CONDITION BLACK MASTER

by Unknown

He swallowed back the bile in his throat.

  It would have been a back-of-the-head shot. A low-velocity round tumbling against the toughness of the skull bone.

  The exit was a mess where the eyes and nose of his friend had been.

  The mouth was what he would remember. Where the laughter was, where the good cracks were. Only the mouth told him that he looked on the face of his friend.

  The Station Officer said, "There are six wounds on the joker

  - Harry just took the one."

  "Which means?"

  Erlich knew the answer.

  The Station Officer said, "Almost certainly it means, wrong place, wrong time."

  "Makes my day."

  " H e wasn't the target, just in the way."

  " T h e Iraqis do their own people . . . ?"

  "When they step out of line, sure, why not?"

  Erlich drew the sheet back over his friend's wretched face.

  He would get autopsy details later. He didn't need more time in this chilled room. From what he had seen he estimated that the low-velocity rounds had been fired at a maximum of a dozen paces. It probably didn't matter whether his calculations were right or wild. A good man and his good friend was dead.

  " A s long as I am allowed to, I will follow this, Elsa. That is my most solemn guarantee, no backing off. If it takes a month, a year, ten years . . . Elsa, I promise."

  His friend's wife sat on the sofa. The two kids were against her, one on each side, and she had her small and narrow arms round her kids' shoulders and she pulled them to her.

  It was five months since he had last seen her, since he had last been in Athens. Barbecue time late on a Sunday night on the balcony, and another Embassy staffer from the floor above leaning over his parapet and complaining about the smoke. She might have understood him, and she might not. She wasn't a pretty woman, but to Erlich's eye she was about the best there could be. Okay, so he didn't have a wife of his own - but of the wives of the men he knew, Elsa Lawrence was the first in line. She had been weeping, he could see that, but there was no chance that she would cry now because the apartment was filled with Agency staff, four men moving through the small apartment, packing the family's belongings. In the fifteen minutes Erlich had been there, not one of the men had come to Elsa to ask her what case which clothes should go in. They were shadow walkers, emerging every few moments with a suitcase, bulging, from one of the bedrooms, stacking it in the cramped hallway.

  " A s long as it takes, Elsa."

  She took her arms away from round her kids' shoulders and held them out for him.

  Erlich came close to her, kneeling on the rug he knew that Harry had brought back from a fast run to Beirut. Her arms were round his neck. He kissed her cheek. He could feel the wetness of his own tears.

  He broke away. When he looked back he could see that once more she hugged her children to her. In the hall the Station Officer said, "Good talk, fighting talk."

  "Not a lot else to say."

  "You're paid to do a job."

  " Y e s . "

  " N o t to play Victim Counsellor."

  " Y e s . "

  " T h e same job whether you knew him or didn't."

  " T a k e n . "

  'How many shots?"

  "Twelve cartridge cases, seven hits."

  " H o w many weapons?"

  "One weapon. Pistol, .22 calibre, with silencer. A professional's."

  " A n d are you sure that Harry Lawrence was not the target?"

  "That's the way it looks."

  Erlich wrote it all down in a pocket notebook, longhand. The policeman sipped coffee. He was not welcome, Erlich knew that.

  He could hardly have been welcome, because when he had entered the senior police officer's room it had been with two aides trying to keep him out by every manoeuvre other than manhandling him. He'd got there, and he was staying . . . He hadn't been offered coffee.

  " D o you have any evidence on which to base this supposition?"

  " T h e aim of the shots."

  " D o you have an eyewitness?"

  The grating of the cup on the saucer. A pause. The snapping of a cigarette lighter.

  "That is a very straightforward question, sir."

  " Y e s , Mr Erlich, I have an eyewitness."

  "Who saw it all?"

  " S o I understand, yes."

  " M a y I talk to the eyewitness?"

  "Probably - at a suitable time."

  " I s tomorrow suitable?"

  " I cannot say . . . "

  Again, a pause. The smoke curled between them, eddied to Erlich's face. A telephone rang in an outer office. The policeman glanced upwards as if he hoped that the phone would give him an excuse to get rid of this intruder.

  "Well, sir, what do you have?"

  "What do I have? Put simply, Mr Erlich, I have an intelligence agent of a foreign country going about his activities without informing the local authorities of his work . . . Do you think, Mr Erlich, that if I went to your Embassy to request a detailed briefing concerning the work in my country of Mr Harry Lawrence, Central Intelligence Agency, that I would be shown anything, other than the door . . .?"

  " Y o u have the hit car?"

  "Burned out, no help."

  A welling frustration.

  "We're on the same side." The last time he had been in Athens, when the group that called themselves "November 1 7 t h " had hit the Procter & Gamble offices with an anti-tank rocket, he had not been admitted to the presence of this big man. The warhead had not detonated, there had been no casualties. He hadn't been welcome then, wasn't welcome now, but he hadn't pushed his luck as hard when the target had been a corporation and no casualties, as when the target had been an American government servant, dead.

  "Are we, Mr Erlich?"

  "What do you have?"

  "Lawrence and his contact walking in a quiet street. An Opel Rekord, stolen three days earlier in the Piraeus, pulls up 20 yards behind them. One man out, Caucasian, blond short hair. The contact shot. Lawrence blunders into the path of the bullets, is hit . .

  "White?"

  "Caucasian, Mr Erlich, white."

  "IN that it?"

  "There was a shout from the car driver."

  "What was the shout?"

  " The word 'Colt'."

  "What?"

  " T h e shout was the one word. Please, Mr Erlich, be so kind as to excuse me. The one word shouted was 'Colt'. Only 'Colt'."

  He was Colin Olivier Louis Tuck.

  Tomorrow would be his 26th birthday, but there would be no cards and no presents.

  He sat and stared out over the skyline of the city in the chill of the evening. The first thing he had done when he had come into the apartment had been to turn off the heating system, and then he had opened the window in his bedroom and the window in the sparsely furnished living room. He hated to be boxed up.

  What had gone wrong he did not know. He had been met by the Defence Ministry people, who had taken him directly from the aircraft steps, but no one had said a word on the way into the city. There had been no pumped handshakes, no kissed cheeks, no back slapping, so something was wrong. And there was a man at the door, standing as if on guard. A man in a two-piece suit, and a thin cotton shirt and his tie knotted at the second button of the shirt. There was little light in the room but he wore wrap-around dark glasses. Colt had his back to his watcher, but could hear him shiver in the draught. They would say whatever it was they had to say in their own time. There was no hurrying them, that's what he had learned since he had been in Baghdad.

  He ran his fingers hard through the cropped growth of his fair, light golden hair. He closed his eyes. He'd wake when they came.

  His day had started at 4.30 with the bleeping of his wrist-watch alarm. No breakfast, because he never took breakfast. No coffee.

  No food, nothing to drink. He had dressed. He had stripped the weapon, rebuilt it, satisfied himself, and then unloaded and reloaded the magazine. He always checked the mechanism bef
ore firing because the Ruger/MAC Mark 1 was now vintage and occasionally liable to jam. At 5.30 he had left his room in the west quarter of Athens, in the student sector. The car had been waiting for him.

  As he lolled in his chair, not asleep but relaxed, he could remember that he had felt no tension, less excitement, as he had thrown his bag into the back seat of the car, climbed into the front carrying the Ruger with the integral silencer in a large plastic shopping bag. The driver was good, no sweat. The driver was from the Colonel's staff, and he had travelled ahead a full month before so that he knew the city, the back-doubles they might need and the side streets. Colt had known the driver for eleven months, and he knew he was good because the Colonel had told him how the driver had once handled an ambush.

  Colt had been taken to the hotel where the target was staying . . . He had seen the target leave the hotel . . . It was his decision as to when he should take out the target. As the target had come out of the hotel, his hand had stiffened on the grip of the Ruger in the plastic bag and he had eased his weight towards the passenger door. But the taxi rank outside the hotel had been full and idle and the target had been straight into a vehicle. They had followed, and he had let his feelings rip when the driver had lost the taxi at a traffic light. The driver had stayed calm and quartered the streets until the taxi was picked up again two full minutes later. The driver would have known it was his first time, didn't take offence at the yelling. The taxi had stopped eventually at a crossroads in a suburb, and the target had paid it off and walked straight to a man who waited on the pavement. The target and the man had walked away up a tree-lined road. It was as good a place as any. No cars parked in the road, no pedestrians.

  The road was two hundred yards long and empty . . . It was as good a place as he could hope to find. He could remember the car pulling onto the verge 20 yards behind the target. He could rememeber calling out, because he wanted to separate the target from the man who masked him. He could remember the suppressed clattering noise of the firing on semi-automatic. The second man had lunged across the target, he could remember that, and he could remember that he had kept squeezing the trigger. He would have shot the second man anyway. It was too good a place to miss out on. But it would have been tidier if he could have separated them. It was just bad luck for the second man that it had been a good place. They had fallen, both of them, he could picture it exactly in his mind, and he could remember Kairallah, calling to him to get back to the car. There wasn't a great deal else to remember because it had all been pretty damn straightforward. Running for the car, the car going steadily, not too fast to the airport, and out onto the flight to Ankara. And even less to remember of the delay at Ankara before the connection to Baghdad. Actually, he had done well . . .

  The thoughts, memories, lulled him. He had made his choice.

  For the time being it was a one-bedroomed apartment on the sixth floor of the Haifa Street Housing Project. It was an open window looking out onto the wind-rippled waters of the Tigris and across to the A1 Jumhuriyah and A1 Ahrar bridges and over to the tower blocks of the foreign-money hotels. It was his bed, and he would lie on it.

  He heard the scrape of the guard's feet as the man scrabbled to get to the door.

  He heard the rap at the apartment's outer door. He pushed himself to his feet. He stood with his back to the open window.

  The Colonel was a thick-set man. He smelled of lotion, from Paris. He was not tall, but there was nothing flabby about the weight of his body. He wore a plain olive-drab uniform, only the insignia of his rank on his shoulders, no medal ribbons. His calf-length paratrooper boots were not shined, they were streaked with the grey dust of the street.

  He liked the Colonel. The Colonel, his patron, his friend, in his mind was without bullshit, but tonight there was no warmth, no smile even.

  "Were you seen?"

  "Seen? What do you mean, seen'"

  "Were there any eyewitnesses to the shooting?''

  " N o . "

  " I s there any possibility you could be identified?"

  "Nobody saw me."

  "Think hard. Could anybody have seen you to associate you with the car even?"

  " T h e road was empty."

  " Y o u were seen by nobody?"

  "Only by the target, and whoever was with him . . . "

  "Whoever . . . ?"

  "They're both dead."

  " D o you know who it was who was with the target?"

  "I did not ask his name before I shot him, no."

  He stood very still. He knew that the target was a writer, an exile. He had been told what the writer wrote about the regime and the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. He had been told also, in whispered confidence, that two attempts against the target had failed. He was the Colonel's card . . .

  Below him he could hear the passing wail of sirens, a familiar sound after dark had fallen over the city. The squads from the Department of Public Security always did their work at night, taking into custody those they claimed were a threat to the regime.

  And the sirens escorted their prisoners from the Department to the Abu Ghraib gaol, and those who had not survived interrogation from the Abu Ghraib gaol to the Medical City Mortuary on the other side of the Al Sarafiyah Bridge.

  " Y o u shot an American, Colt . . ."

  "I killed the target."

  "A C.I.A. American . . ."

  The boy laughed out loud. He laughed in the face of the Colonel, and at the watcher standing against the door.

  " S o what , . . ?" he said.

  "He was an intelligence officer."

  "It was a good street, got me? It was great. It was dead, there was no one No nannies, maids, deliveries, really good. The target, he was already fidgety, I couldn't follow him all day, not a target who was that sharp. The street was right. If the American hadn't gone then he had my face, and he had the car. He had to go . . . and he should have chosen his friends more carefully."

  At last the Colonel smiled, and there was the gravel growl of his chuckle. "And you did nothing stupid in Athens . . . ?"

  " Y o u taught me what to d o . "

  ". . . Nothing Colt-like, nothing wild? What did you do, Colt?

  No girls, no boasting?"

  " Y o u taught me. I'm clean. It was a good street, Colonel.

  There was an opportunity and I took it."

  " Y o u could not be identified?"

  " I ' d go back, to Europe, because I know that I cannot be traced."

  The Colonel laid his broad hands on the young man's shoulders.

  He looked into the calm of the face, into the clear eyes.

  "It was well done, Colt."

  Amongst those few who knew Zulfiqar Khan, and what work he did, news of his killing spread fast. And with the news, fear.

  In Paris, an engineering specialist in deep tunnelling in heavy rock strata, home on leave, made up his mind there and then to turn his back on the remaining two and a half years of his contract.

  The tunnelling that the Frenchman was paid - and handsomely

  - to supervise was off the road to Arbil, close to the village of Salahuddin, due north of Baghdad. The area so far excavated was the size of a football pitch, and deep enough for three levels of laboratories and workshops that would be concrete-lined. One more floor was required. The cavern was eminently suitable for the work intended for it. It was safe from air attack and shielded by the Karochooq mountain mass from satellite photography that would tell the siory of the purpose for which this rock cave was fashioned, News ol Dr Khan's murder had eddied amongst the foreign specialists on the project. By midday word had reached all the hard hat staffers. By late that night, two of those staffers were at Baghdad International airport. They had driven the two hundred miles from their Portacabin compound in the village of Salahuddin at high speed. They waited for the first flight out of Iraq on which there were seats. It might be to Jeddah, or to Karachi, or to Budapest.

  At the airport was an Italian who specialised
in the fitting of the argon gas filters necessary for the hot cell boxes. The Italian sat close to his friend on the front row of the plastic-coated seats, and studied every two, three, minutes the T . V . monitor that would announce the next flight out. The friend had an office in the same block at Tuwaithah. The friend, who was an engineer involved in the precision shaping of chemical explosive, had that morning received a letter bomb which by chance had failed to detonate. They had been at the airport for six hours, waiting for a flight, any flight out of Iraq, going anywhere.

  Erlich was breaking the rules. A Fed on assignment overseas with the ranking of Assistant Legal Attache must always work through local law-enforcement agencies. Back at F . B . I . H . Q . , where the book ran the show, they would have been climbing the walls in the Office of Liaison and International Affairs if they had known that he was out on his own. At the very least, he should have had a local policeman with him. At best, he should have been waiting until the morning and then politely requesting a desk and a telephone and an interpreter somewhere in the back reaches of their Counter-Terrorism building. But Erlich was his own man.

  He had been his own man on the training run at Quantico and it had not been held against him there. And his own man in Atlanta, where his straight talking and his independence had won him his next posting. And his own man in the Washington Field Office, the CI-3 team, and putting in the longest hours and never a word of complaint, and that had won him the job in the Attache's office in Rome. It was not his intention that he would spend the rest of his life as a Special Agent. Ten years, he had set himself, to running a Field Office. Twenty years, he reckoned, to an Assistant Director's desk in Headquarters. It was a break, coming down to Athens, and a good break should be grabbed with both fists.

  The sadness was that it came from the killing of Harry. The excitement was that it was a really brilliant break. Sadness and excitement, both already seeking their own compartments.

  At the edge of his flashlight beam he could see the dampened flowers, flattened now by the steady fall of rain. He wasn't interested in an examination by torchlight of the exact spot where Harry Lawrence and the contact had fallen. He paced out an arc of twelve paces, looked for the killer's place. He could be very thorough . . . A body on a garbage dump nine miles out west of Atlanta. Female, eighteen, black. Believed to be the victim of a serial killer, probably the fourth. She'd fought, her fists were bruised to show she'd fought, and there was nothing to work from.