"Well, are you…?"
"God, it's not that simple."
"It's black and white… Are you going?"
"I'm trying to be sensible."
"Are you staying?"
"I said I wasn't going, I said I was staying."
"What, then, is the problem?"
The boy was upstairs. Davies had gone and Blake was in the car outside. They had come home. Perry had told Meryl that the policeman had dropped his gun in the playground. They had been responsible for a moment of blue panic. That was one problem. Davies had come to the front door fifteen minutes later with another problem.
"I want to stay."
"So stay."
"I don't want to go."
"So don't go."
"But I'm not told anything."
"Neither am I."
Davies had stood on the step. She would have seen the technique he used. He stood on the step, his body blocking the open doorway and he had motioned Perry to stand back in the hallway. He had reached forward to the switch and turned off the hall light. Perry had been in the shadow, she behind him, their bodies protected by the policeman's. Davies had told them, calm and businesslike, that again he was offering his apologies for what had happened in the playground and repeated that Mr. Perry was perfectly entitled to request a change in personnel, and Perry had shaken his head.
Then the second problem was explained. Like a doctor at a bedside with a bad diagnosis to deliver, clearly and concisely, Davies had said that there was an upgrade in the threat-assessment level. The property was to be protected by armed uniformed officers, that premises for them would be delivered in the morning, that there would be additional personnel, mobile, assigned to the village. Davies hadn't said it, it was in his face, but they were going up the tough road; the easy road was to pack the suitcases. They had paced around the kitchen and worried at the problem. They had broken off the talk to eat with the boy before sending him upstairs, and starting at it again.
"What do they know?"
"They haven't told me."
"Why haven't they told you?"
"They don't explain. They never explain."
"What does it mean?"
His voice rose.
"If you want to go, go."
"I don't want to go.
"Can we, then, leave it?"
"I'm just frightened. I'm frightened because we can't even talk about it. Is this our best effort at conversation?"
"Everything I know I've told you. Let's drop it."
"What sort of life " "Better than running out of suitcases. It's home. It's our place. It's among our friends. So leave it or go."
He turned on the television. It was a quiz game and the audience bayed encouragement at the contestants going after giveaway money.
Bitterly, Perry wondered how many of them could have answered real questions. Where was Iran? What was the government of Iran? What was WMD? What was the requirement of mixing machines in the programme for the development of chemical-agent warheads, and the requirement in the programme for the development of ballistic missiles? What did they do with a fucking spy in Iran?
The telephone rang. The sound was suppressed by the shrieking of the studio audience. She heard it and jolted, but he didn't stir from his chair. He watched the ecstatic faces of the audience. The telephone rang a long time before she weakened and went to answer it.
She went into the kitchen, and it was silent.
He could not hear her voice.
He hated the game show, the moronic questions, the cacophony of applause.
The curtains were drawn, as the policeman had said they should be. He'd come into the darkened room and groped in the blackness towards the window and drawn the curtains, then groped back towards the standard lamp and switched it on. Before, they would not have drawn the curtains. Only their home tonight would have the curtains drawn. The drawn curtains separated them from the village, their neighbours and friends. Meryl had said that in the morning she would buy the lengths of net from which to make more curtains, and the boy had been told he was not to stand behind windows when the curtains weren't drawn, where he could be seen.
She came back into the room. She was biting her lower lip. She was pale.
She shouted, "Can't you turn that puerile bloody noise off?" He hit the mute button on the remote.
"Who was it?"
"One of your friends."
"Who?"
"Emma Carstairs."
"What did she want?"
She spoke deliberately, but without emotion and without feeling.
"Emma has dropped out of the school-run with us. We won't be taking Sam, she won't be taking Stephen. Emma won't be coming to our house again, and Sam won't. It's dangerous to come to our house, your friend said, and she's not prepared to put Sam at risk."
"That's ridiculous." He pushed himself up from the chair.
"It's what she said."
He blustered, "I'll speak to her, and Barry."
She blocked his way.
"She said she wouldn't speak to you. She said her decision was final. She said that if you rang her back she would put the phone down on you.
"The bloody cow."
"She said…"
"What did she say.
"She said that it was selfish of us to expose others to danger, then she rang off."
"She's the only one, we're popular here, you see.
He heard, beyond the drawn curtain, a car's engine crawl by and wondered if it were the armed police. He felt the same chilly sweat as when he had come off the feeder flight and joined the emigration queue at Tehran for the international leg, as he had shuffled forward a small step at a time, dying to urinate, trying to appear unconcerned. He'd wondered then, as he did now, if the fear showed. The last times the sweat had soaked his shirt under his jacket as he had presented his passport at the desk. Behind the emigration official were always the penetrating eyes of the pasdar men, in their washed-thin uniforms, who leaned forward and stared in suspicion at the offered passport. When it was handed back, there was never a smile, no farewell joke, and he had walked away towards the departure lounge, his legs weak, fearing that they played with him and would let him go a few paces before the shout for him to come back. Each time as he'd slumped into the aircraft seat, before the engines gained power, before the steps were taken away, wondering whether they would allow him to settle before coming on board to heave him off, he'd felt the cold sweat, because he knew the fate of a spy in Iran.
Meryl had gone to the kitchen, and he heard her start to wash up the saucepans.
"Who's the P0?"
"An SB sergeant, Davies."
"He's useless. Who's on the other shift?"
"A DC, Blake."
"Next to useless. Who's in charge?"
"Box 500."
"Totally fucking useless bloody lights, get on through."
Paget was driving the escort car, with Rankin beside him, through heavy traffic into the road junction as the lights changed to red. The prison van they followed had gone on, shouldn't have. The dozy beggar driving it should have checked his mirror, seen whether the escort car was clear to follow, but he hadn't. No bloody option for Paget but to break the red light and follow across the junction. Rankin hit the siren button and the cars coming at them across the junction from right and left were braking and swerving to avoid them, all except one. The car heading straight for them was a battered old Cavalier with a toothy, grey-haired black at the wheel. They were two, three seconds from a disabling, side-on collision.
Rankin had his window down, the siren scream in his ears, and the H amp;K up. The gun was racked, bullet in the breach, and Rankin's thumb was resting on the lever at safe. As the escort team, they should have been right up behind the prison van. The guy in it was important, a drugs supplier and a bad bastard, on the daily run between the Old Bailey and the Brixton gaol remand block. He had the contacts and cash resources to buy a rescue bid, which was why armed police escorted him each day from his cell to the court and back. The bullet was in the breach, Paget and Rankin were not there for the ride, and they knew it.
The old Cavalier was coming right for them, on target for the driver's door. If the bad bastard had bought a rescue, the copper-bottomed certainty was that the armed escort car would be isolated and rammed, taken out. Rankin was close enough to see, through the Cavalier's grimy windscreen, the gold teeth in the black's wide open mouth and the big mahogany eyes. Rankin's aim, held steady in the swaying escort car, was on the black's forehead. His thumb hardened on the safe lever.
If he shot to kill the law was bloody vague. Section 3 of the Criminal Law Act, 1967, would back him if it were a genuine escape attempt and crucify him if it was only a traffic accident. They were on collision course and closing, and Paget was wrenching the wheel to avoid the old Cavalier, might succeed, might not. It'd take Rankin about half a second to depress the lever from safe and put a double tap, two bullets, through the man's forehead. He'd get a commendation if it was a rescue bid and a murder charge if it was not..~ And they were through, the junction cleared. Paget was ~~celeratmg like a mad idiot, wrong side of the road, to get back up behind the prison van, and in their wake, the old Cavalier had careered into a traffic bollard. The H amp;K was back on Rankin's lap.
"Where were we, Joe?"
No fast breathing, no taut hands, like it was a weekend run-out with the wife.
"We were on about who was in charge, Dave Box "What I said, totally fucking useless. Who's the principal?"
"Civilian, ordinary, an obstinate sod because they offered him the chance to bug out and he wouldn't."
"What's the opposition?"
'fran -he's up the mullahs~ noses.~ "That's bloody choice, that's not clever. When do we get there?"
"Go down tonight, recce, take over in the morning from the half-arsed locals."
They had left a minor traffic accident behind them and were comfortably cosied up behind the prison van. Constables Joseph Paget and David Rankin were a team and inseparable. The driver, Paget, was a toadlike man, short and squat, bald with a thick Zapata moustache, and he had been changing the oil, checking the tyre pressures and vale ting the interior during the long wait at the court, while his colleague had been given the new assignment's briefing. With the H amp;K resting loose on his thighs, Rankin was a wafer-thin willow of a man with a brush of cropped dark hair, the smooth-skinned complexion of a child, and a moustache identical to his colleague's. Anyone meeting them for the first time and noting their language and gait would have believed they made conscious efforts to ape each other. They were both forty-nine years old, lived in adjacent streets in north London, went on holiday together with their wives, and grumbled with each other like a married couple. They would retire on the same day. Both Joe Paget and Dave Rankin were considered expert marksmen. But they'd never done it. Been on the courses, been endlessly on the range, been on every exercise, but never actually done it. For all of their training and with a combined total of thirty-two years' service with firearms, neither had fired for real.
They saw the prison van go through the big gates of the gaol, and swung away.
They stopped at a news agent and Paget went in. He bought three books of crossword puzzles, some soft-drink cans and two packets of sandwiches.
When he had come back up from the canteen and his supper, but before he went to Fenton's room to collect the American, Geoff Markham took a single sheet of white paper and the roll of Sellotape from his desk. He fastened the paper to the outer face of his door, then scrawled on it, with a black marker pen, DAY ONE. The FBI man had said it would be over within a week. It was near to the end of the first day.
The American had gone off with Markham, and the fax purred on. to Fenton's machine. He thought of Markham, like a worrying dog at the heels of a sheep as he'd rounded up the American, made sure he had his coat, gently chided him for fastening the buttons of his waistcoat out of kilter and done them correctly himself. Sheep were stupid and wilful, a bloody nuisance, and necessary… He read the fax from Special Branch operations.
Incredible, an eighth wonder, remarkable. SB had done a deal with the local force. Must have been the angle of the moon, or some such crap, for SB and a local force to have done a deal. He would have predicted an on-going, entertaining dispute. SB would provide the close-protection detail and had liaised with 5019 of Scotland Yard for a static uniformed presence. The local force would offer armed vehicles to watch the single road into the godforsaken dead end and to cruise the area.
There was, had to be, a little scorpion's sting. At the tail of the message: "SB, on own behalf and that of local force, will negotiate with Security Service for budget funding during operation concerning Juliet Seven, with view to reimbursement of expendihire." It was the bare, basic level for protection, and it would cost a goddamn fortune, and the resources bucket was not bottomless. He pondered how to limit the extent of the commitment. He put on his coat, picked up his briefcase and switched off the light in his room.
The budget ruled his life and would until the day he filed his application to join the Portcullis Society, until he joined the rest of yesterday's spooks at the Christmas reunion, reminiscing and carping about days gone by. The commitment could not be endless, and he cursed the bloody obstinate fool who had refused a most reasonable offer of help in moving on.
As if with a sudden afterthought, Fenton went back into his darkened room and dialled the home number of their duty solicitor.
"Harry here, G Section, sorry to, call you this late, Francis. Can I just run this past you? We have a man who we consider to be an assassination target. We've suggested he disappears and we've offered the means to do that. He won't take our advice, says he's staying where he is. Does the law provide us with powers to remove him forcibly from his domicile, against his will, and place him in protective custody?… I see… Assault, civil liberties, yes… Not on, eh?… It's just that these things are so bloody expensive. Thanks for your time, Francis, and regards to Alison…"
When he crossed the silent, deserted work area, Fenton saw the sheet of paper fastened to young Markham's door. DAY ONE.
There had to be a containment on the commitment or the operation would bleed his section dry. He went out into the night.
He had walked quickly along the hedgerows and into what the map called Sixteen-acre Wood and, from the safety of the trees, watched her drive away. With his back against a big trunk, Vahid Hossein used the last light of the day to study and memorize the map.
When darkness came, and he could no longer see the trellised patterns of the upper branches, he had again moved forward.
The map was in his mind. He took a length of dead branch from the ground, and used it as a blind man would. He had friends who were blinded in the marshes by mustard-gas shells, and he used the stick in the darkness as they used their white wands in daylight. The stick told him where were the desiccated lengths of wood that he could have stepped on, broken, left a trail. He walked carefully from Sixteen-acre Wood into Big Wood, then on to Common Wood. From Common Wood he skirted open fields and then he sheltered by a road, and watched and waited and listened. The caution was instinctive. He had crossed the road and passed what the map called a tumulus but did not know what the word meant, and then he slipped into Fen Covert.
It was in Fen Covert that he first smelt the salt of the sea, and that he first heard the screaming.
The smell was soft, the same as the tang off the Shatt-al-Arab waterway and at the Faw peninsula. Then the screaming had come again.
At the Shatt-al-Arab and the Faw, when the salt scent had been in his nose, he had heard the screaming of a man wounded or gassed and left behind in the retreat. It had been his duty, then, inescapable, to go back into the marshes to find a man with a shrapnel-severed leg or with the gas droplets on his skin and in his eyes. He moved towards Fen Hill, cat-like and quiet, where the scent was stronger and the screaming louder. Ahead of him, dappled by thin moonlight, was the open expanse called Southmarsh on the map.
At the slight slope of Fen Hill he angered himself. His mind had been on the scent and the screaming, and on the ribbon of lights that he estimated to be three kilometres away, when he set up a pheasant. If he had been among the marsh reeds of the Shatt-al Arab or the Faw, he would have given his enemy his position. It would have been a fatal error. He stopped, and stood motionless against a tree-trunk so that his body made no silhouette, smelling the sea and listening to the screaming.
The distant sound of a car's horn, among the ribbon of lights, carried over the Southmarsh.
He found the rabbit, its throat caught by a snare. He did not use his torch, but felt it first with his stick and then with his hand. His fingers brushed the fur of the animal's back and then came to the restraining wire. The movement of his fingers, caressing it, had quietened the terror of the rabbit. He held it by the fur at its neck and loosened the fine wire. He could not see it, could only sense it hanging supine from his grip.
Because of his mistake in disturbing the pheasant, his anger and self-criticism, he felt a need to reassure himself. He killed the rabbit with a chop from the heel of his hand against its neck, one blow. He reset the snare and covered the ground where his feet had been with loose brushwood because at first light someone would come to check the snare. He pocketed the rabbit, dead and warm, and moved on.
He came to rest in the heart of a thick tangle of bramble on the edge of Foxhole Covert. Not for hunger, but to purge himself of his mistake, he tore a leg from the rabbit carcass, pulled the skin from it, and ate it. He chewed on the raw sweet meat. It was important to him to feel no revulsion, to be strong. He chewed at the leg until his teeth scraped on the bone, then put the carcass beside him and the cleaned bone, and wiped the blood from his mouth. The act of killing and the eating gave him strength.
The sausage bag was beside him. Through the bramble branches he saw the close-set lights across the Southmarsh. He had the photograph of the house and the man. His hand, stained with the rabbit's blood, rested on the bag and sometimes found the shape of the launcher and sometimes the outline of the automatic rifle. He thought that it would be as easy for him to kill the man as it had been to chop the rabbit's neck and eat its leg.
He tried, lying on his back in the silence, to think of his wife, Barzin, and of the home that they shared, and of the rooms they had decorated and of the possessions they had gathered together, and of the shy, darkened love between them, but the bare thighs of the girl in the car intruded and disturbed him. He could not shake from his mind the white skin of the girl and the outline of her breasts. Vahid Hossein tried, but he could not.
The bell rang three times.
Meryl said she would answer it. She said coldly that she didn't want to see him cowering in the shadow of the unit hallway again when the door was opened. The detectives had said they'd use three short blasts on the bell when they wanted entry to the house.
Blake was at the door and seemed surprised that she opened it. His face fell a little when he saw her. She thought he would be one of those creatures who expected only to deal with the man of the house. Blake said, fumbling for the words, that there were more personnel down from London, uniformed, armed and static, and that they needed to look over the house. She thought him supercilious. He did not ask whether it was convenient, but stood aside for them as they came out of the darkness. They shouldered past her, as if she did not exist, and pushed the door shut behind them.
Frank stood in the living-room doorway. She heard the names they gave him, Paget and Rankin. She grimaced, a bitter little smile, because neither asked Frank if it suited him, just said that they needed to walk round the house, look it over. They went together, as if there was an umbilical cord between them.
They wore blue-black overalls and webbing belts, on which were holsters and weapons and what she thought were gas canisters, ammunition pouches and handcuffs. When they had been waiting for her to answer the bell, they must have been in the mud at the side of the road and the green, and their boots smeared it over her carpet. They seemed not to notice. They looked around the living room, at her furniture and her ornaments, as if they were all dross, and the glass cabinet where she put the china pieces she'd collected, and the pictures of the seashore, prints, by the local artist that Frank had bought. She strained to hear the murmur of their voices.
"Have to get it taped up, Joe."
"Too right, Dave, nothing worse than glass cabinets."
"Have to get the pictures down."
"What you think of where the television is?"
"Not happy, should be back against the wall, right back."
"Shouldn't Davies have done this?"
"Should have, didn't."
"Pillock – I don't like all the stuff on the fireplace."
"Quite right. Let's do the windows."
The tall one, Rankin, went to the standard lamp and switched it off. She stood in the darkness and could sense the rising impatience of Frank beside her, could hear the sharp spurts of his breath. The curtains were pulled back. A faint glow eased into the room from the street-lights on the opposite side of the green. She heard the scrape of their fingers on the glass and the window casing, then the noise as the curtains were yanked without ceremony into place. Only then was the standard lamp switched on again.
"Thought they were supposed to have been laminated, Joe."
"They haven't got round to it the work order's in, be done by the end of the week."
"Bloody marvelous."
"I don't like that window, Dave, not without the lamination."
"Don't tell me, I've got bloody eyes. What is it, a hundred metres, to those houses? A sniper, piece of cake, or an RPG."
"What you say, Dave, piece of cake for a rocket launcher or a rifle. God, this place needs sorting out. Come on… They did the hall, the dining room and the kitchen. Frank trailed behind them and she followed. She didn't have to ask. Everything that was glass, china or pottery, everything that was heavy and unattached, would shatter, fracture and fly, maim and wound. They said they needed to see upstairs. She stiffened. Frank muttered that they should go upstairs if that was necessary, but they hadn't waited for his answer and were already on their way up. There wasn't any more mud from Rankin's boots to dirty the carpet. They looked around her bedroom.
"Don't like the mirror, Dave."
It was the big mirror on her dressing-table.
"Tape it over."
She imagined the mirror, where she made up, where she worked the delicate brushes before they went out for an evening, with packers' adhesive tape crossing it.
"Look at all that loose stuff."
On her dressing-table were the cream jars and the glass eau-de toilette bottles, the vase of dried flowers and the silver-backed hairbrushes.
"Have to get it boxed up, Joe."
She would have to rummage in a cardboard box on the floor for her eye-liner and lipstick. She imagined everything that was precious to her put away on the instructions of these men.
The pictures would have to come down, of course. The photograph frames would have to be put into the drawers, and she wondered if she would be allowed to take out the photographs and stick them to the walls, if they would permit that. In the bathroom, at the back of the house, she couldn't have said they lingered on anything that was hers. They were merely indifferent to each item that belonged and mattered to her. Better if they had lingered on them because then the items might have seemed important. They went into the spare room and discussed what should happen to the pictures, the mirror and the ornaments there. They paused on the landing outside the last door. It was as if they had kicked the fight out of her, and the resentment was flushed on Frank's cheeks, but neither of them protested. She could hear her boy's voice, making the noise of a lorry. They didn't ask her to go first, or Frank. The short one went in, the tall one behind him.
"Hello, sunshine my word, aren't they brilliant?"
"Great lorries, sunshine, proper little haulage business."
"Just call me Uncle Joe…" and I'm your uncle Dave, that's a real good one, the Seddon Atkinson."
"The Seddy's good, Dave, but the Volvo's fantastic."
"It's a great fleet, sunshine… No, sorry, don't touch."
"What's your name? Stephen? Well, Stephen, you mustn't touch what's on Uncle Dave's belt. It's gas, it's handcuffs and it's the Glock… Like what?… He did what? That must have been fun, sunshine. You hear that, Joe? DS Davies chucking his Glock round the playground that's nice to store away for when he gets all pompous. I expect it's time you were in bed, sunshine…"
The door was closed softly. They had come, she thought, effortlessly, into her family's life and brought with them their gas, their handcuffs and their guns. And, in the morning, her home would be prepared for defence against a sniper's attack and against the devastation of a rocket launcher's explosion. When they had gone outside, into the back garden, she went for the vacuum cleaner to remove the mud they'd left on her carpets, and before she started it up she heard Frank's voice.
"Don't ever do that again. Don't dare ever treat me and my wife like we're rubbish. We're human beings and deserve to be treated with decency and respect. This is our home, so show a bit of sensitivity when you come into it. Don't look at me in that dumb, insolent way, just don't. We live here. If that's not convenient, soft shit."
She didn't hear their reply.
When they'd finished in the garden and gone out through the front door, and it had been bolted and locked again, while she was in the living room with the vacuum cleaner, she heard Blake's voice.
"You shouldn't have done that, sir, bawled them out. They're at the end of a pretty long day. But don't worry, they won't take it personally, they're used to principals being stressed up. But you shouldn't have bawled them out, sir. One day you might depend on them to save your life, one day soon."
"This is not a zoo. You don't come here to rubber-neck. It's a working area you're causing disruption."
He'd been told but it had slipped in his mind. It could have been the fourth time the detectives had confronted the duty doctor, but it was more likely to have been the fifth.
"I will say when you can talk to my patient and it is the same answer as the last time, and the time before that. No. My patient is severely concussed, quite apart from the effect of the drugs alleviating the pain of a triple femur fracture. No."
They were at the end of the ward. Beside the door to the partitioned cubicle, Geoff Markham hovered a pace behind the two Branch detectives. The doctor was young, harassed, probably sleep-walking and on the edge of his temper.
"It is not my concern what my patient is alleged to have done, my concern is his health and welfare. I understand he has been neither cautioned nor charged. So, he is in my care, and I decide if he is to be questioned. My answer… No."
A policeman was sitting beside the bed on a hard chair, facing the door, his hands on the snub weapon resting on his legs, his face impassive. The second uniformed policeman sat outside the door, cradling his own gun, a wry smile flickering at his mouth.
"I tell you, it's bad enough for my patients to have guns paraded around, but right now they are trying, unsuccessfully, to get the rest they need. They are not resting, as they should be, because this ward is being treated by you like a high-street pavement. Just get out, go away.
Geoff Markham's fingers were locked together, clasped tight, flexing hard enough to hurt. He thought Littelbaum was somewhere behind him. The American had said this was the big and lucky break, but it didn't seem as if they knew how to use it.
"Just listen to me. You are interfering with the running of this ward. I will protest most strongly in the morning to the administrators about that interference. If the condition of this patient, or any other patient in the ward, were to deteriorate because of your refusal to accept my guidance, then I will make it my personal business to see you broken. Get off my territory."
There was a dull blue sheen of light in the cubicle. Geoff Markham thought, could have sworn to it, that he saw an eye glinting from the mound of white pillows. The head of the patient, the face that Rainbow Gold had identified as Yusuf Khan, was half hidden by the left leg raised in traction. The glint was momentary, but he'd seen it.
The patient now seemed unmoving, unconscious. The detectives turned away.
Markham said, "He's fooling you."
"You're a doctor? Familiar with this case history, are you?"
Markham persisted, "He's alert, listening. He's feigning."
"You're an expert on concussion? You know about the effects of pain-depressant drugs?"
"What I am telling you-' "No. I do the telling on my ward, and I am telling you to get out." Markham spat, "There could be blood on your hands."
"I doubt it."
"A man could be murdered because of your refusal-' "Get out."
He had failed to exploit the break. The faces of the uniformed policemen were expressionless, as though they didn't need to tell him that he'd made a right idiot of himself. Geoff Markham turned angrily and walked up the central aisle of the ward towards the low light at the far end where the night sister sat at her table. The detectives were alongside and he could hear the soft pad of the doctor behind him. He saw the American sitting on a visitor's chair, in deep shadow, against a patient's locker. The patient was passing him a grape, and before he took it the American had his finger on his lips. Markham kept walking.
Beyond the ward's swing doors, there was a last snapped question: "How long?"
The doctor said that it might be two days and it might be three, or it might be a week, before his patient could be interrogated.
He walked on down the empty corridors. The Branch men were with him, said they were looking for a coffee machine. His footfall stamped to the stairs.
There was a fight in Casualty reception. A drunk with blood streaming from a forehead wound swung a fist at the security people. He didn't care and threaded his way past them.
He went to the parking area and his car.
He wished he smoked. He wished he had a hip flask. He wished he was warm and wet-sweaty with Vicky. He wished he worked for a fucking bank.
He sat in the car.
The wail of a siren approached, and he watched the staff gather at the door to meet it, the flurry as the stretcher was hurried inside. He waited. He was cold, tired. He had seen how the bastard had watched them, listened to them, fooled them, and the first day of the week was ten minutes off its end. And he couldn't imagine why Littelbaum had found it important to stay behind.
He was slumped in self-pity, and wondered whether the bank would turn him down by letter or by telephone. Damn sure they wouldn't accept him. He wouldn't tell Vicky what he'd said, about playing God, or tell her how her buzz phrases had been sneered at… The American eased the car door open and lowered himself into the seat.
"First, thanks for being so on the ball and giving me space. You did well. God, what depressing places hospitals are… You see, Mr. Markham, it's all about Alamut… the sort of places we'll all end in, not able to do a lot about it… Alamut is the key… Markham began to drive away, and had to swerve out of the path of another ambulance.
"I'd need convincing I did anything well. Right, Mr. Littelbaurn, tell me why Alamut is relevant."
"If he had known Alamut, been there, then he wouldn't have talked to me."
Markham gasped, then laughed out loud.
"Why, Mr. Littelbaum, did he talk to you?"
"The policemen were very co-operative, heard what you said, about blood and murder. One needed to piss so the other took his place in the corridor."
"Why?"
"I fancy he talked to me because I poked the tip of my pen into the middle of the three femur fractures."
"Didn't he scream?"
"He probably did, but I had my handkerchief and my fist over his mouth. He wanted to talk more than he wanted the poke of my pen if he'd been to Alamut then he wouldn't have cared about the pain."
"What did he say?"
Markham drove recklessly fast on the open road.
"Heh, Mr. Markham, would you slow down, please? I don't want to be going back to that place on my back ease it off, please. He said the guy came off a boat, and I told him we knew that. I hadn't a name, and neither had he. I hadn't a face, but he had. The face is interesting, it's pale-coloured, it's what I imagine to be the edge of Caucasian, and there's no facial hair. English, English accent, not American. Tall but not exceptional, hair not black matt, didn't get the eyes… Age would be late thirties. He crashed the car because the guy sort of frightened him."
"Weapons?"
"He started to tell me I think he was trying to talk about a launcher. Yes, he wanted to tell me the lot, I had the pen right in front of his face, but he didn't. I think he wanted to tell me, but he fainted."
"Associates?"
"The faint wasn't acted. He got another poke, but he was gone cold, like Smoky Joe had hit him and the law came back from its piss."
"So what do we have, Mr. Littelbaum?"
"Enough to think on. May I, first, educate you on Alamut? With education, you get to understand the Anvil, what he'll do, the sense of sacrifice, the danger he poses, the dedication to his orders. In the year 1152, Mr. Markham, two of the fida'is were sent from Alamut to kill Raymond the Second of Tripoli, that's the port city in present-day northern Lebanon. Raymond the Second was the Christian crusader king. They chose the most public place in his city to kill him, where he would be surrounded by the maximum security. The place they chose was the main gate of the city. Imagine it, crowds, traders, travellers, guards, the greatest audience in front of which to demonstrate their power and their commitment. They stabbed Raymond the Second to death at the gate of his own city, and they would have known that within moments they would be chopped into small pieces by his guards. That's Alamut for you, Mr. Markham, that's what you're up against."
He pretended to sleep and made a pattern of his breathing.
Her breasts and stomach were against his back and his buttocks. They were naked in the bed, but for comfort's sake not for loving. Sometimes he heard the engine of the car parked beside the house, as if Blake boosted the heater. Sometimes he heard a car coming slowly by and stopping; then there were quiet voices and chuckled laughter. Sometimes there was the empty whistling of the wind, and the distant ripple surge of the sea on the beach.
If he pretended to sleep and his breathing was regular then he hoped it would be easier for her to sleep.
He lay on his side with her warmth against him and he played the television's quiz game in his mind. The grinning show host asked the questions, and bright-eyed Frankie answered them.
Where was Iran?
"Iran, with a territory of 1.68 million square kilometres and a population estimated in excess of sixty million, is at a pivotal geopolitical position between the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent where it cannot be ignored and is unlikely to be humoured."
What was the government of Iran?
"Iran is ruled by Islamic clerics categorized as fundamentalist and conservative in the extreme, but the government has loose relationships with the organizations of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the autonomous private armies of clerics boasting vengeful actions against Western cultures."
What was WMD?
"Weapons of Mass Destruction, chemical and microbiological and nuclear, are all the subject of urgent research programmes in Iran."
What was the requirement for mixing machines?
"The manufacture of the chemical air droplets to be included in the warhead, and for the lining material of the interior of the missile body that must withstand extreme temperature, require dual-purpose mixing machines sold on fraudulently prepared export dockets."
What was the fate of a spy in Iran? What did they do with a spy in Iran?
"A spy in Iran is either hanged in secret on the gallows at the Evin gaol, or hanged in public from a crane in a Tehran square and hoisted so high that the crowd can better see his death dance."
A final question. Had to answer correctly to win the holiday for two in Barbados and the new fitted kitchen, the food liquidizer and the wide screen television. He squirmed in the bed.
What were the consequences in Iran of the spy's report on a military factory at Bandar Abbas?
"Don't know, can't answer, was never told, don't want to know, better not knowing."
To black, to the darkness of the room, and no prizes to carry away.
He took a point on the shadowed wall, stared at it. She was asleep. If he slept he would dream of the crane. She didn't know of the crane, and she slept. There was a small gale of laughter, from the side of the house, and a car drove away. He was drifting… He had always rather fancied Emma Carstairs, and always thought she rather fancied him… drifting, but not sleeping. If he thought of Emma Carstairs, her bold smile and her wriggling her hips to work off her knickers, her hands taking his to the buttons of her blouse, then he wouldn't sleep, and if he didn't sleep then he wouldn't see the crane. He stared at the bare wall.