A Line in the Sand

by Gerald Seymour

  She was grey-haired, severely dressed, with only a small sterling-silver brooch for ornament, but there was a twinkle of light in her face.

  "Of course, Iran has ambitions. Iran demands recognition as a regional power and believes she has the economic, cultural and military clout to deserve that status. The current leaders detest the image abroad of a pariah state, and they say they received no credit for a statesmanlike neutral posture during Desert Storm. They deny they export revolution. They say that all they export is oil, carpets and pistachio nuts. They say they practise good neighbourliness. At the bottom line they cannot afford to offend the West because the West is the purchaser of their crude, and without that revenue the country simply folds. Actually, they rather respect the British, admire us, give us credit where it may not be due. They have a saying, "If you stub your foot on a stone you can be sure an Englishman placed it there." London's awash with Iranian dissidents but they're alive, aren't they? They're not being shot dead and blown up. We don't think they want to offend us, quite the opposite. Believe me, the Shah was more neurotic about British intelligence and meddling than the present lot. The Shah said, "If you lift Khomeini's beard you will find printed under it, "Made in Britain'." Go to the trade fairs, go to the Queen's birthday party at our summer residence, you'll find great friendship for the British."

  They ate pasta. The end of the Cold War had been a career disaster for Harry Fenton. He was of the old school at Five; a former tank squadron commander in Germany eyeballing Soviet armour, he had found it a straightforward move into counter-espionage when soldiering lost its glitter attraction. He'd been on major spy investigations and found that work totally fulfilling. But the bloody Wall had come down, the enemy was now to be treated as an ally and, after years of dogged resistance, he'd been shuffled to the Islamic Desk. For the first time since that move he felt a fris son of excitement.

  "Another hoary old favourite is Weapons of Mass Destruction, which gets everyone in a proper lather. Our assessment goes against the grain. They're way behind in the production of a microbiological capability. Research facilities, yes, but they're not there. On the chemical front, and they have cause to develop such hideous weapons after the gassing the Iraqis gave them, they were making fast progress until five years ago. Then we don't know why everything seemed to stop. It was peculiar and I don't have the answer. They're back on track now but they lost several years.

  "Top of the list for horror stories is the ayatollahs' nuke, makes the Americans wet their Y-fronts, but we think it's ten years away, that it was ten years away five years ago, that it'll be ten years away in five years' time. Yes, they have missiles for delivery, they can reach the Saudi oilfields, but they've nothing that matters to put in the warheads. Anyway, they're not idiots, they cannot compete on military terms with the Americans and they know it. They're not going to hit Saudi and get a bashing they can't defend themselves from. Is this a disappointment to you? God, look at the time! My little white neck will be on the block when I wobble in smelling of your booze as if it matters."

  She nodded enthusiastic agreement when he pointed to the empty first bottle, then raised his hand to the waiter for another to be brought. She had lamb and he had veal.

  "Bear with me. I'm getting there... As I said, the dissidents here are still alive. How long since we last expelled one of their lOs for sniffing round a target? Six years. OK, OK, there are plenty of disparate groups, factions of their intelligence agencies that are not under specific control, they moonlight, but not on a big one. Would they come into Britain and attempt to assassinate a guarded target? No. Absolutely not. Am I a kill-joy? But I would urge considerable caution on you in the event that my assessment is wrong. Please, if I am wrong, don't go into the pulpit and denounce that country because you would set back years of quiet diplomacy and cut the legs off those we believe are moderates. We're not dealing with school-brat vandals, who should be made an example of, but with a nation state we have to live with.. . Damn good lunch, thanks."

  He walked back to Thames House and put his head round Cox's door.

  He had, of course, a network of high-level contacts; he had been with a senior and respected official of Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and very illuminating it had been.

  The eyes of Cox, the bureaucrat, beaded on him.

  "Do they believe Iran is on the march, coming to Suffolk?"

  "They don't, no and if they are on the march then the FCO pleads for a soft line."

  "Difficult to take a soft line with an assassin."

  Fenton boasted, "I've several more sources that I'll be milking. If there's more to know, I'll find it."

  "The motivation that makes people fight in a holy war is that death does not represent the end of life for a human being..."

  The words were in his mind. He had prayed for the last time that day, the fifth time, an hour and a half after dusk. He had slept well and was rested. He had eaten a small portion of the rice and boiled chicken brought him by the master. He had sat for many minutes on the lavatory in the corner of the cabin until he was satisfied that his bowels and bladder were cleaned, emptied, because that was important. He had stripped, washed himself with soap in the tiny shower cubicle that had been installed for the privacy and personal use of the master's wife. He had dried himself, then shaved.

  "On the contrary, immortal life begins after death, and the kind of salvation that a man has in the next world is dependent on the kind of life he lives in this world..."

  In his mind were the words of the ayatollah who taught at a college in the city of Qom. He stood naked in the cabin. The clothes he had worn when he had boarded the tanker off the port of Bandar Abbas, and on the voyage, with the wedding ring and the gold chain from his neck, were now folded in the cupboard with the chadors and rou push trousers left by the master's wife. He was a tall man, 1.87 metres. He was well muscled yet weighed only 86 kilos. His hair was dark, close, short-cut, but with a neat parting that he combed to an exact line. He was pale-skinned for an Iranian, as if he did not come from the Gulf but from the sunbathed countries and islands of the Mediterranean; it was a reason he had been chosen. The texture of his skin was the gift of his mother, along with the jutting chin and the determination. From his father, he took his eyes, deep-set, shrouded in secrecy. He was thirty-six years old.

  "Taking part in a holy war is a way of assuring oneself that one's immortal salvation in the next world is guaranteed..."

  His English-born mother had been the daughter of an oil worker at Abadan, who had married the young Iranian medical student against the bitter opposition of her family. She had not wavered and had been cut off from all contact when her father and mother had returned to their Yorkshire home. There had never been reconciliation. She had embraced the Faith, become a good Muslim wife. The determination of his mother to follow the road of her love lived on in the jaw shape of her son. Her husband, his father, had qualified as a doctor and they had settled in Tehran with their child.

  He could remember the unannounced visitors coming late at night to the house, and the murmur of voices. As the blinds went down in the surgery room, he, the child, kept watch for the SAVAK thugs, the scum men of the Shah's secret police. At night, behind the lowered blinds, his father treated the patriots who had been tortured by the SAVAK in the cells, and who had been beaten by the SAVAK in street demonstrations. He could remember when the SAVAK had broken into their home, and taken his father away. He could remember when his father had come home, bleeding and bruised, and he'd learned to despise and hate the countries that had supported the corrupt Shah and trained the SAVAK policemen. Now they were dead, suffocated in the rubble of their Tehran home after the explosion of an Iraqi Scud missile.

  "It is natural that a man would wish to be killed seventy times and still come back to life to be killed all over again... He stood naked. What he would wear that night was laid out on the tidied bunk bed. When the revolution had come, when the tanks were on the streets, and the rule of the Shah w
as in its death throes, he had dropped out of school. Going forward with the Molotovs, running across open streets to retrieve those shot by the soldiers, he had been noticed. He had felt no fear and it was seen. When the Imam Khomeini at last came home he was, at seventeen years old, given a Kalashnikov rifle and drafted into a south Tehran komiteh. He had been on the roof of the Alawi Girls' School when the last chief of the SAVAK was half hanged, cut down, beaten so that his leg bones splintered, mutilated with knives, lit by television lights, killed, and he had felt no pity. He had been inducted into the pasdars, joined with pride the unit of the Revolutionary Guard Corps that safeguarded the Imam at his simple home in Jamaran. He had gone into the embassy of the Great Satan, into the Den of Spies, into the rooms where the shredders had failed and the files on collaborators and traitors were to be found, and he had hunted them. The war had come. The military could not be trusted. The war with Iraq was his transient route from teenager to man. He had become an elusive, skilled master of the flooded death ground that was the Faw peninsula and the Haural-Hawizeh marshland. He had come home, his first leave in two years, to find the dried heap of rubble with the small tunnel through which the bodies of his parents had been extracted. After praying at their grave in the Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery, he had taken the next bus back to the front line.

  The Scuds were fired with American help. American satellite photography was passed to the Saudis, who forwarded the images to Baghdad. The hatred grew. When the war was over and the Imam had sued for peace and had spoken of taking a decision more deadly to him than drinking hemlock, when he had come home, he had been taken under the wing of a brigadier in the Ministry of Information and Security, as if by a foster-parent. And his talents were let loose, and killings followed in his footprints. From what he had seen, suffered, experienced, survived, there was no place in his mind for fear.

  "This is the perception which creates the desire for martyrdom among Muslims..."

  He began to cover his nakedness. He wriggled into ankle-length thermal under-trousers, then a thermal vest. He struggled into the rubber suit. He had worn such suits in the probing fast craft they had used in the swamps of the Faw peninsula, and he had been in such a suit when he had first gone ashore on the coast of the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. He put his watch back on his wrist. Later,

  he would synchronize the time on it with the time on the master's watch. Later, the master would send a radio message of seeming innocence to his employer, the National Iranian Tanker Corporation, in Tehran, and his watch would be synchronized with a clock at the NITC, and the clock there with the master clock in the room at the Ministry of Information and Security where the brigadier waited. Later, the master clock would be synchronized on a secure voice-link with the embassy in London. Finally, the intelligence officer at the embassy would synchronize his watch with that of the courier on the shore.. . Everything was planned to the smallest detail, as always. He waited for the master to come to take him to the stern deck. On his bare feet, below where the wet suit sealed his ankles, he slipped a pair of casual trainer shoes. He waited for the master and thought of his wife, Barzin, and their small home, and he wondered whether she missed him. They had no children perhaps it was his fault and perhaps it was hers but the doctors they visited would not tell them. She asked nothing of him except that he should serve the revolution of the Imam. The tanker churned its way north up the Channel. He took comfort again from the words of the ayatollah from the college at Qom. He was Vahid Hossein. He was the Anvil.

  It was a pretext, but the first and there would be more.

  The rain, as promised, had come on harder. Davies sat in the car. He didn't need to wind down the window and let in the damp air. He had the monitor screen on the floor in front of the empty passenger seat, and the headset over his ears. Two cables led from the car to a small junction box screwed to a side wall of the house. He was parked right up against the wall, filling the alley. He could see, in black and white, on his screen, the neighbour on the front doorstep, and hear distorted speech from the button microphone secreted in the porch.

  The pretext seemed innocent enough.

  "Sorry, Frank, for disturbing you. You got a Philips screwdriver? Can't seem to find one anywhere."

  "Sure, Jerry, won't take me a minute."

  "Everything all right?"

  "Everything's fine. Just wait there, I'll get it."

  He saw the neighbour's grimace. He'd have expected to be invited inside, but the principal had learned fast and left him at the door. The neighbour's eye line roved over the front of the house and checked the cables, the broken plants where the ladder had been, and looked into the camera. He wouldn't have seen the button microphone because the men from London were skilled in positioning them had to be because not even the principal knew about the audio surveillance. People didn't mind outside cameras but they were generally difficult about microphones. He could hear, adequately, anything said in the front of the house, ground floor, and on the stairs; it was good technology and necessary.

  "There we go, one Philips screwdriver."

  "Brilliant."

  "No hurry for it back."

  "Great. Frank, Mary said you had a new alarm system fitted today."

  "Yes."

  "Something I don't know?"

  "I doubt it, Jerry."

  "Don't think me inquisitive, Frank, not me, but there hasn't been a burglary this end of the village in four years, not since the Doves' place. Mary said you'd put in the full works, chaps like chimps running up ladders. Friend to friend, what do you know that I don't, eh?"

  "Just taking sensible precautions, Jerry. You're getting soaked."

  "Frank, no pissing, who's that joker in the car?"

  "I'm right in the middle of a bit of work. Bring it back when you've finished with it, no hurry."

  The door closed and the neighbour retreated. He'd have been sent by his wife, neighbours always were. He'd report that he hadn't really learned anything. That wouldn't satisfy the wife, and she'd be round in the morning to beg a half-pint of milk or borrow a half-pound of flour. And they'd fret through the evening, the neighbour and his wife, about the cables and the camera, and whether a wave of thieving was about to strike their small corner of heaven.

  The boy came home, and the woman who drove him gave Davies a grinding glance before she pulled away. He doubted this little place could survive without knowing every soul's business. His lunch-box was finished, except for the apple he always kept till last. It would be another hour before Leo Blake turned up to do the night shift. He polished the apple on his sleeve and listened. He'd made his suggestion, how they should tell the boy. They might have been at the bottom of the stairs or just inside the kitchen. His mother did it. There were faint voices.

  Frank used to work for the government abroad. He'd made some enemies. He did secret work, and it was still secret, and Mummy's secret and Stephen's. Frank's going to be protected by the police just for a few days... "Are we going to have to go? Will we have to leave here?"

  "No." Her clear voice.

  "There's nothing to worry about we aren't leaving our home."

  Davies put the apple core in his lunch-box.

  The evening had come.

  The car was parked in a deep lay-by used in the summer by tourists for picnics. It was hidden from the road by trees and evergreen bushes. Yusuf Khan had reclined his seat and dozed. The small bedside alarm clock in his pocket, synchronized to the watch of the intelligence officer, would rouse him thirty minutes before it was time to move.

  It was the most comfortable car seat he had ever sat in, a BMW 5-series with a 2.6-litre injection engine, high power, high technology, high luxury. His own, left behind in Nottingham, was an eleven-year-old Ford Sierra, 1.6-litre, under-powered and under-maintained; the carburettor had choked on the 150-mile journey to the north-west. They had needed to call out a mechanic to fix it and had sweated to get to the hospital in time to see the target, Perry, the car he used, and the logo of
the salesroom that had sold it to Perry. Farida Yasmin's car was a nine-year-old Rover Metro, cramped and with a small engine, good enough to get them to the car salesroom in Norwich where a story had been told and information received, and good enough to get them into and out of the village by the sea where the photographs had been taken that had lit up the eyes of the intelligence officer.

  Yusuf Khan's car was unreliable, Farida Yasmin Jones's car was too small. The cash float given him by the intelligence officer included enough for him to hire a fast, reliable, comfortable vehicle when he had come off the train. It was fantastic, the BMW, but difficult to handle: once, he had been off the road and a tyre width from a ditch because he had underestimated the speed into a corner. There was caked mud on the driver's-side doors. He didn't use the radio because all the stations on the pre-tune buttons played degenerate, corrupting music.

  He imagined the man he had been sent to meet, who would come out of the darkness. The sausage bag was behind his reclined seat, on the carpeted floor. He felt a sense of pride that he had been shown such trust, and Yusuf Khan dozed, waiting.

  He tried to concentrate but the words mocked his efforts. They registered then they blurred, their message was lost.

  Markham sat on the rug in front of the electric fire in Vicky's apartment. She didn't like the word flat, it was an apartment but the problem with it was the size. Smart but small, as his was dingy and small. Neither's home was big enough for two, so he read the books she'd bought in her lunch-hour and left for him in a neat pile. Everything about the room was neat, organized, like his Vicky.