CONDITION BLACK (3 page)

The road was two hundred yards long and empty . . . It was as good a place as he could hope to find. He could remember the car pulling onto the verge 20 yards behind the target. He could rememeber calling out, because he wanted to separate the target from the man who masked him. He could remember the suppressed clattering noise of the firing on semi-automatic. The second man had lunged across the target, he could remember that, and he could remember that he had kept squeezing the trigger. He would have shot the second man anyway. It was too good a place to miss out on. But it would have been tidier if he could have separated them. It was just bad luck for the second man that it had been a good place. They had fallen, both of them, he could picture it exactly in his mind, and he could remember Kairallah, calling to him to get back to the car. There wasn't a great deal else to remember because it had all been pretty damn straightforward. Running for the car, the car going steadily, not too fast to the airport, and out onto the flight to Ankara. And even less to remember of the delay at Ankara before the connection to Baghdad. Actually, he had done well . . .

The thoughts, memories, lulled him. He had made his choice.

For the time being it was a one-bedroomed apartment on the sixth floor of the Haifa Street Housing Project. It was an open window looking out onto the wind-rippled waters of the Tigris and across to the A1 Jumhuriyah and A1 Ahrar bridges and over to the tower blocks of the foreign-money hotels. It was his bed, and he would lie on it.

He heard the scrape of the guard's feet as the man scrabbled to get to the door.

He heard the rap at the apartment's outer door. He pushed himself to his feet. He stood with his back to the open window.

The Colonel was a thick-set man. He smelled of lotion, from Paris. He was not tall, but there was nothing flabby about the weight of his body. He wore a plain olive-drab uniform, only the insignia of his rank on his shoulders, no medal ribbons. His calf-length paratrooper boots were not shined, they were streaked with the grey dust of the street.

He liked the Colonel. The Colonel, his patron, his friend, in his mind was without bullshit, but tonight there was no warmth, no smile even.

"Were you seen?"

"Seen? What do you mean, seen'"

"Were there any eyewitnesses to the shooting?''

" N o . "

" I s there any possibility you could be identified?"

"Nobody saw me."

"Think hard. Could anybody have seen you to associate you with the car even?"

" T h e road was empty."

" Y o u were seen by nobody?"

"Only by the target, and whoever was with him . . . "

"Whoever . . . ?"

"They're both dead."

" D o you know who it was who was with the target?"

"I did not ask his name before I shot him, no."

He stood very still. He knew that the target was a writer, an exile. He had been told what the writer wrote about the regime and the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. He had been told also, in whispered confidence, that two attempts against the target had failed. He was the Colonel's card . . .

Below him he could hear the passing wail of sirens, a familiar sound after dark had fallen over the city. The squads from the Department of Public Security always did their work at night, taking into custody those they claimed were a threat to the regime.

And the sirens escorted their prisoners from the Department to the Abu Ghraib gaol, and those who had not survived interrogation from the Abu Ghraib gaol to the Medical City Mortuary on the other side of the Al Sarafiyah Bridge.

" Y o u shot an American, Colt . . ."

"I killed the target."

"A C.I.A. American . . ."

The boy laughed out loud. He laughed in the face of the Colonel, and at the watcher standing against the door.

" S o what , . . ?" he said.

"He was an intelligence officer."

"It was a good street, got me? It was great. It was dead, there was no one No nannies, maids, deliveries, really good. The target, he was already fidgety, I couldn't follow him all day, not a target who was that sharp. The street was right. If the American hadn't gone then he had my face, and he had the car. He had to go . . . and he should have chosen his friends more carefully."

At last the Colonel smiled, and there was the gravel growl of his chuckle. "And you did nothing stupid in Athens . . . ?"

" Y o u taught me what to d o . "

". . . Nothing Colt-like, nothing wild? What did you do, Colt?

No girls, no boasting?"

" Y o u taught me. I'm clean. It was a good street, Colonel.

There was an opportunity and I took it."

" Y o u could not be identified?"

" I ' d go back, to Europe, because I know that I cannot be traced."

The Colonel laid his broad hands on the young man's shoulders.

He looked into the calm of the face, into the clear eyes.

"It was well done, Colt."

Amongst those few who knew Zulfiqar Khan, and what work he did, news of his killing spread fast. And with the news, fear.

In Paris, an engineering specialist in deep tunnelling in heavy rock strata, home on leave, made up his mind there and then to turn his back on the remaining two and a half years of his contract.

The tunnelling that the Frenchman was paid - and handsomely

- to supervise was off the road to Arbil, close to the village of Salahuddin, due north of Baghdad. The area so far excavated was the size of a football pitch, and deep enough for three levels of laboratories and workshops that would be concrete-lined. One more floor was required. The cavern was eminently suitable for the work intended for it. It was safe from air attack and shielded by the Karochooq mountain mass from satellite photography that would tell the siory of the purpose for which this rock cave was fashioned, News ol Dr Khan's murder had eddied amongst the foreign specialists on the project. By midday word had reached all the hard hat staffers. By late that night, two of those staffers were at Baghdad International airport. They had driven the two hundred miles from their Portacabin compound in the village of Salahuddin at high speed. They waited for the first flight out of Iraq on which there were seats. It might be to Jeddah, or to Karachi, or to Budapest.

At the airport was an Italian who specialised in the fitting of the argon gas filters necessary for the hot cell boxes. The Italian sat close to his friend on the front row of the plastic-coated seats, and studied every two, three, minutes the T . V . monitor that would announce the next flight out. The friend had an office in the same block at Tuwaithah. The friend, who was an engineer involved in the precision shaping of chemical explosive, had that morning received a letter bomb which by chance had failed to detonate. They had been at the airport for six hours, waiting for a flight, any flight out of Iraq, going anywhere.

Erlich was breaking the rules. A Fed on assignment overseas with the ranking of Assistant Legal Attache must always work through local law-enforcement agencies. Back at F . B . I . H . Q . , where the book ran the show, they would have been climbing the walls in the Office of Liaison and International Affairs if they had known that he was out on his own. At the very least, he should have had a local policeman with him. At best, he should have been waiting until the morning and then politely requesting a desk and a telephone and an interpreter somewhere in the back reaches of their Counter-Terrorism building. But Erlich was his own man.

He had been his own man on the training run at Quantico and it had not been held against him there. And his own man in Atlanta, where his straight talking and his independence had won him his next posting. And his own man in the Washington Field Office, the CI-3 team, and putting in the longest hours and never a word of complaint, and that had won him the job in the Attache's office in Rome. It was not his intention that he would spend the rest of his life as a Special Agent. Ten years, he had set himself, to running a Field Office. Twenty years, he reckoned, to an Assistant Director's desk in Headquarters. It was a break, coming down to Athens, and a good break should be grabbed with both fists.

The sadness was that it came from the killing of Harry. The excitement was that it was a really brilliant break. Sadness and excitement, both already seeking their own compartments.

At the edge of his flashlight beam he could see the dampened flowers, flattened now by the steady fall of rain. He wasn't interested in an examination by torchlight of the exact spot where Harry Lawrence and the contact had fallen. He paced out an arc of twelve paces, looked for the killer's place. He could be very thorough . . . A body on a garbage dump nine miles out west of Atlanta. Female, eighteen, black. Believed to be the victim of a serial killer, probably the fourth. She'd fought, her fists were bruised to show she'd fought, and there was nothing to work from.

Over to the right of the dump was a high tree, holding the storks'

nests. Erlich, rookie Fed, had demanded of the local police that they get a man up there, up to the nests, that they get each of the nests down, that they sift each of the nests on the very long chance that the storks had lifted a fibre of torn clothing to bind a nest wall.

They'd done it, too, the police, and they'd found nothing . . .

After fifteen minutes he was crouched over tyre marks on the grass verge between the pavement and the road. Possibly the tyre threads of the Opel Rekord, that was burned through and useless for evidence prints.

After 40 minutes, on his hands and knees, peering into the-beam of his flashlight, he found the butt end of a small cigar. He had already found chewing-gum wrapping, sweet papers and cigarette filters faded by weather. The butt end of the cigar was fresh. Everything else he had collected he abandoned in the street drain. The butt end of the cigar was three paces from where the tyre treads were clearest, probably where the car had braked. He heard a shout.

He looked up. On the pavement opposite a small boy watched him. The shouting grew fiercer, and the gates opposite were thrown open. It was the woman who had put the flowers on the place where Harry Lawrence had died, and there was a small toy dog, a Pekinese, yapping by her ankles. The child went to her, reluctant to leave. The gates closed.

From his pocket, Erlich took a small plastic bag, and into it he dropped the cigar butt.

It was a beginning.

The wind came from the west. It blew hard on the beach and the militia men who kept guard, protecting the Sheraton and the Ramada and the Tel Aviv Hilton against a landing by guerrillas, turned their faces from the stinging sand.

Two streets behind the sea front the cafes on Ben Yehuda were quiet. There were five of them at one table and they were the only ones still outside. The men drank beer from the bottles, and one of them passed round the cigarettes he had bought on the flight, and the blond girl contributed a half-bottle of Stock brandy. They no longer talked about the substance of the mission.

The debriefing had gone on through the afternoon and early evening in the sound-proofed rooms of their headquarters. The mission was completed. They would probably not work as a team again, and certainly it would be many months before the girl, on any pretext, work or vacation, was permitted to leave the country.

Drinking at a pavement cafe on Ben Yehuda was for each of them a way of signing off from the mission. There was the senior officer who had authorised the mission after assembling the detailed biography of Professor Zulfiqar Khan. There was his deputy who had collated the intelligence that gave the itinerary of the Pakistani. There was the girl who had played the whore and who would go home that night to her husband. There was the man who had killed Khan and who later would go barefoot into the children's room to kiss them and not wake them. There was the man who had been with him and taken the briefcase from the hotel room and who in the morning would go back to the Golani Brigade stationed on the Lebanese border and who would be chided by his fellow officers for having taken leave while the military workload was intense.

Only when the cafe owner remonstrated with them did they leave.

In the middle of Ben Yehuda they kissed each other. It was the only display, through the days and nights of tension, of their emotion. They kissed and they split.

The senior officer walked with the girl. When he waved down a taxi, he saw that her hand ferreted in her bag. As the taxi stopped, he saw that she pushed back onto her finger her narrow and plain gold ring. He opened the door for her.

"It was necessary," he said. " I f we do nothing, if we sit back and watch . . . the State is finished. If that dwarf, Tariq, is permitted to build them a bomb . . . "

The senior officer of the Mossad drew his finger across his throat then quietly shut the taxi door, waved, walked away.

Colt went to the Khan Murjan in the old quarter only when someone else picked up the bill. This time he had the table to himself. The Colonel was paying.

Prawns and avocado, lamb, cheese, fruit, and French wine. It was his favourite eating place in Baghdad. There was a small band away from the tables, and the singer had started as he had begun his meat and called for a second bottle. He was not actually hungry, and it was rare for him to drink, but they were paying and he would make sure they noticed, and - apart from the singer the Khan Murjan was a hell of a fabulous place. A great arched ceiling of close brickwork, carpets too beautiful to put a dirty shoe on. The singer was crap, but he could handle the singer, just switch that amplified voice off in his head, just as he could shake out of his head the recoil thud of the Ruger on semi-automatic . . .

He had walked through the old city with the guard a dozen paces behind. The city was his home, and the Ruger, and the Khan Murjan restaurant, they were as much of a home as he was now at liberty to make for himself. Light years ago, at his school, and Colt of course not a part of it but compelled to sit through it,
Murder in the Cathedral.
The troublesome priest. The Colonel had trusted him to rid the Chairman of the darts of the writer with the poisoned pen. Two had failed, he had succeeded. One had failed to penetrate airport security at Budapest, got himself arrested and deported. A second had failed on the streets of Zagreb, lifted by the Yugoslavs, locked up and the key thrown away. Colt had succeeded. He knew why he had been chosen.