HOME RUN (3 page)

"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 Head to get his pocket picked in the Underground.

"I'm looking forward to it. . . Heard from your mother?"

" N o . " Charlie said it as if it didn't matter to him that his mother never wrote nor telephoned from California. As if it was nothing to him that the golf course and the bridge club and the riding school filled his mother's days and evenings, that she regarded him as a relic of a former life in Iran that was best forgotten, that was pain to remember.

"I read about your escapade, the good old
Tehran Times.

Carried on the radio as well."

A slow smile on Charlie's face.

" . . . You weren't compromised?"

"There was a search afterwards, plenty of roadblocks. No, they didn't know what they were looking for. They put it down to the 'hypocrites'. It went quite well."

Mattie could almost have recited the text of the IRNA communique reproduced in the
Tehran Times.
In separate incidents in south Tehran two Islamic Revolutionary Guards martyred in broad daylight by MKO (
Mojahedin-e Khalq
Organisation) counter-revolutionary
mustaqqfin
(hypocrites) working in conjunction with American mercenary agents.

Now that Harry had retired, gone more than four years, the IRNA communiques reached him ahead of the BBC's transcripts. He missed the messenger's service.

"We came up with a nice one for the next run," Mattie said. He offered the supermarket bag that was taut from the weight of its contents. "Instructions inside."

"Thank you."

"I'll want another report."

"Of course, sir. Mrs Furniss is well?"

"Grand form, and the girls. You'll come down to the country when you're back? We'll round up the girls. Make a weekend of it."

"I'd like that."

"You alright for money? I could scrape the bucket a bit for you."

A present in a plastic bag he could manage with ease. Money was harder. Money had to go through Audit. The present in the plastic bag was by his own arrangement with Resources/

Equipment, on the ninth floor.

"I'm fine for money, sir."

"Glad to hear that."

He saw the boy hesitate. The boy looked as though he were framing his request and not certain as to the best face to put on it. He felt the first drops of rain, and he was sweating now from his run.

"Cough it out."

"The target that I want most has an escort and his car is armoured."

"Meaning?"

"It would be difficult to get close enough."

"And . . . " Mattie wasn't going to help.

"I need what they call stand-off capability. Do you understand that, sir?"

"I understand." Mattie gazed into the boy's eyes. The hesitation was gone, the request had been made. There was cool and attractive certainty in the boy's eyes. "You would have to go for longer, your reports would have to be regular."

"Why not," Charlie said, as if it was a small matter.

Mattie thought of the boy's father, a generous host, a true friend. He thought of the boy's uncle, a mountain of a man, a superb stalker of boar and a brilliant shot. He thought of the boy's sister, delicate and winning her arguments with the brilliance of her smile, and kissing him when he brought gifts to the villa. He thought of Charlie's mother, brittle because she was uncertain, brave because she had tried to blend and assimilate her foreignness into that society of the wide and prosperous avenues of North Tehran. It was a family that had been dismembered.

"That would be very expensive indeed." A sharpness in Mattie's voice. Yes, he was a stickler for protocol and procedure. No, he should never have allowed his Service life to meld with the crusade that was the boy's.

"I could pay for it."

Mattie Furniss was off on his travels, and that was no business of the boy's. And he didn't know his schedule yet.

He did not know when he would return, when they could next meet. So much to talk about. They should have been talking in comfort of gentler matters, relaxed, they should have been gossiping - not prattling around the subject of stand-off capability and armour-piercing weapons under a tree in St James's Park for God's sake, with the rain beginning to come down in earnest. He took out his pen and a sheet of paper from a leather backed pad. He wrote briefly on it. A name, an address.

"Thank you, sir," Charlie said.

The keen statement. "In for longer, the reports more regular."

"Please give my best regards to Mrs Furniss, and to the girls."

"Of course I will. They'll be glad to know I've seen you."

He wondered whether the boy had been more than a friend to his daughters, either of them. They'd been very close, down in the country, and when his brood were all in London and the boy was their guest. It had been in London, three years before, in their little drawing room, the boy on his first trip from California and away from his mother, that Mattie had told Charlie Eshraq, as straight and as baldly as he could, what had happened to his sister and his father and his uncle.

He had never seen the boy cry since then. Bottled it all up, of course. "When do you go, dear boy?"

"Pretty soon."

"You'll telephone me, at home, before you go?"

"Yes."

"You'll go steadily?"

"Yes."

The rain dribbled over Mattie's face, and caught at his trimmed and silver moustache and darkened the front of his shirt. The boy's face was a blur in front of him and masked by the fullness of his beard.

"If anything happened to you, while you're away, Harriet and I, and the girls, we'd be . . ." Mattie squeezed the boy's shoulders.

"Why should it, sir?"

They parted.

He walked home. Mattie felt dirtied because he encouraged the folly of the boy, and yet he did not know how he could have dissuaded him. And he had the thick bulk of the envelope in his pocket, and the boy had said that he would be going in lor longer, and that the reports would be more regular. He thought that in a decent world Matthew Cedric Furniss would deserve to be flailed alive.

He fervently hoped that Harriet would still be up and waiting for him. He needed to talk to her, play a record, and be warmed and wanted. He had never in three years seen the boy cry, and the boy had murdered two Revolutionary Guards and planned to go back in again with his present in a plastic bag. The boy was talking about stand-off and armour-piercing.

He was talking about war, dammit, and the boy was no less than a son to him.

Mattie said an abbreviated prayer for Charlie Eshraq as he crossed at the traffic lights outside his London flat. And if the boy had bedded his daughters then good luck to him.

He was soaked. His face ran with water. His sodden trousers were clinging to his shins and his shoes squelched. When he looked up he saw the light behind the curtain welcoming him.

There could be as many as 50,000 persons addicted to heroin inside the United Kingdom.

On that night one of them, Lucy Barnes, had failed to compensate for the increased purity of the dose with which she injected herself. Alone, in a coma and on a stinking mattress, she choked to death on her own vomit.

2

The detective had led the way up to the attic. During that day he had become familiar enough, as familiar as he wanted to be, with the cramped space under the slope of the roof. He cased back against a wall, brushing against the peeling paper.

Below him the stairway protested at the weight of the two that followed him. The local detective thought it understandable that the Secretary of State would have his own man from Protection with him. The bodyguard would have lived long enough in the Secretary of State's pocket to have become a part of the retinue, almost family. He understood that the Secretary of State needed a face to trust. The Secretary of State emerged into the attic, white dust and cobwebs on the collar of his black overcoat. The detective had taken to the furthest corner, he left the centre ground to the Secretary of State and his bodyguard. He had seen them all. The ones on the breadline, and the most powerful in the land. They all came bowed and subdued to witness the place, the stinking corner, where their child had died. Usually the mothers came too. He knew that some would be aggressive, some would be broken, some crippled with shame. Their child, their future, blown away by a hypodermic syringe. The room was pitifully bare, and even more confused than when the police had first been alerted by the ambulance team because his squad had turned the place over and ransacked every inch of it. The mattress had been taken apart. The girl's clothes had been put into a black plastic sack after examination. Her papers were collected into a cellophane bag which would go to his office for further examination.

The bodyguard stood at the top of the stairway. He gave the sign with his eyes, he told the local man to get on with his talk. The Secretary of State was known to the policeman only through the television in his living room and the photographs in the newspapers that he never seemed to find time to read but which were kept for lighting the fire before he went to work. The Secretary of State was not a pretty sight, looked like a man who had been kicked hard in the testicles an hour before. He could stand, but the colour was gone from his face.