CONDITION BLACK (23 page)

The door of the main bedroom was shut. He was at the top of the stairs. Bad moment . . . Switch off the landing light and the sudden sensation of darkness might disturb the kids, wake them.

Leave the light on, and when he went into the main bedroom, where he had to go, then the light would follow in with him when he opened the door. Could have done with Sissie. Sissie would have known. He turned off the landing light. He eased open the door. God, the room was dark.

When he had come into the bedroom of the bastard who lived off experimentation with animals, Colt had carried a pickaxe handle. He had the torch in his hand. He had to use the torch.

Her breathing was light, regular, his breathing was harsh as if his sleep were as thin as frost ice. He stood at the end of their bed and he turned his back to them so that his body would shield some of the torch light. The torch light moved across the room.

Across a dressing table that was covered by jars and bottles and hair brushes. Across a chair that was draped with her trousers and her blouse and her bra and her pants and her tights. Across a wardrobe with twin doors. Across a chest on which were photographs of two small boys and a handkerchief and loose change. There was a second chair beside the bed, his side. For a moment the torch beam showed, in dulled light, the man's face.

It would have taken an earthquake . . .

She moved. He froze, pushing the torchbeam into his chest.

She was on the further side of the bed. She shifted again and there was a soft cry from her. He was rock still. She subsided.

She might have been dreaming. He waited.

Colt was statue-still for a full minute.

The torch beam found the chair beside the bed, his side, His trousers were folded over the seat of the chair. His sports jacket was hung over the back of the chair. Each footstep considered, tested, before the weight was committed. There was a wallet in the inside pocket of his sports coat. Colt drew the wallet from the pocket. He opened the wallet. He found the bank card What he looked for was not in the wallet.

The boy hacked his cough again. She moved again Again he froze. No cause to hurry

The first side pocket, not there, just car keys there and a spectacle case.

The second pocket, He felt the length of cord. He felt the smooth laminated skin. He eased from the pocket an identity card, issued by the Security Office of the Atomic Weapons Establishment In his notebook he wrote down the name on the card, Frederick Bissett, the serial number of the card, the authority given by the card for access to H area, the date of expiry of the card.

He returned the card to its pocket.

It was what he had come to find.

He closed the door behind him. He switched back on the landing light. He went down the stairs. He crossed the hall, and the kitchen.

The kitchen door was open, wider than he had left it.

He closed it after him.

He used his wire to turn the mortice lock.

Colt stood on the patio, let his breath come in great gasping surges, and the sweat under his balaclava ran to his chest and the valley of his back.

Sara shovelled herself out of bed. Frederick had his eyes open, lay on his back.

"A good night?"

"Great, good sleep."

"Didn't sound like it . . ." Sara was at the door, dragging on her dressing gown.

"What do you mean?"

"Weren't you up?"

" N o . "

"I heard you."

Frederick pushed himself forward on his elbows. "I was never up."

She didn't want a fight, not at three minutes to seven o'clock, not when she had the boys to get up, and his sandwiches to do, and the washing basket to clear, and last night's supper to clear away.

"Sorry, must have been dreaming, forget it . . ."

He heard her going heavily down the stairs. He heard her running the tap in the kitchen to fill the kettle. He heard her shout of pure anger. He heard the opening and the slamming of the back door.

Sara came back up the stairs. "For God's sake, Frederick, can't you be more careful when you lock up? You shut their bloody cat in."

He was only half awake. "I did?" Yes, he had worked late . . .

No, he could not remember opening the back kitchen door . . .

She didn't stay to argue. No time in the morning of a weekday to stand around their bedroom and argue.

Half an hour later, two pieces of toast wolfed down, Bissett presented himself at the Falcon Gate, watched as the Ministry policeman peered down through the opened window of the Sierra to check the I/D hanging from its cord round his neck.

The first joggers were out on the Common, and the first riders urging their ponies into a canter, when Colt left his message underneath the rubbish barrel.

He had copied for the text of his message all that was on his notepad.

He was just another motorist who paused on the Common for a breather, just another motorist who had a plastic bag full of litter in his car, who tucked it into the rubbish barrel on his way to work.

He was quite unremarkable, quite unnoticed.

Rutherford was usually early at his desk, but the Clerical Assistant to the section always beat him in. She handed him two message dockets. Erlich, twice. He found Hobbes, arguing with the sandwich machine.

"How did you do?"

"I delivered your warning and was lectured on the exceptional quality of the Establishment's security."

"Wonderful." Hobbes had extracted a sandwich, salami and Stilton. " N o w
that
is a triumph of intellect over incalculable odds . . ."

"The American's jumping up and down, two calls this morning already."

" Y e s . " A long pause, in which the sandwich machine gave a little heave and a tinkling avalanche of coins, like a fruit machine, seemed about to issue an improbable windfall, but it proved a merely internal matter. "Keep him happy, and try to keep him out of trouble."

Rutherford hadn't made himself comfortable in his chair before his telephone rang.

"Hello, Bill, I was just about to call you . . . "

Bissett heard the exchange from his office. His door was open because he had just come back from the laboratory at the end of the corridor to collect the first sheets of his paper for checking against the latest results produced by the technicians.

"But it isn't convenient," Boll protested.

"Don't tell me, tell him." Carol, enjoying herself.

"Only me and Basil?"

"That's what he said, the two of you from H3, ten o'clock sharp."

"Why not Bissett, can't Bissett go in my place?"

Carol said firmly, " H e wasn't asked, only you and Basil."

At ten minutes to ten o'clock precisely, on Bissett's watch as he stood near the window of the laboratory, Boll and Basil were to be seen hurrying across to Boll's car, bent against the wind.

Bissett had no idea where they were going, what was the summons that was of such importance.

Erlich said, "What I want is a hostile interview facility. I want to turn him over, jazz him so he doesn't know what day it is, shake him."

"That's not easy, Bill . . . "

"It's not supposed to be easy, for fuck's sake. Nothing is easy when an American government servant has been murdered."

Rutherford swivelled his chair. Rutherford's body was positioned between Erlich and the floor safe . . . Good form, so that he couldn't see the combination that Rutherford used on the dials, typical . . . Rutherford turned back. He opened the file that he had taken from the safe. Rutherford was turning pages, not offering them for Bill to read.

" H e has a Military Cross."

" S o ? "

" H e has the Croix de Guerre."

" S o ? "

"They are gallantry medals. They aren't the sort of decorations picked up in little adventures down in Panama or Grenada, or for cocking up in Beirut. Here, he's a war hero, that would be how we would regard Major T u c k . "

"His son's a killer."

"We don't know that for certain."

"Well, I know it. I can't prove it of the Athens killing, though I am sure of it, but I am one hundred per cent sure of it of the Clapham killing."

"Bill, I'm sorry, it's not by any means certain that Colt shot Saad Rashid."

"I have an eyewitness, dammit."

"Who is not saying to the Anti-Terrorist Branch what you say she said to you. Nevertheless . . . "

"They don't know their business."

"Nevertheless . . . , I will request on your behalf a 'hostile interrogation facility' with Major Tuck. I will also, and you're pretty damn lucky for that, accompany you down to that nasty little village so that we can conduct surveillance without you falling on your face in the mud, so that the Embassy of the United States doesn't run too short on transport."

There were times, yes, in the small brick bungalow in the foreigners' compound that he dreamed of walking away from the danger and the fear. Occasions, now, when he took his twice annual leave to Europe and met with the Mossad men and did not have the courage to tell them, face to face and one to one, that his nerve was exhausted. He thought it would require more courage to quit than to go on.

He had guessed that from the first day of his arrival at Tuwaithah, and from the first day that he had used the courier.

He was cut out from the courier. The cut-out was a post-restante box at the new Post Office on Al Kadhim Street in the old Juafir district of the city. He had a key to the post-restante box, and the courier had a matching key. They would never meet.

He read the message. He came once a week to Baghdad and shopped and look lunch at the Ishtar Sheraton, and walked across the Jumhuriyah Bridge and towards the old circled city and into the new Post Office on AI Kadhim Street.

He drove back towards Tuwaithah.

They had never before asked the chemical engineer from Sweden for more complete information.

They were all Grade 5 and Grade 6. All divisional heads and their Superintendents.

They were from Mechanical Engineering and Weapons Electronics and Assembly and Special Projects, from Applied Physics and Materials, from Chemical Technology and Explosives and Metallurgy. Reuben Boll and Basil had come over to F area from Mathematical Physics in H3. Twenty men and women had gathered at the Security Officer's summons, and there was coffee and biscuits.

Not one among them, none of these senior engineers and chemists and scientists, would have claimed that he was glad of a summons to the Security Officer's conference room. They all worked in areas of great secrecy. Their papers were marked with the highest classification used at the Ministry of Defence, Top Secret (Atomic). They were subject to positive vetting. They were encouraged not to discuss their work either with wives or with colleagues. They were all signatories to the Official Secrets Act. Their knowledge was hardly shared, and only a handful of civil servants in Whitehall had anything that approached a full picture of their work, while the number of elected members of government who were trusted to be taken into their confidence was tiny, a small Cabinet sub-committee.

The Security Officer had been the rounds in the Intelligence Corps before being invited to quit two years before his army retirement date. He had held the rank of brigadier, with an O.B.E. as reward for 30 years of service. He had served in Aden, in Whitehall; he had been deputy to the senior intelligence officer at the Land Forces H.Q. at Lisburn outside Belfast; Germany for two tours; the Ministry of Defence again. He had been offered the position of Security Officer at Atomic Weapons Establishment. He was answerable to the Ministry of Defence and the Controller Establishments Research and Nuclear, but a call from Curzon Street was adequate cause for him to jump.

"Good morning, gentlemen, I very much appreciate your finding the time to attend, and at such short notice . . . "

In the Directors' dining room he most often ate alone because he came early to the table. He was joined only when there were no other chairs available. He had long ago realised that his office would leave him friendless and an object of suspicion. There was nothing formidable in his appearance, a bright bald scalp, small and close-set eyes.

" . . . Just a warning, nothing more serious. It has been brought to my attention, and I am duty bound to pass it on, that there is a remote possibility that the Atomic Energy Commission of Iraq may attempt to recruit personnel from the Atomic Weapons Establishment. I expect that sounds quite ridiculous . . . "

A chemist giggled. There was a general release of tension.

". . . In my own view, not so much ridiculous as preposterous.

Some of you may remember talk a few years ago about the Iraqis putting together a nuclear device, and that led to the bombing of their reactor by the Israeli Air Force. Last year, of course, there were further rumours that the programme had been reactivated; unsubstantiated rumours. What has now crossed my desk is a somewhat unspecific warning that the Iraqis may be attempting to recruit top-grade scientists from abroad, and I would be failing in my job if I did not, without overemphasis, pass on that warning. Obviously, I am not for one moment imagining that any single one of you would entertain such an approach should it be made . . . "

There was a ripple of muttered conversation.

". . . but I do ask that you come straight to me if any attempt is made to approach you. From what we read of recent happenings in Iraq, an individual would have to be clean off his or her whistle, certifiable, to entertain an offer, however lavish, from that quarter, but, as I say, we are warned. That's all, and thank you again for your time."

There was laughter. The Security Officer smiled warmly. He had done his bit, and now he could return to the very much more pressing anxiety of vetting the construction workers from the Republic of Ireland currently employed on the fitting out of the A90 complex.

"That was balls," Basil said. Boll was at his car door. He'd brought his keys out of his trouser pocket along with a fistful of change that was spinning in all directions on the tarmac.

"I beg your pardon." On his knees now, reaching under the chassis.