CONDITION BLACK (21 page)

"I've been around," Colt said. "Here and there . . ."

His father would not have known the names of any of them.

His mother would have known their mothers through the Institute. They were the dregs of the village, Colt's father would have said.

Fran said, "Are you going to drink, or are you going to come walking?"

She took off her heavy coat and slung it to her father, and the pheasant spilled on the flagstones.

Nothing changed, not in two years. The poacher's daughter was tall, big-boned, big-hipped. She had red flame hair that would have been on her shoulders if it had not been caught in a pony tail with an elastic band. Strong as a bullock, old Brennie had said. She took Colt's hand and walked him to the door. None of them would tell on him. Most likely, they'd have one of old Brennie's snare wires round their neck if they did.

They went out through the yard at the back of the pub. They crossed two fields, bent and close to the hedgerows.

There was a pillbox on the high ground above the village, to the west. There were brambles across the entrance, and under one of the gun-slits there were the diggings of a badger sett. It was where they had always come, it was where they had been two years back.

"Is the American for you?"

" Y e s . "

"What does he want with you?"

"First choice would be to kill me, second choice would be to take me."

"We'll give him a run," she said.

It wasn't raining now and Frlich used the bivouac cover as a groundsheet. He was a lew yards back into the trees, but he had a clear view down the slope of the fields to the house. He reckoned that he was six hundred yards from the house. An image intensifier would have been a help, but he would have to make do with the monocular glass. From his vantage point he could see the high narrow window on the stairs and he could see the kitchen window, both lit. The rest of the house was dark. The bedrooms were on the front of the house.

The isolation oppressed him. He must have been mad to have taken himself off to a God-awful lonely wood where the birch saplings were dripping and the cold rain water splattered from the big oak branches. He thought of Don and Nick and Vito and their so far empty bulletins, and imagined their warm, convivial evening in an Athens taverna. He saw Colt's father, clear, come down the stairs. He saw him framed in the back door at the kitchen, and he thought he saw the dog come past the man's legs, and a few minutes later the door was opened again, then closed.

The kitchen light went out. And then the stair light. After those fights had gone Erlich's spirits sank. He felt dismally alone. The shouting from the car park at the pub carried to him, and the revving of car engines, and after that only deeper silence beyond the sighing of the wind in the trees above him. He was scared. He nearly jumped out of his sleeping bag when a young roe buck passed ten feet from him, hugging the edge of the field. And he muttered an expletive in fear when a pigeon, alarmed by the slight shift of his body, exploded out of the trellis of branches over his head. He heard a fox vixen call, and once he heard the death screams of a rabbit and didn't know what predator was at its throat. There had been a moon to start with, occasional and in between the fast-moving cloud formations, but that moon was lost in thick cloud.

When it started to rain, he wrapped himself tight in the bivouac cover. He lay still. It was the first time since he had left Washington that he had missed the comfort of the sharp shape against his chest of a standard issue, .38 calibre, Smith and Wesson revolver.

Good loving, just as it had been two years back.

She said that she had known he was back when she found the car hidden away in the old barn at the edge of the twelve acre.

She had known he was back and had carried three bales of straw to the pillbox.

She had stripped him off, she had stripped herself off.

They were on the rough straw in the pillbox.

She was great and she cared about nothing, other than getting the condoms on him.

The third time, she tickled him to life, so he could be useful to her again, with a stalk of straw.

Her on Colt, Colt on her, her back on Colt.

Soft and gentle loving, and fun.

And the talk was soft and gentle. Not heavy and not serious, because that wasn't their way, but fun . . .

" D o you remember . . . ?"

When they had gone to the pheasant pens on the estate, let the lot out, screwed up the whole season's shooting for the posh crowd.

When they had been out at night, the night before the hunt had been due on the estate and the Home Farm land, and they had laid the trails with the aniseed in the sacking bag, and they had sat the next morning on the high ground and watched and laughed till it hurt at the chaos, and the Master looking as though he'd do his heart.

Fran hadn't joined the Front. Fran had said, after Colt had taken her to one meeting, that the A . L . F . were a load of ponces and poseurs. What she had meant was that the activists were too serious. She couldn't be doing with serious.

When Colt was flat on his back with the goosepimples working up the bareness of his thighs, and when there was the big warmth ol her breasts on his chest, then Colt told his Fran where he had been and what he had done. It was natural for him to tell her.

He told her about the rush out of the Manor House, and the flight out of Heathrow before the law was organised, He told her about Australia, and about the man who had tried to roll him when he was sleeping rough off the highway down to Fremanlle.

He told her about his escape from Australia on the tanker where they used bicycles to get from bow to stern. He told her about Kuwait and making his way into Iraq. He told her about a job teaching English to the children of an Iraqi Colonel, about his friendship with the Colonel's family, about his recruitment and about the shooting of two men in Athens, and the shooting of a man in south London. He told her about his life since they had last been, naked and cuddling, in the pillbox overlooking the village that was their home.

Fran told him what she knew, that there was a car parked behind the holly hedge of a field on the Frome road.

Desmond was shaving and his wife was still in bed and the little ones were still asleep when he heard the rapping at the front door.

If he hadn't already wiped his face then Desmond wouldn't have recognised him. Mud from head to toe, like he had been crawling in a gateway where the cattle had churned the ground. A line of rips in his coat, like he had been caught in wire and hadn't the calm to unpick the barbs. The American's chest was heaving. He was at the end of his tether. Obviously not a time for talking, because the American was already walking towards the panda car in the car port. Desmond grabbed his coat and his keys.

The place was halfway between the police house and the village.

The hatchback of the Ford had been forced. The jack from the Ford was abandoned in the mud beside the car. Close to the car, on the field side of the holly hedge, were the four wheels. The Ford was beached, stranded. He could have laughed, but he hadn't the nerve.

Rutherford thought it was the sort of job that he would be looking for when he was that age, a cosy little number.

He sat in the Security Officer's room on the top floor of the main block of F area. "I tell you, Mr Rutherford, we have a happy community here. Fm not talking about the general workforce, I am referring to the senior scientific and engineering staff."

"Quite."

"And you would do well to consider that while Defence has had traitors, so has your Service, so has Intelligence, so has G.C.H.Q. . . . Atomic Weapons Establishment has had no blots on its escutcheon at all."

"Of course not."

"The loyalty of our scientists and engineers is the last thing I shall be losing sleep over. They are first-class people. They know what their job is and they get on with it."

"It's just a general warning . . . "

To Rutherford, the place reeked of complacency, but it wasn't his concern. He was just the messenger, packed off on the errand of communicating a 'general warning'.

" T h e Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, you say."

"That's where we believe a threat to security
might
come from."

" . . . They would need very specialised knowledge. They'd have to know who they were looking for, where that individual worked, and then they'd have to compromise him. Not the least of their problems, you see, Mr Rutherford, would be in identifying one of our scientists. Practically impossible. The Establishment prides itself on its discretion."

"That's very gratifying."

"They couldn't even trawl around and fail. The slightest approach made and that scientist, that engineer, would be straight in here, my door is always open. Government has done very well by this place. Conventional forces may be feeling the draught what with the changes in Eastern Europe, but we've been left untouched. Everybody here has job security."

"It was a general warning and I've passed it on."

"And I've noted it. . . Don't get me wrong, Mr Rutherford.

Anyone,
everyone,
here would be appalled at the suggestion that a regime as bestial and madcap as that of Iraq could get its hands on nuclear weapons. They will not get any sort of help from anyone at A.W.E. Now the French, that's another matter. The Italians, I am afraid, quite a different kettle of fish. On the other hand, Mr Rutherford, if your people come up with something a little more specific, by all means be in touch again."

"I'm sure you'll do what's necessary."

"Well, we won't be scaremongering."

Rutherford said quietly, "The sort of people who could help the Iraqi programme, how many are we talking about?"

"Twenty, not more."

"It would be good if you could keep a weather-eye on them, those 20."

" M r Rutherford, take a message back to London . . . Those 20 men and women are some of the finest brains employed in government science. They are all, each last one of them, people who deserve society's respect. If you think that, on the basis of some intelligence tittle-tattle, I am going to order phone intercepts, mail opening, bank statement access, against our foremost individuals, then . . . "

Rutherford stood up. "I'll tell them in London that the Iraqis will have to look elsewhere."

Again, he could not fault them. He presumed they had learned from the Soviets, but then they might just as well have learned it off the British. They told him enough for him to know that it was foolproof whether it had come from the Soviets or from the British.

They told Colt, the two men that he met in mid-morning in the puddled car parking area on Wimbledon Common, that they had used the scatter and disperse procedure. They told him that there would always be at least one car from the Security Service or from Special Branch watching the front of the Iraqi delegation's building. They told him that their tactic was to overwhelm the watchers. The Military Attache and two Second Secretaries, who were sensitive and known to the Service and the Branch, had left the building one after the other. One had turned right down the street, two had gone left. Three trails to follow, two cars at most for the job . . . Two minutes later, the two men had left the building. They had come via taxi, underground train, mainline train, and taxi again.

He called the taller of the two Faud, and the shorter Namir.

Faud had joked that he was listed as being on the staff of the Cultural Centre in Tottenham Court Road, and Namir had said that he was listed as a chauffeur to the Commercial Attache. Faud had pointed out the rubbish bin in the car park that was emptied on Mondays and Fridays. Namir had said that a message could be left there on any Sunday or Thursday, and that the bin would be checked by himself on those evenings. Faud had shown Colt the decoded telex from Baghdad, Namir had burned it with his cigarette lighter when Colt had read it.

Colt had the address. He had his start point.

And he was told that he had done well, that he was a favoured son, that there was great pleasure at the sending to Hell of Saad Rashid, the thief.

The Metro Vanden Plas went first.

He was down the road, on the verge. Straight after the Vanden Plas came the Saab Turbo. He saw the B . M . W . come out and cross the traffic and it was nothing short of miraculous that it missed the gravel lorry and when the lorry driver hammered his horn she gave him two fingers. There was the E-type and the Audi. He had time to smoke a small cigar before the Fiat crept out of the gates. The Fiat with the A registration, that would be the car. His engine had been idling. He allowed a van and an estate to get in front of him before he came off the verge. Colt did not know the name of the woman, only that he was to follow her because her husband worked as a scientist at the Atomic Weapons Establishment. He followed her off the main roads, and through a housing estate. When he saw her at her front door, her sketch pad under one arm and rummaging in her bug for her key, Colt thought her a good-looking woman.

On every house there was a Neighbourhood Watch sticker. Colt had driven to Newbury and had bought a calculator and an accounts ledger and a book of receipt dockets. He sat, now, in the car in Lilac Gardens. He had positioned himself directly under a street light. He invented receipts, and he entered those receipts in the accounts ledger. He wore a clean shirt and a tie.

He was the sales representative clearing his day's paperwork. He was the rep who had found a quiet place to get his paperwork tidied up before his last appointment of the day.

He was 75 yards from the front of the house, under the light, positioned so that he faced the junction of Lilac Gardens with Mount Pleasant. He had seen the wife again. He had seen her go out in her car, and he had watched her back with her two small boys. It was important for him to know the numbers of the household, and later he would watch for the bedroom lights so that he would know where the family slept, but that would be later. He watched the men of Lilac Gardens coming home from their day's work. He saw a Cavalier pull into the forecourt of the house to the right. He saw a flash Ford, a newer model than he recognised, accelerate up the cul-de-sac, brake, and turn squealing into the opened garage of the house to the left. Colt thought that he had never before watched the herd of workers actually come home. He saw the lights of the Sierra. He had never, himself, worked in his life, he didn't count the part time that he had thrown in with the farmers around the village, harvest-time tractor driving. The Sierra was slowing. There had always been money from his mother for what he needed, beer money, cigarette money, petrol money. He had never gone short, even in Australia, always picked up a bit here and there. Now of course he had in his hip pocket the fat brown envelope that had been handed to him in the car park on Wimbledon Common. The headlights of the Sierra caught his face then swung away, turned onto the concrete and stopped behind the Fiat. He saw the man who came out of the car.