CONDITION BLACK (12 page)

When it was over he was given a Military Cross by the British, and the Croix de Guerre by the French. It was the best time of his life, and everything since has been second best. He's older than his years and I don't know how much longer he can last."

" Y o u are proud of him?"

" W e used to fight, morning, noon and night. Once with fists and boots and teeth."

"Is your father proud of his son?"

He could remember clearly, when he had last been at the Manor House, the day he left. His mother had been crying as she had rifled the house for money for him, and as she had made sandwiches to put in greaseproof paper because it would be dangerous for him to stop at cafes on his way to the airport. His father had followed him from room to room, half a dozen strides behind him all through that late afternoon. When the telephone call had warned that Micky and Sissie had been arrested, there had been no option but to run. There was bound to be something in their squat that would lead the police to him. He had gone out through the kitchen door. He had left his dog tied to a drainpipe by the kitchen door, so that it could not follow him. At the end of the kitchen garden, by the stile to the open fields, he had looked back. They were framed by the kitchen doorway. His mother's head was bowed in her tears. His father had stood erect, his arm round his mother's shoulder. His father had not spoken a single word to him, just followed him around the house, not a solitary word. His mother had waved him on his way, not his father.

"I doubt he'd think there was much to be proud of."

The Colonel bent to retrieve a sheet of paper from his briefcase, then pushed the decoded typescript across the desk towards Colt.

Colt read the letter that had been written that same morning, in haste, by his father.

"I need to go home, sir."

James Rutherford, first thing after he had closed the door behind him, took a tumbler of malt whisky up the narrow staircase to his wife.

Penny said, " I f it doesn't kill the prawn bugs, it'll finish m e . "

"Are we on the mend?"

"Reckon so."

" D a n called by today. You're not alone, his missus has the same."

Rutherford knew that his wife liked Dan Ruane, always had a good word for him. Service wives were not generally involved in the social scene, only when it was an American evening. Penny would have known more wives from the Agency and from the Bureau than she would have met wives from the Service. She was sitting up in bed, and she drank, spluttered, and grinned.

"Brilliant . . . what did Dan want? Sorry, sorry, wasn't thinking . . . "

She was the well-drilled Service wife. She had to be. Service wives did not grill their husbands about
bloody work.
She made it her rule that Belfast, the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army, casual atrocities never crossed her lips, not after his last trip away, because the man who had come back to her from Northern Ireland had been frightened of his own shadow. She hoped to God that he would never have to go back there again.

But James Rutherford didn't give two tosses for that particular tenet of Service discipline.

" The American killed last week in Athens, Agency man, looks like he was shot by a Brit."

"You're joking?"

"No. Some sort of renegade, some dreadful little creature looking for a cause to pin himself to, I expect. The Library's trawling for him."

"And how was Dan?"

"Didn't really have a chance to talk to him. He'd a chap in tow who is doing the case. Civil enough young fellow, bit gauche, bit wet behind the ears."

Penny giggled. The malt was working the colour back to her cheeks.

"Well, he's American, isn't he?"

Erlich sat in his quarters in South Audley street. He had half an hour before Ruane took him to dinner. There was a card game next door whose progress he could hear through the partition wall

When he had left the University of California, Santa Barbara, he had taught literature at a school in Battle Creek, Michigan.

He taught the children of ''Cereal City". Everyone worked for Kelloggs, and the plant turned out, each day, enough for ten million people's breakfasts. The kids didn't want to know about life outside Battle Creek. They wanted to get on the production line and turn out more breakfasts. They were enough to stretch a teacher who wanted them to learn the beauty of poetry. They'd stretched him, but they hadn't snapped him. While he had been kicking his heels yesterday he had spent an hour in a tiny bookshop in Curzon Street and had come away with a paperback edition of the Parsons Rosenberg and the Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes's anthology. He had left home so hurriedly as to have packed not one of the poetry volumes that he was very seldom without

While he waited lor Ruane to be announced from the hall desk, he read.

Red fangs have torn His face,

God's blood is shed.

He mourns from his lone place

His children dead.

His father would never have heard of Isaac Rosenberg, an English poet, killed in the last weeks of the "war to end all wars". His father had died at somewhere called Due Co that was somewhere in the Central Highlands in Vietnam. He thought of the cruel death of Isaac Rosenberg and the death of his father in the breaking of the siege of the Due Co Special Forces camp.

Move him into the sun -

Gently its touch awoke him once,

At home, whispering of fields unsown.

Always it woke him, even in France,

Until this morning and this snow.

If anything might rouse him now

The kind old sun will know.

This he could recite without the book, a poem of Wilfred Owen's which he had impressed into the minds of every one of his pupils in Battle Creek.

Think how it wakes the seeds, -

Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,

Full-nerved - still warm - too hard to stir?

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth's sleep at all?

He thought of his father, killed thousands of miles beyond reach, of Wilfred Owen, killed, of Harry Lawrence, his friend whose death he
could
avenge. And of Elsa and her children. He had made his promise. For Erlich there was no way that promise could be undone . . .

The telephone rang. Ruane was downstairs.

He went fast down the stairs.

"Have they got anything?"

Ruane said, "One fence at a time, Bill."

Carol had told him before he went home, so Bissett knew what to look for - Carol was the conduit of all the gossip for H3 - and it put him in his best humour of the day.

He made a detour to see it. Across Fourth Avenue, right up to the inner perimeter round B area. Through the close-mesh fence topped by razor wire he could see the wide double doors large enough to let a three-ton lorry into the huge earth mound.

He saw the aerosoled message: " W E WOZ ' E R E " .

As Carol had heard it, the Special Air Service had somehow broken through all the perimeter fences in the night, evaded the Ministry police and then bloody dogs, and reached the doors of the earth mound where the chemical explosives were stored, Carol had said that the S A S had also penetrated A area where the plutonium spheres were fashioned, walked right into the Citadel of the Establishment Never mind about A area, in B area it was plain to any Tom, Dick or Harry, bloody well done, the S.A.S.

Bissett, along with almost everyone else at A.W.E., had a pro-found disrespect for the Ministry police. So many times held up at the Falcon Gate, so many times made to open his briefcase and his empty sandwich box and turn Ins empty coffee flask upside down when he was anxious to gel home, so many times subjected to their questions when he was going about his business visiting other corners of the Establishment He could see the savage glower on the face of the Ministry policeman some 50 yards ahead of him. So, the S.A.S. had been in and demonstrated that the Ministry police security was a load of rubbish . . . Bloody well done, the Special Air Service. He imagined with pleasure the bollocking that would be administered to the men who had been on duty the previous night Perhaps they would be a little less arrogant in future.

"In London, in 1934 when the knowledge of the power of the atom was a dream in very few minds," Dr Tariq said, "there was a Hungarian refugee. His name was Leo Szilard. It was he who first comprehended the potential of that atom. He foresaw a release of energy utterly beyond anything considered by scientists before him. He was standing on the pavement of a street called Southampton Row. The idea of this power, this energy, came to him as he waited for the traffic lights to change so that he could cross. If he had been able to cross immediately then perhaps the idea might never have formed in his mind. It was pure luck. But also his very great skill and his dedication - the fact that he was a Jew does not undo his skill and dedication - earned Leo Szilard his luck. If you work with great skill, Colonel, and with great dedication then you will earn your luck."

The Colonel elaborated on the straightforward business of the reference section of the Ministry preparing for him a dossier on the British nuclear weapons programme. He also reported to Dr Tariq that he had put a London Embassy staffer, who worked directly to him, exclusively to following up one or two specific leads. He did not vouchsafe that this particular staffer was routinely tailed by the British secret services. They would all need luck, he reflected.

Dr Tariq did not vouchsafe to the Colonel the news that had reached him that morning, that a Frenchman, home on leave, had sent by letter his resignation. Nor did he tell him that a German was now packing up his quarters, having refused to work another day. The Colonel, whose information on the morale inside Tuwaithah was by now almost as good as Dr Tariq's, was not surprised that this news was withheld. It would be one more damaging admission of cracks in his programme, and Dr Tariq was a vain man, his vanity complicated certainly by fear. Fear of failure. Fear, too, of the consequences of failure.

Dr Tariq saw the slackened jowl of the Colonel, he noted the way that the man dragged at the butt of his cigarette, his third, he watched the fidget of the man's fingers. It would be too soon, he thought, to remind the Colonel of the fate inescapably awaiting those who failed a mission which had the total support of the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council.

" Y o u should seek, Colonel, to earn your luck."

5

It was Justin Pink's lucky morning, that's what he would say afterwards.

What he called his workshop was a conversion of the roof space over the detached garage. He used it sometimes rather than go into the factory at Newbury. That morning there had been no reason to drive to Newbury. He prepared his papers, and the contracts, in his workshop.

Justin Pink was a winner. He was a winner, he realised, each time that he dressed in a Savile Row suit. His shirt was first time on, and his initials were monogrammed over his heart. His tie was silk, his hair was groomed. He felt vibrantly alive, he felt clean, scrubbed by Debbie in a long cold shower. He crossed from the garage loft to the great expanse of his brick-built house.

He passed the cars in the driveway. Bloody women, never could park . . . These women did themselves well, at least their husbands did them well. There was Bea's beautifully preserved E-type, not a scratch on it, Jill's Audi, Susie's B . M . W . , Alice's Saab Turbo, Ronnie's Metro Vanden Plas, and one car that he did not recognise, a Fiat 127 with an A registration. There was rust on the bonnet and rust on the tail. He carried his briefcase into the house. They were out to dinner that night at Wally and Fiona Simpson's on the Kennet. That was a great house, four acres, nearly a hundred yards frontage onto the river, super fishing. Wally had rung to say that it was black tie, and he'd forgotten to tell Debbie. He went to the dining-room door. He had never actually seen what happened at Debbie's art class.

Bloody hell

He stared over the shoulders of Alice and Susie and Jill. The table was folded away The fire was lit, going well. They were in a half-moon, and all facing the fire. Alice and Susie and Jill had their backs to him. Bea on the left. Ronnie and Debbie on the right. They had all reacted to the door opening, as if he'd thrown a grenade into the room and they were frozen.

He stared at the woman, She sat on a hard chair. She was naked, not a stitch on her, She had long good legs, white. The legs weren't together, There was the black matt of the woman's hair. There was a little flabbiness in her lower belly, because she was a woman and not a girl, but she had a tight waist. Big breasts hanging, and the pink nipple buttons. His eyeline had not reached her face when Alice squealed and Bea had a giggling fit. The woman's hair was dark and loose over her shoulders. He looked into the woman's face. Her eyes didn't shift. Ronnie, who had carrot-red hair to go with it, had blushed pillarbox red. She was a great looking woman, so damn relaxed. He had supposed Debbie and her cronies painted flowers, or bowls of fruit, or landscapes up on the Ridge. Damned quiet in the dining room, he'd thought, as he crossed the hall, and if Bea Smith was in a room and it was quiet then something pretty peculiar had to be happening. Her eyes never left his, the woman's, and she did not a damn thing to cross her legs or put her hands across her breasts.