"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 hospitaclass="underline" 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.