HOME RUN Read online

  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 signific
ant 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.

  "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.