A Line in the Sand - Softcover

Seymour, Gerald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 055214682X ISBN 13: 9780552146821

Publisher: CORGI, 2000

Synopsis

A decade ago, Frank Perry had privileged access to Iran's chemical-weapons installations -- a mission he believed was well behind him after he had built a new life in an English coastal village. But now Iran has dispatched its most deadly assassin, code-named the Anvil, to target the spy who single-handedly crippled Iran's killing capacity. While his protectors race to save him, a new threat looms -- as residents of his town, and those whom he believed to be his friends, close ranks against the man who may pay for his past by putting their security on the line. The internationally acclaimed author who creates "palm-sweating tension" "(New York Times) in his electrifying espionage fiction, Gerald Seymour brilliantly masterminds the plight of an ordinary man caught in a violent crossfire.

About this title

Review:

Gerald Seymour is one of the most skillful writers of espionage fiction. While many of his peers seem flummoxed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the need to find new battles, causes, and villains, he hasn't been constrained by the vagaries of geopolitics. Here he delivers a well-plotted suspense thriller that sets Frank Perry, a seemingly ordinary man with an extraordinary past, against an Iranian assassin, the British secret service, and friends and neighbors in the small Suffolk village where Perry went underground a decade after MI5 blackmailed him into spying on Iran's efforts to perfect chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.

Even the woman Perry loves and the young boy they've been raising together don't know that Frank is not the man they thought he was--in fact, he isn't even Frank Perry. Now Iran's search has led the assassin, code-named the Anvil, right to Perry's hiding place, but Frank has drawn a line in the sand, refusing to be frightened into leaving the home and family he's created under an assumed identity. Instead he'll face the Anvil on his own ground. But when the community turns against him, fearing for its own safety, he's more alone than he's ever been. The more they hound him to leave, the more adamant he becomes, despite the increasing danger. The secret service and special forces are supposed to be ensuring his safety, but it seems more like they are staking a goat to lure a predator into a trap than protecting a valuable asset who crippled a rogue nation's terrorist arsenal.

Seymour excels not only in pacing and plotting but also in characterization. Perry is exceptionally well developed, but so is the junior intelligence officer assigned to his case who is wrestling with his own patriotic impulses and the equally compelling allure of a more conventional and remunerative life outside the espionage community. This is a riveting, character-driven story that engages the reader from start to finish. --Jane Adams

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One

The harrier contorted to clean the clammy mud from underneath its wing feathers. It worked hard at the clinging dirt as if its primitive, wild mind demanded cleanliness before the start of the day's long flight north. The dawn sunshine glossed the rusted gold of the feathers. The bird worked at them with its vicious curved, sharpened beak, pecked at the mud, spat, and coughed it down into the marsh water below the perch on a dead, stark tree. At first light it had hunted. It had dived on a brightly crested duck, the bone-stripped carcass of which was now wedged in a fork of the dead tree. The mud had speckled the underneath of the wings when it had fallen, stone fast, onto the unsuspecting prey.

Abruptly, without warning, it flapped with a slow wing beat away from the perch and abandoned its kill. It headed north, away from the hot, wet wintering grounds of west Africa.

It would fly all day, without rest, on an unerring course that retraced its first migratory route. As a killing bird, a predator, the harrier had no sense of threat or hazard.

They had been right over the tent camp, bucking in the strength of the gale, before they had seen it. They had searched all morning for it, forced lower by the lessening visibility from the whipped-up sand. The pilot of the lead helicopter had been sweating, and he was supposed to be the best, with many hours of desert flying experience, good enough in Desert Storm to have flown behind the lines into Iraq to supply the Special Forces. They had been down to a hundred feet, where the wind was most treacherous, and the wipers in front of him were clogged by grains of sand. Only a minute after he had rapped his gloved fist on the fuel gauge and muttered into their earphones that they had little time left, the Marine Corps major had spotted the camp, tapped the pilot's shoulder, and pointed down. The colonel of the National Guard had softly mouthed his thanks to his God.

Duane Seitz had heard the excited voices on his headset and thought this might be a good game for kids, reckoning himself too old for this sort of serious shit. They had put down beside the tents. The two following helicopters, which were also flown by Americans, were talked in and disgorged the local National Guardsmen. The rotors lifted away two of the camp's seven tents, but the pilots had refused, no argument accepted, to cut their engines. They wanted out and soonest.

As the thirty National Guardsmen corralled the camp, the rotors and the wind threw the fine grains in stinging clouds into their faces. The two tents had come to rest in bushes of low scrub thorn a hundred yards from the camp, but the bedding that had been with them, and the clothes, were still in loose flight, scudding over the sand. The pilots broke their huddle. They shouted into the ear of the Marine Corps major: the storm was not lifting, the gusting sand would infiltrate every aperture in the helicopters' engines, they should get the fuck out -- not negotiable -- now. It was already clear to them, to the Saudi colonel, to the men of the Saudi Arabian National Guard, and to Duane Seitz, that the raid had failed.

The man they sought had evaded them.

Seitz felt it keenest. He stood in the center of the camp, huddled against the wind and the blast of the rotors, the sand crusting on his face, and gazed around him. The information had been good. It had come from the interception of the signal of a digital mobile telephone. The antennae on the eastern coast had identified the position across the Gulf from which the call had been initiated, and the position in the Empty Quarter where it had been received. It should have led them to the man Duane Seitz hunted.

There was one prisoner. He was heavyset, jowled, and lay on his stomach with his arms bound behind him at the wrist and his ankles tied sharply. He wore the clothes of a Bedouin tribesman, but his physique and stomach were too gross for him to have been from this group of camel herdsmen. Seitz knew the face of the prisoner from the files, knew he came from Riyadh, was a courier for the man he tracked.

The tribesmen huddled on their haunches around a dead fire surrounded by scorched stones. The colonel yelled at them, kicked them, and they keeled away from him. Twice he whipped them with the barrel of his pistol, but none cried out even when they bled. They were small men with twig-thin bodies, impassive in the face of his anger. They could be shown the blade of a sword or the barrel of a gun but they never talked.

The camels were hobbled to pegs and kept their heads away from the force of the wind. Seitz thought the nameless, faceless man would have ridden on a camel into the blast of the driven sand. There would be no tracks and no chance of pursuit from the air. He knew only the man's reputation, which was why he sought him as if he were the Grail.

The patience of the lead pilot was exhausted. He was gesticulating to the colonel, pointing at his watch, at his helicopter, and back into the eye of the storm. The colonel gave his orders. The prisoner was dragged, helpless, towards a fuselage hatch. Above the scream of the wind, Duane Seitz heard behind him the crash of gunfire, then the camels screaming. Without their animals the Bedouin would either starve or die of thirst or exposure in the wilderness of the Empty Quarter. It was a shit country to which he was posted, with a shit little war, and he had failed to find his enemy.

Perhaps it was because one of the emaciated tribesmen ducked to avoid the blow of a rifle butt, but for a brief second the dead embers of the fire were no longer protected against the wind. Seitz saw black shreds of paper lifting in the gusts between the charred wood. He scrambled through the Bedouin and the National Guardsmen, fell to his knees, whipping out the little plastic bags that were always in his hip pocket.

Carefully, as he had been taught at the Academy at Quantico more than two decades ago, he slipped the scraps into the bags. As he squinted down, he fancied that there were still faint traces of Arabic characters on the fragments.

He was the last into the helicopter, holding his bags as if they were the relics of a saint. They lifted, and the camp in which he had placed such hope disappeared in the storm of driven sand.

"No."

"I appreciate that this is a difficult moment for you, but what I am telling you is based on information gathered within the last month."

"No."

"Of course, it's a difficult situation for you to absorb."

"No."

"Difficult, but inescapable. It's not a problem that can be ignored."

"No."

"They're serious people, Mr. Perry. You know it, we know it. Nothing has changed...For God's sake, you were in Iran as often as I'm in the supermarket. I cannot conceive that you are incredulous to what I'm saying. But this is not accountancy or commerce, where you would have the right to expect definitive statements. I can't give you detail. It is intelligence, the putting together of mosaic scraps of information, then analyzing the little that presents itself. I am not at liberty to divulge the detail that provided the analysis...You have been there, you know those people...If they find you, then they will seek to kill you."

Geoff Markham stood by the door watching Fenton doing the talking and recognizing already that Fenton had made a right maggot of it. The man, Perry, had his back to them and was gazing out the front window as the late-winter rain lashed the glass panes. As the senior operative, Fenton ought to have made a better fist of it. He should have sat Perry down, gone to the sideboard, routed for a whisky bottle, poured generously, and put the glass into Perry's hand. He should have communicated warmth and commitment and concern; instead, he had trampled with the finesse of a buffalo into Perry's home. Now it was fast going sour. And as it went sour, so Fenton's voice rose to a shrilling bark.

Geoff Markham stood by the door and remained silent. It was not his place to intervene when his superior fouled up. He could see Perry's hunched shoulders tighten with each new assault.

Perry's voice was low and muffled, and Markham had to strain to hear the words.

"You're not listening to me...No."

"I cannot see what other option you have."

"My option is to say what I have said...No."

"That isn't an option...Listen, you're in shock. You are also being willfully obstinate, refusing to face reality -- "

"No. Not again. I won't run."

He heard the hiss of his superior's exasperation. He glanced down at his watch. Christ, they had not even been in the house for fifteen minutes. They had driven down from London, come unannounced, had parked the car on the far side of the green onto which the house faced. Fenton had smiled in satisfaction because there were lights on inside. They had seen the face at the window upstairs as they had opened the low wicket gate and gone up the path to the door. He had seen Perry's face and he had thought there was already a recognition of their business before they reached the door. They wore their London suits. Fenton had a martinet's mustache, painstakingly trimmed, a brown trilby, and a briefcase with the faded gold of the EIIR symbol.

There was no porch over the front door, and Perry would have recognized them for what they were, a senior and a junior from the Security Service, before they had even wiped their feet on the doormat. He made them wait and allowed the rain to spatter their backs before opening the door...Fenton was not often out of Thames House: he was a section head, consumed by the reading of reports and attendance at meetings. In Geoff Markham's opinion, Fenton had long ago lost touch with the great mass of people who surged back and forth each day along the Thames embankment under the high walls of the building on Millbank. To Fenton, they would have been a damn bloody nuisance, an impediment to the pure world of counterespionage...Markham wondered how he would have reacted if strangers had pitched up at his door, flashed their IDs, muscled into his home, started to talk of life and death.

Fenton snapped, "We have conduits of information, some more reliable than others. I have to tell you, the information we are acting upon is first class. The threat is a fact -- "

"I won't run again."

Fenton's right fist slammed into the palm of his left hand. "We're not urging this course of action lightly. Look, you did it before -- "

"No."

"You can do it a second time."

"No."

"I have the impression that you wish to delude yourself on the strength of the threat. Well, let us understand each other. I am not accustomed to leaving my desk for a day, journeying into this sort of backwater, for my own amusement -- "

"I won't run again -- final."

Fenton brayed, at the back of Perry's head, "There is evidence of a very considerable danger. Got me? Hard evidence, real danger..."

From where he stood at the door, Geoff Markham thought that Perry's silhouetted shoulders drooped slightly, as if he'd been cudgeled. Then they stiffened and straightened.

"I won't run again."

Fenton ground on relentlessly. "Look, it's a pretty straightforward process. Getting there is something we're expert at. You move on, you take a new identity...A cash sum to tide you over the incidental expenses. Just leave it to us. New national insurance, new NHS number, new Inland Revenue coding -- "

"Not again. No."

"Bloody hell, Mr. Perry, do me the courtesy of hearing me out. They have your name, not the old one, they have Frank Perry -- get that into your skull. If they have the name, then I have to examine the probability that they have the location..."

Perry turned from the window. There was a pallor now to his cheeks, and his jaw muscles seemed to flex, slacken, and flex again. There was weariness in his eyes. He didn't cower. He stood his full height. He gazed back at Fenton. Geoff Markham didn't know the details on Perry's file, had not been shown it, but if he deserved the threat, then there was something in his past that required raw toughness.

"It's your problem."

"Wrong, Mr. Perry. It's your problem because it's your life."

"Your problem and you deal with it."

"That's ridiculous."

The voice was a whisper: "Men like you, they came, they told me of the threat, they told me to quit, run. I listened, I quit, I ran. I'm not spending the rest of my life, every day that remains of my life, like a chicken in a coop wondering if the fox has found me. It is your responsibility, it's owed me. If the fox comes, shoot it. Understand me? Shoot it...What did you ever do for your country?"

Geoff Markham heard Fenton's snort, then the cut of the sarcasm. "Oh, we're there, are we? Playing the patriot's card. A man of letters once said that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels."

"I worked for my country. My head was on the block for it."

"While lining a damn deep pocket..."

"I am staying, this is my home."

It was a good room, Geoff Markham thought. There was decent furniture, a solid sideboard and a chest of dark wood, low tables. It suited the room, which was lived in. He could see it was a home. When he was not sleeping at Vicky's, he lived in an anonymous, sterile, one-bedroom apartment in west London. Here, a child's books were on the floor, an opened technical magazine, and a cotton bag from which peeped a woman's embroidery. Invitations to drinks and social functions stood on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. If it had been Markham's, he, too, would have tried to cling to it...But he had seen bodies, in Ireland, of men who had not covered their tracks, had made themselves available to their killers. He had seen their white, dead faces, the dried blood pools below their cheeks, and hair matted with brain tissue and bone fragments...They could whistle up the removals company; there were people who did discreet business for them. They could have him loaded within twenty-four hours, gone, lost.

Fenton jabbed his finger at Perry. "You won't get the sources from me, but I can tell you they have given this matter -- your life, your death -- a very considerable priority. Are you listening?"

"I am not leaving my home."

"They are starting on a journey. We don't know when they began it, could be a couple of weeks ago. For them, Mr. Perry, it is a long road, but you can be certain that at the end of it you are their target..."

The dhow had brought dried fish and cotton bales across the Gulf. The cargo for the return journey was boxes of dates, packaged videocassette recorders and television sets from the Abu Dhabi warehouses, cooking spices bought from Indian traders, and the man. The dhow's large sail was furled, and it was driven by a powerful engine. The man was the important cargo and the engine was at full throttle. He sat alone at the bow and stared down into the foaming water below. The previous night, each of the five crewmen had seen him come aboard in the darkness, slipping silently down the quayside ladder. Only the boat's owner h...

About this edition

• Publisher: CORGI
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 055214682X
• ISBN 13: 9780552146821
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 509