Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand

"You play a trick with me, a trick of words." I too had felt her body, gazed into her uncovered face. He snatched away his hand and looked at the ground between his damp, muddy boots. He had been wrong: there were no tears in her eyes.

"I trust you," she said.

"Before I converted, I was Gladys Eva Jones. I come from a town in the middle of England, not much of a place. My father drives a train. He's fat, he's ugly, he likes newspapers with pictures of girls without swimsuit tops, he dislikes me because I'm not a boy. My mother's empty, stupid, and she dislikes me because I'm not married and breeding actually, the married bit might not even matter to her, it's not having kids to push round in a pram that upsets her. They both, equally, dislike me because I was clever enough to go to university. It was the most miserable time of my life, and I'd had some. I was nothing on campus, no friends, lonely as sin. I met Yusuf and through him I went to the mosque of Sheik Amir Muhammad, and I was taken into the true Faith, and became Farida Yasmin and happier than I'd been in my life. I'd found respect… I was asked to drop my Faith, to hide it, to go to the hairdresser and beautify myself. I was told that was the way I could best serve the memory of the Imam. I was trusted. I was sent with Yusuf to identify this man, Perry, at a hospital in the north of England when he was visiting. His father was ill and the doctors thought he might die. His parents didn't know how to call for him because he'd cut all the family links when he changed his name. There was an appeal on the radio for him, using the old name, and it was heard by Perry and by the people at the Iranian embassy, and it said where the hospital was. We went there, Yusuf and I, but it was I who actually went into the ward and asked the nurse which patient was his father. I saw him by the bed. We waited outside and noted the car he was driving, and it was I who walked past it and took down the name of the garage that had sold it. We went to the garage and I chatted up the salespeople, gave them a story I flirted, I did what was disgusting for my Faith and I was given the address of the man who'd bought it. I did all of that because I was trusted. Then I was trusted enough to come down here, to Perry's home, to photograph him and his house. And I was trusted, when Yusuf crashed, to drive south, collect you and bring you here. How much trust do you need?"

He gazed at his boots, at the crossed laces and the mud.

She bored on.

"Is it too difficult for you now?"

"What?"

"Because he is protected, is it too difficult?"

"You believe…" He had never before been interrogated by a woman then lectured, not even as a child by his mother.

"Are you giving up, going home?"

"No… no… no..

She had angered him. She smiled as if his anger pleased her, as if she had finally reached him.

"What are you going to do?"

"Think and plan."

"It's possible?"

"In God's hands, everything is possible."

"How can I help?"

He said, "I need bread and cheese and bottled water, and I need raw minced meat. Please, bring them for me tomorrow."

"Same time tomorrow bread, cheese, water, minced meat yes." He pushed himself up. The damp of the ground had seeped through the material of his camouflage trousers, stiffened his hips. He stretched. She reached up with her hand. He hesitated. She challenged him. He took her hand and she used the strength of his grip to pull herself to her feet. The blood flushed in his cheeks. She rubbed the skin at the back of her legs as if to give them warmth. He looked away from her and began to brush the ground on which they had sat with sticks to lift the flattened grass.

"I don't know your name and you don't trust me," she said softly.

"But you can't do without me, can you?"

~We're stuck with him."

"Don't know how we can shift him."

"Whichever budget it's coming out of will be facing a black hole." It was where they found comfort at Thames House: a meeting around a table, an agenda, and a stenographer parked in a corner to record conclusions.

Barnaby Cox, once, had gestured discreetly to the stenographer with the palm of his hand, an indication to her that a particular area of discussion was not to be recorded for posterity; no hack trawling in future years through the archives in library would learn how information was extracted from a hospitalized patient.

Fenton was beside him. Next to him was the senior warhorse from B Branch, former Army with a history going back to Cyprus and Aden. Beyond him, was Littelbaum, in his crumpled tweed suit and creased shirt, then the red-haired woman. Opposite Cox was the Branch superintendent with the maps on which were drawn the lines covered by the sensor wires and the arcs watched by the cameras and the fields of defensive fire… and Geoff Markham was isolated at the end of the table and watched and said nothing.

The agenda had covered the threat; the guarded prisoner; the evidence of the presence in the United Kingdom of a killer with the coded name of Anvil good laughter at the top end of the table at that; the possibilities of putting a name to Anvil; the missing associate thrown up by Rainbow Gold no laughter there because Rainbow Gold was a sacred Grail, cost an annual fortune and was beyond criticism; and the mobile surveillance and taps on the movements and communications of the lOs at the Iranian embassy. The agenda had reached the transcript provided by Geoff Markham.

"The call, Geoff's call, wasn't authorized…" Cox fretted.

"All Geoff's done, not that we needed it, is provide further confirmation that Perry's a stubborn fool," Fenton said reassuringly.

"He should have cleared it first," Cox complained.

"The bloody trouble is, and Perry knows it, we cannot abandon him. If the Iranians drop him in the gutter, with half his head missing, they've won, and that is unacceptable." The Branch man gazed at the table.

Cox huffed, "Sounds as if he's deranged, all this rubbish about home and friends."

Fenton said, "I think we should call him up to London, with his wife, give him lunch and the treatment. Plant the doubts in him, scare the daylights out of her. Soften him up."

The Branch man relaxed and grinned.

"Spell it out in words of one syllable that even an engineer can understand."

"A good lunch, a good wine and a good dose of fear should crack him," Fenton pressed on.

"The cost of protection, with no end date, is simply unacceptable." Cox pummelled his hands together.

"But I like what I'm hearing now."

Fenton rocked back in his chair, smiled broadly.

"Get some photographs from the Germans, the French, a few of their corpses courtesy of the Iranians for her to look at while she's eating. Always best to go through the little woman works every time."

"Right, agreed." Cox rapped his pencil on the table.

"We're not criticizing Geoff for his initiative, he was following the agreed line. It's just that he didn't have sufficient weight in his punch. Handle it, will you, Harry?"

The stenographer scribbled briskly. At the far end of the table,

Markham felt like a child brought in to the adults' dinner, not expected to contribute but to be washed, neat and silent. The red-haired woman yawned. The American, who hadn't spoken since his precis of the hospital-bed interview, coughed.

Cox gathered up his papers and stood, content.

"Thank you all for your time the main priority, get him out. A good lunch and lashings of gore to help it down Harry to make the arrange~nents. Thank you.~ The American coughed again, in a more stagy fashion.

"Sorry, Mr. Littelbaum, have we ignored you?" Cox grimaced.

While they were on the move around him, Littelbaum remained still and sitting.