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 of 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 infiltrate. 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.
He'd sat the Civil Service examination, done adequately, and been called to a shapeless interview in an anonymous London building. His parents had been told by the neighbours, murmured over the garden fence and in their street, that they'd been asked questions about young Geoff. No skeletons had been found in the positive vetting because there weren't any. He'd been accepted. He had done three years, as a probationer and dog's body, of excruciating boredom in front of computer screens, with occasional days for surveillance training and tracking East-bloc trade attaches across London; everyone said it would get better when the probation time was completed. Three years of similar frustration on the Russia Desk, but the Cold War was over and the team had the lethargy of yesterday's crisis; everyone said it would improve when he was transferred to Ireland. Three years in Belfast had turned up interesting and occasionally frightening work; everyone said he should wait for promotion. He'd come back from Ireland and been put on the Islamic Desk, and in London his salary chit seemed to go less far every month.
Islamic Desk was hardly the stuff of Defence of the Realm, and ran a poor third to the obsession with Ireland and the East European culture. He'd met Vicky. Vicky and he were engaged, and she'd found the advertisement in the newspaper and urged him to go for it. He hadn't yet faced up to the big problem of when to tell his parents that he wanted to jack in the Security Service and go for a life in the uncertain world of finance. They were so pathetically proud of what he did because he never told them about mediocrity and paper-pushing. It would have been cruel to disillusion them, tell them that nothing he did mattered or affected an individual's life. He could recognize the change in himself since he'd applied for the job. He was spar kier and more daring, and quite prepared to ask the blunt questions that raised Fenton's eyebrow.
"If it's any business of yours, I'll be in my room arranging lunch dates I'll scalp you if there isn't a full transcript… Remember what I said, young man, about us going into an area of unpredictability. It's looking like it might be a good deal worse than that."
The great leviathan shape of the tanker, monstrous in the thinning mist, crossed at right angles ahead of the course of the ferry. It was huge against the size of the closing car ferry. She glanced at it, saw it merge again into the mist wall, then turned away. From the cross-Channel ferry, Charmaine, disappointed by another romantic cul-de-sac, pointed at the speck in the sky.
The bird flew low over the churning mass of the sea, only just beyond the white whip of the ferry's bow wave.
The unsuitable object of her imagined affection shrugged.
"Just a bloody bird what's special about that fucking thing? Come on, come on back down…"
"Piss off," she said, and turned to watch the bird.
Its wing-beat should have been perfect in its symmetry. Charmaine watched it through a film of tears. Its right wing rose and fell in a tired and flailing way, and the left wing flapped harder as if to compensate. She was on a high deck, where she'd hoped the amour would not find her, and the line of the bird's flight was beneath her. She did not understand how the crippled bird had the strength to make the great sea crossing.
It was down near the breaking crests and the spume of the bow wave. The bird dropped and the talons, startled and outstretched, would have splashed and skimmed the water. She heard its agony cry, and saw the frantic effort to climb again, to survive. She did not believe it could make the landfall. If it fell again, if the water covered its wings… She wept uncontrollably. The ferry sailed on, fast, and the bird, even when she screwed her eyes to see it, was lost in the bank wall of the mist.
"Stop."
The driver braked, then crawled forward again.
"Do it. Stop. Stop the car."
The eyes of the driver flickered uncertainly, as if an illegality was demanded of him. But he had worked nine years for Duane Littelbaum and knew better than to question. He stamped again on the brake pedal, then coasted the Jeep to the kerb. They were on AlImam Torki Jbn Abdulla Street.
"Don't look where I look, Mary-Ellen. Take a point in the other direction, fix on it. Don't look."
Out of her window, she took a point as instructed: the telephone office at the far end of Al-Dhahirah Street. He kept his eyes on the square between the central mosque, the Palace of Justice, the big souvenir shop and the mud-brick Masmak fortress. All the old embassy hands called it Chop-chop Square.
There was a good-sized crowd. Word would have spread fast. It was never announced first, but the sight of men bringing out plastic bags of sawdust was enough to gather a crowd. He had seen the man pitched out of the back of the closed van. He recognized the prisoner, and the colonel beside him. He doubted that his ambassador had made the promised telephone calls, or had bothered to pull rank. In the long distance he saw the drawn, frightened eyes of the prisoner, and the easy stride of the colonel as if he were going to a picnic lunch on the beach. It was the square where the crowds had gathered to see the beheading of the Princess Mishaal, and of some of those fanatics captured after they had invaded the Grand Mosque at Mecca. It was where they beheaded Yemeni thieves, Pakistani rapists and Afghan drug-dealers.
He lost sight of the prisoner behind the wall of heads and with him went the last chance to put a name and a face to the footprints. They would never understand in the Hoover building, the assistant directors who flew to Saudi Arabia not more than twice a year, and the desk analysts who never left DC, why co-operation was denied him. He dictated reports, endlessly, that were typed up by Mary Ellen cataloguing the Saudi deceit and vanity that denied him co-operation. On Mary-Ellen's insistence, they had gone to buy new shirts, which now lay wrapped in paper on the floor of the Jeep, between his shoes. He saw a television camera held up to get a better view over the heads of the sword. The sword-point would prick the base of the man's spine and the instant reflex of the man would be to extend his neck. He saw the flash of light, the rakban held high, before it fell. He heard the soft groan of many voices before the crowd began to thin, and then the corpse was dragged away. Another man carried the head by the hair. They would have had a confession and it would lie in a file; the bastards would play their dignity and not share. Sawdust from a plastic bag was scattered.
He told Mary-Ellen that she no longer needed to look at the telephone office and instructed the driver to head on back to the embassy.
There was a message on his fax requesting his availability for a secure hook-up. He glanced at it, felt nothing. Littelbaum had only old footprints to follow.
She broke the quiet. She threw back her head, and the auburn of her hair flashed. She threw a stone, savagely, ahead of her towards the tide-line.
"Who are you?"
"I am, will be, Frank Perry. You never met Gavin Hughes. This time, I am not running."
"What did they say?"
She stared in front of her. Her eyes were red-rimmed. She allowed him to take her limp hand.
"For what I did, the consequence of my actions, the Iranians would kill Gavin Hughes. He disappeared, ceased to exist. A new name, a new identity, a new home. He would have been hunted, but the trails had dried out, were lost. I am not trusted enough to be told how the Iranians found my new name. What I was told if the Iranians have the name then in probability they've the location where I live. The men who came yesterday wanted me to move out, offered me a removal van, said I quote the words "There is evidence of danger." But, I'm not doing it again, not running. This is my home, where you are, and our friends. I don't have the strength for more lies. I am staying… It's like I've drawn a line in the sand."
"But they're experts. They're policemen or intelligence people. Don't they know what's best?"
"What's convenient, that's what they know, what's cheapest and simplest for them."
"And you're right, and all their experience is wrong, is that what you're saying?"
"All they've done is send me a book about being sensible. It's not that bad or they'd have done more. I know these people, you don't. They look for an easy ride…"
"And me?"
"I don't know what it means, saying that I will stay, for you or Stephen. I do know it's better than running. I've done that."
"It hurts that you kept the truth from me."
"For fear of losing you…"
The sea was grey dark in front of them. The gulls hovered over them, screaming. Her grip on his hand tightened, and their fingers locked together. and I told them what was owed me."
Once before, he had asked for what he said was owed him. Nine months after they had cut him off, three months before he had met Meryl, exhausted by the loneliness of his life, he had taken the train from Croydon to central London, and walked along the river to the monolith building at Vauxhall Bridge Cross. He had reached the gate, been stopped at the glass window of the outer reception building, and he'd asked to see Ms Penny Flowers. Did he have an appointment? He did not. Did he know that it was not possible to come off the street and ask to see an officer? He did not. He'd been told there was no procedure for such a visit. He'd said, "Do you want me to sit down here till you call Ms Flowers? Do you want to call the police and have them cart me off, and me tell them what I did and what I want?" The call had been made from the reception desk, and inside ten minutes she'd been there.
She was slighter than he'd remembered her, and had seemed older than in the heady days when she'd bought him drinks and meals and made him feel that he mattered. She'd taken him to an interview room, and sat him down, and brought him a beaker of coffee, and looked at him with distaste. What did he want? He wanted to belong. Did he want more money? He didn't want money, but to feel that he was a part of something.
Did he want a job found for him? He didn't want to be found a job, but to feel some pride in what he'd done. She'd looked at him across the surface of the plastic-topped table and said, "You don't belong with us, Mr. Perry. You are not a part of us and never will be. On any given day there are, on our books, fifty men like you, and when they've outlived their usefulness, we forget them. You're past history, Mr. Perry." She'd shown him the door and told him that she didn't expect to see him or hear of him again, and he'd walked out into the winter sunshine the better for the crisp six-minute exchange.
He'd shrugged his shoulders, straightened his back and strode away. He had broken the link and believed his dependence on them was cut. He'd taken the train back to Croydon and reached the library in time to start his first trawl through the engineering magazines on the shelves. Turning the pages of advertisements, his mind had raced with opportunities and plans for a new life. For what he'd done, they owed him that new life, which her rejection had sparked.
Her eyes were closed. His fingers played with the ring he had given her. He did not know what more he could say, and he waited for her to tell him whether she would go or whether she would stay.
Classification: SECRET Date: 31 March 1998 Subject: Gavin HUGHES (UK national) assumed identity of Frank PERRY 2/94.
Transcript of telephone conversation (secure) between GM, G Branch, and Duane Littelbaum, FBI Riyadh.
GM: Hello, can I speak please to Mr. Duane Littelbaum?
DL: This is he.
GM: This is Geoffrey Markham, G Branch of the British Security Service.
DL: Pleased to talk to you, Mr. Markham. How can I be of help? GM: You produced the name of Frank Perry I'm sure you're a busy man, I won't go off on sidetracks.
DL: Sometimes busy, sometimes not so busy, I've all the time you want. Correct, I found the name of Frank Perry on a sheet of paper, burned… We had a raid down in the Empty Quarter. We got less than I'd hoped for. I sent the burned pieces of paper to our Quantico lab not that anyone's had the courtesy to come back to me in two months… Sorry, I'm griping, it's that sort of day. Is Frank Perry yours?
GM: When your people had drawn blank on the name it was sent to us. We have a Frank Perry.
DL: You have my attention, Mr. Markham.
GM: Frank Perry is an identity given a man after it was considered his life was under threat from Iranian hit squads. Perry was formerly a British engineering salesman, Gavin Hughes. What I need to know… DL: Come again, that name.
GM: Gavin Hughes.
DL: [Expletive] GM: What I was saying, we are into threat assessment. I need to know where the name was found, in whose possession.
DL: You got him secure of course you have.
GM: Actually, he's at home.
DL: What's his home? Is it Fort Knox? You got his home in a basement at the Tower of London?
GM: We offered to relocate him he refused.
DL: [Expletive] What did you tell him?
GM: He was told that they had his new name, that in probability they would have the location of his present home that they might come after him… DL: [Expletive] Might? [Expletive] GM: Please, explain.
DL: He's coming, he's on his [expletive] way God knows why it's taken him so long. He is a top man, alpha quality. You'd better believe it, he's coming… What have you done for him, for Perry! Hughes? You got a unit of Marines round him? GM: We sent him our Blue Book.
DL: Is that a Bible? Is that a joke?
GM: Not a joke, a sort of Bible. The Blue Book is a guide to personal security, sensible precautions… DL: [Expletive] GM: He should look under his car, vary his routes… The same as in any FBI manual.
DL: The top man there was once a code name for him I heard of in Dhahran, it was, literal translation, the Anvil. My dictionary, that is (open quote) a heavy iron block on which metals are hammered during forging (end quote) it's the entry below Anus it's the same meaning in Saudi Arabic where I've heard it, and has the same meaning in Persian Farsi. The people who go with him, what I've heard, they regard him as indestructible. To me, he's a hard man. Before you ask, Mr. Markham, I don't have his name and I don't have his face. What I have is a pattern of digital calls that we have failed to break into, but from which we get, when the computer is allowed time to work on it, locations. Before each hit he goes to Alamut. It's spiritual for him. He was there just over two weeks ago. That's why I say he's coming. GM: Sorry, what's Alamut?
DL: You know about Vetus de Montania, the Old Man of the Mountain?
GM: Afraid not.
DL: You know about the Fida'is?
GM: No, sorry.
DL: So, you don't know about Raymond the Second of Tripoli, not about Conrad of Montferrat. [Expletivel You don't know what was shown to King Henry of Champagne… It's about Alamut. If you don't know about Alamut, then, my friend, you're lexpletive] with your threat assessment. [Pause] Where are you located, Mr. Markham?
GM: G Branch, Thames House, Millbank, London why? Shorthand is Box