Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks [64]
house. He was too modern and secular to observe the ritual distinction of the sexes in his household, but used the separate buildings to keep his work and domestic affairs apart. Darius had been married three times for brief periods and had three sons by his different wives. He had followed the Shia provision of the mut’a, which allows a couple to contract a marriage for as short a period as they like and to end it without divorce. He was fond of quoting the helpful lines from the Koran: ‘If you fear that you will not act justly towards the orphans, marry such women as seem good to you, two, three or four; but if you fear you will not be equitable, then only one . . .’
Darius had had no such fears and had provided handsomely for his sons and their mothers. He kept a sharp eye open for the fourth wife the Prophet permitted him, and allowed himself the occasional trial run with likely candidates. He was seeing one of them – Zohreh from the restaurant where he had dined with Bond – later that evening.
The air-conditioned top floor of the andaroon, Darius’s office, was a single open-plan space with wooden ‘American’ shutters, a stripped wood floor with a single antique rug from Isfahan and a gilded cage in which he kept a white parakeet. At 1800 hours
each day he transmitted his report to London. If he failed to come on air at precisely this time there was a reprimand in the shape of a ‘blue call’ from Regent’s Park half an hour later, then a red call at 1900. If that went unanswered, London would set about trying to find out what had happened to him.
Darius had never received reminders of either colour, and this evening he was particularly keen to be on time. He put on the headphones and positioned himself in front of the transmitter. His practised fingers went to work on the keys, tapping out his call sign – ‘PXN calling WWW’ – on 14 megacycles. He heard the sudden hollowness in the ether that meant London was coming in to acknowledge him.
He had a great deal to tell them, but it was important to keep calm as he did so. In the control room in Regent’s Park, there was an entire wall of glass dials with quivering needles which, among other things, measured the weight of each pulse and the speed of each cipher group, and registered any characteristic stumbles Darius had with particular letters – the s, for instance, under the weak second finger of his left hand. If the machines didn’t recognize his personal
‘fist’, a buzzer would sound and he would immediately be disconnected. He knew of an agent in the West Indies who,
when overexcited, frequently transmitted too fast and found himself cut off by the electronic guardians. There were subtle ways in which agents who had been captured could let it be seen from the variations
– either in their ‘fist’ or by previously agreed groups of words in the message – that they were operating under duress. But Darius was distrustful of such measures. The whole of the British SOE group in Holland, having been captured in the war, had faithfully included the agreed tell-tale signs in their Nazisupervised transmissions only for their bosses in Baker Street to come on the line and tell them to stop messing about.
Darius informed London in code that there was still no word from 007 and requested instructions as to whether he should himself proceed to Noshahr. He included the slender details of what he had so far discovered in Tehran – from Hamid among others –
about the Caspian Sea Monster. At lunchtime he had gone downtown to the elegant French club and bought cocktails on the veranda for some old IndoChina hands who viewed themselves as having seen it all. Over coˆtelettes d’agneau and red Burgundy, he had learned that they were aware of sightings and that their photographs suggested the Monster had been modified to fire rockets. On his way back, Darius
called in at the club known only as the CRC, one of the chicest venues in Tehran, where ten-pin bowling was played