"In my book, the evil people traffic in heroin."
"There was no other way."
"That's an excuse, Eshraq, and excuses don't make rights out of wrongs."
"David, who do you love?"
"None of your business."
"Anyone, anyone in the world?"
"I want to sleep, and I want to get out of this shit hole in the morning."
"Do you love your wife?"
"That's my business."
"My sister, David, she was my business…"
"I don't care."
"I will tell you what they did to my sister. They took her from the gaol at Evin, they flew her to Tabriz. They drove her to the centre of the town. They had brought a crane into the centre of the town. They stood my sister on a table and they put a rope around her neck. There were many hundreds of people there to watch her die, David. I am told by people who were there that when my sister stood upon the table and looked down on to the people who had come to watch her die that she smiled at them. She made the smile of a girl who was not yet a woman. It was talked about for many weeks afterwards, the way that my sister smiled… They kicked her off the table and they hoisted the crane up. That was how she died. They tell me that she died in great pain, that she did not die easily. There were two men who held her on the table as the executioner put the rope around her neck, I killed them as I killed the executioner. If it had been your wife, David, and not my sister, would you not have wanted money for weapons?"
"Running heroin is wrong, for me that's the beginning and the middle and the end of it."
"Because you have no love?"
"Because I have no love for people who run heroin."
"Your father is alive?"
"My father is alive."
"Do you love your father?"
"I want to go to sleep."
"Is it shaming to say that you love your father?"
"My feelings for my father, that's not your concern."
"My father was in the gaol at Evin. He was a soldier. He was not a policeman, he was not in the S A V A K, he never commanded troops who were used to put down the revolt of the masses. He was an enemy of no man, and he was my father. I know about my sister, David, her last hours, and I know also something of the last hours of my father. I know that he was taken from his cell at dawn one morning out into the killing yard at Evin. He was tied to a stake in the yard, and shot there. When that has happened to your father, and your uncle has been butchered, is it wrong to want weapons?"
"You can talk all night, Eshraq. Me, I'll be sleeping."
He heard the heaving of the bed. He saw the shadow of Park's body toss as the back was turned to him.
He thought that by the next nightfall he would be far inside.
He thought that at the next dusk he would be approaching the stone hovel of Majid Nazeri on the frost cold slopes of Iri Dagh. He would be where there were eagles, and where there were wolf packs, and where as the light came or as the light went there was the chance of seeing the fleeting passage of a leopard. Perhaps that was his world. Perhaps he did not belong, never had belonged, in the world of David Park.
"David, may I ask a favour?"
"I doubt you'll get it, what?"
"That you take back a letter for me."
"Just a letter?"
"To a very fine man, a very kind man, a man who knew about love."
There was the grated concession. "I'll take it."
Charlie crawled from his bed, and he went to his rucksack and took out the envelope. The envelope had been bent while it had been lying amongst his clothes and his map charts in the rucksack. He laid the envelope on the table beside Park's bed.
He stood at the window. Carefully, slowly, he edged aside the curtain. He looked down at the Transit. He saw the jutting nose of a Mercedes car, and he saw the white light flash. He felt the thunder roar in his ears, and he felt the hot heat back draught of the LAW 80.
"You should try to find love, David. Without love then life is empty."
He had waited all evening for a call to be routed through to the nineteenth floor.
His chauffeur was in the car park below. Houghton was yawning.
The Director General dialled the number, and they were a long time answering.
"Carter – is that you, Carter? Have you any idea of the time? It is past midnight, I have been waiting for two and a quarter hours for your call. What has Furniss said?"
The voice was faint, tinny. The scrambler connection had that effect. And the scrambler could not disguise the hesitancy of the far away metallic voice.
"He hasn't said anything."
"Then you've a problem, Carter, by Christ you have."
"I'm aware of the problem, sir."
"My advice to you, Carter, is that you have one hour…
I want to speak to Furniss."
He heard the telephone put down, clumsily. He heard the tramp of departing footsteps. He waited. What was the bloody man at? He didn't know how he would ever again face Furniss.
He heard the footsteps returning.
"Not possible at the moment, sir, to speak to Mattie."
"Carter, understand me… understand your position.
I'll see you gutted if harm has come to Furniss, if you turn out to be wrong. I'll have you skinned. You have one hour."
He thought that he had betrayed Furniss. He felt deep shame. He strode out of his office, and he had no word for his Personal Assistant who padded behind him. He thought that he had betrayed a very good man.
The Station Officer could no longer stay awake.
On a pad beside the telephone in the bedroom was written the code of Dogubeyezit and the number of the Ararat hotel.
The call from London, if it came, would be in clear. There was no difficulty in that. The codeword for a halt, a postponement, had been agreed via the teleprinter in his office before he had shut up shop for the evening. In an ideal world he should not have been snuggling against his wife's back, in his own bed, he should have been close to that wretched frontier, up in north-eastern Anatolia. He should have been hugging the Iranian border, not his wife's slim back. No question of him being there. The frontier was out of bounds, the border was closed territory after the lifting of the Desk Head (Iran).
He had not been told the reason that there might, possibly but not probably, be a hold put on Eshraq's movement. He had no need to know why there might conceivably be a hold… If there were a hold then he would communicate it. He drifted towards sleep. He had rather enjoyed the company of the young man who had come to the park in Ankara. A bit wild, of course. Any man going inside Iran with LAW 8os was entitled to be a bit bloody-minded. But they had thrashed out their lines of communication. Not that he would last. Not possible that he would survive.
"Terence, is that 'phone going to ring tonight? There'll be murder if it does."
"Don't know, love, I really don't know."
They had not slept. They had lain on sleeping bags on the concrete floor inside the inner hall of the Guards' barracks at Maku. The investigator was amongst the last to push himself back up to his feet. There were some amongst them who prayed, and some who worked with clean cloths at the firing mechanisms of their automatic rifles. The investigator wandered out of the inner hall in search of the latrine, and after the latrine he would be in search of the Communications room and news from the men who watched a hotel across the border.
It was sensible of him to leave the inner hallway for the latrine and the Communications room. If he had stayed then it would have been remarked that he had not prayed. It was hard for him to pray because the words of the Qur'an held no place in his mind. He had no time that early morning because his mind was filled with the vision of armour-piercing missiles and a Transit van and the man who had been named by Matthew Furniss.