Gerald Seymour - Home Run

She was grateful to kind Miss Duggan. When she was a child, before she had been sent away to school, her parents had employed a Flossie Duggan as a nanny, a nice, soft woman with a big bosom and a well of loyalty. Mattie used to say that, at Century, life would not be worth living if he didn't have Flossie Duggan to take care of him.

Harriet Furniss would not have called herself a Service wife, rather described herself as a Service widow. The Service had no room for wives. In more than twenty years, since Mattie had come out of the Coldstreams and joined the Service, she had never set foot inside Century. How could she have done?

She had never even been allowed to drive to the corner on the Embankment and wait to collect him after work. She had never been to a social function that involved Century people.

The only person that she knew at Century was Flossie Duggan, because Flossie would once or twice a year come down to Bibury and type up a report over a weekend if it had to be on the DG's desk or the DDG's desk first thing on a Monday morning. The life of the Service was a closed book to her.

Little boys playing secretive games. But dangerous games. So hideously dangerous that Mattie was a prisoner in Iran… and she had good memories of Iran. She remembered when they had been young and together there, when she had been the young mother of two small girls, the swimming trips to the Caspian in the summer and the skiing trips to the Elborz in the winter, when the future was stable and set to last for a millennium. It had been a lovely country, kind and welcoming and comfortable. Infuriating, too, because it had aped Europe and of course she couldn't get a plumber or an electrician, never for love and rarely for money. Endless dinners by candlelight, because as night followed day it was inevitable her social calendar would be dogged by power failures.

She looked out into her garden. It was time to strip the wallflowers from the beds, but the rain was beating on the windowpanes. She loved her garden in summer… She could picture Mattie pacing the lawn and then coming inside to tell her, bluff and stiff because he could never handle matters that were emotional, that Juliette Eshraq had been hanged from a crane in a square in Tabriz. She would never forget that, how he had walked backwards and forwards past the lupins and pinks and stocks before he had come inside to tell her of the execution of the girl she had known as a cheeky and darling child perched on her knee.

And what could Miss Duggan have meant about Charlie being in trouble and why did the Service know anything about Charlie? He was bound to call when he came back from his trip overseas. She would get him down to the cottage and ask him. Straight out. She wasn't going to let Charlie get himself mixed up with Century. That would be unbearable.

She thought of her man. Darling Mattie, everybody's friend, her husband.

Later, she would go down to the Post Office for some stamps, and if she were asked then she would put on a smile and say that Mattie was fine, just abroad for a few days, and before she went to the Post Office there were more circulars to send about the footpath.

She was a Service widow, and she would be good at it.

Mattie would expect that.

Herbert Stone had the brochure on the desk in front of him.

"It's just what you want, Mr Eshraq, and it's the best of British technology. Very much up to date, only been in service with our own forces for a few months. 'Provides an exceptional hit and kill capability for its size and weight… outstanding accuracy against both fixed and moving targets is achieved using a built-in spotting rifle… high technology warhead provides excellent kill probabilities from all angles of attack

… not complicated to teach… zero maintenance.' Sounds pretty good, and it is. It'll get through 650mm of armour, it has an effective range of 500 metres, and the whole thing weighs only ten kilos. The beauty of LAW 80, Mr Eshraq, is in the spotting rifle, you fire a tracer round, you get a hit, you depress the main firing button and away you go. If this is designed to take out a main battle tank then it goes without saying, Mr Eshraq, that it will make a frightful mess of an armoured Mercedes."

"What is it going to cost me?"

"Let's have a drink… you'd like a drink, Mr Eshraq?"

"What will it cost?"

"Expensive."

"How much?"

"Right, Mr Eshraq, no drink, just the figures. We're talking about a round half dozen, correct?"

"No, four."

Herbert Stone's voice did not waver. There was no apology.

"I'm quoting you?50,000 for four… "

"What does that include?"

Herbert Stone had seen that the young man hadn't blinked, hadn't gagged. "Each missile would cost the army?2000, that's for ordinary bulk dealing. You are not ordinary and you are not bulk, and if I had not just spoken to a colleague of Mr Furniss you and I would not be dealing at all. You have a good friend, young man, but even with friends there are complications. You don't want all the seamy details, do you?

You just want delivery through Customs at Istanbul. For that money you get four missiles. Don't worry yourself with the details, Mr Eshraq."

"Four missiles at fifty thousand pounds?"

"Right," said Stone and made a swift note.

Charlie bent over, and he lifted his rucksack on to his knee.

He delved into it. He laid on the edge of the desk a dirty shirt, and two pairs of dirty socks, and then his washing bag. From the bottom of the rucksack he drew out a plastic bag. He pushed the washing bag and the socks and the dirty shirt to one side, and from the plastic bag he took the first wad of notes, wrapped by an elastic band. Other wads followed. A less experienced businessman might have showed surprise, hut Stone had the first wad in his hand and was counting.

Twenty-pound notes, one hundred notes in each wad. The heaps of notes moved from the side of the desk where Charlie sat with his laundry, across to Stone's side. Twenty-five wads of notes on the desk top, and Charlie lifted the bag back into the bottom of his rucksack, and covered it with his clothes and his washing bag.

"That's it, thank you." The money was shovelled, fast, into Stone's safe.

"Mr Stone, what are the complications that cost so much extra, please?"

It was a reasonable question, and that was how Stone treated it. "You're better off without details, Mr Eshraq, details tend to get messy in the wrong hands… I have to have a cut.

They have to come off the tail of a truck, and someone has to put them on a truck, and someone has to make the paperwork right, and someone has to find a bit of room on a lorry, one or two palms to be crossed at frontiers on the way to Turkey, and someone has to make sure Istanbul doesn't look that closely at what's coming through. There are quite a lot of people who would go to prison for quite a long time, that adds up to the difference, as you think of it, above ?2000 per weapon."

Charlie said, "In that price, in the load, I'd like there to be included three wholesale cartons of bath soap, the best there is, whatever Mrs Stone would recommend. Can you manage that?"

"Yes, I believe we can manage that."

"I'll give you my number in London. You'll call as soon as you are ready?" Charlie's eyes narrowed. "If they were tampered with, if they didn't work… "

"I think we can let Mr Furniss be our mutual surety, don't you, Mr Eshraq?"

Park said, "If we don't get into Colombia and start to hit the bastards in their own backyard, then we're going to lose. It's the Americans who are at the sharp end at the moment, but our turn's coming. We won't avoid the really big cocaine traffic if we don't act much more positively. The demand's here, for the lunch time snort, and that demand'll grow in London just as it's grown in New York. Do you know that there's a guy in Medellin, that's in Colombia, who has a fortune estimated at two billion dollars? That's cocaine money.