HOME RUN (13 page)

He had a ride from a local official on the pillion of an ancient USA for fifteen painful miles, and he had been thankful to have been able to spend two hours mostly asleep in a donkey cart.

He had reached the village shortly before noon.

The stone dwellings, too few, too insignificant to be marked on any map of the region, nestled at the base of hills and alongside the river. Once every decade on average, when the spring came following a particularly heavy snowfall in the mountains, the river would overspill and leave a deposit of loam soil across the washed down fields. The plain beside the village was an excellent area for all crops.

Because of its isolation, and because of the quality of the fields beside it, the village was a place of quite startling prosperity. There was no outward sign of that wealth. The American dollars and the Iranian rials that the headman had accumulated he kept buried. It was his persistent fear that the village would one day attract attention, that the wealth of his community would be discovered and that he would be taken by the Guards to Qazvin and put to death in the yard of the Ali Qapu. Charlie had never been able to prise from the headman how he planned to use the cash that he risked his life to amass.

He had eaten with the headman, and the headman's sons and brothers. They had slaughtered and roasted a goat in his honour. He sat now on the carpet that covered the dirt floor of the principal room of the headman's house. They would be good Shi'a Moslems in the village, they would follow the teaching of the Qur'an. He looked for the fault in the pattern, the mistake of the craftsman weaver. There was always a mistake in even the most precious carpet. Only God could make what was perfect. For a human creature to attempt perfection, to try to imitate God, was heresy. He could see no flaw . . . He had eaten too much, he had allowed the rich meat of the goat to blunt his wits. In the evening he would need to be at his sharpest. He would negotiate with the headman then.

The village was condemned to sleep for the afternoon. The sun belted into the tin roofs of the houses, and scorched the alleys between. There was a corner of the room where he had been told to leave his rucksack and where blankets had been laid out.

He stood in the doorway of the headman's house and gazed out towards the grey brown of the flowing river, across the rich fields, over the shimmering scarlet of the poppies in flower.

The packets taken from the picnic cold box in Leroy Winston Manvers council flat had been sent to the Scotland Yard forensic laboratory in Lambeth for analysis. And with the packets had gone the instruction of the ACIO that absolute priority was to be attached to the first, if superficial, study.

There were only 24 scientists at Lambeth who specialized in drugs-related investigations, and their backlog was soaring. A cocaine possession charge had just a month earlier been thrown out by an inner city magistrate after he had been told at five remand hearings that forensic had not yet come through with its results. Simple analysis was now subject to a nine week delay. So the ACIO had demanded that all else be dropped, this was a matter for the best and the brightest. He could do that once in a while, heaven help him if he made a habit of it.

When he was bawling down a phone line, when he was trying to extract blood from men and women already drained dry, it was inevitable that the ACIO would ask himself whether they were all, all of them at the Lane, wasting their bloody time.

Was government, parliament, authority, really serious, when they confronted the drugs epidemic with just 24 scientists?

buggered if he knew whether they were serious, buggered if he cared. He was long enough in Customs and Excise to realise the absurdity of getting steamed under the collar about resources. In the last week he had been up before the National Audit Office to justify the way he ran the drugs teams, and the week before that he had had to defend a paper to the Staff Inspection and Evaluation Board. He had talked to Bill Parrish. He knew what had happened in the cell early in the morning after the door had closed behind his Case Officer.

Typical of Parrish, that he had gone straight into the ACIO's office and shared the dirt, spread the load up the ladder, so that if the shit was flying then it would be the ACIO fielding it and not dear old Bill.

When he was alone in his office, when he was not spitting about the delays in forensic analysis and the scrutiny of the National Audit Office and the nit-pick ways of the Staff Inspection and Evaluation Board, the ACIO could understand the way the system worked. The system was pretty bloody rotten. The system said that if a Cabinet Minister's daughter took an overdose because she didn't know that the heroin was of a purer quality than she was used to, then her disgusting self inflicted death took priority over the very similar deaths of the ordinary and the humble. It was a surprise to him that young men like Park ever chose to get themselves involved or stay involved, and he thanked the good Lord that they did.

The ACIO had his preliminary report brought over the river by courier just as his secretary was bringing him his afternoon pot of tea and a buttered scone.

He read.

Initial study showed that the probable origin of the 34

packets, total weight at 2 kilos and 742 grammes, was Northern Iran. Attention was drawn to a stencilled marking
on
each plastic packet, a small symbol of a dagger. The symbol had been observed on other hauls over the past six years. The quality of heroin in packets stamped with the symbol of the curved blade dagger was invariably high.

He rang Parrish's office on the floor below.

"Don't you worry, love . . . Just leave him to me."

Park pushed himself up from his chair. The front door was already open, Ann was putting the key back into her handbag, her head was down, and his father was standing behind her.

He was all puffed up, chest out, back straight, as if he was going on duty. Maybe he was, because he wore his navy blue trousers, and a white shirt and black tie, and his old anorak in which he was always dressed when he was either on his way to the station or when he had just clocked off. His father was a big man, and Park reckoned that because he sat all day either in a Panda or in the station canteen, he had a gut on him. Since his father was a policeman David had gone into Customs and Excise, a sort of bloody-mindedness, and he had had a bellyful as a kid of hearing his father moaning about the force.

He led them into the living room and closed the file that he had been reading.

Inside the room he could see clearly into Ann's face. She was red-eyed. His lip pursed. She had no business taking their marriage into his parents' home, and crying in front of them.

"Very nice to see you, Dad . . . Mum well, is she? . . . I was catching up on a bit of reading. We had a late night up in town and they sent us all back with a day off . . ."

"It's freezing in here . . ." Ann strode forward, snapped on both bars of the electric fire.

He paid the electricity bill. The last bill had been £148.74.

He remembered that. He had had to pay the electricity in the same week as the telephone that had been £74.98, and the car service that had been £101.22. He had gone overdrawn.

He looked steadily at his father. "As I said, I was catching up on a bit of reading. I'm doing a paper for the ACIO. What I really want is to get out of heroin and join a team who do cocaine. This paper is to persuade the ACIO to put a man into Bogota . . ."

He wondered if his father knew where Bogota was.

" . . . Bogota is the capital of Colombia, Dad. We've got a Drugs Liaison Officer in Caracas, which is the capital of Vene-zuela . . . but I reckon that Caracas is too far from the action.

We need much more hard intelligence on the ground. Colombia exports 80% of the world's cocaine. I rate heroin as peaked, but I ocaine is really growing up. I mean, last year's heroin figures were just about the same as the previous year, but cocaine was going through the roof. There could have been half a billion pounds' worth going through the UK system last year. Do you know, there's a place called Medellin in Colombia where the big traffickers live quite openly. We've got to get in there after them. Having a DLO in Caracas means that too much of our intelligence is secondhand. Do you know, Dad, that last year the Drugs Enforcement Agency made a seizure in Florida of ten tons of coke? That's worth fifty million dollars on the street.

That's where the action is. What do you think, Dad?"

"What I think is that you're getting to be the biggest bore I've ever met."

"That's not called for."

"And the biggest prick."

" Then get out of my house."

"I'm here at Ann's invitation and I'm staying until I've done some talking." A flush was in his father's face, big veins leaping in his neck and his forehead. "Is that all you do when you get home, bore on about drugs?"

"It matters."

"Do you think Ann cares two pins about drugs?"

"She's made her feelings plain."

" There's nothing else in your life, it's getting to be an obsession."

"What do you want me to do, chat up bloody geraniums in a bloody greenhouse?"

"Look after your wife - try that for a change."

"Don't lecture me on how to look after Ann."

"If someone doesn't have a go at you, you won't have a marriage to worry about. You don't deserve Ann."

"You're out of order."

"Not as out of order as the way you treat your wife."

He exploded. "Something you never learned, Dad, but if you don't do a job with commitment then it's not worth doing at all. In ID we don't just clock watch, we're in the front line.

We're not just handing out parking tickets and checking shotgun licences, and taking down the details of people's bloody cats that have got lost - we're in the front fucking line.

If we all go home when the bell rings then there's no line left, and all that filth is swimming in here. Got me? Have you the wit to comprehend that? You know what I did this morning when you were watering your bloody geraniums before another second rate day, what I did while she was painting her face before getting into her posh little office, you know what I did . . . ? I beat shit out of a man. I hit Leroy Winston Man vers every place where the bruises don't show. I kicked him, punched him, till I was fucking tired . . . until he gave me a name. Isn't that what you 'old fashioned coppers' used to do? Hand out a bit of a belting, in the good old days. I smashed up Leroy Winston Manvers because he's a heroin dealer, and he fixed up the pusher, and the pusher sold to some government crap artist's daughter. I hit shit out of Leroy Winston Manvers because I hated him. I hated him as much as I wanted the name of his distributor . . . That's what it does to you, that's the fucking filth you get into when you're hunting the distributors. You don't have an idea, do you? Not a fucking idea. I could go to gaol for five years for what I did this morning... I tell you, I enjoyed hitting the black bastard.

I loved hitting him. You know what? He gave me the name.

He was such filth. He's a pig. He makes more money in one month, probably, than I can make in ten years. He's a rat from a sewer . . . They don't ask you to do that, do they, Dad? They don't ask an old fashioned constable to be Case Officer when we're talking heroin, do they, Dad?"

"Like you said, David, out of order." His father stood.

Ann said, "I'm sorry, Pop, for asking you."

"I can't walk away from it," David said. "You can follow me if you want to. If you don't want to then I go on by myself. That's fair warning. You do what you like, I'm not quitting."

"Do you want to come with me, love?"

David saw his wife shake her head. She was muttering on about getting some supper, and she was gone out of the room
and
heading for the kitchen.

"We love that girl, David, your mother and I. We love her like she's ours."

"I don't hold that against you, Dad. I'm glad of it. But don't turn her against me. There's enough to contend with without that. It's a war we're in, do you see that, goddammit, a war."

But his father's face was set, astonishment, fear, disgust.

And then he was gone.

It was a game to them. He thought at the end he would get what he wanted and they would concede. He played the game.

He even rose off the carpet and walked out of the house and into the dirt street, stood in the moonlight and listened to the dogs yelping and the distant wolf howl. All part of a game because they were all tired and looking for sleep, then they
would
give him the whole of the seventh kilo.

They could have taken Charlie's money and put him down an old well or dug him into a field.

The thought was in Charlie's mind, but not uppermost. He reckoned on their greed. He believed the squirrel mentality of the headman preserved him. They would want him back.

It was his protection that the headman had no notion that this was Charlie's last shipment.

Late in the evening the headman's hand snaked out, grasped Charlie's hand. Charlie reckoned that the headman was tired, or that he wanted his wife and bed. The strong dry hand caught Charlie's, held it, shook it, sealed the bargain. A game was at an end.

The cash was in wads of fifty notes, fastened with elastic bands. Charlie fetched the rucksack and put the ten bundles carefully on to the carpet in front of him. He sat cross legged.

That was awkward to him, and his back ached from the stretching of muscles that were unused. When his hand was shaken then he knew that his safety was guaranteed. Never in much doubt, but that was certainty.

Charlie left the village before dawn. In his rucksack were seven kilos' weight of pure heroin powder in sealed plastic bags, and on the bags was the stamp of the drugs' pedigree.

He had watched them stencil on to the plastic the symbol of the curved dagger. That early in the morning there was no cart to carry him alongside the river. He strode out on the dirt trail.

This was the currency that would buy him armour-piercing missiles. He was in a hell of a good humour, and whistling to himself, and he was alone in the mountains of his homeland.