So tired, and so scared by the running away. But they had still the chance of the ferry.
He watched the staircase behind the bar counter. He looked for the reckless and vivid smile of Colt.
He was ready, ready to run with Colt.
" M r s Bissett, until we can resolve our differences, you won't get to bed, I won't move out of your house, and you don't get your children back."
"I have nothing to say."
The Security Officer settled again on the kitchen chair. The house was quiet. There were only two policemen left in the house with them, and they were sprawled out in the sitting room. The search was over. She knew they had found nothing, because as the ripping and tearing went on she had heard the bad temper replace their earlier laughter and chat. She had not heard them attempt to repair what they had broken.
She stared out through the window. She had not turned when the telephone had rung, nor when the Security Officer had been called out of the kitchen, nor when he had come back and the chair had groaned under his weight.
" M r s Bissett, please listen to me very carefully. Your husband was being escorted from the country by a man wanted for murder in Athens, London and Australia. He was intercepted. This young man… "
She muttered the name, the name was Colt.
"… is armed. He is dangerous and unstable. We have to fear for your husband's safety. They are together at the moment in a public house in Wiltshire. They are ringed by armed police.
There is a distinct possibility that the young man will reject ail sensible courses of action, that he will try to break out. He is armed, so he may open fire on police officers, and the armed officers may be forced to return fire… "
She shuddered.
"… and then Frederick would be in the gravest danger. It is a small thing to ask of you, but it could save his life."
She thought of him going out into the dusk, going through her front door, stumbling after Colt, the humiliation of her rejection.
"… We can put you in direct contact with the police there.. ."
" N o. "
" S o that you speak to Frederick, and urge him to surrender… "
" No. "
" We want him out of there, Mrs Bissett, away from the potential crossfire."
"I said, no."
She stared at the window set in the kitchen door, at the raindrops dancing on it like a curtain in the wind.
The Security Officer said, "With a bitch like you for a wife, it's no wonder the poor devil wanted out."
His hand was on the door latch.
He had the Smith and Wesson tight in his hand, barrel against his ear.
Past Flight or Fight, way beyond that.
Erlich would fight…
As he raised the latch he heard the first shimmer of the grating of the metal pieces.
No more caution.
His hip barged into the unfastened door.
The light spilled into his face, and he was moving.
Erlich came into the back bar, and he cannoned off a table, glasses flying, smashing, and he tripped on a chair, and he stumbled, and all the time he was in motion. It was Condition Black. He saw the table peel away towards the fireplace, and the chair career towards the bar counter. He saw the line of upended bottles with optics on their necks, the mounted fox's head with its teeth bared, and the half-finished glasses on the other tables and the ashtrays full. All the time moving until he reached the solid protection of the jukebox. He was crouched down. He was at Isosceles stance, and he pivoted his upper body behind the aiming position of his revolver in Turret One.
He saw the man from the airport on his knees, dark curly hair, his eyeline caught him, thick-rimmed heavy spectacles, dismissed him. He quartered the back bar… No sign of Colt… Shit…
The adrenalin draining from him. All the push, drive, impetus of belting his way into the back bar, safety off, index finger inside the trigger guard, and he did not find Colt.
He yelled, "Where is Colt?"
The man seemed frozen in the position of tying his shoe-laces.
He was met by the empty, terrified stare of the man, and the silence trimmed his shout.
He gazed down at the man over the V-sight and foresight of the revolver, and he could see that there was the increasing shake of his locked fists. Keyed up to go in, and he had lost the brilliance of surprise and his nerves caught at him and the barrel cavorted in the grip of his hands.
"Where the fuck is he?"
He saw the man's head turn. He saw the man look back towards the counter, and beyond the counter was the gape of the open door that led to the staircase and darkness. He could see the first steps of the staircase. The man's head swung back, as if he knew he had been caught out.
Erlich eased himself up from behind the cover of the jukebox.
He was panting… One thing to open the door and charge into the back bar, another thing to go walkabout up a staircase into darkness… He rocked again on his feet. His decision. Quantico teaching said that an agent should never, alone, follow a man up a staircase, and never, ever, into an unlit staircase.
He was on the line, he was alone.
"Good God," Basil Curtis was bemused. " You quite astonish me.
The Security Officer invited himself into the bedsitting room.
There was a strong smell of cat. He looked around him. More books than he had ever seen in such a room, three walls of them, from floor to ceiling and piles of them elsewhere. And a cat litter-tray in one corner. Quite extraordinary to the Security Officer that Curtis, famously the best brain at A. W. E., paid more, certainly, than anyone else there, should choose to live in a single man's quarters in the Boundary Hall accommodation.
" H e was going to Iraq, it's cut and dried."
He saw that Curtis had covered, with the newspaper he had been reading in bed, a half-written letter on his desk. The cat emerged from the wardrobe and observed the Security Officer with distaste. Curtis stood in his striped flannel pyjamas, holding a mug of cocoa.
"I wouldn't have believed it… but, of course, I didn't know him well."
He could see a pink hot-water bottle peeping from under the back-turned bedclothes.
The Security Officer said, "I am beginning to understand why Bissett ran."
"I think that we should allow events to run their course, away from view. I don't want anything public, Mr Barker. I only want a message sent in private to that regime of blood. My advice, go home, get a solid night's sleep."
"Very good, Prime Minister."
"Good night, Mr Barker."
Too old and too tired to wrestle through the night with the new world of the Rutherfords and the Erlichs, the Colts and the Frederick Bissetts. He would have one more word with Hobbes at the Pig and Whistle to let him know that both he and the Prime Minister required a total blanket over the outcome, tell him to push the goggling bystanders back another 200 yards, confiscate any cameras etc etc. As to the outcome, it scarcely troubled him to consider it. There was not a lot he could do to influence the outcome now. These sieges had a habit of going on for half a day, minimum.
Hobbes could, by God, earn a spur here after his craven performance at Century. Yes, he would go to bed and be ready to pick up the pieces in the morning. With Tuck's boy and the lunatic Erlich in the frame, there would, by God, be pieces.
Later, he would leave through the basement tunnel, he would walk out via the doors of the Cabinet Office. He would wait on the wide Whitehall pavement for a cruising taxi. And he would wonder if Penny Rutherford slept, whether she had taken the pill that the Curzon Street doctor would have left her. And he would wonder – if Erlich got the better of Tuck's boy – if he could persuade Ruane to send him away, right away, before Rutherford's funeral.
He could walk out through the back door and put his gun back in his holster, and he could tell the guys from the Special Weapons unit that there was no way Bill Erlich was going to do the right thing by his friend if it meant climbing a staircase into da
rkness.
His decision.
He could shift his ass up the stairs and search till he found the bastard, and hit down each door, and belt open each cupboard, and kick over each bed, until he found the mother.
He wasn't as good as when he had come in. It was going away from him, ebbing with each of the slow seconds as the time slipped by him. His eyes had never left the staircase. All the time he had expected to see the barrel that was the integral silencer and the fast-coming bulk shape of Colt behind it.
He started to move. The man was in front of him.
There was the raised hatch that cut off the barman's place from his customers. His route would be through the hatch and behind the counter and onto the bottom step of the staircase.
All the time watching the opening to the staircase…
He heard the crash of the breaking glass.
Erlich half swivelled.
The man had stood, and he had a glass in his hand with the drinking rim broken, and the man stood across Erlich's path and the broken glass was his weapon.
"Put that down."
"You're not going up."
"Get out of my way."
"Not going up."
The sound of their voices… Erlich thought Colt would be at the top of the staircase. It was goddam crazy. Why not send him a message Western Union, Federal Express…
"You'd better move, buddy, or you're going to get yourself hurt."
The man held his ground. Erlich hardly saw the broken drinking end of the glass. Eyes on the staircase. The staircase was Colt.
Colt was danger. Danger was not a nutcake with a broken glass, like he was high on smack or hash. Danger was Colt, sober and cold. He took a pace forward.
He saw, from the corner of his eye, that the glass was aimed at his face.
Erlich tried to sound calm, "Stand back."
The glass was held at arm's stretch. The broken end was a foot from his face.
"He's my friend."
"I don't even know who you are."
"I am Colt's friend."
He saw the veins in the man's throat, and he saw the tremble in the wrist that held the glass. This was the man he had seen at the airport. Then he had been a craven passenger of Colt's. He was a man with no pedigree of violence, who just once and only once had wound himself to the point of no return.
" H e ' s a psychopath, your friend. A killer, do you understand that?"
The glass was in front of Erlich's face.
" H e gave me a chance, no one else did."
"You're not my quarrel, buddy, so put that thing down and if you know what's good for you, you'll walk right through that back door with your hands in the air."
Erlich went forward. The glass rose towards his eyes.
" N o one else," the man screamed.
He felt the judder of pain at his cheek and his chin.
Erlich fired.
He saw the man pitch away from him. He could not remember the name that Rutherford had shouted at the airport. He heard nothing. He saw the glass fall and break apart. He heard nothing… He saw the blood dribble on the floor and the blood splattered on the wall and over a glass case with a pair of stuffed pheasants.
The rain fell hard about him. It ran on his face. The rain and the wind that drove it and the cloud mist were his freedom.
It was his joy when he had felt the sting of the rain as he had first pushed up the skylight window. The happiness had been with him all along the roof gulley, and after he had dropped down beside the old water barrel. He had rejoiced to be free as he had crawled flat on his stomach along the rows of cabbages and between the stems of the laurel bushes that made the overgrown edge between the outbuildings and the open field.
In the moment that he reached the tree line of the Top Spinney he heard the clatter of two shots.
He did not pause.
His freedom was the night around him.
EPILOGUE
It was only when all the other passengers had gone and he was left with the cabin crew that the three men came on board. They shook his hand.
It was the day before Christmas. There was a carol playing over the loudspeakers in Arrivals, and he saw through the tinted glass that there was a sleet storm blowing in from the west and towards London.
He had no luggage. He wore the same clothes in which he had fled into the haven of the Embassy, and he carried only an overcoat that the Station Officer had said he would certainly need even if he was only in London for ten minutes. It was too small for him but it would be a keepsake. They took him to a V.I.P. lounge, and they poured him a drink.
The man called Percy Martins was saying, "… No morality at all, I don't think that he understood the meaning of right or wrong, but most certainly blessed by a totally destructive charm completely undermined Bissett, I gather. The problem was his father, a war hero, a maverick soldier operating behind enemy lines. Colt tried to emulate him, but never succeeded.
"We're not entirely sorry that we missed him, not at my level anyway. They had dogs out at first light, but there was nothing for them to follow, the rain did for the scent. Frankly, when he does turn up again it's going to be headaches all round, but his Hail's cold right now.
"It's what took so long to negotiate your release. Didn't catch on straight away because it cost us a week or so to break the code they were using. Baghdad didn't believe Colt was not captured.
Wanted him back in exchange for you. Although the London end never had the nerve to propose it. They even sent a chap disguised as a florist to quiz the locals. We put him in the bag, I'm happy to say. Seems that the man running Colt was the Colonel whose voice you recorded at Tuwaithah, same Colonel who kicked up a fuss on the Embassy doorstep. The voices match exactly. He wasn't going to let you go without that he got his Colt in return, but wiser heads prevailed – I have some good friends in quite high places – and anyway the ubiquitous Colonel has fallen from grace. No longer on the letterhead.
"Anyway, you're safely out and we've a trade mission going in next week, so all's well that ends well. Cheers."
The Swede saw the youngest of the three men check his watch, and nod. The Swede drained his glass. Martins clasped him by the hand.
Two of them took him on, and Martins stayed in the lounge.
He strode, long stepping paces, between the two men. He was happy to walk. For the last five weeks he had been allowed only one daily circuit of the Embassy compound, after dark always and with the military policeman tracking him. He was glad to start to work off the stiffness in his knees.
They moved across the concourse, threading their way between queues of holiday-makers.
Hobbes said, "It's all luck in this business, or lack of it. It was Bissett's luck that he found himself up against an F. B. I, agent called Erlich. Erlich's mission in life was to hunt down this Colt.
"Wild horses weren't going to stop him. He shot at Colt in a terminal as crowded as this one is, and killed a young man in my department. He practically tore the pub apart looking for Colt when he had finished off Bissett. I saw Erlich off when he went, Iback to his base in Rome. Couldn't help feeling sorry for him.
Be a waste if he quit. He's a very thorough policeman. He'd found a cigar butt of Colt's in Athens at the scene of crime where Colt shot the joker from the Agency, and he went through Colt's home in Wiltshire like a terrier till he found a matching butt in a dustbin. D.N.A. test proved it from the saliva, good enough for a court of law. Here or in the States. And it will come to that, in my view. It may be convenient in some quarters that Colt disappeared, but with his Colonel gone in Baghdad he has no bolt-hole. He'll turn up sooner or later and Erlich will be waiting for him. I'll be waiting for him and every policeman in Britain too, but the conviction will be down to Erlich."
Only one of them went with the Swede through the side doors that by-passed the emigration formalities.
They went past the armed police, and the dogs, and the El Al security teams.
They were allocated se
ats immediately behind the forward place that was already occupied by the sky marshal.
Tork said, "You'll be wanting to know about Bissett. It's only what I heard today from "Sniper" Martins – miserable bastard, isn't he? – between the time my flight came in and you landed.
The conclusion seems to be that Bissett was just another unhappy little man who was offered the moon and was daft enough to reach for it. He was actually prepared to go and work for the Iraqis because his bank manager was nagging him, and his supervisor was bullying him. It was as pathetic as that. The very last thing he did in his whole life was probably the only thing he did that deserved admiration. Poor old Bissett, standing up for the man he thought was his friend, and getting himself shot for it. Saved us a deal of bother. We wouldn't have wanted to prosecute, and there wasn't much evidence that could have been brought against him if we had.
" T h e general opinion at Atomic Weapons is that Bissett really had very little to offer the Iraqis. It was all a bit of a confidence trick. You know what it is, the people who do the recruiting always talk up their client. I think that when they found out what they'd got, there would have been some pretty unhappy gentlemen at Tuwaithah.
"The story put out was that he had got himself involved with a lunatic fringe outfit called the Animal Liberation Front and that rather than face the shame of exposure he took his own life,
"We were quite good about it to his family. We cocked up some story about a promotion having just been agreed, so ins widow gets a better pension, and more importantly she doesn't holler her mouth off. She's left the district already and the house is up for sale.
"It's the old story, it never happened. There was no Colt, there was no Bill Erlich, there was no Frederick Bissett…"
The aircraft cabin was filling.
There was the frantic stampede of passengers along the aisle of the aircraft. For the life of him Tork could not understand why it was that grown men and women, all with their own seats, needed to behave as if there were one last place at the back of a Moscow bread queue. Noise all around them, shouting dinning in their ears.
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