The two traffic policemen stopped work for a sandwich lunch. One, after he'd eaten, the elder one, complained of his bladder and slipped through a hedge hole.
He didn't notice the canvas sack, rammed down into the base of the hedge, until he'd finished and was shaking himself. He would not have seen it if he hadn't been standing almost on top of it. He bent and pulled it open.
The traffic policeman shouted to his colleague to come, and bloody fast, and showed him a black rubber wet suit, a pair of trainer shoes, and some squashed sales dockets, before pointing down into the bag at the hand grenades.
She drove well, confidently. She was not intimidated by the heavy lorries. His own wife, Barzin, did not drive. He admired the way she drove, but he was ashamed that each time she punched her foot on the brake or the accelerator he could not keep his eyes from the smooth whitened skin of her thighs. She would have seen him flinch and flush.
"They called me when I was asleep, told me it was urgent. I just took the first clothes that came to hand I didn't find any stockings. I suppose it's what you'd call bad he jab yes?"
There was a mullah, he had heard, who had stayed inside his house for thirty years, never gone outside his house, never dared to, for fear that he would see a woman improperly dressed, bad he jab and be corrupted… She kept in the slow lane of the wide motorway skirting London. Never in his life had he been driven by a woman. The diesel fumes of the lorries came and went, but constant in the car was the soft scent of soap and lotion.
She saw the twitch of his nostrils.
"I went out last night with some girls from work. One of them's getting married next weekend. We went out for some drinks no, I don't drink alcohol, but I can't tell them it's for my belief. I have to tell a little lie, I say I don't drink for a medical condition. They've told me to be like everyone else, and that way I can better serve my Faith and the revolution of Iran. I have to use women's soap and eau-de-toilette if I'm to be like everyone else. They tell me that God forgives little lies."
Because of the persecution of his Faith, throughout history, her Faith, it was acceptable for the Shi'a peoples to tell the khod'eh, the half-truth, in defence of the true religion… He believed, as did his wife, so Barzin told him, that the place for a woman was in the home and rearing children. She would be in their home, cleaning it, always cleaning it because they had no children to divert her. His mother had been different: dressed in good he jab she had come out of her home to help his father on his sick visits. His wife, Barzin, only undressed in his presence if the room were darkened.
When she changed the gears, her body shook and her breasts swung loosely, and he had flushed the most when he had seen the cherrystone shape of her nipple he would have picked the fruit from a tree in the Albourz hills and sucked it, turned the stone on his tongue and cleaned it, then spat it out and then he stared straight ahead at the spinning wheels of the vehicle in front, and the grinning idiot face of a child in the vehicle's back window.
She knew.
"I had the call, I was out of my room in four minutes.
I told you, I didn't have the chance to dress properly, decently. My name's Farida Yasmin."
It was said that the Imam Khomeini, on the drive from his French home in the village of Neauphle-le-Chateau to the airport at orly for his flight home and the triumphal return, had never looked from his car's windows on to the decadence of the Parisian streets, had kept his head lowered to avoid the sight of impurity.
"You've seen the man's photograph, Perry's? Of course, you have. I took it. You've seen the picture of his house? Yes? I took that as well. I think I'm to be trusted."
He jolted. Under the law that was the basis of the state, the sharia, the testimony of a woman was worth half that of a man. They were not of half value, the crucial photographs of the man and his house. She was beside him and her thighs were bare and her breasts bounced under a thin sweater. It was written that exposure of the flesh 'without Islamic cover can invite foul looks from men and invite the devil's lusting'. He was dependent on her.
She told him when she had seen the man and about his house. In the planning of an attack he had never before talked to a woman as his equal.
She looked into his face, caught his eyes.
"What happened to my friend, to Yusuf?"
He said what he knew, and offered her no sympathy. She was strong. He had known so many who had died young, gone early to the Garden of Paradise. She looked ahead.
"You talk well, Geoffrey," the man said.
"You say the right things, but I am not yet convinced of your commitment to them."
"We get a lot of sincerity these days," the woman said.
"What we have to look for is when the sincerity is larded on like greasepaint."
Markham swallowed hard.
"Anyway, that's as maybe, that's our problem to evaluate, not yours…" The man hesitated, as if for effect.
The interview had lasted twenty-five stilted minutes. He had used all the words that Vicky had written out for him, woven them into answers, and twice he had seen the little mocking glint in the woman 5 eyes.
"Let's press on. Let's explore a bit more… We're not with the civil service, we're not able to rely on government's safety net, we're in a hard, commercial environment. A man works for a company, does all that it asks of him, takes his work home and frets over it, is a good colleague and a pimple-faced creep who knows nothing of anything hands him a letter of dismissal, without warning, and a second letter of redundancy terms, and he's cleared his desk and gone in ten minutes, on the scrap-heap for the rest of his life. Could you be the pimple-faced creep and do that?"
The woman leaned forward.
"Are you up to that, Geoffrey, screwing good employees' lives?"
He took a deep breath.
"I've done it, I know about it. It got to be pretty much every day. I was in Northern Ireland, I ran informers that's playing God. You make a mistake with an informer and you get him killed it's not just killed like in a road accident, it's torture first with electricity and beatings and cigarette burns, and then it's the terror of a kangaroo court and then it's a bin-bag over the head and a kick so that he goes on to his knees, and the last thing he hears is a weapon being cocked… They're not good guys, they're scum-bags, and they're so damned scared that they get to lean on you like you're a crutch. You know how it will end and they do, but you don't let them quit. It's expensive when they quit, and they're damn all use once they're out of it. So you keep your player in place, and you sleep at night and put him out of your mind. It's your work and you don't worry about it… I've played God with people who won't be getting a good pension and won't have only their ego bruised I've played God with men who'll have the back of their heads blown off and whose women will be spat on as the wife of a traitor and whose parents will disown them and whose kids will be ostracized for their lifetime. Does that answer your question?"
The bleeper went at his waist. The woman stared at him, her mouth slack. The man looked blankly down at his notepad.
He read the message: "MARKHAM/G RE JULIET 7 GET BACK SOONEST. FENTON
He said, "I'm sorry, I'm called back."
The woman asked, "To play God?"
The man looked up from his notepad.
"You'll hear from us."
Markham was out of the chair.
"Thank you for your time."
He left the office and waved down a taxi.
He was dropped on the corner, and went into the building that had housed the last ten years of his life, past the desk where they had the hidden guns, through the security locks, and ran up the stairs with the laminated windows.