"Yusuf Khan would never talk."
"All men say they would never talk, and believe it."
"You're insulting him."
"He was stupid, he was like a child. He spoke too much and he could not drive why should I believe he would not talk?"
"You've no right to say he'd talk. What're you going to do?" He had come from Fen Hill and across Fen Covert and he had sat for close to twenty minutes hidden in bushes watching her before he had shown himself. After twenty minutes Vahid Hossein had gone in a wide loop around her to check that she was not followed, was not under surveillance. He had seen the men at the house with the guns. He had no trust in anything he had been told. There had been an Iraqi ruse in the marshland in front of the Shattal-Arab: an ambush would be set by a patrol; they would lie up and their guns would cover a raised pathway through the reed-banks; a cassette recorder would play a conversation, men's voices, in the Farsi tongue; men of the Revolutionary Guards would be drawn towards the voices of their own people. Friends had been killed because they trusted what they heard. He had watched her. She had eaten mint sweets from a packet, and scratched the white skin of her legs above her knees, and looked frightened around her in the quiet. She had rubbed hard against the softness of her breast, as if there was irritation there. She had snapped her fingers together in impatience. All the time he had watched her. He had no trust in her and yet he was yoked to her.
"Think, plan."
"Think about what? Plan what?"
"Think and plan."
"Don't you trust me?"
"I have faith only in myself."
Her face was against the white skin of her legs and her hair cascaded over her knees. He thought that she might be crying.
"I'll do whatever you want."
"You cannot think for me and you cannot plan for me."
"Is that because I'm a woman?"
"Because…"
"What is your name?"
"You have no need to know my name. You have no need to know anything of me."
She gazed into his face and the half-light made shadows at her mouth and her eyes, but the eyes held the brightness of anger.
"Then I'll tell you my name and everything about myself, because that shows you my trust. I take the chance, the trust, that you'll not talk."
"You believe that? You believe I would-' She mimicked, "All men say they would never talk, and believe it"."
His hand went instinctively to her shoulder, caught it, gripped it to the bone.
"You play a trick with me, a trick of words." I too had felt her body, gazed into her uncovered face. He snatched away his hand and looked at the ground between his damp, muddy boots. He had been wrong: there were no tears in her eyes.
"I trust you," she said.
"Before I converted, I was Gladys Eva Jones. I come from a town in the middle of England, not much of a place. My father drives a train. He's fat, he's ugly, he likes newspapers with pictures of girls without swimsuit tops, he dislikes me because I'm not a boy. My mother's empty, stupid, and she dislikes me because I'm not married and breeding actually, the married bit might not even matter to her, it's not having kids to push round in a pram that upsets her. They both, equally, dislike me because I was clever enough to go to university. It was the most miserable time of my life, and I'd had some. I was nothing on campus, no friends, lonely as sin. I met Yusuf and through him I went to the mosque of Sheik Amir Muhammad, and I was taken into the true Faith, and became Farida Yasmin and happier than I'd been in my life. I'd found respect… I was asked to drop my Faith, to hide it, to go to the hairdresser and beautify myself. I was told that was the way I could best serve the memory of the Imam. I was trusted. I was sent with Yusuf to identify this man, Perry, at a hospital in the north of England when he was visiting. His father was ill and the doctors thought he might die. His parents didn't know how to call for him because he'd cut all the family links when he changed his name. There was an appeal on the radio for him, using the old name, and it was heard by Perry and by the people at the Iranian embassy, and it said where the hospital was. We went there, Yusuf and I, but it was I who actually went into the ward and asked the nurse which patient was his father. I saw him by the bed. We waited outside and noted the car he was driving, and it was I who walked past it and took down the name of the garage that had sold it. We went to the garage and I chatted up the salespeople, gave them a story I flirted, I did what was disgusting for my Faith and I was given the address of the man who'd bought it. I did all of that because I was trusted. Then I was trusted enough to come down here, to Perry's home, to photograph him and his house. And I was trusted, when Yusuf crashed, to drive south, collect you and bring you here. How much trust do you need?"
He gazed at his boots, at the crossed laces and the mud.
She bored on.
"Is it too difficult for you now?"
"What?"
"Because he is protected, is it too difficult?"
"You believe…" He had never before been interrogated by a woman then lectured, not even as a child by his mother.
"Are you giving up, going home?"
"No… no… no..
She had angered him. She smiled as if his anger pleased her, as if she had finally reached him.
"What are you going to do?"
"Think and plan."
"It's possible?"
"In God's hands, everything is possible."
"How can I help?"
He said, "I need bread and cheese and bottled water, and I need raw minced meat. Please, bring them for me tomorrow."
"Same time tomorrow bread, cheese, water, minced meat yes." He pushed himself up. The damp of the ground had seeped through the material of his camouflage trousers, stiffened his hips. He stretched. She reached up with her hand. He hesitated. She challenged him. He took her hand and she used the strength of his grip to pull herself to her feet. The blood flushed in his cheeks. She rubbed the skin at the back of her legs as if to give them warmth. He looked away from her and began to brush the ground on which they had sat with sticks to lift the flattened grass.
"I don't know your name and you don't trust me," she said softly.
"But you can't do without me, can you?"
Chapter Nine.
~We're stuck with him."
"Don't know how we can shift him."
"Whichever budget it's coming out of will be facing a black hole." It was where they found comfort at Thames House: a meeting around a table, an agenda, and a stenographer parked in a corner to record conclusions.
Barnaby Cox, once, had gestured discreetly to the stenographer with the palm of his hand, an indication to her that a particular area of discussion was not to be recorded for posterity; no hack trawling in future years through the archives in library would learn how information was extracted from a hospitalized patient.
Fenton was beside him. Next to him was the senior warhorse from B Branch, former Army with a history going back to Cyprus and Aden. Beyond him, was Littelbaum, in his crumpled tweed suit and creased shirt, then the red-haired woman. Opposite Cox was the Branch superintendent with the maps on which were drawn the lines covered by the sensor wires and the arcs watched by the cameras and the fields of defensive fire… and Geoff Markham was isolated at the end of the table and watched and said nothing.
The agenda had covered the threat; the guarded prisoner; the evidence of the presence in the United Kingdom of a killer with the coded name of Anvil good laughter at the top end of the table at that; the possibilities of putting a name to Anvil; the missing associate thrown up by Rainbow Gold no laughter there because Rainbow Gold was a sacred Grail, cost an annual fortune and was beyond criticism; and the mobile surveillance and taps on the movements and communications of the lOs at the Iranian embassy. The agenda had reached the transcript provided by Geoff Markham.