CONDITION BLACK (8 page)

They did two hours on, four hours off. It was the first obstacle in his route from A1 Mansuriyah to Qara Tappah, and he could have ignored it, simply carried on, but that was not his way.

He had waited, motionless, until the frost had settled on his body.

The gag was across the trooper's mouth, and the pressure of Colt's knee was into the small of his back, and the sheer strength of Colt's arm took the trooper's wrists up into the blades of his shoulders.

He trussed the trooper so that he could not move his feet or his hands. On top of the gag, he forced into the trooper's mouth the trooper's own filthy handkerchief.

Where he had been a child, when the fox came at night around the barricaded chicken houses then the old bugger always scented the chicken house sides, left his stink, boasted that he had been there.

And it would amuse the Colonel to hear what he had done to the President's elite guard.

He would have a 90-minute start on them, maybe longer.

''I am afraid, Dr Bissett, thai ignoring facts does not make those facts go away."

It was a quarter past nine. It was a clear hour after Bissett would normally have been at his desk.

"Now, if we could, please, just go over the figures . . ."

He hated to be late It was the way thai he had been reared.

I

"Your salary as a Senior Scientific Officer currently runs at

£17,500. I am correct

He had heard Carol, only the week before, say that the man who delivered coal to hn house was paid £345 a week. For loading and unloading sacks of coal, and driving a lorry round the villages, that was £440 per annum more than a Senior Scientific Officer earned slaving for the defence of his country. That was the society they lived in. No account taken of intellect and value.

"Your wife does not work Don't misunderstand me, I am not implying that she should be working . . . I sometimes feel that a great many of out social problems at the moment, young people rampaging, are brought about by mothers going out to work . . . So, there is no other source of income coming into the household? Correct again?"

She had worked in the supermarket off Mulfords Hill for five and a half month-. It had been t he first time that he had really seen Sara in tears. Adam had fallen over in the playground, hit his head on a bench, been taken to hospital. The school hadn't had his number at A.W.E. The teachers couldn't ask Frank where his mother might be because his class was out for the day on a Project Course. The first Sara had known of Adam's injury was when she had turned up to collect him at the school gate. She'd told him about the looks aimed at her by Adam's teachers. That was the end of her working, and anyway the money had been peanuts.

"Your mortgage is currently set at £62,500, Dr Bissett, which is slightly excessive for the salary you command, but I do quite understand that you bought at the top of the market and that interest rates were then not at their present level."

They had made the move to Lilac Gardens in the summer of 1988. They had paid £98,000. They had known they were on the knife edge, and interest rates had been at 8 per cent. Sara had said that she just was not prepared to live any longer in the jerry-built little terrace at the bottom of the village.

" N o w , your salary works out at approximately £1460 per month, gross. Then, we've tax, insurance, local government rates, pension

contributions, and the mortgage. I would estimate that, allowing for your outgoings, you have around £600 a month at your disposal.

But that, of course, does not take into account the loan we made you at the start of the year. Six thousand five hundred, repayable over three years, plus of course interest. That's another £180 a month, without interest. You are behind on the interest, Dr Bissett, and you are two months behind on the r e p a y m e n t . . . "

The loan had been to buy the second-hand Sierra, and then had been topped up to cover repairs required by the M . O . T . ; and then increased again when Sara's Mini had just died on her, expired in the middle of the village with 110,000 miles on the tombstone. Sara had to have a car. And topped up again to pay for the repair of the flat roof over the kitchen, and the man who had done the work should have been prosecuted for fraud.

" D r Bissett, I hate to say this to a government employee, but

. . . private enterprise round here is on its knees for skilled and qualified people . . ."

"What I'm interested in is no use to the private sector. And I'm a research scientist, damn it, not a yuppie."

"So be it . . . Can you look for promotion, a better salary scale, a higher grade?"

"I've been
looking
for it for years, but I'm not in charge of promotion and the people senior to me in my department are
Home
of the most brilliant minds in England, and elsewhere for that matter."

The bank manager eased back in his chair. He was young and a Initially, flitting from branch to branch and all the time climbing.

His elbows rested on the leather padded arms of his chair, and his fingers were clasped comfortably in front of his chin.

"Something has to be done. We cannot go on like this, Dr Bisssett,"

Sara said that the exterior woodwork of the house was a disgrace and needed painting, and that the kitchen floor needed new vinyl, and that the hall carpet was awful. Sara said that if they couldn't do better than last year's holiday, a caravan in the rain in West Wales, then it wasn't worth bothering . . .

Bissett stood.

When he was angry then the Yorkshire surfaced again in his voice, the grate of the harsh streets of Leeds. So bloody hard he had fought to get those streets behind him. All that struggle, just to have this jumped-up little man lecturing him.

" T r y telling the government that 'something has to be done'.

Try telling bloody Downing Street 'we cannot go on like this'."

"Nobody forced you to buy that house."

Bissett stared at him. "Don't ever say anything as stupid as that to me again."

In his adult life he had never struck any person, certainly not Sara, not even his children in anger. He stood, looming over the manager's desk. His forehead beneath his curled brown hair was reddening. His spectacles had shaken down the arch of his nose.

His fists were clenched at the seams of his trousers. His breath came in short pants.

"Steady down, Dr Bissett."

He could see that his bank manager was further back in his chair, almost cowering.

The bank manager waited until Bissett was at the door, until he was sure of his safety.

"I have to say it again, Dr Bissett, we cannot go on like this."

The door slammed. The papers leaped on his desk. In fairness, the bank manager would concede, he could not see where the poor fellow could make another economy and continue to live a half-way acceptable life. But the man needn't have shouted . . .

Anyway, the whole thing was ridiculous, maintaining that white elephant when every school child knew that the Cold War was over and done with.

Erlich's morning was a write-off. He hadn't expected the red carpet to be unrolled for him, but he had thought that at last he would be at work, setting up his meetings, on the move. The Legal Attache 1

was once more apologetic, he had a late runner in his programme, a problem with a fraud extradition. There were problems with the warrant, and the Legal Attache was going to be down at New Scotland Yard for the morning, and probably for the afternoon.

Could Erlich manage eight o'clock the next morning?

He rang Rome, the Legal Attache's office, and spoke to the girl who typed his letters and answered his telephone. He didn't know when he'd be back and she should cancel everything for the next several days. A lunch with the
Capo dello Squadro
Anti-Terrorismo
that he had been waiting a year for, a session with a good guy in the
Guardia di Finanze,
and a squash game with Dieter who was number two to the Legal Attache, and he just didn't know whether he'd be back before the Little League All Stars trip to Naples and the game against the Sixth Fleet which was the high point of the season which they played now courtesy of the Italian sunshine into late fall. Everything on his desk to go into Pending.

He had never been a happy sightseer and until his work was done, until Harry Lawrence's killer was identified and caught he couldn't see himself playing the tourist at the Changing of the Guard, or the Tower of London, even Poets' Corner which he had longed to see, as a passionate student of English poetry . . .

that would have to wait. When this assignment was well and truly nailed he would ask Jo, long chance, if she could get over here. It would be a pleasure to share these glories with Jo. By mid morning he had been through the day's edition of the Herald Tribune. Under the dateline of Rome, that caught his eye, he read that increasing mystery surrounded the murder of Professor Zulfiqar Khan. It was now known that the body of the Professor who specialised in nuclear physics had been claimed by the Iraqi Embassy in Rome. It was not yet known what had brought the Professor to the city . . .

By the time he hud read the Herald Tribune from front page lead to back page comic strip, the maid had come to make up his room. There was a sniff of disapproval signifying that it was out of court for a grown man to be still in his bedroom in mid-morning, and not at a place of work.

Her vacuum cleaner drove him into the street, in search of a coffee shop.

Two espressos and a Danish pastry later, he was reduced to buying postcards. One for Jo. He had tried again in the early morning, and again the phone hadn't been picked up. He could have rung the C.B.S. office in Rome, and asked where she was, where they'd shipped her. But Jo never rang him at work, and he never rang her office secretary to find what flight she'd taken.

That was their way, their understanding. The
Herald Tribune
had told him that there was more confusion in Prague, more rioting in Zagreb, an O.P.E.C. meeting in Geneva, and a European summit starting that evening in Madrid. She could have been assigned to any one of them. He wouldn't have admitted it to Jo, but deep down he resented it when she was out of town and not picking up his calls. They met whenever she had a free evening and he had a free evening, and it wasn't often. It was even rarer that they could share a weekend in the villages round Orvieto.

They spent their evenings together in a
trattoria
on the square beside the Ponte Milvio or down in Trastevere, before a couple of hours at his place, or half a night at her apartment. They each said that it suited them, that kind of relationship. He wrote, 'Jo honey, will you pick up the goddam phone? It's me, your friend, and I need to hear your voice. Where are you? Maybe you're in London. Will look more closely at all the girls in future. Just in case.'

One for his mother. His mother had married Herbie Mason just three years after his father had been killed. They ran a hardware store and diner in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, serving the hikers and campers up on the Appalach-ian trail. He rarely heard from his mother, but he rang her each Christmas morning, wherever he was, and on her birthday, and he sent her maybe a dozen postcards a year.

One for his grandparents. They were his mother's people, they had an old weathered brick house close to the harbour moorings at Annapolis, Maryland. He was fond of them both. A bit correct for a small boy, a little formal, but they had been his proxy parents for school terms after his father's death, and after his mother had taken off with Herbie. Good people. They had never once criticised his mother's behaviour in their grandson's hearing. School terms in Annapolis, and holidays in the White Mountains, it could have been a lot worse. His grandfather was retired Navy, action in the Pacific and off Korea, where he had his own command.

If his father had lived he would now have been in his sixtieth year. Every time that he wrote postcards to his mother and to his grandparents memories of his father revived. Memories of a man going overseas in his best uniform. Memories of a man coming home for burial, with full military honours . . . Such a very long time ago.

He had once heard an Englishman say that what he knew of nuclear physics could be written on the back of a blackcurrant.

It was an expression that still gave him pleasure and he would have used it to describe his own limited grasp of the subject, but it would have been wasted on the sparrow-sized man across the big desk from him. The Colonel had swiftly appreciated that if he needed to describe Dr Tariq's sense of humour the backside of a blackcurrant was all he needed, and to spare.

Soldiering was what the Colonel understood. As a young paratrooper he had fought in the north against the Kurdish rebels. It was where his reputation had been forged. It was his battalion's heroic defence of their positions on the Basra to Baghdad road, when the rats from Iran had swarmed in their thousands from the marshlands, that had given him his present renown. He had commanded a unit of the Presidential Guard which provided close escort to the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. When the traitor scum, the creatures of the Al Daawa al Islamiya, last tried to assinate the Chairman, six of the Guard had been killed, the Colonel had taken a bullet to the stomach, but the Chairman had survived untouched. Rewards followed. The rewards of the Chairman could be generous. But the Colonel had seen to it that his name did not go forward for promotion. He could learn from the fate of those who had climbed too high. He would never be a rival, he would remain the loyal servant of the Chairman. Now he directed a section of the Military Intelligence unit concerned with the security of the state from threats outside its boundaries.