The Corporal's Wife (2013) (14 page)

He had the previous day’s English paper in front of him and worried at the crossword. For Auntie, all of those dealing with the Iranian were walking in a minefield, and he couldn’t judge what small-talk to make. Petroc Kenning had been in three times since his return from Vienna and had put probing questions about detail, each preceded by ‘We’re looking at this very seriously, but we have to know what we’re going to get’ and ‘It’s a huge step, not to be undertaken lightly’ and ‘I have to persuade people that you’re worth the effort.’ The corporal told him the locations of storage bunkers for warheads, conventional, and the logistics of munitions shipments to the Hezbollah forces, directed by the 1800 Unit, in south Lebanon. The final time, Petroc had quizzed him on personalities at the Natanz enrichment centre and the new leadership there. Then he had hurried out, his pad covered with pencilled notes.

Would he have done the deal? Or would he, instead, have left the front door open and enough euros on the hall table for Mehrak to buy a bus ticket, then one for the train to Vienna and a taxi to the embassy? Would Auntie have believed Mehrak?

My love is like a red red rose

That’s newly sprung in June . . .

Her picture was on the wall in the secure room and was blown to twice life-size. The pixels showed up the imperfections of focus and blurred the outlines of her cheeks, but couldn’t destroy her prettiness.

My love is like the melody

That’s sweetly played in tune . . .

Sidney had said the love between them was one-sided. Could be – she was awesomely pretty and he had been hauled out of a brothel. It made no sense. The man came alive when questioned and seemed to sense his importance, but slumped each time Petroc left him. Auntie, aged fifty-three, understood little of man’s attraction to woman, except that extreme danger so often followed the linkage.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,

So deep in love am I . . .

He could smell the talc he had sprinkled on his body, but the scent of the rose won through. He lived with his sister, Maureen, in Cloghy on the Ards peninsula of the Province, and their spaniel. Over the years he had been in the pay of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, A Branch of MI5, then the SIS, and stayed in London in a one-bedroom Battersea studio. He regarded himself as near to Heaven when he was with the dog, braced against the winds, and walked along the coast of the Irish Sea. He had experience with defectors, had handled ‘touts’, who had been compromised or turned from the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army and become informants. He realised the value of men who betrayed their friends, community or country. He didn’t have to like the traitors, but he would be formally polite. He thought it appropriate that the red rose was on the table.

And I will love thee still, my dear,

Till a’ the seas gang dry.

He appreciated the man’s loneliness, and the doubts that ate into him . . . and he thought that the game Petroc Kenning was playing now stank of risk. Too sour for Auntie to stomach? Irrelevant: his opinion would not be sought. The light was failing and he couldn’t concentrate on the crossword. The silence was a wall between them.

At the entrance to the site, Dunc Whitcombe introduced himself with a bogus name, smiling as he always did when he lied. He’d brought with him an interpreter that FCO used in tandem with the Service, a national, who was elderly and a long-time refugee from the regime. There was serious mud in front of them and Dunc murmured that it would be better if he waited close to the gate, then repeated, as he had many times in the car, what was expected. He went forward, found a sort of bridge over the slime, single planks end to end. It challenged him but he made progress. He wore a trilby, always did to go to work, and would have been the only man on the site not hard-hatted.

He heard a grinding squeal, then a shout. ‘Do you mind getting off this?’ The man behind him had a wheelbarrow of wet cement and needed the planks.

He said affably, ‘I was looking for Zach Becket.’

‘Looking in the right place. You’ve found him – but not till this lot’s delivered.’

Dunc Whitcomb stepped off the plank, stood to the side and the mud came over his shoes. The barrow’s wheel squealed again and the load went past. He heard chortles, and thought he might have been the cause. He had a handkerchief, put out that morning with his clean shirt, underwear and socks. He regained the plank and tried to use the handkerchief to wipe off the mud. If it went pear-shaped now, he wasn’t sure that another option existed. The mud clung to his feet. The barrow wheel squeaked closer.

‘I’m Zach, what can I do for you?’

In front of the Friend and the Cousin, there were single memory sticks, pushed across the table to them by Tadeuz Fenton. The Israeli and the American sensed the crisis and didn’t hurry him.

‘I’ve told you what we have and this is a taster of what we’re getting. We value it but we’ve hit a wall. We’re dealing with a man on the edge and he’s closed down on us. The evaluation is that he’s not a waterboard or fingernail-removal case. Something marginally more subtle is required. I’m going out on a limb. Gentlemen, I need help from each of you.’

He was a minor player, and accepted it. They had had a bare ten minutes with the sticks but would have been able to use their phones to fast-track into a sense of the material on offer. Another view: he wanted to kick the ball round the park with the Agency and the Mossad. The Agency would nod each time the Stuxnet virus, which had eaten into the software of the enemy’s nuclear computers, was mentioned, and the Mossad would offer a raised eyebrow when a nuclear scientist or engineer in downtown Tehran flicked his car ignition and went on a fast ride to Paradise. The MOIS big players would regard Tadeuz Fenton – if they knew of his existence and had bothered to prepare a dossier on him – and his efforts as having little more than nuisance value.

He told them the time scale and what he wanted. The Cousin whistled and the Friend gulped, then drummed his fingers on the table. He was humiliated that he had had to grovel but didn’t doubt that both could deliver on his requests, if they cared to.

She finished her presentation. ‘That’s about it, as background and the mission statement. If you don’t want a part in it, please, close the door after you. Otherwise sign on the line.’

There were three sheets of paper on the table, printouts. Mandy Ross pointed to the place, took a pen from her handbag and waited to see who would use it first. She thought that Contego Security would have produced those most likely to join up: a small firm, off the smart circuit’s radar, offering a little more of a family than the bigger companies. She wondered how troubled a man would have to be to accept the offer, and how out of love with life. She had been given their files by the chief executive officer, had skimmed them in his office and knew who each man was, and who would lead. Only a brief hesitation. Wilson first, the veteran, then Cotton, the youngest, who looked as though he had once had money but was now familiar with hardship. Davies was last and signed with a flourish.

She took back the pen, bagged the papers and grimaced. ‘Excellent. Thank you. I’m sure it’ll be a good show.’

Among the three, hardly a word had been said, but now Wilson spoke up: ‘Hope you’re right, ma’am. Special Forces would have been the natural first call and they’re not here – they turned it down. Companies like Control Risks, Aegis, Erinys and Olive would have been next in the pecking order. So, it’s us, which means a fuck-up, excuse me, is rated as probable by the best and the brightest, and a fuck-up where we’re going is bad news. But, ma’am, you’ll get a best effort from us. When do we get to meet the golden boy?’

He might have had a beer too many. He had the back seat of the car to himself and was sprawled across it so he could lapse into and out of sleep. Dunc drove and the Iranian, no name given, was in the front passenger seat.

They had gone to the pub. Before that, though, the man waiting by the car had started to talk to him in good street-quality Farsi, no explanation. Why the hell did a guy in a suit come onto a building site in the south Midlands, ask for him, then trek him off to talk Farsi? No explanation. They’d talked about newspapers in the capital, the price of tomatoes in the bazaar, the best films that were likely to come onto the circuit of the capital’s cinemas, the looming election, the jobs crisis, the traffic and the city’s smog. They had talked for nearly three-quarters of an hour.

Then Dunc had touched the man’s arm and he’d stepped back two paces. Dunc must have asked him something because the man had given a vigorous nod – as if Zach had passed a test with flying colours. Then Dunc had sent the man to the car outside the site gate, and had made the proposition.

Zach hadn’t argued, hadn’t haggled about the money on offer, equal to a couple of months of what his father had paid him. He thought he had been treated as an adult. Dunc had been blunt and to the point.
What
was required,
when
and
why
. He wasn’t given a week to make up his mind, or told he could sleep on it. The light had been slipping and they were still talking when the shift ended and the team were piling off the site. He’d called to them: if they wanted a pint off him they should be at the Adelaide in an hour. He’d had an offer of work and was taking it. Then Zach had put a newspaper on the back seat of the car, because his clothes were filthy, and had directed the driver, Dunc, to his lodging.

He’d a shower, put his jeans, waterproofs and fleece into a bin bag, then sluiced the mud off his boots and wiped them half dry with kitchen roll. He left the food and milk from his fridge in a box outside a neighbour’s door and put the rest of what he owned into another bag. A note for his landlady on the table, his thanks, and a month’s rent, supplied by Dunc. Outside, he’d put his key through the letterbox and they’d gone to the pub. He thought it was to humour him that Dunc, from London, hadn’t demurred about the pub, but the man’s eyes had stayed on him, judging him.

The boys were there. Where was he going? Down south. How long for? Open-ended. What was he going to do? A bit of this and a bit of that. They’d lost interest and drunk the beer. There had been satellite football and a band that was auditioning for a Saturday-night slot. The place had a mellow feel and the music was sentimental, its message about loneliness, home and a girl. Dunc had asked if he needed to phone his parents and Zach had said he didn’t – the site manager, Terry, would tell them in the morning. Was there a girl he wanted to speak to? No. One minute he’d been in the pub, and the next he was gone. His exit would have been masked by the band’s anthem and the goal scored in the match. He would have been in the car park, maybe inside the car and turning onto the road, before any of them had realised he’d left.

The immediate destination? He didn’t ask.

The people who’d be escorting him? He’d find that out.

The woman to whom the proposition would be put? Time for that later.

Zach Becket dozed. He couldn’t have given a sensible answer if someone had asked why he’d accepted a ride with a stranger towards a country that was paranoid about spies and infiltrators, and inflicted punishments that fitted crimes. He didn’t know why he’d agreed to travel, but he did know a little of the poetry he’d learned years before.
The Book of Kings
: Ferdowsi, writing fifty years before William’s archer had put an arrow into Harold’s eye –

I am deathless,

I am the eternal Lord

For I have spread the seed of the Word
. . .

The car took him to the airport.

And Zach didn’t know whether he heard the man say, into his hands-free phone, or had dreamed it, ‘He’s been very good . . . A clear road, and we’re making good time . . . Say again . . . Will he stand strong? Maybe. Look at it another way. He has to. We’re all up the creek if he doesn’t . . . What do I think? With him, we have a chance. You know, funny thing, he never blinked. As if he’d been waiting for me, hoping I’d call by, was doing him a favour. He’s a bright enough lad, and seems to have some fibre to him. Can’t say more . . . I’ll see you there . . . That’s my bottom line, a chance. Can’t say more.’ Might have dreamed it, might not. What had he done? Well, he’d crossed the road. But that was only a start.

Chapter 5

The huge aircraft had lifted, tilted to a sharp angle, and they were up.

Goodbye to Ramstein, near to Kaiserslautern, Germany, and the 521st
Air Mobile Operations Wing. Hello, some time ahead, to
I
ncirlik in Turkey, and another American oasis, the 39th Air Base Wing, far from home. A flight had brought them from Northolt to the USAF base, and there had been an hour in a lounge, sequestered from any facilities, with a guard at the door. They had been called forward and had gone by bus to a distant apron, where Zach had gulped at the sight of the transport that would take them south, east, and beyond the far edge of the Mediterranean.

They were the only passengers. The cabin was filled with pallets on which crates were covered with netting and strapped down with floor stays. They had been given an emergency-procedure drill during taxi and Zach had listened hard. He fancied the woman had too, but the man in the suit hadn’t, and neither had the ‘guys’. The American sergeant had sounded bored with what he had to say – but he’d seemed to imply that if anything went wrong then the hope of getting out was marginal.