The Corporal's Wife (2013) (18 page)

‘I knew nothing,’ she told him. ‘I was second in his life. You came first. He spent more time in your company than he did with me. He ignored me. In fact, although I said I came
second
, I was actually third, after the al-Qods division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Most nights when he came home I was already asleep and his supper was on the table. Most mornings when he left, before it was light, I was asleep. Where has he been? I don’t know. Why did he go? I don’t know. Ask yourself, Brigadier. Where did you send him and why?’

Farideh was trembling. She thought she saw a trace of a smile on his face. There was also a trace of sadness and regret. There were five other men in the room. None of them had called her ‘whore’, or rushed to retrieve the blanket for her. She thought he was lost, unsure.

She said quietly, ‘I am only his wife. I know nothing. He didn’t tell me anything.’

‘If you have lied to me . . .’

‘I have not.’

He was – Mehrak had told her this much – one of the few men in the state with unlimited power. She thought he believed her, and that he was confused. He was no fool, but now he didn’t know which way to turn. She picked up the blanket and put it loosely around herself.

He left, and the men followed him.

From the door she was told, ‘If you’ve lied, there will come a time when you will beg to die.’

The door closed.

From the window she saw the big Mercedes and the other cars leave, but the watchers stayed in the doorways.

He had used minor roads after leaving the track, then metalled surfaces either side of Sanandaj. They had taken a ring road round Hamadan and gone north. The capital city was a subdued glow of light.

He was coming home.

He would not be acknowledged, and neither would the young man beside him. The men in the escort were, after a fashion, professional and he thought they would have appreciated that deniability was essential on such missions. They were hidden, with their kit, behind the cab. The bolt behind his seat had to be unscrewed and removed to reveal the hatch leading to the compartment that was built in with a false bulkhead. It had space for three men and their kit.

When he had worked on the hits, the assassin had used a motorcycle to take down a scientist, an engineer or a high-ranking military strategist, then drive to an underpass under a trunk road into the city and torch it. He had sat in his lorry, complete with its load of unwanted fridges, cookers and washing-machines, waiting to take the assassin and his driver to the rendezvous and know that they were free and heading for home. A night later or two they would be in Haifa or Tel Aviv, but he would be in his temporary home and nursing the stress.

No deal would be done to save him. A thousand men and women of Hamas and Hezbollah had been worth the freedom of one soldier in the IDF, Gilad Schalit. If he were captured, he would die. No bank held the amount of bullion it would cost to free him if he were picked up. The man beside him was either an innocent or a fool to be so relaxed. Eli Cohen, hanged in Semiramis Square in Damascus, beyond the reach of help, was a hero of Israel. He himself was the fixer, the linkman, the facilitator for guns and get-away people. He was a fool. He lived on the edge, hugged shadows. He assumed he had been offered by the Institute for Espionage and Special Tasks because of the imperative need for HumInt sources. The British had a chauffeur and now needed the chauffeur’s wife. Human intelligence, war clouds gathering, was the priority. He drove.

Rare for him to pass judgement, but he had liked the guy beside him and his Farsi had improved with each hour before he’d fallen asleep. The fixer had to be able to read men. This one had the fingernails of a casual labourer, but that would have been a temporary occupation. He was intelligent and maybe had kept it hidden – he’d listened intently to the details of the pick-up for the run out. The fixer had emphasised that the window would be open briefly and that the rendezvous must be kept. The lights of Tehran intensified, but he turned off at a junction and pulled up behind a deserted fuel station. A vehicle was parked there, out of view. It seemed a shame to wake the guy.

Chapter 6

‘It’s bigger than London, square miles and population density, and choking under the smog. It’s third world to look at, and in the standard of living where we are now, but in the north, where we’re not going, there’s a sophistication that’s Rome or Paris. Technically, in spite of the regime, they can do almost anything we can.’ It helped Zach to talk as he drove.

They had their own vehicle. It had been tough at first for Zach to be behind the wheel. He’d taken the track behind the ruin, negotiated a slip road and come onto the highway. The tallest buildings of the city pierced the skyline ahead, and to his left was the great range of the Alborz; the snow gave lustre to the upper ridges. Mikey did the map work and the satnav – they’d turned the woman’s voice off. Mikey had said that they were sure to take a wrong turn down the road and end up facing a wall, but there was to be no shouting. They were all going to be doing their best, he had said, and there was no room for criticism.

Zach had taken that to be directed at himself. He was in the central lane of three. His foot, on the brake or the accelerator, balanced the car’s speed with that of the vehicles around him. He used the horn when he had to.

They had a full tank.

They’d had the big conversation after the Israeli had left them. They’d come out of the hidden compartment in the lorry with the gear, and there’d been no great farewell. He’d punched Zach on the chest, over the heart, nodded to the guys, then climbed back into his cab and pulled away. He hadn’t waved or wished them well. The big conversation had been about the weapons.

Off the highway, heading for the centre, and the area a few blocks to the north of Enghelab, they were past the airport turn. Zach dug deep in his memory for where he had been during his student visit: two and a half day’s in a hostel in Tehran five years ago, 2007 on the infidel calendar. He’d done mosques, the bazaar, galleries of antiquities, and had spent nearly half of a day at the railway station to buy a ticket to the south. He hadn’t driven anywhere. It had been out of the question to hire a car, way beyond his budget. Anyway, the buses were cheap, the metro was new and there were the shared orange taxis, always the locally made Paykan. He thought he remembered stretches of road, the outside of a building, or a square.

The big question. There were three guys with him. They had enough firepower between them, he could reflect gloomily, to start a minor war. The big question’s tag-on was:
what were the weapons for?
And:
when are they used?
They hadn’t got into the vehicle until they’d discussed it: no raised voices, no misunderstandings.

The traffic had thickened and slowed. Drivers and passengers alongside them had more time to glance at them. On the big question, Zach had said, ‘Don’t we call it Rules of Engagement? I should have thrashed this out hours ago, certainly at the base in Germany. I didn’t know when I signed up that we were taking that stuff. How can there be any innocent explanation? If a traffic cop stops us because an indicator light isn’t working, what happens?’

Now eyes raked them, not hostile or suspicious, just curious. They knew it was a mistake to stand out from the crowd. On the big question, Ralph had said, ‘We’re not bullet-catchers, we don’t do glory-boy stuff, but we do protect you. We aim to prevent circumstances in which any of us is taken. Simple.’

He had come off Enghelab, left the university’s central library behind, had wormed through a mob of students and was near the main campus of the technology university. He was on Valiasr Avenue, and nothing was familiar. A teenager on a bicycle had wobbled close enough to catch the end of his handlebars on the offside mirror. He had lurched but hadn’t come off. From the time he had taken the wheel, Zach had dreaded a traffic fracas, a crowd and a policeman pushing his way forward. He swore.

There had been an Iranian, an exile with a rare wit, at the School, and he’d liked to indulge in vulgar or obscene talk with a new lecturer. Zach had learned gutter-speak from him. It flowed back. He hadn’t used or heard it in more than five years, but it came in a torrent. He left the kid in the road, near cowering, and a couple of drivers hooted applause at him. He thought he’d passed a test when Mikey had laid a hand on his thigh and squeezed.

Wally had said, ‘We have to put you there, alongside her. You do the talk and – miracle of miracles – she’ll come with us. You’re talking about what happens if one arsehole puts his hand up. Might be a hundred thousand police in the city, armed, and another hundred thousand paramilitaries, but they don’t know who we are or where we’re going. A hand goes up. What happens? He’s blown away. The last option will always be open. We don’t end up sitting on the floor of a cell and wishing we’d reached for the hardware. If nobody told you, I’m sorry, sunshine, but that’s how it is.’

He passed the City Theatre and the park, and went on to Shirzad. He knew where she lived and where she worked. He didn’t know, if she wore ‘good
hijab
’, how he would identify her. He had said that if they were lucky they’d likely be on her street before she went to work. He didn’t know how they would make the approach. A committee would decide and then he’d be launched. On the big question, Mikey had said, ‘We shot them up in Iraq, and we zap them in Afghanistan. If they hadn’t envisaged a fight, they’d have sent Boy Scouts with you. Leave this to us.’

He’d read that tension ‘crackled’. Now it enveloped them. In front there was a junction, with a turn to the right. He couldn’t read that street’s name, but it matched the map. A man using a stick crossed the road and Zach braked.

Her street gaped ahead of him. She was the reason that a man in a suit had come to a building site in the south Midlands, why they had been dumped on aircraft. The voice in his ear murmured, ‘Go for it, Zach, if you’ve nothing better to do.’

‘Shit.’ A man crossing the road, a young mother pushing a pram, a war veteran who’d lost an arm, and many who hurried to get a bus or taxi would have seen the vehicle that had stalled in the middle of the road at the turning to Rafah Street. It was a van, and a ladder was roped to the roof. Another ladder protruded from the back where the tail flap was roped up. They would have seen into the storage area – cement sacks, a wheelbarrow, tool bags, a stack of concrete blocks and paint pots. It was the debris and kit of a small commercial builder who did jobs round a neighbourhood. Typical.

Those who saw it would not have realised that four men were inside it. They would have seen only the two in the front: the passenger had well-cut hair but a dirty face, and his mouth and nose were covered with a filter for protection against air pollution – not an unusual sight in Tehran. The van was blue, but the sides and doors were dusty, the windscreen too. The driver would not have attracted attention – except when he had sworn at the kid who had nearly scratched the door, gutter language that had raised laughter: a vehicle in that condition, and a driver angry at the possibility of another scratch or scrape. Scores had seen the van, had passed it, eased out of its path and given way to it at junctions. They had seen the driver and the man beside him with the mask, and none had noticed anything about them that was remarkable.

There were many attacks on Iran’s territorial integrity that day – agents were loose, secrets probed for, computers stretched in their capabilities to extract covert detail; the public was warned in broadcasts and newspapers of the dangers posed by foreign spies. None of the men and women close to the builders’ van had seen the deception it posed. Now it was in the middle of the road, blocking two vehicles. The man crossing had stopped.

The van moved. The traffic edged past it on Shirzad, and the brief hold-up was forgotten. The van went into Rafah Street, named after that part of the Gaza Strip where many martyrs of the Palestinian cause, fighting against the Zionists, had died.

From his counter, near the door of his hardware business, opening early as he always did so that ‘trade’ could buy what they needed for the day, Jamali saw the van. He saw it past the backs, shoulders and heads of the men who waited in his doorway and had left a heap of cigarette ends there. He would have to clear it himself later.

The van moved slowly forward. From behind Zach came a murmur, ‘Too fucking much. That is just the pits. It is shit.’

The street was the beginning of the journey – or the end.

Mikey had told them what he’d seen, and they’d done what squaddies did: they’d sworn. They were no longer in the world of Catterick, Warminster, Aldershot or Colchester pubs with a regiment in Iraq or Helmand, but they behaved as if the clock had been turned back. It was their way of dealing with the blow.

Mikey had seen a knot of men in the doorway of a hardware store: their eyes were fixed on the doorway to a block four storeys high. Mikey had the aerial photograph on his knee, and the map of the streets off Shirzad and bordering Enghelab Avenue.

Wally said, ‘We’re too late.’

Down Rafah Street, on the same side as the hardware store, there was another business: outside, a man moved old cookers and fridges onto his pavement space; a group of men allowed him to manoeuvre around their legs. They didn’t back off or help, just looked up Rafah Street, their eye on the same place, the doorway to the apartment building.