CONDITION BLACK MASTER

by Unknown

  Colt was to be found, shot, and forgotten.

  Would Barker resign? Would he hell! He was a man who took an order.

  The technicians had put on their heavy coats and taken their bread and goat's cheese and their sweet tea out onto the verandah below. The Swede was often alone in his office for that hour of the day. Today there was the music of Beethoven in his ears, the Seventh, and even that beloved symphony was not enough to calm him. He could set his watch from the time they left to the time they would return, his two assistants. He would be alone for an hour. The Colonel had not, so far as he knew, come back.

  He could hope for a telephone call, and hope that the rifle microphone could pick up whatever was said by the Director if he were to he telephoned by the Colonel.

  For every second that the microphone lay, assembled, against the window side of his desk, he experienced an agony of fear.

  The Swede knew the fate of spies working against the regime.

  A German chemist had told him, and sniggered as he said it, that spies did not even suffer a clean death by hanging. Spies were stood under the open-air gallows in the execution yard at the Abu Ghraib gaol on a shallow stool. When the stool was kicked away then the spies would kick and strangle to their deaths.

  It was because he detested the despot regime of cult and fear that he could justify what he did. He had taught the Pakistani how to play golf. Khan had thought him his friend and Khan was dead. The Swede had felt no regret when Khan did not come back from his European journey. He had not expected that he would.

  He knew that security men had been seen, had been interviewing the Iraqi-born scientists and engineers and administrators in the office complex in Tuwaithah. They were searching for the source of the leakage of information. If he went now, and failed to return from leave, the finger would be pointed at him. Where would he run to, that was beyond the reach of the thugs of the regime? Not to a desk in the Chemistry Faculty of the University of Uppsala, not to a hi-tech factory in California. Would they want him in Israel? Would they want his expertise in the Negev desert factory of Dimona? Very probably not. It was enough to make him laugh out loud in his office, his bungalow, the thought that he was safest at Tuwaithah from assassination.

  Tonight was Bridge night in the compound, at the bungalow ol the physicist from Salzburg. He knew the dates of the Au strian's next leave, his skiing holiday, and he wondered who would take over the little brick bungalow two down from his own if, as he expected, the Austrian did not return from his leave There were no calls received by the Director during his technicians' lunch hour. The agony was wasted.

  The Swede had gone to the limit of the hour. He was barely back at his desk, the rifle microphone returned to its hiding place, when the technicians came back into the office.

  He had come downstairs in his stockinged feet in answer to the woman's shout. They must have been getting used to him in the house because the woman didn't bother to come up and knock at his door, just yelled from the hallway.

  There was the breathy voice. He wanted a meeting. No, he did not want to go back to London. No, he wanted only Colt.

  He sounded to Colt like he was going through hell.

  Bissett gave him a rendezvous. A pub at Stratfield Mortimer, beside the Foudry Brook, just across the stream from the railway station. And a time. Colt said he'd be there. The telephone purred in his ear.

  Barker had not been back in Curzon Street five minutes before the summons came for him to take a sandwich and a bottle of Malvern in his Director General's top-floor office.

  A fierce and rare sunshine splayed through the arms of the blind. The Director General was tiger-striped.

  " . . . You'll do what you're bloody well told, Dickie, and if I don't have, right here and now, your total commitment and support then you have exactly 30 minutes to clear your desk. But before you do anything rash, let me put you in the picture. In the time it has taken you to get back from your meeting Century House has been alerted by their man. He has talked to the Chairman of the J.I.C. and he has called me.

  Everyone is giving the decision arrived at at your meeting the go-ahead. You won't have a friend in the whole wide world. Is that understood?"

  "However you dress it up, whatever illusion of national security you invoke, it is still murder."

  "Thank you, Dickie. Your point is made. Now get me Rutherford in here. Get Rutherford back . . . "

  "I'll not have my name on any bloody piece of paper."

  "Pipe down, Dickie, and get me Rutherford."

  Rutherford was in the small room next to the Security Officer. He was deliberating whether to call Hobbes and recommend that one more day was needed at Aldermaston. He didn't know, that was the problem. He wanted someone to talk through with him what he had assembled. He simply didn't have the experience in this sort of investigation. He hadn't known Bettany, hadn't been involved in the case at all. He didn't know what had made Bettany different to any of the rest of them. He hadn't worked on Prime, because he had still been sharpening pencils when the team had gone down to G.C.H.Q. to rout through the Soviet agent's past history. He had only the book to fall back on. The book said that the danger was M.I.C.E. M.I.C.E. was Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego.

  Money was an overdraft. Under this government everybody had an overdraft, but Money was worth looking at further.

  Ideology, post-Cold War, was pretty ludicrous. He couldn't see the International Brigade and the Fight against Fascism or the Fight against Communism, for that matter, making any sense a propos Iraq. Ideology was probably better off in the British Museum, and he'd have to have a word with the instructors and have them dig up a new acronym. Compromise was cash or sex.

  What they said on the course was that anyone could be reached by cash or by a woman's thighs. Anyone, all the way to an ambassador. He didn't know, not yet, just how critical was Bissett's financial crisis. Sara Bissett he'd seen, the night before when she had come home from the school. Good-looking woman, very pretty if she hadn't been creased with worry lines. He'd have been willing to bet that Bissett was going short, and he'd have bet more that Bissett wasn't complaining . . . Ego was the key. Ego, in his case, was carrying around a damn great chip on his shoulder, believing that the world was selling the big talent short. Maybe he had seen disappointment, but he hadn't seen arrogance and he hadn't seen vanity. Bissett was alone, maybe not of his own choice . . .

  He was called to the secure line in the Security Officer's room.

  There must have been a meeting in progress, because there were half a dozen men and women filing out of the office, including the Security Officer. This was one way to make himself popular.

  Probably half the Establishment would have defected, anywhere, before old Pig Eyes called for help again from Curzon Street.

  "That you, Rutherford?"

  Yes, it was James Rutherford.

  "Get yourself back here."

  He hadn't finished. There were a few loose ends.

  " Y o u got a goodie?"

  No, he didn't think so. No, there was nothing positive. But if he were to be thorough . . .

  "Don't ask me why, starshine, but the Director General wants to take tea with you, and I don't think he means tomorrow."

  There were no regrets expressed when he informed the Security Officer that he was called back to Curzon Street. "Basically, Mr Rutherford, the lesson you should carry away with you is that we know how to run our affairs at Atomic Weapons," the Security Officer told him.

  As he accelerated away down the Burghfield Common Road, Rutherford thought he'd have to find some polish for his shoes, after tramping round in the rain-splashed compounds of Aldermaston, before he presented himself in the Director General's office.

  And that the pubs weren't closed, and he'd get a drink before he reached the motorway. And Bissett - was he a traitor? Well, that could wait, that was apparently on the back-burner. Erlich would probably recite, "Theirs not to reason why", some crap like that.

  "It's y
our decision, Dr Bissett."

  "I used to love it, the work there."

  "Used to?"

  "I'm treated like dirt now."

  "Then that's your decision made."

  "I'm certain of it, I'm passed over for promotion this year."

  "That's unthinkable, a man of your potential . . . "

  "You probably cannot understand, it's hideous to work when you are accorded no respect."

  It was dark in the car park of the pub at Stratfield Mortimer.

  Their faces were briefly lit by the headlights of the cars of the first customers. Each time they were caught in the lights, Colt ducked his head away, and Bissett was like a rabbit held in a flashlamp's beam.

  "Then you walk away."

  "That business last year, I read something, that report from the Human Rights crowd."

  "The Israelis interfering again, just their propaganda. Me, I'm not aware of torture, that sort of thing. I wouldn't be there if I didn't like the place. Heh, Dr Bissett, you don't believe what you read in the gutter press . . . ?"

  "What sort of life would I have?"

  "What they told you, Dr Bissett. You'd be head of a whole department. It would be a good life, good accommodation and good facilities."

  "And Sara, my wife, and the boys?"

  Colt gagged . . . Corrected himself. "You'd take them?"

  "Of course."

  "They'd have a great life. They will be happy. It's a very modern country. Good British community, international school, cverydiing . . ."

  Colt didn't know what the living conditions were like at Tuwaithah, he didn't even know where Tuwaithah was. He knew there was a small British community, but he had never moved in it, and he had never been within a mile of the British Club. He didn't know, but he thought that the International School might be the pits.

  "I don't know what to do."

  Colt said quietly, "It's your life."

  "It's so difficult . . . "

  " Y o u take your chance, or you turn your back on it."

  " Y o u know, Colt, when I came here they all said that I was brilliant, that I had an original mind. I was coming to the place where there was the best original thinking in the country. That's the way it used to be. It used to be a real community of endeavour, but that community's dead now. It's not a place lor scientists any more, it's for accountants, penny-pinchers. You want to get on, you have to be a politician and a safe bureaucrat. It's 20 years since anything outstanding came out of here. They suffocate brilliance and they've strangled me. Brilliance would threaten the little pedestals of the empire builders. They dragged me down, Colt, they squashed out my brilliance . . . What would I be, there?"

  " Y o u r own master, if you go."

  "Would I be a traitor?"

  Colt's head sagged back against the seat. So what the fuck would the frightened little bastard be?

  "Just a word, Dr Bissett. Words don't mean much. If you go, then you are in charge of your own life. If you stay then you are their slave, till you drop, till they give you a gold watch."

  "There's something I should tell you."

  "What's that?"

  "I've had a little . . . difficulty."

  "What sort of difficulty?"

  "I was interviewed this morning by a man from the Security Service."

  Colt was straight up in the seat. His eyes roved across each of the cars parked close to the Sierra. Mind going flywheel speed.

  Looking for a Watcher, looking in the darkness to see if he could isolate the shadow shape of a Watcher . . . fucking hell . . . As cool as he could make it. "Why was that, Dr Bissett?"

  The blurted answer. "I had to work late, but I couldn'i be in my office because I'd said to Sara I'd look after the boys. I was taking papers home. I was stopped at the gate check. I was interviewed by the Security Officer, but there's been another man down, from London, from the Security Service. He was awful, terribly aggressive . . . "

  The hard cut in Colt's voice. "Did you satisfy him?"

  "How would I know?"

  Colt said, "If you're to go, you'd better be going fast."

  "I don't know, so difficult to know what's best."

  "I have to know your answer."

  "I tell you, I wouldn't tell another living soul, I'm just so desperately frightened."

  Colt's hand rested on Bissett's arm. It was a gesture of friendship, a touch of solidarity. "I go out with you. I am with you each step of the way when you go out."

  "I'll ring you."

  "Tomorrow."

  "I'll ring you tomorrow."

  Colt slipped out of the car. He moved back in the car park so that he would not be caught in the headlights as Bissett drove away. And he was sick, sick as a dog, onto the loose chip stone of the car park. He thought he was the small bird over which the fine close-mesh net was thrown. If he flew now, he could escape.

  If he stayed, he would be trapped. There was quiet around him, there was the fading of Bissett's car in the lanes. Bissett had attracted the attention of the Security Service . . . He retched onto the gravel behind his car and before he collected his pistol and searched all the cars in the car park he retched again until there was nothing more for him to bring up.

  She heard the Sierra's engine and she broke off the conversation.

  Sara put the telephone down.

  Beside the telephone, on the little table in the hall, was the post that had come after he had gone to work. She had learned to recognise the type used by the bank.

  She heard the car door slam shut.

  She was quivering. Through all of her body there was a tightness. Debbie's voice was still in her ears, all of Debbie's regret and Debbie's pleading with her. She opened the front door. He was bent into the back of the car and he was lifting out his briefcase and his raincoat. It was the saddest thing she could remember, telling Debbie that she would not again be coming to the classes . . . She saw the way that he looked around him after he had locked the car. He looked to the right up Lilac Gardens, and he looked left. She thought he looked like a fugitive. He came fast over the few paces from the car to the front door, and he almost punched her out of his way as he came through the front door and into the hallway. He kicked the door shut behind him, used his heel, and the hall echoed with the rap of the front door closing and latching. She had told Debbie, no explanation, no justification, that she would not again be coming to the classes . . . The television was on in the sitting room, it was where the boys were. Any other day and he would have nodded to her, forced a smile, hurried past her. Any other day he would have gone up the stairs to change out of his jacket into the cardigan that he wore on cold evenings. Any other day, not that day. He clung to her. The angle between the arm and the lens frame of his spectacles gouged at her cheek. So long since he had held her in that way, so fiercely. As though he was struggling to reach her. She felt the trembling in his body. She couldn't see his eyes, she didn't know whether or not he wept. When she broke away it was with the muttered excuse that the supper would be boiling over on the cooker's rings, and that he should greet his boys. She went back into the kitchen. She left them, her husband and her sons who had come to him in the hallway that needed new carpeting . . . Thank God she had rung Debbie.

  Thank God it was over . . . When she came back into the hall, Sara could see Frederick's face. Like he'd aged ten years since he had gone to work that morning.

  Sara said that supper would be a few minutes.

  He said that after supper they would all play Scrabble, then he saw the letter from the bank. She watched as he tore the envelope, unopened, into small pieces.

  The Kurd from the city of Kirkuk had been under surveillance for a week, and it had been observed that he had come to the new Post Office and been seen at the post-restante boxes on three days of the last seven. The man was arrested as he came away from the new Post Office on Al Kadhim street in the old Juafir district.

  He was one amongst the four million Kurds struggling for a life-hold inside Iraq. He
was of the people that had been shelled and bombed and attacked with the odourless gas canisters. The man was a member of the "Peshmerga", the guerrilla army that fought, poorly armed, to hold back the regime of the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. The man was also a field agent of the Mossad. Because he was a Kurd, he had always run the risk, in Baghdad, that he would come under observation.

  There were three of them. They carried their Makharov pistols under their coats. They had closed on him. He saw them. He might have stood his ground. He might have stated, baldly, that he awaited a letter from a cousin living in Turkey, he might have spun any tissue of lies . . . He had run.

  He had burst past them. He had turned once to see how far behind him they were. He had turned as he ran and he had seen them reaching for their handguns from their shoulder holsters.

  He had collided into the woodframe stall, pushed on old pram wheels by a seller of pistachio nuts. He had fallen.

  The sirens howled across the city, and the Kurd was held in the basement cells of the Department of Public Security.

  It was the best day Erlich had known since he had come to London.

  A good breakfast, good company, a good picnic, good shooting.

  After the picnic he had let go a magazine of the Ingram, and he had fired the G-3 through a telescope sight and he'd had a better group than Joe from corporate security and he had a $20 bill, proper old greenback, to prove it. He had told Ruane, until the big man had looked tired of hearing it, that he was grateful for his day.

  He stood on the corner of South Audley Street and Grosvenor Square, searching for a free taxi. He held the paper bundle against his chest. The bundle was a shirt that he had been lent, and a singlet and a pair of underpants and grey socks, laundered and ironed. A taxi veered across to the kerb in front of him.

  He had the weight of the Smith and Wesson, in its holster, pulling at his belt, and he felt good.

  "You're Rutherford?"

  " Y e s , sir."