and sucked it, turned the stone on his tongue and cleaned it, then spat it out and then he stared straight ahead at the spinning wheels of the vehicle in front, and the grinning idiot face of a child in the vehicle's back window.
She knew.
'I had the call, I was out of my room in four minutes.
I told you, I didn't have the chance to dress properly, decently. My name's Farida Yasmin.'
It was said that the Imam Khomeini, on the drive from his French home in the village of Neauphle-le-Chateau to the airport at orly for his flight home and the triumphal return, had never looked from his car's windows on to the decadence of the Parisian streets, had kept his head lowered to avoid the sight of impurity.
'You've seen the man's photograph, Perry's? Of course, you have. I took it. You've seen the picture of his house? Yes? I took that as well. I think I'm to be trusted.'
He jolted. Under the law that was the basis of the state, the sharia, the testimony of a woman was worth half that of a man. They were not of half value, the crucial photographs of the man and his house. She was beside him and her thighs were bare and her breasts bounced under a thin sweater. It was written that exposure of the flesh 'without Islamic cover can invite foul looks from men and invite the devil's lusting'. He was dependent on her.
She told him when she had seen the man and about his house. In the planning of an attack he had never before talked to a woman as his equal.
She looked into his face, caught his eyes.
'What happened to my friend, to Yusuf?'
He said what he knew, and offered her no sympathy. She was strong. He had known so many who had died young, gone early to the Garden of Paradise. She looked ahead.
'You talk well, Geoffrey,' the man said.
'You say the right things, but I am not yet convinced of your commitment to them.'
'We get a lot of sincerity these days,' the woman said.
'What we have to look for is when the sincerity is larded on like greasepaint.'
Markham swallowed hard.
'Anyway, that's as maybe, that's our problem to evaluate, not yours…' The man hesitated, as if for effect.
The interview had lasted twenty-five stilted minutes. He had used all the words that Vicky had written out for him, woven them into answers, and twice he had seen the little mocking glint in the woman 5 eyes.
'Let's press on. Let's explore a bit more… We're not with the civil service, we're not able to rely on government's safety net, we're in a hard, commercial environment. A man works for a company, does all that it asks of him, takes his work home and frets over it, is a good colleague and a pimple-faced creep who knows nothing of anything hands him a letter of dismissal, without warning, and a second letter of redundancy terms, and he's cleared his desk and gone in ten minutes, on the scrap-heap for the rest of his life. Could you be the pimple-faced creep and do that?'
The woman leaned forward.
'Are you up to that, Geoffrey, screwing good employees' lives?'
He took a deep breath.
'I've done it, I know about it. It got to be pretty much every day. I was in Northern Ireland, I ran informers that's playing God. You make a mistake with an informer and you get him killed it's not just killed like in a road accident, it's torture first with electricity and beatings and cigarette burns, and then it's the terror of a kangaroo court and then it's a bin-bag over the head and a kick so that he goes on to his knees, and the last thing he hears is a weapon being cocked… They're not good guys, they're scum-bags, and they're so damned scared that they get to lean on you like you're a crutch. You know how it will end and they do, but you don't let them quit. It's expensive when they quit, and they're damn all use once they're out of it. So you keep your player in place, and you sleep at night and put him out of your mind. It's your work and you don't worry about it… I've played God with people who won't be getting a good pension and won't have only their ego bruised I've played God with men who'll have the back of their heads blown off and whose women will be spat on as the wife of a traitor and whose parents will disown them and whose kids will be ostracized for their lifetime. Does that answer your question?'
The bleeper went at his waist. The woman stared at him, her mouth slack. The man looked blankly down at his notepad.
He read the message: 'MARKHAM/G RE JULIET 7 GET BACK SOONEST. FENTON
He said, 'I'm sorry, I'm called back.'
The woman asked, 'To play God?'
The man looked up from his notepad.
'You'll hear from us.'
Markham was out of the chair.
'Thank you for your time.'
He left the office and waved down a taxi.
He was dropped on the corner, and went into the building that had housed the last ten years of his life, past the desk where they had the hidden guns, through the security locks, and ran up the stairs with the laminated windows.
He came to the door of Fenton's office and heard the American's quiet voice.
'You'll have a week, and you should take this as the first day of the week. In a week either he'll have reached his target and goner or you will have him dead or in your cells. A week, not more, believe me. Your countdown, gentlemen, has started. And -can I say? you've had the luck of a break the like of which I've never had. The question is, can you use your luck?'
The police, uniformed and wearing bullet-proof vests, their handguns on their hips but their machine-guns secreted in cases, filed into the cubicle area at the far end of the ward for the hospital's emergency cases. Away from the sight of the patients, close to the bed, they unpacked the cases, produced and loaded their machine-guns. The nurses came and went, checking the purring equipment and dials on the rack beside the bed, and glanced at them with raw distaste. They found chairs, and settled in. Their role, the guns across their laps, was simple. The problem was away down the corridor where the detectives met the duty physician and the arguments began.
He turned his head and saw the cottage with the for-sale sign, and thought what it would cost to buy and repair. It was the sort of home that Lily would have loved, and the village was the sort of place where the boys would have flourished. But it was an empty thought because his job was in London, and it was beyond the bounds of possibility that he could have afforded it. It was the sort of place that some high-flying bastard out of London bought as a second home, for occasional weekends, and they were the people he detested.
They were out of the village, and soon into the narrow roads. Davies had the map on his knee. Perry drove.
If there was just the one protection officer, the principal always drove. He had jerked his coat back so that the butt of the Glock was clear for his hand to reach. He had the road-map open and on it were marked the regional hospital, fifty-two miles away, and the two local hospitals with Casualty and Emergency, twenty-four and thirty-one miles away; by now all of them would have been discreetly requested to hold plasma stocks of the principal's blood group. Also on the map were airforce bases to the north and the south-west, and a telephone exchange in the destination area; all designated as safe areas of refuge.
'It's nice countryside it's fabulous, isn't it?'
'Yes, it is.'
Bill Davies knew the countryside round the Prime Minister's bolt-hole, Chequers, and round the Oxfordshire home of a onetime Northern Ireland minister, round the estate of a Saudi fat-cat, and the countryside round Windsor Great Park where the Jordanian king had a mansion. He knew about the countryside and loathed it. He called it a hostile environment.
They'd come out of the village on the one long, straight road and were now in the close, high-hedged lanes. His eyes were on the hedges, on the ditches, on the concreted culvert entries, on the trees back from the lanes. It was the nature of the job, and he regarded himself as professional and dedicated to it, that the warning time might be two seconds or three, and the principal wasn't trained to drive, wouldn't have known how to perform the bootlegger turn, wouldn't have known how to get to maximum speed. He'd half frozen just before the last junction, his hand hovering over the Glock, when they'd come to a Transit van half filling the road with the bonnet up and a
