There could be guards outside. Mattie had to accept that there might be guards outside the villa and that he had no idea of their positioning. He was listening, but his ears were filled with the radio broadcast, and the words of the men inside the room. He pushed himself away from the wall and walked past the door, trying to make himself upright. He should have brought the tray, either as disguise or something to throw.
He undid the catch on the holster, put one hand on the butt of the pistol and went into the kitchen. No one there. They had already eaten. His own food would have been the last to be prepared. The sink was stacked with plates and with cooking dishes. They'd come soon, perhaps when the radio broadcast was over. They'd wash the dishes and then they'd wonder where were the two guards who had taken the food tray to the prisoner.
Mattie told himself that he was going for the wall in the back yard, he was going and he wasn't stopping. If they were going to stop him then they were going to have to shoot him.
The kitchen was behind him. He had passed through the door and he would have been silhouetted in the doorway. He didn't know a way of going through a doorway, from a lit room and out into darkness, without throwing shadows.
The back yard, beyond the kitchen, was the only area outside the villa that he had seen, and he knew there was a high wall. If there was one guard outside then the likelihood was that he would be at the front, by the gate, but that was the area of chance.
He went on tiptoe across the yard. He had never heard a dog, and he didn't think there was a dog there. The Major had said that dogs were the nightmare of the escaper, but he hadn't heard a dog, not a guard dog nor a pet dog. He went for the wall. He went for the wall where there were the bullet marks in the concrete blocks. If they caught him, if they brought him back, then it would be at the wall that his life would end. He reached up. The palms of his hands and his fingers could just reach the top of the wall.
A terrible pain when he pulled himself up. In his shoulders and his upper back and down to the cage of his ribs. The hurt was from the times that he had been on the hook in the cellar.
He struggled to get his feet off the ground, and he scrambled with his knees to give him purchase up the wall. There was a moment when he had his head and his shoulders above the summit of the wall, and then he was balancing on his chest and the pain was excruciating. He could see into a street, and he could see low bungalows.
There were the headlights of an approaching car. The lights played on the centre of the road and lit up the walls of the buildings, and the lights were rushing closer to the wall of the villa, surging towards Mattie who was high on the wall and working to swing his legs on to the top of the concrete blocks.
Behind him, through the open kitchen door, came the signature music of the end of the news broadcast. He knew the music because most days at Century he listened to the recording picked up at Caversham. He thought that if he fell back from the wall then he would never find the strength again that had carried him to the top of the wall, and the music at the end of the broadcast told him there would in a few moments be guards in the kitchen. He had his elbows over the top of the wall, and he ducked his head as low as was possible, and his legs dangled, and the blood and the pain roared in his feet. He waited for the lights to pass, and it seemed to him impossible that the lights would not search him out for the driver. So bloody long. He seemed to hear the shouting in the kitchen, and the stampeding of feet, and he seemed to feel the hands grabbing at his knees and at his ankles and dragging him down.
The lights passed.
Quiet behind him, grey shadow ahead of him.
He heaved himself up and on to the wall. He levered one leg across. He rolled, he slid and fell.
Mattie tumbled eight feet from the top of the wall and down on to the weed verge at the side of the road, and he was winded.
Go for it. It would have taken more than the breath being knocked from his lungs to hold him. He was up and he ran.
He did not know where he was running. Distance was the name of the game. He hobbled down the street, away from the prison gate. Mattie ran for survival and running was risk.
He did not know whether there was a curfew in Tabriz, and if there was a curfew then at what time it started. He didn't know where in the city he had been held. He only thought he was in Tabriz.
He ran until the stitch cut into his belly lining. When he aaw a cafe, benches outside, chairs and plastic topped tables inside, he had slowed and crossed to the far side of the road.
Where there was a shadow he tried to find it, and he had to skin his eyes to peer ahead of him, hard because his head was shaking from the exertion of running, because it would be fatal to be running and not looking and to barge into a patrol of the Revolutionary Guards.
He ran for a full five minutes. He was 52 years old, and he thought that he had run a mile. He had run on back streets, and he had heard laughter and shouting from inside small homes, and he had heard the voice of a radio announcer inciting verses from the Qur'an.
When he rested, when his legs and his wind had died, he crouched in a concrete storm drain.
Grab any luck that begs to be taken, the Major had said at the Fort. Luck is earned. Luck doesn't show itself that often, and if it's not grabbed then it's gone. He thought of Harriet, and he thought of his girls. The first time this day that he thought of his women tribe at home. They would have expected it of him, and it's for you, my darlings, that I run. No other beacon for Mattie.
A car pulled up in the street, ten paces from him. The driver took a parcel from the back seat of the car and carried it into a house. The engine was left running.
The driver made a gift of a car to Mattie.
Out of the storm drain, into the car. At first very gently away, hardly changing the beat of the motor. And once round the first corner, then he really went at it. He had not driven so fast since the year before he was married, since he had owned the Austin Healey Sprite. No sports car, this, but the bloody thing went, and he drove like there was no tomorrow, and probably there wasn't. He drove away out of the town, until he was surrounded by darkness, and then he stopped and axed the lights. He found a map in the glove compartment.
He was, by his best calculation, between 150 and 200 miles from the Turkish frontier, and by the grace of God, the stars were clear and bright and he was on the north-west edge of the town that he thought must be Tabriz.
The three guards who had been in the house placed the blame in entirety on those two men who had taken no precautions to defend themselves… The investigator would have done the same in their position, in his position he would do the same.
The investigator was told that there had been a period of fifteen minutes between the time that the food had been carried upstairs, and the discovery of two comrades, dead in the prisoner's cell.
Furniss had a start. More important was the fear of the guards who had survived. While they had searched the villa a full hour had passed, and only then had they summoned an ambulance. The police had not yet been informed, neither had the army, neither had the headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. They had waited for the investigator to return.
It crossed his mind that he could do worse himself than make tracks for the Turkish frontier. But there was too much blood on his hands for him to be welcomed into asylum by the western agencies.
It was like a wound to him, the escape of Matthew Furniss.
He had the names of three agents, and the name of an infiltrator, nothing more. He had no detail yet on the running of Century's Iran Desk, on the collaboration between Century and Langley, on the gathering of intelligence from the British listening posts on the frontiers and the American satellites.
He should have had hard information on the passing of information from the Americans and the British to Baghdad, and on the battle engagement instructions to Royal Navy warships on the Armilla patrol. He had taken so little, and he had promised so much to the Mullah, and the Mullah would, no doubt, have repeated these promises to his own patrons. Well, he would start again when Furniss was recaptured, as he must be. No one would shelter an English spy in Tabriz. Deep in his gut was the tremor of insecurity, the ripple of the sensation of his own vulnerability.
When he had pieced together the story, he had himself driven to the IRG headquarters in the centre of the city. He gave the commander photographs of Matthew Furniss. He described what he knew him to be wearing when he escaped from the gaol, warned him that Furniss was armed with a pistol.
He wrote out the messages to be sent by radio.
