Gerald Seymour - Home Run

No, Dr Owens had not checked out, and that was an embarrassment to reception because they had been promised he was going and they had a client for the room, and it was still occupied with Dr Owens' possessions.

No, Dr Owens had not brought back his car, and the hall porter had twice been phoned by the rental company.

From the airport, after the Van flight arrived without Mr Furniss, it had taken the Station Officer a full hour to get through on a payphone from Ankara to Van. It took him another hour to reach the Embassy's Air Attache.

No, of course he had confirmed there were no flights to Van that night.

No, for crying out loud, this was not a trivial matter. He wanted a light aircraft, and he wanted the Air Attache to pilot it, soon as possible, like an hour ago.

"I was half into bed, Terence. This is on the level?"

"Sadly, yes… right on the level."

It had been a ghastly flight in a light Cessna across a great expanse of raw countryside, buffeted by gale force winds. The Station Officer was a poor air traveller at the best of times, but now he noticed not at all the yawing progress of the aircraft. The Air Attache didn't speak to him, had his hands full. He took his cue from the furrowed anxiety of the young man strapped in beside him.

When they'd landed, the Station Officer asked the Air Attache to go directly to the Akdamar, to make sure that the room in the name of Dr Owens stayed sealed.

He went to the local offices of the jandarma. He said that he was from the British Embassy. He knew the registration number of the hired Fiat. It was close to dawn when the report came in, car discovered abandoned, indications of an accident.

He was taken to the scene. He said that Dr Owens, the driver of the damaged car, was a distinguished archaeologist and the guest of the Ambassador. He tried to minimize the concern that had brought him at night across the country, and a poor job he made of it. The headlights of the jeep had picked out the Fiat's rear reflectors. It was on the verge, off balance, it seemed, both right hand wheels sunk into the soft mud. They gave him a flashlight and let him make his own examination.

To them it was a small matter. No big deal, death on the roads, not in eastern Turkey, and this wasn't death, this was just a missing person. True, there was nothing inside the car to suggest that Mr Furniss was hurt, no blood stain that he could see, no broken glass. But outside he saw the Fiat's skid tracks on the tarmacadam and he saw the dirt trail across what would have been the path of the Fiat. He saw the broken shields of the brake lights and the indicators and the stoved-in bumper. Pretty straightforward… A vehicle coming off the open fields in front – wide tracks, probably a tractor or farm lorry – a vehicle ramming from behind… and the unaccompanied Desk Head in between.

The jandarma officer said, "It is possible that he has been concussed, that he has wandered off the road… "

No chance.

"… There is no other explanation."

The officer drove him to the Akdamar.

He gutted the room. Clothes everywhere, books and papers too, and many pages of scribbled notes, not in English certainly, must be some sort of code. He looked carefully at the disorder and decided that it was as Mr Furniss had left it, that it had not been searched. He packed everything into Mr Furniss' suitcase.

The Station Officer paid Dr Owens' bill. He woke the Air Attache from a deep sleep in an unlit corner of the lobby.

"Sorted out your little problem, Terence? Knickers all untwisted, eh?"

"No, I am afraid the news is all bad."

"Anything I can do?"

"Just fly us home. No jokes. No japes. No funny faces.

Just don't say anything at all. Please."

Standing on the hotel steps, waiting once more for a taxi, the Station Officer felt an aching anxiety. Whatever else, Mattie Furniss was not gone walkabout in eastern Turkey nursing a concussion. He had been thinking, how would it have been if he had been there too? Would he be alive now?

Where would he be? Come what may, he'd be crucified, he knew that, for leaving a Desk Head alone. Probably finished altogether.

They took off, with the dawn rising behind them.

A blustering wet early summer morning in London. The traffic clogged the Thames bridges. The commuters below the high windows of Century House swarmed in ant columns along the pavements.

The first report from the Ankara Station Officer was deciphered then passed, marked URGENT, to the desk of the Night Duty Officer. The Night Duty Officer was ready to clock off, and he was enjoying his last cup of coffee when the message reached him. He signed for it, he read it, and he spluttered coffee over the morning newspapers. There was a procedure for catastrophe. Telephone the Director General's PA. The PA would alert the Director General wherever he was. The Night Duty Officer would then ring the Director General on a scrambled line.

The Night Duty Officer read over the message in a clear and firm voice. That was a sham. His throat had dried, his fingers drummed on his desk. He knew Mattie, everyone at Century knew Mattie Furniss. He listened to the silence at the other end of the distorted connection.

"Did you get that, sir?"

A clipped voice. "Yes, I did."

"What can I do, sir?"

A longer silence. What could anyone do? And what the hell was old Mattie, a Desk Head, doing in Turkey? Last he'd heard of him he was in Bahrain and God knows what he was doing there. Not the Night Duty Officer's place to question

… The Night Duty Officer had cause to think well of Mattie Furniss. His son had had pretty serious problems with his teeth, came up one day at lunch in the canteen, and Mattie had taken a note, and a week later he had the name of a specialist in Wimpole Street, and the specialist had sorted out the problem over the following nine months, and the bills hadn't been bad. The Night Duty Officer's wife always spoke well of Mr Furniss, and when the Night Duty Officer went home that morning he would not be able to tell her that Mattie Furniss was posted missing, and in a country he'd no business being in.

The voice jolted him.

"All the West Asia Desk Heads, and the DDG, in my office at nine – inform Downing Street that I'll be there in half an hour. I shall require to see the P M. "

The telephone clicked, went dead.

The truck had slowed, and there were the sounds of a city's traffic flow around him. He thought that they were close to a commercial area. He could hear the hawkers' shouts, and whenever the truck stopped he could smell the pavement food stalls. They had come down a fast road for two or more hours, that could only be the Tehran road from the border. If they were now in a city then they had reached Tabriz. A lifetime ago since he had been in Tabriz. That was wrong.. . A lifetime ago was being trapped and kidnapped on the road from Toprakkale. That was more than a lifetime ago.

In the hours that he had lain in the truck no word had been spoken to him. His head, where he had been kicked, was not hurting any longer. His gag was constantly painful. His mouth was parched. His feet were dead, below the binding.

The truck stopped, lurched forward and then swung to the right, revving in low gears, stopped again. The engine was cut. He heard everything. The click of the door, the squeaking of the driver's seat as the driver left it, and then it slammed shut. The same at the passenger side. He heard a low conversation beside the driver's cab, but too quiet for him to understand what was said. He saw his captors in the back of the truck move towards him. He didn't flinch. He was not afraid, not yet. Their hands came at his face. He could smell their breath through the masks they wore. He did not try to wriggle away from them, because he thought that would have invited a beating. They fastened a strip of cloth around his eyes.