HOME RUN (38 page)

"There's grand news through from the medics. A very good bill of health, no bugs."

"I just feel a bit shaken."

Henry looked into Mattie's face. The man was completely shattered.

"I'll tell you something for nothing, Mattie. . . . In twenty years' time, when the DG's been forgotten, when no one at Century will know my name, they'll still talk about 'Dolphin's Run'. Dolphin's run out of Iran is going to go into the history of the Service."

"That's very decent of you, Henry."

"Don't thank me, you did it. The fact is that the Service is buzzing with collective pride. You have given us all, down to the tea ladies, one hell of a lift."

He saw Mattie drop his eyes. Perhaps, he had been over the top, but he knew the psychology of the debrief, and the psychology said that an agent back from abroad, where he'd had a rough time, needed praise, reassurance. A colleague of Henry's, with a brood of children, had once likened the trauma of return to a woman's post-natal depression. Henry couldn't comment on that, but he thought he knew what the colleague had meant. He had told the Deputy Director General when he had been given his marching orders, before finding that his carburettor was playing up, that he would take it gently.

It would have been scandalous to have taken it otherwise, after a man had been tortured and broken . . . oh yes, the DDG had been most sure that Mattie would have been broken.

"Thanks, Henry."

"Well, you know the form. We'll hammer through this over the next few days, and then we'll get you back home. What you've been through is going to be the basis of study and teaching, no doubt, at the Fort for the next decade. . . . Shall we get down to things some time this evening? Mattie, we're all very, very excited by what you achieved."

"I think I'd like to be outside for a bit. Can't walk too comfortably just yet, perhaps I'll sit in the garden. Can you keep that ghastly dog at bay?"

"By all means. I'll ask George to put him in the kennel.

And I'll see if Mrs Ferguson can find us something rather special to drink this evening. I don't think we can hold out much hope for the meal itself."

17

A good early start, because Henry Carter thought that Mattie would feel stronger at the beginning of the day. They ate breakfast of tepid scrambled eggs and cold toast. They discussed the possible make-up of the team for the first Test.

They had a chuckle over the new switch in the Socialists'

defence policy. Henry told Mattie about Stephen Dugdale from Library who had been laid low last week with throm-bosis. It was a good room, the old dining room, fine sideboards, and a glasses cabinet, and a carving table, and the main table could have seated twelve in comfort. The worst thing about eating in the dining room and at the big table, in Carter's opinion, was that Mrs Ferguson having polished the table then insisted that it be covered with a sea of clear polythene.

"Shall we make a start then, Mattie?"

"Why not?"

He settled in the chair by the fireplace. Across the hearth rug from him Carter was fiddling with a cassette player. It was the sort of cassette player that Harriet had bought the girls when they were teenagers. He saw the spools begin to move on the cassette player. He could see the investigator, he could see the cellar walls, he could see the bed and the leather thongs, he could see the hook on the wall, he could see the length of electrical flex wire . . .

"How long is this going to take?"

"Hard to say, Mattie. Depends on what you've got to tell me. My immediate target is to get home."

"Goes without saying. . . . Where shall we begin? Shall we start in Van?"

Mattie told the tape-recorder everything about the way the attack on his car had been carried out. He felt uncomfortable describing his carelessness. Henry looked rather schoolmarm-ish but didn't interrupt. Mattie's account was perfectly lucid.

He seemed to Henry to take pleasure in the clarity of the narrative, in the orderly compilation of details that would one day be of value at the Fort. At eleven Mrs Ferguson knocked and came in with coffee and a packet of chocolate digestives.

Mattie stood at the window until Henry said, "This house they drove you to?"

"I was blindfolded when we got there, I didn't see it. When I went out of it then, it was dark."

"Tell me what you can about the house."

"They didn't take me on a tour, they weren't trying to sell it me."

He saw the puzzle at Henry's forehead. Stupid thing to have said. . . .

"Is there a problem, Mattie?"

"I'm sorry - of course, there's a problem. You are asking me to recall a house where I was tortured, where others have been put to death."

"We'll just take it slowly, that way it won't be so painful.

You've nothing to be ashamed of, Mattie."

"Ashamed?" He spoke in Henry's soft voice. He rolled the word. "Ashamed?" Mattie spat the word back at him.

The conciliatory raising of the hands. "Don't misunderstand me, Mattie."

"Why should I be ashamed?"

"Well, we've been working on the assumption . . ."

"What assumption?"

"We had to assume that you had been taken by agents of the Iranian regime, and that of course you would be interrogated, and in due course that you would be, well, broken or killed. . . .

That was a reasonable assumption, Mattie."

"Reasonable?"

"You'd have made the same assumption, Mattie, of course you would."

"And at what stage did you decide that Mattie Furniss would have been broken?"

Henry squirmed. "I don't know anything about pain."

"How could you?"

"Myself, I wouldn't have lasted a day, perhaps not even a morning. I think just the knowledge of what was going to be done to me would have been enough to tip me into the confessional. You shouldn't feel bad about it, Mattie."

"So, I was written off?"

"Not by the Director General. I am afraid almost everyone else did."

"Most touching faith you had in me. And did you shake the dust off my obituary? Had you booked St Martin's for a Memorial? Tell me, Henry, who was going to give the Address?"

"Come on, Mattie, this isn't like you. You've been on this side of the fence. You know what the form is."

"It's just abominable, Henry, to realize that Century believes a senior officer of the Service will cave in at the end of the first day, like some damn Girl Guide - I'm flattered . . . "

"We made our assumption, we aborted the field agents."

A sharpness in Mattie's voice, "They're out?"

"We aborted them, they're not out yet."

Mattie sat upright in his chair, his chest heaved. There were still the pain pangs deep in his chest. "You assumed that I would be broken within 24 hours, can I assume that you aborted as soon as I went missing? How can it be that two weeks later the agents are not out?"

"It was felt, I believe, that aborting a very precious network was a big step, takes years to rebuild. It took them a little time to get to the sticking point. Part of it was that the DG

convinced himself that you would never talk. All sorts of waffle about Furniss of the old school. Frankly, I don't think he knows the first thing about interrogation. Anyway, wiser heads prevailed, as they say, and the messages were sent, but the agents are not yet out . . . "

"Christ . . . "

Mattie stood. Dreadful pain in his face. Pain from his feet that were bandaged and inside bedroom slippers that would otherwise have been three sizes too large.

"It wasn't easy, knowing nothing, hearing nothing."

A cold whip in Mattie's voice. "I clung on, I went through hell - yes, hell, Henry, and at Century you couldn't get your fucking act together . . . it makes me sick to think of it."

"I have the impression that there was more interest, more interest even than in the safety of the field agents, in whether Eshraq was compromised . . . "

Mattie swung his shoulders. His eyes fixed on Henry.

"What do you know about Eshraq?"

"That he is of very considerable importance."

"While I was away my safe was rifled, yes?"

"Rifled? No, Mattie, that is unreasonable. Of course we went through your safe. We had to know about Eshraq . . . "

Henry paused. The silence weighed. He looked up at Mattie.

There was the attempt at kindness, and understanding, and friendship. "I gather that Charlie Eshraq is not just important for his potential in the field, but also that he is very close to your family."

"So my safe was gutted."

"Mattie, please . . . we had to know everything about the boy, and now we have to know whether he is compromised."

"So you burrow about in my private files and you find that he is close to my family, is that it?"

"That's right."

"Here you assumed that I would talk to my torturers about a young man who is like a son to me?"

"I'm sorry, Mattie, that has been our assumption."

"Your assumption, but not the Director General's?"

"Correct."

"But all the rest of you?"

"The Director General said he thought that you would go to the grave before you named names."

"You, Henry, what do you think?"

"I've seen the medical reports. I know the extent of your injuries. I have an idea of what was done to you. To have escaped after all that argues a phenomenal constitution, phenomenal courage."

"I killed three men getting away. I broke the neck of one, I strangled one, I drove one down."

"If there were doubters, Mattie, they will obviously keep their doubts to themselves. I didn't know that, of course, and I am horrified to hear it. One has no idea what one may be capable of
in extremis."

"Am I capable of betraying Charlie, that's what you are asking yourself."

"To me, Mattie, God's truth, you are one of the finest men that I have known in my lifetime with the Service, but no one, no one in the world, is capable of withstanding torture indefinitely. You know that and nobody in the Service is holding it against you. Everyone thinks it was wrong to send you - my God, I hope the DG doesn't listen to this tape -

and, well, to tell you the truth, quite a few people think you were a fair old chump to be gallivanting about on your own near the border. That's what comes of being an archaeologist, I suppose."

Mattie smiled at the irony. He walked to the window. He did not need to hold on to the chair backs. He walked as if there were no pain in his feet, as if he could straighten his back and there was no pain in his chest. He stared out. There was a brisk sunshine lighting the lawn.

"I may have named the field agents, I can't be certain.

There were times that I was unconscious, I might have been delirious. There were times when I thought I was dead and certainly prayed I would be. But that was, oh Christ, after days of agony. If the agents were not aborted immediately then I won't accept the blame for that. . . . "

"And Eshraq, did you name Eshraq?"

The dog was barking in the kitchen, frustrated at being denied the run of the house. Mattie turned, stared levelly across the hearth rug at Henry.

"No, Henry, I couldn't have done that. I'd much sooner be dead than have done that."

"Mattie, truly, I take my hat off to you."

The lorry began the journey from the north of England to the port of Dover. Midday Saturday, and the lorry observed strictly the speed limits set for it. The driver would not approach the Customs checks at Dover until the evening of the following day. Lorry movement through the port of Dover was always heaviest on a Sunday night, when the drivers were jockeying to get a good start on the Monday morning on the through routes across Europe. The volume of traffic on the Sunday night sailings dictated that the Customs checks on outgoing cargo were lightest. And the early summer was a good time, also, for the sale of machine parts. The ferries'

vehicle decks would be jammed with both commercial and holiday traffic. The chances of the lorry's cargo being searched, of the containers being stripped out right down to the four wooden packing cases, were very slight. The haulage company also took care to check whether there was any form of tail on the consignment. The lorry had been followed away from the warehouse at the loading depot by a car that checked to see whether it was under surveillance. The car varied the distance between itself and the lorry; at times it was a mile back, and then it would speed up and catch the lorry. The purpose of this was to pass the cars travelling in the wake of the lorry, and to look for the tell-tale evidence of men using radios in the cars, or vehicles that were too long in the slow lanes.

It was a wasted exercise.

The Investigation Division had no tail on the lorry.

Not yet six o'clock and she had already had her bath. She was at her dressing table. She could hear him in the next room, working at the final touches. It was the trip out with Bill Parrish that had set him behind. He hadn't told her where they had gone, and she hadn't asked. He might not have told her where he'd been, what he'd done, with Bill Parrish, but at least when he had returned he had peeled out of his work clothes and put on the old jeans and the sweatshirt and headed back to his decorating. He was pretty quiet, had been ever since he'd come back from the north of England, and she was almost sorry for him. More vulnerable than she'd ever known him. She thought he must have been wanting to please her, because he had set out to decorate the spare bedroom. Not that David would ever have admitted to a living soul, let alone his wife, that his case was up the river and no punt. She didn't care what he said. She'd liked coming home from work and finding the flat smelling of paint and wallpaper paste. It was a big change in her experience, that her husband had gone down to the DIY and had managed the best part of a week without referring to Bogota or the Medellin cartel.

"Who am I going to meet there?" she called out.

"A gang of complete morons."

She yelled, and she was laughing, "Will it all be shop talk?"

"Absolutely. Blokes all up at the bar, wives sitting down by the band."