'Is it about me?'
'No.'
She took Stephen's plate, stacked it under hers.
'Is it about him? Has he said something done something?'
'No.'
'It's about you?'
'My problem,' he said. His words were muffled through his hands.
'Aren't you going to tell me?'
'When I'm ready.'
She was up from the table, carrying away the plates.
'Of course, we're not husband and wife. We're only man and woman with a bastard child. Makes a difference, doesn't it?'
'Don't talk such rubbish, don't hurt yourself.'
'Frank, look at me. Is it what we don't talk about? Is it that forbidden area, the past? Two men came, and you lied. Did they come out of the past?'
He pushed back his chair, took the plates from her and put them in the sink. He held her close against him and his hands were gentle on her hair. He kissed her eyes as tears welled.
'Just give me time, please… I have to have time.' He gave her his handkerchief, then went upstairs to Stephen's room to ask about his English assessment.
She tipped the food from his plate into the bin, wiped the table, then went back to typing the Institute's minutes and the details of the Wildlife Field Day and the Red Cross bring-and-buy morning.
She heard him talking with her boy. Because two men had come from the past and he had lied, she thought, somewhere in the darkness outside the window there was danger.
The previous evening, four men and a woman from the Mujahiddin-e-Khalq had been brought in a closed lorry to the camp at Qasvin. Normally it was the corpses of executed criminals -rapists, drug-dealers and murderers that were dumped at the Abyek camp, but because the four men and one woman were filth and apostates they were alive. He had heard them singing in their cell in the night, low, chanting voices.
They had headed north from the training base in southern Iraq and crossed the frontier in the mountains between Saqqez and Mahabad, and been ambushed by the pasdars. Most of the raiding party had fled, but five had been captured. After interrogation, trial and sentence, they had been brought to the Abyek camp at Qasvin.
Normally the corpses were propped against bare wood chairs or low walls of sandbags but once, when an airforce officer had been found guilty of spying for the Great Satan, he had been offered as live target practice.
It was not a camp like a military compound but was constructed as a small town, on the outskirts of Qasvin. It was a miniature Babel, for the recruits spoke in many dialects, with a sprawl of concrete houses and shops, a market that sold vegetables, meat and rice, and a mosque. For many years the Abyek camp had deceived the spy satellites of the Americans, but no longer. Now there was stricter security around the perimeter and greater caution on all methods of communication. Only the best, the most determined, of the Palestinians, Lebanese, Turks, Saudis, Algerians and Egyptians were brought to the camp to finish their training.
Many came to watch, marshalled by their instructors into small groups of their own nationality. In front of them, in the sand scape that stretched to the perimeter wire and then the open country, were the low heaps of sandbags and the chairs. He wore a scarf across his face. Even the most dedicated and determined of the recruits might be captured, interrogated, might not have the resolve of those who had gone from the mountain at Alamut. He did not cock his Kalashnikov automatic rifle until the terrorists were brought out from their cell and were within hearing range of the metal scrape. They were not blindfolded.
They were led to the chairs and the sandbags. Their ankles were not tied. The airforce officer who had spied for the Great Satan had tried to run, which had made for a better shot. It would be good if some of them ran. They were between thirty metres and a hundred metres from him. They were denounced by the commander of the camp, who read from a page of text. There was a silence and the sun caught their bared faces. He shot two with a short burst and saw them spill over, dead. He fired a long burst into another, a dozen rounds, and watched as the body kicked in spasm. He used many shots on the fourth man, but his mind was clear enough to reckon when he had one bullet left. She was furthest away, the last. She stared back at him. None of the men had given him the satisfaction of running, and neither did she. He shot her in the forehead, and she fell backwards. There was applause. He cleared his weapon, and walked away.
As the recruits blasted at the corpses it hardened them to fire at real bodies he made a call on his digital telephone. He was ready to begin his journey.
'I cannot fashion it out of nothing. I can only pass on what I've been given by the Americans, and I've done that. I've gone to the edge of my remit. If you can't shift him, that's your problem.'
Penny Flowers had cycled over from Vauxhall Bridge Cross to Thames House; a rucksack and a mauve helmet sat beside her chair. It was the end of her day and she was tired, Geoff Markham thought. She wanted out and the ride home. She was older than him, and more senior. She didn't acknowledge his presence. He sat at the far end of the table and took the minutes of the meeting.
'May I just go over the ground once more. Stop me if I'm wrong. We have FBI material..' on a raid into the Saudi deserts, following an intercepted but scrambled telephone link. They miss their target but retrieve sheets of burned paper, which are sent to their laboratories for examination.'
Barnaby Cox was a high-flier, and Geoff Markham had heard it said often enough that promotion had come too fast for his slender ability. He headed G Branch, with responsibility for the prevention of Islamic terrorism and subversive activity in the United Kingdom. His route to survival, as Markham had heard it, was a dogged pursuit of detail and a fierce avoidance of decision-taking. The weight of responsibility had prematurely aged his features and greyed his hair.
'Which is what I told you yesterday afternoon, Barney. Their forensics came up with the name of Frank Perry, in capitals, roman characters, a date and time, and a wharf number in the port at Abu Dhabi, in arabic. There was a secondary call the next day from a position located as mid-Gulf, between Abu Dhabi and Bandar Abbas. The Americans checked the name Frank Perry with their own computers, drew blank, tried us. We registered, it's what I told you yesterday.'
It was not Harry Fenton's style to show deference to the younger man who had leapfrogged him on the advancement ladder. Fenton was back on tried and trusted home territory. He had private means and didn't care about the pension, but he had failed that day and there was an exaggerated edge to his voice. Geoff Markham doodled on his pad, waiting for something of value to note.
'Unless I'm given facts from which a threat-level assessment can be made, there's not really much point in me sitting here. Resources don't grow on trees. Franldy, it's pathetic that a man at risk cannot be persuaded to move to a safer berth.' The superintendent from Special Branch spoke. He had come into the room and jerked off his jacket, ready for a fight. He was already bored. Geoff Markham knew the spat for influence between the Branch and the Services was already explosive. It amused him to watch.
'Fatal, the use of businessmen, never worth it,' Cox mumbled.
'He's simply a silly little man without the wit to know when he's being offered common sense,' Harry Fenton said.
'But we, dammit, are obliged to react.'
'I'll need some facts, if it's to come out of my budget,' the superintendent shot back.
So, pass the load to Geoff Markham. The junior would write a report, and decisions could be suspended until it was circulated. Beside his doodles of Victorian gravestones, with a couple of church steeples, he wrote down Penny Flowers's extension number at Vauxhall Bridge Cross and the policeman's number at Scotland Yard. He left them, as a whisky bottle was lifted out of the cabinet, and went back to his cubbyhole between the partitions on the outer walls of the open-plan area used by G/4.
There was a photograph, blown up by the copier, above his desk. The Ayatollah Khomeini glowered down at him, fixed him with a cold, unwavering stare. It was good to have the picture. It helped him to understand: the image on the wall was better than anything he read or was told. It was a snapshot to suspicion and hostility. He rang Vicky to tell her he couldn't make dinner. She was giving him the treatment, and he put the phone down on her, didn't bother to continue a scrap with her. He opened the file on his desk and gazed at the three useless sheets of paper that dealt with an identity change five years previously. Nothing was in the file about a life and a name
