"You have made a growth industry in the study of the Islamic faith, but the work is shallow. You seek to vilify Iran, to cast that great nation and its people in a mould of the "medieval"~ I tell you, Mr. Fenton, where there is the Sharia, the law of Islam, you would find it safe to walk in the streets. It is a code of fairness, charity and decency. Yes, there is a death sentence. Yes, there is very occasional amputation and the flogging of offenders but only after the most rigorous examination of the felon by the courts. I venture to say that there are many in the United Kingdom, so-called Christians, who yearn for the punishment of the guilty. But to suggest as you do, Mr. Fenton, that the legally elected government of Iran would seek clandestine vengeance abroad is just another example of a warped and closed mind. Let me tell you if a small incident or a trivial event occurred, if you made from it a fraudulent link with Iran, if you danced to the American tune, if you made lying public statements, then the consequences could be most grave. Do you dance to that tune, Mr. Fenton? Are you acting now as a lackey to those Islamophobic elements of the American establishment who wish to block the return of more normal relationships between Iran and the United States? A false and deceitful move would lead, Mr. Fenton, to the most desperate of consequences. Of course, I do not threaten you but I warn that your irrelevant and decadent country would be at war with a billion Muslims throughout the world. I do not think you would wish that."
So, earnestly, at the end of a meal that left him hungry, he had fled the canteen.
With a deep sigh, Fenton switched off the tape-recorder he had worn under his jacket. The two roads split ahead of him, and the directions they took were opposite and irreconcilable.
Was Islamic Iran a force for good, which he was too bigoted to appreciate, or a force for evil, which made a sewer of the streets of his country? He did not know which road led to truth. What he did know was that Abigail Fenton had punished him for her missed lunch with the price of a new handbag, a dress and a matching twin-set.
He rang Cox in the country, and hoped he was disturbing him. He told him what he had learned. Whichever way they twisted was fraught with problems. Cox said his confidence in Fenton's judgement was, as always, total. He'd always thought of Cox as a time-serving, networking fool; now he began to doubt that opinion.
He wandered towards Cathy Parker.
"I'm confused, Cathy."
"Goes with the rank, Harry."
"I don't know whether it's real can't quite bring myself to believe it the threat."
"Best, Harry, as the actress said to the bishop, just to lie back and enjoy the ride. Do you want to be told?"
"If it'll blow some clarity into a fogged old mind…"
"Bollocks, you're loving every minute of it."
He grinned. She laughed and started to map it out, what they had. A man had come in from the sea. A car had crashed, the man had moved on. An associate was missing from home but photographs had been found of a target and a location. Between each point she rapped her pen on the desk, as if to alert him, then her face lightened.
"I've found a marriage, 1957. The daughter of a British oil engineer to an Iranian doctor. There's a cousin down in Somerset…"
"What'll that give you?"
"Who knows? Might give me a face. I don't like to see you confused. Confusion is like haemorrhoids, Harry, embarrassing for you and therefore bloody unpleasant for the rest of us. I'm making it my business, by hand, to swab away your confusion."
"Do you believe in it, the threat?"
"I'd be a right idiot if I didn't."
"And the tethered goat, do you believe in that?"
She laughed into his face.
"I'm just the bottle washer it's your responsibility, Harry, not mine. You volunteered."
The blue Fiat 127 was behind a hedge, hidden from the road. Brought up in the provinces by a family without military or criminal links, she had compensated for her lack of experience in such areas by the simple application of common sense. Using basic logic she had thought through each of her moves. The car was the right colour to avoid attention; the station, with commuters not coming back from London until the middle evening, had been the right place to steal it from. Her own car was abandoned in woods: she had unscrewed the number-plates and buried them under fallen leaves. It would be days or weeks before it was found, reported. She had done each thing sensibly, and even if he had wanted to be could not have criticized what she had done.
She sat in the car, in the silence, in the dark, and her mind wafted between her two contrary worlds: Farida Yasmin or Gladys Eva. He would now be making the final checks on his rifle and would be smearing mud on his face. She shuddered, and tried to pray to his God, her God, to protect him. When she tried to pray, she was Farida Yasmin Jones. The man was guarded. Under her sweater, she was running her fingers over the skin of her stomach, as he had caressed the bird's feathers, as she had stroked his hair. The man was guarded with guns. It was the first moment that she had considered the realities of the guards, the guns. She thought of him shot, bleeding. As her fingers moved faster, pressed harder, she was Gladys Eva Jones. She thought of herself, waiting and alone. She thought of the boots on his neck where her fingers had been, and the pools of blood. Soon, he would be moving off, tracking beside the marshes towards the lights of the village.
Geoff Markham had crossed the orbital motorway and was coming through the dirty sprawl of east London's streets. Littelbaum had slept on the open road but the jerking drive through the traffic had wakened him, and he talked.
"Pathetic, really, a sign of age, that I cannot climb a narrow staircase without a palpitation. I'm fine now, I'm warm, and I've had my necessary sleep. I owe you an explanation why a hundred miles driving out of London, a quick climb of the church tower, and a hundred miles drive back has not been a waste of your time."
Markham stared into the weaving mass of cars, vans and lorries, in heavy concentration.
"I am not a criminologist, or an academic, most certainly not a clinical psychologist. I detest those shrinks who charge fat fees for profiling. I am simply, Mr. Markham, an ageing soldier of the Bureau. I have been in Tehran and Saudi Arabia for the last twenty years of my working life. I said, because I know those places and those people, I could smell him. It's not vanity, it's the truth."
Markham drove past the brightly lit shop windows festooned with bargain stickers and kept his silence. He had noted that not a word of sympathy had been expressed by the American for Frank Perry and his family, as if there were no room in the job for compassion.
"My tools of trade, Mr. Markham, are intuition and experience and I value them equally. Actually, there is little that's complicated. We are told he is late thirties. He would have been eighteen or nineteen years old when the Ayatollah returned from exile. Then comes the war with Iraq. The military are not trusted, the principal fighting is given to the fanatical but untrained youth of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They fought with a quite extraordinary and humbling innovative ness and dedication. They made up the rule books of combat as they went along. Any man, given the responsibility for a mission of this importance or the importance of the bombings in Riyadh or Dhahran, would have come through that route."
He saw the men who carried the clusters of shopping-bags and the women who pushed prams, and the voice in his ear dripped the story of a world they would not have comprehended. Markham would be joining the great uncomprehending masses because he did not believe he had the ability to affect events.
"Most of life is a linked chain. Think about it the Iranians could not match the quality of the Iraqi weaponry that had been provided by the Western powers. They had to learn to improvise and fight where that hardware was least effective. They chose the most unpromising ground. You won't have heard of these battles, Mr. Markham, but they were of primitive ferocity. Fish Lake and the Jasmin Canal, the Haur-al-Hawizeh marshes, the Shatt-al-Arab waterway and the Faw peninsula. The battleground for the best of the Revolutionary Guard Corps was water and reed-banks. By choosing to fight on such hostile and difficult territory, they nullified the sophisticated equipment of their enemy, and that's why I had to climb to the highest point, the vantage-position. I am not ashamed to say it, I was on my hands and my knees, petrified. I surveyed the battleground, and all I could see was water and marshes. It's where he would be, it is why I said it was like I could smell him… Don't waste fuel by sending up helicopters with infrared, the Iraqis did that, and don't waste people's time by commissioning aerial image-intensified photography, they did that as well. He will be hiding there and an army wouldn't find him. But he has to come out, Mr. Markham, and then, God willing, you shoot him."