Gerald Seymour - Home Run

It was his protection that the headman had no notion that this was Charlie's last shipment.

Late in the evening the headman's hand snaked out, grasped Charlie's hand. Charlie reckoned that the headman was tired, or that he wanted his wife and bed. The strong dry hand caught Charlie's, held it, shook it, sealed the bargain. A game was at an end.

The cash was in wads of fifty notes, fastened with elastic bands. Charlie fetched the rucksack and put the ten bundles carefully on to the carpet in front of him. He sat cross legged.

That was awkward to him, and his back ached from the stretching of muscles that were unused. When his hand was shaken then he knew that his safety was guaranteed. Never in much doubt, but that was certainty.

Charlie left the village before dawn. In his rucksack were seven kilos' weight of pure heroin powder in sealed plastic bags, and on the bags was the stamp of the drugs' pedigree.

He had watched them stencil on to the plastic the symbol of the curved dagger. That early in the morning there was no cart to carry him alongside the river. He strode out on the dirt trail.

This was the currency that would buy him armour-piercing missiles. He was in a hell of a good humour, and whistling to himself, and he was alone in the mountains of his homeland.

Keeper, restless, fretting, pacing the ragged and worn carpet in April's office. He was a bloody pain, and even Parrish didn't have the spirit to tell him that to his face, and Harlech, who was the nearest that Park had to a friend, just cursed him and stayed quiet.

Charlie Persia. The great silent stomach of the computer had no entry on Charlie Persia. Nothing under the name, and nothing like it from the scores, hundreds, of cross referenced Suspicious Movements Reports that were daily fed into CEDRIC's system.

It was Keeper's opinion that Leroy Winston Manvers had come clean in his pain, had told all. Charlie Persia was the name that the distributor traded under. He believed that. The face and the gasping admissions of Leroy Winston Manvers had a truth about them. He knew from forensic's analysis that the packets found in the Notting Hill council flat were of Iranian origin. He took as his base position that Charlie Persia was Iranian, had carried the good, hard stuff to London. He waited on a phone call to take him forward now that the computer had come up blank. He needed a break. He needed luck. And he was pacing because his phone call had not been returned, and because he did not know where else the break would come from.

It had been luck that had heaved Park out of uniform at Heathrow Airport and into the ID on the Lane. He would never have argued with that. He had spotted the girl coming off the Varig from Rio, and she looked like a towrope, and her accent was an East London slur, and her clothes weren't good enough for a return ticket to Rio, and she had been the only passenger he had stopped all that morning off the overnight intercontinentals. She had had an airline ticket and ?1500 for couriering a kilo of cocaine, fastened in a sanitary towel between her legs. That was a break, that was noticed.

Luck was different, luck could only be taken advantage of. A slack half hour between the clearing of the Customs hall and the arrival of the next jumbo and he had gone out into the concourse to get himself an afternoon paper, and he had seen the man waiting at the barrier, in position to meet a passenger off the incoming flight. At Heathrow they had the police mugshots of all convicted pushers and dealers. Not everyone looked at them, but the young David Park had made a point of studying them every week. He recognised the face, eighteen months at Isleworth Court and he could only have been out a few weeks. That was luck, recognising the chummie. He had tipped off the local ID based at the airport. The "greeter" had been watched, the meeting had been observed, the passenger had been challenged and asked to return to the Customs area… a few grammes more than a kilo stuffed into the cavities in a pair of platform shoes, and back to Isleworth Court for the "greeter", and seven years for the courier. Luck, but there were those in the ID command who said that a man earned his luck, and his luck had been noticed, noticed enough for his application to join the Investigation Division to be processed at speed.

When the telephone on his desk rang out Park was at the far end of the room and he charged for it. God, and he needed the break and the luck when CEDRIC had gone down on him.

Ann… would he be in for supper? He didn't know…

Should she cook for two? Probably best not… Did he know what time he would be home? Could she clear the line, he was waiting on a call.

He pounded on over the carpet. The carpet was a disgrace, and so were the blinds that sagged unevenly across the windows, and so was the crack on the upper wall behind his desk that had been there for a year and not repaired. Without luck he was going to stay grounded.

The telephone call, when it came, left him flattened. The Anti-Terrorist branch at Scotland Yard had the most complete records on Iranians living in London. A Chief Inspector told him that they had no record of any exile who went under the name of Charlie Persia… sorry not to be of help.

The folder on his desk contained a single typed sheet which was the preliminary report from forensic. Another sheet was his own hand-written record of the interview with Leroy Winston Manvers. He was certain that his man took the name of Charlie. He thought the man was most probably an Iranian.

He had written TANGO One on the outside of the folder.

Tango was ID's word for a targeted suspect.

For the moment, he was damned if he knew how he would put a face into the Tango One folder.

The investigator worked iate into the evening. He had no family, he had no call to go back to the cramped one-bedroomed flat that had been his home since his former life.

Beneath his window the Tehran streets had emptied. The recruit from Manzarieh Park would be flying out in the morning, that part was simple, but the arrangement of the detail of the collections that he would make upon his arrival, and the back-up that he would receive on the ground, all of that required care. It was, of course, his intention that no "smoking pistol" would remain behind. He was working at long range, and great distances always posed problems.

When he had finished with the matter of Jamil Shabro, traitor and collaborationist, he switched his attention to the business of the British intelligence officer, Dolphin/Matthew Furniss, in the city of Van.

He had on his desk all the sightings marking Furniss' progress across Turkey, just as he had them for his journey around the Gulf. The man came like a lamb to him, to within reach.

As the crow flies, the ebony scavenging crow, the city of Van was sixty miles from the nearest crossing point into Iranian territory.

The watch on Furniss had been kept to a bare minimum.

He had been shadowed from airport to hotel, from hotel to airport. Away from his hotel, in between his flights, he had been free of his tail. That was of no matter to the investigator, not at this moment.

He worked late because, early in the morning, he would fly to Tabriz to put in place the final pieces of a mosaic of which he was proud.

"The fascinating thing about this region, Terence, is that it was never touched by the European civilizations. Here what you have are the unadulterated remnants of the Hittites and the Urartians and the Armenians."

As far as the Station Officer from Ankara was concerned, Van was one of the most forgettable cities it had been his misfortune to visit. His eyes streamed and he had an aggravating catarrh from the street dust thrown up by the traffic. To Terence Snow, Van was quite stunningly ordinary.