"Where is this getting us?"
"Listen, will you?… Among the foreign cadets are always Syrian-sponsored Palestinians. The shooting was at lunch time; that same Saturday evening a Syrian Air Force transporter put down at Simferopol and then flew on to Damascus… "
"How do you know that?"
"Listen… and that's none of your business. It is quite credible that a Palestinian, at least an Arab, shot the ambassador and Miss Canning and was flown back to the Middle East the same evening. It is even credible that the Soviets knew nothing of the plan."
"Why are you telling me this?"
"We need your help in identifying the man who killed Armitage and a member of our Service, your girl."
"And then?"
"That's none of your business either."
"I'd want him killed."
"So tell me what he looked like, everything."
Desultory cheers, H'ray, H'ray, H'ray; the game was finished. Martins's son tramped off the field. He didn't so much as look at his father. Martins made an attempt to greet him, but the young man kept walking. Holt thought Martins too proud to chase after him. And then it was too late. The two teams disappeared into the pavilion. Martins and young Holt paced the touchline.
They were still there after the groundsman had come out to unhook the goal netting and to gather up the flag posts. They were still there when the two buses with the chemists from York and the lawyers from London drove away from the pavilion. Holt poured out every detail from his memory on the man who had held the Kalashnikov assault rifle. The way he moved, height, weight, age, the clothes, the wig, the shape of the eyes, movement, features. Again and again, the crow's foot scar. Still talking when it was too dark for Holt to see Martins's face beside him.
Finally they walked back to the car.
"You never even spoke to your son."
"Watched him play, didn't I? That's what I promised his mother – how close would you have to be to him to see the scar?"
"Well, I was ten paces and could see it as clearly as I described it to you. I mean, you wouldn't miss it if you met him. You'll go after him?"
"She was one of ours."
Martins dropped Holt off at Paddington station, thanked him again and said he'd be in touch in a day or so. Then he crossed London and the Thames and parked his car in the basement at Century House. It was not unusual for him to be returning to his office as the commuters were heading for home. Martins lived in a torpid cul-de-sac in Putney, but his home was the seventh floor of Century. No need for him to ring his wife and tell her that he would be back late. She took it for granted that he would work eleven or twelve hours six days a week and that he would fish on the seventh.
He had been 27 years in the Service. He had served in Amman and Cyprus and Tel Aviv. He was a graduate, years before the fighting ripped the city apart, of the American University of Beirut.
The debrief had taken days to reach him. It bore a string of FCO staff's initials and in Century it had come by way of the Soviet Desk. The seventh floor was Middle East. Martins was the Middle East Desk's third in the chain. The head of the Desk was twelve years his junior, his immediate superior was 14 years younger.
Martins would climb no higher. Sometimes it rankled, most times in fact. His solace was his work.
On his desk was the debrief and transcripts of messages sent from an Antonov en route to Damascus. These had been intercepted by the Dhekelia listening post in Cyprus and deciphered at the Government Communications HQ in Cheltenham. It was indeed none of young Holt's business that the messages sent from the Antonov within minutes of its leaving Soviet airspace were in the code systems of Syrian Air Force Intelligence and not those of the regular Air Force.
For the next two hours he wrote down in neat longhand everything that Holt had told him. By the time he had completed seven foolscap sheets he believed he could build a picture of a face, a working likeness of a man. He was satisfied that he knew exactly where the crow's foot scar should be placed.
Later, at a time when the train carrying Holt was west of Taunton, Inter City 125 and hammering, Percy Martins took the lift two floors up the 19-storey building to a small cubby-hole of a room where a technician had been whiling away the hours making a balsa wood 1:50-scale replica of a vintage Churchill tank. It would be a late night. The technician would work with Martins to make a likeness of the face of an assassin.
The following evening the actual size portrait and the four typed sheets of briefing were carried in a large buff envelope in the nearly empty briefcase of a government messenger en route to Tel Aviv. For the duration of the flight, a little over four hours, the briefcase was attached to the wrist of the messenger by a length of fine steel chain. It would have been impossible for the messenger to eat the airline meal without his chain being noticed so he went without food.
At Tel Aviv the messenger was met by the Service's station officer. A docket was signed. The papers were exchanged. The messenger flew back on the return flight after killing four hours in the transit lounge, and twenty minutes in the restaurant.
Before dawn a light burned in the upper room at the rear of the British embassy on Hayarkon. This upper room had no view of the stretching Mediterranean sea.
The walls of the room were of reinforced concrete, the windows were of strengthened glass. The room was reached by an outer corridor in which had been placed a gate of heavy steel vertical bars. Behind the locked door of the room, the station officer examined the face that had been built for him, and read Martins's brief.
The killer of Sir Sylvester Armitage and of Jane Canning was believed to be Arab, most probably Palestinian. The distinguishing feature of the Arab was a crow's foot scar of approximately one inch in diameter on the upper left cheek. The station officer smiled at what he called Martins's fingerprints all over the brief, his unlovely grammar, but the substance of it was good.
Near the bottom of the third page was the text of the message – underlined in red, typical Martins touch – from the Antonov transporter after it had entered Turkish airspace.
" The target is taken."
It was left to the discretion of the station officer as to whether he went for help to the Mossad, Israel's external Intelligence gathering organisation, or the Shin Bet, the state's internal counter subversion and counter terrorism apparatus, or to Military Intelligence. Since the trial of Nezar Hindawi and the severing by Britain of diplomatic relations with Syria, co-operation between London and Tel Aviv was unprecedentedly close. He had no doubt that he would get the help Martins requested.
As the low-level sunbeams rose above the squat, dun-coloured apartment blocks of Tel Aviv, the station officer dialled the private telephone line of the man whose friendship he valued most in Military Intelligence. He liked the hours they worked. He locked his room behind him, and with the photofit in his bag he drove to the Ministry of Defence on Kaplan.
As the crow flies, and nothing larger than a crow can make the flight without plucking up a barrage of ground-to-air missiles, it is 125 miles from Tel Aviv to Damascus. The principal cities of the old enemies are adjacent in the currency of modern warfare. Behind the frontier that divides them, Syria and Israel have massed divisions of armour and mechanised infantry, regiments of artillery, squadrons of interceptor aircraft. The two client states scowl at each other from the cover of curtains of state-of-the-art United States and Soviet equipment. Two great coiled armies awaiting the order to commence the blood-letting, poised to exploit the moment of maximum advantage.
In the waiting time, as the troops idle away the hours in their fox holes and base camps, the tanks are kept armed and fuelled, stacks of ammunition lie beside the heavy howitzers, the aircraft are loaded with their missiles and cannon shells and cluster bombs.