with that.'
They would be pleased with what they had because they were now beggars searching for crumbs. Sad but true, that the Desk Head, Iran, had been able to sprint round the Gulf and up to north-eastern Turkey and brief his three field men without the anxiety of knowing that he had missed an opportunity of meeting other operatives working inside. Iran Desk had access to the reports of only three agents in place.
Not the sort of thing he would have discussed with Master Snow, of course, and the young man was left, most probably, in cheerful ignorance of the poverty of information from Iran.
Mattie knew. He knew that Iran Desk was damn near dead.
Eight years after the Revolution, eight years after the purges had started, Mattie Furniss was wafer thin on the ground. No question, not in the land of the Mullahs, of volunteers queueing up to offer their services to the Secret Intelligence Service of the United Kingdom. Looked at logically, he was rather lucky to have had a single agent remaining. The Americans never told him much about their operations inside Iran, and what they did tell him he took with a fistful of scepticism. For all the money they had to spend, which he did not himself have, he doubted they had many more agents than he. The wear and tear of terror, of arrests, firing squads, had left him short handed. He was down to three agents… and to Charlie Eshraq. Thank the good Lord for Charlie Eshraq.
'I'll meet you off your plane, sir.'
'That's kind of you, Terence. Run along now, and give your lovely wife the excellent evening she deserves.'
Mattie watched the Station Officer slip away into his taxi.
He thought Terence Snow had much to learn, but at least he was capable of learning it. More than could be said for the buffoons in Bahrain… His report was gone, a weight off his mind. He would write a fuller report when he was back at Century. He had sat up half the night writing it, and sipping sweetened yoghurt, alternately with water, bottled, and the substance of the report pleased him. In Mattie's experience the preliminary report was the one that would do the business.
His longer paper would circulate wonderfully swiftly and be back in the files within 48 hours.
At the reception desk he ordered a hire car.
In the lounge he introduced himself to a group of tourists, and chatted easily with them to pass the time before the car arrived. Americans, of course. Such stamina for travel, it always impressed him. From Milwaukee and Boise, Idaho, and Nashville. They were going to Lake Van in the afternoon in the hope of seeing pelican and flamingo and they told Mattie that if they were lucky, and if their tour literature was to be believed, then they might also see Greater Reed Warblers and Redshanks and Potchards. He was mightily impressed with the power of their field glasses and camera lenses, and humbly suggested that it would be prudent not to point these implements at anything military. In the morning they would be heading on for Ararat. They gave Mattie a catalogue of their expectations and he did not disabuse them. It seemed only too possible that they would indeed light upon Noah's Ark. Such very pleasant people. It was the pity of Mattie's life that he so rarely mixed with the likes of them. And it was an immediate pity that they would be off to capture Mount Ararat first thing in the morning, and would not be able to share with Mattie the glory of the Van Kalesi, fortress of Sardur the Second.
In good humour, and thinking well of Terence, Mattie Furniss bought a card to post home.
George's wife was out of earshot, being wonderfully brave as they would afterwards say, a thoroughbred performance, shaking hands and thanking other mourners for coming.
Four of the Secretary of State's staff had come to the service, showed support, and a pretty impressive turnout altogether.
The photographers and reporters were kept back from the porch of the building by police and a crash barrier. George walked away with the Home Secretary at his side.
'Are you backing off?'
'Most certainly not.'
'I expected results by now.'
'We're working very hard.'
The Secretary of State snorted. 'There have been no charges.'
'There will be, very soon.'
'She was just a child, destroyed by scum…'
Typical of the man, the Home Secretary thought, that he should pick a fight outside the chapel in which his only child had just been cremated. The Home Secretary would not tell him what he deserved to be told, not at this moment. Nobody had made little Lucy take the damn stuff, she was a volunteer, she hadn't had to be press-ganged. If that pompous sod had spent less of his time working the constituencies, burnishing his image, if he had spent a little more time at home. If that poor suffering mother hadn't been so mountainously self-obsessed they certainly wouldn't be here now.
'I can tell you, George, that in addition to the pusher of the heroin your daughter used, we now also have in custody the dealer, that's the next step up in the chain, and we have the beginnings of a line to the distributor. The distributor… '
'I know what a distributor is, for heaven's sake.'
'No, I'll tell you, George, what the distributor is. The distributor is bringing into the United Kingdom anything upwards of half a million sterling, street value, of heroin.
He is a practised criminal with too much to lose to make the sort of mistakes that enable us to pick him up the instant you flick your fingers and call for action. Are you with me, George?'
'But you're going to get to him? If you wouldn't do it, make it happen as a simple duty, you will by God surely do it, whatever it costs your vast empire, as an act of friendship.'
'It will be done.'
'I will hold you to that.'
The Secretary of State turned and stalked back to his wife's side, seeming impatient now to be away. The Home Secretary was breathing hard. God, and he'd been very close to losing his temper. He thought that if that man ever became Prime Minister then he might just as well pack up the black car and return to his farm. He thought that mucking with pigs would be preferable to sitting in Cabinet with an elevated Secretary of State for Defence. He watched them go, sitting back in the limousine with their faces lit by flashbulbs.
The border was a small stream, knee deep and a body's length across and cutting through a gully of smoothed rocks. The water was ice cold, biting at his feet, sloshing in his boots.
The crossing point was at the apex of a salient of Iran territory to the west of the village of Lura Shirin. Each time he had taken this route he had travelled alone. He was north of the sector through which the refugees usually tried to escape, with the help of Kurdish villagers who would lead them to the frontier if the money were right. With his life, Charlie Eshraq trusted no other person. He had heard from the exile community in Istanbul many stories about the crossing of the frontier. In the cafes, in the bars, he had spoken with those who had come through, stripped of their money by the guides, their nerves shredded by the patrols on either side. He knew that the Guards Corps regularly patrolled the Iranian side and were committed to hunting down those that they hated most, the draft dodgers. He knew that Turkish paratroopers were set out in strength on the west of the border with night vision equipment and with helicopter gunships. He knew that a boy, running from conscription, running from a place in the trenches outside Basra, could evade the Guards Corps patrols only to be caught by the Turks and handed back. The first time he had crossed he had chosen a route that was well away from the paths used by the Kurdish guides.
When he had forded the stream, he felt a small sense of sadness. He remembered the wetness in Majid Nazeri's eyes, and he thought of him polishing the motorcycle. He thought of the girl. He knew he would not be happy until he was back.
He moved forward as quickly as he dared. It was a steep rock climb up a feeder gully, the rucksack was heavy on his back. His hands were cold and slippery and he worked hard to get away, up out of the stream bed. He wanted to be over the line of the ridge before the sun had risen behind him, before he could be silhouetted on its back.
