goodnight."

  He walked across the wet grass of the green towards the light above the front door and his home. He still did not know what he would tell her or when.

  Chapter Three.

  The atmosphere hung like gas, poisoned, in the house, and had for three days and three evenings. It clung to the rooms, eddied into each corner, was inescapable. They went their own ways, as if the atmosphere dictated that they should separate themselves from each other. The stench of the silence they carried with them was in the furniture, in their clothes, and had seeped to their minds.

  He stood on the green, beyond his front gate, and gazed out over the rooftops towards the expanse of the gunmetal grey sea.

  Stephen came down the stairs each morning, gulped half of his usual breakfast, and waited by the door for his mother to take him to school, or by the gate for the other half of the school-run to collect him. He came home in the afternoons and bolted for his room, came down for supper, then fled upstairs again. The atmosphere between his mother and his stepfather had filtered into his room. Twice, from the bottom of the stairs, Perry had heard him weeping.

  It was a bright morning, there would be rain later, and the wind brought a chill from the east.

  Since he had pleaded for time Meryl had not spoken of his problem. She was brisk with him, and busy. She called shrilly to him for his meals, dumped his food in front of him, made sharp, meaningless conversation while they ate. It was as if they competed to be the first to finish what she had cooked so that the charade of normality might be over more quickly. If he spread work papers on the table in the kitchen then she was in the living room with her embroidery. If she had an excuse to be out, she took it, spent all of one of the three days helping with the nursery class and staying late at school to scrub the floor. He knew that she loved the house and the village, and that she feared that both were being pulled, by the poison, from her. They slept at night in the same bed, back to back, apart. The space between them was cold. She had looked into his face once, the only time that her eyes had flared in anger, when she'd pushed him aside and run up the stairs to her son's room, in answer to his weeping.

  He watched the gulls flying lazily over the sea, and felt jealous that such matters did not trouble them.

  His life, many times, in those three days, played in Frank Perry's mind. He remembered his many friends at Shiraz, where the gases were mixed, before the project's move to Bandar Abbas, where the warheads were constructed, and more friends there. They had entertained him and kissed his cheeks when he gave them gifts, and were deceived. At the thought of his betrayal, he screamed silently across the winter-yellowed grass of the green, and the rooftops where the first smoke of the day crawled from the chimneys, and the open depth of the sea. It was not his fault: he hadn't been given a chance to do otherwise.

  Emma Carstairs drove up, smiling and chirpy. She pushed the door open and belted her horn. Stephen ran past, without looking at him, and dived for the car as if to escape.

  Frank heard Meryl's brisk shout behind him. The car drove away. There was a call for him. The Home Office in London. He went back into the house and heard her washing up the breakfast things. She hadn't asked him why the Home Office had rung. He picked up the telephone.

  He felt like a Philby or a George Blake. Bettany, who had rotted in gaol on an Official Secrets Act sentence, would have felt like this when he'd made his first communication with the Soviets. He took the phone card from his wallet. Geoff Markham had come out of Thames House, doubled back behind the building, scurried up Horseferry Road for the first bank of telephones. The brewery answered, through to Marketing, a shout for Vicky. He felt he was breaking faith, and the furtiveness exhilarated him. He told her that the bank was giving him an interview for a place in investment brokerage; his application had been short listed down to the last three. She squealed, she said he was brilliant. He gave her the details. She growled that she would bloody murder him if he blew it and started on about her teaching him interview technique. She had wanted him out of what she called that creepy job and into proper work since they'd first shared a bed. He rang off. He wouldn't have dared make that call inside Thames House. He felt elation that he had been short listed and the same sense of shame as when he'd sent off the application to the bank with the necessarily limited personal background. It was what Vicky had told him to do she had torn the job advertisement from the Situations Vacant.

  He took the back-streets to the bridge, crossed over. The great building, the home of the Secret Intelligence Service, the green and cream and tinted-glass monstrosity, was enemy territory to most of his seniors at Thames House. When Cox or Fenton went across the river to Vauxhall Bridge Cross, they always said, after they'd legged it back, that they felt they ought to wash their hands. He asked for Ms Flowers, and the security staff at Reception looked at him and his Security Service ID as if they were both worthless.

  She took him into a bare interview room on the ground floor. She laid a file in front of her on the table, and leaned her elbows over it, covered it with her bosom.

  He talked.

  "We went down under prepared to see him, went with big holes in what we knew. We knew that his new name and identity were blown open how and where is what we did not know. We told him his life was under threat, but we didn't know the extent of the threat.. . It was difficult to assess who was the blind and who the one-eyed. We're sending him the Blue Book. We need help and have to have answers to questions."

  She snorted derisively.

  "Ask away. Whether I'll answer, that's a different matter. And you should know the importance we give to the Iranian weapons programme. Attention, among the ill informed was directed towards Iraq, which is just comic cuts, cartoon-strip stuff. Iran is the big player. Iraq has no global following, Iran is a focus point for billions of Muslims. Iran matters." She guarded the file with her elbows.

  "Who was Frank Perry?"

  "His name was Gavin Hughes. He was a pushy young salesman in an engineering manufacturing company at Newbury. He sold commercial mixing machines, mostly for export."

  "What was the Iran link?"

  "The Iranians wanted mixing machines for their programme WIVID development. You know what that is, don't you? Weapons of Mass Destruction, microbiological, chemical and nuclear."

  "But the export to Iran of those machines is blocked by legislahon, enforced by Customs and Excise. Isn't that right?"

  "The machines are dual-purpose you were informed of that, and the Customs interest. The same machine can be legally exported to mix chewing-gum or toothpaste to industrial quantities, and illegally exported to mix explosives and the chemical precursors for nerve gases and bio-toxins, which are the anthrax or suchlike end of the business. His company's machines, with falsified export declarations, were for the equipment of military factories."

  "What was his importance?"

  "He's a sharp salesman, as I said, everybody's good guy. People warm to him, people want to be his friend. The man who is liked and makes friends, he gets access. The access was disproportionate to the importance of the product he supplied. No need to go to Tehran to meet him, have him down to Shiraz or Bandar Abbas, sort the problem out there and save time. He's a popular
man and not stupid. He doesn't push his luck, just keeps his ears and eyes open, and he oils the friendships with gifts. It gets so that he's hardly noticed when he's there. I'm not exaggerating he was remarkable, one of the most valuable assets we've ever had."

  "Who was the controller running him?"

  "Ran him a bit myself at the end, when it was leading up to the sensitive time. We were into him about eighteen months before it finished. We'd picked up the illegality bit. He faced a Customs and Excise investigation and he'd have gone to prison. We had him well stitched, and he knew it. He was always very co-operative. You don't need to know who recruited him, did the heavy stuff and pulled him on-side they wouldn't give you the time of day."

  "What happened "at the end"? What finished it?"

  "We and other agencies became aware of the pace of the development of chemical warheads. We needed to obstruct, or at least impede, that progress. Necessary action was taken."

  "What was the action taken?"

  "You should never try to run, Mr. Markham, before you've learned to walk. That's not your concern.

  "Sorry, but it is my concern if I'm to be in a position where I can assess the contemporary threat level."

  "If you've ever rammed a stick into a wasps' nest then you make the wasps angry. They want to sting you. At which point you're advised to get the hell out. That'll have to be good enough for you.

  "How would the Iranians have known that he was the source of information?"

  "They're not idiots, certainly not in our eyes. At the same time they were clearing up the debris, he'd disappeared, left home and work. Yes, they could put that together. They would have been very angry.

  "Has he been looked after?"

  "What you already know new life, no Customs and Excise feeling his collar, new identity. We treated him well and expensively."

  "That's a minimum of five years ago. Would their anger have lasted?"

  "With the action that was taken, yes. The anger might have matured, but it wouldn't have diminished."

  "What are we supposed to do now?"

  "God, why'd you ask me? Water under the bridge, as far as we're concerned. He's no earthly use to us or anyone now, just another engineer doing whatever engineers do."

  "But if he was brilliant and remarkable, we owe him."

  "Understood you've done that, offered help. I know his reaction too. He's made his bed. We don't acknowledge debt to civilians, businessmen. They work for us, we explain the risks, they stand on their own feet. Actually, we were surprisingly generous in this case. Nothing is owed."

  "One last thing. What was the quality of the information on the renewed threat?"

  "There's an American in Riyadh, a funny little fellow from the FBI. He's their Iran guru. He dug up Perry's name, a little consolation on a failed raid. If you call him, don't have a pending appointment and don't expect him to draw breath and let you get a word in. Get the message Perry or Hughes is a spent cartridge, he's of no importance. At the reception they'll show you the lavatory. The American in Riyadh is Littelbaum..."

  The electric fan always distorted the television picture, and the cranking air-conditioner set in the wall did the damage to the sound. Mary-Ellen was responsible for catching the local-language news programme because Littelbaum found it hard to remember schedules. He was at his desk, the fan blast riffling the papers in front of him. This small section of the embassy building that he used with Mary-Ellen and the larger area in an adjacent corridor, the Agency's place, were not served by the building's main air-coolant system. The pipes had been cut off and sealed. A security review, two years back, had decided that the Bureau and the Agency should be protected from the possible hazard of lethal gases being fed into the system, so they had their own air-conditioners, a nightmare of noise and unreliability that needed the back-up of electric fans.

  The local-language news bulletin was usually a catalogue of the King's palace meetings and the public appearances of the prime princes. The picture was awful, the sound worse, and the content negligible, so he let her monitor it. Even above the clatter of the air-conditioner and the whine of the fan, he heard her gasp. Littelbaum swung in his chair.

  The man's head was down, his voice a monosyllabic whisper. Goddammit... The man was dressed in a white robe, like a long shirt. dress, was round-shouldered as if the hope had gone from him. Under the loosely draped gutra, the scarf covering his head, his eyes had lost their light. Damn, shit, damn... The man mouthed a rehearsed confession. Littelbaum listened as he confessed to terrorism and subversion of the kingdom. He was shrunken, as if dehydrated, from when Littelbaum had last seen him, dragged in the sand towards the waiting helicopters. The bastards, the lying, deceiving, double-talking bastards... He grabbed his herringbone jacket, and ran, a fast waddling gait, for the door, the corridor, the grille gate where the Marine stood guard, the elevator, and the ambassador's floor.

  He stood to his full squat height, and his body shook with anger as he hammered his complaint.

  "It is just obstruction. I have been blocked at General Security six times and I have made two dozen, more, calls to General Security, the ministry, God knows who else. I have not only been denied the chance to talk to this man myself, I have not been permitted to read the interrogation dossier. They are supposed to be fucking allies -I know, sir, about their delicate sensibilities, and I know they are a proud and independent people, and please don't tell me to humour them, but I don't give a shit what happens in this country. The place is a cess-pit, it is corrupt, devious, lying, complacent. Americans died in Dhahran and Riyadh. If this man is on TV and making a confession, then he has been tried, convicted, condemned. Three Americans died in Riyadh, nineteen in Dhahran. Finding the killers of Americans is my job. This man, sir, was in contact with an organizer who I am paid to track and find. This man could give me the name and the face of that organizer, but I am blocked. When he has been, one-way ticket, to Chop-chop Square, I have lost the chance to get from this man that information. I was so goddamn close. So what the fuck are you going to say to our good sweet allies? I have been working more than two years for this one chance so I can hunt the bastard down. What are you going to say?"

  The ambassador wrung his hands and said he would make telephone calls, which was what he always said. Littelbaum went back to his section. The fan blew the papers on his desk and Mary-Ellen put a decent slug of 'brown' in his coffee.

  The coffee, laced with whiskey, might just make him forget that he had no face and no name to work towards, and that he did not know where the footprints led.

  The wind whipped about her and could not move her. The sea swell bucked beneath her and did not shake her.

  She was out of the Kharg Island terminal, the property of the National Iranian Tanker Corporation. Her call sign was EQUZ. Her length, bow to stern, was 332 metres; her beam, port to starboard, was 58 metres; her draught, the waterline to the lowest point of the hull, was 22.5 metres. She was loaded with 287,000 tonnes of

  Iranian crude. Her speed through the water, regardless of weather conditions, was a constant 21 knots. She had been at sea for thirteen days, routed from Kharg Island, past the port of Bandar Abbas, through the Straits of Hormuz, north up the Red Sea to the canal, away from Port Said and into the Mediterranean. After navigating the Straits of Gibraltar, her last reported position had her giving a wide berth to the sea lanes leading to Lisbon. She was two days' sailing from the western approaches of the English Channel. Her crew complement was always thirty-two Iranian and Pakistani nationals, and the master would give that number, in truth, to the immigration authorities at the Swedish refinery. She was a monster, carving her way forward, moving remorselessly towards her destination.

  "Just read it, Mr. Perry, it's all in here. I can't say it's anything that pushes back the frontiers of science. It just states what's sensible."

  When she walked out of the front door Meryl had been crying. She'd tried not to cry in the house, but she'd cried when she was on the step, and go
ing down the path. Perry had seen her dab her eyes when she reached the car and then he'd closed the door. He was not ready to tell her. It would have been easier if she'd confronted him. He had been leaning against the hall wall, head in the coats, when the bell had rung. A card had been proffered, Home Office Central Unit, and a smiling, middle-aged man had been following him into the house.

  "It's all in the pamphlet what we call the Blue Book, because it's blue. Vary your route to and from your home, keep a constant watch for strangers whom you might suspect of showing a particular interest in the house. You haven't a garage, I see. Car parked on the street, that's a problem. Well, you look like a handyman, get an old car wing-mirror, lash it to a bamboo pole and check under the car each morning, under the main chassis and especially that naughty little hidden bit above the wheels, doesn't take a moment. Imagine anywhere under the car, or under the bonnet, where you could hide a pound bag of sugar, but it's not sugar, it's military explosive, and a pound of that stuff will destroy the car, with a mercury tilt switch. Always best to be careful and do the checks, doesn't take a minute."

  They wandered through the house, as if the man were an estate agent and the place was going on the market but it wasn't, he was staying. No quitting, no running. The furniture was eyed, and the ornaments and the pictures, and the fittings in the kitchen. He'd made them both a mug of tea, and his visitor had taken three biscuits from the jar, munched them happily and left a trail of crumbs behind him.

  "It's mostly about the car. You shouldn't think you're alone. I don't get many days in the office. So many Army officers who were in Northern Ireland, they all need updating. I've a lovely list of gentlemen I visit, and judges and civil servants. You shouldn't get in a flap nothing's ever happened to any of my gentlemen. But what I tell all of them, watch the car.. . I'll be leaving brochures of the locks on offer, doors and windows, all fitted at our expense. You know, we spend five million pounds a year on this, and me and my colleagues, so don't get depressed and think you're the only one. They didn't tell me, never do, who you'd rubbed up the wrong way... They came down the stairs. The biscuits were finished and the mugs were empty. The man darted back into the living room. There was a grimace on his face, as if he had forgotten something and that was a personal failure.