CONDITION BLACK MASTER

by Unknown

  " Y o u are to be congratulated, Colonel."

  "There has heen an unexpected difficulty with Bissett;s security, Dr Tariiq Thai is why he must leave at once "

  " Y o u would not lose him, Colonel?"

  " T h e hands on him, Dr Tariq, they are excellent hands The Swede gulped at the air. So worn down by the late evening vigil. He gulped at the air, and his sigh sang his relief. He had what they wanted of him. Feverishly he dismantled the rifle microphone, and the receiver, and the aerial. He reached between the slats of the blind and drew his window slowly shut.

  Fifteen minutes alter the Colonel had reported to the Director of the Atomic Energy Commission that Frederick Bissett would travel from London to Baghdad the following evening, the Swede walked from his workplace to his small bungalow. The tall, shambling, blond-haired figure was familiar to all the guards who patrolled the area between the offices and laboratories and the accommodation area. He was not challenged and he was not searched.

  "This is just dumb, James."

  "Wouldn't have thought a hero from the Bureau would have noticed a drop of rain, a little breeze . . . "

  "Notice? I can't even notice the face of my wristwatch."

  "It's eight minutes to two o'clock."

  "That's all you know. I reckon your watch got drowned an hour ago. It feels more like time to go back to bed to m e . "

  The wind crowed in the treetops and the rain fell steadily. For a long time neither spoke, nor moved. Only watched. Once, twice, the bedroom lights came on. And the second time Rutherford watched the old man go down the staircase and the kitchen light went on and when he went back upstairs the kitchen light stayed on.

  Erlich suddenly said, "I rang my girl this afternoon. She's with C.B.S. in Rome. Sorry, but you're paying for the call . . ."

  " I f we do all that's expected of us, young Buffalo, I don't suppose they'll kick up much of a fuss."

  "She wanted me to go to Ruane, tell him that I needed a vacation, get myself down to Mombasa. I mean, that is just idiotic. Wasn't even friendly when I said I was tied up here. Do you know what I'll do when this business is over? I'll go into the mountains. My Mom is up in the mountains. Got a hardware store and a diner with my stepfather. Do a bit of walking, bit of shooting, never read a paper, put the television in the garbage."

  "They all say that. It's impossible . . . Heh."

  "We haven't gone on vacation together in months . . ."

  "Heh, Bill."

  "Never her fault when she can't synchronise with me, always my fault when I'm working and she's free. That's women . . . "

  "Bill, shut up . . ."

  Erlich stared out into the night. The rain was on his nose and in his eyes. And the kids going all the way down to Naples and having the game scratched because it rained. Can't have been rain like this. He saw the car headlights coming slowly, then almost to a stop. He saw the lights swing and they caught at the big trees. Erlich rose to the crouch on his knees.

  "Got me, Bill?"

  "Got you."

  "We struck lucky, Bill?"

  "Right."

  Erlich drew the Smith and Wesson, .38 calibre, from his waist holster. He checked it, he could do that by feel in the darkness.

  A clean bill for the Smith and Wesson.

  " Y o u okay, Bill?"

  "Never been better."

  They left the tree line. They came out into the force of the wind and the teeth of the rain. They started walking. Down the long field sloping to the Manor House. Lights coming on downstairs in the big building. They walked to the first hedgerow.

  They trotted to the second briar and thorn line.

  " Y o u got him, Bill."

  "Damn right."

  Both of them running, both sprinting through the mud to the Manor House ahead, to the target man.

  15

  "You'll deal with the dog?"

  "I'll do the dog," Rutherford said.

  They were at the wall of the vegetable garden. Rutherford showed his watch; on the luminous dials it was 25 past two. He didn't know why Rutherford had to show him the time of night.

  He clipped the revolver back into its holster. Rutherford made a stirrup with his hands and Erlich slid a boot into them. Rutherford heaved, levered Erlich up. It was an old wall, and the mortar came away as Erlich steadied himself on the top. He reached down, took Rutherford's hand and dragged him up. They were both on top of the wall and bent low.

  " Y o u ready, Bill?"

  " A s I'll ever b e . "

  He turned and took Rutherford's outstretched hand and lowered himself down a carpet of ivy to the ground. Rutherford was beside him, crouching, in a second. He unholstered his revolver and Rutherford motioned him to follow. Rutherford was a pace ahead of him when they reached the kitchen door. He was flattened against the wall beside the door with the Smith and Wesson up close to his ear.

  His hand was tight on the revolver handle. His breath came in great controlled surges. His heart was going like a hammer and he thought that if the wind hadn't roared through the trees around the house the dog would surely have been alerted by now. Rutherford's hand was on the door handle.

  " L o c k e d ? "

  "We'll try the front . . . "

  "Where he came in."

  Again Rutherford was in front. First they withdrew 20 yards into the kitchen garden and then looped along the back of the house, past old flower pots, past an overturned wheelbarrow.

  They stepped through the loose coil of a watering hose. They came up the side of the house, along a narrow path. He was at Rutherford's shoulder, as if it were important to him to be close to the Englishman. They were at the corner of the house. He thought that the front light's bulb, the light above the front door, must have blown, because the front door was in darkness. There was a small car parked near to the door, but it was outside the crescent beam thrown by the skylight above the door. And across the lawn beyond the gravel there was a narrow shaft of light where it pierced poorly drawn curtains upstairs.

  "Upstairs . . . ?"

  "Where his mother is."

  Rutherford turned the door knob. The door eased a fraction of an inch. Rutherford was looking at him. It was his choice.

  There was the dead weight of the Smith and Wesson in his hand.

  He could go inside fast, he could leave Rutherford to handle the dog, he could finish it. Rutherford was waiting on him. His choice, because he had the weapon. He could feel the shake in his hands and the hard panted breathing in his lungs. He knew his breathing was too hard, too fast. He held his breath, on his terms and in his time he let the breath hiss from his lips. That was what they taught on the StressFire course. That was what they taught when the student was going into Condition Black.

  One more time. Hard in . . . and wait . . . slowly out. Then he drove his shoulder into Rutherford. He push-punched the front door open.

  He was on his way.

  He was going.

  He was committed to shooting Colt, to killing Colt.

  Across the hallway, the bloody great animal seemed to fly at him off the wall. Erlich ducked, the loose carpet scudded from under his feet. There was the moment he stumbled. He caught at the end of the bannister rail for his balance. He was on the bottom step of the staircase. Behind him he heard the first barked shout of the dog, from the kitchen. He went fast up the stairs, stamping his feet for speed. He could see the blood pool in the rain where Harry Lawrence had fallen. He pulled himself with his free hand on the bannister round the corner hallway up the stairs. He could see the pale and hollow cheeks of Harry Lawrence on the stretcher in the Athens mortuary. He hit thetop of the staircase. There was the door ajar, with the light behind it, ahead of him. The dog was making pandemonium, blocked at the bottom of the stairs by Rutherford.

  He went in fast and crouched and turning

  "Safety" off. Isosceles stance. Finger hooked beside thr trigger guard. His arms were out to their limit, hr, body was bent forward, slight angle. His legs were loose, not
locked, so he could turn right, turn left. His eyeline was over the sights He saw the man beside the window. He saw the woman sitting in the chair beside the bed. He saw the woman frail shape, eyes shut, lying propped by pillows on the bed

  Holy God . . .

  Christ, no . . .

  He saw the man, Major Tuck, guest at the Reform Club, father of Colt, stare at him, unable in shock to speak He saw the woman, dressed like a nurse, rising from her chair, and her fury had bitten at the plumpness of her face.

  "Who are you?" The snarl of the woman's voice.

  "Where's Colt?"

  "I'll have you know there's a patient in this house."

  "Colt came, his car."

  "Nonsense . . . Put that ridiculous thing down. It's my car, and I came alone."

  Holy God, Christ, no . . . He saw that the woman in the bed was conscious, gazing at him in horror, perhaps in disappointment, her mouth fallen open, her eyes searching past him. He eased the hammer of the Smith and Wesson down. His thumb flicked the Safety upwards.

  "Where you come from, don't you have any respect for the sick? Go at once, and go quietly."

  He didn't apologise. He had nothing to say. He turned and he went out through the door. He closed the door behind him. He came back down the stairs, stepping carefully in the wet mud footprints of his ascent. He thought he might faint. He steadied himself on the bannister rail. Rutherford was at the bottom of the stairs with a walking stick clamped into the back of the mouth of the dog and holding tight at the animal's collar.

  Erlich walked past him out through the front door into the howling night.

  That it was his last night in his own country had not at all disturbed him.

  He had taken Bissett back to his train, his arm hugging his shoulders. Bissett had slurred his thanks. He had stood by the train's window until it had gathered speed, and he had seen that Bissett's eyes had followed him as far as it was possible to see him. He had gone back to the room in the Great Western Hotel, and he had taken a glass of mineral water with the men from the Embassy, and they had made their plans for the following day.

  They couldn't do without him, Colt thought, but it was obviously as much as they could tolerate, having to work with him. His association with the Colonel bewildered them even as it discomfited them.

  The house was dark when he came back. He had gone up the stairs to his room as quietly as when he had climbed the stairs in Bissett's house, and he did not think that he had wakened the couple and their baby.

  It was his last night in England, and he had not cared to think that thought. He had tried to free himself from the thought of his mother and her bedroom that had become a sickroom, and from the thought of his father and the long, cold days of his vigil, and from the thought of Fran and her freedom and her love and her big dog and her snaring wires. Colt had torn the thoughts from his mind because they were danger to him.

  His country was his mother and his father and his Fran, but he had turned his back on them. It would have weakened him if he had told Fran that he was hers, that he would come back, by Christ, some time, to his Fran. Might have told her, but he would have to have told himself first and he couldn't sap himself with such a thought.

  Colt slept. The hard outline of the Ruger pistol under his pillow did not trouble his sleep.

  At daybreak, the Swede drove the fast straight road that cut across the rich land between the great waterways of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Behind him was modern Iraq, the Atomic Energy Commission headquarters at Tuwaithah and the sprawl of the aL-Qaqa military industrial complex further south near al-Hillah where the rocket fuel was manufactured that would launch the Condor intermediate-range missile. And behind him was the ancient site of Babylon, where a thousand Sudanese labourers had worked all weathers for three years to recreate the citadel of Nebuchadnezzar.

  It was an hour's run, the journey to Baghdad.

  He saw the first giant-sized portraits of the smiling Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, and the streets were choked by the early traffic. His routine was that he went first to the coffee shop of the Ishtar Sheraton, to leave his car there for the kids to clean before he walked across the Jumhuriyah Bridge.

  He ignored his usual route into the city, along Fourteenth July Street. He turned left onto Imam Musa, into the slow crawl amongst the lorries and the cars that pushed towards Al Kadhim Street, and the new Post Office.

  He waved his identity card at the Ministry policeman, he was gestured on.

  Bissett drove through the Falcon Gate at the normal time, the same cars around him that were there every morning. It was what they had said to him, a normal day, his last day.

  But already he was the stranger. He drove down Third Avenue, seeing F and B areas as a stranger would, and the great grey box building that housed the laser equipment and then the four high-rise chimneys and then the bulk of the A area and then the colossus that was A90.

  He no longer belonged.

  Today he did not care whether A90 would come into service two years late or three years late. It did not matter to him whether the fourth Trident submarine were cancelled, whether the new cruise-launched missile to replace the WE-177 bomb ever reached development and manufacture.

  He saw the H3 building as a stranger would have seen it. It was no longer his place of work, no longer his second home.

  If it had not been for the confidence he felt in the young man, then he would never have dared, he told himself, to come back, to play this last act, as a normal day. He showed his identity card again. He carried his raincoat and his briefcase, with his sandwiches and his thermos, into H3. He smiled at Carol, he nodded to Wayne, he acknowledged the chiming greetings of the Clerical Assistants. Basil came in behind him, shivering from the cold, peeling the bicycle clips from his ankles. Basil had never spoken up for him, and Basil's word could have turned the scale for his promotion. Carol and the Clerical Assistants had only ever paid him token respect. Wayne sneered at him. He was a stranger to them all, he had been for years.

  " A h , Frederick . . ."

  "Yes, Reuben?"

  Boll, all bustling self-importance, came into the outer office.

  "Tomorrow, listen, very oring, but will you attend the .P.S..O,/

  S.P.E.O. meeting?"

  " I don't . . . "

  " N o problem, Frederick, they won't eat you. I'll have gone and Basil's much too busy. Just go and take a note, see they dn't decide anything stupid. It's in A45/3, at 9.15. You can do that for me?"

  "Of course."

  "Good man."

  Of course he would agree to attend but the .Senior Principal Scientific Officers and the Senior Principal Engineering Officers would have to manage without him because he would be in Baghdad.

  "Excellent, glad I caught you . . . Goodbye, eveiybody."

  "Goodbye," Bissett said, and he shook Boll's hand. "Send us a postcard."

  He went to his room.

  It was to be a normal day, just that. He switched on his terminal and gave the screen time to warm. Just another day, the stranger's last day.

  It was the time that Sara liked least at home.

  It was the time after he had gone to work, and she was back from dropping the boys at school. The beds needed making, the boys' washing was on their bedroom floor, the breakfast things were still on the table. She made a mug of instant. She sat at the kitchen table. She had the radio playing a phone-in.

  Drunk again, that's what he had been, and practically midnight when he had come home. She had been awake, of course, because she had reached the stage when she had wondered how much longer before she phoned the police, or started to ring round the hospitals. He had said that he had been late at work - she knew by now, surely, that he couldn't bring papers out - and that he had stopped off in the bar at Boundary Hall. But, he never worked late, and he never went to Boundary Hall, and the first and last time when he had drunk too much had been at Debbie's party when he had been in the corner, all evening, with the young man inje
ans.

  It was the morning that she should have been at Debbie's. Her head was bent in her confusion, and the beds went unmade and the washing undone, and the plates were still in the sink. She had come upstairs, broken off from getting the boys' lunches ready, and he had been in their bedroom still. She had stood in the door, and he hadn't known she was behind him. She had watched as he put into a suitcase the suit that he had taken to New Mexico, the nearest thing he had to a summer suit. She had seen him open the second to bottom drawer of his chest and take out his summer shirts, and put these in the case, and the case back on top of the wardrobe.

  The confusion boiled in her head, that Frederick should seem suddenly to have snapped, after the business with the police, the pressure, obviously, of his work, weeks of not hardly talking to her at all, now this odd business of taking the boys to school, taking them swimming, playing games with them. Was he saying goodbye? It was as if he had been standing in the door - just as she was this morning - watching her on Debbie's bed with Justin.

  It couldn't be so, but she felt weak with the sense of having destroyed her home, maybe even driven Frederick out of his wits, certainly put the happiness of her children at risk by that one massive lapse, that great tumbling fall from grace. It was not enough. Not lapse enough. She craved a longer, more clarifying fall. Not enough, Justin, not by any means enough, and yet Frederick was on the point of abandoning her. Well, by heavens, he wasn't going without a word. He wasn't going to creep out without an explanation. She would wait until the weekend. She would wait no longer. She stirred herself to the routine of her day, her normal day.

  As he walked up the wide steps he saw none of them. His right hand was on the tape spool in his jacket pocket. His left hand was in his trouser pocket, fingering the key to the post-restante box.

  It was the start of the day's business in the new Post Office.

  Noisy queues, shoving and pushing, had already formed. There were Egyptians thronging at the counters to send the registered mail to Cairo and Alexandria and Ismailia with the small amounts of foreign currency permitted. There were Kuwaitis in line for use of the international telephone cubicles. There were Sudanese shouting for the telegram forms. There were the men who stood by the walls and who watched.