CONDITION BLACK MASTER

by Unknown

  Just a miserable mistake.

  She had waited behind after lunch. She had helped Debbie clear away. She had wanted to speak to Debbie after the others had left, and all the talk over lunch had been of the trip to the Tate.

  She could have bought each of the boys a pair of trainers for what she had spent on the watercolours.

  "It's nothing to do with whether I'm good, whether I'm lucky enough to have been given more talent than you, the rest of you . . ."

  It was to do with money, bloody, bloody, money.

  She turned back to Debbie. She felt dirtied in her old jeans, and her old student painting smock. The other women hadn't pulled something out of a bottom drawer to come to the classes.

  The other women, Debbie and her friends, would have been shopping in Newbury or Hungerford, run round the boutiques, for something careless and suitable. Debbie's husband owned a software business outside Newbury.

  "Bloody hell, am I stupid." Debbie's voice had softened.

  Sara turned to her. There was a turquoise stone set in a pendant and hanging from a fine gold chain at Debbie's throat. The chain was long, too long, and Debbie had unbuttoned the two top buttons of her blouse so that the stone wouldn't be hidden, Sara thought the stone would have cost all of their own take home money for a month after the mortgage was paid.

  "It's boring old money, isn't it?"

  Sara nodded She should have been at home. She should have been thinking about the boys' tea, and about Frederick's dinner

  "Well, I have the solution," Debbie said. "You're going on the payroll, Sara. You're going on a freebie to the Tate because you're going to be our guide. And here, too, because when we need a model, you will be our model."

  She wanted so much to belong, could not help herself.

  Debbie said, "You're prettier than any of us, anyway. You'll be brilliant."

  Sara said, "I really don't . . . "

  "You're not modest, are you?"

  The Chief Inspector was not a snappy dresser. If he had been working for three days and three nights then it was in the suit he was wearing now, and his shoes had mud on them, and Erlich didn't think Ruane would be impressed.

  A yawn, then a big sigh. They were in a small office on the fourth floor, and one wall of the office was glass, and the heater was full on. Again the yawn.

  " N o w , what can I do for you, gentlemen?"

  Erlich was getting sharp on the routine. He could get through it in a minimum of words. The voice was English, the face was Caucasian. Height, about 5' 10". Age, mid-twenties. Eyes, bluish.

  Complexion, tanned. Build, solid without spare weight. Hair, short and fair. The name he answered to, "Colt".

  The Chief Inspector of Special Branch no longer yawned. " A n Englishman shoots a C.I.A. staff man and an Iraqi journalist in Athens, that's a pretty bizarre set-up, Mr Erlich. What's the motive?"

  "Iraqi state-sponsored terrorism. Our opinion, they would have set it up, used your national as the contract man."

  "Can't be all that many Englishmen qualified for work of that sort, don't grow on trees. A single shot, you say, through the head at twelve paces. He ought to be quite an interesting young man."

  Erlich said, "I want an identification."

  " I ' m sure you would . . . Working for Iraqi intelligence? An Englishman? If we find him for you, I fancy we'd value a few minutes of his time ourselves, if we find him . . . "

  And the yawn broke again on the Chief Inspector's face.

  Erlich said, " I ' m asking for your best effort, sir."

  " D o what I can, can't promise more."

  Erlich thought that he wouldn't be doing anything before he'd put his head down. Trouble was, if he put his head down then he might not wake up again for 24 hours.

  He went through the hallway of New Scotland Yard with Ruane, past the flame that burned alongside the Book of Remem-brance. Outside, he braced himself as the wind lashed them.

  "Will he do us the business, Dan?"

  "Maybe. He'll do his best."

  Erlich said, "I didn't get the message we were exactly priority."

  Ruane said, "They may have a crowd in town from Abu Nidal.

  That's to say, they do have a very dangerous crowd, they just think they're Abu Nidal. They have no line on a target, but they have four addresses staked. He came off that to meet you."

  "Good to hear that somewhere at least the killing of an American matters."

  " N o , it's not t h a t . . . he owes me at poker."

  Colt was escorted into the Colonel's office.

  He was invited to sit, he was offered a cigarette. He sat opposite the Colonel. He declined the cigarette, he lit for himself a small cigar. The Colonel beamed across at Colt.

  Not for Colt to ask why he had been summoned to the Intelligence Section of the Ministry. He rarely asked questions of them.

  He had learned early on that they did not appreciate questioning.

  They appreciated only answers to their own questions. He jolted.

  Away along the corridor from the Colonel's office, a man screamed. A rising wail of pure agony. And then a shorter second scream. And then silence.

  Colt had already shut the sound from his head, and the colonel showed no sign of having heard it. When a rabbit was in a snare, pinioned, and the fox closed in, then the rabbit screamed in tear and agony. Colt knew the sound, he knew the ways of the regime that was his host.

  "Are you well, Colt?"

  "Very well, sir."

  "Not damaged?"

  "Girls I know, sir, could have hurt me worse."

  The Colonel smiled. "I won a bet on you, Colt."

  "I hoped you would, sir."

  "I bet my friend, who commands the 4th Battalion of the Presidential Guard, that he could deploy $0 men and that none of them would lay hands on you. But you were impertinent to take their kit."

  "I hope it was a good bet to win, sir."

  "The favours of a Thai whore . . . "

  Colt grinned, and the Colonel laughed. Colt sat upright in the chair, there was less ache in his spine that way, less of a throb in his kidneys. His body was still a rainbow of bruises.

  "Colt, will you tell me about your father?"

  He spoke in a flat monotone, suppressing all the emotion he might have felt. " H e comes from what in England is called a good family. His parents had status, what a good family means.

  He is 70. Being of a so-called good family doesn't mean much these days, and the sort of money required to keep things ticking over a few years back doesn't get you anywhere now. After the war, when he was out of the army, he tried his hand at several things, and they were all pretty much a disaster. The money he had inherited with the house just wasn't enough. He tried business, just about anything. When I was a child he was selling insurance, then he was offloading imported sheepskin coats in the London street markets, then it was free range eggs. None of them worked. I really don't know where the money comes from these days They live, him and my mother, in one of those damn great draughty houses in the country. I suppose it's just about falling to pieces. It was after the war that he married. My mother is French, they met in the war. Truth is that everything that was best in my father's life happened during the war. He was a young regular officer, Brigade of Guards, at the start of the war, and he went to France with the Expeditionary Force. You'll have heard that they lifted the army off the beaches at Dunkirk. They took most of them off, but the rearguard and the wounded were left behind. My father was in that last line that protected the beach-head. When he knew they were going to surrender in the morning, he slipped away from his unit. I suppose you could say that he deserted. He moved out into the countryside, and eleven months later he was back in England. He had moved himself right across France and through Spain to get himself repatriated.

  Early in the war, in London, they set up something called Special Operations Executive, and my father was a natural for it. He was recruited. In the next three years he was twice parachuted into Occ
upied France. There are parts of France, used to be anyway, where he was almost a legend. Won't be too many places he'd be remembered these days, all those who could remember him are dead, or trying to die. He was an explosives man. Signal boxes on the railway, power lines, bridges. When they sent more men across, to liaise with him, it didn't work. He was his own man, never a team player . . . As long as the planes came to drop his explosives he didn't give a damn for the rest of the war effort.

  When it was over he was given a Military Cross by the British, and the Croix de Guerre by the French. It was the best time of his life, and everything since has been second best. He's older than his years and I don't know how much longer he can last."

  " Y o u are proud of him?"

  " W e used to fight, morning, noon and night. Once with fists and boots and teeth."

  "Is your father proud of his son?"

  He could remember clearly, when he had last been at the Manor House, the day he left. His mother had been crying as she had rifled the house for money for him, and as she had made sandwiches to put in greaseproof paper because it would be dangerous for him to stop at cafes on his way to the airport. His father had followed him from room to room, half a dozen strides behind him all through that late afternoon. When the telephone call had warned that Micky and Sissie had been arrested, there had been no option but to run. There was bound to be something in their squat that would lead the police to him. He had gone out through the kitchen door. He had left his dog tied to a drainpipe by the kitchen door, so that it could not follow him. At the end of the kitchen garden, by the stile to the open fields, he had looked back. They were framed by the kitchen doorway. His mother's head was bowed in her tears. His father had stood erect, his arm round his mother's shoulder. His father had not spoken a single word to him, just followed him around the house, not a solitary word. His mother had waved him on his way, not his father.

  "I doubt he'd think there was much to be proud of."

  The Colonel bent to retrieve a sheet of paper from his briefcase, then pushed the decoded typescript across the desk towards Colt.

  Colt read the letter that had been written that same morning, in haste, by his father.

  "I need to go home, sir."

  James Rutherford, first thing after he had closed the door behind him, took a tumbler of malt whisky up the narrow staircase to his wife.

  Penny said, " I f it doesn't kill the prawn bugs, it'll finish m e . "

  "Are we on the mend?"

  "Reckon so."

  " D a n called by today. You're not alone, his missus has the same."

  Rutherford knew that his wife liked Dan Ruane, always had a good word for him. Service wives were not generally involved in the social scene, only when it was an American evening. Penny would have known more wives from the Agency and from the Bureau than she would have met wives from the Service. She was sitting up in bed, and she drank, spluttered, and grinned.

  "Brilliant . . . what did Dan want? Sorry, sorry, wasn't thinking . . . "

  She was the well-drilled Service wife. She had to be. Service wives did not grill their husbands about bloody work. She made it her rule that Belfast, the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army, casual atrocities never crossed her lips, not after his last trip away, because the man who had come back to her from Northern Ireland had been frightened of his own shadow. She hoped to God that he would never have to go back there again.

  But James Rutherford didn't give two tosses for that particular tenet of Service discipline.

  " The American killed last week in Athens, Agency man, looks like he was shot by a Brit."

  "You're joking?"

  "No. Some sort of renegade, some dreadful little creature looking for a cause to pin himself to, I expect. The Library's trawling for him."

  "And how was Dan?"

  "Didn't really have a chance to talk to him. He'd a chap in tow who is doing the case. Civil enough young fellow, bit gauche, bit wet behind the ears."

  Penny giggled. The malt was working the colour back to her cheeks.

  "Well, he's American, isn't he?"

  Erlich sat in his quarters in South Audley street. He had half an hour before Ruane took him to dinner. There was a card game next door whose progress he could hear through the partition wall

  When he had left the University of California, Santa Barbara, he had taught literature at a school in Battle Creek, Michigan.

  He taught the children of ''Cereal City". Everyone worked for Kelloggs, and the plant turned out, each day, enough for ten million people's breakfasts. The kids didn't want to know about life outside Battle Creek. They wanted to get on the production line and turn out more breakfasts. They were enough to stretch a teacher who wanted them to learn the beauty of poetry. They'd stretched him, but they hadn't snapped him. While he had been kicking his heels yesterday he had spent an hour in a tiny bookshop in Curzon Street and had come away with a paperback edition of the Parsons Rosenberg and the Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes's anthology. He had left home so hurriedly as to have packed not one of the poetry volumes that he was very seldom without

  While he waited lor Ruane to be announced from the hall desk, he read.

  Red fangs have torn His face,

  God's blood is shed.

  He mourns from his lone place

  His children dead.

  His father would never have heard of Isaac Rosenberg, an English poet, killed in the last weeks of the "war to end all wars". His father had died at somewhere called Due Co that was somewhere in the Central Highlands in Vietnam. He thought of the cruel death of Isaac Rosenberg and the death of his father in the breaking of the siege of the Due Co Special Forces camp.

  Move him into the sun -

  Gently its touch awoke him once,

  At home, whispering of fields unsown.

  Always it woke him, even in France,

  Until this morning and this snow.

  If anything might rouse him now

  The kind old sun will know.

  This he could recite without the book, a poem of Wilfred Owen's which he had impressed into the minds of every one of his pupils in Battle Creek.

  Think how it wakes the seeds, -

  Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.

  Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,

  Full-nerved - still warm - too hard to stir?

  Was it for this the clay grew tall?

  - O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

  To break earth's sleep at all?

  He thought of his father, killed thousands of miles beyond reach, of Wilfred Owen, killed, of Harry Lawrence, his friend whose death he could avenge. And of Elsa and her children. He had made his promise. For Erlich there was no way that promise could be undone . . .

  The telephone rang. Ruane was downstairs.

  He went fast down the stairs.

  "Have they got anything?"

  Ruane said, "One fence at a time, Bill."

  Carol had told him before he went home, so Bissett knew what to look for - Carol was the conduit of all the gossip for H3 - and it put him in his best humour of the day.

  He made a detour to see it. Across Fourth Avenue, right up to the inner perimeter round B area. Through the close-mesh fence topped by razor wire he could see the wide double doors large enough to let a three-ton lorry into the huge earth mound.

  He saw the aerosoled message: " W E WOZ ' E R E " .

  As Carol had heard it, the Special Air Service had somehow broken through all the perimeter fences in the night, evaded the Ministry police and then bloody dogs, and reached the doors of the earth mound where the chemical explosives were stored, Carol had said that the S A S had also penetrated A area where the plutonium spheres were fashioned, walked right into the Citadel of the Establishment Never mind about A area, in B area it was plain to any Tom, Dick or Harry, bloody well done, the S.A.S.

  Bissett, along with almost everyone else at A.W.E., had a pro-found disrespect for the Ministry police. So many times held
up at the Falcon Gate, so many times made to open his briefcase and his empty sandwich box and turn Ins empty coffee flask upside down when he was anxious to gel home, so many times subjected to their questions when he was going about his business visiting other corners of the Establishment He could see the savage glower on the face of the Ministry policeman some 50 yards ahead of him. So, the S.A.S. had been in and demonstrated that the Ministry police security was a load of rubbish . . . Bloody well done, the Special Air Service. He imagined with pleasure the bollocking that would be administered to the men who had been on duty the previous night Perhaps they would be a little less arrogant in future.

  "In London, in 1934 when the knowledge of the power of the atom was a dream in very few minds," Dr Tariq said, "there was a Hungarian refugee. His name was Leo Szilard. It was he who first comprehended the potential of that atom. He foresaw a release of energy utterly beyond anything considered by scientists before him. He was standing on the pavement of a street called Southampton Row. The idea of this power, this energy, came to him as he waited for the traffic lights to change so that he could cross. If he had been able to cross immediately then perhaps the idea might never have formed in his mind. It was pure luck. But also his very great skill and his dedication - the fact that he was a Jew does not undo his skill and dedication - earned Leo Szilard his luck. If you work with great skill, Colonel, and with great dedication then you will earn your luck."

  The Colonel elaborated on the straightforward business of the reference section of the Ministry preparing for him a dossier on the British nuclear weapons programme. He also reported to Dr Tariq that he had put a London Embassy staffer, who worked directly to him, exclusively to following up one or two specific leads. He did not vouchsafe that this particular staffer was routinely tailed by the British secret services. They would all need luck, he reflected.