Condition black

by Gerald Seymour

  " 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 repla
ce 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 injeans.

  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.

  The Swede never went directly to the box. He followed a procedure given him by his Control. He must always join the longest queue first. He should join the queue, shuffle forward, gradually turn this way and that, he should see everybody in the cavernous hall of the Post Office. He should never hurry when he came to deliver and to receive from the post-restante box.

  He always played the game to himself that the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council was Sven… Each of the techno-mercenaries at Tuwaithah had their own name for the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. He was Gunther, he was Pierre, he was Giancarlo… They lived in a world whose every wall had ears, where servants were never trusted. They could talk openly of Gunther and Pierre and Giancarlo and Sven. It was the Swede's little joke to himself, that Sven had a new set of teeth.

  The portrait poster was above the benches that were set the length of the wall opposite the post-restante boxes. The Chairman wore the heavily decorated uniform of a paratrooper and round his head was a quaffiya. His smile would have brightened a dark night. Sven's new dentures… There were two men sitting under the poster, and he saw that their eyes never left the post-restante boxes. The Swede's hope died a little. He stayed in the queue and he studied again every wall and corner of the interior of the Post Office. It was ten minutes before he was sure.

  There were four more men, other than the two men who sat on the bench under Sven's broad smile, whose attention was fixed upon the post-restante boxes.

  He was the only Westerner so far as he could see. He was tall, he was blond, he was pale-skinned. It was impossible that he had not been noticed. He had seen the men who watched the post-restante boxes, he could not know how many men watched him.

  The sane thing to have done would have been to bend to his shoe lace, retie it, put the tape on the floor, kick it away amongst the sandalled feet, then to walk out. But the tape was too precious to him

  …

  He made a gesture of impatience, he looked long and hard at his watch, he shrugged. He spun on his heel.

  He tried to stop himself from running. The fear surged in him.

  When he was close to the wide door of the new Post Office, he saw a man reach into his jacket pocket and take out a personal radio. Then he ran.

  The bright sunshine, the white concrete dust of the unfinished pavement, blinded him when he came to the bottom of the steps outside. Fear pulsed inside him.

  His eyes cleared, he blinked hard. He saw the two cars on the far side of Al-Kadhim Street, and there were men in each car. He ran.

  The bungalow that had been home for the two Italians driven from Tuwaithah by an unexploded letter bomb was vacant.

  Under the direction of the housing manager, a work force of women was brought that day to the bungalow. It was cleaned, it was scrubbed and it was polished. The rugs were taken outside and beaten. The kitchen was washed from ceiling to floor. New linen was p
ut on the bed in the main bedroom. Fresh flowers were arranged in vases. In the refrigerator were put a dozen cans of beer and two bottles of French white wine and food and cartons of milk.

  The Baghdad flight, it was announced, was delayed indefinitely for operational reasons.

  A few of the passengers, the foreigners, the ones not already checked in and through to the duty-free lounges, vented their anger at the Iraqi Airlines desk. They were the minority. The majority accepted the situation and the free meal vouchers without complaint.

  He was in the heart of the ancient round city. He ran, in fear of his life, in the narrow and dark-shadowed streets.

  He had seen them last when he had stopped, panting, in the shelter of a black awning, and he had seen them quartering, searching, and a car drawing up at a crossing, disgorging others to join the hunt 50, perhaps 60 yards back down the alleyway.

  The alley he was in was not wide enough for a car and down the middle of it ran a sewer carrying grey-blue slime. There were narrow and obscure openings, their steel shutters lifted, where melons and limes and tomatoes were sold, where the metal workers plied their trade, where iced lemon juice was poured into dull dirty glasses. These he passed, sometimes running, sometimes where the press of people was too thick walking briskly, his head down, as if on some anxious errand. Overhead, filtering the sunlight from the blond gold of his hair, were lines of hanging washing. This was the quarter of the poor, the crippled and the bereaved of the war, those ignored now by the regime.

  No voice was raised to point him out to the dark-suited men of the Department of Public Security. The Swede was a fugitive.

  He would not be helped and he would not be hindered.

  It began to settle in the Swede's mind that even if he discarded the tape he could not ever return to Tuwaithah. He had been watched too long in the Post Office. He would be recognised.

  Even if he could reach his car, he would be trapped at a road block. The gathering fear seemed to tug at his legs. The Swede stopped at a stall, bought a black woollen hat and an old khaki greatcoat. He paid for them three times what he would have if he had stopped to barter. He pulled the hat hard over his ears and shrugged into the coat as he left the labyrinthine alleys of the ancient round city. He prayed to his northern, foreign God for the preservation of his life and the safety of his tape.