"You'll deal with the dog?"
"I'll do the dog," Rutherford said.
They were at the wall of the vegetable garden. Rutherford showed his watch; on the luminous dials it was 25 past two. He didn't know why Rutherford had to show him the time of night.
He clipped the revolver back into its holster. Rutherford made a stirrup with his hands and Erlich slid a boot into them. Rutherford heaved, levered Erlich up. It was an old wall, and the mortar came away as Erlich steadied himself on the top. He reached down, took Rutherford's hand and dragged him up. They were both on top of the wall and bent low.
" Y o u ready, Bill?"
" A s I'll ever b e. "
He turned and took Rutherford's outstretched hand and lowered himself down a carpet of ivy to the ground. Rutherford was beside him, crouching, in a second. He unholstered his revolver and Rutherford motioned him to follow. Rutherford was a pace ahead of him when they reached the kitchen door. He was flattened against the wall beside the door with the Smith and Wesson up close to his ear.
His hand was tight on the revolver handle. His breath came in great controlled surges. His heart was going like a hammer and he thought that if the wind hadn't roared through the trees around the house the dog would surely have been alerted by now. Rutherford's hand was on the door handle.
" L o c k e d? "
"We'll try the front… "
"Where he came in."
Again Rutherford was in front. First they withdrew 20 yards into the kitchen garden and then looped along the back of the house, past old flower pots, past an overturned wheelbarrow.
They stepped through the loose coil of a watering hose. They came up the side of the house, along a narrow path. He was at Rutherford's shoulder, as if it were important to him to be close to the Englishman. They were at the corner of the house. He thought that the front light's bulb, the light above the front door, must have blown, because the front door was in darkness. There was a small car parked near to the door, but it was outside the crescent beam thrown by the skylight above the door. And across the lawn beyond the gravel there was a narrow shaft of light where it pierced poorly drawn curtains upstairs.
"Upstairs…?"
"Where his mother is."
Rutherford turned the door knob. The door eased a fraction of an inch. Rutherford was looking at him. It was his choice.
There was the dead weight of the Smith and Wesson in his hand.
He could go inside fast, he could leave Rutherford to handle the dog, he could finish it. Rutherford was waiting on him. His choice, because he had the weapon. He could feel the shake in his hands and the hard panted breathing in his lungs. He knew his breathing was too hard, too fast. He held his breath, on his terms and in his time he let the breath hiss from his lips. That was what they taught on the StressFire course. That was what they taught when the student was going into Condition Black.
One more time. Hard in… and wait… slowly out. Then he drove his shoulder into Rutherford. He push-punched the front door open.
He was on his way.
He was going.
He was committed to shooting Colt, to killing Colt.
Across the hallway, the bloody great animal seemed to fly at him off the wall. Erlich ducked, the loose carpet scudded from under his feet. There was the moment he stumbled. He caught at the end of the bannister rail for his balance. He was on the bottom step of the staircase. Behind him he heard the first barked shout of the dog, from the kitchen. He went fast up the stairs, stamping his feet for speed. He could see the blood pool in the rain where Harry Lawrence had fallen. He pulled himself with his free hand on the bannister round the corner hallway up the stairs. He could see the pale and hollow cheeks of Harry Lawrence on the stretcher in the Athens mortuary. He hit thetop of the staircase. There was the door ajar, with the light behind it, ahead of him. The dog was making pandemonium, blocked at the bottom of the stairs by Rutherford.
He went in fast and crouched and turning
"Safety" off. Isosceles stance. Finger hooked beside thr trigger guard. His arms were out to their limit, hr, body was bent forward, slight angle. His legs were loose, not locked, so he could turn right, turn left. His eyeline was over the sights He saw the man beside the window. He saw the woman sitting in the chair beside the bed. He saw the woman frail shape, eyes shut, lying propped by pillows on the bed
Holy God…
Christ, no…
He saw the man, Major Tuck, guest at the Reform Club, father of Colt, stare at him, unable in shock to speak He saw the woman, dressed like a nurse, rising from her chair, and her fury had bitten at the plumpness of her face.
"Who are you?" The snarl of the woman's voice.
"Where's Colt?"
"I'll have you know there's a patient in this house."
"Colt came, his car."
"Nonsense… Put that ridiculous thing down. It's my car, and I came alone."
Holy God, Christ, no… He saw that the woman in the bed was conscious, gazing at him in horror, perhaps in disappointment, her mouth fallen open, her eyes searching past him. He eased the hammer of the Smith and Wesson down. His thumb flicked the Safety upwards.
"Where you come from, don't you have any respect for the sick? Go at once, and go quietly."
He didn't apologise. He had nothing to say. He turned and he went out through the door. He closed the door behind him. He came back down the stairs, stepping carefully in the wet mud footprints of his ascent. He thought he might faint. He steadied himself on the bannister rail. Rutherford was at the bottom of the stairs with a walking stick clamped into the back of the mouth of the dog and holding tight at the animal's collar.
Erlich walked past him out through the front door into the howling night.
That it was his last night in his own country had not at all disturbed him.
He had taken Bissett back to his train, his arm hugging his shoulders. Bissett had slurred his thanks. He had stood by the train's window until it had gathered speed, and he had seen that Bissett's eyes had followed him as far as it was possible to see him. He had gone back to the room in the Great Western Hotel, and he had taken a glass of mineral water with the men from the Embassy, and they had made their plans for the following day.
They couldn't do without him, Colt thought, but it was obviously as much as they could tolerate, having to work with him. His association with the Colonel bewildered them even as it discomfited them.
The house was dark when he came back. He had gone up the stairs to his room as quietly as when he had climbed the stairs in Bissett's house, and he did not think that he had wakened the couple and their baby.
It was his last night in England, and he had not cared to think that thought. He had tried to free himself from the thought of his mother and her bedroom that had become a sickroom, and from the thought of his father and the long, cold days of his vigil, and from the thought of Fran and her freedom and her love and her big dog and her snaring wires. Colt had torn the thoughts from his mind because they were danger to him.
His country was his mother and his father and his Fran, but he had turned his back on them. It would have weakened him if he had told Fran that he was hers, that he would come back, by Christ, some time, to his Fran. Might have told her, but he would have to have told himself first and he couldn't sap himself with such a thought.
Colt slept. The hard outline of the Ruger pistol under his pillow did not trouble his sleep.
At daybreak, the Swede drove the fast straight road that cut across the rich land between the great waterways of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Behind him was modern Iraq, the Atomic Energy Commission headquarters at Tuwaithah and the sprawl of the aL-Qaqa military industrial complex further south near al-Hillah where the rocket fuel was manufactured that would launch the Condor intermediate-range missile. And behind him was the ancient site of Babylon, where a thousand Sudanese labourers had worked all weathers for three years to recreate the citadel of Nebuchadnezzar.
It was an hour's run, the journey to Baghdad.
He saw the first giant-sized portraits of the smiling Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, and the streets were choked by the early traffic. His routine was that he went first to the coffee shop of the Ishtar Sheraton, to leave his car there for the kids to clean before he walked across the Jumhuriyah Bridge.
He ignored his usual route into the city, along Fourteenth July Street. He turned left onto Imam Musa, into the slow crawl amongst the lorries and the cars that pushed towards Al Kadhim Street, and the new Post Office.
He waved his identity card at the Ministry policeman, he was gestured on.
Bissett drove through the Falcon Gate at the normal time, the same cars around him that were there every morning. It was what they had said to him, a normal day, his last day.
But already he was the stranger. He drove down Third Avenue, seeing F and B areas as a stranger would, and the great grey box building that housed the laser equipment and then the four high-rise chimneys and then the bulk of the A area and then the colossus that was A90.
He no longer belonged.
Today he did not care whether A90 would come into service two years late or three years late. It did not matter to him whether the fourth Trident submarine were cancelled, whether the new cruise-launched missile to replace the WE-177 bomb ever reached development and manufacture.
He saw the H3 building as a stranger would have seen it. It was no longer his place of work, no longer his second home.
If it had not been for the confidence he felt in the young man, then he would never have dared, he told himself, to come back, to play this last act, as a normal day. He showed his identity card again. He carried his raincoat and his briefcase, with his sandwiches and his thermos, into H3. He smiled at Carol, he nodded to Wayne, he acknowledged the chiming greetings of the Clerical Assistants. Basil came in behind him, shivering from the cold, peeling the bicycle clips from his ankles. Basil had never spoken up for him, and Basil's word could have turned the scale for his promotion. Carol and the Clerical Assistants had only ever paid him token respect. Wayne sneered at him. He was a stranger to them all, he had been for years.
" A h, Frederick…"
"Yes, Reuben?"
Boll, all bustling self-importance, came into the outer office.
"Tomorrow, listen, very oring, but will you attend the. P.S..O,/
S.P.E.O. meeting?"
" I don't… "
" N o problem, Frederick, they won't eat you. I'll have gone and Basil's much too busy. Just go and take a note, see they dn't decide anything stupid. It's in A45/3, at 9.15. You can do that for me?"
"Of course."
"Good man."
Of course he would agree to attend but the. Senior Principal Scientific Officers and the Senior Principal Engineering Officers would have to manage without him because he would be in Baghdad.
"Excellent, glad I caught you… Goodbye, eveiybody."
"Goodbye," Bissett said, and he shook Boll's hand. "Send us a postcard."
He went to his room.
It was to be a normal day, just that. He switched on his terminal and gave the screen time to warm. Just another day, the stranger's last day.
It was the time that Sara liked least at home.
It was the time after he had gone to work, and she was back from dropping the boys at school. The beds needed making, the boys' washing was on their bedroom floor, the breakfast things were still on the table. She made a mug of instant. She sat at the kitchen table. She had the radio playing a phone-in.
Drunk again, that's what he had been, and practically midnight when he had come home. She had been awake, of course, because she had reached the stage when she had wondered how much longer before she phoned the police, or started to ring round the hospitals. He had said that he had been late at work – she knew by now, surely, that he couldn't bring papers out – and that he had stopped off in the bar at Boundary Hall. But, he never worked late, and he never went to Boundary Hall, and the first and last time when he had drunk too much had been at Debbie's party when he had been in the corner, all evening, with the young man injeans.
It was the morning that she should have been at Debbie's. Her head was bent in her confusion, and the beds went unmade and the washing undone, and the plates were still in the sink. She had come upstairs, broken off from getting the boys' lunches ready, and he had been in their bedroom still. She had stood in the door, and he hadn't known she was behind him. She had watched as he put into a suitcase the suit that he had taken to New Mexico, the nearest thing he had to a summer suit. She had seen him open the second to bottom drawer of his chest and take out his summer shirts, and put these in the case, and the case back on top of the wardrobe.
The confusion boiled in her head, that Frederick should seem suddenly to have snapped, after the business with the police, the pressure, obviously, of his work, weeks of not hardly talking to her at all, now this odd business of taking the boys to school, taking them swimming, playing games with them. Was he saying goodbye? It was as if he had been standing in the door – just as she was this morning – watching her on Debbie's bed with Justin.
It couldn't be so, but she felt weak with the sense of having destroyed her home, maybe even driven Frederick out of his wits, certainly put the happiness of her children at risk by that one massive lapse, that great tumbling fall from grace. It was not enough. Not lapse enough. She craved a longer, more clarifying fall. Not enough, Justin, not by any means enough, and yet Frederick was on the point of abandoning her. Well, by heavens, he wasn't going without a word. He wasn't going to creep out without an explanation. She would wait until the weekend. She would wait no longer. She stirred herself to the routine of her day, her normal day.
As he walked up the wide steps he saw none of them. His right hand was on the tape spool in his jacket pocket. His left hand was in his trouser pocket, fingering the key to the post-restante box.
It was the start of the day's business in the new Post Office.
Noisy queues, shoving and pushing, had already formed. There were Egyptians thronging at the counters to send the registered mail to Cairo and Alexandria and Ismailia with the small amounts of foreign currency permitted. There were Kuwaitis in line for use of the international telephone cubicles. There were Sudanese shouting for the telegram forms. There were the men who stood by the walls and who watched.
The Swede never went directly to the box. He followed a procedure given him by his Control. He must always join the longest queue first. He should join the queue, shuffle forward, gradually turn this way and that, he should see everybody in the cavernous hall of the Post Office. He should never hurry when he came to deliver and to receive from the post-restante box.
He always played the game to himself that the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council was Sven… Each of the techno-mercenaries at Tuwaithah had their own name for the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. He was Gunther, he was Pierre, he was Giancarlo… They lived in a world whose every wall had ears, where servants were never trusted. They could talk openly of Gunther and Pierre and Giancarlo and Sven. It was the Swede's little joke to himself, that Sven had a new set of teeth.
The portrait poster was above the benches that were set the length of the wall opposite the post-restante boxes. The Chairman wore the heavily decorated uniform of a paratrooper and round his head was a quaffiya. His smile would have brightened a dark night. Sven's new dentures… There were two men sitting under the poster, and he saw that their eyes never left the post-restante boxes. The Swede's hope died a little. He stayed in the queue and he studied again every wall and corner of the interior of the Post Office. It was ten minutes before he was sure.
There were four more men, other than the two men who sat on the bench under Sven's broad smile, whose attention was fixed upon the post-restante boxes.
He was the only Westerner so far as he could see. He was tall, he was blond, he was pale-skinned. It was impossible that he had not been noticed. He had seen the men who watched the post-restante boxes, he could not know how many men watched him.
The sane thing to have done would have been to bend to his shoe lace, retie it, put the tape on the floor, kick it away amongst the sandalled feet, then to walk out. But the tape was too precious to him
…
He made a gesture of impatience, he looked long and hard at his watch, he shrugged. He spun on his heel.
He tried to stop himself from running. The fear surged in him.
When he was close to the wide door of the new Post Office, he saw a man reach into his jacket pocket and take out a personal radio. Then he ran.
The bright sunshine, the white concrete dust of the unfinished pavement, blinded him when he came to the bottom of the steps outside. Fear pulsed inside him.
His eyes cleared, he blinked hard. He saw the two cars on the far side of Al-Kadhim Street, and there were men in each car. He ran.
The bungalow that had been home for the two Italians driven from Tuwaithah by an unexploded letter bomb was vacant.
Under the direction of the housing manager, a work force of women was brought that day to the bungalow. It was cleaned, it was scrubbed and it was polished. The rugs were taken outside and beaten. The kitchen was washed from ceiling to floor. New linen was put on the bed in the main bedroom. Fresh flowers were arranged in vases. In the refrigerator were put a dozen cans of beer and two bottles of French white wine and food and cartons of milk.
The Baghdad flight, it was announced, was delayed indefinitely for operational reasons.
A few of the passengers, the foreigners, the ones not already checked in and through to the duty-free lounges, vented their anger at the Iraqi Airlines desk. They were the minority. The majority accepted the situation and the free meal vouchers without complaint.
He was in the heart of the ancient round city. He ran, in fear of his life, in the narrow and dark-shadowed streets.
He had seen them last when he had stopped, panting, in the shelter of a black awning, and he had seen them quartering, searching, and a car drawing up at a crossing, disgorging others to join the hunt 50, perhaps 60 yards back down the alleyway.
The alley he was in was not wide enough for a car and down the middle of it ran a sewer carrying grey-blue slime. There were narrow and obscure openings, their steel shutters lifted, where melons and limes and tomatoes were sold, where the metal workers plied their trade, where iced lemon juice was poured into dull dirty glasses. These he passed, sometimes running, sometimes where the press of people was too thick walking briskly, his head down, as if on some anxious errand. Overhead, filtering the sunlight from the blond gold of his hair, were lines of hanging washing. This was the quarter of the poor, the crippled and the bereaved of the war, those ignored now by the regime.
No voice was raised to point him out to the dark-suited men of the Department of Public Security. The Swede was a fugitive.
He would not be helped and he would not be hindered.
It began to settle in the Swede's mind that even if he discarded the tape he could not ever return to Tuwaithah. He had been watched too long in the Post Office. He would be recognised.
Even if he could reach his car, he would be trapped at a road block. The gathering fear seemed to tug at his legs. The Swede stopped at a stall, bought a black woollen hat and an old khaki greatcoat. He paid for them three times what he would have if he had stopped to barter. He pulled the hat hard over his ears and shrugged into the coat as he left the labyrinthine alleys of the ancient round city. He prayed to his northern, foreign God for the preservation of his life and the safety of his tape.
It was as he crossed in front of the Central Railway Station forecourt that he saw the man with the personal radio that he had seen in the Post Office. He saw him and turned briskly away.
Too late. He had been recognised in his khaki greatcoat and his black cap. The man started towards him and then seemed to think better of it. The Swede could hear him shouting into his radio as he ducked into the crowd and began running as soon as he turned the first corner.
Bissett could imagine it, his situation in three months, six months, when he would be desperate for access to his computer terminal in H3/2. But he did not consider taking any material with him.
He would take with him only what he could carry in his head.
For his first week there he would sit alone and write out every small item from his memory. Maybe it would take him two or three weeks. When he had cleared his memory, then he would be free to set up his research unit and to plan the administration of his department.
All morning he funnelled his screen across past papers, past calculations, past reports.
And then he had concentrated on what they liked in H area to call the "physics of the extreme". Workings and statistics and figures tumbling up in front of his eyes. The heart core of a warhead detonation, reactions at 100,000,000° Centigrade, press ures of 20,000,000 atmospheres. Work from the lasers, studies from the "Viper" fast-pulse reactor that could produce peak power of 20,000 megawatts. .. So much for him to learn again, so little time before the end of his last day. It was like examination revision, which he had done so well at Leeds. Working quietly, methodically, at speed, he could nevertheless reflect that it would be peculiar to communicate his work to a stranger. It wasn't a question of morality, just that it would be peculiar. But then he had never worked anywhere except at the Establishment, had never had strangers as colleagues, never since he had joined.
He consigned to memory the charts, as much as he could, that dictated beryllium weights, how the tritium material could be melded in minute particles into the molten shape of ochre-coloured plutonium cores, the thickness of the highly enriched uranium that formed the concentric circle around the plutonium inside the quality gold crust.
There was a knock at his door.
He felt the frozen stampede of guilt. He swivelled to face the door.
Carol, hugging a plastic bucket to her waist. "Sorry to disturb you, Dr Bissett. You remember the electrician who had the accident on the A90 site, poor love, there's a collection for him."
He reached into his trouser pocket.
"He's paralysed, Dr Bissett."
He abandoned his trouser pocket. He had four ten pound notes in his wallet, no five pound notes. He took a ten pound note and dropped it into the bucket, amongst the pound coins and the 50 pence pieces. " O h, that's lovely, Dr Bissett, that's really nice of you. So sorry to have disturbed you. Thanks ever so much." He saw the way that Carol eyed him, like he'd cracked her image of him. It would be all round H3 that Dr Bissett had put ten pounds in her bucket.
He came out of the lavatory, in the early afternoon, not looking where he was going, struggling to retain the figures, graph shapes, calculation analyses, swimming in his mind, and walked straight into Basil.
They grabbed at each other. Bissett's hands had hold of the weathered old sinew of Basil's arms below the short sleeves of his shirt. Typical of Basil, late November and dressed as he would have been in June. They made their apologies. Bissett wanted to be away, but Basil would have none of it.
" Y o u r paper, very good. Reuben showed it me. I thought it was first class."
Bissett blushed. " T h a n k s. "
" A n d you may as well know that I have written to the Security Officer to tell him that, in my opinion, you were treated outrage-ously over that business with the files. I have asked that my letter, my assessment of you, should go on your file."
His voice was a whisper. "That's kind of you, Basil. Thank you very much."
"Absolutely nothing, Frederick."
He broke away. He went back to his office. He closed the door behind him. The stranger in the brotherhood. He bent once more to the last hours at his screen. Just a normal day, his last.
The Swede saw the flag fluttering high above the rich foliage of the trees, and at the same instant he heard the shriek of the siren.
There was a wide road for him to cross to get to the gates. There was a car thrashing forward through the traffic towards him.
There were guards in front of the gates, local militia.
He would not have thought that he could run further, faster.
He thought the siren was to warn the guards.
The Swede stumbled out into the road. The traffic parted for him. He had in his sights only the gate, and piercing his ears was the rant of the closing siren. Lead legs, empty lungs, darting crazily through the buses and vans and cars. And then he jerked to his left to avoid a cyclist and the cyclist hit him and he fell.
Because he fell, crashing knees and hands and chest onto the road, the Peugeot with the siren missed him. From the road, from the hot tarmacadam, he had looked up, the split moment, and he had seen the face of the driver career past him before the car skidded into the cyclist
He heard a scream and the brake squeal. He pushed himself up. He ran again.
He staggered off the road, across the wide footpath.
There was the shouting behind him. He saw the gaping curiosity, the bewilderment, on the faces of the militiamen at the gate. One militiaman tried hall heartedly to block him Willi his rifle barrel.
He ran on. He ran through the gate. Behind him now the siren and the shouting. He ran up the driveway. He ran through the wide doorway that was the entrance to the principal building of the British Embassy.
He no longer heard the shunting, he no longer heard the siren.
He lay on the floor in front of the reception desk, and a voice said, "Good afternoon, Sir, how can I be of help to you?"
He Jerked up from his bed Rutherford was in the doorway, and he carried his handset telephone, and it looked to Erlich as if Rutherford's world had fallen in.
Rutherford said, " They pulled us out."
"I don't have to ask why
"His father's raised Curzon Street and burned senior ears."
Erlich said bitterly, "Your people have one hell of an idea of consistent thinking."
"I can't argue with that."
"Are they reared on milk and rice?' Haven't they balls when the going's tough?"
"My orders are crystal clear. Get back to my desk and bring you with me. It's probably not worth saying I'm sorry."
He might as well have gone to Mombasa. He didn't think that he would see Jo again, and it had been for nothing. his virtuous stuff about duty. What did she think? That he could drop everything and head for the African sunshine? He might as well leave tonight before they threw the book at him. Probably Ruane had a transcript of Major Tuck's observations on his desk even now, with an acid memo from Mr Barker about the great astonishment of Her Majesty's Government that Mr Erlich should be armed with a Smith and Wesson rather than the regulation-issue kitchen knife.
"We should have checked the car."
"We should have stayed in the office and moved paper round, what every other bastard does."
Erlich said, "If he'd been there, I'd have shot him."
"Can you be ready to leave in ten minutes?"
"I'll be ready."
They came in turn to see the Swede in a small room in the heart of the Embassy building. There were no windows and the walls were reinforced, sound-proofed. He had drunk five glasses of fresh orange juice.
The first to see him had been the Information Attache, who swept up all loose strands of the Embassy's work, and he had gone away to deliver his report. There was a military policeman outside the door. The military policeman, on the Diplomatic List, was the Ambassador's driver, and he carried a Browning automatic pistol in a shoulder holster under his blazer jacket.
After the Information Attache, the Swede was interviewed briefly by t he Assistant Military Attache, and then again left alone. From the Ambassador's first floor windows, the deployment of militia and plainclothes men from the Department of Public Security was clearly visible.
Next in line was the Charge, the Ambassador's deputy. The Swede was not to know that while he sat with the Charge a telephone call had been received from the Foreign Ministry demanding the immediate expulsion from the protection of diplomatic premises of a dangerous foreign criminal. The Charge left him, and the Military Policeman give him some English newspapers and offered him the choice of tea or coffee. There was some difficulty with the supply of the fresh oranges. The Swede gratefully accepted tea. Sometimes he heard muffled talk in the corridor outside, but it was too distorted for him to understand.
The fourth man who came was different.
He was athletically thin. He had the old-fashioned razored moustache trim on his upper lip, and he wore rumpled jeans and a loose knit cardigan and a check shirt without a tie. The fourth man was what he had waited for. The Swede stood.
" Y o u don't need my name, and I don't need yours, the Station Officer said. "Best you come with me, my office is quiet, and there's a tape recorder."
"Good night, Carol." She looked up. Her console was already under its plastic sheet, and she was filing.
"Good night, Dr Bissett… and thanks for the ten pounds, that was great… are you coming in first in the morning, or going straight to that meeting?"
" E r, I'll decide tomorrow. Good night, then "
He had left his office as he had always left it. He had left behind the photograph of Sara and the photograph ol Adam and Frank. He carried in his briefcase only his empty sandwich box and his empty vacuum flask..
He drove away from the H area.
He passed Basil, pedalling into the wind along Third Avenue.
He passed the towering outline of the building that was A90.
He passed Wayne, waiting at the bus stop for the transport to the main gate and the coach park, and he remembered that he had heard Wayne say that his Mini had gearbox trouble.
He passed the signposts to the A area, the plutonium factory, where in the morning there was to be a meeting in A45/3 of Senior Principal Scientific Officers and Senior Principal Engineering Officers. He passed Carol's husband, the lathe operator, hurrying towards the canteen area and the bar where he would have managed three pints before his better half dragged him out and home. He passed the mole-hill mounds that were the testing and manufacturing areas for the chemists who worked with explosives.
Bissett came to the falcon Gate. He showed his identity card, he was waved through. He braked at the junction with the Burghfield Common to Kingsclere road. He waited for the traffic to allow him to enter the flow… and further on turned left into Mulfords Hill.
The end of a normal day.
The tape recorder was switched off.
For a few moments, in silence, the Station Officer continued his scrawled longhand precis of what he had heard.
"Thank you… Perhaps you wouldn't mind just waiting in here for a little while… oh, and don't go near the windows."
He let himself out of his office. He told the military policeman that no one, not even the Ambassador, was to go through that door without his permission. He waited long enough to see the military policeman draw his automatic pistol from his shoulder holster and hold it behind his buttocks.
The Station Officer walked swiftly down the corridor, down the stairs, down into the basement to the Embassy's communications area.
"You're not serious…?"
"It's my chance."
"You can't possibly expect me to take you seriously."
"Can't you just once listen…?"
It had started downstairs. Bissett had begun it in the kitchen.
He had followed Sara into the kitchen, left the children in front of the television, and he had put his arms round Sara's waist as she had been stirring the soup on the hob, and he had told her.
Too late to wonder if there might have been a better time. It could have been after the party at those awful friends of hers, or when he had first gone to London, or after the meeting in Stratfield Mortimer, or last night. Could have been any of them, but it hadn't been, it had been in the kitchen with the digital clock throwing up the numbers, telling him that the minutes were rushing away from them.
It had started in the kitchen. It had gone on through the hallway, where the boys could hear her, and up the stairs, and into their bedroom.
She could have listened to him.
She could have been quiet at least, and supportive.
She could have let him finish his explanation.
Too much to ask for…
"Even by your standards it is pretty fucking stupid."
" T h e boys will hear you… "
"Don't you involve my boys."
"They're my sons, too, Sara."
"They won't want to know you. Nobody'll want to know you, you silly little man… "
She had been his wife for twelve years. They didn't row, they didn't argue. When there was friction between them, then each in their own way sulked and withdrew inside a barricaded shell.
Never voices raised, because the children would hear. She had never abused him like this before, never.
"I have the opportunity to better myself. I am going to head a department. It's the equivalent, really, of a chair at a major university."
"Oh, I get it." She laughed out loud. There was her shrill laughter beating around his ears. "It's your vanity… "
"It's for you, don't you see that? It's for you and our children."
"Count us out, it's your ego trip, you go on your bloody own."
He tried to touch her. She recoiled.
"There will be a lovely house for you, a good school for the boys
… "
"God, you are dim… What am I? I am the wife of a traitor.
What are the boys? They are the children ol a traitor… Have you the least understanding of what you have done?"
He bridled at her. "Waste of my time, trying to get support from you."
"Support for what? For giving away this country's secrets…
If you've any sense, any, you'll just walk away from it."
" N o. "
" F o r the love of anything sensible."
" I ' m committed."
"Committed, to whom? Why not to me, to the boys?"
" T o Colt."
"Christ… who the fuck is Colt?"
" Y o u met him, at the party you took me to…"
He saw her reaction. As if the contempt went from her. As if the passion had left her.
"… Who you left me talking to. Where were you…?"
" I was… "
"Where were you?"
"I went…"
"Where were you?"
"Our host was laying me, like you never did. So it felt bloody fucking good."
It was as if he had not heard her. His voice was a whisper. "I am flying to Baghdad this evening. Everything I have done is for you. I am going to be collected in 35 minutes. Everything has been for you and for the boys. We can make a new life, a happy and prosperous life for our family. We owe them nothing here…"
"At the very least, you owe them loyalty."
He shouted. He felt the tear in his throat from the scream of his voice "Who ever showed me loyally? None of them there gave loyalty to me, Sara, when did you show me loyalty?"
"Frederick, stop this insanity at once!"
"I'm going."
"Without any of us."
"You're not there every day. You're not sneered at by Reuben Boll, patronised by Basil Curtis. You're not passed over. You're not humiliated."
"Without any of us, Frederick. Make up your mind."
"Please, please… "
"Are you going?"
He did not know how to touch her, how to win her. "I'll send you money… Y e s. "
She went to the wardrobe. She opened the wardrobe door. She threw his suits, his jackets, his trousers, his ties, onto the floor at his feet. She lifted the suitcase from the top of the wardrobe and hurled it onto his clothes. She went to the chest of drawers.
She opened each of the drawers and threw his socks, shirts, vests, underpants, handkerchiefs, pullovers. All onto the heap, all burying the suitcase.
"When you go out of our lives… "
"Sara, please, it is only for you."
She said, "When you go out of our lives, don't ever try to come back."
Alone in their bedroom he packed his suitcase, and he waited for the ring at the front-door bell.
His briefcase was on his chair, and his carefully furled umbrella was on the desk, and he was just putting on his coat. Martins winced at the ring of his telephone.
"It's Mid-East Desk. Meeting, please, soonest."
The Sniper said, "It's not actually convenient. I was just on my way home."
"Sorry about that, but there's a storm blowing… soonest, please. Main meeting room."
Hobbes knocked once and came fast into Dickie Barker's office.
"Apologies, Mr Barker, it's Mid-East Desk at Century. They would like you down there… "
"I've got far more important…"
" T h e car will be at the front for you in one minute. I gather it's Frederick Bissett."