A Line in the Sand (39 page)

She looked down at his

waist and the gun in the holster.

"What you have to understand, Mrs. Perry, it's all totally

.

predictable

It's not peculiar to here, it would happen if you lived

anywhere. It would be the same if you were in a suburb or a city

.

street

It's what people do when they're frightened. Maybe you'll

find someone out there who has the guts to stand in your corner, and you

maybe

won't. What you have to remember, they're ordinary people,

xpect anything else from

people you'd find anywhere. You can't e

em."

th

e lavatory flushed upstairs.

Th

ironing done.

"I'll get the

How long will it be till they come for

Frank?"

"Thank you, the stuff's a bit tight on me.

He disappeared into the dining room. In the kitchen her Stephen was dly writing in his exercise book even though he would have

still dogge

heard each word Vince had said to her. Outside, the night was coming and the curtains were tightly drawn against it. Vince had always

258

been

good with Stephen, had made him laugh.

so

Would they come that night

for Frank, or the night after, or the night after that? She shook and

tried to hold the iron steady.

In a vile temper, Fenton returned to Thames House from his lunch.

It

should have been lunch and shopping with his wife, if the wretched man

had not cancelled lunch for Monday, and insisted his only opportunity day. Fenton had bartered with his wife: lunch with the

was Satur

academic and then shopping, with her having access to the full range of

his plastic.

He came up to the third floor, was told there was nothing new of note, n went into his office to shed his coat and spill his micro

the

tape-recorder on to the desk. The lunch had further confused him, and

the expensive shopping had wounded him.

He had not used this source before, but the file said he was sound.

The

ademic was white-haired and ginger-bearded, a professor of Islamic ac

studies at a minor college at the university, had a face lined like a

popular ski-run, from Sudan. The confusion, from the soft-voiced

lecture, had fuelled Fenton's temper. He listened to the tape again.

tresses me is the hostility of the Western media and the

"What dis

Western "orientalists" towards the Islamic faith. They are servants of

imperialism. They stigmatize, stereotype and

ize

categor

us, and any

holar of the Faith of Islam is labelled with the title of

sc

"fundamentalist". There's no denying it is a term used with y.

hostilit

uisition, or if

If we judged Christianity by the excesses of the Inq

we

in Zionism to

took the Fascist elements

reflect the faith of Judaism,

u would be horrified. If we talked always about apartheid and

yo

Nazism

would rightly criticize us but

as examples of Christian belief you

when

aircraft he is labelled an Islamic

a zealot hijacks an

fundamentalist.

259

If a lunatic shoots children in a school, do we call him a Christian

. You follow

fundamentalist? You live by a double standard

avishly

sl

tle, without

the American need to have an enemy, and you plant that ti

e slightest reason, on the faithful of Islam."

th

They had

en

be

in the students' canteen, a dreary cavern of a building.

f-service counter,

They'd colleded salads and fruit juice from a sel

t

no

ersistently

a bottle of wine in sight, and the academic had p

estioned

qu

the woman at the till to be certain there was no alcohol in the vinegar the salad.

that accompanied

"You distrust us in your midst, even those Muslims who are British citizens.

y are monitored

Our colleges for converts in this countr

by

the security forces why? Because we are different, because we live by

other criteria? Is it that you fear believers and the standards to y dedicate their lives?

which the

A Muslim will not steal from you,

will not seduce your wife, will not go to prostitutes, and yet the th of our decency is regarded as a threat so we are harassed

streng

by

ing you talk about involves this

the political police. Everyth

reat,

th

n the

but it is a figment of your imagination. We are not drunk i

reet and looking for violence, we are not hooligans. Would a

st

virtuous young woman, an Islamic convert, join in a criminal

iracy

consp

r? The very idea is preposterous and shows the depths of

of murde

your

prejudice."

Fenton had listened and toyed unhappily with his lettuce leaves,

probably left over from the previous week's catering. They had a

table

to themselves. He had attended the Royal Military Academy at

t, not university, and when his eyes wandered to the students

Sandhurs

sitting around them, he'd felt a sense of disgust.

"You have made a growth industry in the study of the Islamic faith, but

the work is shallow. You seek to vilify Iran, to cast that great

nation and its people in a mould of the "medieval"~ I tell you, Mr.

Fenton, where there is the Sharia, the law of Islam, you would find 260

it

safe to walk in the streets. It is a code of fairness, charity and decency. Yes, there is a death sentence. Yes, there is very

occasional amputation and the flogging of offenders but only after the

most rigorous examination of the felon by the courts. I venture to say

that there are many in the United Kingdom, so-called Christians, who yearn for the punishment of the guilty. But to suggest as you do, Mr.

Fenton, that the legally elected government of Iran would seek

clandestine vengeance abroad is just another example of a warped and closed mind. Let me tell you if a small incident or a trivial event f you made from it a fraudulent link with Iran, if you

occurred, i

danced to the American tune, if you made lying public statements,

then

the consequences could be most grave. Do you dance to that tune,

Mr.

Fenton? Are you acting now as a lackey to those Islamophobic

elements

of the American establishment who wish to block the return of more normal relationships between Iran and the United States? A false

and

deceitful move would lead, Mr. Fenton, to the most desperate of

consequences. Of course, I do not threaten you but I warn that your t

irrelevan

and decadent country would be at war with a billion Muslims

throughout the world. I do not think you would wish that."

So, earnestly, at the end of a meal that left him hungry, he had fled een.

the cant

With a deep sigh, Fenton switched off the tape-recorder he had worn The two roads split ahead of him, and the

under his jacket.

directions

they took were opposite and irreconcilable.

or good, which he was too bigoted to

Was Islamic Iran a force f

appreciate, or a force for evil, which made a sewer of the streets of

his country? He did not know which road led to truth. What he did ow was that Abigail Fenton had punished him for her missed lunch

kn

with

of a new handbag, a dress and a matching twin-set.

the price

He rang Cox in the country, and hoped he was disturbing him. He told him what he had learned. Whichever way they twisted was fraught with 261

problems. Cox said his confidence in Fenton's judgement was, as

always, total. He'd always thought of Cox as a time-serving,

networking fool; now he began to doubt that opinion.

He wandered towards Cathy Parker.

"I'm confused, Cathy."

"Goes with the rank, Harry."

"I don't know whether it's real can't quite bring myself to believe it

the threat."

"Best, Harry, as the actress said to the bishop, just to lie back and

enjoy the ride. Do you want to be told?"

"If it'll blow some clarity into a fogged old mind..."

"Bollocks, you're loving every minute of it."

He grinned. She laughed and started to map it out, what they had.

A

man had come in from the sea. A car had crashed, the man had moved on.

An associate was missing from home but photographs had been found

of a

target and a location. Between each point she rapped her pen on the n her face lightened.

desk, as if to alert him, the

d a marriage, 1957.

"I've foun

The daughter of a British oil engineer

to an Iranian doctor. There's a cousin down in Somerset..."

"What'll that give you?"

ho knows?

"W

Might give me a face. I don't like to see you confused.

you and

Confusion is like haemorrhoids, Harry, embarrassing for

therefore bloody unpleasant for the rest of us. I'm making it my

business, by hand, to swab away your confusion."

"Do you believe in it, the threat?"

"I'd be a right idiot if I didn't."

t, do you believe in that?"

"And the tethered goa

262

She laughed into his face.

"I'm just the bottle washer it's your responsibility, Harry, not mine.

You volunteered."

The blue Fiat 127 was behind a hedge, hidden from the road. Brought up

in the provinces by a family without military or criminal links, she had compensated for her lack of experience in such areas by the simple application of common sense. Using basic logic she had thought

through

each of her moves. The car was the right colour to avoid attention; tion, with commuters not coming back from London until the

the sta

middle evening, had been the right place to steal it from. Her own car

was abandoned in woods: she had unscrewed the number-plates and

buried

them under fallen leaves. It would be days or weeks before it was found, reported. She had done each thing sensibly, and even if he had

wanted to be could not have criticized what she had done.

She sat in the car, in the silence, in the dark, and her mind wafted between her two contrary worlds: Farida Yasmin or Gladys Eva. He

would

now be making the final checks on his rifle and would be smearing

mud

on his face.

shuddered, and tried to pray to his God, her God,

She

to

protect him. When she tried to pray, she was Farida Yasmin Jones.

The

man was guarded. Under her sweater, she was running her fingers over her stomach, as he had caressed the bird's feathers, as

the skin of

she

had stroked his hair. The man was guarded with guns. It was the

first

moment that she had considered the realities of the guards, the guns.

She thought of him shot, bleeding. As her fingers moved faster,

pressed harder, she was Gladys Eva Jones. She thought of herself, waiting and alone. She thought of the boots on his neck where her fingers had been, and the pools of blood. Soon, he would be moving off, tracking beside the marshes towards the lights of the village.

was coming through

Geoff Markham had crossed the orbital motorway and

263

the dirty sprawl of east London's streets. Littelbaum had slept on the

open road but the jerking drive through the traffic had wakened him, and he talked.

"Pathetic, really, a sign of age, that I cannot climb a narrow staircase without a palpitation. I'm fine now, I'm warm, and I've had

my necessary sleep. I owe you an explanation why a hundred miles

driving out of London, a quick climb of the church tower, and a hundred miles drive back has not been a waste of your time."

Markham stared into the weaving mass of cars, vans and lorries, in heavy concentration.

"I am not a criminologist, or an academic, most certainly not a clinical psychologist. I detest those shrinks who charge fat fees for

profiling. I am simply, Mr. Markham, an ageing soldier of the

Bureau.

I have been in Tehran and Saudi Arabia for the last twenty years of my

working life. I said, because I know those places and those people, I

could smell him. It's not vanity, it's the truth."

Markham drove past the brightly lit shop windows festooned with

bargain

stickers and kept his silence. He had noted that not a word of

sympathy had been expressed by the American for Frank Perry and his family, as if there were no room in the job for compassion.

ools of trade, Mr.

"My t

Markham, are intuition and experience and

I

value them equally. Actually, there is little that's complicated.

We

are told

he is late thirties. He would have been eighteen or nineteen

years old when the Ayatollah returned from exile. Then comes the

war

th Iraq.

wi

The military are not trusted, the principal fighting is

the fanatical but untrained youth of the Revolutionary Guard

given to

Corps. They fought with a quite extraordinary and humbling