CONDITION BLACK (47 page)

He could walk out through the back door and put his gun back in his holster, and he could tell the guys from the Special Weapons unit that there was no way Bill Erlich was going to do the right thing by his friend if it meant climbing a staircase into darkness.

His decision.

He could shift his ass up the stairs and search till he found the bastard, and hit down each door, and belt open each cupboard, and kick over each bed, until he found the mother.

He wasn't as good as when he had come in. It was going away from him, ebbing with each of the slow seconds as the time slipped by him. His eyes had never left the staircase. All the time he had expected to see the barrel that was the integral silencer and the fast-coming bulk shape of Colt behind it.

He started to move. The man was in front of him.

There was the raised hatch that cut off the barman's place from his customers. His route would be through the hatch and behind the counter and onto the bottom step of the staircase.

All the time watching the opening to the staircase . . .

He heard the crash of the breaking glass.

Erlich half swivelled.

The man had stood, and he had a glass in his hand with the drinking rim broken, and the man stood across Erlich's path and the broken glass was his weapon.

"Put that down."

"You're not going up."

"Get out of my way."

"Not going up."

The sound of their voices . . . Erlich thought Colt would be at the top of the staircase. It was goddam crazy. Why not send him a message Western Union, Federal Express . . .

"You'd better move, buddy, or you're going to get yourself hurt."

The man held his ground. Erlich hardly saw the broken drinking end of the glass. Eyes on the staircase. The staircase was Colt.

Colt was danger. Danger was not a nutcake with a broken glass, like he was high on smack or hash. Danger was Colt, sober and cold. He took a pace forward.

He saw, from the corner of his eye, that the glass was aimed at his face.

Erlich tried to sound calm, "Stand back."

The glass was held at arm's stretch. The broken end was a foot from his face.

"He's my friend."

"I don't even know who you are."

"I am Colt's friend."

He saw the veins in the man's throat, and he saw the tremble in the wrist that held the glass. This was the man he had seen at the airport. Then he had been a craven passenger of Colt's. He was a man with no pedigree of violence, who just once and only once had wound himself to the point of no return.

" H e ' s a psychopath, your friend. A killer, do you understand that?"

The glass was in front of Erlich's face.

" H e gave me a chance, no one else did."

"You're not my quarrel, buddy, so put that thing down and if you know what's good for you, you'll walk right through that back door with your hands in the air."

Erlich went forward. The glass rose towards his eyes.

" N o one else," the man screamed.

He felt the judder of pain at his cheek and his chin.

Erlich fired.

He saw the man pitch away from him. He could not remember the name that Rutherford had shouted at the airport. He heard nothing. He saw the glass fall and break apart. He heard nothing . . . He saw the blood dribble on the floor and the blood splattered on the wall and over a glass case with a pair of stuffed pheasants.

The rain fell hard about him. It ran on his face. The rain and the wind that drove it and the cloud mist were his freedom.

It was his joy when he had felt the sting of the rain as he had first pushed up the skylight window. The happiness had been with him all along the roof gulley, and after he had dropped down beside the old water barrel. He had rejoiced to be free as he had crawled flat on his stomach along the rows of cabbages and between the stems of the laurel bushes that made the overgrown edge between the outbuildings and the open field.

In the moment that he reached the tree line of the Top Spinney he heard the clatter of two shots.

He did not pause.

His freedom was the night around him.

It was only when all the other passengers had gone and he was left with the cabin crew that the three men came on board. They shook his hand.

It was the day before Christmas. There was a carol playing over the loudspeakers in Arrivals, and he saw through the tinted glass that there was a sleet storm blowing in from the west and towards London.

He had no luggage. He wore the same clothes in which he had fled into the haven of the Embassy, and he carried only an overcoat that the Station Officer had said he would certainly need even if he was only in London for ten minutes. It was too small for him but it would be a keepsake. They took him to a V.I.P.

lounge, and they poured him a drink.

The man called Percy Martins was saying, ". . . No morality at all, I don't think that he understood the meaning of right or wrong, but most certainly blessed by a totally destructive charm completely undermined Bissett, I gather. The problem was his father, a war hero, a maverick soldier operating behind enemy lines. Colt tried to emulate him, but never succeeded.

"We're not entirely sorry that we missed him, not at my level anyway. They had dogs out at first light, but there was nothing for them to follow, the rain did for the scent. Frankly, when he does turn up again it's going to be headaches all round, but his Hail's cold right now.

"It's what took so long to negotiate your release. Didn't catch on straight away because it cost us a week or so to break the code they were using. Baghdad didn't believe Colt was not captured.

Wanted him back in exchange for you. Although the London end never had the nerve to propose it. They even sent a chap disguised as a florist to quiz the locals. We put
him
in the bag, I'm happy to say. Seems that the man running Colt was the Colonel whose voice you recorded at Tuwaithah, same Colonel who kicked up a fuss on the Embassy doorstep. The voices match exactly. He wasn't going to let you go without that he got his Colt in return, but wiser heads prevailed - I have some good friends in quite high places - and anyway the ubiquitous Colonel has fallen from grace. No longer on the letterhead.

"Anyway, you're safely out and we've a trade mission going in next week, so all's well that ends well. Cheers."

The Swede saw the youngest of the three men check his watch, and nod. The Swede drained his glass. Martins clasped him by the hand.

Two of them took him on, and Martins stayed in the lounge.

He strode, long stepping paces, between the two men. He was happy to walk. For the last five weeks he had been allowed only one daily circuit of the Embassy compound, after dark always and with the military policeman tracking him. He was glad to start to work off the stiffness in his knees.

They moved across the concourse, threading their way between queues of holiday-makers.

Hobbes said, "It's all luck in this business, or lack of it. It was Bissett's luck that he found himself up against an F . B . I , agent called Erlich. Erlich's mission in life was to hunt down this Colt.

"Wild horses weren't going to stop him. He shot at Colt in a terminal as crowded as this one is, and killed a young man in my department. He practically tore the pub apart looking for Colt when he had finished off Bissett. I saw Erlich off when he went, Iback to his base in Rome. Couldn't help feeling sorry for him.

Be a waste if he quit. He's a very thorough policeman. He'd found a cigar butt of Colt's in Athens at the scene of crime where Colt shot the joker from the Agency, and he went through Colt's home in Wiltshire like a terrier till he found a matching butt in a dustbin. D.N.A. test proved it from the saliva, good enough for a court of law. Here or in the States. And it will come to that, in my view. It may be convenient in some quarters that Colt disappeared, but with his Colonel gone in Baghdad he has no bolt-hole. He'll turn up sooner or later and Erlich will be waiting for him. I'll be waiting for him and every policeman in Britain too, but the conviction will be down to Erlich."

Only one of them went with the Swede through the side doors that by-passed the emigration formalities.

They went past the armed police, and the dogs, and the El Al security teams.

They were allocated seats immediately behind the forward place that was already occupied by the sky marshal.

Tork said, "You'll be wanting to know about Bissett. It's only what I heard today from "Sniper" Martins - miserable bastard, isn't he? - between the time my flight came in and you landed.

The conclusion seems to be that Bissett was just another unhappy little man who was offered the moon and was daft enough to reach for it. He was actually prepared to go and work for the Iraqis because his bank manager was nagging him, and his supervisor was bullying him. It was as pathetic as that. The very last thing he did in his whole life was probably the only thing he did that deserved admiration. Poor old Bissett, standing up for the man he thought was his friend, and getting himself shot for it. Saved us a deal of bother. We wouldn't have
wanted
to prosecute, and there wasn't much evidence that could have been brought against him if we had.

" T h e general opinion at Atomic Weapons is that Bissett really had very little to offer the Iraqis. It was all a bit of a confidence trick. You know what it is, the people who do the recruiting always talk up their client. I think that when they found out what they'd got, there would have been some pretty unhappy gentlemen at Tuwaithah.

"The story put out was that he had got himself involved with a lunatic fringe outfit called the Animal Liberation Front and that rather than face the shame of exposure he took his own life,

"We were quite good about it to his family. We cocked up some story about a promotion having just been agreed, so ins widow gets a better pension, and more importantly she doesn't holler her mouth off. She's left the district already and the house is up for sale.

"It's the old story, it never happened. There was no Colt, there was no Bill Erlich, there was no Frederick Bissett . . ."

The aircraft cabin was filling.

There was the frantic stampede of passengers along the aisle of the aircraft. For the life of him Tork could not understand why it was that grown men and women, all with their own seats, needed to behave as if there were one last place at the back of a Moscow bread queue. Noise all around them, shouting dinning in their ears.

Tork said, "You'll be working at Dimona, I suppose. We're just a little way back from the seafront in Tel Aviv. Do stay in touch, this is my card . . .

"The sadness of it is that what you do, I do, may only
delay
the work at Tuwaithah and Mount Karochooq. It's a dangerous world, and I doubt that we have made it less dangerous for more than a few months. What my masters and your masters will do with those few months, God knows. My guess is that my masters will wake up to the threat when it's too late, to the terrifying reality of a nuclear capability in Iraq. But then, that's the sort of people they are . . ."

The engines were on, gathering power.

The Swede slept.