been to London before, but that was many years earlier. He gazed around him. He was at ease. His confidence in the planning behind his mission was complete.
They parked 500 yards beyond the mews.
The student followed Araqi back up the road, well behind him. There was a narrow entrance to the mews cul-de-sac, and Araqi's eyes roved to find the lighting above so that he could estimate the fall of shadows at night inside the cobbled entry. Briskly, Araqi walked the length of the cul-de-sac, keeping to the right hand side, keeping away from the 5 series BMW. There were cars parked outside each of the brightly painted front doors.
He was satisfied.
When he had driven back to within ten minutes' walk of the hotel, the student gave Araqi a brown paper package. The student did not know what was in the package, nor that it had been brought by a courier from West Germany, passing the previous evening through the port of Felixstowe.
The student was told at what time, outside the garage on Park Lane, he should collect Araqi that night. For the rest of the day, Araqi worked on the assembly of an explosive device by which a mercury tilt system would detonate one kilo weight of military explosive.
The PA stood in front of the desk.
'You won't shoot the messenger, sir?'
The Director General winced, his head dropped.
'Tell me.'
'We've got Mr Furniss' bag back from Turkey. All his kit that the Station Officer, Ankara, collected from his hotel.
There's a report which I couldn't make head or tail of but which Miss Duggan has typed up for you. You'd better read it… sadly, it gets worse. Mr Furniss' passport was with his things. That's the passport in his wife's maiden name. What it would appear is that Mr Furniss does not have supporting documentation of his cover.'
'That just about caps it.'
The Director General had served half a lifetime in the Foreign and Commonwealth with Benjamin Houghton's father. He and Houghton's father were golfing partners of old and they had once courted the same girl, she'd turned them both down. He had made certain when he came to Century that young Benjamin would be his Personal Assistant. The boy was cheeky and casual and very good. He would go a long way, if he cared to stay the course.
'Just thought you should know, sir.'
And Houghton was gone, almost indecent haste. Just the same at the meeting with the Deputy Director General and the Desk Heads. They'd all been exasperatingly aloof, distinctly themselves. Bastards.
The Director General began to read Furniss' report, apparently based on the observations of an agent travelling quite widely inside Iran. Very recently, too. Not world shaking, but good, incisive stuff. His PA came through on the internal phone. A meeting with the Permanent Under Secretary, Foreign and Commonwealth, at two. A meeting with the Joint Intelligence Committee at three. A meeting of the Service's Crisis Management Committee at four, with the possibility of a teleprinter link to Ankara. The Prime Minister at six.
'Would you like me to raffle the ballet tickets, sir?'
'No, dammit. Call Angela and ask her to take one of the children. And you can, too, cancel anything you had planned for this evening.'
He didn't notice the builders' van parked opposite the block of flats, across the playground from the concrete entrance way. He stared up at the side windows of the flat. There were no lights on, and it was a damp clouded morning. There should have been lights on in the flat. He knew the children did not go to a pre-school, and he knew that the flat should have been occupied at that time in the morning.
He did not hear the click of the camera shutter, and he did not hear the suppressed whisper of Harlech as he reported Tango One's arrival into a lip microphone. To have heard the camera noise and the voice whisper Charlie would have to have been hard up against the grubby side of the builders' van. Charlie stood in the centre of the playground. Kids played on the swings and larked in the sand pit, their mothers sitting and nudging their pushchairs and pulling on their cigarettes, huddled in conversation. There was a Corporation cleaner out with a broom and a bin on wheels rounding up the swirl of crisp packets and fag wrappers and coke tins.
There was a soccer kick-about and the goal posts were snapped off young trees.
He climbed three flights of concrete stairs. Charlie saw the plywood hammered across the door of the flat. He ran down the stairs, fighting a fierce anxiety. All around him was the normality of the estate. The young mothers heaving their lung smoke into their kiddies' faces, the cleaner whose work would never be completed, the kids who played their eternal soccer.
The flat of Leroy Winston Manvers seemed to Charlie as dead as the broken goal post trees. He was irresolute. Inside Iran, inside his own country, closing with the silenced pistol on two Guards, riding behind the executioner of Tabriz, he would not have known the feeling of sudden apprehension. That was his own ground, the estate in Notting Hill in West London was a foreign country to him.
He looked around him. There were the parked cars, and the builders' van, and the people… there was a stunning ordinariness about the estate on a grey morning.
He snapped his back straight. He walked forward. He went to a group of young mothers. He pointed up to the flat with no lights.
A snort of rich laughter. They were the women who would have been at the front for a public hanging in Tabriz, they would have thought that a good show. Bright laughter, enough to make them choke on their fags. A cigarette was thrown down, not stamped out.
'Got busted, didn't he. Old Bill took away plenty. He won't be back.'
Charlie felt winded, the control ripped from him. He took off, and he had the hoots of their mirth behind him.
Half an hour later, when the mothers had retrieved their young and scattered, the builders' van pulled lethargically away from the estate.
'What he is not going to do is dig a hole in the ground and bury his stuff. He is going to find another dealer. He's sitting on a pile. He's got to find somewhere else to drop it.'
Parrish thought he agreed. He thought Keeper had taken a good attitude.
'Where is he now?' he asked quietly.
'Top end of Kensington High Street, his motor's on double yellows. Harlech says he's looking pretty pissed off. The sign on the door where he's gone says it's an Import-Export company. Haven't any more yet.'
'Tally ho, Keeper.'
Park grinned. 'For the moment it's fine, but it's just a beginning.'
'Home Office files, a stateless person has to have a guarantor.'
'Nice one, Bill.'
'What would not be nice would be for you to lose track of a load of stuff. Got me? That would not be nice.'
The load of stuff was still in the flat in Beaufort Street, Park would have sworn to that. The Suzuki had the canvas back off, and the stuff wasn't in the cab. There was a watch on the front and back of the flat, 24 hours, and the tail was solid on the jeep when it went out, just as it had been solid when Tango One had come out earlier in the morning and gone down to the delicatessen for a pastry and a coffee.
Park would be going down to the Home Office. Parrish would be linking the radios. That was the way Parrish liked it best, left in the Lane with just the typists and clerical assistants to spoil him and share their lunches with him, and keep him fuelled up with coffee. The youngsters all out, raring to go and gone. It took a fair amount to wind up old Parrish, it took the whole of his team out and hunting to wind him right up.
He was in one hell of a great mood that morning, and thumping out on two fingers his progress report for the ACIO.
Of course he was excited, of course it had been one hell of a risk to let Eshraq and the stuff loose.
'You're very kind. I thank you.'
'For nothing.'
Mahmood Shabro walked through the outer office with Charlie. He was no fool, he saw the way his new secretary glanced up from her desk at the boy. He saw the trace of the smile at Charlie's lips. He took Charlie to the outer door.
