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 get better when the probation time was completed. Three years of similar frustration on the Russia Desk, but the Cold War was over and the team had the lethargy of yesterday's crisis; everyone said it would improve when he was transferred to Ireland. Three years in Belfast had turned up interesting and occasionally frightening work; everyone said he should wait for promotion. He'd come back from Ireland and been put on the Islamic Desk, and in London his salary chit seemed to go less 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 advertisement in the newspaper and urged him to go for it. He hadn't yet faced up to the big problem of when to tell his parents that he wanted to jack in the Security Service and go for a life in the uncertain world of finance. They were so pathetically proud of what he did because he never told them about mediocrity and paper-pushing. 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 Fenton's eyebrow.
'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 did not understand how the crippled bird had the strength to make the great sea crossing.
It was down near the breaking crests and the spume of the bow wave. The bird dropped and the talons, startled and outstretched, would have splashed and skimmed the water. She heard its agony cry, and saw the frantic effort to climb again, to survive. 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 wall of the mist.
'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, then coasted the Jeep to the kerb. They were on AlImam Torki Jbn Abdulla Street.
'Don't look where I look, Mary-Ellen. Take a point in the other 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 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 would never understand in the Hoover building, the assistant directors who flew to Saudi Arabia not more than twice a year, and the desk analysts who never left DC, why co-operation was denied him. He dictated reports, endlessly, that were typed up by Mary Ellen cataloguing the Saudi deceit 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 flash of light, the rakban held high, before it fell. He heard the soft groan of many voices before the crowd began to thin, and then the corpse was dragged away. Another man carried the head by the hair. They would have had a confession and it would lie in a file; the bastards would play their dignity and not share. Sawdust from a plastic bag was scattered.
He told Mary-Ellen that she no longer needed to look at the telephone office and instructed the driver to head on back to the embassy.
There was a message on his fax requesting his availability for a secure hook-up. He glanced at it, felt nothing. Littelbaum had only old footprints to follow.
She broke the quiet. She threw back her head, and the auburn of her hair flashed. She threw a stone, savagely, ahead of her towards the tide-line.
'Who are you?'
'I am, will be, Frank Perry. You never met Gavin Hughes. This time, I am not running.'
'What did they say?'
She stared in front of her. Her eyes were red-rimmed. She allowed him to take her limp hand.
'For what I did, the consequence of my actions, the Iranians would kill Gavin Hughes. He disappeared, ceased to exist. A new name, a new identity, a new home. He would have been hunted, but the trails had dried out, were lost. I am not trusted enough to be told how the Iranians found my new name. What I was told if the Iranians have the name then in probability they've the location where I live. The men who came yesterday wanted me to move out, offered me a removal van, said I quote the words 'There is evidence of danger.' But, I'm not doing it again, not running. This is my home, where you are, and our friends. I don't have the strength for more lies. I am staying… It's like I've drawn a line in the sand.'
'But they're experts. They're policemen or intelligence people. Don't they know what's best?'
'What's convenient, that's what they know, what's cheapest and simplest for them.'
'And you're right, and all their experience is wrong, is that what you're saying?'
'All they've done is send me a book about being sensible. It's not that bad or they'd have done more. I know these people, you don't. They look for an easy ride…'
'And me?'
'I don't know what it means, saying that I will stay, for you or Stephen. I do know it's better than running. I've done that.'
'It hurts that you kept the truth from me.'
'For fear of losing you…'
The sea was grey dark in front of them. The gulls hovered over them, screaming. Her grip on his hand
