The Corporal's Wife (2013) (9 page)

And PK had put some cheese into his mouth.

Then, he’d added, ‘In my business Mehrak, we talk about ‘‘false-flag penetration’’. In your case, it implies that you may be a decoy, given to us to confuse us and tell us lies. I don’t believe that’s true of you, but should we learn that we’ve been deceived, it would go badly for you.’

Only PK had eaten with him. The others had sat against a wall and watched.

He had pushed away his plate when PK had said, ‘We start work tomorrow, but we’re making this effort to save your skin in a good cause.’

A notebook had come from an inner pocket, and a silver propelling pencil. He gave his full name, his father’s and his wife’s. He confirmed the address of the barracks where the Mercedes was garaged. Sometimes he was in English and sometimes in Farsi. Why had he gone to the bank in Dubai and received a statement to a numbered account? He had hesitated, stumbled on an answer in English, then reverted to his own language. The pencil had jabbed his lower arm and he had been told to speak up.

He had said it was Brigadier Reza Joyberi’s account, then took the path of treachery and gave the addresses. He had memorised the account details of two more banks. Then he reconstructed the diary for the week before he had flown out, the last month, and the last quarter, and said where he had driven the brigadier. As if it hardly mattered to him, PK had written brief notes.

His door was unlocked quietly. He thought he might as well have been manacled with a chain fastened to a wall. He was a traitor, and in the Evin gaol, such men were hanged by the neck until they were dead.

It was her fault. She was to blame. She had done it to him. He didn’t drop his head into his hands or weep but bit his lips and drew blood. Auntie was there, smiling at him, and Nobby was behind him. It was because of her that he had done it.

Had Petroc Kenning taken holidays, what he saw from the front door might have given him ideas. But he didn’t: no one did on the Iran Desk, fronted by Tadeuz Fenton. The Islamic Republic was too volatile to abandon at any time so Petroc lived and breathed Iran. The best he could say to Sidney was that the ‘safe house’ ticked all the boxes.

The previous evening after their arrival, it had rained, but then the skies had cleared and near dawn a frost had formed. Petroc stood on a patio and smoked. The foreground was taken up with neat lines of cultivated vines. Already this morning small tractors had drawn trailers into position and women were hacking off the bunches of grapes and dropping them into big plastic buckets. He liked what he saw. There would be good wine again for him to drink tonight after the corporal had been put to bed and he was analysing the day’s notes, which Auntie would help him to type. Later, every man, woman and teenager would be on the slopes, picking frantically. Who would notice strangers in a house rented at short notice? It was likely that he and the babysitters had moved into the village at the best possible time.

The vines were in front of him, to the sides and behind the house. If it went well, he would be there long enough to sample most of the better labels that came from this village, Spitz. The community, with the exception of the farmers who owned the vineyards, lived along a tight series of roads running between the old houses, and a fine church, with a tall, angular steeple, dominated the centre. To his left was the main road between Krems and Schallenbach – Sidney had said that the summer brought the tourist hordes, with a regular flow of passenger craft along the river, but they were gone. The river was high and, beyond a ruined castle, it turned sharply. A tug boat came upstream, dragging a fleet of barges against the current.

He was unlikely ever to quit intelligence-gathering in favour of private industry. Wealth would escape him. The probability was that he would retire to live on a government pension. It would be a frugal existence, and Polly’s parents would have to dig deep if Archie were to have the education his mother wanted for him. They seemed in good health so an inheritance wasn’t imminent.

A million pounds, banked wherever the client wanted it, seemed a waste of resources to Petroc Kenning: he didn’t think Hector would have talked in such terms – more likely he’d have got to work on the toenails. PK could offer a million, which seemed to him far in excess of what might be owed to a corporal. And the man was a turncoat: he could never be respected.

There had been men in the Service when PK had been a fresh-faced recruit, who had known Harold Adrian Russell Philby and felt his treachery keenly. He had been told that on 11 May each year, since 1988, veterans of the Russia Desk drank vintage champagne from paper cups on the anniversary of the spy’s death.

His uncle had already been part of the post-war Vienna legend in the days of Maclean and Burgess, and had talked about the atom traitors.

PK wanted a career that marked him out as a competent professional, who had justified the faith in him of his mentor, his uncle – but the way to justify it was, apparently, to thrust a million pounds at the corporal. If the man coughed, networks would be wound up, arrests made along the Gulf, targets evaluated, locations confirmed, and they would be inside the minds of the leadership, under their skin and flaying it.

PK called inside, ‘Let’s go to work.’

He flushed.

. . . that’s what we’ll do for you. A million in sterling, which is about one point five million American dollars.’

His heart pounded.

‘We’ll help you set up a new life. You’ll live where
they
can’t find you. Maybe start a little business. It’s generous.’

He blinked, could barely see the man across the table. He reached for the cigarettes.

‘That’s what you’ll get, Mehrak, for complete co-operation. It’s how we show our gratitude. In return, you give us every installation you visited, every checkpoint, every air-defence battery that you went to inspect with the brigadier, every scientist you met and every engineer . . . Everything.’

His fingers trembled. He couldn’t take a cigarette from the packet and tore the flap.

‘There’s no going back, believe me. You know what’ll happen to you. Do they do most hangings off chairs or tables? I think I read somewhere they’ve started bringing tables from the staff room at Evin into the yard where the gallows are – the tables have wheels so they’re easy to drag away. There’s no going back, Mehrak, so you have to believe us. Start walking forward and don’t stop or look back.’

He had a cigarette out, but each time he flicked the lighter, his breath extinguished the flame.

‘It’s not my place to pass judgement on why you were in a whorehouse, Mehrak, and failing to get anywhere with a Ukrainian tart, but I reckon that as you were there, you won’t find it a big deal to leave your family – your wife’s called Farideh, yes? When we’ve done the work, you’ll be able to meet any number of attractive young women.’

He had the cigarette in his mouth, gripped the lighter in both fists, lit the tip, and spluttered on the smoke. A million and a half American dollars was . . . A sheet of paper lay in front of him and there was a pen in his hand. He signed his name, and the paper was gone.

‘A five-minute break, Mehrak. You have much to live up to if you’re to earn your money.’

Petroc watched as Father William and Nobby took the corporal towards the kitchen where fresh tea would be served in a glass. A smart woman, Sidney’s wife. She must have been on the Internet to learn how they liked it in Iran. Auntie held the camera, pulled a face, then flicked to play-back.

Petroc saw the screen and the man signing the contract. He said, ‘Nails him to the floorboards. We can do the deductions later – board and lodging, tax, security expenses – still be a good amount. We’re going to squeeze him till the pips squeak. It’ll be satisfying. At the end of the day he’ll give us insight on the bowel movements of the regime, the pecking order of the hierarchy, and all its military postures, attack and defence. All invaluable, should we go to war with them. He’s only a corporal, but one with unqualified access. Can’t be bad.’

The drivers and those tasked with guarding the packages of refined heroin had stopped to brew tea. There were four vehicles in the convoy and each carried in excess of a hundred kilos, so – among the ammunition boxes, belts of bullets, projectiles for the launchers, sleeping bags and bread – each Nissan pick-up had cargo already valued at half a million American dollars. It did not concern the men that behind them, in the provincial centres, idealistic foreigners tried to lure the farmers away from the opium crop.

They talked quietly, as they squatted with the cups in their hands. A small but significant proportion of the drug’s value would go into their purses.

The agronomists from Britain, the United States and Germany said that the land should be used for growing wheat, vegetables, tomatoes and fodder for dairy cattle. If a farmer grew potatoes he’d be lucky to earn one American dollar for two kilos. Each time the heroin was moved, its value increased, as did the need for vigilance on the part of the drivers and guards.

They talked and sipped tea, and a little spiral of smoke eddied upwards from the fire. There were brothers, cousins and men related by marriage; they lived well thanks to the trade. They were favoured. The rewards for the drivers and guards outweighed concerns for their safety.

One had not joined the group: he was sulking because the marriage of his second eldest daughter – a good match, one likely to forge a strong alliance with a clan leader – would not take place. He stayed in the cab of his pick-up and chewed a strip of dried goat meat. He was not a trained fighter – neither were the others: all in this group were familiar with the weapons they carried, but they didn’t do combat with the forces occupying their province. They didn’t understand the fire power of their enemy – it came so fast.

This driver, alone, reacted. He turned on the ignition, stamped on the pedals and won traction. The others didn’t hear the helicopter until it had climbed over the ridge some five hundred metres behind them. The driver didn’t know the detail in the manufacture of a Hughes M230 Chain Gun firing a 30mm cartridge at high velocity, but he recognised the silhouette of the Apache. In a low gear, he surged for a network of gorges a kilometre ahead. He had judged, correctly, that the killers in the sky would be more interested in destroying a dozen men and three vehicles than in chasing him and losing the big group. He left behind two of his cousins and his brother’s wife’s brother.

He drove at the highest speed the Nissan could manage and threw up a trail of dust. He hoped to save his life and protect his cargo. When he reached the gorge, he pulled up in the lee of a sheer wall, and in shadow. Behind him he saw merged columns of smoke. The helicopter circled the target area, then veered away towards the sun.

He didn’t go back to see what the machine-gun had done. It would have been God’s will that some were taken and others were not. He drove west, towards the frontier.

Later he realised that there were three shell holes in the pick-up’s floor and one of the sacks was punctured. Several bags had split and the resin was oozing out. He threw away the damaged sack and its contents. Further on, under an overhang, he parked and wrapped a blanket round his body. He would sleep in the shade of the rock. He had the evidence of the shall holes to explain why half of his load was lost. God’s will.

The two aides travelling with him had been met by a driver and gone in the jeep sent for them. They had been reluctant to abandon him but Brigadier Reza Joyberi was adamant. He’d thanked them for their work on the visit to Bandar Abbas and other locations on the Gulf, asked for the typed-up papers they’d discussed on the train to be couriered to him that evening at his garrison office, and waved them off. He’d said his driver was no doubt temporarily delayed in the traffic.

He had not rung the corporal’s mobile phone immediately, but had paced on the wide steps of the station entrance. The building towered behind him: an architectural monument to the old regime with a marble façade. Now, a portrait of the Imam hung as a banner, ten times life-size, from the wall to his left. He looked out onto Rah-Ahan Square and tried to spot the Mercedes in the columns of vehicles skirting the trees and fountains in front of him. The visit to the coast was planned, the schedule agreed. The corporal had been told the arrival time of the train. The Mercedes should have been parked at the bottom of the steps in front of the area allocated to waiting taxis; when he had appeared at the top of the steps the corporal should have jumped out of the driver’s seat and smartly opened a rear door for him.

Outwardly, he did not show frustration or anger. He stood erect, holding his briefcase, his jacket sufficiently full across the chest to hide his shoulder holster. A few minutes had passed since the aides had left him. Annoyance nagged. Principals of the al-Qods had been killed in bomb attacks or by shooting in most quarters of the country. He was a prime target of the Americans and the Israelis; he had a professional respect for the Jews’ intelligence apparatus, the Mossad, and professional envy for the resources available to the Americans’ Agency.

He stood on the steps and couldn’t see his car. He felt vulnerable: an assassin could have walked to his shoulder unnoticed, could smile at him and produce – a sharp, clean movement – a short-barrelled pistol, fire it, and be gone before his knees buckled. Women would be screaming and men would be backing off, but the killer would be gone. The thought gripped him.