CONDITION BLACK (25 page)

He reached for the telephone. He rang the restaurant down in the Piraeus to hook the table by the plate-glass window with a view over the yacht harbour. Next, he rang the Station Officer to say they'd be gone in the morning.

After dark, Colt left the house and walked three streets to where he had parked the car.

Colt was the moth, his mother was the flame. He headed for his home and for her bedside.

10

"Of course, I wanted her to see you but, God help me, I don't want you taken . . . "

" I f you shout, you'll wake her, and she needs all the sleep she can get."

"Damn you . . . "

The boy was his agony. Still so clear in his mind, the dawn raid of the police. He and Louise in their dressing gowns in the hall while uniformed men and detectives swarmed over the house.

The detectives had carried handguns when they had run through the hall in the moment after he had opened the front door.

The armed detectives and uniformed men, who carried pickaxe handles and sledgehammers that would have taken down the door if he had not immediately opened it, had ransacked their home in frustration. The whole village had known. The road outside the main gate to the drive had been blocked for an hour, and there had been more guns outside, guns carried in the garden and in the fields beyond the paddock at the back. That was what the boy had done for them, sentenced them to the dropped lace curtains when they walked the village street and to dropped voices when they used the shop that was also the Post Office. After the raid there had been the surveillance and the clicking interruptions on their telephone line and the delay on their letters that most often took four days from postage to delivery.

"You're just a bloody fool to go to the pub."

"Nobody'll tell on me."

"You're so bloody arrogant, and so bloody naive."

"They're my friends."

"Friends? . . . You don't have any
friends.
They're junk, trash.

You have your mother, and you have me . . . You have no one else, Colt."

His mother's hair had still been fair, soft sunlight gold, when the police had come that early morning. Now it was grey-white.

The medical people that they had traipsed to see, from one specialist to another, searching for better news, said that extreme stress hastened the spread of the cancer. The raid had only been the worst. There had been the time when Colt had stayed away a week, and the papers and the radio had carried the story of the bludgeoning of an animal scientist in his own home. Nothing had been said, but they had known.

After the raid, the two of them, together, had tidied the house.

Neither of them had mentioned the boy's name, not for hours, not until the work was finished. If he had mentioned the boy's name she would have broken. But he wasn't a rogue dog that he could have had put down if it bit the postman, he was their son.

There was no escape from the love, whatever the agony, whatever the confusion.

"Is there anything you want?"

"I didn't come here to take anything. I came only to see my mother."

" D o you want money? I could go to the bank . . . "

"I need nothing. I have more money than I can spend."

"You're a whore . . . " And he bit on the word. He stepped back because for the briefest of moments he wondered if his son would strike him. Facing him was only the total calmness of the boy. It was, he thought, as if Colt had been through hell and fire and tempest and to be called an abusive name was merely trivial.

God, and he loved the boy. Colt's voice was gentle. "Were you happy in France?"

"I had a cause, I had something to fight for."

" Y o u didn't think that then."

"It was right what I did, I knew it was right."

" Y o u never thought about that."

"What do you think I did it for?"

"Because it was freedom."

His freedom had been being hunted, and never believing that he would be caught, tortured, shot, never believing that. Freedom had been making up his own rules, far from the armchair warriors at S.O.E., from the buggers who had never slept in a cave and never stripped a belt-fed machine gun and never run like the wind from a wired shunting yard.

"We're the same, Dad. You have to see that . . ."

He looked down into his son's face. God, and how he loved the boy.

He said, "Before you go, if you can come again, please . . ."

The boy kissed his cheek. He hugged the boy.

He stood on the landing and watched his son lope away lightly down the staircase.

The shadows had gathered around him, and his age and his loneliness. As he went back into the bedroom to prepare the night medicines he heard the kitchen door close on his son's back.

A wild and awful night, a night when the badgers moved without threat of disturbance, when the rabbits crushed their bellies against the ground and fed fast, when the fox coughed a hoarse bark to bring a screamed answer from a vixen, when a tawny owl clung with talons extended to the ivy skein of an old oak.

A night on which an Astra car was parked for safety in the driveway of the local police constable in the adjacent village, across the parish border.

The night for a man who gloried in the wild and who would never be trapped. Colt was at home. He was at one with the darkness and the elements. He was as free as the badger and the fox and the owl in the oak above him.

Standing in the black doorway of the pillbox, he did not consider what error of his had brought men from the Security Service and the F . B . I , to the village. In his mind were images of animals transported to the slaughterhouse; of beagles with masks on their heads so that they breathed only nicotine smoke all the way to the first shadows of lung cancer; of a polar bear, its brain damaged by captivity stress, in the zoo at Bristol; of chickens reared in confinement so close that they could not walk nor beat their wings; of a gin trap tight on a bear's leg, and the animal in its pain gnawing at the limb that it might find crippled freedom.

Fran was close to him. With a slow and deliberate movement she pointed away to his right, to the fringe of the wood, to where the wood was directly behind the Manor House. He saw the movements.

T i s a dull sight

To see the year dying,

When winter winds

Set the yellow wood sighing:

Sighing, O sighing!'

" F o r Christ's sake, Bill, shut u p . "

"Edward Fitzgerald, perfectly good poet, didn't hit the big lime like Tennyson, but . . ."

"You'll wake the whole village. Is that what you want?"

"Just didn't want you to be bored."

They had been in the wood for two hours.

" I ' m going to shift a few hundred yards along to get a clear view of the side of the house. Do you see the corner of the wood?

I'll be there. Sing out if you get lonely. Otherwise I'll be back before daybreak."

"Yeah, okay . . ."Erlich hoped his regret wasn't plain to hear.

He felt the shake of the bivouac as Rutherford crawled away, and heard the sounds of his body scraping away through the leaves. He heard the wind sigh and whistle after the sound of Rutherford's movement was gone. He heard the ram splatter onto the bivouac. At the house, through his monoglass, he saw nothing.

Rutherford took pleasure in his slow progress along the wood's edge. Knees. Elbow, Knees. Elbows. And all the while .weeping the twigs from his path, stopping every two or three minutes to study the house and sweep his binoculars over the gardens. Me found a patch of leaves, almost dry, under a beech close to the furthest edge of the treeline and shrugged his way down into their cover. He settled into a nightmarish reverie ol long nights of surveillance in Armagh. He wondered what absurd notion had possessed him to leave his flask behind. A gift from Penny's father. This was the last time he'd go on night exercises with windy Americans without his flask. Anyone who talked that much had to be scared. Probably allergic to rabbits.

The scream . . .

Shit . . .

The scream was desperation.

He was on his feet. The scream was in the air and in the trees.

Where, where was the scream?

The cry. Had to be Erlich.

The cry was pain and terror.

He charged, blundering through the trees, through the low branches and the brambles. He couldn't see a blind thing, and he ran with his arms outstretched in front of him, barging off trees and fighting and kicking his way through the undergrowth.

Gasping and running, knowing that he had heard Erlich's scream.

A lifetime to where he had left Erlich, through the lashing branches and the catching, tearing bramble undergrowth. And he hadn't a weapon. He had nothing more lethal than a pencil torch in an inner pocket.

He saw them, silhouetted against the fainter light of the night sky, two of them.

He saw the punching and the kicking, the frenzy.

He closed on them. No way that they could not have heard his approach, the bloody elephant's arrival. They must have heard him, and yet had not faltered from the blows and the kicks into the heaving and writhing shape of the bivouac. He had no gun and he had no weapon, and he didn't think about it. He hurled himself forward to get them away from the American, he threw himself at them. His hand flew at an arm, caught a sleeve, rough cloth. The two figures separating. He staggered from a kick to his shin bone. His hand scrabbled to stop himself from toppling, found material, clung to it, and a fist, gloved, smashed at his lace. He was falling, tumbling, out of their reach.

He yelled, "Stand or I shoot . . . "

And they were gone. Good fucking bluff. He didn't see them go. He was on his back, no shadows above him, no silhouette bodies. They were gone without a sound. He listened for them.

He heard the silence, and the wind gale in the trees and the rain driven around him, the moan of the American's pain.

He found the pencil torch in his inner pocket. He wriggled forward. He pulled back the bivouac cover. He shone the torch on his own face, so that Erlich would see it, know who was with hint, then he swung the torch down. It was a long time since he had seen the face of a man who had been systematically beaten and kicked.

That was Ireland. Not in Ireland now. In the English countryside, for God's sake. Blood all over the face, and an eye closing faster than paint dried. Rain falling on the face. Erlich was doubled up, knees against his chest, and his breath came in sharp hissed sobs.

"It's O . K . , Bill, they've gone."

"Thank Christ for the cavalry."

"Anything bust?"

"God knows."

Gently, he pulled Erlich upright. The blood ran from the cut over the American's right eye and from his nose.

The covert stuff, that didn't matter any more. There seemed to be a dog barking in the Manor House as they made their way across the field. Too late to worry about being spotted from the village. He limped from the blow on his shin bone, and because he had the full weight of Erlich on his shoulder. He had Erlich's arm wrapped round his neck and his throat, and the man was solid. They sloshed across the middle of the field and the wind and the rain lashed their faces. They ploughed through a gateway and into another field, and the lights of the pub car park came slowly to meet them. Rutherford's fear and shock gave way to anger that Erlich had let himself be jumped. He had probably been reciting Wordsworth. But greater than anger was his amazement. The man was a wreck, done over fit to break. Why? What in God's name
for?

And he hadn't the heart to tell Erlich that at least one of them had been a woman. When he had gripped at a sweater his fingers had caught a bra strap. Might just ruin Erlich's night altogether.

A car came past them fast, sprayed them with road water, heading away from the village. It was a long two miles to the next village, to the policeman's house.

Dr Tariq sipped at his fresh pressed juice, as he waited for the Colonel to be admitted. Dr Tariq had little respect for the military men of his country, but his contempt was kept concealed. They were the power of the regime, they were the provider of resources.

He had no interest in the executioners and the torturers and the interrogators of the regime. He was a scientist, he was responsible only to his work. A laboratory technician had come to him the previous month, spoken of a cousin taken into custody and no word of him had been heard by the family. Could the Director, please, please, use his highly esteemed influence? He had not picked up the telephone. It was not his business. Only his work was his business.

The Colonel, too, was all business. No niceties with the Colonel of Intelligence, Dr Tariq thought. The Colonel said the name.

The name was that of Frederick Bissett.

He repeated the name. "Frederick Bissett of the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston."

"And his rank?"

"Senior Scientific Officer."

"His department?"

"His identification card gives him access to the H3 building."

He stared out of the window of his office at the broken upper structure that had housed the Osirak reactor. The jagged, wrecked shapes of the crippled reactor were never far from his thoughts, as present as a most recent bereavement.

" H 3 is where a most acclaimed team of scientists work on the study of implosion, Colonel . . . Bissett, how could he be attracted?"

"Money, no doubt."

"You know that?"

The Colonel opened his briefcase. He passed to Dr Tariq a transcript of the message from London.

Dr Tariq read it and smiled faintly. "A Senior Scientific Officer, in that department, I would want him, Colonel, subject to your being absolutely satisfied that you are not importing a foreign spy into my team. To have any scientist from Britain's best team would be so exceptionally unusual as to create suspicion on this score, but I will grant that the circumstance of your discovering his possible willingness to join us are themselves so, well, so exceptionally unusual that I believe luck will be on your side."

Dr Tariq outlined the terms that could be offered to Frederick Bissett, and stated that he would have prepared, by that evening, a list of questions to be put to Frederick Bissett, before a deal would be struck.