Free HOME RUN by Gerald Seymour Page A

sadness flood her face. He was listening. He saw her grab inside her bag, and slap the meat down on to the kitchen table.
    "The Lane tomorrow. Eight sharp. Look forward to it. . .
    Ann, she's great, she's in great form. Thanks, Bill, see you in the morning."
    He could see that she was crying. Park did not know how to stop his wife's tears. He did not know how to tell her of his excitement because the April leader had called him for a meeting, eight o'clock in the morning, at Investigation Bureau's offices on New Fetter Lane, and promised a good one.
    The teaboy's message was carried by a passenger from Bahrain to Abu Dhabi on the Gulf, and then flown on, having been passed to a member of an IranAir cabin crew, to Tehran.
    The message reached the desk of a counter-subversion investigator in an office on the fourth floor of a small office block, close to Bobby Sands Street, once Churchill Street.
    The block was not identified in any way, but was a part of the Ministry of Information and Intelligence. To the investigator the transcript of a briefly heard conversation was a source of amazement.
    The investigator had read the message several times. He knew "Dolphin". There would have been a dozen men in the section who knew the codename of Matthew Cedric Furniss.
    He had known the codename from far back, from times that were not referred to when he had worked for a different master, before the Revolution. He was astonished that the same codename was still maintained over so many years. In the Islamic Republic of Iran the British Secret Intelligence Service was hated with a loathing second only to that reserved for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Spies for the Great Satan. The investigator was not a man to initiate action, too great a survivor for that. To have survived a career with the Sazman-e Amniyat Va Attilaat-e Keshvar, the Organisation of National Security and Intelligence, to have found a safe haven in an organisation dedicated to rooting out all traces of S A V A K , that was survival indeed. His way was to assemble information and present it to those few people in the regime who had the power to act. To many, the investigator was a valued tool.
    On his computer, IBM state-of-the-art, he punched up the entry on Matthew Cedric Furniss, and composed a brief note on the information that the British head of Iran Desk was travelling in the region to pass on a reassessment of intelligence aims and means.
    The investigator always worked late in his office. He liked the cool and calm of the evening, the silent shadows in the corridors. He made his decision, he lifted his telephone. When he talked it was against the distant thunder of an air raid striking the west of the city.
    He travelled on a false passport in his wife's maiden name, and with the occupation of "Academic".
    Harriet had seen him off, which was unusual, but then it was wholly unusual for a Desk Head to journey abroad. They had had their little nuzzles at each other's cheeks, and he had told her to get back to the Bibury cottage and keep on giving that city farmer hell, double-time, over the rape of the footpath.
    Actually Mattie was rather pleased to be airborne, in harness again, but he hadn't said that to Harriet. Good to be on the road, not pushing paper.

    4
    The car had coughed to life, and thick fumes poured from the exhaust. He let the engine run while he thanked his neighbour for the loan of the charged battery that had been attached to the leads. He could ask any small favour of his neighbour and it would be granted. His neighbour knew his work. Most m en, in fact, who knew his work, treated him with respect.
    No man in his company offered him offence or cursed him.
    Perhaps no man in Tabriz could feel with certainty that he would never look across the space of a cell at the deep brown eyes that would peep from the slits of the tight-fitting black mask that he had taken to wearing when he performed his work. The highest in the land, and the lowest,