CONDITION BLACK MASTER

by Unknown

"Bucharest, air head. They ran a facility down there to show us a new housing project. It's a real fun place, you'd love it. We got one slot on the Breakfast, two others are holding pending (he trash can, and I'm scratching all over."

  "What's Bucharest like?"

  "Creepy, horrible . . . When are you coming home?"

  "I don't know."

  " I ' m lonely already . . ."

  "Get yourself a stud off the beach."

  " T h e stud I've got, he's pulling my panties off now . . . Love you, Bill, that sort of crap."

  "Take care, J o . "

  "Come home."

  "Ciao, J o . "

  Perhaps he should have told her that he loved her. He sure as hell missed her, but they weren't supposed to love each other.

  When they were together, great. When they were apart, too bad.

  Jo wasn't going to throw up a Field Producer's job with a network to shuffle round after a Fed. They were just career people, and busy. And he had forgotten to ask her what was the result of the game in Naples. She was on the edge of that scene with him, bringing in a picnic in the summer and a thermos of soup when the Saturday mornings came colder. He thought that theirs was what was called an "adult relationship", and the best they could manage. Rutherford had a wife at home, lucky old Rutherford.

  Rutherford had his shirts washed and his trousers pressed and his meals served up on demand. Erlich put together his boots and his waterproofs and his bivouac. Rutherford would be waiting for him, down on the street in the car.

  Colt found himself a room on the south side of Newbury.

  He paid £80 to the man, and because he hadn't jibbed at the

  £40 a week, two weeks in advance, he thought the man regretted not asking for more. The house was virtually new and the builders were only a hundred yards away putting roof beams on for the next phase of the development. There were worry lines on the man's lace, and he had passed the notes straight to his wife who was behind him, holding a baby.

  He stood in the room. The man was by the door. A bed, a table, a chair, and a wardrobe which didn't close properly.

  Colt said, "I've moved up from the West, looking for work. I may be on days or nights. I just don't know at the moment what my hours will be. I hope you don't mind that, me coming in and out at all hours. But I'll be quiet. Is that all right?"

  " N o problem, mate."

  The door closed on them. He had found a room in a quiet street. He could come and go at will. He was only eight and a half miles from Tadley. He kicked off his shoes. He lay on the bed. He would rest until it was dark.

  Sara had seen them through the sitting room window, working the far side of Lilac Gardens.

  " Y e s ? "

  She had her coat on and she was in time, if she left quickly, to get to the MiniMarket before turning up at the school gate.

  "Good afternoon . . . "

  "Can I help you?"

  The older woman had a pale face, shoulder-length auburn hair tied in two plaits and she wore a long overcoat tightly buttoned.

  The younger woman had short-cut fair hair with a parting and was bright in her yellow raintop and mauve shirt. Not Salvationists, not Jehovahs. The younger woman carried a clipboard and she stood behind her companion with a pencil poised. Sara really, actually, did not have time to be polled on detergents or politics or . . .

  The older woman smiled. It was the sort of smile that was taught in charm classes, wide, brilliant and signifying nothing.

  "We're from P . A . R . E . "

  " D o you want money?" Of course, they wanted money. Why rise would anyone tramp round tedious Lilac Gardens if not for money. I low much would it take to get rid of them? She had three £10 notes in her purse, and damn near nothing in small change, Could she give them a tenner, and ask for nine in change?

  "We just want to tell you about P . A . R . E . "

  "Oh, I am in rather a hurry."

  "We think it pretty important. Cancer in general, leukaemia in particular. We think it's worth a few moments of your time.

  May I ask what your name is?"

  "Bissett, Sara Bissett. I am in rather . . ."

  "Mrs Bissett, do you have children?"

  "I've two small boys."

  "Then of course you'll be interested in P . A . R . E . " The younger woman smiled, the same smile.

  The older woman said, "We are from the Tadley action group, People Against Radiation Exposure, I expect you've read about us."

  The younger woman said, "The cancers round the Aldermaston base and the Burghfield Common factory . . . "

  The older woman took her cue. They were well rehearsed.

  " T h e cancers are way above average in this area."

  "That's child cancers, which is mostly leukaemia, and testicular cancer for male adults."

  "I don't know whether you are aware, Mrs Bissett, that you are living very close to such danger."

  "Both Aldermaston and Burghfield Common have quite appalling safety records."

  "Into the water, into the air, they're just spurting out poison.

  Nobody knows the long-term effects."

  "When the new building at Aldermaston is working we estimate that it will produce two thousand drums of solid waste a year."

  "And it will produce a million gallons a year of liquid waste, and where does that go after it's been treated? It goes, Mrs Bissett, into the Thames."

  "Already the leukaemia rate in this area is six times the national average, and it's going to get worse."

  Sara was calm. She rather surprised herself. She just wanted to be rid of them. She wanted to do her shopping, and she wanted to be at the school gate to collect her children. She had no sense of loyalty to Frederick, not at that moment.

  "That's a pack of lies."

  The older woman's mouth tightened. "Statistical evidence shows . . . "

  " L i e s . "

  The younger woman's voice keened, " Y o u know what we've got here, Deirdre, one of the 'little women' whose husband works there."

  Sara said, "That's right, so just piss o f f . "

  " I f you think that learning about the risk of leukaemia in children is wasted time . . . ?"

  "She'll just parrot her husband's distortions, Deirdre."

  "God, why can't women think for themselves . . . "

  They turned away. The younger woman minced to her companion, " I f I were married to a man working at that place, spreading leukaemia around, I'd have left him."

  For what? Bed and breakfast with the kids on Social Security, new schools, no roof? She would never leave, not now . . . She was late. "I don't have time to hang about listening to your lies and distortions," Sara snapped.

  They had their shoulders back, as if to make their point that they could take abuse and survive. In a few moments they would be at little Vicky's door, and half frightening her to death. Sara locked her door behind her. No, it hadn't been out of loyalty to Frederick. It should have been out of loyalty to him. She should not have sent them packing because she wanted to get supper from the MiniMarket and still be on time at the school. She should have kicked their behinds off her front step for slagging off her husband, and her husband's work. She sat in her car.

  Sara knew what she should have done, and she had not done it. And she should not have sat in her car before switching the ignition, and rejoiced that it was her art group again in two days and wondered if Debbie's husband . . . she should straightaway have made up the lost time.

  It had taken them time, hut they were getting there.

  They were a good team and there was nothing that an investigation could throw up that, between the three of them, they had not confronted before. No rush, but the hours had been worked, and the picture had emerged.

  The pieces had started to slot together when Don had received from Ruane, down the wire from London, the photograph of Colin Tuck. Don thought that young Erlich had done well to have gotten the name of Colt, and the photo. He had made an asshole of himself at Athens Coun
ter-Terrorism, nothing but criticism for closing down that source, but this was good work.

  Don had sent Vito and Nick out with the photograph, and he had booked the best table at the best restaurant in the Piraeus, and he had treated the head of Counter-Terrorism to the sort of meal that was going to lift an eyebrow or two when the docket reached Administrative Services Division. Smoothly he had opened the doors that had been slammed in young Erlich's face.

  Opening the doors had given the team a good young liaison who would go anywhere with them, get past any block, and was at their disposal from the time they woke to the time they hit the sack. The Agency's Station Officer, across on the other wing of the Embassy, said that no one had ever oiled such co-operation out of those Greek mothers as Don had. With the doors open and the liaison in place, Don could sit back in the office and collate what came in. They had the place, the rented room, where Colt had spent the night before the killing, and they had a kind of identification from a Yugoslav who still stayed there, but the room had been cleaned and there were no prints that helped.

  Vito and the liaison had done the airport. Every check-in desk for every flight that had gone out from Athens that morning and that afternoon, and when that showed nothing, then he and Nick had worked the lists of the cabin crews of all the Olympic flights.

  A stewardess, a week later, back from the mid-morning flight to Ankara had been shown the photograph. She had remembered the man in the photograph as a passenger He had refused coffee and refused food. She had given Vito and Nick a seat number, and the airline computer had given them a name, and the name and the Irish passport had been checked with the Emigration officers on duty that morning. They had had a flight to Ankara.

  Of course, the passport was rubbish, not important . . .

  Pleasantly calm for Don, Athens, once Vito and Nick had flown to Ankara. A round of golf in the Ambassador's four-ball, a cocktail party at the Station Officer's home. Vito, through on secure communications from the Embassy in Ankara, had reported that he had found the check-in girl who had done the duty that late afternoon. The check-in girl had nodded when shown the photograph. The Iraqi flight had been delayed. There would have been a passport switch in transit at Ankara, a British passport used. She remembered the British passport, and she remembered that she had been shown the Iraqi visa. Ankara airport didn't carry a passenger list for the flight, and they weren't inclined to go asking the Iraqi officials if they had a flight list. Didn't matter . . . They had him, the little bastard, out of Athens and into Ankara transit, and they had a passport switch, and they had him on a delayed flight to Baghdad.

  It had taken them time, but they had gotten there.

  They sat in the room they had been allocated at the Embassy, and they had a portable radio playing in the room and they talked under the sound of the radio. Old professionals, doing it the way it should be done.

  When he had finished the longhand draft of their report, Don read it back.

  Nick said, "That's shit in the fan, guys."

  Vito said, "Respectfully, Don, that's for the Director's desk."

  Don said, " I ' m not arguing."

  Nick said, "It's just too clean, to well-organised, for Colt to be hitting for an asshole group."

  Vito said, "It's state-sponsored, and what Big Wimp will want to do about that, I just don't know,"

  Don shuffled the sheets of paper together. The Athens end was over.

  Don said, "We shouldn't take that kind of crap, least of all from a government."

  He reached for the telephone. He rang the restaurant down in the Piraeus to hook the table by the plate-glass window with a view over the yacht harbour. Next, he rang the Station Officer to say they'd be gone in the morning.

  After dark, Colt left the house and walked three streets to where he had parked the car.

  Colt was the moth, his mother was the flame. He headed for his home and for her bedside.

  10

  "Of course, I wanted her to see you but, God help me, I don't want you taken . . . "

  " I f you shout, you'll wake her, and she needs all the sleep she can get."

  "Damn you . . . "

  The boy was his agony. Still so clear in his mind, the dawn raid of the police. He and Louise in their dressing gowns in the hall while uniformed men and detectives swarmed over the house.

  The detectives had carried handguns when they had run through the hall in the moment after he had opened the front door.

  The armed detectives and uniformed men, who carried pickaxe handles and sledgehammers that would have taken down the door if he had not immediately opened it, had ransacked their home in frustration. The whole village had known. The road outside the main gate to the drive had been blocked for an hour, and there had been more guns outside, guns carried in the garden and in the fields beyond the paddock at the back. That was what the boy had done for them, sentenced them to the dropped lace curtains when they walked the village street and to dropped voices when they used the shop that was also the Post Office. After the raid there had been the surveillance and the clicking interruptions on their telephone line and the delay on their letters that most often took four days from postage to delivery.

  "You're just a bloody fool to go to the pub."

  "Nobody'll tell on me."

  "You're so bloody arrogant, and so bloody naive."

  "They're my friends."

  "Friends? . . . You don't have any friends. They're junk, trash.

  You have your mother, and you have me . . . You have no one else, Colt."

  His mother's hair had still been fair, soft sunlight gold, when the police had come that early morning. Now it was grey-white.

  The medical people that they had traipsed to see, from one specialist to another, searching for better news, said that extreme stress hastened the spread of the cancer. The raid had only been the worst. There had been the time when Colt had stayed away a week, and the papers and the radio had carried the story of the bludgeoning of an animal scientist in his own home. Nothing had been said, but they had known.

  After the raid, the two of them, together, had tidied the house.

  Neither of them had mentioned the boy's name, not for hours, not until the work was finished. If he had mentioned the boy's name she would have broken. But he wasn't a rogue dog that he could have had put down if it bit the postman, he was their son.

  There was no escape from the love, whatever the agony, whatever the confusion.

  "Is there anything you want?"

  "I didn't come here to take anything. I came only to see my mother."

  " D o you want money? I could go to the bank . . . "

  "I need nothing. I have more money than I can spend."

  "You're a whore . . . " And he bit on the word. He stepped back because for the briefest of moments he wondered if his son would strike him. Facing him was only the total calmness of the boy. It was, he thought, as if Colt had been through hell and fire and tempest and to be called an abusive name was merely trivial.

  God, and he loved the boy. Colt's voice was gentle. "Were you happy in France?"

  "I had a cause, I had something to fight for."

  " Y o u didn't think that then."

  "It was right what I did, I knew it was right."

  " Y o u never thought about that."

  "What do you think I did it for?"

  "Because it was freedom."

  His freedom had been being hunted, and never believing that he would be caught, tortured, shot, never believing that. Freedom had been making up his own rules, far from the armchair warriors at S.O.E., from the buggers who had never slept in a cave and never stripped a belt-fed machine gun and never run like the wind from a wired shunting yard.

  "We're the same, Dad. You have to see that . . ."

  He looked down into his son's face. God, and how he loved the boy.

  He said, "Before you go, if you can come again, please . . ."

  The boy kissed his cheek. He hugged the boy.

&n
bsp; He stood on the landing and watched his son lope away lightly down the staircase.

  The shadows had gathered around him, and his age and his loneliness. As he went back into the bedroom to prepare the night medicines he heard the kitchen door close on his son's back.

  A wild and awful night, a night when the badgers moved without threat of disturbance, when the rabbits crushed their bellies against the ground and fed fast, when the fox coughed a hoarse bark to bring a screamed answer from a vixen, when a tawny owl clung with talons extended to the ivy skein of an old oak.

  A night on which an Astra car was parked for safety in the driveway of the local police constable in the adjacent village, across the parish border.

  The night for a man who gloried in the wild and who would never be trapped. Colt was at home. He was at one with the darkness and the elements. He was as free as the badger and the fox and the owl in the oak above him.

  Standing in the black doorway of the pillbox, he did not consider what error of his had brought men from the Security Service and the F . B . I , to the village. In his mind were images of animals transported to the slaughterhouse; of beagles with masks on their heads so that they breathed only nicotine smoke all the way to the first shadows of lung cancer; of a polar bear, its brain damaged by captivity stress, in the zoo at Bristol; of chickens reared in confinement so close that they could not walk nor beat their wings; of a gin trap tight on a bear's leg, and the animal in its pain gnawing at the limb that it might find crippled freedom.

  Fran was close to him. With a slow and deliberate movement she pointed away to his right, to the fringe of the wood, to where the wood was directly behind the Manor House. He saw the movements.

  T i s a dull sight

  To see the year dying,

  When winter winds

  Set the yellow wood sighing:

  Sighing, O sighing!'

  " F o r Christ's sake, Bill, shut u p . "

  "Edward Fitzgerald, perfectly good poet, didn't hit the big lime like Tennyson, but . . ."

  "You'll wake the whole village. Is that what you want?"

  "Just didn't want you to be bored."