He was into Thames House early, had limped from a photo-development kiosk to the building, shown his temporary accreditation at reception and hobbled into the third-floor work area. His feet were blistered from a long day's walking; the deep bath and the salts in it hadn't lessened the pain.
Duane Littelbaum had walked, the previous day, right round the Tower of London the Jewel Tower, the White Tower, Traitor's Arch, the grass-centred square where the state's enemies had been beheaded, and all the places of death and imprisonment. Once he'd giggled, attracted attention, because he'd wondered why his Saudi friends hadn't bought the whole damned place lock, stone and axe and transferred it to Riyadh. He had gone round on a tour, led by a costumed guide, then gone round again, on his own, and taken a whole roll of film. From the Tower of London he had walked to St. Paul's Cathedral, then hiked through the Sunday empty streets towards the Palace and Parliament. When he was half dead, and on the third film for Esther, he had weakened and taken a taxi back to the embassy's service flat and the bath.
A probationer told him that his office in Saudi Arabia had called, that he should ring back. The young man fixed the secure link for him because Duane Littelbaum was adept at demonstrating technological incompetence when the situation necessitated. He listened to the distant, tinny, concerned voice.
Mary-Ellen bur bled at him, asking about his domestic arrangements, and he wondered whether she was missing him.
"It's been hellish hot here, Duane, 110 plus Fahrenheit, and the cooling system in here's zapped again, it's awful. One of the visa-section guys went out in the parking lot, Saturday, and cracked an egg on the paving to see if he could fry it. He couldn't, the egg dehydrated. Seriously…"
He saw Cathy Parker come in. She had a bounce in her walk. She stopped in front of Markham's door and scribbled through the writing on the paper stuck to the door. She wrote, boldly, DAY FIVE.
"What I thought you should know, Duane, we had a briefing, at short notice, from the Agency people. There was a proper fracas about me being admitted in place of you. Was I cleared for a briefing from the Central Intelligence goddamn Agency? Ambassador, heads of section, and me. They are such seriously pompous people. Anyway…"
She sat beside him and laid a closed envelope on the table.
"You still there, Duane? Look, the guy said that the Saudi intelligence people admitted to him that the "outsider hired guns", you know what I mean, came in during the last Ha]], with all the pilgrims, and are still in place inside the Magic Kingdom. Also the Army's come clean and said that four believe me four 81mm mortars have been stolen from one of their bases up north. How can you defend against that sort of scenario? A dump truck pulls up on the median just outside of a major enclave of ours, the tarp is pulled back, the rounds fly, and the Agency say they could have chemicals in them… and the Agency have gotten the name of your pal, Duane, A is for Anvil, away now but coming back… The commercial attache you know, that lanky idiot had to be told why one man was so important, why they'd wait for one man's return before launching. He seemed to think that quality men, like Anvil, came off a production line as if they were General Motors products. He was put right. When Anvil comes back it's time to go into the shelters, that's what the Agency people are saying. There's real fear here, those mortars and the name of Anvil. It sort of, kind of, makes you cold…"
Beside him, Cathy Parker pulled two photographs out of the envelope. He saw a young man holding a Kalashnikov rifle at a roadblock of Revolutionary Guards, and the picture was lifted away. The second photograph showed an older man in combat fatigues with his back to the water and t1~e reed-banks. She reached again into the envelope.
"I came away from that briefing and, I tell you, I was quite spooked. Well, that's it. I'll meet you Wednesday night off the flight oh, sorry, how's it going? Nowhere? I'll cook you supper Wednesday night. Would you have done better to stay here? There's someone at the door.
"Bye."
He replaced the receiver. A slow smile was spreading across Cathy Parker's face. She took a blown-up picture from the envelope. He recognized immediately the work of computer enhancement, the ageing process, a fattening at the face, a thickening at the neck, more lines at the eyes, shorter hair with bleached, greying, thinner lips. She took a pen from the table and wrote, in big capital characters, the place of birth, Tehran, the date of birth, 28.7.1962, the name, only the goddamn name, Vahid Hossein. He gazed at it, then at her and into the brightness of her eyes. He kissed her on the mouth, kissed her hard.
What they would have noticed, everyone else in the work area, Cathy Parker kissed him back, lip to lip.
Fenton was gathering up his coat" saying he had a train to meet, but he paused long enough to lead the applause, and to call for a copy, post haste, to be sent to Geoff Markham.
Duane Littelbaum stared down at the face, at a stranger who had become familiar, and could still feel the taste of Cathy Parker's wicked, groping tongue.
"Why isn't he coming?" Sam Carstairs howled.
His mother, distracted and trying to put on her makeup for the day in the solicitors' offices, told him not to worry his head with such things.
"He's my best friend. Why isn't he coming to school?" the child bellowed.
His father, trying angrily to put the papers together that he'd been working on the previous evening, told him it was none of his business.
"If he isn't ill, why isn't he coming to school?" In a tantrum, little
Sam started to rip pages from the book they'd bought him only the week before, and stamped on them.
If Emma hadn't caught his arm, Barry would have hit his son. The row had gone on since the child had woken and sensed the tension. It was convenient for neither of them to take Sam into Halesworth for school. Emma, the legal executive, was in court that day with the senior partner, and Barry had the annual sales conference. It was the sort of day when they could have relied upon Meryl Perry's help: she was always prepared, with a smile, to alter the schedule of the shared school-run. Sam and Stephen had always been close friends, good for each other. Barry grabbed the child by the collar of his school coat and frog marched him to the car. Emma had said her job was as important as his; because of the row she'd be late meeting her senior partner, and he'd be bloody late at the conference. He put Sam into the back of his Audi, then ran back to the house because he'd forgotten, damn it, his briefcase.
Emma was throwing on her coat in the hall.
"We've done the right thing, haven't we?"
"What on earth do you mean?"
"With Frank and Meryl." Until that moment, through all the weekend, neither had spoken of it, as if it were forbidden territory.
"They must be so isolated, without friends."
"Their fault, not mine."
"You don't think that we should make a gesture?"
"What did she call me? A second-rate rat? What sort of gesture do I make in response to that?"
"I suppose you're right." She touched her hair in front of the mirror.
"Of course I'm right."
"Please, tell Sam in the car why they're not our friends any longer. He doesn't understand, hasn't a clue, why he's lost his best friend. Please do it, Barry."
"You wait, a week after they've gone we'll have forgotten they were ever here."
He set the alarm, she locked the house, and they ran for their cars, to live their busy lives.
Ten minutes earlier, Geoff Markham had gone out into the parking area behind the town's police station. The arrival time had been given them in the crisis centre and others had drifted after him to stand in the light rain, and wait.
Aside from Markham, glancing at their wristwatches, were a uniformed superintendent and the inspector from the Branch, detectives and the people who manned the radios and the computers; away in the corner of the (ar-park were the military from Special Forces, denied involvement but permitted stand-by status. They were all out in the rain to see the arrival of the Scottish tracker. The local uniforms would have thought they were be~st equipped to search their own area, had the feel for it. Th.~detectives from London, and the Branch, would have thought they bad the trained surveillance specialists, had the necessary expertise The military would have thought they owned the territory of stalk and track, had the right to crack the problem. They were all interested to see the man dragged out from the north by Five, the man given the job that should have been theirs. Geoff Markham felt an atmosphere around him of acid curiosity edging on malevolence.
The car, big, black and sleek, driven by a chauffeur, swept into the parking area and braked hard. All eyes were on it.
Harry Fenton pushed himself out of the front passenger seat, mischief in his eyes. He called a cheerful greeting to the watchers. It was his show, and that mattered to him. He caught Markham's glance, and there was the slightest, faintest wink of his eye, then he opened the rear door.
The dogs came first. They were squat, scurrying creatures, held by leashes of fodder-bale twine, bright orange. They yapped.
He came after them, wriggled clear of the car.
What Markham had expected was an old man, ruddy and weather-skinned, a man with the lore of the countryside in his face and a lifetime of experience in his eyes.
He was small. He looked barely out of his teens. His visage was pale, and his cheeks and chin were speckled with light stubble. His build was slight, looked as if the wind could blow him away. More than that, he was filthy.
The gathered audience gazed at him with astonishment.
At ten paces Markham could smell the dank dirtiness of his clothes. He wore boots, khaki trousers and a tweed coat, all liberally smeared with mud; Markham thought the coat was a bigger man's cast-off. Its buttons were gone and it was held tight at the narrow waist by the same twine. The man stood beside Fenton and glowered at them.
A titter of laughter rippled behind Markham.
An old man, Markham thought, would have merely ruffled feathers, but this pallid, grimy, stinking youth disjointed noses. The dogs, heaving at their leashes, coughing, had seen a police Alsatian God, and the little verminous bastards would probably try to roger it if they were free but the young man grunted at them, almost inaudibly, and they sat at his boots, their teeth bared. He didn't back off from the laughter but stared back at them. They were, Geoff Markham thought, the most frightening eyes he had ever seen.
From the back seat of the car, the chauffeur was lifting out sheets of newspaper and shaking the mud off them.
Fenton strode to Markham. He said, in a loud voice as if to be certain he was generally heard, "What a stink. Had the window open all the way down I thought I was going to throw up. Like being shut in a cellar with a well-hung duck. I'd like you to meet Andy Chalmers, Geoff. It's your job to see he goes where he wants to go, has what he wants. I see that his appearance creates amusement. I want to see that amusement wiped off their faces and shoved far up their backsides. Got me? You'll brook no obstruction from any bastard in a clean shirt or I'll break his bloody neck and yours. I've lunch to be getting back to. Keep to the windward of him. Good luck, and good hunting."
Fenton was gone, without a backward glance. The car swept out of the parking area.
The theatre over, the uniforms, the detectives and the military trooped back into the police station. Geoff Markham thought that if the young man failed it would be Fenton's neck for breaking. As the car disappeared down the road, he realized that no bag had been dumped with the tracker and his dogs.
"Damn, your bag's still in the car."
"Don't have a bag."
"Clean clothes and so on."
"Don't have a bag."
Markham laughed out loud. Who needed clean socks, who wanted fresh underwear, who had to wash?
"Do you like something to eat?"
"No."
"Do you want anything?"
"No."
"What would you like to do?"
"Get there."
There had once been ambition in Mr. Hackett's ministry, but that was long gone. He existed now in this coastal parish, believing his congregation and his community were beneath his talents, on a diet of godless weddings, hurried funerals and a continuing~nxiety about the maintenance of the fabric of his church. His welcomin1 smile, his proffered friendship were shams. He was lonely, he was better; his wife lived away and the fiction that explained her absence involved her need to care for an elderly, bedridden mother, but she had left him. He lived out his life in the village, kept trouble from his door and the bishop off his back, and waited for retirement, blessed release. The ambition of the Reverend Alastair Hackett, then an inner-city curate on a fast-promotion track, had ended twenty-seven years earlier in the north Welsh mountains when he had taken a party of deprived children, with volunteer helpers, from their Manchester tower blocks for a camping holiday. It was the sort of expedition blessed by bishops, the sort of trip that was good for advancement.." and an eleven-year-old boy had died in a fall. Such a long time ago, but there was no forgiveness in the file that passed from bishop to bishop each time he had applied for subsequent promotion. The file held the muted criticism, unspecified but hinted at, of the police evidence at the subsequent inquest why had the child been alone, why had the child not been better supervised?
His career had never recovered, and the bitterness lingered still. Its target was sometimes the bishops, who did not seem to understand the problems of watching over eighteen hooligan youngsters, but most particularly the police. That bitterness verged on detestation. When he should have been explaining the circumstances of the accident to his bishop, and comforting the bereaved parents, he had been incarcerated in a bare interview room in the police station at Conway, treated like a felon, quizzed relentlessly by men seeming determined to find inconsistencies in his account. The career gone, ambition fallen, he had moved from Manchester to mid-Devon, then taken this Suffolk parish. It was a blighted life, no fault of his own, and empty.
They were in the village. If Geoff Markham spoke, he won a grudging response. If he didn't speak there was silence.
Did he want to go up the church tower, use it as an observation point? A grunt, a shaken head. Did he want to take a look at the house? Again, a similar response.
While he had driven, Chalmers had spread across his knees the map on which a red-ink line marked the trail the police dogs had found, and the riverbank where they had lost it. By Chalmers's boots, the dogs chewed noisily at the car's floor mat. Markham was pretty damn certain that one, maybe both, had peed during the journey.
The smell reeked through the car. He stopped near to the hall, down the road from the green. Chalmers's brow was furrowed in concentration as he studied the detail of the map.
A young woman with a guidebook was sitting on a bench, her back to them. An older woman was coming out of the shop with a wheeled shopping bag. He ignored the slow life of the village around him and busied himself with putting new batteries into the second radio then checked the transmission between the two… Shit, the stress snatched at Markham. Hadn't rung Vicky, and he didn't know the terms of employment offered him. Hadn't spoken to Bill Davies, didn't know whether they were still on their feet or down on the floor. Hadn't remembered the picture. Chalmers eased out of the car, took a little of the smell with him, but not enough. The mat was chewed and puddled and he seemed not to notice. Markham took the picture out of his briefcase, locked the door after him.
"Sorry about that sorry I didn't give it you earlier you should have had it before."
He didn't know why he should be frightened into abject apologies to this stinking kid. He passed over the picture. It was the first time he had seen anything other than hostility in Chalmers's eyes. He had once been to a boxing match, when he was at college, for a middleweight title. He remembered the first sight of the men when they had come into the ring with the hype blaring over the loudspeakers, and it was supposed to be a grudge match. There had been no hate in their eyes, only respect, and the fight had started. Each had done his bloody damnedest to batter the other to the canvas. The bout had been brutal and merciless, and he'd hated it.
He took back the picture, and they walked away, following the map's trail.
Chalmers unpicked a piece of cotton thread from a strand of barbed-wire topping a garden fence and said that the man wore a camouflage tunic.
Where the path narrowed, Chalmers stopped, hunched down and studied the ground beside the path's mud. Half hidden by squashed nettles, a boot print was just visible. Chalmers said the man was size eleven, and added casually that he was hurt, handicapped.
They were beside the river. Chalmers unhooked the twine from the dogs' throats but cooed softly to them. They stayed at his heel.
Ahead were the marshes. The grey cloud was low on the reed-beds. The rain spat on their faces. Chalmers gestured to his right, a contemptuous short motion of his arm, and Markham saw the movement of the policemen in bushes away on higher ground. The marshes stretched ahead to the mist-line and the far, dull shape of the trees. There was the slow thunder of the waves on shingle beyond the sea wall.
"Get lost," Chalmers growled.
"When'll I see you?"
"Some time, when I'm ready. Go away."
Geoff Markham walked back down the path alongside the river. He turned once, looked round, and the path behind him was empty.
Bill Davies flushed the downstairs lavatory, and came back into the hall. Nothing for him to do but drink coffee and ruminate on the catastrophe of the evening before, which he'd been doing all morning. Perry had been looking like chilled death when Davies had come in first thing to relieve Blake and was now pacing the living room. Meryl was in the kitchen, quiet, and she'd only been out the once, to hang her washed dress on the line. Paget had been with her, scanning the bottom fence all the time she'd pegged it up, and the rest of the clothes from the machine. He heard a sudden clatter of sound from the kitchen and knew that with a numbed mind and clumsy fingers she'd dropped a plate, broken it. He glanced out through the window, through the new net curtains. There was a spit of rain misting the glass but he saw the tall, wiry man's clerical collar. He moved aside the curtain for a better glance. Mr. Hackett's name hadn't been scratched off the list by the kitchen telephone.
It was reflex, not thought through.
He spoke on his radio to the hut, said he'd be outside, to the front of the house.
He went out into the light rain. He ran across the green, past the new tree and the new post, towards the clergyman.
"Excuse me."
The man stopped in mid-step, turned, the wind catching his greying hair.
"Excuse me are you Mr. Hackett?"
"He is me." A piping voice and a thin smile of greeting.
"Please, have you a moment?"
"A moment for what?"
"I'm with Frank and Meryl Perry."
The caution clouded his face.
"Which means you're a policeman, which means you're an armed policeman. Why would you want a moment of my time?"
Why? Because Frank Perry was told last night of his responsibility in the death of a coach load of Iranian military scientists. Because he had drunk two bottles of wine and been sick twice. Because he and Meryl were at home alone, and needed a friend.
"I just thought, if you'd the time it's rough for them. A visit from a friend would help."
The clergyman took a step forward.
"I have appointments. People are expecting me."
Bill Davies caught his arm.
"What they need, please, is for someone to show them some charity."
"Be so kind as to take your hand off me. Another time, perhaps…"
Davies's hand was shaken off, and the clergyman quickened his stride.
"You are a leader in this community, Mr. Hackett."
"I doubt it, but I do have a filled appointments diary."
"Your example is important. Please, go and ring the bell, go and smile and make some small-talk. Better still, walk up this road with Meryl Perry, with Frank we'll protect you. Show everybody here that they have your support."
"Another day, perhaps. But I cannot promise."
"They need you."
"There are many who need me. I don't know your name and I do not need to, but we did not ask for your guns to be brought into our community. We did not ask for our children and our women to be endangered. We are not a part of whatever quarrel Frank Pejry is enmeshed in. We owe him nothing. He should go what he owes us is his departure from here. I have a wider responsibility to the majority. I do not condone the ostracism of this family, but I cannot condemn it. But we are a God-fearing and law-abiding community, and I doubt that observance of God's teaching and the rules of society have brought Perry to his present situation. In your search for a friend to Perry, I suggest that you look elsewhere."
"Thank you, Mr. Hackett, for your Christian kindness."
"Good day."
Bill Davies walked slowly back to the house.
The Italian owner of the restaurant, from Naples, eyed the many-layered stomach of the German and murmured, with quiet discretion to Fenton, "The full menu, Mr. Fenton, not the two-course luncheon special?"
They were eased into their seats, and immediately the German ordered decisively, as if to feed himself for the rest of the week. Fenton's guest was from the BfV, attached to the embassy, an old hand at counter-terrorism, and a friend of sorts. As was his habit, Fenton set an agenda. He was confused, he admitted, and in search of enlightenment. The Foreign Office preached appeasement of Iran, the Israelis demanded they be beaten with lump hammers, the Islamic movement claimed there was American-inspired unwarranted hostility towards the Muslim world. Where lay the truth?
The German talked and ate, drank and smoked.
"So, you have one of their excrement loose on your territory otherwise it would be sandwiches and Perrier in your office. You wish to know how seriously to take that threat. My government, as you well know because you have leaked your criticisms, has taken a conciliatory attitude towards Iran, has rescheduled debts, has given out visas, has pushed for stronger trade links, and has still provided the venue for Iranian assassins to meet their targets. It won us nothing, so we have considerable experience of their tactics. That is what I should talk about our experience of their murder tactics?"
A heaped plate of antipasti was followed by a wide, filled bowl of pasta with fungi. The German left his cigarette burning. The smoke made Fenton's eyes smart.
"They aim to be near, to kill at close quarters. But the beginning the beginning is from the top in Tehran, from the peak of government, and the authorization for the allocation of hard-currency funding and the provision of weapons through diplomatic pouches. A trusted man is appointed and he will be backed by local sympathizers, but he takes the responsibility for success or failure. He will have no contact point with his embassy, there is the creed of deniability. He will not be helped by diplomats or intelligence officers. Our experience is that the trusted man is most hard to capture or kill. It is the sympathizers who reconnoitre and drive the cars who sit in our prison cells. It is a great triumph to take or eliminate the trusted man if you can do that, you will have my sincerest congratulations."
When the steak was brought, the German took the majority of the vegetables, the greater part of the potatoes, and lit another cigarette.
"What is he like the trusted man? I tell you, very frankly, he is the same as the people in our Rote Armee Faktion, the same as the people in your Irish groups. The less you know of him, the more impressive you will believe him to be. Our ignorance lifts his reputation. He is dedicated, fanatical, he is skilled, he is prepared for martyrdom, he is elusive that is what ignorance tells us."
The German chose ice-cream with pistachio flavouring, and asked the waiter to bring a double portion.
"But I have seen them, I have interrogated them. I have been with them in the cells and explained with politeness that the rantings of their government and the shouting mobs outside our legation compound in Tehran will not affect the length of a prison sentence. I have talked with those men of the Bundesgrenzshutz who have dragged them from cars at gunpoint, spreadeagled them on the road, laughed about shooting off their testicles. The trusted man, then, is the same as you, or me. You know, at Fustenfeldbruck, at the airbase, at the time of the Olympic Games, we killed five of the Palestinians of Black September, and three surrendered. Did they then wish to die, go to the Garden of Paradise? Did they hell! They knelt and wept for mercy. When the Italians, our esteemed friends, eventually capture a capo of the Mafia, he is the same. He has been a killer on a grand scale, perhaps murdered a hundred men and consigned their corpses to the Gulf of Palermo or acid vats or concrete construction pillars, but when he is arrested, when he faces the guns, he fouls his trousers. They are very human invincible when free, pathetic when taken. You should not be intimidated by the trusted man."
Espresso coffee was brought, and small chocolates. The Germar~ cleared them, and stubbed out a cigarette in the saucer.
"Perhaps, when they leave their country, when the mullah's words are still fresh, they believe they are a sword of Islam, a soldier of the faith. My experience, they forget… So soon they are like all the other killers. They are, I believe, addicted to excitement, adrenaline is their narcotic. I said to you that they wished to be close, to see the fear in their victim's eyes, so they will try to use a knife to cut a throat, or a handgun from a metre. They are disturbed people and they will not gain the same excitement from a bomb or from a rocket attack. The bomb and the rocket are the last option, but will not provide the same excitement. If you take this trusted man, go into his cell, try to talk with him. Then I believe you will be sincerely disappointed at what you find."
When the wine was finished, they drank brandy. Fenton had the cigar box brought for him.
"He will be a lonely man. He will seek the admiration of the sympathizers, but will not share with them. He will have the paranoia of the isolated. He is nauseatingly sentimental. Above everything, he will seek praise, always he will want that praise… I think, also, he wants the body of a servile woman, not an equal because that would frighten him. What is most dangerous about him, he is terrorized by the thought of failure he wants to go home, of course he does, but to praise and adulation. I think, to a psychologist, he is a rather tedious, pitiful figure. Let me know what you find."
They left the table, eased into their coats.
On the pavement, the German caught Fenton's arm and whispered close in his ear, through a fog of cigar fumes.
"But hear me. Ali Fellahian, who controls the trusted men, who sanctions their journeys, was invited by my superiors to visit us. For some of us it was a shameful day in the history of our Service to play host to a criminal, and our lips bled because we bit so hard on them to maintain our composure. He took our hospitality and he threatened us. We were left with no area for misunderstanding the economic and diplomatic consequences of publicizing the activities of his killers on our territory. Should you destroy or capture this piece of excrement now bothering you, you should consider very carefully the implications of triumphalist statements… A wonderful meal we should do it more often."
Fenton took a taxi back to Thames House.
Cox was poring over a leave chart, but pushed it away.
Yes, Fenton told him, lunch had provided a most valuable opportunity to quiz a distinguished German anti-terrorist officer. He had gained a good insight into the mind of their enemy. But how much further forward were they? Fenton gazed at the ceiling and found no relief there.
"What worries me, whichever way we jump will be the wrong way."
"I did hear you, Harry, unless my ears deceived me, take responsibility…"
At the nearest point the bird was a hundred metres from his cover, at the furthest it was two hundred metres. It was a hunter, and quartered the stretch of water and reed-bed between. The sight of it made him lose the ache in his hip. Through his care, the bird could fly, could hunt… Many times, in the Haur-al-Hawizeh and off the Faw peninsula, he had watched these birds flying overhead. When they flew, hunted, had no sense of danger, he knew no enemy approached him. The pain in his hip was lessening, and he thought that by the next morning he would have regained his mobility and be strong enough to go back for his target.
The bird flew in long, slow lines, still handicapped but able enough, glided, the gold and brown of its neck bent to study the land below and it dived. In a sudden moment, the wide wings were tucked in, and the bird fell. When it came up, flapping hard for height, he saw the flailing legs of the prey, held in a talon's grip. The bird, the wild creature, came back to him and set down on the grass in front of his cover. He saw the last writhing movements of the frog as the curved beak hacked at it. The bird ripped at the frog's carcass until only scraps were left.
In the life of Farida Yasmin, no one had ever told her she was importaut.
With her guidebook to the village and the neighbourhood around it, she had sat on the bench, read it and reread it, then read it again so that the words danced on the pages and no longer had meaning.
No one had ever told her she was valued.
From the bench she had walked to the beach and gazed out at the sea. She had been alone on the sand and shingle, and had seen the faraway boats that hugged the horizon line. The next day, or the day after, the next night, or the night after that, far further down the coast, the tanker would divert towards the shore and a small boat would run from it, would collect him. She would be left behind, abandoned.
She had walked through the village, as far as the church, then turned and retraced her steps and come back past the pub, the hall, and the shop where she had bought postcards that would never be sent and a salad-filled bread roll, and the green. She had stood on the far side of the green, the guidebook opened, and looked around her.
She saw the cars come and go from the house. She saw the detective at the door, and the armed police, huge men in their bulging vests. She watched the pattern of their day. Earlier, the detective had run from the house and had spoken with a priest. She couldn't hear what was said, but the body language was of rejection. She noted the camera above the door at the house, and believed as the afternoon darkened that she saw the red wink-light of a sensor… She wanted his body under her, in the position she had seen on television films. She wanted to ride over him, dominate him, and hear him cry out that she was important, valued, essential and critical, as no one had ever done. Before he went off the beach into the small boat and out to sea to board the tanker, she wanted the memory of it. What would happen to her then, afterwards?
No one had ever told her that she was loved.
Not her father, the bastard, and not her mother, the bitch. Not the kids at school or at college or at any time afterwards. Love was the black hole, without a bottom, without light, in her life. From the bench she saw the villagers coming on foot and by bicycle and in cars, as the afternoon faded, to the hall. Ordinary people, and they didn't seem to notice her sitting on the bench with the opened guidebook, ordinary people who ignored her. She stood, stretched, wiped the rainwater off her forehead and shook it from her shoulders. The lights of the pub were on, the first cars were scraping the gravel, and there was the first laughter. She wondered how long it would be before the ordinary people, gathering in the pub and the hall, knew her name and her importance.
She went away from the house. She thought she'd seen his shadow pass the window, and she determined that she would be there to witness it when the rocket was fired. She drifted slowly up the road towards the side lane near the church where her car was parked.
"I've said all I want to say about her, and that's too much. She's never coming back here again. If she showed up at the door, I'd slam it in her face too right I would…"
Cathy Parker watched him. She leaned against the kitchen door as Bill Jones stamped out into the narrow hall for his coat and his train driver's satchel. He was a big man, two stones overweight, and she thought it was the blood pressure that reddened his face when he spoke of his daughter. The last thing he did, before glowering at her and barging out of the front door, was to hook a football scarf round his neck. He went out to drive a train from Derby to Newcastle, and back. Cathy Parker's own parents had wanted her to be a pretty and feminine girl, and she'd fought hard against it; Bill Jones would have wanted his daughter to be a boy, with him at home matches, sitting alongside him in the workingmen's club, following him into train driving.
"What's she done with her life? She's screwed it, and now she's screwing us."
Annie Jones was a small woman, grimly thin in face and body, with prematurely greying hair. She hadn't spoken while her husband had badmouthed their daughter, and Cathy didn't think she'd have spoken when the detectives had come to the house to search through the few personal things that Gladys Eva Jones had left there before the links were cut. Cathy made a pot of tea while the mother sat at the kitchen table. She had no difficulty in drawing the woman out: it was a skill that went with her job.
"We tried to love her but, God knows, it wasn't easy. She didn't want for anything we haven't money, but we gave her what we could. It didn't satisfy her. You see, Miss Parker, we were never good enough for her, and nor was anyone else round here. She went to the university Bill won't admit it, but he was proud. She was the only kid in the street that had got to university. I thought if she hadn't friends here she'd find them there. Perhaps the people she met there weren't good enough either. The few times she came back, the first year away, I could see how lonely she was. There's not much here, but you don't have to be lonely, not if you'll muck in. Gladys wouldn't do that, nor at the university neither. I think she was always pushing for more control of people, but it was so obvious that they didn't want to know her. It's not nice to say this about your daughter, but she's a stuck-up bitch. Bill can't talk to her, but it's the same for me. I tried but she never came near to half-way to meet me. Then she went into that religious thing. She came back once after she'd joined them. Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against foreigners having their own religion, but it wasn't right for her. She came back in her robes, her face half covered, and some of the kids in the street gave her some lip. She's not been back since. Do you know where she is now? Do you know what she's doing? She's in real trouble now, isn't she? Or you wouldn't have been here and the detectives wouldn't have come. She wants to belong somewhere special, wants control, wants people to talk about her. Is she going to get hurt? Please, Miss Parker, try to see she doesn't get hurt."
Cathy left her sitting at the kitchen table, staring out of the window above the sink at the song-birds wheeling around the hanging sack of nuts.
Once, on a course with the German GSG9 anti-terrorist unit, she'd heard an instructor bark at the recruits about to practise a storm entry to a building, "Shoot the women first."
She drove away from the mean little street, headed for the motorway and London. The instructor had said that the women were always more dangerous than the men, more likely to reach for a weapon in the last critical seconds of their lives when there was no hope of survival.
She was wondering whether Farida Yasmin was a help to the Iranian, or a liability.
Cathy thought of the girl, confused and willing, blundering forward with the man. Farida Yasmin craved a little spot where the sun shone on her, but Cathy didn't think she'd find it. A talent of Cathy's was to make instant assessments of the people she investigated: Farida Yasmin was unimportant and she would write only the briefest of reports on her visit; the girl was a loser. But there was nothing she could do to prevent her being hurt, and she felt quite sad.
She knew about loneliness.
"If we don't make it it will be the fault of all these wretched boxes. But thank you for the thought. Luisa and I have always been interested in wildlife."
Simon Blackmore went back to his wife in the kitchen. They had been washing the plates, cups, mugs, saucers that had been wrapped in newspaper by the packers. The man at the door had said his name was Paul, that he was on the parish council, that he was the man to fix any little difficulties confronting them, was always pleased to smooth the way for new arrivals. He'd told them there was a meeting in the hall that evening of the Wildlife Group, with a talk on migration from a warden of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Then, he'd asked whether Luisa typed, and had explained how the group had lost its typist: "The most selfish people I've ever known here, and I was born in the village. The worst sort of in comers The sort of people who don't give a damn for the safety of those they live among." Simon Blackmore had seen the way that the man had looked at his wife's wrists, at the slash scars across the veins.
"What you're being offered, Geoff, sweetheart, is 63 per cent more than you're getting now. It's fantastic. On top of that there's the inhouse bonus scheme, the private medical thing, there's guaranteed three-star minimum accommodation when you're working out of London, business-class flights into Europe. You'll be on at least double the pittance you're getting now at the end of the day. Your pay at the moment is actually insulting, they don't deserve people like you. The sooner you're gone, the better. Get your letter in straight away. Write it tonight. I stopped off in the travel agent's on the way from your place. They said Mauritius or the Seychelles are great I'm talking honeymoons, sweetheart. As soon as you're back from that dump tomorrow, day after tomorrow? let's get tramping round some property. Call me. Love you."
Geoff Markham heard her blow kisses down the telephone, and cut the call. His mind was too distracted to make the calculation of a 63 per cent increment on his existing salary. He was thinking of the young man out at the rim of the reed-beds, and of the firm certainty of his gaze, watching the marshlands.
"And him, too." Frank Perry stood by the telephone in the kitchen.
"Gutless bastard." He stood by the telephone and read the lengthening list of scratched-out names.
Bill Davies shrugged.
"I suppose I shouldn't have done that, cut him off your list sorry."
"I don't go to church, can't bear listening to his dreary sermons."
"I just thought, given the circumstances I thought it would help if he showed support."
Perry turned to the detective. He was beaten down, grey-faced. The hand resting on Davies's shoulder shook as it grasped at the jacket, held tight to it.
"Was I out of order last night?"
"Not for me to comment."
"I can just take it. Meryl can't. She's drowning. One more thing, one more, another bit of chaos, she'll go under. How long?"
"I'm not supposed to talk tactics or strategy."
"Bill, please."
The detective thought his principal was close to defeat and that was not the policy. He'd done them all: he had stood with the Glock on his hip beside cabinet big-shots and foreign leaders and turned IRA informers, and he had never felt any sense of involvement. He thought that whatever he said would go back to Meryl Perry.
"There's a fair bit going on, don't ask me what. We're beefed up, most of which you won't see. It was said at the beginning that our
Tango couldn't last hostile ground, lack of resources, your location more than a week."
"What day are we?"
"We're at Day Five."
A tired nervy smile played at Perry's mouth. What's the Al Haig story?"
Davies laughed out loud, as if the tension were lifted.
"Monday, right? Getting to the end of bloody Monday. It's appropriate… United States Army General Al Haig was in Belgium on a NATO visit. The sort of trip where there are convoys of limousines about a half a mile long. A security nightmare. The convoy's hammering along a main route of course, the search teams have worked over it. But they missed a culvert. In the culvert was a bomb; handiwork of a leftist anti-American faction. The detonation was a fraction late and, anyway, it malfunctioned. The car, armour-plated, didn't take the full force, kept on going, and the escorts. In the culvert had been enough explosive to bounce Haig's car right off the road and make a crater fish could have lived in. Al Haig said, "I guess that if we can get through Monday then we can survive the rest of the week." It's about hanging on in there. We've about got through Monday, Mr. Perry."
"I can hold her for two more days if nothing else breaks her first."
It was the end of the day, and the quiet was all around him. The bird sky danced displaying for him its regained flying skills.
But there was the quiet.
He no longer watched the bird, no longer took pleasure from the extravagance of its flight. He watched the geese and the swans, the ducks and the wheeling gulls, and he looked for a sign, the quiet playing in his ears.
They did not stampede, they did not skim the water with flailed wings to take off in panic, they did not shriek as they would when disturbed. They were quiet, as if they were warned.
Vahid Hossein could see the positions of the policemen on the far side of the marsh, on the higher ground. He had no fear of them. He knew where they were. They would have thought they were still unnoticed, but he saw each movement of their bodies as their legs, backs, hips, shoulders stiffened and they shifted their bodies for relief… There had been an Iraqi sniper on the Jasmin Canal who used the SVD Dragunov 7.62-calibre rifle with an effective range of 1,300 metres. He was never seen, and he had shot eighteen men in three weeks. A prisoner had said afterwards that a mortar's shrapnel had hit him as he went to his firing position on the banks of the canal in the early morning. It was luck that a random shell had killed him. The birds on the Jasmin Canal were always quiet in the hours before the sniper fired. He sensed the presence of a watcher. He felt a new atmosphere. He believed himself now and he had only the evidence of the quiet to be challenged. A slight frown of apprehension had settled on his forehead. At the fall of the day, as the wind quickened and trembled the reed-heads, he made his plan to go into the water, away from the bank, towards the place he had seen yesterday deep in the beds of old gold reeds and near to the central water channel.
He could not see the watcher, could only sense the new quiet that had settled around him.