'My option is to say what I have said… No.'
'That isn't an option… Listen, you're in shock. You are also being wilfully obstinate, refusing to face reality-' 'No. Not again. I won't run.'
He heard the hiss of his superior's exasperation. He glanced down at his watch. Christ, they had not even been in the house for fifteen minutes. They had driven down from London, come unannounced, had parked the car on the far side of the green on to which the house faced. Fenton had smiled in satisfaction because there were lights on inside. They had seen the face at the window upstairs as they had opened the low wicket gate and gone up the path to the door. He had seen Perry's face and he had thought there was already a recognition of their business before they reached the door. They wore their London suits. Fenton had a martinet's moustache, painstakingly trimmed, a brown trilby and a briefcase with the faded gold of the EIW symbol.
There was no porch over the front door, and Perry would have recognized them for what they were, a senior and a junior from the Security Service, before they had even wiped their feet on the door mat. He made them wait and allowed the rain to spatter their backs before opening the door… Fenton was not often out of Thames House: he was a section head, consumed by the reading of reports and attendance at meetings. In Geoff Markham's opinion, Fenton had long ago lost touch with the great mass of people who surged back and forth each day along the Thames embankment under the high walls of the building on Millbank. To Fenton, they would have been a damn bloody nuisance, an impediment to the pure world of counter-espionage… Markham wondered how he would have reacted if strangers had pitched up at his door, flashed their IDs, muscled into his home, started to talk of life and death.
Fenton snapped, 'We have conduits of information, some more reliable than others. I have to tell you, the information we are acting upon is first class. The threat is a fact-' 'I won't run again.'
Fenton's right fist slammed into the palm of his left hand.
'We're not urging this course of action lightly. Look, you did it before-' 'No.'
'You can do it a second time.'
'No.'
'I have the impression that you wish to delude yourself on the strength of the threat. Well, let us understand each other. I am not accustomed to leaving my desk for a day, journeying into this sort of backwater, for my own amusement-' 'I won't run again final.'
Fenton brayed, at the back of Perry's head, 'There is evidence of a very considerable danger. Got me? Hard evidence, real danger From where he stood at the door, Geoff Markham thought that Perry's silhouetted shoulders drooped slightly, as if he'd been cudgelled. Then they stiffened and straightened.
'I won't run again.'
Fenton ground on relentlessly, 'Look, it's a pretty straightforward process. Getting there is something we're expert at. You move on, you take a new identity… A cash sum to tide you over the incidental expenses. Just leave it to us. New national insurance, new NHS number, new Inland Revenue coding-' 'Not again. No.'
'Bloody hell, Mr. Perry, do me the courtesy of hearing me out. They have your name, not the old one, they have Frank Perry get that into your skull. If they have the name, then I have to examine the probability that they have the location…'
Perry turned from the window. There was a pallor now to his cheeks, and his jaw muscles seemed to flex, slacken and flex again. There was weariness in his eyes. He didn't cower. He stood his full height. He gazed back at Fenton. Geoff Markham didn't know the details on Perry's file, had not been shown it, but if he deserved the threat, then there was something in his past that required raw toughness.
'It's your problem.'
'Wrong, Mr. Perry. It's your problem because it's your life.'
'Your problem and you deal with it.'
'That's ridiculous.'
The voice was a whisper: 'Men like you, they came, they told me of the threat, they told me to quit, run. I listened, I quit, I ran. I'm not spending the rest of my life, every day that remains of my life, like a chicken in a coop wondering if the fox has found me. It is your responsibility, it's owed me. If the fox comes, shoot it. Understand me? Shoot it… What did you ever do for your country?'
Geoff Markham heard Fenton's snort, then the cut of the sarcasm.
'Oh, we're there, are we? Playing the patriot's card. A man of letters once said that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.'
'I worked for my country. My head was on the block for it.'
'While lining a damn deep pocket…'
'I am staying, this is my home.'
It was a good room, Geoff Markham thought. There was decent furniture, a solid sideboard and a chest of dark wood, low tables. It suited the room, which was lived-in. He could see it was a home. When he was not sleeping at Vicky's, he lived in an anonymous, sterile, one-bed roomed apartment in west London. Here, a child's books were on the floor, an opened technical magazine, and a cotton bag from which peeped a woman's embroidery. Invitations to drinks and social functions stood on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. If it had been Markham's, he, too, would have tried to cling to it… But he had seen bodies, in Ireland, of men who had not covered their tracks, had made themselves available to their killers. He had seen their white, dead faces, the dried blood pools below their cheeks, and hair matted with brain tissue and bone fragments… They could whistle up the removals company; there were people who did discreet business for them. They could have him loaded within twenty-four hours, gone, lost.
Fenton jabbed his finger at Perry.
'You won't get the sources from me, but I can tell you they have given this matter your life, your death a very considerable priority. Are you listening?'
'I am not leaving my home.'
'They are starting on a journey. We don't know when they began it, could be a couple of weeks ago. For them, Mr. Perry, it is a long road, but you can be certain that at the end of it you are their target…'
The dhow had brought dried fish and cotton bales across the Gulf. The cargo for the return journey was boxes of dates, packaged video-cassette recorders and television sets from the Abu Dhabi warehouses, cooking spices bought from Indian traders, and the man. The dhow's large sail was furled, and it was driven by a powerful engine. The man was the important cargo and the engine was at full throttle. He sat alone at the bow and stared down into the foaming water below. The previous night, each of the five crewmen had seen him come aboard in the darkness, slipping silently down the quay side ladder. Only the boat's owner had spoken with him, then immediately given the order for the ropes to be cast off, the engine to be started. He had been left alone since the start of the journey. The call to his mobile telephone had come just after the crewmen had seen him lean forward and peer down to watch the dark shape of a shark, large enough to take a man, swimming under the bow wave before it dived.
None of the crew approached him except to offer him a plastic bottle of water and a bag of dried dates. Then the man had lifted his face. The scarred redness around his eyes, the upper part of his cheeks and his forehead were raw. The crewmen, swabbing the deck, stowing ropes, taking turns at the wheel, understood: he had come through the stinging ferocity of a sandstorm. He had talked quietly into his telephone and none of them could hear his words in the several minutes the call had taken. It would be late afternoon before he would see the raised outline of the city's buildings, the mosque minarets and the angled, idle cranes of the port. They did not know his name, but they could recognize his importance because they had sailed with their hold half empty, at night, to bring him home.
He wore the torn, dirtied clothes of a tribesman, he smelt of camels' filth, but the crewmen and the owner simple, devout men who had sailed through the worst gale storms of the Gulf waters -would have said that they held this quiet man in fear.
Later, when they had a good view of the buildings, minarets and cranes of Bandar Abbas, a fast speed boat of the pasdaran intercepted them, took him off and ferried him towards the closed military section of the port used by the Revolutionary Guards.
They felt then as if a chill winter shadow was no longer on their dhow, and they tried to forget his face, his eyes.
'The last time I did what I was told to do.'
