HOME RUN (2 page)

The messenger watched. He peered through the smoke haze.

The evening's transcript was on the desk and Mr Matthew Furniss was scanning it, taking it line by line. He stopped, he looked as if he was unwilling to believe what he read.

The messenger stood by the door. He saw the fist over the transcript clench, saw the knuckles whiten.

"The bastards . . . the filthy, vicious bastards . . . "

"That's not like you, Mr Furniss."

"The wicked, fucking bastards . . . "

"Not at all like you, sir."

"They hanged her."

"Hanged who, sir?"

The messenger had seen the moment of weakness, but it was gone. Furniss poured a generous measure of the whisky into a fresh glass and offered it to the messenger, and the small glass already on the desk was filled, splashed to the top.

The position of the messenger at Century was indeed unique, no other uniformed servant of the Service would have been offered hospitality in the office of a senior Desk man. The messenger bent and scratched at his knee where the strapping chafed.

"The daughter of a friend of mine, Harry . . . What you brought me last night told me that it was on their radio that she'd been tried, found guilty, sentenced, probably a short ten minutes of play acting at justice. And tonight it says that she's been executed. Same age as our girls, roughly . . . a sweet kid . . . "

"If anyone harmed your girls, Mr Furniss, I'd want to kill them."

"Yes, Harry . . . I'll drive you home. Be a good chap, find yourself a chair outside, just one phone."

The messenger sat himself down in the outer office. He could not help but hear. Carrying papers, post, internal mem-oranda around the corridors of Century he knew so much, eavesdropped so often. He heard Mr Furniss place, through the operator, a call to California. He heard the calm voice the far side of the partition wall. "Kate, that's you, Kate? It's Mattie. I'm very sorry, Kate, but I've awful news. It's Juliette, she died this morning in Tabriz. Put to death. I'm terribly, terribly sorry, Kate, and our love to you and Charlie . . .

You're still going to send him? Of course, we'll look after Charlie, whenever you think he's ready to come . . . Kate, our very sincere sympathy." He heard the telephone placed down gently. That was awful, hanging a girl, that was diaboli-cal. There was no call for hanging seventeen-year-old girls, not in Harry's book. Mr Furniss was in the doorway, coat over his arm.

"Time we were going home, Harry."

1

Mahmood Shabro always invited Charlie Eshraq when he threw a thrash in his office. Shabro had known his father, and his sister and his uncle. The wide windows looked out onto the busy east end of Kensington High Street. There was a teak veneer desk and shelves and cabinets. There was a computer console in the corner, a pile carpet on the floor with a centre-piece of a good rug brought many years before from home. The easy chairs were pushed against the walls that were covered with photographs of a far away country - mosques, landscapes, a bazaar scene, a portrait of an officer in full dress uniform and two rows of medals. Mahmood Shabro was somewhat rare among the London exile community, he had done well. And when he did better, when he had clinched a deal, he celebrated, and he asked the less fortunate of his community to push out the boat with him.

Mahmood Shabro was a conduit for electrical goods going down to the Gulf. Not your low life stuff from Taiwan and Korea, but high quality from Finland and West Germany and Italy. He didn't do badly. He liked to say that the oil rich buggers down in the Emirates were putty to him.

Charlie could put up with the cant and boasting of the Shabro husband and wife, and he could put up with the caviare and the canapes, and the champagne. A thousand top of the range Zanussi washing machines were going down to Dubai, and some cretin who was happier on a camel was paying the earth for the privilege of doing business with Mahmood Shabro. Good enough reason for a party. He stood by the window. He watched, he was amused. He was not a part of the cheerful talk that was fake, the tinkling laughter that was fraud. He knew them all, except for the new secretary. One man had been a minister in the penultimate government appointed by Shah Reza Pahlavi as the roof was caving in over the Peacock Throne. One was once a para troop major who now drove a mini-cab, nights, and he was on orange juice which meant he couldn't afford one evening off to get pissed.

One was a former judge from Esfahan who now collected Social Security payments and who went to the Oxfam shop for shoes. One had been a policeman and now went every two weeks to the offices of the Anti-Terrorist branch at New Scotland Yard to complain that he was not given adequate protection for someone so obviously at risk.

They had all run away. They weren't the ones who had ripped off the system and come out with their dollars folded in their wife's underwear, if they weren't far sighted enough to collect them from banks in Switzerland. They were all pleased to be asked to Mahmood Shabro's parties, and they would eat everything within reach, they would drain every bottle.

Charlie always had a good laugh out of Mahmood Shabro.

Mahmood Shabro was a rogue and proud of it. Charlie liked that. The rest of them were pretence, talking of home as if they were off to Heathrow next week for the flight back, talking about the regime as if it were a brief aberration, talking about their new world as if they had conquered it. They had conquered nothing, the regime was in place, and they weren't going home next week, next year. Mahmood Shabro had put the old world behind him, and that was what Charlie Eshraq liked. He liked people who faced facts.

Charlie was good on facts. Good enough on facts last month to have killed two men and made it clear away.

The talk flowed around him. It was all talk of home.

They had exhausted their congratulation of Mahmood Shabro.

Home talk, all of it. The economy in chaos, unemployment rising, the Mullahs and Ayatollahs at each other's throats, the war weariness growing. They would have gagged if they had known that Charlie Eshraq had been home last month, and killed two men. Their contact with home was long range, a drink in a hotel bar with the captain of an Iran Air Jumbo who was overnighting in London and who was prepared to gossip out of earshot of his minders. A talk on the direct dial phone with a relative who had stayed inside, petty talk because if politics were debated then the line would be cut. A meeting with a businessman who had travelled out with foreign currency bankers' orders to purchase items of importance to the war effort. Charlie thought they knew nothing.

He reckoned Mahmood Shabro's new secretary looked good. Charlie and the girl were younger by 25 years than anyone else at the party. He thought she looked bored out of her mind.

"I rang you a few weeks back - good party, isn't it? I rang you twice but you weren't there." Mahmood Shabro at his shoulder.

He had been watching the girl's backside, when her skirt was tight as she had bent down to pick up a vol-au-vent that had been dropped on the carpet and that was steadily being stamped in. The carpet, he supposed, was worth fifteen thousand.

"I was away."

"You travelling much, Charlie?"

"Yes, I'm travelling."

"Still the . . . ?"

"Travel courier," Charlie said easily. He looked across at the secretary. "That's a pretty girl. Can she type?"

"Who knows what talent is concealed?"

Charlie saw the watchful eyes of Mrs Shabro across the room.

"You alright, Charlie?"

"Never better."

"Anything you want?"

"If there's anything I can't get by myself, I'll come to you."

Mahmood Shabro let go of Charlie's arm. "Save me the taxi fare, take her home."

He liked Mahmood Shabro. Since cutting loose from his mother and pitching up in London without a family, Mahmood Shabro had been a friend, a sort of uncle. He knew why he was Mahmood Shabro's friend. He never asked the man for anything.

The secretary had come to his corner of the room, taking her boss's place. She had a bottle of champagne in her hand.

He thought it must have been the last bottle, and she had come to him first to fill his glass almost to the lip before moving on and pouring out a few drops for everyone else. She came back, bearing the empty bottle. She said that Mahmood Shabro had told her to put a bottle aside for herself. She said with those eyes that had been worked with such care that she would not object to sharing the bottle. She told him that she would have to clear up. He told her his address and gave her a key and a note to cover the cab, and he said that he had to meet a man on his way home, that she was please to wait for him.

He went out into the early summer night. It was already dark. The headlights of the traffic flow scratched across his features. He walked briskly. He preferred to walk. He could check for a tail. He just did the usual things, nothing flash.

Round the corner and waiting. Stopping on a pavement, spinning, walking back, checking the faces. Just being sensible.

He went to his meeting. He had put out of his mind the gathering of no-hopers, losers, dreamers, in Mahmood Shabro's office.

She was nineteen.

She was a mainliner.

The middle of the evening, and the darkness spreading.

She stood in shadow at the side of the toilets in the small park area off the main shopping street. She was a mainliner because dragon chasing and mouth organ playing were no longer sufficient to her.

Lucy Barnes was a tiny elf girl. She felt the cold. She had been waiting for two hours, and when she had left the squat the sun was still hovering amongst the chimneys of the small terraced homes. The sleeves of her blouse were fastened at her wrists. The light above the toilet block had been smashed and she was in a black hidden space, but she wore a pair of wide dark glasses.

Two weeks ago she had sold the remote control colour 16-channel portable television set that had been her parents'

birthday present to her. She had spent the money, she had used up the grammes of scag the sale had bought. There was more money in her pocket, more notes crumpled into the hip pocket of her trousers. That afternoon she had sold a teapot from home. Georgian silver, good price. She needed a good price.

The bastard was bloody late, and her legs ached in cramp, and she was cold and she was sweating. Her eyes were watering, as if she was crying for him to come.

Mattie Furniss would not have shared the conviction with even his closest colleagues, but the last fourteen weeks had convinced him that the Director General was just not up to the mark. And here they were again. The meeting of Heads of Desks, Middle East/West Asia, had kicked off an hour behind schedule, it had dragged on for close to three hours, and they were bogged down a third of the way down the agenda. Nothing personal, of course, simply the gut feeling that the Director General should have been left to vegetate in main stream diplomacy at Foreign and Commonwealth, and not been inflicted on the Service in the first place. Mattie Furniss was a professional, and the new Director General was most certainly not. And it was equally certain that the Secret Intelligence Service of Century House could not be run as if it were merely an offshoot of FCO.

Worst of all was the inescapable conclusion that the Director General, wet behind the ears in intelligence tradition, was gunning for Iran Desk. Israel Desk, Mid East Desk, Gulf Desk and Sub-Continent (Pakistan) Desk, were all in his sights, but Iran Desk was taking the bulk of the flak.

"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.