'That's the long and the short of it, gentlemen, we are simply not producing top quality intelligence material. I go to JIC each week, and they say to me, 'What is actually happening in Iran?' Perfectly fair question for Joint Intelligence Committee to be asking me. I tell them what you gentlemen have provided me with. You know what they say? They say to me, and I cannot disagree, that what they are getting from us is in no way different from what is served up by the usual channels along the Gulf… '
'Director General, if I may… '
'Allow me, please, to finish. I'd appreciate that…'
Mattie sagged back in his chair. He was the only smoker round the mahogany table that the Director General had imported upon arrival. He had his matches out. Every other DG he had worked for had stuck to one on one meetings where a bit of concentration could be applied, where speeches would seem inelegant. He smoke screened himself.
'I won't be able to defend my budget proposals for the coming year if the Service is producing, in such a critical international theatre, the sort of analysis that is going into FCO day in and day out. That's the crux of it, Mattie.'
It was the fourth time Mattie had listened to this monologue.
The three previous sessions he had stood his corner and justified his position. He sensed the others round the table praying he wouldn't bite. On three previous occasions he had delivered his answer. No embassy in Tehran as cover for a resident Station Officer. Not a hope in hell of recruiting anyone close to the real power bases inside Iran. Less and less chance of persuading British technicians to do any more than decently keep their eyes open while setting up a refinery or whatever. Three times he had come up with the more significant data that his agents in place had been able to provide… all water off a duck's backside… including the best stuff he had had last time from the boy, and unless they finished soon he would be too late to pay for it.
'I hear you, Director General.'
The Director General hacked a cough through the wreaths of smoke drifting past him. 'What are you going to do about it?'
'Endeavour to provide material that will give greater satisfaction than the hard won information my Desk is currently supplying.'
The Director General flapped in front of his face with his agenda paper. 'You should go out there, Mattie.'
'Tehran, Director General. First class idea,' Mattie said.
Israel Desk was the youngest in the room, high-flier and still irreverent, too long in the field, and having to bite on the heel of his hand to stop himself laughing out loud.
'I cannot abide facetiousness.'
'Where would you suggest I travel to, Director General?'
'The fringes.'
Mattie asked quietly, 'To what purpose?'
'Pretty obvious, surely. To brief your people on what is now required of them. To take the opportunity to get your agents in place out from inside so that they can be advised, in exact terms, of our needs.'
He bit at his pipe stem. 'You are forgetting, Director General, that Desk Heads do not travel.'
'Who says so?'
'Since ever, Desk Heads do not travel because of the security implications.'
'Do not travel, wrong. Do not usually travel, right.'
If he bit through the stem of his pipe he would at the same time break his teeth. 'Is that final?'
'Yes it is. And I think we'll pause there.'
There was a rapid gathering of papers. Israel Desk was already out of the door when the Director General said,
'Goodnight, gentlemen, and thank you for your patience.
What's worth doing is worth doing right.'
Mattie Furniss didn't wait for the lift to get up to the 19th floor. He ducked away from his colleagues for the fire escape stairway. He went down nine flights at two steps at a time, praying that the boy would still be waiting for him and for his present.
It had been a short road for Lucy Barnes from home in a mews house in London's Belgravia to the attic of a terraced house in the West Country town. On this cool and early summer evening she was at the end of her financial resources.
She had gone to London that week, she had broken into the family home through a kitchen window, she had taken the teapot. They would change the locks after that. Probably they had already changed the locks. She couldn't remember now why she had only taken the teapot. She had no idea where she would go for more money, for more scag, after the doses that were on the floor beside her were exhausted.
A short road. Cannabis smoking behind the school's sports pavilion, an act of adolescent defiance and experimentation.
She had been through dragon chasing, heating the scag powder through tinfoil and inhaling the fumes through a soft drinks tube. She had tried mouth organ playing, dragging the same heated fumes into her lungs through the cover of a matchbox.
One and a half years after her expulsion – and pretty goddam embarrassing that had been because darling Daddy was already signed up to hand over the prizes at next term's Speech Day – she was a mainliner and needing a grand a month to stay with it.
The pusher had said this was new stuff, purer than he had ever had through his hands before, the best stuff he had ever been sold. None of the usual dilution shit in the cut, no talcum or chalk dust or fine sugar. Real stuff, like it had been before the dealers got to be so bloody greedy.
She loaded the hypodermic. She could estimate the dose, didn't use fragile weighing scales. She sat cross- legged on a square of threadbare carpet. The attic was lit by the beam from a street light that pierced the dirty glass of the skylight window. She could see what she was doing. The arm veins were no longer any good to her, the leg veins were failing on her. She kicked off her shoes. She wore no tights, nor socks.
Her feet were dark stained, she had not had a bath in more than a month, but she knew where the veins ran on the underside of her feet.
She gritted her teeth as she inserted the needle behind the ball of her right foot. She drew back the arm of the hypodermic, sucking blood into the container, allowing the blood to mix inside the syringe with the scag powder. Slowly, trying to control the trembling of her thumb, she pressed down on the syringe.
She lay back on the bare mattress. She anticipated the peace and the dream.
The boy was where he had said he would be.
Old habits would die hard for Mattie Furniss. The old way of doing things was to meet in a park's open spaces where it was comparatively easy to guard against surveillance and eavesdropping. The boy was a shadow under a sycamore tree close to the lake. He was almost trotting, and the supermarket bag flapped against his trouser leg. Out in the road that fringed the park a van did a U-turn, and its headlights played across the open ground with the manoeuvre and the boy was lit.
Tall, bearded, a fine looking boy. Mattie had known young Eshraq so long that he would always regard him as a boy. But Charlie did not seem to Mattie like any other 22-year-old that he knew, not in build and stature, not in temperament or attitude. A hell of a fine young man, but then so had his father been… He reached the tree. He drew at his breath. He had run all the way from Century on the other side of the river, over the Bridge and across Whitehall to the park. He would have to put in some extra training if he were to finish the half marathon this summer.
'Tied up, dear boy. Apologies.'
'No problem, sir.'
Mattie liked the way that Charlie addressed him. That was his father's stamp on the young man, and his mother's too, in fairness to her.
'Long time, dear boy.'
'It's a new skill for me, learning to write reports, sir. I hope it will be of use to you.' Charlie reached into his blazer pocket, took out a thick envelope, handed it to Mattie. Mattie didn't examine it, just slid it down into an inner pocket of his suit then drew across a zip fastener at the top of the pocket, another old habit. Wouldn't do for a Desk
