The brigadier in Tebran had insisted. The intelligence officer, nervous, wary, had left his embassy office in the middle of the day. He had not seen a tail but always assumed one followed him. He had driven to the home in west London's suburbs of a colleague from Visa Section, parked outside the front of the house, been greeted at the door and invited inside. Without stopping, he had gone out of a back door, crossed the rear garden to the gate, tracked along an alley between garages and taken his colleague's car. He had driven to the offices and yard of the car-hire company at the extreme of south London, and asked about a BMW rented out to Yusuf Khan. A shadow of hesitation crossed the young woman's face, and he had eased his wallet from his pocket. A hundred pounds, palmed across the desk, in twenty-pound notes had lightened the shadow. He was shown, hurriedly, a photograph from an insurance file of the wrecked vehicle. He was told of the hospital where the injured man was treated… Did she know about a passenger? The police had not spoken of one… It was already early evening by the time he reached the hospital. After checking for the location of Delivery/ Post-natal, he headed for the casualty ward.
He was another visitor, one of many who anxiously came to see the sick, the injured and the maimed. He had the flowers and the grapes, as if they guaranteed him admittance.
He walked slowly down the centre of the ward, through the aisle between the beds, scanning the faces of the patients.
He seemed lost and confused but none of the harassed nursing staff came forward to help him.
A corridor was ahead of him, signs for the fire escape, and to the side a trolley carrying resuscitation equipment. He took a risk because Tehran required it of him. He edged forward with the fool's smile on his face.
Only when he was beside the trolley did he see the policeman with the machine-gun on his lap.
"I am looking for my sister and her baby."
There was a door with a glass window in it. Behind it a second policeman was reading a magazine that half hid the bulk of his firearm. He saw the bed, and the bandaged head of Yusuf Khan.
"Not here, no babies here thank God."
"This not the place for babies?"
He gazed at the bandaged head, the linking tubes, the opened eyes. The head shook, the tubes wavered, the eyes blinked with recognition.
"Absolutely, pal, this is not the place for babies."
He saw the tears gathering in the eyes, and he thought he saw a trace of guilt flicker there.
"I must ask again."
He walked away. He had seen what he needed to see. He laid the flowers and the grapes on the ward sister's desk. When he left his colleague's house in west London, he sped back to central London and his office at the embassy, with the urgent report to be sent by secure coded communication to Tehran locked in his mind.
"Is that what you want, a van coming to the front door? All those bastards out in the road, watching. You want to give them that satisfaction? Your things, everything that's personal to you your furniture, your clothes, your pictures, your life paraded for them. They'll spit at the car as it takes us away. Is that what you want?"
His hand was on her shoulder and his fingers massaged Meryl's bones and muscles. She never looked at hiWi and she didn't speak.
The brigadier was a careful man. If his back was to be protected, it was necessary for him always to be careful. He was that rarity in the service of the Ministry of Information and Security, an intelligence officer who had made the transition from the previous regime. He had crossed sides. The majority with whom he had worked as a captain in the SAVAK were long dead, hanged, shot, butchered, for their service to the Shah. But three days before the mob the street scum from south Tebran had entered and sacked the SAVAK offices on Hafez Avenue, he had taken a suitcase of files from his workplace and made contact with his enemy. The files were his credentials. With them were his memories of names, locations and faces. In the confused days that followed he was, to the new men of Iran, a small, treasured mine of knowledge. The names of former colleagues, the locations of safe-houses and the faces of informers, all had tripped off his tongue as he bought himself survival.
The new regime, of course, was innocent in the matters of security and counter-revolution. The change coat prospered as his colleagues died. When the captured Americans from the embassy protested that they were not employees of the Agency, the change-coat could identify them. When the Mujahiddin rose in revolt against the Imam, he could put faces to names. He had been promoted to major and then colonel in the Vezarat-e-Ettelaat Va Ammyat-e Kishvar, and now held the rank, in the VEVAK, of brigadier, but he was too intelligent, too cautious a man to believe that his position would ever be secure and above suspicion. A few detested him, a few more despised him, the majority, those who knew his past, were wary of him.
The protective screens with which he surrounded himself were the zealot's commitment to the new regime, coupled with a total, ruthless efficiency. No word of criticism for the mullahs in government and influence ever crossed his lips, no mistake in his planning of operations was ever admitted. If the mildest words of criticism were ever spoken he would be denounced and pitched from his office. There were many, and he knew it, who would clamour to fire the bullet or tighten the noose around his neck.
Vahid Hossein had been like a son to him… The communication from London was on his desk. The hot, fume-filled night was around his high office. Tears and guilt meant betrayal, were evidence that a coward, Yusuf Khan, had talked. It was his hope, alone in the cigarette-smoke-filled office, that the man who had been like a son to him would be shot dead.
It would be worse if the great tanker, which was the pride of the fleet, were intercepted as it slowed in the shipping lanes to launch the inflatable, was boarded and impounded. He weighed the possibilities open to him, then wrote an instruction for the VEVAK officer who worked as an official at the building of the National Iranian Tanker Corporation. The ship was to sail in the morning. There was to be no attempt at a pick-up.
For his own survival, to avoid an inevitable fate, he cut the link to Vahid Hossein. He did not hesitate.
"I want to go shopping, I want Stephen to go to school, I want you to go to work, I want us go walking I don't want, ever again, Frank, to see a gun. I want to be happy again. There's nothing left for us here."
Downstairs the television droned on, under Davies's tuneless whistling to himself. There was a muted cackle of laughter from the hut at the back, and the revving of the engine of the car at the front to keep the heater going. Everything they listened to, all around them, was sourced by the guns.
"Please, I'm begging it of you, please…" Perry's voice quavered to his wife's silence.
"In a way it's like Khe Sanh, not that I was there."
They were so nervous, as if frightened of each other. Littelbaum would not undress her. Cathy had done it herself, stripping while he had turned his back to her to shed the old tweed suit, the crumpled shirt and the underclothes that weren't quite clean. He had gentle hands and they touched her breasts with a teenager's awe, as he lay on her, was inside her.
"Khe Sanh was staking out a goat. We put down a base, the middle of nowhere, and we invited them to come and get us. We thought the North Vietnamese Army would destroy itself when it came on to our wire."
Cathy thought it was his nerves that m'~ade him spatter out the bullshit, and she reckoned he hadn't a woman in Riyadh, was as lonely as herself. It was a long time since she had had sex. This was ship-deck romance, without commitment, and in less than forty-eight hours he would be on the flight back to where he had come from. We reckoned we had it right at Khe Sanh, had learned the French lessons from Dien Bien Phu. The French hadn't the resources we had, but they believed in the same principle, which was putting out a bait with the opportunity to smack the bad bastard when he comes sniffing…"