Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand

GM: G Branch, Thames House, Millbank, London why? Shorthand is Box

DL: Are you in charge of this guy's safety?

GM: I seem to be getting the donkey's load.

DL: Tell me, if the pressure grows on him, will Perry/ Hughes crumple? In words of one syllable, if the crap comes thicker, will he accept the relocation offer?

GM: I wouldn't have thought so. He talked about home and about friends. He ran once, says he won't again. Why?

DL: How do I reach you?

[DL given my personal extension number, personal fax number. GM]

DL: I'll come back to you. Oh, Mr. Markham… GM: Yes, Mr. Littelbaum.

DL: Forgive me, and it's not my style to patronize, but you sound to me to be at the bottom of the heap. At the top of your heap are the guys who know to what use was put the information supplied by Gavin Hughes on the project at Bandar Abbas. When you've been told that, I promise you'll be in a position to make a very fair guess at the threat assessment, and get Alamut into your head. Can I offer advice? My advice, put some hardware adjacent to our friend… I'll come back to you… Fenton read the transcript and his nails worried at his moustache. His brow was furrowed as if a plough's blade had cut it.

Geoff Markham stood in Fenton's room and looked at the vinyl floor, then at the ceiling, where the cleaners had missed a spider's web, then at the walls, which were bare except for the leave chart for the section, then at the desk and the photograph of Fenton's family. He thought the transcript made poor reading: when he had typed it up from the tape supplied him by the Grosvenor Square people, he had thought he came across as an ill-informed pillock, a kid in an adult world.

Fenton paced with the transcript.

Geoff Markham blurted, "Do you know about Alamut?"

Fenton nodded as if it was basic for anyone working the Islamic road to know about Alamut.

"And do you know to what use was put the information supplied by Perry/ Hughes

Fenton shook his head didn't know, and had no wish to.

"What do we do now?"

Abandoning the rape of his moustache, Fenton laid down the transcript pages and picked up his telephone. He dialled his PA in the outer office, gave the name and extension number for the superintendent from Special Branch, held the telephone loosely against his ear and waited.

Markham felt so tired. He wanted to be back in his own space and clear of Fenton's room where there was, he thought, all the fun of a mortuary chapel. He had known bad times in Ireland, when the weight of responsibility had seemed to crush him, but hadn't known it before at Thames House. In his mind was the pichire of Frank Perry. Defiant, bloody-minded, awkward, obstinate, like a vixen with cubs deep in the darkness when the hounds and the terriers came to her earth. It would be different at the bank -pray to God that he pulled it off at the interview different and better. When he'd stood by the door in that gloomy living room, looking out of the window towards the rooftops and the sea, he hadn't quite believed that the threat was real. He could not conjure the image of a man, of alpha quality, coming. He headed for the door.

"I'll be at my desk, Mr. Fenton, I've got a mountain of work."

Fenton ignored him and told the superintendent, on the telephone, that they should meet, that they should consider a protection officer.

Markham's mountain was a missing man, who had bought all-weather clothing that did not fit him and a guidebook, and a woman, who had left the address recorded on the file with no forwarding details. He rang Vicky, said he was thinking about his interview, said he did not know when he would be clear said it wasn't his fault, not anybody's fault.

The call came through as she worked at her keyboard, distracted her. She finished the entry, picked up the phone and heard his voice.

She had been Gladys Eva Jones, only daughter of a train driver out of the Derby depot. She had been a plain girl, with poor eyesight, a love of mathematics and a desperate loneliness. Her school-teachers, perhaps out of pity, had concentrated sufficiently on her that she won a place at Nottingham University. She had clung limpet-like to gangs of fellow students, and she'd seen the efforts they'd made to avoid her. One night, second year, drunk in the union bar, they had told her to get 'flicking lost' because she was so 'fucking boring' and so 'fucking ugly'. She had gone to an abandoned lecture room to sob out her misery. She had been the girl found by an Afro-Caribbean cleaner, and she had wept on his shoulder. It was he, six years before, who had taken her to the classes of Sheik Amir Muhammad. She had learned the Five Pillars of the Faith the Shahada, the Salat, the Zakat, the Sawm and the Ha]]. She had recited the words, "There is no deity but God. Muhammad is the apostle of God." In her last year at the university, she had gone to her lectures wearing the chad or the rou push. She had felt the protection of her Faith, and the respect it gained from fellow believers, and had taken the names Fanda and Yasmin. Her degree was mediocre, but she knew that reflected the prejudice of her examiners. She had been turned away by many potential employers, but that reflected the prejudice of the management who interviewed her because she wore with pride her chad or Her mentor had been Sheik Amir Muhammad, her friend Yusuf Khan, and she felt herself to be safe in a world of enemies. She had not known she was under the watching eye of an intelligence officer from the Iranian embassy.

Three years after her conversion, when Yusuf Khan had appeared to abandon the Faith, forswear the prayer meetings of Sheik Amir Muhammad, and had left their small group, she had been rocked. At that time, her own obedience to the Faith had been total… Without Yusuf Khan's friendship, her own commitment to the Faith had gradually weakened. She had the intelligence to be aware of the change, but she had tried her best to ignore the weakening. At night, alone, she could analyse the shifting ground on which her Faith was based. She had wanted a place for herself, had wanted respect. At first, the white girl, she had been a prized convert and a focus of the Sheik's attention, but new converts had come to the small red-brick mosque and she had sensed she was no longer the centre-point of interest. Even so, Farida Yasmin had still been shaken to the core when the Sheik, with Yusuf Khan sitting silently behind him, had quietly told her that she could best serve the true religion if she, too, were to seem to walk away from everything that was precious and reassuring. She had not doubted them, she had been obedient to their wishes. She had felt undressed, dirtied, when she had gone for a job interview at a Nottingham insurance company, two years back, dressed in a skirt and blouse and not in the black chad or She said her prayers each day at the appointed time in the privacy of her new bed sit home and in the insurance company's lavatory, but the comfort of the mosque was now denied her.

For much of those two years she had been ignored; no contact had been made. At first she had been merely miserable, then resentful. The friendship of the mosque was in the past, and the present offered no warmth because she despised the other girls who worked around her. She had been given no explanation of why she had been recruited as a 'sleeper', nor what would be expected of her one day, until six weeks ago. Arriving back at her one-bedroom flat from another day's humdrum work for the insurance company, Yusuf Khan had been waiting on the pavement for her. After she had telephoned the company and pleaded a family bereavement they had driven north, and the following week they had gone to the Suffolk coast. She did not know who had instructed Yusuf Khan to contact her, but at last she felt a small sense of usefulness. Farida Yasmin, an unknown soldier of Islam, had just come back from the lavatory when her telephone had rung.