The watch on Furniss had been kept to a bare minimum.
He had been shadowed from airport to hotel, from hotel to airport. Away from his hotel, in between his flights, he had been free of his tail. That was of no matter to the investigator, not at this moment.
He worked late because, early in the morning, he would fly to Tabriz to put in place the final pieces of a mosaic of which he was proud.
7
'The fascinating thing about this region, Terence, is that it was never touched by the European civilizations. Here what you have are the unadulterated remnants of the Hittites and the Urartians and the Armenians.'
As far as the Station Officer from Ankara was concerned, Van was one of the most forgettable cities it had been his misfortune to visit. His eyes streamed and he had an aggravating catarrh from the street dust thrown up by the traffic. To Terence Snow, Van was quite stunningly ordinary.
'It's all lying around here to be picked up. Get a spade, dig in the right place, and you'll find the artefacts of old Sarduri, king here in ninth century BC. Fascinating… '
The Station Officer's chief preoccupation was how to attract the attention of a taxi that would stop where they stood a hundred yards down the street from the hotel where the orderly tourists waited in line, and his second anxiety was how he was going to extricate himself altogether from this cultural excursion and get back to Ankara.
'Do you know, Terence, that within half an hour's drive of here there are cave paintings made 15,000 years ago? I cherish that sort of knowledge. I believe it gives a man a sense of his own mortality, which is absolutely healthy.'
'Yes, sir…'
The morale of the Station Officer had been on the wane almost since their flight out of Ankara had been airborne.
They had flown over the huge, bleak wilderness of the interior.
Never mind the history, he reckoned that Van was a quarter of an hour beyond the outside rim of civilization, ancient or modern. No car at the airport, though it had been booked from Ankara. No rooms for them at the Akdamar hotel, booked and confirmed by telephone. True, he had the car now, and he had two singles in the Akdamar, but they had taken sweat and fury and the last iota of his patience. When he was back in Ankara he'd dine out on the baroque excrescence where they had laid their heads in their first night in the city.
Warmly commended by the hall porter in the Akdamar but unlisted by any of the guide books. No hot water, no breakfast, no toilet paper. .. And these people thought they were ready to sign on for the European Economic Community.
What really pissed him off was the certainty that his Desk Head was completely at ease in this godforsaken town.
He was angry just being there. He was frustrated by his inability to wave down a taxi. He was careless. He was playing host to the man from London and he was not running his checks. He had not seen the man who had followed them from the hotel steps, and who now lounged against a wall behind them.
'Have you ever bought jet here, Terence? It's really quite excellent. You can alter the stones, make a very pleasant necklace with the local stuff.'
The Station Officer's wife might well have thrown him out of their flat if he had come home to her with a peace offering of Van jet. He smiled. He couldn't help liking Mattie, everyone in the Service liked the man, but, Christ, you had to wonder whether he wasn't just a wee bit soft in the head.
'No, sir, I never have.'
They had spent two days talking to refugees from Iran. The Station Officer would have had to hand it to Mattie, that the old blighter was ever so casual, ever so easy in his approaches, and he had them eating from his hand as he milked them.
The Station Officer appreciated that the talk was for his benefit, that he was being shown what was expected of him in the future. The Desk Head had been talking about him coming up to Van or Hakkari or Dogubeyezit at least once a month henceforward, to where the refugees crossed. The Station Officer wasn't good with the refugees. Frankly, they embarrassed him. They were young, they were still in shock, they were exhausted from their hike across the mountains and from the long nights of fear from the Iranian and the Turkish military patrols. Bloody unpleasant as it was, the Station Officer would have to admit that the Turkish authorities had no choice but to police their frontier and turn back those trying to cross out of Iran. They had three quarters of a million Iranians, draft dodgers and riff-raff, settled in their country.
They had problems of gang crime and heroin trafficking from the refugees. They had every right to turn the refugees round and send them back whence they came. Bit bloody stark though, when he thought of the young, exhausted faces he had seen these past two days…
'That's our boy, Mattie.'
The taxi had swerved over to them. From afar there was a chorus of protest reaching out from in front of the hotel.
Mattie didn't seem to hear.
They went fast.
The Station Officer damn near cracked his head open on the taxi's roof when they flew over the potholes. They skirted the huge inland sea of Lake Van, azure blue, with a ferry boat on it making a postcard, and they rattled north. Through Caldiran and on to the Dogubeyezit road, and the surface worse, and the driver not attempting evasive action. The Station Officer was rubbing his forehead, and saw that Mattie had his eyes closed, as if he were catnapping. He lit a cigarette.
He thought he understood why Mattie Furniss was a Desk Head, and why he had no enemies in Century. They were on their way to meet a field agent, a man from inside, a guy who was taking one hell of a risk to travel outside, and Mattie had his eyes closed and was beginning to snore. The Station Officer reckoned that was true class. He had been fussing about a taxi, and Mattie hadn't given a damn, because he would have believed that a field agent who had crossed out of Iran wasn't going to be going home when his contact was a quarter of an hour late. He was being given a lesson in how to soak up the punishment of getting to the sharp end and meeting up with agents whose necks were on the line. Sit back and let it happen, and don't bother if you start to snore, well done, Mattie… He checked behind. No tail. Should have done it earlier, should have checked when he was still hot from not being able to find a taxi. He could see a long way back down the road, and the road was clear. After two days with his Desk Head he could have drafted a tourist pamphlet on Van's history. He knew that Xenophon had led his Ten Thousand in battle at Van, that Alexander had been there, and Pompey, and the Mongols of Tamerlane; that Van had not come into the Ottoman empire until Sultan Selim the Grim had done the necessary butchering in AD 1514. He wondered if, in 25 years' time, he would be able to sleep in the back of a taxi on the way to brief a field agent, and seem as antediluvian to a young Station Officer.
When Mattie started awake, and looked around him and had his bearings, and had apologised with a shrug as if it were rude to sleep, then the Station Officer invented an important meeting in Ankara the next day and asked whether it would be alright for him to catch the morning flight. No problem.
He hadn't the spunk to tell Mattie outright that it was his wife's birthday, and that they were throwing a thrash for her at his flat.
They stopped the taxi at the front of the coffee shop. There was a repair yard at the back, and a shed of rusted corrugated iron. The yard was a cemetery for disabled vehicles, some cannibalised, all defunct. The Station Officer saw the lorry with Iranian registration plates.
It was a good place for a meeting. Any long-distance Iranian driver might have cause to stop at the yard.
He thought the agent must be an old friend of Mattie's.
The Station Officer stood back and watched the beaming welocome of the man who pumped Mattie's hand, and then held his arm. The Station Officer had joined the Service straight from Cambridge, he was well thought of and young for the Ankara post, but by now he thought that he knew nothing… He saw a field man take hold of a
