A Line in the Sand (12 page)

kham was slumped at his desk.

Geoff Mar

He had spent the night at his desk, and his head ached enough for

him

to have taken two paracetamols washed down with the corridor

er's coffee.

dispens

His mouth was foul, his socks smelt and he had

broken his house rule: there wasn't a clean pair in his desk drawer.

A

run-over with the electric shaver didn't help. He was raddled.

Fenton had been in at six, scrubbed fresh, following behind the

r sprays, Hoovers, mops and buckets.

cleaners with thei

Fenton would

not have had more than four hours' sleep and it didn't show.

The hook-up was complicated.

eded voice security and there

They ne

were

two choices. He could go to Vauxhall Bridge Cross and have the FBI tend the British Embassy in Riyadh's diplomatic quarter,

agent at

walking distance from his own workplace, or he could take a cab over to

Grosvenor Square, into their London embassy's FBI section, and have the

hook-up direct to the American's office in the Saudi Arabian capital.

o travel himself. He was exhausted. He would get more

He chose t

help

venor Square than Vauxhall Bridge Cross.

from Gros

transcript is accountability neither party can then wriggle off

"A

the

ad said.

hook," Fenton h

72

most, Geoff Markham had been asleep when his supe nor had

What hurt

opened his door. By his watch, he had been asleep for nine minutes, abruptly by a little hacked cough from the doorway. He had

woken

been

ight, playing linkage with the small network of night-duty

up all n

officers in London, talking, pushing, trading favours with the

Special

Branch NDO and the woman at Foreign and Commonwealth and the man at Vauxhall Bridge Cross. The minute he had drifted off to sleep he

had

been discovered. It hurt.

"And where's the zealot, where's his guidebook? His known

associates,

where are they?" Fenton had asked, a rasped voice.

Through the night he had been searching for those answers. Alone

in

his small partitioned section, his eyes flicking only occasionally towards the pinned-up snapshot of Vicky, he had been with the sub-file on Yusuf Khan, and with the mother-file of Operation Rainbow Gold.

The

mother-file was the net result of the most expensive operation, in rces and manpower, with which Markham had been involved since

resou

his

rom Ireland. Rainbow Gold was the setting up of a United

return f

Nations inquiry front, grandly named: The United Nations Committee for

the Eradication of the Harassment of Ethnic Minorities (Islamic).

Rainbow old

G

had started up New York and London offices for UNCHEM(I).

Resources had been found for the rent of offices and for the printing CHEM(I) literature, and the wages of correspondence writers

of the UN

and the telephone answerers, manpower for the writers and

s.

researcher

who knew of it in Thames House called Rainbow Gold a bottomless

Those

well in the budget of G Branch (Islamic), but out of the hearing of o was the suckling parent of the operation. It was

Barnaby Cox wh

the

to dig deep: Islamic society was damn near impossible to

only way

infiltrate. The religion, the culture, the hatred of the Muslim

radicals in the United Kingdom could not be penetrated by the usual tried-and-tested procedures. Researchers, vetted and hired,

carried

the literature to the selected mosques of the UK, talked, listened, 73

explained it had taken three years of resources and manpower for

Rainbow Gold to begin to win trust, and a desperate amount of G Branch s budget.

(Islamic)'

So slowly, water dripping on stone and eroding

lichen, Rainbow Gold had opened a small door into the world of the radicals. They had tried with the Irish, with the Committee of Human Rights for the Irish in UK - CHRIUK but they'd been too smart to buy it.

The name of Yusuf Khan, formerly Winston Summers, was a product of Rainbow Gold, and the name of Sheik Amir Muhammad, the spiritual

teacher of Yusuf Khan, was from UNCHEM(I). Farida Yasmin (formerly awled

Gladys Eva) Jones, associate of Yusuf Khan, had also been tr

in by

UNCHEM(I). It had taken Markham all night, between the nagging phone Special Branch and the other night-duty officers, to turn

calls to

up

f Farida Yasmin Jones.

the name o

And when he had found it the waves

of

tiredness had caught him, and he'd slept.

said, "SB have a base camp outside Yusuf Khan's place.

Markham

Since

they lost him there's not been sight or sound."

"Typical... Try and keep your eyes open, or do you want a bed moved in?" With the sarcasm was the twinkle in Fenton's eyes.

es?"

"Associat

"Just one, a woman I'm about to get SB to put surveillance on her."

?"

"Their lOs

"The big boy was out of London most of yesterday we picked him up at

that study college at Bedford that gets its funding from

Qom. The little guy was in the embassy all day. If I need you,

you be, Mr. Fenton?"

where'll

r had gone to work each

Markham's fathe

day in a worn suit with the

fear

dancy haunting him.

of redun

He had preached the need for financial

security to the young Geoff. In his last year at Lancaster

University,

studying modern history, he had gone to the milk-round careers day.

The

74

crowds of students had been thickest round the stalls offering

graduate

opportunities with British Airways, the big accountancy firms and

Imperial Chemical Industries, but he'd avoided the crush and gone

to

the civil-service display. He'd said to the earnest woman on duty there, blurted out a whisper, that he wanted to join the Security

Service. It had seemed to offer a winning combination of a job for life coupled with clandestine excitement. The woman hadn't put him down, had merely filled in his details, and he'd dictated a hundred words to her for the application about his wish to contribute to the safety of his country.

He'd sat the Civil Service examination, done adequately, and been

called to a shapeless interview in an anonymous London building. His parents had been told by the neighbours, murmured over the garden

fence

and in their street, that they'd been asked questions about young

Geoff. No skeletons had been found in the positive vetting because there weren't any. He'd been accepted. He had done three years,

as a

probationer and dog's body, of excruciating boredom in front of

computer screens, with occasional days for surveillance training and tracking East-bloc trade attaches across London; everyone said it

would

n time was completed. Three years of

get better when the probatio

similar frustration on the Russia Desk, but the Cold War was over

and

d the lethargy of yesterday's crisis; everyone said it

the team ha

would

when he was transferred to Ireland.

improve

Three years in Belfast

had

up interesting and occasionally frightening work; everyone

turned

said

d wait for promotion.

he shoul

He'd come back from Ireland and been

put

the Islamic Desk, and in London his salary chit seemed to go less

on

far every month.

Islamic Desk was hardly the stuff of Defence of the Realm, and ran a

poor third to the obsession with Ireland and the East European

culture.

He'd met Vicky. Vicky and he were engaged, and she'd found the

isement in the newspaper and urged him to go for it.

advert

He hadn't

yet faced up to the big problem of when to tell his parents that he 75

to jack in the Security Service and go for a life in the

wanted

uncertain world of finance. They were so pathetically proud of what he

old them about mediocrity and paper-pushing.

did because he never t

It

would have been cruel to disillusion them, tell them that nothing

he

did mattered or affected an individual's life. He could recognize the

change in himself since he'd applied for the job. He was spar kier and

more daring, and quite prepared to ask the blunt questions that raised eyebrow.

Fenton's

"If it's any business of yours, I'll be in my room arranging lunch dates I'll scalp you if there isn't a full transcript... Remember

what

I said, young man, about us going into an area of unpredictability.

It's looking like it might be a good deal worse than that."

The great leviathan shape of the tanker, monstrous in the thinning mist, crossed at right angles ahead of the course of the ferry. It was

huge against the size of the closing car ferry. She glanced at it, saw

it merge again into the mist wall, then turned away. From the

cross-Channel ferry, Charmaine, disappointed by another romantic

cul-de-sac, pointed at the speck in the sky.

The bird flew low over the churning mass of the sea, only just beyond the white whip of the ferry's bow wave.

The unsuitable object of her imagined affection shrugged.

"Just a bloody bird what's special about that fucking thing? Come on,

come on back down..."

"Piss off," she said, and turned to watch the bird.

Its wing-beat should have been perfect in its symmetry. Charmaine watched it through a film of tears. Its right wing rose and fell

in a

tired and flailing way, and the left wing flapped harder as if to

compensate. She was on a high deck, where she'd hoped the amour would not find her, and the line of the bird's flight was beneath her. She 76

did not understand how the crippled bird had the strength to make

the

great sea crossing.

It was down near the breaking crests and

e spume of the bow wave.

th

e

Th

bird dropped and the talons, startled and outstretched, would have hed and skimmed the water. She heard its agony cry, and saw

splas

the

effort to climb again, to survive.

frantic

She did not believe it

could make the landfall. If it fell again, if the water covered its wings.. . She wept uncontrollably. The ferry sailed on, fast, and the

bird, even when she screwed her eyes to see it, was lost in the bank f the mist.

wall o

"Stop."

The driver braked, then crawled forward again.

"Do it. Stop. Stop the car."

The eyes of the driver flickered uncertainly, as if an illegality

was

demanded of him. But he had worked nine years for Duane Littelbaum and

knew better than to question. He stamped again on the brake pedal, asted the Jeep to the kerb. They were on AlImam Torki Jbn

then co

Abdulla Street.

-Ellen. Take a point in the other

"Don't look where I look, Mary

direction, fix on it. Don't look."

Out of her window, she took a point as instructed: the telephone

office

at the far end of Al-Dhahirah Street. He kept his eyes on the square between the central mosque, the Palace of Justice, the big souvenir shop and the mud-brick Masmak fortress. All the old embassy hands called it Chop-chop Square.

There was a good-sized crowd. Word would have spread fast. It was never announced first, but the sight of men bringing out plastic bags of sawdust was enough to gather a crowd. He had seen the man pitched out of the back of the closed van. He recognized the prisoner, and the

colonel beside him. He doubted that his ambassador had made the

77

promised telephone calls, or had bothered to pull rank. In the long distance he saw the drawn, frightened eyes of the prisoner, and the easy stride of the colonel as if he were going to a picnic lunch on the

beach. It was the square where the crowds had gathered to see the beheading of the Princess Mishaal, and of some of those fanatics

captured after they had invaded the Grand Mosque at Mecca. It was where they beheaded Yemeni thieves, Pakistani rapists and Afghan

drug-dealers.

He lost sight of the prisoner behind the wall of heads and with him went the last chance to put a name and a face to the footprints. They ver understand in the Hoover building, the assistant

would ne

directors

w to Saudi Arabia not more than twice a year, and the desk

who fle

analysts who never left DC, why co-operation was denied him. He

reports, endlessly, that were typed up by Mary Ellen

dictated

cataloguing the

deceit

Saudi

and vanity that denied him co-operation.

On Mary-Ellen's insistence, they had gone to buy new shirts, which now

lay wrapped in paper on the floor of the Jeep, between his shoes.

He

saw a television camera held up to get a better view over the heads of

the sword. The sword-point would prick the base of the man's spine and

the instant reflex of the man would be to extend his neck. He saw the

ash of light, the rakban held high, before it fell.