A Line in the Sand

by Gerald Seymour

  "My present work, and you'll respect that I'm bound by confidentiality, has been challenging and responsible but, the nature of the beast, it's limited. I'm capable of spending more time in the fast lane. I don't expect to be found unsuitable."

  "Great, that's what they want, arrogance and they want the rounded man. Mr. Markham, what are your hobbies, recreations? Shit!"

  It was the telephone.

  "So, they don't want to hear about Herefordshire churches... No?"

  The telephone stayed ringing.

  "Hill-walking give them long-distance hill-walking, exploring the inner man. You can't move for bloody bankers on Snowdonia or Ben Nevis, for Christ's sake, and skiing."

  He couldn't ignore, any longer, the ring of the telephone bell.

  "I'll field it."

  It was Fenton, opening with a caustic, savage quip about clock-watching. Had he gone on the stroke of five? He was to get back in, soonest. There was no apology for the time of night at which he was summoned back. He left Vicky. If he'd stayed longer she'd have killed him or lifted the skirt higher. He drove into central London, against the homeward traffic from the theatres and the restaurants. He parked on a double yellow as the Big Ben clock hammered out the midnight chimes.

  Fenton showed him the single sheet of paper, a Special Branch detective sergeant's report of a routine surveillance. Markham knew Yusuf Khan: convert, zealot in the Hizb-ut-Tahrir, pupil of Sheik Amir Muhammad, cleaner at Nottingham University, knew him as well as he knew a hundred others from the files. The report was the familiar story of a fuck-up. The target had been followed, lost, not found again. While he was followed, before he was lost, he'd been on a shopping jaunt. A cleaner, no skills, at the university took home not more than 125 a week after stoppages. Three weeks' wages gone in an outdoors shop, cash and out of generosity because the boots wouldn't have fitted. And the book... There was a giant wall map in Fenton's room, floor to ceiling, which Montgomery would have appreciated or perhaps Wellington. Fenton used a snooker cue to do the business. Its end rapped the area covered by the guidebook, north Suffolk, then stabbed a line where land became sea, and rested there. The guidebook covered a 'dead-end place', a 'one-street hole'. He held in his hand the routine report from Special Branch, and he felt the night cold.

  "I'd ring her if I were you, Geoff, and postpone the nookie and don't get to be a timekeeper." Fenton smirked.

  "Go to work, because

  I want it on my desk at lunch-time the threat, what it is, where it's coming from."

  He had said it himself: "He chose well, if he won't run." The cue end was beside the name of the village, which a man wouldn't leave, where a home was protected only by a door with a new lock and an old bolt.

  The wind whipped about him and snatched at his coat. He was alone in the darkness. The sea cried beneath him and he sat on the deck far forward of the lights of the tanker's bridge. The night hours were precious to him, when he could escape from the claustrophobic confines of the cabin, which was like a prison cell during daylight because he had been told he must not attract the crew's attention. He stayed there until darkness came, and then he slipped out, glided silently along the hushed corridors of the accommodahon block and eased open the watertight door that led to the wide length of the deck space above the crude's tanks. In the night, in the darkness, with the great throbbing power beneath him, he felt the strength of his people and of his God.

  Frank Perry had walked for nearly an hour past the green, down to the darkened boatyard with the stilted walkways over the river mud, then out on the raised path towards the Northmarsh.

  He was at the place where the tidal river merged with the inland water mass and the slow-swaying reed-beds. There was a crescent moon up and a shallow light on the beds. The silence was broken only when he disturbed a swan that clattered, screaming, away. He rehearsed what he would say, what he would tell her, and he peed the beer out of his bladder and into the still water at his feet. If they had had their way, Fenton and the younger man who had not spoken, then he, Meryl and her boy would by now have been rootless flotsam. Maybe they would have been in an hotel, or an Army camp, or in an empty chalet complex that was available because the holiday-makers had not yet come. There would be nothing to hold on to but the handles of packed suitcases, for ever. If he had moved her on, if they were now in an unknown bed, listening for danger in the night, alone, perhaps she would have stayed with him for three months, a year, but finally she would have gone.. . It was his home, and her home and her son's home, and he prayed,

  mumbling, that she would understand... He would stay where he was safe, where she was, where his friends were, and her friends... He was drunk. He had accepted two more pints than was good for him. It was so long since he had been drunk, the Christmas before last, lights on the tree, Stephen in bed with his new toys around him. They'd shared a bottle of whisky, sprawled on the sofa, her head on his waist, and stayed there until the bottle was finished, then helped each other up the stairs, tittering. He had thought himself blessed.

  But he could remember as clearly when he had thought himself cursed. It was the second night after the minders had checked him into an Army barracks, and at his insistence they had permitted him a single phone call. They'd huffed, complained, left him in no doubt that they were doing him a great favour, and would only drop the rule book that once. Perry had rung his father. Every moment of the call was seared sharply in his memory.

  "Hello, Dad, it's Gavin. Dad, please don't interrupt me and don't ask me questions. And don't try to trace this number because it's ex-directory and you'll only waste your time. I've had a difficulty overseas and I'm changing my identity. I don't exist any more. I have a new name and am starting out on a new life. I've left home. They don't know where I am. I won't be able to make contact again. It's for the best. If I came to see you and Mum I'd be endangering you as much as myself. Don't, please, think badly of me. There were good times and we should all cling to them. I don't know what the future holds, but I won't ever forget your and Mum's love for me. Forgive me, Dad. I'm not Gavin any more. He's gone. Look after yourself, Dad, and kiss Mum for me." He'd rung off.

  The minders had been round him and they'd nodded coolly as he put down the phone, implying that he'd done well without bothering to say so. His father had never spoken, there had been only the silence in his ear. That silence on the line had been the moment when he'd known he was cursed... He would not quit again. He listened to the retreating cry of the swan, watched its ghostliness over the reed-beds and the quiet water, and turned for home.

  His car was parked in front of the house. He paused beside it, then crouched and felt with his fingers into the hidden space above the front near side wheel for a bag of sugar.

  "Got a flat one? Got a puncture?"

  Jerry Wroughton stood in his door holding his cat, a spiteful little beast that killed song-birds. His neighbour always put it out last thing at night.

  He lied, "Thought I had false alarm."

  The cat was dropped and ran to the cover of darkness. Wroughton asked, "Are you all right? You've not looked yourself the last few days, Frank."

  "Haven't I?" He straightened and rubbed the dirt off his hands.

  "What I wanted to say, and Mary, if there's anything wrong, and we can help, you've only to shout."

  "Do I look that bad?"

  "You said it, chief. Pretty grotty. Just yell, it's what neighbours are for."

  "Thanks, Jerry, I'll remember that you're very kind, both of you. I appreciate it."

  He went inside, locked the door and pushed the bolt over. He went to bed, alone, his back to hers, cold. He would tell her in the morning. It could wait until then.

  Chapter Four.

  They walked on the beach, their feet crunching on the smoothed stones of red agate, opaque quartz and pink granite, and on the pebbles of cysterine, slate and Torridonian rock, and on the broken scallop, whelk and mussel shells. He did not speak until they were quite alone, away from a pair o
f winter shore anglers with their long rods resting on triangles of gawky legs, away from a woman and her toddler, who threw flat stones that bounced then sank into the first wave line, and away from the sight of their village behind the sea barrier of raised shifting rocks, away from the world. He had told her, at the house on the green, that he was ready to talk. She had made two curt telephone calls to cancel her commitments for the morning, and she had seen her boy, Stephen, charge for a sort of freedom into the Carstairs car. They walked together, but they were apart. Her hands were deep in the pockets of her coat, as if she intended to prevent him taking her fingers in his.

  Perry didn't work his way round to it. There was no delicacy, no subtlety. It would have been kinder to her if he had come upon it slowly, but kindness wasn't in his script. He wanted the weight of deceit off his back.

  "You tell a lie and each day it is harder to retract. The lie breeds a life of its own. You get so that the lie becomes the truth. You become comfortable with it, even though you dread the moment the lie will be found out. The lie is easy at the beginning, but it becomes, gradually, more and more, the hell that you carry." He paused, stared at the stones and shells under his feet, then pressed on.

  "Frank Perry is a fraud and doesn't exist. A woman gave me that name. She asked if it was all right for me, and I said that I didn't care. I had a new name, new numbers, a new life. It was to block out the past..."

  He wanted to reach her, to close the gap between them. She was pale with shock, never looked at him. The waves beside them broke on the shingle pebbles, and were spent on the sand.

  "Everything I am telling you now is the truth. My name is Gavin Hughes. Gavin Hughes, until this week, was dead and buried. He died so that Frank Perry could survive, was buried for my protection. Gavin Hughes was a chancer, everybody's friend, the good guy with good fun and good chat. Gavin Hughes had a wife, and perhaps she had seen through him and was growing out of love with him, and he had a son. Gavin Hughes had a job, selling, and responsibilities, and was envied. He was the good guy who won trust. Gavin Hughes falsified the sale dockets, betrayed all those who trusted him, went and sold mixing machines in Iran, and reported back to the intelligence people. Everything about Gavin Hughes was a lie..."

  Above the bluster of the wind, and the rumble of the spent wave surges on the pebble shore, were the cries of the birds on the Southmarsh behind the sea's barrier. Gulls and curlews, whimbrels, sandpipers and avocets wheeled and dived. She never lifted her head or helped him.

  "The machines were for military use in Iran. It was illegal to export them for the manufacture of weapons and missiles. All the documentation was lies. I betrayed my company and my colleagues, and they didn't ask questions because the order book stayed full and the end-of-year bonuses kept coming. I had good friends in Iran, kind, ordinary, decent friends, and I broke their trust and gave them presents and sat their kids on my knee in their homes, and reported on everything I learned to the intelligence people. Something was planned. I don't know what because I wasn't on the need-to-know list I was told that it was better for me that I did not know. There was a last visit to Iran and a last debrief back in London, and the links were cut, like a slice with an axe. Gavin Hughes died overnight. I walked out of my home, with two suitcases, and was buried by the following morning. Whatever was planned, from the information I gave, made the death of Gavin Hughes a necessity. It was for my own protection."

  At the top of the wall behind the beach, where the sea never reached, the straggling plants grew from the stones; glasswort, sea lavender, wormwood and beet. As he had known the names of each of the integral parts of the mixers the screws, nozzles, end-plate jackets, the cored blades, the air-purge seals now he knew the names of the plants and the pebbles.

  "What I told the intelligence people was used in an action against the Iranians. My life was considered in jeopardy. I ran, I quit. For a few days, not many, I was like a package that was moved around, a parcel in a sorting office, thrown between military bases, safe-houses, empty hotels. I left behind my family, my job, my friends, everything I had known. And I started again, and I found you. With you, I made a new home, new family, new friends... I was so damned lonely before you came... I have never been back. I didn't tell you, but two months ago I went to see my father. They'd done that appeal, what they put on the radio when a parent is dying and has lost track of a child. Imagine what they thought in the hospital:

  an old man is sick and his middle-aged child has disappeared out of his life. I told you I had a business meeting. He didn't die, he wept when he saw me, he called me by my real name. I didn't tell him who I was and where. I came home to you and the lie was alive again. I thought the lie would last for ever..."

  He walked on, towards the far distant bright little shapes of beached boats hauled up high for the winter. It was a moment before he realized she was no longer abreast of him. He turned. She sat on the stones where they made a line against the wet sand that marked the extent of the tide's encroachment. He went back and sat close to her.

  "Take a transcript spit, pick your nose, urinate in the corner. Anything is permissible provided you've taken a transcript," Fenton had said.

  Geoff Markham was slumped at his desk.

  He had spent the night at his desk, and his head ached enough for him to have taken two paracetamols washed down with the corridor dispenser's coffee. His mouth was foul, his socks smelt and he had broken his house rule: there wasn't a clean pair in his desk drawer. A run-over with the electric shaver didn't help. He was raddled.

  Fenton had been in at six, scrubbed fresh, following behind the cleaners with their sprays, Hoovers, mops and buckets. Fenton would not have had more than four hours' sleep and it didn't show.

  The hook-up was complicated. They needed voice security and there were two choices. He could go to Vauxhall Bridge Cross and have the FBI agent attend the British Embassy in Riyadh's diplomatic quarter, walking distance from his own workplace, or he could take a cab over to Grosvenor Square, into their London embassy's FBI section, and have the hook-up direct to the American's office in the Saudi Arabian capital. He chose to travel himself. He was exhausted. He would get more help from Grosvenor Square than Vauxhall Bridge Cross.

  "A transcript is accountability neither party can then wriggle off the hook," Fenton had said.

  What hurt most, Geoff Markham had been asleep when his supe nor had opened his door. By his watch, he had been asleep for nine minutes, woken abruptly by a little hacked cough from the doorway. He had been up all night, playing linkage with the small network of night-duty officers in London, talking, pushing, trading favours with the Special Branch NDO and the woman at Foreign and Commonwealth and the man at Vauxhall Bridge Cross. The minute he had drifted off to sleep he had been discovered. It hurt.

  "And where's the zealot, where's his guidebook? His known associates, where are they?" Fenton had asked, a rasped voice.

  Through the night he had been searching for those answers. Alone in his small partitioned section, his eyes flicking only occasionally towards the pinned-up snapshot of Vicky, he had been with the sub-file on Yusuf Khan, and with the mother-file of Operation Rainbow Gold. The mother-file was the net result of the most expensive operation, in resources and manpower, with which Markham had been involved since his return from Ireland. Rainbow Gold was the setting up of a United Nations inquiry front, grandly named: The United Nations Committee for the Eradication of the Harassment of Ethnic Minorities (Islamic). Rainbow Gold had started up New York and London offices for UNCHEM(I). Resources had been found for the rent of offices and for the printing of the UNCHEM(I) literature, and the wages of correspondence writers and the telephone answerers, manpower for the writers and researchers.

  Those who knew of it in Thames House called Rainbow Gold a bottomless well in the budget of G Branch (Islamic), but out of the hearing of Barnaby Cox who was the suckling parent of the operation. It was the only way to dig deep: Islamic society was damn near impossible to infiltrat
e. The religion, the culture, the hatred of the Muslim radicals in the United Kingdom could not be penetrated by the usual tried-and-tested procedures. Researchers, vetted and hired, carried the literature to the selected mosques of the UK, talked, listened, explained it had taken three years of resources and manpower for Rainbow Gold to begin to win trust, and a desperate amount of G Branch (Islamic)'s budget. So slowly, water dripping on stone and eroding lichen, Rainbow Gold had opened a small door into the world of the radicals. They had tried with the Irish, with the Committee of Human Rights for the Irish in UK - CHRIUK but they'd been too smart to buy it.

  The name of Yusuf Khan, formerly Winston Summers, was a product of Rainbow Gold, and the name of Sheik Amir Muhammad, the spiritual teacher of Yusuf Khan, was from UNCHEM(I). Farida Yasmin (formerly Gladys Eva) Jones, associate of Yusuf Khan, had also been trawled in by UNCHEM(I). It had taken Markham all night, between the nagging phone calls to Special Branch and the other night-duty officers, to turn up the name of Farida Yasmin Jones. And when he had found it the waves of tiredness had caught him, and he'd slept.

  Markham said, "SB have a base camp outside Yusuf Khan's place. Since they lost him there's not been sight or sound."

  "Typical... Try and keep your eyes open, or do you want a bed moved in?" With the sarcasm was the twinkle in Fenton's eyes.

  "Associates?"

  "Just one, a woman I'm about to get SB to put surveillance on her."

  "Their lOs?"

  "The big boy was out of London most of yesterday we picked him up at that study college at Bedford that gets its funding from

  Qom. The little guy was in the embassy all day. If I need you, where'll you be, Mr. Fenton?"

  Markham's father had gone to work each day in a worn suit with the fear of redundancy haunting him. He had preached the need for financial security to the young Geoff. In his last year at Lancaster University, studying modern history, he had gone to the milk-round careers day. The crowds of students had been thickest round the stalls offering graduate opportunities with British Airways, the big accountancy firms and Imperial Chemical Industries, but he'd avoided the crush and gone to the civil-service display. He'd said to the earnest woman on duty there, blurted out a whisper, that he wanted to join the Security Service. It had seemed to offer a winning combination of a job for life coupled with clandestine excitement. The woman hadn't put him down, had merely filled in his details, and he'd dictated a hundred words to her for the application about his wish to contribute to the safety of his country.