CONDITION BLACK MASTER

by Unknown

  "Please sit down."

  Erlich sat. "What have you got for me?"

  "Would you like coffee?"

  Erlich said, " I ' d rather know what you've got for me."

  "Milk and sugar?"

  Erlich said, " N o sugar."

  "Have to do it myself, my girl's off sick."

  Erlich had gone down to New Scotland Yard fast enough to be more than 25 minutes early for his appointment. They had made him wait. He had been taken to the fourth floor at exactly the time of his appointment. It was a bare working room. Erlich had seen nothing like it in CI-3, in Washington Field Office, where each room had photos of wives stuck onto cork boards, of kids, postcards from vacations all over the world, cartoons, clippings of headlines and a huge blow-up of a quote from an English thriller writer: " T h e most suspicious, unbelieving, unreasonable, petty, inhuman, sadistic, double-crossing set of bastards in any language [are] the people who run counter-espionage departments." Nothing like that here. Not even a picture in a frame.

  The Chief Inspector came back in with two plastic containers of coffee. Erlich thought that the Chief Inspector looked, if it were possible, more tired. He thought that any Special Agent who dressed like this guy would be disciplined.

  The Chief Inspector took his pipe from his pocket, filled it slowly, methodically, and lit it, and when the room seemed to Erlich dangerously full of smoke, he lit it again. "For the last week I've had my head into Irish files, got me? In this country Irish files come first, and every time I'm into an Irish case I find myself cursing just about everything American, got me? American money keeps the Provos alive . . . And one more thing. We put a hell of a lot of time and effort into feeding your crowd detail on the Provos on your side of the water, and trying to get your judges to extradite the bastards back here is harder than getting water out of rock."

  "You'll have to forgive me, Chief Inspector, I've got a one-track mind and I'm here only to locate the man called Colt, the Englishman who murdered an Agency man in Athens."

  "Just so you know what kept us busy." The Chief Inspector put flame to his pipe once more and under cover of the smoke-screen took a thin file out of the desk. "We have a movement here called the Animal Liberation Front," he said. "It's made up of anarchists in part and in part middle-class softies. This is a free country and people are allowed to sound off about the fur trade, about vivisection, about experimenting with live animals.

  These people do all that, but they are also known to plant fire bombs and rough people up who work in laboratories where animals are used for experiments. A couple of years ago, the A . L . F . was getting out of hand. There were two department stores gutted by incendiaries; there was a laboratory where three dozen beagle dogs were 'liberated'; a bomb was put under a car hut failed to explode; a scientist who was trying to find an antidote for cystic fibrosis was beaten up. There was a special unit set up here, Animal Rights National Index, but these idiots had tight security, a good cut-off cell system, and it took us a hell of a long time to open the can. The breakthrough was a squat we turned ovei on the south coast, two years back. We found a set of initials there. We were able to put names to all the initials. Four males, two females. Three males and one female were arrested. The fourth male was identified as a boy named T u c k . "

  "And that's Colt?"

  The Chief Inspector ferreted again for matches.

  "That's Colin Olivier Louis T u c k . "

  Erlich said, and he meant it, "Great thing, this special relationship, and thank you very much."

  The Chief Inspector leaned over the desk, his voice hissed in anger. "I'll tell you what I think of this so-called special relationship. It's whatever you want, and when you want it."

  Erlich did not understand the hostility of this man. He had been given a name. He had said what he thought was the decent thing to say, and had it chucked back at him.

  "What's your problem, Chief Inspector?"

  "My problem? By Christ, I'll tell you what my problem is. My son has been dead for three years. My problem, as you call it, is that he was 19 and serving his first year in the Light Infantry, in the Bogside of Londonderry, and the weapon that shot him dead was an MI6

  high-velocity rifle, product of America, put into the hands of those scum by scum in America protected by American judges."

  Erlich dropped his head. " I ' m sorry," he said.

  He was told that the liaison procedures were being sorted out.

  By tomorrow they would be in place.

  Erlich let himself out of the room.

  In the outer office a young detective intercepted Erlich.

  " M r Erlich?"

  "That's me."

  "A Mr Rutherford has been trying to reach you. He said would you call by, Curzon Street, side door."

  The passport that the Colonel had given him was in the inside pocket of his anorak. The contact telephone number and the contact address he had memorised.

  He was going home, aind home meant to him no more and no less than the room where his mother was dying. The Colonel had no need to pressure him to return again to Baghdad after his mission was completed, and after he had visited his mother who was dying. They might as well have had a rope round his ankle.

  He was a fugitive from the justice of his own country. He knew the sentences that had been handed down to his associates. Twelve years the men, seven to the girl. Of course, he was a fugitive.

  His own country offered him only the deathbed of his mother, and twelve years' imprisonment, Of course, he would come back to Baghdad. It was rare for him to feel gratitude to any person, but the nearest was his feeling for the Colonel. He had drifted into the Colonel's orbit. He had come from a bulk tanker that had tied up in the oil terminal in Kuwait harbour, thanked the Master who had allowedhim to work his passage from the port of Perth, and gone ashore. He had gone because the great forward deck had in its turn become another confining space to him.

  Kuwait meant nothing to him, but the place was crawling with his countrymen, in the hotels and eating houses, on the streets and beaches. Brits were bad for Colt, so he had hitched a ride away from the city, to the fronier, and crossed over to Iraq. He had smiled at the frontier guards and kept walking with his rucksack slung over one shoulder . . . until the hand had clamped on his collar, and the boots had pitched him into a cell. Bruised and bloodied from days of interrogation on the floor of a cell that was an inch deep in his own shit and piss, the Colonel had found him and freed him. Of course, he would return to Baghdad. They had a need of him, he a need of them.

  At the gate of the security zone where there was access directly onto the apron, he formally shook the Colonel's hand. The Colonel kissed him on both cheeks.

  "The Thai whore, sir, she was good?"

  The Colonel hugged his shoulders, and he laughed.

  "If you had lost the bet, sir, what would you have paid them?"

  The hands moved to the back of Colt's neck and squeezed.

  It would have been a long story, the warming of friendship and respect between the barrel-chested Iraqi Colonel and the young man from England who had proved he could stalk and kill. But a long story was an indulgence. Colt could only abide a short story. So it was a short story as he told it to himself, of an English runaway crossing the frontier from Kuwait, and failing in spite of many beatings to satisfy his interrogators until the arrival of the Colonel at the Public Security base at Basra. Colt seldom lied, not now, not then. He told the Colonel his life story between puffed lips, chipped teeth, and the Colonel was amused.

  He had been taken to the Colonel's bungalow. He had been told that he would teach two overweight, spoilt teenage boys the English language. Colt, bottom of the class before he was expelled, now Colt the tutor. He had been lifted from a detention cell and given the job of English teacher because the Colonel liked a boy who could smile into the face of an interrogator who wielded a rubber truncheon. And Colt, after long days of torture, had recognised in the Colonel someone he could like, so
meone whose trust he would value.

  "Until we meet, Colt."

  He was the last passenger onto the aircraft.

  Rutherford sensed Erlich's impatience from across the room.

  "Right, Mr Erlich . . ."

  "Bill."

  "Right, Bill . . . concerning Colin Tuck, who we shall call Colt, I am your liaison while you are in Britain. Anything you want, you put in a request to me. Any actions you may think necessary will be vetted by me, any interviews you wish to carry out will be arranged through m e . " Rutherford hoped that he spoke with sufficient polite force to nail the message home. " M r Ruane will have told you, no doubt, you adhere, most strictly, to the guidelines that we lay down. That way you get all the help and co-operation we can provide, any other way and you get shown the door. Are we quite clear?"

  He saw the American rise. He was like the pellet led rainbows in the Fishery waters near Penny's parents. But the American rose and didn't take, had more sense than those daft trout

  "Thank you for hearing me out, Bill. Sorry for the i laptrap, but the rules are important to all of us."

  "Quite understood. Tell me about Colt."

  There wasn't too much to tell, and after Rutherford had finished he would leave the American in the room with the file and let him gut it for himself. He gave him the digest. He told the story of a loner, a drifter, a maverick boy who went from banner-waving at public meetings to protest at experiments on animals, all the way to incendiaries and assault and finally an attempted car bomb. And then the sudden flight and the disappearance of the boy from the face of the earth. He mentioned the request for information from the Criminal Investigation Division of the police in Western Australia, of a description received from Perth of a murder suspect, which might be relevant and might not, couldn't say.

  " H e went to the pub in the village where his parents live the night before he disappeared. He was in the pub, that we know.

  The next day his parents' home was searched, and the boy was gone. His parents have always refused to co-operate or even to discuss the boy."

  "Isn't that where we start?"

  " The house is periodically watched, the mail is routinely opened, telephone calls are intercepted. We have no indication that his parents have had any contact with him since he disappeared two years ago."

  "It's still where we start, I'd reckon."

  Rutherford said, "Would you not rather read the file first?"

  Rutherford saw the determination, the jutted chin, of the American. If he had been working out of the Embassy in Washing ton, If he was being shunted round the F.B.I. and the Cental Intelligence Agency, if he had been twiddling his thumbs for a week, he might just have been a little determined himself. This was not a Lockerbie operator, that was clear. He had heard that the Feds at Lockerbie had been good as gold, working at the pace required, picking up on every small detail provided by the forensic team at Farnborough, where the 747 had been reconstructed.

  This young man was a bull looking for a china shop. He assumed Erlich to be ambitious, looking for results that would lift his career forward. He didn't care for ambition, perhaps he should have done. Rutherford found ambition a little vulgar.

  He pushed the file across to him. He saw it snapped open. The photograph spilled out. Rutherford saw the way Erlich's eyes focused onto the photograph. It was a vendetta, any child would have seen that. This was Bill Erlich versus Colin T u c k , and anything that was personal in an investigation was going to be a bloody nuisance.

  "I'll leave you to it. Be back shortly." Not good form to leave Erlich alone in his office, but his safe was locked, and the drawers of his desk were locked, and he wanted to get to Accounts before they closed, to draw a float before setting off.

  T h e Swede's office was on the second floor of the building.

  Outside his window there was a small garden, well watered on these warm evenings. The garden was often used by the target for a short relaxing walk. The distance between the Swede's second-floor office and Dr Tariq's ground-floor suite was 60 feet.

  The Swede had measured it.

  He was at Tuwaithah because his much-loved sister had married an Israeli Air Force pilot. On his last visit home, to the university city of Uppsala, he had met with countrymen of his sister's husband. When he had returned to Baghdad, he had limped through Customs and Immigration to the car sent by the Atomic Energy Commission. He had leaned heavily on a stick.

  With his baggage had been a Sony music centre

  The stick, after the apparent improvement of his pulled ten-dons, remained in his office, always in the corner by the door where he hung his coat.

  The stick concealed a rifle microphone, which, after much debate - over the alternative merits of contacts, spikes, tubes, any number of possible bugs - had been manufactured for him.

  He could only use the microphone after his two Iraqi assistants had gone home. It was a huge risk, each time he unscrewed the base of the walking stick, took out the rifle microphone, plugged it to the small receiver that by day nestled in the back of his music centre, put on the headphones which on most days he used to listen to classical music. The fear, the terror of detection, each time, left him physically drained. But the job he had been given by the Mossad agents, who traded ruthlessly on his love of his sister, was a narcotic to him. He had become addicted to the terror.

  He had twice before seen the Colonel walk through the garden to Dr Tariq's office, but on each occasion his assistants had still been at work.

  It was 17 days since he had last locked the door of his office, turned down the lights, and unscrewed the cap of his walking stick, and heard Dr Tariq and Professor Khan discuss a series of meetings in Europe.

  He crouched now beside the window. It had seemed so very straightforward at first, at the time of his recruitment. He was a techno-mercenary in the laboratory at Alto Gracia under the Sierra Chica mountains of North-West Argentina. Their first approach, late at night in his hotel room, came a week after he had received his sister's long and excited letter telling him of her marriage. Perhaps he had been bored, perhaps he simply hadn't believed in the danger. There were a number of Iraqis at Alto Gracia. They were the banker of the Condor missile development on which Argentina co-operated, with the further expertise of Egyptian engineers.

  It had all been stage-managed by the Mossad. By a chance remark in passing in the Sierra hotel bar where the foreigners were billeted, a remark in the hearing of a senior Iraqi scientist, the Swede had let it be known that he found the missile programme tedious, that he really needed more challenging work.

  It had been true, and he often reflected, the work was challenging.

  For a bachelor, too, the working conditions and the pay were well above what he thought he could command elsewhere. Barely a week later an invitation had been made to him. He had thought, naively, of the excitement, and of his sister. But the conditions and the pay were long since beside the point. The point was the barbed hook of the Mossad in his nervous system.

  The Venetian blind was drawn down. The window was open.

  The microphone rested on the window ledge. Sharp and much too loud in his ears, the evening song of the birds and, between the calls of the birds, voices. It was hard for him to catch the words, because the flowerbeds had just been hoed and the birds were raucous in their search for food in the fresh-turned soil.

  " . . . Only H area, Colonel. Their A area, no, no, just engineers. Their B area, that we do ourselves. He must come from H

  area, nowhere else . . . I don't want a chemist, I don't want an engineer . . . A scientist, Colonel, and he must come from H

  area . . . "

  The Swede never attempted to assess what he eavesdropped.

  He passed it on verbatim.

  Every shrill cadence of the birds' song, every soft utterance of Dr Tariq poured into him the high exhilaration of fear.

  Colt flew into London on the last flight from Frankfurt. He had changed aircraft already at Prague. At Immigrati
on he produced the Irish passport that the Colonel had given him.

  He was nodded through.

  No problem. And why should there have been a problem?

  6

  Saad Rashid was a shrewd man, good with figures, but it did not take his shrewdness to know that a sentence of death would have been passed upon him by those who had once been his colleagues in Baghdad.

  It was a month since he had made the initial transfer. Twenty-nine days earlier he had personally visited the National Westmins-ter Bank in Lower Regent Street, and in the office of the Deputy Manager he had ordered the movement of 500,000 American dollars from the account of Iraqi Airlines (London) to a numbered account in Dublin. Twenty-eight days earlier he had travelled to Dublin to transfer that sum to a second numbered account in Liechtenstein. Twenty-seven days earlier he had, by telephone, moved that same sum out of Liechtenstein and into the secrecy-shrouded computers of the Credit Bank of Zurich. On the day on which Saad Rashid had received the confirmation of the transaction from Switzerland, he had tidied his desk at the back of the Iraqi Airlines office, taken what few personal possessions he kept there and placed them in his briefcase, locked his door, pocketed his key, and told his assistant manager that he believed he was showing the first symptoms of the 'flu that was sweeping London. He had gone then to the Syrian Embassy and had applied for a visa for himself, for his English-born wife, for his two daughters. On that day, twenty-seven days earlier, he had travelled from the Syrian Embassy back to his rented home in Kingston-upon Thames, and there he had, for the first time, informed his wife of their changed circumstances.

  They had moved out that evening from the house in Kingston-upon-Thames. They had spent two nights in bed-and-breakfast accommodation before taking a month's let on a furnished flat close to Clapham Junction mainline railway station. Twenty-five days of suffocating in the one-bedroomed flat with his wife and the two children. He was a man used to taking his favoured clients to the Ritz or to Claridges. When he was on business away from home he stayed and entertained in the Hiltons and Sheratons and InterContinentals. The children wanted to go back to school.