CONDITION BLACK MASTER

by Unknown

  A hesitation, a smaller voice. "Morning, Sara . . ."

  "Good morning, Vicky."

  It was her own fault. If she hadn't been an awkward, obstinate bitch of a teenager, it would all have been very different. If she hadn't sulked with her father, fought like a cat with her mother, she wouldn't now be hanging up Frederick's threadbare underpants on the drying frame in a tiny back lawn in Lilac Gardens, Tadley. There should have been a nice young man on the Sun-ningdale marriage circuit, and then a nice house in Ascot, and probably a cottage in Devon, and two boys at a good prepatory school in Surrey. But it had been her choice. She had turned her back on her upbringing, but it didn't matter how many times she told Vicky. She was always going to be Mrs Bissett to Vicky, and Mrs Bissett to Dorothy on the other side.

  "Got none of this 'flu, then?"

  "Wouldn't have the time for it, Vicky."

  " Y o u busy, then?"

  She saw Vicky's face, over the fence, crestfallen. Poor little soul must be as lonely as sin. Come in, join the club . . .

  She said cheerfully, "Big day today, Vicky. I'm joining an art class."

  She didn't have to tell the girl. She didn't have to tell anyone.

  She hadn't told Frederick, there just hadn't seemed to be the right time.

  "Oh, that's clever, Mrs . . . Sara."

  "Probably be a bloody mess."

  She should have stayed and talked with the girl, but this morning, unlike most mornings, she had a deadline to meet.

  Simply didn't have the lime to make soap-opera conversation over the fence. It was their fence, and it was coming down, and she had pointed that out to Frederick, and she had known he wouldn't do anything about it, any more than he would buy himself new underpants. He said that he much preferred the money they could afford for clothing to go onto the boys' backs, and onto her. She thought that her father probably now earned more than £100,000 a year, but she did not know for sure because it was nine years since she had last visited him, four years since she had last received a Christmas card from him. Her mother didn't even telephone. No reason for either of them to write or telephone, not after what had been said.

  "It would be wonderful to be able to do pictures."

  The telephone was ringing inside the house.

  She had the last of the shirts pegged to the frame.

  She should have stayed to talk to the girl, but her telephone was ringing.

  "Sorry, Vicky, another time . . ."

  She ran inside. She went through her kitchen, past the pool of water. Dorothy's husband had plumbed in the second-hand washing machine for her, and refused to accept money, taken all Saturday morning doing it. Because he had refused to be paid she couldn't ask him to come back again to deal with the seepage. So it would stay leaking. She went through the hall. They needed a new carpet in the hall, and on the stairs. She picked up the telephone.

  " Y e s ? "

  It was the bank manager, Lloyds.

  " Y e s ? "

  He had written twice to Mr Bissett.

  "Doctor Bissett, yes?"

  He had written twice asking for a meeting, and he had received no reply. There were matters to be discussed that were really quite urgent. Would Doctor Bissett be so kind as to call back and arrange the appointment?

  "I'll tell him you phoned."

  He would be very grateful if she would do just that.

  She rang off She had seen the two letters. The first had arrived ten days before, and the second had been delivered four days before. She had seen him, ten days before and four days before, scoop up the letters from the kitchen table and put them in his briefcase. He hadn't remarked on them, and she had not asked.

  Each morning she had been too busy getting the boys ready to query the letters from the bank. It was years since she had last been to an art class. She didn't really know what she should be wearing, but that morning she put on an old pair of jeans. All of her jeans were old. She had dressed in a vivid red blouse and a loose woollen blue cardigan, and she had tied her long dark hair into a pony tail with an orange scarf. She hadn't been to an art class since she had been married.

  She thought that she looked good, and she felt bloody good, and she wasn't going to let a telephone call from the bank manager interfere with her seldom-found excitement.

  When it was dusk, Colt walked out of the village of Al Mansuriyah. The last light played on the cliff wall of the Jabal Hamrin, but by the time he reached the steep-sloping ground he would be covered by darkness. The sun's rays lingered on the one narrow minaret tower in the village behind him, and on the flat roofs where the corrugated iron was weighted down with heavy stones against the spring gales.

  When he was clear of the goat herds and the sheep that grazed around the village, he moved down to the river that was a tributary of the distant Tigris. His boots were comfortable, had a deep tread. He scrambled down to the water's edge. With his fingers he broke away mud from the river bank and wet it in the river.

  He smeared the mud across his face, and then across his scalp so that it matted in his close-cut hair. He layered more mud onto his throat and down to his chest and across his shoulders. Last, he rubbed it over his hands and wrists.

  They had tested him in Athens, now they tested him again.

  He had no hesitation in telling himself that he would win.

  Failure, he had often said to himself, was not a part of his life.

  He had sat forward, in Club, because Tourist was full. The whole plane was full and Nick had done well to get him a seat at all. He had never before been through Customs and Immigration at Heathrow. Not a bad experience, because there was an Englishman with Erlich's name on a sheet of cardboard waiting at the entrance to Immigration. That was good. He wouldn't have his suitcase to show. The man had a card that did the work at the desk, saved them the queue, and it did the business at Customs too. The guy let him carry his own case and led him through into the concourse where the English driver from the Embassy pool was waiting.

  That was okay. He hadn't reckoned on one of the Liaison team coming down from Central London just to shake his hand, talk baseball results, and drive him back. It was a good run into the city, against the outgoing commuter traffic.

  They ended up close to the Embassy in a road called South Audley Street.

  The driver gave Erlich an envelope with his name and the South Audley Street address on it. Inside a glass door he was met by a security man, plainclothes, not at all talkative, probably from Kansas. He was given a key and left to find his own way up two flights of stairs.

  It was a room like any other room. It was what Bill Erlich, the bachelor, was used to, clean and soulless. Inside the envelope was a note from the London-based Legal Attache. He was tied up that evening, apologies, and the rest of his team were out of town. Could Erlich be at the Attache's office at eight in the morning at the Embassy?

  Erlich was alone in a city that he didn't know. He dialled Jo's number in Rome, and grew lonelier and sadder as it rang on and on, unanswered.

  Colt could easily have killed him. Colt thought that "elite"

  was the most overworked word in the military dictionary. He reckoned that the word elite was usually applied to those who had the best publicity machine. In the Baghdad Times, the English-language newspaper, the Presidential Guard were always written up as an elite force. They had all the kit, down to the nightscope. They had bivouacs, sleeping bags and cold-weather anoraks.

  He had found the observation post two miles beyond the outer rim of the Jabal Hamrin. He had skirted it and approached them from behind. Three troopers of the Presidential Guard.

  They did two hours on, four hours off. It was the first obstacle in his route from A1 Mansuriyah to Qara Tappah, and he could have ignored it, simply carried on, but that was not his way.

  He had waited, motionless, until the frost had settled on his body.

  The gag was across the trooper's mouth, and the pressure of Colt's knee was into the small of his back, and the sheer
strength of Colt's arm took the trooper's wrists up into the blades of his shoulders.

  He trussed the trooper so that he could not move his feet or his hands. On top of the gag, he forced into the trooper's mouth the trooper's own filthy handkerchief.

  Where he had been a child, when the fox came at night around the barricaded chicken houses then the old bugger always scented the chicken house sides, left his stink, boasted that he had been there.

  And it would amuse the Colonel to hear what he had done to the President's elite guard.

  He would have a 90-minute start on them, maybe longer.

  ''I am afraid, Dr Bissett, thai ignoring facts does not make those facts go away."

  It was a quarter past nine. It was a clear hour after Bissett would normally have been at his desk.

  "Now, if we could, please, just go over the figures . . ."

  He hated to be late It was the way thai he had been reared.

  I

  "Your salary as a Senior Scientific Officer currently runs at

  £17,500. I am correct

  He had heard Carol, only the week before, say that the man who delivered coal to hn house was paid £345 a week. For loading and unloading sacks of coal, and driving a lorry round the villages, that was £440 per annum more than a Senior Scientific Officer earned slaving for the defence of his country. That was the society they lived in. No account taken of intellect and value.

  "Your wife does not work Don't misunderstand me, I am not implying that she should be working . . . I sometimes feel that a great many of out social problems at the moment, young people rampaging, are brought about by mothers going out to work . . . So, there is no other source of income coming into the household? Correct again?"

  She had worked in the supermarket off Mulfords Hill for five and a half month-. It had been t he first time that he had really seen Sara in tears. Adam had fallen over in the playground, hit his head on a bench, been taken to hospital. The school hadn't had his number at A.W.E. The teachers couldn't ask Frank where his mother might be because his class was out for the day on a Project Course. The first Sara had known of Adam's injury was when she had turned up to collect him at the school gate. She'd told him about the looks aimed at her by Adam's teachers. That was the end of her working, and anyway the money had been peanuts.

  "Your mortgage is currently set at £62,500, Dr Bissett, which is slightly excessive for the salary you command, but I do quite understand that you bought at the top of the market and that interest rates were then not at their present level."

  They had made the move to Lilac Gardens in the summer of 1988. They had paid £98,000. They had known they were on the knife edge, and interest rates had been at 8 per cent. Sara had said that she just was not prepared to live any longer in the jerry-built little terrace at the bottom of the village.

  " N o w , your salary works out at approximately £1460 per month, gross. Then, we've tax, insurance, local government rates, pension

  contributions, and the mortgage. I would estimate that, allowing for your outgoings, you have around £600 a month at your disposal.

  But that, of course, does not take into account the loan we made you at the start of the year. Six thousand five hundred, repayable over three years, plus of course interest. That's another £180 a month, without interest. You are behind on the interest, Dr Bissett, and you are two months behind on the r e p a y m e n t . . . "

  The loan had been to buy the second-hand Sierra, and then had been topped up to cover repairs required by the M . O . T . ; and then increased again when Sara's Mini had just died on her, expired in the middle of the village with 110,000 miles on the tombstone. Sara had to have a car. And topped up again to pay for the repair of the flat roof over the kitchen, and the man who had done the work should have been prosecuted for fraud.

  " D r Bissett, I hate to say this to a government employee, but

  . . . private enterprise round here is on its knees for skilled and qualified people . . ."

  "What I'm interested in is no use to the private sector. And I'm a research scientist, damn it, not a yuppie."

  "So be it . . . Can you look for promotion, a better salary scale, a higher grade?"

  "I've been looking for it for years, but I'm not in charge of promotion and the people senior to me in my department are Home of the most brilliant minds in England, and elsewhere for that matter."

  The bank manager eased back in his chair. He was young and a Initially, flitting from branch to branch and all the time climbing.

  His elbows rested on the leather padded arms of his chair, and his fingers were clasped comfortably in front of his chin.

  "Something has to be done. We cannot go on like this, Dr Bisssett,"

  Sara said that the exterior woodwork of the house was a disgrace and needed painting, and that the kitchen floor needed new vinyl, and that the hall carpet was awful. Sara said that if they couldn't do better than last year's holiday, a caravan in the rain in West Wales, then it wasn't worth bothering . . .

  Bissett stood.

  When he was angry then the Yorkshire surfaced again in his voice, the grate of the harsh streets of Leeds. So bloody hard he had fought to get those streets behind him. All that struggle, just to have this jumped-up little man lecturing him.

  " T r y telling the government that 'something has to be done'.

  Try telling bloody Downing Street 'we cannot go on like this'."

  "Nobody forced you to buy that house."

  Bissett stared at him. "Don't ever say anything as stupid as that to me again."

  In his adult life he had never struck any person, certainly not Sara, not even his children in anger. He stood, looming over the manager's desk. His forehead beneath his curled brown hair was reddening. His spectacles had shaken down the arch of his nose.

  His fists were clenched at the seams of his trousers. His breath came in short pants.

  "Steady down, Dr Bissett."

  He could see that his bank manager was further back in his chair, almost cowering.

  The bank manager waited until Bissett was at the door, until he was sure of his safety.

  "I have to say it again, Dr Bissett, we cannot go on like this."

  The door slammed. The papers leaped on his desk. In fairness, the bank manager would concede, he could not see where the poor fellow could make another economy and continue to live a half-way acceptable life. But the man needn't have shouted . . .

  Anyway, the whole thing was ridiculous, maintaining that white elephant when every school child knew that the Cold War was over and done with.

  Erlich's morning was a write-off. He hadn't expected the red carpet to be unrolled for him, but he had thought that at last he would be at work, setting up his meetings, on the move. The Legal Attache 1

  was once more apologetic, he had a late runner in his programme, a problem with a fraud extradition. There were problems with the warrant, and the Legal Attache was going to be down at New Scotland Yard for the morning, and probably for the afternoon.

  Could Erlich manage eight o'clock the next morning?

  He rang Rome, the Legal Attache's office, and spoke to the girl who typed his letters and answered his telephone. He didn't know when he'd be back and she should cancel everything for the next several days. A lunch with the Capo dello Squadro Anti-Terrorismo that he had been waiting a year for, a session with a good guy in the Guardia di Finanze, and a squash game with Dieter who was number two to the Legal Attache, and he just didn't know whether he'd be back before the Little League All Stars trip to Naples and the game against the Sixth Fleet which was the high point of the season which they played now courtesy of the Italian sunshine into late fall. Everything on his desk to go into Pending.

  He had never been a happy sightseer and until his work was done, until Harry Lawrence's killer was identified and caught he couldn't see himself playing the tourist at the Changing of the Guard, or the Tower of London, even Poets' Corner which he had longed to see, as a passionate studen
t of English poetry . . .

  that would have to wait. When this assignment was well and truly nailed he would ask Jo, long chance, if she could get over here. It would be a pleasure to share these glories with Jo. By mid morning he had been through the day's edition of the Herald Tribune. Under the dateline of Rome, that caught his eye, he read that increasing mystery surrounded the murder of Professor Zulfiqar Khan. It was now known that the body of the Professor who specialised in nuclear physics had been claimed by the Iraqi Embassy in Rome. It was not yet known what had brought the Professor to the city . . .

  By the time he hud read the Herald Tribune from front page lead to back page comic strip, the maid had come to make up his room. There was a sniff of disapproval signifying that it was out of court for a grown man to be still in his bedroom in mid-morning, and not at a place of work.

  Her vacuum cleaner drove him into the street, in search of a coffee shop.

  Two espressos and a Danish pastry later, he was reduced to buying postcards. One for Jo. He had tried again in the early morning, and again the phone hadn't been picked up. He could have rung the C.B.S. office in Rome, and asked where she was, where they'd shipped her. But Jo never rang him at work, and he never rang her office secretary to find what flight she'd taken.

  That was their way, their understanding. The Herald Tribune had told him that there was more confusion in Prague, more rioting in Zagreb, an O.P.E.C. meeting in Geneva, and a European summit starting that evening in Madrid. She could have been assigned to any one of them. He wouldn't have admitted it to Jo, but deep down he resented it when she was out of town and not picking up his calls. They met whenever she had a free evening and he had a free evening, and it wasn't often. It was even rarer that they could share a weekend in the villages round Orvieto.

  They spent their evenings together in a trattoria on the square beside the Ponte Milvio or down in Trastevere, before a couple of hours at his place, or half a night at her apartment. They each said that it suited them, that kind of relationship. He wrote, 'Jo honey, will you pick up the goddam phone? It's me, your friend, and I need to hear your voice. Where are you? Maybe you're in London. Will look more closely at all the girls in future. Just in case.'