HOME RUN (11 page)

Her parents were taking the last of the snow on the ski slopes above the Caspian Sea. The girl was alone in the villa that was set back from the wide street, where the cherry blossom was starting to bloom, and she was amused, and not frightened as the boys had been.

"I went with my mother to California. I loathed it. I was sent to London, where we have friends. I live there, but I hate that city too. I am Iranian and I want to make my life in the country that is my home."

He had said the same to the boys. None of them had wanted to hear him out. He had been given little chance to talk in any one of the boys' homes before being shown the door, but the girl was in no hurry to expel him. She had always had more guts than any of the boys in his class. Now she smiled frankly at him.

"You don't believe me?"

"I'm not a fanatic, Charlie. I don't pray for the eternal life of Khomeini. I just exist here. If anyone tells me that they want to live here when they have the chance to live in California or London then I think that either they are addled in the head, or they are lying."

"But you haven't thrown me out, the madman or the liar.

The others were fast enough."

"Your father was killed, and your sister, and you talk about coming back as if it were the matter of crossing a street . . .

Let me tell you why the boys are frightened of you. When you left there were 22 of us in the fourth grade. The boys that you have been to see and me, we are the only ones still living in Tehran. There are eight in exile, and eight have been killed."

"A war doesn't last for ever, not for ever, a war finishes.

The Imam finishes. There is a new country to be built. There will be a new Iran, and that will be my country . . . "

Her eyebrows flickered. "You believe that?"

"It is why I am coming home."

And then the keenness of the girl. "And what part in your new order would I play, or the boys who rejected you?"

He was thinking that he needed a place to store the weapons that he would carry back on his next journey which would be the last journey, that he might need a driver or a minder at his back.

He said, "I would want someone who will share my vision."

She laughed. She sounded as though she mocked him. "You know nothing of Iran . . . "

"I know that I want to live out my life in my own country."

She stood. She played the hostess. She walked towards the door. "I am in love with life, Charlie. I too have friends, relations, who were taken to the Evin gaol, and to the Qezel Hesar gaol and to the Gohar Dasht gaol, and I don't wish to follow them. Nor, Charlie, do I believe a single word, not one, that you have told me."

She had been leggy and spindly when he had last seen her.

He thought that now she was beautiful.

"When I come back I will come here, to see you, to show
you
my truth."

She grimaced. "And we could go for a drink in the cocktail lounge of the Hilton . . . Trouble is, Charlie, that the Hilton is now the Independence Hotel, Oppressed Area Base Three of the Mobilisation Volunteers of Beitolmoqaddar, it is now the property of the Deprived People's Organisation. Goodbye, Charlie. It was amusing to see you, but not sensible."

"I did not believe you would be afraid."

There was the first moment of bitterness in her tongue. Her voice was sharp. "That's California talk, or London talk. You insult me. You know nothing of my Iran, you know nothing of my life You come here and you tease me, you laugh at me, and for whatever reason you also lie to me."

"What would you like me to bring you?"

"If you contact me then you put me at risk."

"Just tell me what you would like."

"Soap," she said simply.

She let him out of the house.

He thought she was very pretty, very sad. She closed the door before he had reached the pavement. He walked away down the street, and his feet trampled the early fall of the cherry blossom.

The first time he had come to the Manzarieh camp in Niavaran the- statue of Lord Baden Powell, Chief Scout, had been at the gate and he had been employed in the secret police of the former monarchy. He had been sent to the Empress Farah University for Girls to arrest a student who was believed to be a member of a Tudeh cell. The hostel for the College girls was now sealed from the outside by heavy coils of barbed wire, guarded by troops of the Mobilisation of the Deprived Volunteers, separated from the main expanse of open ground by electrified fences. And much that was different in the appearance of the investigator and his transport. The dark grey suit and the BMW coupe had given way to plain grey trousers, and sandals on his feet, and a long shirt outside his waist band; his cheeks were laced in stubble, and he drove a humble Renault 4. It was not quite necessary for him to have renounced all of his previous life, the SAVAK trappings, but the investigator was a cautious man.

In what had once been the Dean of Studies' office, the investigator was made welcome and given tea. Each time that he came to this room it was to seek advice on the suitability of a candidate for operations overseas. It was the responsibility of the Director of the Revolutionary Centre to consider the target, the location, the method of attack, and then to recommend a volunteer. The investigator had been many times to Manzarieh because the regime was often anxious to exercise the long arm of its discipline against traitors in exile.

The students at Manzarieh were trained in the teachings of the Qur'an, the ideology of the Imam, and close quarters killing. Prayers at dawn, noon and dusk, learning the trade of killing for the rest of the day. To brief the Director he took from his attache case his notebook. The Imam glowered down from the wall at him. He tried never to think about it, but he had been at the meeting where the assassination of the Imam in exile had been discussed. If the investigator had a nightmare in his life it was that a minute of that meeting should have survived, a minute with a list of those attending.

His voice was a forgettable monotone.

"The exile is Jamil Shabro. In spite of warnings telephoned to his home in London he has continued to vilify the Imam and the Islamic government of Iran. I will leave with you a resume of his most recent speech. It is our suggestion that explosives be used. One restive tongue is cut out, but a hundred others are silenced by fear."

The Director gazed down at the photograph of Jamil Shabro. "London . . . London is so very open to us."

"There is another matter . . . "

The investigator reached again into his attache case. He produced a second file. On the outside, written large in the investigator's hand in the Farsi language, was a single word which if translated back to the English would have been written as Dolphin.

He saw the high steel gates open, and he saw the car's bonnet pushing into the narrow space, and he saw the Guard who had opened the gate duck his head in respect.

The width of the street was 40 paces. The traffic was solid.

The Mercedes could not nudge into the flow. It was as it had been the last time that he had stood on that pavement.

The building behind him was abandoned, its garden was overgrown and the oleander bushes had been allowed to grow wild and provide a screen of evergreen cover. He had been in the garden, and he had seen the place where he could stand on the wall of the old and demolished conservatory and see over the outer wall of the derelict building. The driver of the Mercedes hammered at his horn, and made space.

He saw the Mullah. He saw a man who was still young.

The face of an academic. Charlie saw the thin glasses, and the sallow face, the clean turban, and the shoulders of his camel hair cape. The Mullah sat alone in the back of the long Mercedes, and Charlie noted once more that the car windows distorted the width of the face inside. He noted also that the carriage of the Mercedes was low over its tyres. The Mercedes was armour-plated along its sides and its windows were of reinforced glass.

The gates creaked shut. The Guard was again positioned outside them, his rifle slung on his shoulder. The Mercedes had moved on.

Charlie drifted away.

He walked for a long time. He liked to walk because when he walked he could rehearse what he had learned in the previous hours.

He had that morning found the investigator. He had not seen him, but he had discovered his place of work.

Charlie was staying in a small hotel. In London it would have been a guest house behind Paddington Station. In Tehran it was down an alleyway crowded from dawn and beyond dusk with food stalls and metal craftsmen. A well scrubbed little establishment, and cheap. There was a telephone in the hallway of the hotel. All morning he had telephoned different numbers at the Ministry of Information and Intelligence. He had been passed from one number to another. Fifteen calls, and always the same question. He had asked to be put through to the man. Fourteen times he had been denied. The fifteenth time, he had been told to hold. He had heard the extension ringing out. He had been told that the man was not in his office . . . and he had rung off.

An hour later, more depth disguising his voice, he rang again.

He had said that he had an appointment at the building, but had lost the address. Now he knew.

The procession passed him.

Students marching, goosestepping.

Boy children striding and overstepping, uniforms too large.

Women shuffling their feet under the full flow of their
chadors,
the widows of the war.

Men carrying buckets, and money being thrown from the pavement into the buckets, screwed up bank notes.

Portraits of the Imam carried high, the streets filled with the shouting of the slogans.

Charlie put some notes into the bucket when it reached him. Not to have contributed would have attracted attention.

He found a taxi.

An age it took, to wind through the clogged streets, through the drab and smog-blanketed mass of the city. He would never be at ease in the south of Tehran. It was the shrine of the Imam, the working class ghetto of those who shouted loudest lor the war, for the death of their enemies. South Tehran was the bedrock of the Revolution. He kept his peace in the taxi until he was dropped.

He stood outside the main entrance to the Behesht-i-Zahra cemetary. It was a pilgrimage for Charlie Eshraq. Each time he came to Tehran he came to the cemetery. He had to wait at the gate as a line of taxis drove through. There was a coffin on the roof of each taxi, martyrs were being brought back from the front line, with a horde of family mourners alongside them for an escort. He followed. For hundreds of yards Charlie walked amongst the graves. A rippling sea of flags. Small wooden and glass-fronted box shapes, on stilts, in which were placed photographs of the dead. He saw a bulldozer excavating the yellow earth from a pit the size of a swimming pool, waiting for the dead from the next battle. He saw the raven women and old men and small children threading between the death markers.

He hurried on. His country's youth was laid to rest here amidst the keening cries of women, the drone of the bulldozer, and the coughing of old taxi engines. The Gateway to Heaven Cemetary, and there was a queue to get there. Deep inside the Gateway was the Fountain of Blood. The water spouting from the fountain ran red. Charlie thought that was sick. He thought it was as sick to colour the cemetery fountain water as it was to issue young soldiers going to the front with plastic keys, made in Taiwan, so that if they were killed in battle they could get through the Gates, make it to Paradise. On his first journey here he had given a bribe to a clerk in the Administration Office. A hundred dollars in small notes, and that had produced the burial charts, the names against the numbers.

He could not forget the way to this outer plot . . . far beyond the flags and the stilted boxes and their photographs, were the bare concrete slabs on which, while they were still wet, a number had been scratched. He would not forget the number of his father's grave.

His father had said that a professional soldier, a soldier who foreswore politics, had nothing to fear from the Revolution and his father lay in a grave marked only by a scratched number.

He had no idea where his sister was buried, or his uncle who had been clubbed, butchered, shot on the roof of the Refah school where the Imam had made his first headquarters after his return from exile. This was the only grave that he knew of, and each time in Tehran he was drawn to it.

Mattie Furniss could not abide sloppiness. It bred complacency, and complacency was fatal to field operatives.

He was not good at delivering an old-fashioned dressing down, but he felt it time to let the Ankara Station Officer know that he was quite dissatisfied with what he had seen.

The Ankara station was not located in the Embassy building. The Service had several years before taken a long lease on the third floor of an office building in the government sector of the Turkish capital, where the high-rise blocks seem to stretch without end. The cover of the office was that the Service staff working there were employees of a British firm of structural engineers.

They had an hour before an appointment at the Turkish National Intelligence Agency, the only occasion on this trip when Mattie went official. An hour, and he intended to use it well.

"Don't interrupt me, Terence, that's a good fellow, and do not imagine for a single moment that I get pleasure from what I am about to tell you . . . It's the oldest scenario in the book.

A chap gets abroad, and all that he's absorbed when he was on courses at home goes out of the window. We'll start at the beginning, the car that picked me up and brought me here.

The driver, he was not alert. We were cut up by a car full of men, and your driver just sat there, never considered the prospect of kidnapping, of having to take evasive action, your driver was dead from the neck up. It is the third time I have been to this office, and each time your driver has taken the same route. Your car is not fitted with a rear-seat passenger mirror as it should be. Your driver came into the hotel this morning to wait at Reception for me, and when he had met me, taken me out to the vehicle he made no effort to check for an IED . . ."