"Meryl, hold on."
"Yes, Peggy."
"I've that typing for you you said you would?"
"Of course I did."
"For the Red Cross and the Wildlife."
"No problem."
"Can't thank you enough, don't know what I did before you came. Oh, Meryl, you couldn't manage the Institute's minutes? Fanny's got an awful cold I think there's a lot of it about."
"Thanks, Meryl."
"You should get on home, Peggy. You look like a hose has been turned on you."
"I tell you, Meryl, those people seeing Frank when you were out they drove right through a puddle, could have avoided it. I used the F-word and all. Quite made my day, using the F-word."
Stephen had left the door open and the rain was driving on to the hall tiles. She took off her coat and shook it hard outside. She called, "Frank, we're home."
"I'm in the kitchen."
There was no light on downstairs. Stephen would have gone straight to his room, for his books and his toys. She went into the kitchen. He sat at the kitchen table, but it was too dark for her to see his face.
"You all right, love?"
"Fine."
"Had a busy day?"
"No."
"Visitors?"
"No, no visitors."
It was the first time in the four years she had known him that she could have proved he had lied. She said she would make a pot of tea, and switched on the light.
Kicking a cat would have been too easy, and beating his balding head against a wall would have been poor satisfaction. Littelbaum wondered if they knew in Audobon, west Iowa, the good, solidly ignorant folk, as they scratched a living and paid taxes, where their sweat money went. Did they know in California or South Carolina where it ended? In Texas? In Montana? If it were not for the tax money, Saddam Hussein might have been in Dhahran and the ayatollahs might have made it to Riyadh. And they treated him, the representative of those tax-payers, like a dog's turd, but he kept smiling. All day he had waited at the guarded headquarters of General Intelligence, and been shuffled between various air-conditioned offices. They offered him fruit juice and cake, polite talk, and he had achieved nothing.
The prisoner for Littelbaum he was a number, 87/41 had most probably been below him all through that day, in the basement holding cells. It was the fifth time he had tried to win access to the prisoner, without success. The man would be in the cells, and maybe his mother would not recognize him. Maybe he was without fingernails. Maybe a fine cord had been knotted tightly round his penis while water was poured down his throat.
Littelbaum did not have the name of the man he hunted, nor the face. He had footprints. The prisoner might have told him the name, described the face.
His driver took him back to the embassy. He could demand time of the ambassador and shout a bit, and the ambassador would shrug and mouth sympathy. He could send another protest signal to the Hoover building, and it would be filed along with the rest.
Later, he would be in his windowless office behind the bombproof door guarded by the young Marine, and he would stand in front of the big wall map of the region, with his herringbone jacket loose on his shoulders, and look at the footprints, at the bright-headed pins. It took two weeks, from the event, for Littelbaum to be able to put another pin in the map, to mark another footprint. From the pins hung little paper flags, carrying a date. For two and a half years he had followed the footprints, and they made a pattern for him.
There was a digital mobile telephone that made scrambled, voice-protected calls from and to an office in Tehran of the Ministry of Information and Security. The computers could not break through the scrambled conversations but they could locate and identify the position from which the call had originated or been answered. His pins, with their carefully dated flags, were scattered over the map surface of Iran and Saudi Arabia. It was two and a half years since the explosion at the National Guard barracks in Riyadh in which five of his countrymen had died; the pin was there and dated the day before it happened. Two years since the lorry bomb at the Khobar Tower airforce base outside Dhahran had killed nineteen Americans, and that date pin was there, the day before the massacre. Each atrocity enabled him to track a man without a name and without a face.
It took two weeks for the computer to log the locations. There was a pin in the Empty Quarter, dated forty-three days back, and he had bypassed every bureaucratic instruction, ignored every standing order, worked the contact game, won the one-time favour, tasked the Marine Corps helicopters and the Saudi National Guardsmen, and still been too damned late. And there was a pin in international waters along the trade route between Abu Dhabi and the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas.
No name, no face, only footprints for Duane Littelbaum to follow as if he were a shambling, slow-going bloodhound.
Mary-Ellen brought him the day's communications from the cypher section, and coffee. Sometimes she put whiskey in it, which, in this arrogant, ungrateful, corrupt country, was almost a beheading offence. She was blue chip, with a Ph. D." old money off Long Island, and she seemed to regard it as her life's work to look after a middle-aged man from poor farm stock out of Audobon in west Iowa.
It took sixteen days from the time the antennae or the dishes sucked in the streams of digital information for the computers to locate the positioning of the receiver, and transmit it to Duane Littelbaum. She passed him two pins and two dated flags. Mary-Ellen was too short to reach that far up the wall map into northern Iran. He grunted and stretched. He drove home the pins where there were two tight clusters.
He drank the coffee.
She said, and he did not need her to tell him, "It's where he always goes. He calls from Alamut, then the next day from Qasvin, then silence, then the call again, then the killing. It's what he always does…"
"That paper we got, the burned paper, what did Quantico scratch out of that?"
She shrugged, as if the Hoover building hadn't bothered to report back what the forensics at Quantico had learned.
"He's going for a killing, yes?"
"It's what the footprints say. He calls from Qasvin and the day before from Alamut, like it's his ritual. Then he moves and then he kills."
Hasan-i-Sabah had called for a volunteer to strike down a vizier. A young man without fear had stepped forward and Nizam al-Mulk was stabbed to death as he was carried in a litter to his wives' tent. Hasan-i-Sabah had inscribed, "The killing of this devil is the beginning of bliss."
The words had been written 906 years before, in the place where the man now sat. Every wall of the mountain fortress constructed by Hasan-i-Sabah was now broken. It was the eighth time he had climbed the mountain, taken the narrow path used only by the sheep, wild goats and foraging wolves over the scree slope. The drop beneath him did not frighten him, but if he had slipped on any of those climbs he would have died. He was two thousand metres above sea level, perched on a small rock high over the valley. It was where he found strength.
Among the fallen stones of the fortress, it was difficult for him to imagine it as it had been. In the valley had been the Garden of Paradise. In the fortress had been the discipline of self-sacrifice and obedience. The young men who gazed down on the garden and learned their skills in the fortress were the Fida'is. Their trade was killing. They understood their duty, and the personal sacrifice it required. They yearned for their reward, a place in the Garden of Paradise, where there were groves of sweet fruit trees, clear tumbling streams and women of great beauty. He had slept in a tent by a small fire, and at dawn had packed up and started his climb on the path over the scree. Whether in sunshine, or in the winter's mists, whether the snow had fallen and the path was treacherous, he made that pilgrimage to the destroyed fortress. He would reach it and sit for hours with the silence of the valley below him and consider the mission he had been given, the requirement for obedience and self-sacrifice, and the reward of a martyr's glory. When the sun lowered or the clouds darkened, he would make the call on the digital phone given him by the man who was like a father to him, like Hasan-i-Sabah had been to the Fida'is, and he would start the descent. He would reach the four-wheel-drive vehicle as darkness fell and drive back to the camp at Qasvin. From Qasvin, he would start on his journey as, long ago, the Fida'is had started theirs.