HOME RUN (15 page)

He was not included. He was left for an hour to kick his heels.

He was sitting on an old upturned oil drum when Mattie came back to him.

"Did you get all you wanted, sir?"

"Stiffened his backbone, told him what we need. Usual carrot and stick job . . . Your meeting in Ankara tomorrow, won't go on too long I hope."

"Shouldn't think so, sir."

"Don't want it to interfere with your party."

Mattie was walking away, and the Station Officer had seen the dry vestige of the smile.

The bus churned through the miles as the road climbed towards Zanjan. Through the dusted window Charlie could see the small oases, surrounded by poplar trees, and the mud brick villages on either side of the route. It had been night when he had travelled from Tabriz to Tehran, but high sunshine now and he could see into the spreading distance.

There was no heat haze, the altitude of the road was too great for mists. He was looking south of the road, he wanted to see the ruins that when he was still a child Mr Furniss had first told him about. The Mausoleum of Sultan Oljaitu-Khocabandeh in the sprawl of ruins near Soltanieh. Charlie, eight years old, and meeting the friend of his father at their villa. Mr Furniss always had good stories to tell the boy. The Mausoleum of Sultan Oljaitu-Khocabandeh had stayed in Charlie's mind.

A man, a Sultan of the Mongols, had died 550 years before, and he had sought immortality, and his resting place was a monument that reached 170 feet above the ground.

That was the ultimate folly. There would be no photographs of Charlie Eshraq ever raised on a wall. None of his sayings ever daubed on high banners. When he died . . . whenever . . . Charlie wanted a grave like his father's. A corner of a cemetery with a number scratched into the wet cement slab, and weeds at the edge. He thought that made him his own man.

When they passed it, the Mausoleum was clear from the windows of the coach, and Charlie wiped hard at the window although most of the dirt was on the outside of the tinted glass. He saw the great octagon shape of the building and the cupola dome. He saw the goats grazing at its base.

The sight of the Mausoleum was only of a few seconds. No other passenger on the bus bothered to look at it. He thought that he hated men who built mausoleums to their memory, and who had their photographs overlooking public squares, and who demanded that their sayings be scrawled on banners.

The hate was active in his heart, but did not show on his face.

He appeared relaxed, dozing. He was leaning on his rucksack on the seat next to him. He had no fear that the rucksack of a
pasdar
would be searched at a road block. He had the correct papers. The Guards would be friendly to a
pasdar
returning to Tabriz, they would not search him.

He hated the men who built mausoleums, and despised them.

He remembered what Mr Furniss had said to him, when he was eight years old.

"A man who is afraid of death, dear boy, does not have the courage to live."

In the car taking him from the airport to the Guards Corps headquarters in Tabriz, the investigator listened to the radio.

The
pasdaran
operating from speedboats had rocketed a Singa-pore flagged tanker en route to Kuwait, and crippled it. Many soldiers had been martyred after the Iraqi enemy had once again dropped mustard gas on their trenches, and of course there had been no condemnation from the United Nations Security Council that was in the pocket of the Great Satan.

Spies, belonging to the Zionist regime of Baghdad, had been arrested in Tehran.
Mojahedin-eKhalq
counter-revolutionaries had been captured at the western borders carrying 250 kilos of explosive. The Islamic Revolution Committees' Guards had carried out exercises in Zahedan and displayed their ever-increasing readiness to destroy outlaws and smugglers.

A bomb had exploded in Tehran's Safariyeh Bazaar, no casualties reported. A grenade and machine-gun attack on the Guards Corps Headquarters in Resselat Square in Tehran had been repulsed. The Speaker of the Majlis had spoken at a military meeting of the success of the Republic's home-produced ground-to-air missile in bringing down an enemy MIG-25 over Esfahan. Thirteen foreign cargo ships inspected at sea, and allowed to continue . . .

The war was endless. He had been at war all of his adult life, he had worked ten years for the S A V A K , and ten years for the Ministry of Information and Intelligence. All his time at the S A V A K , reading the files, assessing the statistics of opposition, he had known the certainty of ultimate defeat, so he had built the bridges, covertly prepared for the transfer of power, avoided the firing squads that had been the fate of most of his colleagues. He had changed sides, and he could not now predict the shape of things after this next defeat.

Military defeat seemed to him most probable, but would it alter the power structure in Tehran and if so, how? The investigator could read between the lines of a news bulletin.

Ever increasing references to battles, losses, insurrections, threats from outside the country, they were all to prepare a crushed people for even greater sacrifices. To himself, he would wonder how many more sacrifices the people, however willing, could sustain . . . There had been a time when he had believed in the ultimate victory. When the MKO had shown their naivety and attacked in force, and been thwarted, beetles under hobnails, then he had thought that victory was close. But the war went on, and the bombs went on . . .

He had chosen the radicals. He had banked on their success over the moderates.

The man from Manzarieh Park who flew to London that morning, IranAir, he would strengthen the hand of the radicals, and the matter of the Englishman, Furniss, if that were successfully accomplished, that would be muscle in their arm.

Coming into the city of Tabriz, the driver had slapped a police light on the roof of the car, and had hammered the vehicle's siren.

They came to the square outside the Guards Corps Headquarters. There was heavy security at the gate, even the instructor travelling in an official car was asked to produce identification. There had always been security at this building, since a bitch girl had thrown a grenade at the gate and the Guards. An office had been prepared for the investigator, direct telephone lines had been installed, and a telex link with Tehran. He at once examined again the arrangements for the movement of the transport, and he summoned the men who would travel for their final briefing. Later he would oversee the preparations at the villa.

"You'll be alright, sir?"

"Of course I'll be alright, Terence, and do stop nannying me. I will not drink the water, I will eat only in the restaurant, I forswear salads, and yes thank you, before you ask, I do have ample loo paper. All in all, even without you as nanny, guardian or devoted student, I shall be in bliss. I will be pottering on the battlements of the Van Kalesi. I will be climbing the stone steps on which the feet of Sardur the Second stood. I will stand in the rooms that were his home 750 years before the birth of Christ. I don't know when I shall have that chance again. Not now that you are trained to undreamed of heights, Terence. I fancy I am redundant here.

What do you say?"

The Station Officer smiled wanly and slapped the inside pocket of his jacket. "I'll get your report off as soon as I'm in the office."

"Yes. It will give them something to chew on. It is a perpetual source of amazement to me how much a field man can provide if he is directed in the right way. I mean, you might not suppose that running a repair depot in Tabriz gives you the chance to observe much that is important to us, and you would be wrong. They'll be pleased with that."

They would be pleased with what they had because they were now beggars searching for crumbs. Sad but true, that the Desk Head, Iran, had been able to sprint round the Gulf and up to north-eastern Turkey and brief his three field men without the anxiety of knowing that he had missed an opportunity of meeting other operatives working inside. Iran Desk had access to the reports of only three agents in place.

Not the sort of thing he would have discussed with Master Snow, of course, and the young man was left, most probably, in cheerful ignorance of the poverty of information from Iran.

Mattie knew. He knew that Iran Desk was damn near dead.

Eight years after the Revolution, eight years after the purges had started, Mattie Furniss was wafer thin on the ground. No question, not in the land of the Mullahs, of volunteers queueing up to offer their services to the Secret Intelligence Service of the United Kingdom. Looked at logically, he was rather lucky to have had a single agent remaining. The Americans never told him much about their operations inside Iran, and what they did tell him he took with a fistful of scepticism. For all the money they had to spend, which he did not himself have, he doubted they had many more agents than he. The wear and tear of terror, of arrests, firing squads, had left him short handed. He was down to three agents . . . and to Charlie Eshraq. Thank the good Lord for Charlie Eshraq.

"I'll meet you off your plane, sir."

"That's kind of you, Terence. Run along now, and give your lovely wife the excellent evening she deserves."

Mattie watched the Station Officer slip away into his taxi.

He thought Terence Snow had much to learn, but at least he was capable of learning it. More than could be said for the buffoons in Bahrain . . . His report was gone, a weight off his mind. He would write a fuller report when he was back at Century. He had sat up half the night writing it, and sipping sweetened yoghurt, alternately with water, bottled, and the substance of the report pleased him. In Mattie's experience the preliminary report was the one that would do the business.

His longer paper would circulate wonderfully swiftly and be back in the files within 48 hours.

At the reception desk he ordered a hire car.

In the lounge he introduced himself to a group of tourists, and chatted easily with them to pass the time before the car arrived. Americans, of course. Such stamina for travel, it always impressed him. From Milwaukee and Boise, Idaho, and Nashville. They were going to Lake Van in the afternoon in the hope of seeing pelican and flamingo and they told Mattie that if they were lucky, and if their tour literature was to be believed, then they might also see Greater Reed Warblers and Redshanks and Potchards. He was mightily impressed with the power of their field glasses and camera lenses, and humbly suggested that it would be prudent not to point these implements at anything military. In the morning they would be heading on for Ararat. They gave Mattie a catalogue of their expectations and he did not disabuse them. It seemed only too possible that they would indeed light upon Noah's Ark. Such very pleasant people. It was the pity of Mattie's life that he so rarely mixed with the likes of them. And it was an immediate pity that they would be off to capture Mount Ararat first thing in the morning, and would not be able to share with Mattie the glory of the Van Kalesi, fortress of Sardur the Second.

In good humour, and thinking well of Terence, Mattie Furniss bought a card to post home.

George's wife was out of earshot, being wonderfully brave as they would afterwards say, a thoroughbred performance, shaking hands and thanking other mourners for coming.

Four of the Secretary of State's staff had come to the service, showed support, and a pretty impressive turnout altogether.

The photographers and reporters were kept back from the porch of the building by police and a crash barrier. George walked away with the Home Secretary at his side.

"Are you backing off?"

"Most certainly not."

"I expected results by now."

"We're working very hard."

The Secretary of State snorted. "There have been no charges."

"There will be, very soon."

"She was just a child, destroyed by scum . . ."

Typical of the man, the Home Secretary thought, that he should pick a fight outside the chapel in which his only child had just been cremated. The Home Secretary would not tell him what he deserved to be told, not at this moment. Nobody had made little Lucy take the damn stuff, she was a volunteer, she hadn't had to be press-ganged. If that pompous sod had spent less of his time working the constituencies, burnishing his image, if he had spent a little more time at home. If that poor suffering mother hadn't been so mountainously self-obsessed they certainly wouldn't be here now.

"I can tell you, George, that in addition to the pusher of the heroin your daughter used, we now also have in custody the dealer, that's the next step up in the chain, and we have the beginnings of a line to the distributor. The distributor . . . "

"I know what a distributor is, for heaven's sake."

"No, I'll tell you, George, what the distributor is. The distributor is bringing into the United Kingdom anything upwards of half a million sterling, street value, of heroin.

He is a practised criminal with too much to lose to make the sort of mistakes that enable us to pick him up the instant you flick your fingers and call for action. Are you with me, George?"

"But you're going to get to him? If you wouldn't do it, make it happen as a simple duty, you will by God surely do it, whatever it costs your vast empire, as an act of friendship."

"It will be done."

"I will hold you to that."

The Secretary of State turned and stalked back to his wife's side, seeming impatient now to be away. The Home Secretary was breathing hard. God, and he'd been very close to losing his temper. He thought that if that man ever became Prime Minister then he might just as well pack up the black car and return to his farm. He thought that mucking with pigs would be preferable to sitting in Cabinet with an elevated Secretary of State for Defence. He watched them go, sitting back in the limousine with their faces lit by flashbulbs.

* * *

The border was a small stream, knee deep and a body's length across and cutting through a gully of smoothed rocks. The water was ice cold, biting at his feet, sloshing in his boots.