HOME RUN (17 page)

He was lifted and thrown hard into the back of the truck.

The doors slammed. Light died.

The Immigration Officer gazed from the young man standing in front of his desk back down to the Travel Document.

"Stateless Person . . . ?"

"The government of Iran does not recognize my old passport. I hope soon to have British citizenship, and a British passport."

The Immigration Officer squinted down at the writing.

"And you are . . . ?"

"Charles Eshraq."

The eyeline, at measured speed, moved again from the Travel Document to the young man who wore a smart navy blazer with a travel company's logo over the breast pocket.

"Sorry . . . "

"I am Charles E..S..H..R..A..Q."

When he worked fast at the desk top that was out of sight of the man standing in front of him, the Immigration Officer could still maintain an air of impenetrable boredom. His fingers were flicking at the pages of the book with the print-out of entries. It was sharp in his mind. He and the rest of his shift had had the briefing when they had come on duty in the late afternoon. The queue was stretching out behind the man.

That was alright, too, they could all wait. He had the Iranian, he had Charles/Charlie, born August 5, 1965, and he had a Customs ID call. The name in the Suspects' Index was Charlie Persia, probably a nickname, followed by the reference letter

"o". " o " was Customs referral. The Immigration Officer pressed the hidden button on his desk top.

The Supervisor hovered behind him. The Immigration Officer pointed to the travel document, Charles Eshraq. Place of Birth: Tehran. His finger slid across to the Suspects' Index, Charlie Persia, assumed Iranian. Date of Birth: early, middle 1960s.

"Would you mind stepping this way, sir?" The Supervisor asked, and his hand rested easily on Charlie's sleeve.

"Is there a problem?"

"Shouldn't think so, sir. Just routine. This way, please, sir."

I

8

"We put the dog onto his bag - hung on like it was marrow-bone."

The room was crowded.

There were men from the Immigration Control, and from the uniformed Customs strength, and Park stood dead centre.

Parrish and Harlech were hanging back by the door. Park listened carefully. He had learned long before that the initial brief was the important one, and he would make his Case Officer decisions from that first information.

"We've him sat in a room now. He thinks there's something wrong with his documentation. I tell you what, he doesn't look fussed, not like I'd be if I had the sort of quantity in my case to make the dog go clean off its whistle. OK, your airport dog will get a good sniff every so often, so they're not as you might say blase, but, Jesus, I've seen nothing like it."

Parrish had not yet recovered his sanity from the style of the journey down from the Lane to Heathrow. He still looked like a man clutching a spar in a high sea. Harlech was pale from sitting in the passenger seat where he could not escape from the swerving and the overtaking and the raw speed; Harlech would tell the rest of them later that Keeper's drive down was the worst experience in his life. Harlech had been the late duty, Parrish had been clearing his desk and checking the overtime sheets, and Keeper had just been using up time, polishing his shoes for the third time that day, when the telephone call had come through from the airport.

"We got his ticket off him, and the baggage tag was stapled.

We collected the bag off the trailer and let the dog close.

Damn near pulled the handler off his feet." The senior uniformed officer had been Park's guv'nor at the airport. He didn't like the boy, but he'd seen his quality and he had written a fulsome recommendation for transfer to ID. ". . . The bag is a rucksack, the ticket is from Istanbul. Listen, the dog tells you a fair amount when it gets going. The way that dog went then, our chummie is carrying one hell of a load. We haven't opened anything up, we haven't touched anything. So, it's your baby."

Parrish wasn't saying anything, still shaking his head like he were trying to get rid of the bad dream of the Escort's wheel caps touching the wheel caps of a taxi. Park would not have been able to remember when he had last been so elated at the contact with a suspect. He was the Case Officer. Like the man said, his baby.

"I'd let him run." He knew that there were two other cars on the way to Heathrow, April team members summoned without apology from home. "Just as soon as we've the back-up."

The lift of Bill Parrish's eyebrows told him of the concern.

Normal practice would have been to bust the chummie, and if the chummie wasn't to be busted, then the second most obvious procedure would have been to open the rucksack, empty the contents and substitute dross for the real thing.

Parrish's raised eyebrows were a warning to him.

"Sorry, Bill, but what I'm saying is to let him run."

It was Parrish's style to trust to the flair of the young men in the ID. If he had a deep disliking inside the civil service office where he worked it was for those of his contemporaries, the old lags, who believed that only age and experience counted when decisions were taken. Parrish backed his youngsters, he gave them their heads, and he sweated blood over it. He went to a telephone. He leafed through his diary. He dialled the home number of the ACIO. He was brief. He didn't tell the ACIO that the dog had gone berserk when confronted with the rucksack, that they were sitting on a major haul. He reported that there were thought to be traces of narcotics in the suspect's baggage. He said that a man of Iranian birth, and travelling on a UK-issued Stateless Person's document, the right sort of age, would now be carrying the April team's tag of Tango One. He said that Tango One would be released from the airport as soon as he was satisfied that a sufficient number of personnel had gathered for effective surveillance.

Perspiration on his forehead, not blood . . . by Christ, there would be blood if Keeper fouled up. Nothing in this world surprised him, not since an archbishop had been stopped by his Customs colleagues at Rome and waved his arms about in protest and thereby dislodged three packets of heroin that had been stuck in his belt under his cassock. Nothing surprised him, not even that a young man should try to walk through Heathrow with a heavy load of stuff in a rucksack. Most of them tried the clever way. Most of them used carefully hol-lowed out Samsonite cases, or chess pieces fashioned from solidified cocaine, or they stuffed it up their backsides, or they swallowed it in cellophane packets. They'd try any bloody thing. It did not surprise Parrish that Tango One had it loaded in a rucksack where even the most casual search would have found it. And yet, what did they stop? They stopped one PAX

in a hundred, or one in two hundred. A fair risk, a chance worth taking . . .

"It's okayed, David. You can let him run . . . "

He took Keeper out into the corridor, out of range of the men in the room.

Only Harlech heard the ferocity of his whisper into Park's car. "If you screw up, David, I'm gone, and the ACIO who has backed you will be gone with me, and we'll bloody well hang on to your legs to make sure, damned sure, that you go down with us."

"I hear you, Bill."

"Too right, you'd better hear me."

The telephone rang, and it was passed to Parrish, and he listened and then told Park that the two other April cars had arrived, were outside Terminal 3, v/aiting for instructions.

They set off down the corridor. The man from Immigration, and Parrish and Keeper and Harlech, and a uniformed Customs man caught them up carrying a khaki rucksack. Parrish would have sworn that he could see flecks of the dog's saliva on the rucksack's flap. The rucksack was grimed with dried mud. They didn't open it. That sort of bag was much harder to unpack and repack than a suitcase. No need, really, because the dog had told them what they would find. They transferred from Customs and Excise territory to Immigration. A new set of corridors, another set of duty rosters pinned to notice boards.

In the door of the room where Tango One had been sat, and where he was watched, there was a one way window.

Keeper went close to it, nose against it, stared through the glass. There was the slightest quickening of his breath. He had the break and he had the luck, and he had not really believed in either. He looked through the window at Charlie Persia. Charles Eshraq, now Tango One. He saw a well-built young man with a strong head of dark hair, and a beard of a couple of months, and he saw that the man sat quietly and flicked ash from his cigarette into the tinfoil ashtray. He saw that the man was calm. He wouldn't go in himself. He motioned Harlech to the window. Wrong for either of them to show their faces. He gave a wry smile to Parrish.

"Better we hang together than hang separately, Bill."

Parrish wasn't in the mood for banter. He shouldered past Harlech, opened the door.

Park stood close to the door. He could hear everything.

Something massively reassuring about old Parrish's competence when it came to keeping the suspect at ease.

"I am really sorry about the delay, Mr Eshraq."

"What was the difficulty?"

"No real difficulty other than you happened to hit a desk man who was less than knowledgeable about Stateless Persons documentation."

"Is that all?"

"They're changing the form of the documentation and that young fellow had it in his head that the change had already taken place . . . You know what it is, late at night, no one to set him right until they called me."

"It's taken a long time."

"I'm very sorry if you've been inconvenienced . . . can I just have the details, Mr Eshraq? Everything that happens in Civil Service work, there has to be a report. Name . . . ?"

"Charles Eshraq."

"Date of birth, and place of birth . . . ?"

"August 5, 1965, Tehran. It is in the document."

"Never mind . . . Address in the UK . . . ?"

"Flat 6, 24, Beaufort Street, SW3."

"Very nice, too . . . Occupation, Mr Eshraq?"

"Freelance travel courier."

"Get all the sunshine, do you?"

"Eastern Mediterranean mostly, yes."

"We've delayed you horribly, were you being met?"

"No, I have my wheels in Long Stay parking."

"Christ, I wouldn't leave anything decent in there, I hope it's alright."

"It's only a little Suzuki jeep."

"Can we give you a lift over?"

"Thanks, but I'll take the bus. I'm not in a hurry."

"Well, it's quite a fine night. Again, my apologies. I suppose you've some luggage?"

"Just a rucksack."

"Let's go back to baggage reclaim then, Mr Eshraq."

Harlech and Park ducked away and into an empty office.

Through the door he saw Parrish leading the Tango One out into the corridor. He told Harlech for Christ's sake not to let himself be seen but to watch chummie on to the bus and then wait to be collected by Corinthian by the bus stop. Then he sprinted to get to the Escort in the Customs parking lot.

Keeper found the others, detailed Corinthian to collect Harlech and then join Statesman at the gates of the Long Stay parking lot, one a hundred yards to the west and the other a hundred yards to the east. "Target in a Suzuki jeep, Keeper's Escort not far behind. Take nothing for granted. He says he lives in Beaufort Street in Chelsea, but he's so fucking cool this one he may just fancy his chances at Windsor Castle.

As soon as the line of flight is established, usual procedures to apply."

Then he hammered under the tunnel to get to Long Stay parking to give himself time to locate the Suzuki before his Tango One.

He had been held up at Immigration before, but never for so long.

It was not a surprise to him. The Immigration men always took a hard look at stateless persons' documentation. He had learned in Britain that foreigners were always given a hard time at the airport, almost part of an immigration policy.

What had been a surprise was the courtesy of the senior man who cleared the matter up. That man was one in a thousand, and not a well man by the look of him. Wouldn't last, that was certain. He checked his mirror and saw that a dark coloured Ford, possibly a new Escort, was immediately behind him.

He had lived in London for four years, but it had never felt like home to him. He did not think that any of the exiles who had come first to London would have thought of the city as anything other than a temporary refuge. But it had effectively swallowed them all. They would still all dream of going home.

They would dream, but Charlie was going, and he realized that this was his last journey back from the airport. "Get all the sunshine, do you?" Oh yes, he would be getting all the sunshine. He was off the motorway, and heading past the old Lucozade building. Temperature 5. He looked up into his mirror and saw that he was followed by a Vauxhall, almost certainly a Vauxhall.

There was no tension in his driving. He was controlled, at ease. It had not crossed his mind that he could be busted at Heathrow. He was Charles Eshraq, Stateless Person, but he would not be stateless for long . . . Charlie Eshraq had taken out two Guards with a handgun. He had blown away the executioner of Tabriz. He was the friend of Mr Matthew Furniss. He was going home with just two more items of business to deal with. And then . . . then he would be Charles Eshraq, Iranian citizen. Probably no longer the friend of Mr Furniss, certainly no longer the very close friend of the Misses Furniss. He thought of La'ayya and he patted the rucksack and made a wild calculation of what in perfumes and soap seven kilos of first grade heroin would buy. After the small matter of the armour-piercing missiles, of course. He was on the King's Road. He looked up into the mirror as he changed through his gears, as his foot eased on the brake. There was a Maestro behind him.

If he was quick with a shower, he would be in time to get to the pub before closing. Charlie Eshraq would get a great welcome before "last orders". He would tell some good stories about dumb tourists losing passports or knickers in the Turkish resorts, and he'd get a good laugh and a good welcome.