CONDITION BLACK MASTER

by Unknown

  "I'm sure you'll do what's necessary."

  "Well, we won't be scaremongering."

  Rutherford said quietly, "The sort of people who could help the Iraqi programme, how many are we talking about?"

  "Twenty, not more."

  "It would be good if you could keep a weather-eye on them, those 20."

  " M r Rutherford, take a message back to London . . . Those 20 men and women are some of the finest brains employed in government science. They are all, each last one of them, people who deserve society's respect. If you think that, on the basis of some intelligence tittle-tattle, I am going to order phone intercepts, mail opening, bank statement access, against our foremost individuals, then . . . "

  Rutherford stood up. "I'll tell them in London that the Iraqis will have to look elsewhere."

  Again, he could not fault them. He presumed they had learned from the Soviets, but then they might just as well have learned it off the British. They told him enough for him to know that it was foolproof whether it had come from the Soviets or from the British.

  They told Colt, the two men that he met in mid-morning in the puddled car parking area on Wimbledon Common, that they had used the scatter and disperse procedure. They told him that there would always be at least one car from the Security Service or from Special Branch watching the front of the Iraqi delegation's building. They told him that their tactic was to overwhelm the watchers. The Military Attache and two Second Secretaries, who were sensitive and known to the Service and the Branch, had left the building one after the other. One had turned right down the street, two had gone left. Three trails to follow, two cars at most for the job . . . Two minutes later, the two men had left the building. They had come via taxi, underground train, mainline train, and taxi again.

  He called the taller of the two Faud, and the shorter Namir.

  Faud had joked that he was listed as being on the staff of the Cultural Centre in Tottenham Court Road, and Namir had said that he was listed as a chauffeur to the Commercial Attache. Faud had pointed out the rubbish bin in the car park that was emptied on Mondays and Fridays. Namir had said that a message could be left there on any Sunday or Thursday, and that the bin would be checked by himself on those evenings. Faud had shown Colt the decoded telex from Baghdad, Namir had burned it with his cigarette lighter when Colt had read it.

  Colt had the address. He had his start point.

  And he was told that he had done well, that he was a favoured son, that there was great pleasure at the sending to Hell of Saad Rashid, the thief.

  The Metro Vanden Plas went first.

  He was down the road, on the verge. Straight after the Vanden Plas came the Saab Turbo. He saw the B . M . W . come out and cross the traffic and it was nothing short of miraculous that it missed the gravel lorry and when the lorry driver hammered his horn she gave him two fingers. There was the E-type and the Audi. He had time to smoke a small cigar before the Fiat crept out of the gates. The Fiat with the A registration, that would be the car. His engine had been idling. He allowed a van and an estate to get in front of him before he came off the verge. Colt did not know the name of the woman, only that he was to follow her because her husband worked as a scientist at the Atomic Weapons Establishment. He followed her off the main roads, and through a housing estate. When he saw her at her front door, her sketch pad under one arm and rummaging in her bug for her key, Colt thought her a good-looking woman.

  On every house there was a Neighbourhood Watch sticker. Colt had driven to Newbury and had bought a calculator and an accounts ledger and a book of receipt dockets. He sat, now, in the car in Lilac Gardens. He had positioned himself directly under a street light. He invented receipts, and he entered those receipts in the accounts ledger. He wore a clean shirt and a tie.

  He was the sales representative clearing his day's paperwork. He was the rep who had found a quiet place to get his paperwork tidied up before his last appointment of the day.

  He was 75 yards from the front of the house, under the light, positioned so that he faced the junction of Lilac Gardens with Mount Pleasant. He had seen the wife again. He had seen her go out in her car, and he had watched her back with her two small boys. It was important for him to know the numbers of the household, and later he would watch for the bedroom lights so that he would know where the family slept, but that would be later. He watched the men of Lilac Gardens coming home from their day's work. He saw a Cavalier pull into the forecourt of the house to the right. He saw a flash Ford, a newer model than he recognised, accelerate up the cul-de-sac, brake, and turn squealing into the opened garage of the house to the left. Colt thought that he had never before watched the herd of workers actually come home. He saw the lights of the Sierra. He had never, himself, worked in his life, he didn't count the part time that he had thrown in with the farmers around the village, harvest-time tractor driving. The Sierra was slowing. There had always been money from his mother for what he needed, beer money, cigarette money, petrol money. He had never gone short, even in Australia, always picked up a bit here and there. Now of course he had in his hip pocket the fat brown envelope that had been handed to him in the car park on Wimbledon Common. The headlights of the Sierra caught his face then swung away, turned onto the concrete and stopped behind the Fiat. He saw the man who came out of the car.

  There was a light rain. He flicked the windscreen wipers across once, killed them.

  He saw the sports jacket. He saw the dark hair. He saw the man run with his briefcase to the front door. Colt saw the face of his target.

  An electric fan purred in the corner, its face traversing a narrow arc, and every few seconds the papers on the desktop gently lifted, then fell back.

  There were filing cabinets, each drawer with a solid pad-lock fastening it. There was a floor safe, old enough to have carried the papers of the founding fathers. There was a desk, and hard chairs against the walls. No decorations of any kind.

  Typical of them, Tork thought. That room symbolised everything that he admired about the men of the Mossad. No frills, no bullshit.

  "What you are suggesting is blatantly ridiculous."

  "I'm not their apologist," Tork said.

  "Arc they too stupid to interpret the threat?"

  "I simply cannot say what they have or have not read into it."

  "If the Iraqis were prepared to use chemical agents against their own people, their Kurds, would they hesitate to use a nuclear device against us? They have the Condor missile, capable ol reaching any of our cities. A missile with Condor's range is not designed to carry a sackful of conventional explosive."

  "We must assume that Century is au Jait on Condor and its current state of development." With his hand Tork flapped away thr smoke from the Israeli's cigarette. If he ever developed cancer of the lungs it would be from passive smoking in the offices of the Mossad.

  "And do they also know that Dr Tariq has recently purchased 15 kilos of weapons-grade plutonium?"

  "Has he now?" Tork wrote a sharp note in his pocket pad.

  "And they want an even bigger picture drawn for them?"

  "I think what it is, is that Century, in consultation no doubt with the boffins, regards it as inherently improbable that the programme directors at Tuwaithah would dream of targeting a British scientist. So much so that they - well, obviously there are more plausible targets - want something pretty specific before they are willing to turn Sellafield or Aldermaston upside down looking for Iraqis under the bed. At least, that's the gist of it."

  "So, they will do nothing until there is a warhead on the Condor, the Middle East at Baghdad's mercy? Most politic."

  "In a separate communication," Tork said, "my own Desk Head asked particularly that I should say that he hoped very much that you would be in a position to give them something more. Then he'll go straight in to bat. That's to say . . ."

  " Y e s , yes, we know all about batting, Tork. This is not cricket.

  This is survival."

  There was a cursory
handshake. He was escorted from the building.

  He liked to walk. He felt that when he walked on Ben Yehuda, and on the other arteries of Tel Aviv, then he could soak up something of the atmosphere of the society on which he had reported to London for the last eleven years. There was much in that society which he disliked. His private opinion, never expressed, was that the Israeli military had demeaned its reputation in its handling of the intifada war against the Palestinian teenagers. And there was much in that society which he admired.

  His private opinion was that the men and women of the Mossad left his own Service for dead. But they were ruthless, the case officers of the Mossad, and he wondered what poor devil, living a buried life of danger, would be ordered to produce "more" that the hesitations of Century might be quelled.

  "I'll take them," Frederick said.

  "Are you sure?"

  " I ' d like to."

  "I've got a splitting headache."

  "I'll take them."

  " I t would be marvellous . . ."

  "I'll do it."

  She couldn't quite believe it, that Frederick would take the boys swimming. He never took them. Not to Cubs, nor to the Saturday morning soccer.

  "Has something happened?"

  "Should it have done?"

  " A t work?" Hope in her voice.

  "Just another bloody day in another bloody factory."

  She turned away. She didn't want him to see her disappointment. She went to get the boys' costumes and their towels. When she came downstairs again the boys were at the front door, and she could see the way they looked at their father, hesitant because of the change in a precious routine. They were super swimmers, that's what she'd been told last month at the pool, and they should be encouraged. Well, that was encouragement, their father taking them.

  "Watch Frank's freestyle, won't you? Adam, you'll show Daddy how you can do backstroke now?"

  Sara kissed Frederick's cheek.

  She saw them through the door.

  She waved them off. It was three years since she had last packed her bag and started to fill suitcases with the boys' clothes.

  It was before they had put the small house on the market and moved to Lilac Gardens. It hadn't been a particular row, just an accumulation of tension and frustration and the slow building of the ice wall that blocked communication with each other. As she had packed and filled the suitcases and bags she had not thought through where she would have headed for. Not her mother's home, where she would have been crippled by the recrimination of what had taken her into this ill-fitted marriage, God, no. Not any friend's home, because she had no friends with whom she was close enough to share the agony of a failed relationship. It would have been a bed and breakfast place somewhere. And that afternoon he had come home early because he was sickening with the 'flu that was going round, and she had kicked the bags under the bed. She had decided that she would stay, that they would exist together. There was still the sensation of Frederick's cheek on her lips. So stiff, so taut, as if the muscles of his face were in spasm. God, the poor man. Poor old Frederick . . .

  He sat in the gallery above the pool, watched the man who walked alongside the pool calling encouragement to a small boy struggling with a backstroke. The man walked barefoot, carrying his shoes with his socks hanging from them.

  He could have done with something to eat. He hadn't eaten that morning, nor that afternoon, nor that evening. He'd have to find time to eat, because if he didn't eat then the motion of his stomach would wake the dead. What he would really have liked to have eaten was a bowl of pistachio nuts and a plate of lamb filled with rosemary and spiced rice at the Khan Murjan.

  His eyes were never off the man, not for the 75 minutes that the man was at the pool with two boys.

  "So it's Indian country."

  Down there, Custer would be messing his pants."

  ''Hostile natives . . . ?"

  ''If you'd jummped out of a hit Phantom over North Vietnam then you'd get a better welcome than down there,"

  Ruane had his shoes on the desk, spotless and polished "Did he do it?"

  Erlich said, "Not necessarily, according to the local lawman.

  He says that it might have been thought a police cair, or they might have thought it was Customs and Excise snooping to check whether the farmers are using iheir tractor diesel in their cars They're just not very friendly people down there."

  " D o you think he's there?"

  "I don't know but I know he's close. He shot that Iraqi in Clapham Junction, that's for sure, Dan."

  Ruane pushed bai across his desk the five-page report that Erlich had hammered out once he had returned from the country Each page was now initialled by the Legal Attache for trans mission to Washington and Athens. Erlich was calm now. His anger had been steadily dissipated in the bath at the policeman's house, and on the platform of the railway station, and on the train back to London, and in the accommodation on South Audley Street where he had hung out his wet clothes and changed into clean, and when he had sat at his desk and punched out the report on the hard scene of Colt in London and the killing. He thought Ruane was great, no post-mortem about the car, not a word about going off alone without consultation. He only said,

  "Where do you go next?"

  "Back to Rutherford, in case he's forgotten me. I'll put some hassle under him."

  Ruane said, "They like to piss on us, Bill. If they do then you catch it in a bucket and chuck it back at them."

  9

  The cat eyed Colt.

  It was marmalade and huge, with a fluffy tail. He had seen it put out of the house with the Cavalier.

  As he came up off the roadway, flitted towards the garage door, the tomcat was watching him. Its back arched briefly and there was a fast spit from its mouth, just to warn him. He was the interloper on the tomcat's territory. The torn cat scented, tail lifted, against a rear wheel of the Sierra, then relaxed, came and rubbed its head against Colt's shin. The brute had a purr like a lion cub's growl. It was a hell of a cat . . . He didn't need his torch, not until he was inside.

  The whole of the cul-de-sac was quiet. It was past two o'clock and three hours since the cat had been put out. There were no lights on in the houses on either side of the target's house. There was a light on the landing of the target's house, no bedroom lights that he could see from the front, no downstairs lights. He stood in shadow at the side of the house. He took his time, looked steadily and carefully around him. Neighbourhood Watch country, he peered across the cul-de-sac at the houses opposite, those from which he was visible. All the curtains were motionless, drawn tight.

  He reckoned the time was as good as any time would be. There was no door through the wickerwork to the back of the house, so he went past the Cavalier, to the garden door of that house.

  Not locked. He was in deep shadow once he had pulled the garden door to behind him. His torch battery was old, little more than a glow thrown, and that was good enough to show him the watering can and the wheelbarrow and the dustbin. He avoided them all. He came down the passageway between the house and the garage wall. At the end of the passageway, he came to the fence that divided the gardens of the two properties. It too was wickerwork, and in a terrible state, five foot high and all over the place. Big breath. Colt held two panels gently then firmly apart and stepped through.

  There had been no alarm box on the front, and there was no box high on the back wall.

  He could see into the kitchen. There was light coming from the upper landing into the hall and through the kitchen door. He crouched down on the patio by the kitchen door and listened.

  There was occasional distant traffic on the main road that was beyond the bottom of the garden and the line of houses beyond.

  He couldn't see those houses because conifers had been planted when Lilac Gardens was built. He could see the washing-up left in the sink for the morning, and he could see the frame over which were draped the towels and the swimming trunks. He had learned what to do from Sissie
. Sissie was better at it than Micky. Sissie had the small neat fingers, and the patience. Before they had gone to the home of the bastard who made his living from experiments on animals, before they had beaten the shit out of him, Sissie had shown Colt how to pick a mortice lock. Sissie had told him that people put a Chubb and a Yale on their front door, and economised at the back with a simple mortice, and she had been right about that bastard's house, and she would have been right about this one.

  Poor little Sissie, doing seven bloody years . . . Straight, simple, opening the mortice with three inches of wire.

  The door opened.

  Don't hurry, that's what Sissie and Micky had said. He sat on the doorstep and took the thick pair of wool socks from his anorak pocket, drew them on over his trainers. Colt eased the door far enough open for his body to pass inside, then pushed it to. He went through the kitchen. What he wanted would not be in the kitchen. He went through to the hall and the bottom of the stairs.

  Again, he listened.

  He heard a boy's cough, and the creak of movement in a bed.

  He thought the boy coughed in his sleep. The sitting room and the eating area ran the length of the house. The curtains were drawn at each end of the long room. Torch on. Papers on the table, letters and blank sheets that had been covered with pen-cilled columns of figures and an account balance sheet. Thin rubber gloves on his hands, bought from the all-night chemist in Reading before he had gone for the burger to stop the howl in his stomach. Sissie would have thrown up in her cell, would have cried her heart out, if she had known that he had actually sunk so low as to go for a fast-food burger. Poor little Sissie . . . Don't ever hurry. She'd been the one who always took most care over her personal security. He'd never known how they screwed up, what took the filth to the squat. Sissie would have been taking her time, would never have rushed as she moved around a target's house, and she had taught him well.