Condition black

18

The village constable stepped into the back bar of the pub.

Because he lived in the next village along, he was not seen in this community as often as he would have liked. Once a fortnight, at least that, he committed himself to spending an evening, whatever the weather, just walking through the village. It was nearly half past nine when he came into the back bar of the pub… He had been away from his car for an hour now. His car was parked, and locked securely, beside the football pitch and the play swings. He was quite unaware of the increasingly anxious radio traffic beamed from Warminster towards that car.

And, on the back seat of the car was his personal radio, gone down that morning, crossed wires or something broken in its innards, and ready to be taken to the Warminster stores in the morning for replacing.

Desmond nodded to old Vic, a good publican who kept a good house, a proper village pub. He thought old Vic didn't look well.

Being away from his car for an hour had been breaking pretty basic rules because he was out of radio contact all that time. He had called in on Mrs Williams to check that the new wire window-guards were ready to be erected on the shop next week, and he had knocked on the solicitor's door to remind him that his shotgun licence needed renewing, and as was his custom, he had stood for 15 minutes against the trunk of one of the big beech trees at the end of the Manor House drive until he had felt a sense of shame at prying on the world of the bereaved. He had been on his way back to his car when he had passed the pub car park and seen that two vehicles there had their lights still on.

The noise died around him. The talk, the chat, fled the back bar. O. K., O. K., so the local Law had wandered in, but it wasn't the first time and it wouldn't be the last. There was no call for them to be reacting like he was Inland Revenue… and old Vic looked fit to drop behind the bar counter.

"Evening, Vic, a Cortina and a Nova out there, lights on. The time you close this place up, they'll be dead in the batteries…"

Old Vic had his mouth hanging open. The jukebox was playing.

"… Know whose they are?"

He turned.

He smiled affably. They were scattered around the back bar and they all stared at him. He knew them all… old Brennie, Poaching, convictions going back 48 years, last time done under the Armed Trespass Act of 1968… Fran, nothing ever proved, should have been, and would be… Billy and Zap both for Receiving and Handling lead off a church roof in Frome…

Zack, Larceny and Aggravated Assault, gone inside for it…

K e v, once breathalysed for an eighteen-month ban, twice in court for Driving without Insurance, fined… Johnny, still on probation for Vandalism, smashing up the bus shelter… He knew them all, and he smiled warmly to each in turn. Normally, every other time that he came into the pub, his ritual visits, he took a bit of banter. Coexistence, wasn't it? He was local, they were local. Normally, there was banter that didn't go way over.

Desmond didn't mind the banter… Not a bloody sound in the back bar of the pub to mix with the God-awful noise of the juke box. Old Brennie looking at his flies, Fran at the smoke-stained ceiling, Billy and Zap in their beer and caught in mid-sentence, Zack in his fag packet, Kev rooted with the handful of coins he was going to feed into the jukebox, Johnny blushing because he was the youngest and the one who always ended with the rap.

He saw the feathers on Fran's jersey. He didn't care, bigger game around than pheasants off the estate, and she'd only be making 75 pence a bird off old Vic, and that was plucked.

He knew them all. They were the flotsam of the village and they were the strength of the village, they were the heart of it…

He saw the young man.

He saw the young man, and then behind the young man he saw the stooping figure with the heavy-frame spectacles and the curled black hair receding and the sports jacket that was a half size too small. He saw the young man.

The young man gazed back into his face. Every last one of them other than the young man seemed to cower away from him, even Fran who was wild was back on her heels. Not the young man.

He saw the tan. He saw the short-cut fair hair. He saw the eyes that were bright with anger at him. There was no fear in that face. He had seen the photograph.

They had shown it him the first day that he had been assigned to the posting in the village up the lanes. It had been a good photograph.

He saw the metalled handle of the pistol bulging out from the young man's belt.

He looked into the face of Colt.

The jukebox died.

The silence suffocated the back bar of the pub.

He knew it was Colt.

Desmond had been to the Ashford Police Training College. At Ashford they taught a young constable how to look after himself if he were trying to break up a fight outside a pub at closing time, how to intervene in a domestic row, how to tackle a fleeing thief.

He had been good on unarmed combat. Not firearms, though, they didn't teach firearms. Guns were for the zombie men who guarded the Northern Ireland politicians who had their gentry farms in the county, and for the squads that were detailed to protect the Royals when they came to open a new annexe in the hospitals of the local market towns. He knew sweet nothing about confronting an armed man. He was into the back bar, halfway across it towards the bar counter. Couldn't just turn, not on his bloody heel, like nothing had happened, and walk out. At the Police Training College they had said that if guns were involved then there were no heroes required, whistle up on the radio and get scarce till the professionals arrived. He had no radio. He could not turn back for the door. He saw the hand of Colt on his hip and close to the handle of the pistol.

No, he wasn't a hero… It was his instinct for survival.

He was a vertigo man on the cliff top.

He lunged.

If he had not tried to prise out the truncheon from his slim hip pocket as he went forward…

If he had watched both hands and not the pistol handle in Colt's belt…

He was launched when he knew that the heel of Colt's hand

… not the pistol, not the bullet… was the threat.

Razor fast, the heel of the hand, rising at his throat.

There was the ripple shock through Colt's wrist and the length of his forearm. The heel of his hand took the centre point of the police constable's neck. And the policeman went down. He did not stagger or topple, he went down like a dropped sack of potatoes.

There was the gasp, in unison, all around Colt.

It was not what he had wanted to do. He had not wanted to shoot the American who was stumbling in confusion across the path of the fusillade aimed at a man who wrote vitriol from abroad against the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council.

Nor had he wanted to break the bones and the faces of two army deserters coming in desperation to a camp site to steal a jeep. Nor had he wanted to throttle the life from the gross bum boy who had tried to roll a backpacker sleeping rough alongside the road to Freemantle. He stood rock still, and his weight was forward on the balls of his feet as if the police constable still offered a threat to him.

They all stared at him.

He looked into the faces of old Vic and his Fran, and old Brennie, and of Billy and Zap, and Zack, and Kev and Johnny.

He saw their fear, and he saw the terror that collapsed the face of Dr Bissett who backed away to the far corner of the back bar.

The words came…

"Christ, you screwed it now."

" N o call for that."

"What you done that for?"

" W e live here, Colt… "

He stood his ground. He was the one who never panicked. He was the one who would never be taken. He stood straight and tall and the police constable was prone at his feet. He saw the shoulders of the police constable heave up as the spasm muscles tried to find breath for the lungs down the passage of the damaged windpipe. He was 200 yards from his home. Running, like he could run because he was fit, he could have gone to the front door of his home, the Manor House, in a half of a minute.

He heard the creak of the door behind him… Zap gone.

Had he come to the village for money? Had he come home to see his father the one last time, and to see his mother who was dead for the one last time? There was the movement to his right flank. Pathetic bastards. The dross of the village, gone nowhere, met nobody, seen nothing… Kev sneaking through the door.

Bissett whimpered, like a dog waiting to be kicked, he thought, in the far corner of the bar.

From Warminster they had little call to come to the village. The village was a backwater. The convoy of police cars, four of them, and nine policemen had been delayed in the yard at the back of the Warminster police station for more than 35 minutes while the numbers were made up, and while the Duty Inspector fumed at the failure of Communications to raise the local man. They came into the village. Their orders were to seal the one road running through the village at each end, and to maintain a discreet watch on the Manor House, and to do nothing if they saw the bastard because he had had a handgun at Heathrow and because the firearms unit was being helicoptered from London. They saw the police car parked beside the goalposts of the football pitch.

The lead car stopped. The Sergeant was still examining the car when there was the thud of the footfall of the two running youths.

"Heh, you, stop there. You seen Desmond?"

Kev stammered, " B e in the pub… in there… "

Oh, was he, by Christ… The Sergeant grimaced… A bloody earful coming young Master Desmond's way, using his work transport to get out on the piss, with his wile saying over the telephone that he was gone on patrol. In the pub, by Christ.

"Thank you, son."

Zap stuttered, "Don't be going in there… he's a gonner in there… Get in there he'll bloody kill you, like him… "

"All right, young 'un, who's been killed?"

" Y o u r copper," Kev said.

" W h o b y? "

" B y Colt," Zap said.

The Sergeant, middle-aged and heavy, ran for his car and his radio.

He stood above the police constable.

Again the slither of feet on the flags of the back bar and the heave of the door of the back bar. Billy and Zack gone.

He wanted to go to his father. He wanted to sit beside the bed in which he had last seen his mother. He wanted to flop on the bed in the room that had been his. The room was the shrine to his youth. His father had told him that, after the raid by the Regional Crime Squad, after the room had been searched by armed detectives, his mother had gone into the room and restored it just as it had been when they had first sent him away to the boarding school at the coast near Seaton in Dorset…

"Please, Colt, hurry…"

Bissett coming across the back bar towards him.

"… We have to go."

"Shut u p. "

" T o the ferry…"

"Shut up, damn you."

"I was just trying to say…"

Bissett's hand pulling at his arm. Colt dragged the fingers off his sleeve.

"Don't touch me, don't ever cling to m e. "

Old Brennie was on his feet, and nodding gravely towards old Vic behind the bar counter, the way he always nodded when he had supped up his beer and it was time to walk home, and he'd stop halfway down the road, like he always did, and empty his bladder into the privet hedge at the front of the comprehensive schoolteacher's garden.

There was the bleat of Bissett's voice in his ear. "Why don't we go…? "

Because going was for ever. Going now was never to return.

All the months in Oz, all the weeks on the big laden tanker, all the long days of the training in Baghdad and the long nights in the Haifa Street Housing Project were bearable only because there was the certainty that one month, one week, one day and one night he would return to the village and the love of his father and his mother. When he went this time, he was gone for ever, he was never to return.

" OK., O.K., " Colt said.

He saw that Fran squatted now on the floor and that she stared into the half-obscured face of the police constable. He would finish his drink. They would remember him in the back bar of the village pub for ever and a day because he had finished his drink and then he had gone out into the night, never to return.

He lifted the glass. Three gulps and he would finish the glass, just as he would have finished the glass in three gulps if the police constable had not walked in to warn of Zack's car and Johnny's car with the lights left on in the car park.

Colt grinned, "Cheers, Dr Bissett."

The Duty Inspector at Warminster gave his order. The pub was to be surrounded. All possible light was to be thrown from headlights and flash lamps at the front and rear and sides of the pub. The blue lamps on the roofs of the police vehicles were to be switched on.

Over the radio link, he told his Sergeant, "Just keep them bottled up there, George. The heavy crowd's close to you now.

Just keep them bottled, pray God they don't do a runner."

There was the racing of vehicle wheels across the loose gravel of the car park, the crunch of the brakes, the beam of light cutting through the thin curtains of the back bar. And the white light was mixed with the flash of the blue, penetrating.

Colt choked on the last swill of his glass.

The light was over Bissett's face, white and blue, dappled like sunshine and cloud.

His glass slammed down onto the table. He drew the Ruger from his belt and the foresight caught at the waist of his trousers and there was the rip of the material… He would never be taken… and Bissett cowered away from him.

Fran said, " Y o u shouldn't have done it, you didn't need to hurt him… "

She had her hand, rough and callused and worn and the hand that he loved, cupped under the head of the policeman. She had turned his body over as if she believed that were the way to help him to breathe.

He felt the clammy damp of a prison cell.

One more, one more for the road, and when he looked to the bar counter he saw that old Vic had gone. He had the gun in his hand and he advanced across the bar towards Bissett, and bissett shrank from him.

He saw it go. Erlich saw the first flutter beats of the ghost flight.

It was gone without sound. There was a scudding moment of moonlight, enough to catch at the wide wingspan ol the owl.

There was the silence of the flight, then the sharp warning cry of the bird, and it was gone.

He heard the movement of the cars down at the other end of the road through the village, and when he stood to his full height he could see, slashed by the winter trees, the lights that were white and blue.

He came from his hiding place. He walked across the Manor House's lawn and onto the drive to the road.

Ahead of him was the facade of the pub, bathed in warm lights.

He walked forward. This was his war. Colt was his He saw policemen crouched down behind the opened doors of their cars, and far away in the night he heaid the clatter of a helicopter.

He walked to the Sergeant.

"My name's Erlich, Federal Bureau ol Investigation

"Oh yes. Heard about you from young Desmond Young lad just told me …"

"You have him in there? Colt?"

"Right now I do. If he doesn't do a runner…''

"You got firearms?"

"On the way."

"What you got to stop him running?"

"There's nine of us."

"Where is he?"

"Back bar, through the side entrance, it's where he was last Erlich pulled the Smith and Wesson from the holster at his belt. The Sergeant didn't seem to want to argue. Erlich thought the Sergeant was bright, wasn't going to fuss that a Fed was on his territory, and armed. Round the corner of the building, into the glare of the light came the girl and a youth with a shaven head and tattoo work over his arms and they carried the slumped weight of a policeman. Erlich remembered him, and he remembered his cup of tea on the best china and homemade cakes. And he remembered the girl and the way that she had stared her hatred into the torch beam when she had come to take away her dead dog.

He walked forward and the headlights threw his shadow huge against the front stonework of the pub. He could hear, mingled with the wind, the closing thump of the helicopter's rotors.

Colt was his.

The military policeman locked the door behind him.

The Station Officer carried the tray into his office.

The Swede was crouched on the low camp bed that had been made up for him, and there was a second bed against the far wall from the door. The Station Officer put the tray down on his desk.

He took out from his pocket, where it was awkward, his P. P. K. pistol and laid it on the desk alongside the tray of sandwiches with the bottle of champagne.

"Will you surrender me?"

"Give you up? Good God, no."

" D i d Bissett get onto the flight?"

" H e was blocked."

"Thank God. "

"It's what you risked your life for… The champagne comes with warm wishes from your friends in Tel Aviv. "

The Swede started to eat, and when he drank he coughed and then giggled his appreciation.

He watched.

With fast and controlled movements, Colt had the pistol cleared and the magazine out and there was the dead metal rattle of the mechanism firing, and then Colt had checked each round before feeding it into the stick magazine.

Bissett watched.

They were going to break out. He did not have to be told.

They were going to run at the cordon of white and blue light, they were going to sprint for the dark shadow line beyond the brilliance of the perimeter that was strung around the pub. He heard, muffled by the thickness of the old stone walls of the building, a distant pulse of growing sound.

All the time he was watching the sharp and more confident hand movements of Colt.

He thought of his father and mother, of the small terraced home in the small streets of Leeds. He thought of their letters, abandoned in his suitcase at the airport. They would not have understood. He had told them so little from the time that he had first taken his appointment at the Establishment. His father and his mother were against the Bomb, they all were in that street. He had won for them no pride for working as a government scientist.

He might as well have been a deputy manager at an amusement arcade, or running a local Radio Rentals… Yes, he thought they would despise him now, his mother and his father. He would never go home to greet his father on the day that his mother died. They would not have understood. It was not his fault.. He had outgrown them. They were no longer a part of his life…

He watched.

Colt had finished with the pistol, and now he crouched and undid the knots at both his trainer shoes, and he had retied the laces.

It was not possible that Colt could not hear the coming thunder sound breaking through the windows of the back bar, permeating the stone walls.

"It'll be all right, Colt…?"

"Why not?"

"We're going together?"

" O f course."

" D o you think we can do it?"

" N o problem."

There was sick fear in Bissett's stomach. They would run at the lights. He would let Colt hold him by the wrist and he would cling to Colt's sleeve, and they would run.

"What's that noise?"

Colt said, like it didn't matter, " I ' m just going upstairs. I want a better view of the ground. You shouldn't worry, Dr Bissett.

It's a helicopter, they'll be bringing in their heavy mob, I expect

… nothing to worry on, Dr Bissett."

" I ' m sorry about your mother, Colt, really sorry."

"I'll be a minute, then it's running time."

He heard the shuffle ripple of Colt's feet, and he was gone onto the narrow and twisted staircase that led out from behind the bar counter.

And the silence in Bissett's ears was broken by the drum beat of the helicopter banking on its flight path over the village.

He heard the helicopter put down.

Erlich thought it sounded, from its power, a big transporter.

They would be getting their act together at last. Armed men, and the big guys from London. He thought that they would not have room in their plan for Bill Erlich, number three from Rome, wanted for questioning in connection with the death of James Rutherford. He was in the porchway to the back bar. He had the Smith and Wesson in his hand. Held beside his ear.

The helicopter had cut its rotors.

He strained to hear the sound of voices, Colt's voice. He listened for the sound of movement.

Bill Erlich readied himself for the charge through the closed heavy door.

He was the law-enforcement man. He was small-town America's hero. He was the Mid-West glamour kid. He was the Special Agent, the hero, the good kid, and he had come to get the scum face, the dirt bag, who had dared to stand against Old fucking Uncle fucking Sam. Ride on, Bill Erlich, Special Agent, hero, good kid. He was the guy who rode off into the setting sun, he was the joker that they loved to patronise in their rocking chairs on the verandah behind the white picket fencing. Heh, Bill, how's it going…? Going okay, don't you know. Going good, just have to get into this goddam museum pile, move around a bit, find the mother. Got to shoot, kill, bury the mother.

Got to line up then for the thanks of the great fat smug ranks of the bastards, so that they can say 'thank you', and light up the barbecue, and unpack the camper trailer, and turn their backs on what their taxes pay for. And who cared…? Did any bastard care on the east side, getting their cocktails in before the Beltway home? Any bastard on the west coast, just back from lunch, care?

Did they hell… He was FBI, he was armed, he was going to shoot a guy who had killed an American government servant.

It was what a good government and a grateful people paid Bill Erlich to do, to get on with. Did they care? Did they, hell…

He was breathing hard, like he had been taught to, like through the heavy stained door to the back bar was Condition Black…

Holy God…

The wind and the first shower of rain funnelled up the road through the village, caught at the legs and backs of those who watched.

The group grew. The solicitor stood with his eldest son under a titled golf club umbrella. The bank manager was there, with his pyjama trouser bottoms peeping from underneath the waterproof leggings The Home Farm tenant was there, rubicund and overweight and chewing a cube of cheese and with his dog, Rocco's sire, at his heel. Old Vic and his wife were there, and he had a quarter bottle of rum in his hip pocket .

In the centre of the road, as far forward as they were allowed to stand, were Billy and Zap, Kev, Zack, Charlie, and Johnny with his arm hard round Fran's shoulder.

In their clusters they waited.

The solicitor said that if ever there was a boy born to be hanged it was Colin Tuck, God rest his mother, and his son who was Colt's exact contemporary, who had secretly admired him and who had yearned for Fran for years, said nothing. The District Nurse, who had just joined them, said that il was the blessing of God that Louise Tuck had not lived to witness this final humiliation. And she thought that when it was over she would go to the Manor House and break the news to him, and make him one last pot of tea. The bank manager said that he had heard at Rotary that Colt was wanted for terrorism now and that prison would be too good for him. The Home Farm tenant said that he had always known the kid to be a wrong 'un, stood out a mile since he had got himself involved with those Animal Liberation bastards. Old Vic said he'd miss him, didn't mind who knew it, and his wife said that she had never known anything but politeness from Colt.

Zack said, and he laughed but sure as hell it wasn't funny to him, that he'd be kissing goodbye, and the rest of them, to what they had raised in the pub. Kev said, bright-eyed in excitement, that Colt had the gun, and that Colt would take them with him. Fran cried and buried her cheek in Johnny's chest.

All of them, waiting for the action, waiting for it to end, stood among the puddles and the tractor mud. They watched what Colt had brought to their village, his village.

In a blur of movement the shrouded figures ran to take their positions round the building and the outhouses and garages at the back. Heavy movements because they were weighed down with their bulletproof vests and ammunition pouches and radios and the battery-driven power lamps and the image intensifies on the barrels of their rifles.

Hobbes tried to scrape the helicopter sound from his ears. He hadn't got a bloody coat, and he had walked across the football pitch from the helicopter and already his London shoes squelched. He was told that an American, an F. B. I. agent, had been allowed forward because he was the only one on site with a handgun.

"Where forward, Sergeant? The back door?" In a sickening instant Hobbes could see how this nightmare would end.

"Commander," he yelled.

"Right beside you, Mr Hobbes," said a calm voice. "We've seen him, and we know where he is. Do you want him out of there?"

"What's he doing, for Christ's sake?"

" H e looks as though he's counting to a hundred before he goes through the back door."

"Well… My God Almighty would certainly say that he's earned the privilege, going in first. Your cat's paw, eh, Commander? Just don't have him shot by one of ours. Or the boffin, for heaven's sake. Got that?"

" Y e s, Mr Hobbes."

He thought that Colt should have been back.

All the time he watched the staircase. It must have been three, four minutes since he had last heard Colt's step from the ceiling above the back bar.

He did what Colt had done. He untied the laces of his shoes and he retied them tight, strained the cord and then tied a double knot. They would be running across fields, couldn't have his shoes sucked off in the mud, not if he were running and needing to keep up with Colt.

It was the third time that he had undone his laces and retied them, reknotted them.

They should have been, if they had taken off from the airport when he had been told they would take off, somewhere over the Eastern Mediterranean, somewhere over Greece, or over Cyprus.

They should have been beyond recall, sharing a drink and a meal with Colt in the safety of the aeroplane. He was tired, so tired…

The dragging on of the day that had started with breakfast in Lilac Gardens, and with the drive up Mount Pleasant and Mulfords Hill, and with the check at the Falcon Gate, and with the examination of his I/D at the H3 barrier. So tired… He thought of the hours he had spent in front of his screen, working, concentrating. So tired… and he heard again Basil's muttered and embarrassed praise of his paper, and the cheerfulness of Boll's departure. So tired… and there was a meeting in the morning of Senior Principal Scientific Officers and Senior Principal Engineering Officers at which he was expected. It was all madness, and sharp through the exhaustion of his mind was the shouting of his name in the airport, the clatter of gunfire, the collapse of a man in pursuit.

So tired, and so scared by the running away. But they had still the chance of the ferry.

He watched the staircase behind the bar counter. He looked for the reckless and vivid smile of Colt.

He was ready, ready to run with Colt.

" M r s Bissett, until we can resolve our differences, you won't get to bed, I won't move out of your house, and you don't get your children back."

"I have nothing to say."

The Security Officer settled again on the kitchen chair. The house was quiet. There were only two policemen left in the house with them, and they were sprawled out in the sitting room. The search was over. She knew they had found nothing, because as the ripping and tearing went on she had heard the bad temper replace their earlier laughter and chat. She had not heard them attempt to repair what they had broken.

She stared out through the window. She had not turned when the telephone had rung, nor when the Security Officer had been called out of the kitchen, nor when he had come back and the chair had groaned under his weight.

" M r s Bissett, please listen to me very carefully. Your husband was being escorted from the country by a man wanted for murder in Athens, London and Australia. He was intercepted. This young man… "

She muttered the name, the name was Colt.

"… is armed. He is dangerous and unstable. We have to fear for your husband's safety. They are together at the moment in a public house in Wiltshire. They are ringed by armed police.

There is a distinct possibility that the young man will reject ail sensible courses of action, that he will try to break out. He is armed, so he may open fire on police officers, and the armed officers may be forced to return fire… "

She shuddered.

"… and then Frederick would be in the gravest danger. It is a small thing to ask of you, but it could save his life."

She thought of him going out into the dusk, going through her front door, stumbling after Colt, the humiliation of her rejection.

"… We can put you in direct contact with the police there.. ."

" N o. "

" S o that you speak to Frederick, and urge him to surrender… "

" No. "

" We want him out of there, Mrs Bissett, away from the potential crossfire."

"I said, no."

She stared at the window set in the kitchen door, at the raindrops dancing on it like a curtain in the wind.

The Security Officer said, "With a bitch like you for a wife, it's no wonder the poor devil wanted out."

His hand was on the door latch.

He had the Smith and Wesson tight in his hand, barrel against his ear.

Past Flight or Fight, way beyond that.

Erlich would fight…

As he raised the latch he heard the first shimmer of the grating of the metal pieces.

No more caution.

His hip barged into the unfastened door.

The light spilled into his face, and he was moving.

Erlich came into the back bar, and he cannoned off a table, glasses flying, smashing, and he tripped on a chair, and he stumbled, and all the time he was in motion. It was Condition Black. He saw the table peel away towards the fireplace, and the chair career towards the bar counter. He saw the line of upended bottles with optics on their necks, the mounted fox's head with its teeth bared, and the half-finished glasses on the other tables and the ashtrays full. All the time moving until he reached the solid protection of the jukebox. He was crouched down. He was at Isosceles stance, and he pivoted his upper body behind the aiming position of his revolver in Turret One.

He saw the man from the airport on his knees, dark curly hair, his eyeline caught him, thick-rimmed heavy spectacles, dismissed him. He quartered the back bar… No sign of Colt… Shit…

The adrenalin draining from him. All the push, drive, impetus of belting his way into the back bar, safety off, index finger inside the trigger guard, and he did not find Colt.

He yelled, "Where is Colt?"

The man seemed frozen in the position of tying his shoe-laces.

He was met by the empty, terrified stare of the man, and the silence trimmed his shout.

He gazed down at the man over the V-sight and foresight of the revolver, and he could see that there was the increasing shake of his locked fists. Keyed up to go in, and he had lost the brilliance of surprise and his nerves caught at him and the barrel cavorted in the grip of his hands.

"Where the fuck is he?"

He saw the man's head turn. He saw the man look back towards the counter, and beyond the counter was the gape of the open door that led to the staircase and darkness. He could see the first steps of the staircase. The man's head swung back, as if he knew he had been caught out.

Erlich eased himself up from behind the cover of the jukebox.

He was panting… One thing to open the door and charge into the back bar, another thing to go walkabout up a staircase into darkness… He rocked again on his feet. His decision. Quantico teaching said that an agent should never, alone, follow a man up a staircase, and never, ever, into an unlit staircase.

He was on the line, he was alone.

"Good God," Basil Curtis was bemused. " You quite astonish me.

The Security Officer invited himself into the bedsitting room.

There was a strong smell of cat. He looked around him. More books than he had ever seen in such a room, three walls of them, from floor to ceiling and piles of them elsewhere. And a cat litter-tray in one corner. Quite extraordinary to the Security Officer that Curtis, famously the best brain at A. W. E., paid more, certainly, than anyone else there, should choose to live in a single man's quarters in the Boundary Hall accommodation.

" H e was going to Iraq, it's cut and dried."

He saw that Curtis had covered, with the newspaper he had been reading in bed, a half-written letter on his desk. The cat emerged from the wardrobe and observed the Security Officer with distaste. Curtis stood in his striped flannel pyjamas, holding a mug of cocoa.

"I wouldn't have believed it… but, of course, I didn't know him well."

He could see a pink hot-water bottle peeping from under the back-turned bedclothes.

The Security Officer said, "I am beginning to understand why Bissett ran."

"I think that we should allow events to run their course, away from view. I don't want anything public, Mr Barker. I only want a message sent in private to that regime of blood. My advice, go home, get a solid night's sleep."

"Very good, Prime Minister."

"Good night, Mr Barker."

Too old and too tired to wrestle through the night with the new world of the Rutherfords and the Erlichs, the Colts and the Frederick Bissetts. He would have one more word with Hobbes at the Pig and Whistle to let him know that both he and the Prime Minister required a total blanket over the outcome, tell him to push the goggling bystanders back another 200 yards, confiscate any cameras etc etc. As to the outcome, it scarcely troubled him to consider it. There was not a lot he could do to influence the outcome now. These sieges had a habit of going on for half a day, minimum.

Hobbes could, by God, earn a spur here after his craven performance at Century. Yes, he would go to bed and be ready to pick up the pieces in the morning. With Tuck's boy and the lunatic Erlich in the frame, there would, by God, be pieces.

Later, he would leave through the basement tunnel, he would walk out via the doors of the Cabinet Office. He would wait on the wide Whitehall pavement for a cruising taxi. And he would wonder if Penny Rutherford slept, whether she had taken the pill that the Curzon Street doctor would have left her. And he would wonder – if Erlich got the better of Tuck's boy – if he could persuade Ruane to send him away, right away, before Rutherford's funeral.

He could walk out through the back door and put his gun back in his holster, and he could tell the guys from the Special Weapons unit that there was no way Bill Erlich was going to do the right thing by his friend if it meant climbing a staircase into darkness.

His decision.

He could shift his ass up the stairs and search till he found the bastard, and hit down each door, and belt open each cupboard, and kick over each bed, until he found the mother.

He wasn't as good as when he had come in. It was going away from him, ebbing with each of the slow seconds as the time slipped by him. His eyes had never left the staircase. All the time he had expected to see the barrel that was the integral silencer and the fast-coming bulk shape of Colt behind it.

He started to move. The man was in front of him.

There was the raised hatch that cut off the barman's place from his customers. His route would be through the hatch and behind the counter and onto the bottom step of the staircase.

All the time watching the opening to the staircase…

He heard the crash of the breaking glass.

Erlich half swivelled.

The man had stood, and he had a glass in his hand with the drinking rim broken, and the man stood across Erlich's path and the broken glass was his weapon.

"Put that down."

"You're not going up."

"Get out of my way."

"Not going up."

The sound of their voices… Erlich thought Colt would be at the top of the staircase. It was goddam crazy. Why not send him a message Western Union, Federal Express…

"You'd better move, buddy, or you're going to get yourself hurt."

The man held his ground. Erlich hardly saw the broken drinking end of the glass. Eyes on the staircase. The staircase was Colt.

Colt was danger. Danger was not a nutcake with a broken glass, like he was high on smack or hash. Danger was Colt, sober and cold. He took a pace forward.

He saw, from the corner of his eye, that the glass was aimed at his face.

Erlich tried to sound calm, "Stand back."

The glass was held at arm's stretch. The broken end was a foot from his face.

"He's my friend."

"I don't even know who you are."

"I am Colt's friend."

He saw the veins in the man's throat, and he saw the tremble in the wrist that held the glass. This was the man he had seen at the airport. Then he had been a craven passenger of Colt's. He was a man with no pedigree of violence, who just once and only once had wound himself to the point of no return.

" H e ' s a psychopath, your friend. A killer, do you understand that?"

The glass was in front of Erlich's face.

" H e gave me a chance, no one else did."

"You're not my quarrel, buddy, so put that thing down and if you know what's good for you, you'll walk right through that back door with your hands in the air."

Erlich went forward. The glass rose towards his eyes.

" N o one else," the man screamed.

He felt the judder of pain at his cheek and his chin.

Erlich fired.

He saw the man pitch away from him. He could not remember the name that Rutherford had shouted at the airport. He heard nothing. He saw the glass fall and break apart. He heard nothing… He saw the blood dribble on the floor and the blood splattered on the wall and over a glass case with a pair of stuffed pheasants.

The rain fell hard about him. It ran on his face. The rain and the wind that drove it and the cloud mist were his freedom.

It was his joy when he had felt the sting of the rain as he had first pushed up the skylight window. The happiness had been with him all along the roof gulley, and after he had dropped down beside the old water barrel. He had rejoiced to be free as he had crawled flat on his stomach along the rows of cabbages and between the stems of the laurel bushes that made the overgrown edge between the outbuildings and the open field.

In the moment that he reached the tree line of the Top Spinney he heard the clatter of two shots.

He did not pause.

His freedom was the night around him.