Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand

The lavatory flushed upstairs.

"I'll get the ironing done. How long will it be till they come for Frank?"

"Thank you, the stuff's a bit tight on me.

He disappeared into the dining room. In the kitchen her Stephen was still doggedly writing in his exercise book even though he would have heard each word Vince had said to her. Outside, the night was coming and the curtains were tightly drawn against it. Vince had always been so good with Stephen, had made him laugh. Would they come that night for Frank, or the night after, or the night after that? She shook and tried to hold the iron steady.

In a vile temper, Fenton returned to Thames House from his lunch. It should have been lunch and shopping with his wife, if the wretched man had not cancelled lunch for Monday, and insisted his only opportunity was Saturday. Fenton had bartered with his wife: lunch with the academic and then shopping, with her having access to the full range of his plastic.

He came up to the third floor, was told there was nothing new of note, then went into his office to shed his coat and spill his micro tape-recorder on to the desk. The lunch had further confused him, and the expensive shopping had wounded him.

He had not used this source before, but the file said he was sound. The academic was white-haired and ginger-bearded, a professor of Islamic studies at a minor college at the university, had a face lined like a popular ski-run, from Sudan. The confusion, from the soft-voiced lecture, had fuelled Fenton's temper. He listened to the tape again.

"What distresses me is the hostility of the Western media and the Western "orientalists" towards the Islamic faith. They are servants of imperialism. They stigmatize, stereotype and categorize us, and any scholar of the Faith of Islam is labelled with the title of "fundamentalist". There's no denying it is a term used with hostility. If we judged Christianity by the excesses of the Inquisition, or if we took the Fascist elements in Zionism to reflect the faith of Judaism, you would be horrified. If we talked always about apartheid and Nazism as examples of Christian belief you would rightly criticize us but when a zealot hijacks an aircraft he is labelled an Islamic fundamentalist. If a lunatic shoots children in a school, do we call him a Christian fundamentalist? You live by a double standard. You follow slavishly the American need to have an enemy, and you plant that title, without the slightest reason, on the faithful of Islam."

They had been in the students' canteen, a dreary cavern of a building. They'd colleded salads and fruit juice from a self-service counter, not a bottle of wine in sight, and the academic had persistently questioned the woman at the till to be certain there was no alcohol in the vinegar that accompanied the salad.

"You distrust us in your midst, even those Muslims who are British citizens. Our colleges for converts in this country are monitored by the security forces why? Because we are different, because we live by other criteria? Is it that you fear believers and the standards to which they dedicate their lives? A Muslim will not steal from you, will not seduce your wife, will not go to prostitutes, and yet the strength of our decency is regarded as a threat so we are harassed by the political police. Everything you talk about involves this threat, but it is a figment of your imagination. We are not drunk in the street and looking for violence, we are not hooligans. Would a virtuous young woman, an Islamic convert, join in a criminal conspiracy of murder? The very idea is preposterous and shows the depths of your prejudice."

Fenton had listened and toyed unhappily with his lettuce leaves, probably left over from the previous week's catering. They had a table to themselves. He had attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, not university, and when his eyes wandered to the students sitting around them, he'd felt a sense of disgust.

"You have made a growth industry in the study of the Islamic faith, but the work is shallow. You seek to vilify Iran, to cast that great nation and its people in a mould of the "medieval"~ I tell you, Mr. Fenton, where there is the Sharia, the law of Islam, you would find it safe to walk in the streets. It is a code of fairness, charity and decency. Yes, there is a death sentence. Yes, there is very occasional amputation and the flogging of offenders but only after the most rigorous examination of the felon by the courts. I venture to say that there are many in the United Kingdom, so-called Christians, who yearn for the punishment of the guilty. But to suggest as you do, Mr. Fenton, that the legally elected government of Iran would seek clandestine vengeance abroad is just another example of a warped and closed mind. Let me tell you if a small incident or a trivial event occurred, if you made from it a fraudulent link with Iran, if you danced to the American tune, if you made lying public statements, then the consequences could be most grave. Do you dance to that tune, Mr. Fenton? Are you acting now as a lackey to those Islamophobic elements of the American establishment who wish to block the return of more normal relationships between Iran and the United States? A false and deceitful move would lead, Mr. Fenton, to the most desperate of consequences. Of course, I do not threaten you but I warn that your irrelevant and decadent country would be at war with a billion Muslims throughout the world. I do not think you would wish that."

So, earnestly, at the end of a meal that left him hungry, he had fled the canteen.

With a deep sigh, Fenton switched off the tape-recorder he had worn under his jacket. The two roads split ahead of him, and the directions they took were opposite and irreconcilable.

Was Islamic Iran a force for good, which he was too bigoted to appreciate, or a force for evil, which made a sewer of the streets of his country? He did not know which road led to truth. What he did know was that Abigail Fenton had punished him for her missed lunch with the price of a new handbag, a dress and a matching twin-set.

He rang Cox in the country, and hoped he was disturbing him. He told him what he had learned. Whichever way they twisted was fraught with problems. Cox said his confidence in Fenton's judgement was, as always, total. He'd always thought of Cox as a time-serving, networking fool; now he began to doubt that opinion.

He wandered towards Cathy Parker.

"I'm confused, Cathy."

"Goes with the rank, Harry."

"I don't know whether it's real can't quite bring myself to believe it the threat."

"Best, Harry, as the actress said to the bishop, just to lie back and enjoy the ride. Do you want to be told?"

"If it'll blow some clarity into a fogged old mind…"

"Bollocks, you're loving every minute of it."

He grinned. She laughed and started to map it out, what they had. A man had come in from the sea. A car had crashed, the man had moved on. An associate was missing from home but photographs had been found of a target and a location. Between each point she rapped her pen on the desk, as if to alert him, then her face lightened.

"I've found a marriage, 1957. The daughter of a British oil engineer to an Iranian doctor. There's a cousin down in Somerset…"

"What'll that give you?"

"Who knows? Might give me a face. I don't like to see you confused. Confusion is like haemorrhoids, Harry, embarrassing for you and therefore bloody unpleasant for the rest of us. I'm making it my business, by hand, to swab away your confusion."

"Do you believe in it, the threat?"

"I'd be a right idiot if I didn't."

"And the tethered goat, do you believe in that?"

She laughed into his face.

"I'm just the bottle washer it's your responsibility, Harry, not mine. You volunteered."

The blue Fiat 127 was behind a hedge, hidden from the road. Brought up in the provinces by a family without military or criminal links, she had compensated for her lack of experience in such areas by the simple application of common sense. Using basic logic she had thought through each of her moves. The car was the right colour to avoid attention; the station, with commuters not coming back from London until the middle evening, had been the right place to steal it from. Her own car was abandoned in woods: she had unscrewed the number-plates and buried them under fallen leaves. It would be days or weeks before it was found, reported. She had done each thing sensibly, and even if he had wanted to be could not have criticized what she had done.