wanted the poke of my pen if he'd been to Alamut then he wouldn't have cared about the pain.'
'What did he say?'
Markham drove recklessly fast on the open road.
'Heh, Mr. Markham, would you slow down, please? I don't want to be going back to that place on my back ease it off, please. He said the guy came off a boat, and I told him we knew that. I hadn't a name, and neither had he. I hadn't a face, but he had. The face is interesting, it's pale-coloured, it's what I imagine to be the edge of Caucasian, and there's no facial hair. English, English accent, not American. Tall but not exceptional, hair not black matt, didn't get the eyes… Age would be late thirties. He crashed the car because the guy sort of frightened him.'
'Weapons?'
'He started to tell me I think he was trying to talk about a launcher. Yes, he wanted to tell me the lot, I had the pen right in front of his face, but he didn't. I think he wanted to tell me, but he fainted.'
'Associates?'
'The faint wasn't acted. He got another poke, but he was gone cold, like Smoky Joe had hit him and the law came back from its piss.'
'So what do we have, Mr. Littelbaum?'
'Enough to think on. May I, first, educate you on Alamut? With education, you get to understand the Anvil, what he'll do, the sense of sacrifice, the danger he poses, the dedication to his orders. In the year 1152, Mr. Markham, two of the fida'is were sent from Alamut to kill Raymond the Second of Tripoli, that's the port city in present-day northern Lebanon. Raymond the Second was the Christian crusader king. They chose the most public place in his city to kill him, where he would be surrounded by the maximum security. The place they chose was the main gate of the city. Imagine it, crowds, traders, travellers, guards, the greatest audience in front of which to demonstrate their power and their commitment. They stabbed Raymond the Second to death at the gate of his own city, and they would have known that within moments they would be chopped into small pieces by his guards. That's Alamut for you, Mr. Markham, that's what you're up against.'
He pretended to sleep and made a pattern of his breathing.
Her breasts and stomach were against his back and his buttocks. They were naked in the bed, but for comfort's sake not for loving. Sometimes he heard the engine of the car parked beside the house, as if Blake boosted the heater. Sometimes he heard a car coming slowly by and stopping; then there were quiet voices and chuckled laughter. Sometimes there was the empty whistling of the wind, and the distant ripple surge of the sea on the beach.
If he pretended to sleep and his breathing was regular then he hoped it would be easier for her to sleep.
He lay on his side with her warmth against him and he played the television's quiz game in his mind. The grinning show host asked the questions, and bright-eyed Frankie answered them.
Where was Iran?
'Iran, with a territory of 1.68 million square kilometres and a population estimated in excess of sixty million, is at a pivotal geopolitical position between the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent where it cannot be ignored and is unlikely to be humoured.'
What was the government of Iran?
'Iran is ruled by Islamic clerics categorized as fundamentalist and conservative in the extreme, but the government has loose relationships with the organizations of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the autonomous private armies of clerics boasting vengeful actions against Western cultures.'
What was WMD?
'Weapons of Mass Destruction, chemical and microbiological and nuclear, are all the subject of urgent research programmes in Iran.'
What was the requirement for mixing machines?
'The manufacture of the chemical air droplets to be included in the warhead, and for the lining material of the interior of the missile body that must withstand extreme temperature, require dual-purpose mixing machines sold on fraudulently prepared export dockets.'
What was the fate of a spy in Iran? What did they do with a spy in Iran?
'A spy in Iran is either hanged in secret on the gallows at the Evin gaol, or hanged in public from a crane in a Tehran square and hoisted so high that the crowd can better see his death dance.'
A final question. Had to answer correctly to win the holiday for two in Barbados and the new fitted kitchen, the food liquidizer and the wide screen television. He squirmed in the bed.
What were the consequences in Iran of the spy's report on a military factory at Bandar Abbas?
'Don't know, can't answer, was never told, don't want to know, better not knowing.'
To black, to the darkness of the room, and no prizes to carry away.
He took a point on the shadowed wall, stared at it. She was asleep. If he slept he would dream of the crane. She didn't know of the crane, and she slept. There was a small gale of laughter, from the side of the house, and a car drove away. He was drifting… He had always rather fancied Emma Carstairs, and always thought she rather fancied him… drifting, but not sleeping. If he thought of Emma Carstairs, her bold smile and her wriggling her hips to work off her knickers, her hands taking his to the buttons of her blouse, then he wouldn't sleep, and if he didn't sleep then he wouldn't see the crane. He stared at the bare wall.
Chapter Eight.
In the last minutes of the night he moved like a wraith.
He came off Fen Hill and kept inside the tree-line, skirting the end of the marshland. The high winter tides, blown by storms, and the heavy winter rainfall, had made the ground he covered into a swampy bog. The water was always above his ankles and sometimes above his knees but he left no visible track of his advance, and he was hidden by the tree-line. He left behind him the carefully concealed sausage bag and the weapons because, at this time, he had no need of them.
When he came to a small stream feeding the marsh it was necessary for him to wade up to his waist, the sediment clawing at his boots and his legs. The higher ground of Hoist Covert, the name he had read from his map, was ahead of him, and the faint outline of the church tower loomed beyond it.
He moved fast. Once he was out of the bog land and the marsh, he did not stop to unfasten the laces of his boots and empty out the stale dark water and the mud. It was all familiar to him. He crossed the ground as if he were again in the Haur-al-Hawizeh reeds. It gave him comfort to be on familiar ground. He did not move as a trained soldier would, working from instructions and manuals, but used instead the innate skills of a predator. He did not have to consider the dangers of silhouette, of breaking cover, of leaving a scented track behind him. It was natural to Vahid Hossein that he should go as a stalking animal searching for a prey.
He had kept a steady pace and broke it only once when he had seen a single man come with binoculars and sit on a bench between Hoist Covert and a path that led back to the church. He stopped then and checked the ground ahead of, behind, and to the side of the man and watched the traverse of his binoculars. He was only twenty metres from the man when he passed him, in scrub cover. He assumed that the man had come to the bench to watch for birds from the viewpoint that overlooked the marshes; it was a point squirrel led in his mind for future attention.
He moved on past high fences and garden hedges and a sign marking a narrow worn path towards the village.
He climbed a fence and used garden shrubs to mask his movement He crawled on his stomach through a gap in a hedge, lifted a length of chicken wire to go under it, and replaced it. Twice he was within five metres of a house and could hear voices inside, but he kept from the arc of light thrown from the windows. Once he stopped and retraced his steps because a back door opened and a dog, bouncing and barking, was put out to run on a patch of grass. He needed to know where the dogs were: they were a greater enemy than the people.
The houses he went by were of old brick. Some were the homes of artisans, with wilderness gardens stacked with rubbish bags and discarded kids' bicycles, as they would have been in south Tehran. Some were the homes of the affluent, with little tended squares of lawn, heaps of raked leaves and the smell of dead bonfires, as there
