Condition black

2

The first of the November frosts had settled on the lawn in front of the house, and the Sierra was an age starting. There were some mornings, Monday mornings in particular, when it would have been as quick for him to walk to the main gates and then catch an internal minibus to his office block. On Monday mornings there was a solid traffic line at the junction where Mulfords Hill joined the main road from Kingsclere to Burghfield Common.

But Frederick Bissett detested walking, and because his Sara's car was in the garage, and his own car sat outside overnight, he condemned himself to five minutes of scraping the ice from the windscreen and the back window and to revving the engine, blowing grey fumes away down Lilac Gardens. Sara seldom saw him off to work. She was generally too busy getting Frank and Adam ready for school.

His neighbour came through the front door of the house to the right. He was kissed. His wife always kissed him. His neighbour always wore grey overalls when he went to work. His neighbour was a plumber.

"Good morning, Fred."

Frederick Bissett, Senior Scientific Officer, loathed being called Fred. He waved his de-icer without enthusiasm.

"Better mornin' for cuddling up – eh? What?"

His other neighbour was twelve years younger than Frederick Bissett, wore white socks inside his black shoes, and sold Heinz products into local supermarkets. His other neighbour's child- bride kissed her boy hero each morning, in her floating web dressing gown, as if he were going to the Falklands for three months. He drove an Escort XR. 3i complete with fluffy toys, and had moved to Lilac Gardens in the eye of the housing price slump, aided by the bequest of a dead aunt. Bissett had been told that often enough, about the dead aunt and her bequest.

He had very little to say to his other neighbours. He could live in a cocoon of his own making. That was the way of his work, and that was the way of his life in Lilac Gardens.

Bissett laid his old briefcase on the back seat of the car. The case contained only his sandwich box and his thermos flask of coffee. He drove out onto Mount Pleasant and was stopped at the temporary lights where the new sewer pipe was going in. He was held up again when he needed to turn into Mulfords Hill because no one would let him into the flow. The next hold-up was outside Boundary Hall where a stream of cars was emerging from his left and not acknowledging his right of way. He was stopped outside the Lloyds Bank by the entrance to Boundary Hall. It was far too early for the manager to be coming to work. An hour at least before the manager turned up to write his acid little letters.

There was a short gap between the cars sprinting out from Boundary Hall, he gunned his engine and surged forward. The Audi that thought it had a clear run had to brake hard…

Excellent… He recognised the driver, one of the Principal Training Managers lodged at Boundary Hall, saw his annoyance and felt the better for it. Another hundred yards, and then held again at the Kingsclere-Burghfield Common crossing. It was the same every morning, only worse on some mornings. Eyes into his mirror. He recognised the man with the white handlebar moustache sitting high in a ridiculous Japanese jeep, Health Physics branch, and he heard the sharp horn blast before he saw that the road ahead of him was clear. He took his chance and crossed the road. Another queue of cars at the Falcon Gate. They had the rods out with the mirrors. No end to it… State Amber Black at the Falcon Gate… He always left the newspaper at home in the mornings for Sara. He never listened to radio news in the mornings, and in the evenings he usually turned his chair away from the television set, so that he could read. He had an idea there had been a car bomb at another barracks. He did not know where, and did not particularly care, except that it meant that the Establishment was on Amber Black, and every car had to have the magic mirror wand shoved underneath the chassis.

He was waved ahead

He drove forward.

He was inside the perimeter fence of his workplace.

There are five such workplaces in the world. There is the L o s Alamos National Laboratory in the desert uplands of New Mexico.

There are the Institutes and Design Laboratories of the Ministry of Medium Machine-Building in the Chelyabinsk region of the Ural mountains. In France, there are the Centres d'Etudes of the Directions des Applications Militaires which is a sub-division of the Commission d'Energie Atomique at Ripault. There are the design facilities of the Ministry of Nuclear Energy at Lanzhou in Gansu province in the People's Republic of China. And in Great Britain there is the Atomic Weapons Establishment which has been built upon a World War T w o airfield in the countryside of Berkshire, 50 miles from London and overlooking the Thames Valley.

When Bissett had left home the sky had been clear. No longer.

The chill of the early morning was dispersing under the grey cloud base that spread in from the west.

He took the central avenue, along the old runway. Where he drove, surrounded by cars and bicycles and mopeds and minibuses, there had once been the strained drone of Dakotas pulling gliders into the air for the flights to the bridges and crossroads behind the D – D a y beaches of Normandy, and for the flights t o the Dutch town of Arnhem. He drove slowly down the wide Third Avenue. Grey concrete buildings that had been thrown up, always wherever they could be fitted in, on either side. The coiled wire above the fences that surrounded the A area where the plutonium was worked, and the B area where the chemical explosives were fashioned, and the contaminated areas, and the waste storage areas, all separated by their own grey wire barricades. The four great chimneys to his left spewing out their fumes into the grey cloud.

Bissett drove to the H area.

His workplace was H3.

The building was single-storey, red-brick walls, metal window frames, flat-roofed. The H3 building had been put up hastily in the early 1950s to get the scientists out of their first accommodation that had been little more than Nissen huts. There should have been a lifespan of twenty years for H3, but other priorities had been higher, and every four years since 1973 there had been a doctoring of the patient, a new lick of paint on the inside, an attempt to reinforce the roofing against damp, new wiring to carry the power of the computer that ran their lives. There was also a new fence around H area, all a part of the new security drive.

Once more he showed his I/D card to the Ministry policeman.

Carol was at the coffee machine, stoking up for the day, the cover not yet off her typewriter.

"Morning, Dr Bissett."

Wayne was lighting his first cigarette. He was the most recent recruit into H 3, and only had a Lower Second from Aston.

"Morning."

Reuben Boll was unwrapping the first of the boiled sweets he bought each morning in Tadley. The door to his office was always open. He was the Superintendent, Grade 6. He was the man in charge of H 3, and he spoke with his emigre parents' guttural Central European accent although he had been born in Ipswich, and he had been in H area for 26 years.

"Morning, Frederick."

Basil Curtis slammed the door behind him. He had been there since ever. Basil shrugged out of his dufflecoat. The dufflcoat would have been the one he had worn when he first came to work at the Establishment. There were no Civil Service retirement regulations applicable to Basil. The stitching of the rent in his corduroy trousers was his own work, the runs in his pullover were his cat's.

Bissett thought him the most brilliant man he had ever met.

"Morning, Bissett."

They were the first in. There would be others on the clerical staff who were always late, always pleading that the school bus hadn't turned up, or that their dog had to be walked. And others on the scientific level who would claim the excuse of a school run, or taking the wife to Surgery. Bissett was never late.

He went down the corridor that led off the central area. Third on the right. He unlocked the door with the key that was on his chain. His routine was invariable. Each morning he first switched on the power for his terminal. Then he took his sandwich box and his thermos of coffee from his briefcase. They went onto the shelf behind his chair, between the photographs of Sara and of the two boys. Then he went to his wall safe, opened it with the second key on the ring attached by a chain to his trouser belt, and took out his papers.

His Personal Air Sampler, the size of a small matchbox, hanging by a cord from his neck, banged on the desk top. It always banged on the desk top, each morning, before he remembered to tuck it below his tie.

Carol knocked, came in before he was able to tell her to. Her husband was a lathe operator in B area. She always said she could have done a better job running the place than the Director or his boss, Controller Establishment Research and Nuclear.

"This got delivered here, Dr Bissett."

The envelope was marked Personal and Confidential.

As at Los Alamos and Chelyabinsk and Ripault and Lanzhou, the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston is a workplace governed by secrecy.

Behind the grey wire, beyond the uniformed guards with their sub-machine guns and automatic pistols and attack dogs, 5000 people daily go about their work, to research, design, test and finally manufacture an independent source of nuclear weapons.

Much of the work moving from the A. W. E. consoles and design tables and laboratories and workshops is considered, by the few who so jealously guard their knowledge, as information too sensitive to be transmitted to any but those in the topmost reaches of government. Infinitely too sensitive to be shared, even in the most vague terms, with the general public, for whom the nuclear shield remains the ultimate defence.

Nine tenths of the work done here would be known to the scientists and engineers at Los Alamos and Chelyabinsk and Ripault and Lanzhou. But Los Alamos and Chelyabinsk and Ripault and Lanzhou and Aldermaston form the club with the greatest exclusivity yet devised. No helping hand will be offered to newcomers. The door is closed to new members, and the membership protects itself against what it calls Proliferation with wire, guns, attack dogs, certainly, but above all with a suffocating cloak of secrecy.

It was noon.

He had arrived at the forward brigade post three hours earlier.

His car was mud-splattered, parked amongst the jeeps and armoured personnel carriers, a hundred yards from the helicopter pad. He was Dr Tariq. Dr Tariq had never liked the featureless flatland of the Fao peninsula before the war. After seven years as a battlefield it was now an unearthly, hellish landscape. Around the excavated brigade post were gun positions, and trench patterns, and mud. As a scientist, Dr Tariq despised the waste and confusion of the place. His back was to the waterway. He had no wish to look out over the Shatt al-Arab, the narrow glistening strip that divided his country from the Islamic Republic of Iran, He did not care to look beyond the semi-sunken hulks of the bombed merchantmen towards the clear flames rising from the refinery tower of Abadan He waited. He paced close to his car.

As far as he could see back up the Basra road were the headless date palms, lopped by the shrapnel.

As soon as he had received news of the death of Professor Khan he had requested a meeting with the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, at the Chairman's earliest convenience. As Director of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr Tariq was familiar with the dark undercurrents of Iraq's body politic. He knew of the coup attempt of seven weeks earlier and he had heard the rumour that nine Air Force officers had been put to death. It did not surprise him at all that the Chairman's answer should come, hand-delivered, to his villa at four o'clock in the morning, and that the rendezvous would be away from Baghdad. He knew that the routine and itinerary of the Chairman were a closely guarded secret. Dr Tariq would not have said that he liked the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, but he admired him. Nothing was possible, not any movement, without the clearance of the Chairman. He admired in particular the durability of the man, and his capacity to absorb succinctly presented detail, and his ability for work. So he awaited his summons without impatience.

Dr Tariq had rehearsed what he wished to say. When, eventually, he was admitted to the presence of the Chairman he would have perhaps fifteen minutes to explain himself. It was well known amongst that elite of which he was a part that the Chairman detested news of crisis. But the killing of Professor Khan, no doubt at the hands of Zionist agents, and a letter bomb to one of his scientists at Tuwaithah, that was crisis and had to be confronted. The defection of foreign personnel from his programme, that too was crisis. Like every man who had direct contact with the Chairman, Dr Tariq had a most sincere fear of his master.

He knew of the disappearances, the torturings, the hangings. He had been told that the Chairman had with a handgun shot dead a general who had dared to argue with his strategy during the dark days of the war. So he had prepared his words with care.

The officer approached him.

Dr Tariq, five foot two inches in height, thin as a willow wand, stood erect. He raised his arms, to permit the officer to frisk him.

Then, without fuss, Dr Tariq opened his briefcase for inspection.

He followed the officer, stepping through the churned mud, towards the concrete steps down into the brigade post, and the presence of the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council.

Not yet past the lunch hour, and Erlich had had his first argument of the day.

It could have been the second, but he had swallowed his pride when they had shown him the room that was allocated him. It was scarcely a box. Just a table and a chair and a telephone that wouldn't be secure, and the room was two floors and the length of a ministry corridor away from the Operations Co-ordination Centre of the Counter-Terrorism section at police headquarters. He had accepted that. What he would not accept was the refusal to make available to him, face to face, the eyewitness. It was not suitable that he should meet the eyewitness, he had been told. He didn't know how much of his fury had been translated by the interpreter.

The guys who had been up at Lockerbie, after Pan Am 103, working alongside the British police, they didn't know how lucky they'd been. .. Same language, same culture, same team…

But they had given him photographs.

He had on the desk the photographs that showed Harry and his contact on the grass and the pavement. Every goddam way they had taken Harry's picture, so that he saw the part of Harry's head that was intact, and the part that was blasted.

They had given him one written statement. It was a photocopy and the name and address of the eyewitness had been omitted.

He copied into his notebook all that his interpreter dictated.

Harry and the contact walking and talking in 28th October Street.

No traffic. Twenty-eight minutes to nine o'clock in the morning.

The silver grey Opel Rekord pulling onto the grass verge, braking 20 yards away. No description of the driver. A fair-haired man getting out of the passenger seat, front. A shout from the fair-haired man. The targets turning. The fair-haired man opens fire.

Pistol plus silencer. The contact hit. Harry blundering into the field of fire. The second shout, the driver's shout, "Colt". The car turning in the road, getting the hell out. Harry dead, and the contact dead when the first police and ambulance crew had arrived…

He left his desk as bare as he had found it.

He took a taxi to the Embassy.

He had to wait for fifteen minutes before he was admitted to the Agency's annexe.

Erlich told the Station Chief what he had. He was seeking to trade information, and he was going to be disappointed.

" I 'm not opening up our file to you, Bill. It's nothing personal…"

" And it's not co-operation."

"It's the facts of life. I give you a file, it goes into your system.

You nail a guy, weeks ahead, months, and my file is evidence.

My file gets to be prosecution material. Any asshole who wants it gets to read my file."

" Is that final?"

" As I said, it's nothing personal."

Erlich stood. He had the cigar butt in the plastic sachet in his pocket. He had not spoken of the cigar butt to the Station Chief. ..

"Bill, look at it our way, do me that favour. Harry Lawrence was your friend and I appreciate that, but Harry Lawrence was not the target. An Iraqi was the target, and it's your assessment and it's mine. We are in deep stuff, real deep. We have a big mission down in Iraq, during the war we did all we damn well could to make certain those boys didn't go under to the Ayatollah's shit-pushers. We gave them A. W. A. C. S. material, we put up satellites just for them. The enemy of Iran is our friend, got me?

But we keep our hands dirty, we stay in touch with the regime's enemies. We don't make any noise about that…"

"Investigating a murder is making a noise?"

"You've a job to do, O. K., but don't make waves."

"I want to know the identity of a man, I want to reach him, I want to put him in handcuffs and read him a charge of First Degree murder."

"Beautiful."

"With or without help."

"Brilliant. You're a detective, you don't mix easily in diplo-macy, neither does hustling for commendations… You go on like this and you'll find yourself short of help."

"With respect, what I'm after is a result."

Erlich walked out. Didn't even bother to close the door behind him. He walked straight through the outer office and out past the security gate and the Marine guard.

He headed for the main building, and the area of the basement where secure matter could be despatched back home.

As she filled in the forms for him, the girl in Despatch, big and black and at last a friendly face, told him she was from Mississippi, and sure as hell she hated Greeks, Athens, moussaka and retsina. In front of him, she sealed the cigar butt in the plastic sachet into a small tin box and then into the padded envelope. The package was addressed to the Laboratory Division of F. B. I. H.Q. Erlich, like every other Fed, had plenty to grumble about in the running of the Bureau, but the Laboratory was the best.

" You okay, Mr Erlich?"

He'd slept poorly. He hadn't eaten breakfast. The coffee at Counter-Terrorism was ditch water, and he had been poleaxed twice. He should have been at the airport last evening to see Elsa Lawrence and her children off and the casket. For Erlich not much was allowed to get in the way of a job and he supposed that was why he had been sent.

She said she would get him some coffee, proper coffee, coffee from home.

While she was making the coffee, boiling her kettle, he glanced across at her Herald Tribune. He saw the Rome dateline. He read the name of the hotel, and the name of the street. He had been in that street two weeks earlier. He read of the death of the Pakistani nuclear scientist last seen in the company of… no leads… The coffee she brought him was great, kept him alive.

All through the morning there had been detonations and gunfire. Of course there had to be detonations, and of course there had to be shooting practice, but Monday morning was hardly the appropriate time. On any other morning, Bissett would have been able to live with the thudding blast of the explosives and with the crisp rattle of sub-machine gun and pistol fire. But not that morning, not on the morning that the envelope marked Personal and Confidential had lain unopened in his briefcase.

He had spent two hours in his room, at his console. By 10.30 he had gone down the full length of the corridor that ran past his office and he had then spent two and a half hours in H3's laboratory. He had achieved next to nothing in his own room, and in the laboratory he had been the victim of Reuben God Almighty Boll's sarcasm.

So that every technician and every junior could hear him, Boll had enquired just how much longer before his present project would be completed, how much later than it was already.

Lunch hour, and quite suddenly, when it didn't matter, it was perfectly quiet. Boll would be in the Directors' dining room, Basil would have gone to see his cronies in A area, Wayne would have gone out with those as young and limited as himself to the Hind's Head in the village, Carol would be in the canteen wittering with the other Clerical Assistants and her husband.

He had drunk his coffee. He had brushed the crumbs from his desk top into his wastebasket. He screwed the top, that served as a mug, back onto his flask. He was determined not to rush himself. He had deliberately not used his home address.

He replaced the plastic sandwich box in his briefcase, and took out the envelope. He checked that his door was closed. He tore open the envelope. A fearful mess of it, he made, because his hands were trembling.

There was the letter heading. Imperial Chemical Industries.

'Dr Frederick Bissett, B. Sc. (Leeds), A. W. E., Aldermaston, Berkshire.'

He didn't look to the end of the letter first. He exercised his self-control. He began at the first line. He held the paper in both hands and he saw the paper waver in front of his spectacles.

Dear Doctor Bissett,

Thank you for sending your application for employ ment, dated October 19th. I do understand that because of the nature of your current employment your C.V. has remained narrower than would otherwise have been expected.. .

Idiot. Of course his C.V. was narrow. He had worked for twelve-years on matters covered by the Official Secrets Act, of which, obviously, he was a signatory.

… However, I understand from your application that you have been concerned in your A. W. E. work with the areas of Fiuid Dynamics and Plasma Physics, but with the necessary somewhat restricted interpretation…

How in heaven's name could his interpretation be other than restricted? His work was concerned with the interplay reactions at the moment of implosion. The effect of micro-second synchronised detonation of chemical explosive onto beryllium, then onto uranium 238, then onto uranium 235, then onto weapons-grade plutonium 239, and then onto the innermost pit and the core of tritium/deuterium. In the innermost pit, if the work of the scientists in the H area had been successful, it would be assumed that a nuclear explosion would generate a heat in the core of tritium/deuterium of one hundred million degrees Centigrade.

So, yes, it was somewhat restricted. .. Sadly, it has been our experience in the past that the most specialised work carried out at the Atomic Weapons Establishment leads scientists into a cul-de-sac of research that has little, or no, relevance to science as practised in civilian life…

The science that was relevant to Frederick Bissett was the moment, too fast for any but the most powerful computer to register, when chemical explosive was driven by uniform spherical detonation against the fissionable material of highly enriched uranium and plutonium creating some millions of pounds overpressure per square inch… His head dropped. In front of him the page blurred.

… With regret, therefore, I have to inform you that we are not in a position to offer you employment in any research division of the company.

Yours sincerely

Arnold R. Dobson, Personnel Director.

(dictated, and signed in his absence)

He felt sick. He took the letter and the envelope out of his office and down to the abandoned area at the end of the corridor. He fed the sheet of paper and the envelope into the shredding machine beside Carol's desk.

He went back to his room.

Later he would hear Carol's laughter, and Wayne's giggle, and the clumping tread of Basil's iron-tipped shoes, and the coarse grate of Reuben Boll's voice. And later he would hear the dull punch of explosive detonations. He would work until it was time to go home, on the new warhead design that would replace the free-fall W E – 1 7 7 bomb with an air-launched cruise system. He would work on the mathematics of implosion until, in the late afternoon, he cleared his desk, and took his briefcase, with empty sandwich box and empty coffee flask, to his car, and drove home.

In crisp early morning sunshine the Air Force plane touched down at Andrews Air Base.

Nothing hurried, none of the subterfuge of moving a body quietly and in the dead of night out of Athens. The networks were there, penned behind a steel barrier. The high-level officials from State Department stamped their feet on the tarmac and waited for the aircraft doors to open. There was a bearer party, old friends and colleagues of Harry's. The Director of the Agency and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were there.

The F. B. I. Director said, " M y first man into Athens, a young man but a good friend of Lawrence's, has promised the widow that we'd go for the jugular on this one."

The Agency Director mused, "But, whose jugular?"

"Whichever."

"Something tells me you may bump into a little politics on the way. "

The F. B. I. Director said, "Just this once, fuck the politics."

The Agency Director said, "I didn't hear that… but I wish you luck."

They had brought Agency men back to Andrews, in caskets, from Europe, from Lockerbie, from Lebanon, from Central America. It was a regular run for the Agency Director, down the Capital Beltway from Langley to Andrews. He was used to shaking the hand, gravely, of a young widow. He was accustomed to dropping his arm round the shoulders of young and fatherless children.

The aircraft door was open, and the cargo hatch.

They saw, at the top of the steps, the small, intimidated figure of Elsa Lawrence, her children behind her. They saw the casket taken from the cargo hatch, and draped in their flag, and lifted onto the shoulders of Harry Lawrence's work friends.

The Agency Director said, " You know what? Half the C. B. S. story on Lawrence last night was time taken explaining where Athens is."

When it came to their turn, both men shook Elsa Lawrence's hand, felt her limp grasp in theirs. And both men put their arms round the children, and felt them flinch from the touch of strangers.

Dr Tariq, frail and looking as though the gentle zephyr that came in off the Tigris might flatten him, could muster a savage temper when attacked.

He had been badly damaged when the Zionists had sent their commando squad with explosives to La Seine-sur-Mer, close to the French port of Toulon, to destroy the two reactors that were to have been shipped to Tuwaithah 48 hours later.

That had been twelve years ago, just one year after the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council had promoted him to Director at the Atomic Energy Commission.

They had hurt him again, killing el-Meshad in Paris in 1980, and frightening off the Italian companies who had been engaged to deliver hot cell boxes.

And ten years ago he had been hurt worst of all when the Zionist Air Force, the F – i 6 s and the F-15S, had come to Tuwaithah out of the setting sun to put down 16 tons of explosive ordnance onto the Osirak reactor. He would never forget the great dust cloud that climbed over the reactor shell, broken like a duck's egg, after the jets had soared away into the June evening. Hundreds of millions of dollars blown away. Hundreds of thousands of working hours lost. And the ground defence system had not got one shot off in retaliation. He could remember lying on the floor of his office on a carpet bright with the shards of his shattered windows, and how he had howled in his frustration. Over long years, he had sought to rebuild the nuclear programme, as he had been charged to by the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. In those long years when the war had taken priority, Dr Tariq had rethought the detail of the programme.

On the day alter the Cease Fire he had been granted an audience with the Chairman of the Revolutionary Council and he had argued his case for the revitalisation of his dream.

And now the Zionists had attacked him again. Professor Khan had been a crucial cog in the great mesh of wheels that made up the whole for the creation of an Iraqi nuclear warhead. He was a foreigner, he had been bought, just as Frenchmen had been bought, and Italians.

In the brigade post at Fao, Dr Tariq had won his day The Chairman gave orders for the military helicopter to fly the scientist back to Baghdad.

In spite of the headset that he wore for the flight, his ears were still ringing when he climbed down from the helicopter. Waiting for him was an army officer, squat and powerful, rocking on the soles of his paratroop boots.

The voice of the Colonel was faint, hard to understand, as they scurried bent low from the helicopter's hatch door to safety beyond the reach of the thrashing rotor blades.

"I am at your service, Dr Tariq. Whatever it is that you wish, I am instructed to provide."

In the late afternoon, Erlich was back from the airport. Protocol and politeness had taken him out to the airport to meet the Temporary Duty men off the flight. It was what should have happened to him when he had come in from Athens, and hadn't.

Nothing better than a smoothed way through Customs and Immigration, and ready transportation for the trip into a new city.

They would be on the same corridor as him in the Embassy's accommodation annexe, and later they would talk through the case history together.

The three T. D. Y. s were all senior to him, all had done more than ten years in the Bureau. He hadn't met any of them before.

That was the way of these things. Only a small chance that an overseas liaison Fed would know the guys coming in as firemen from Stateside The one who was born Greek and fluent, had lost his baggage, presumably in transit in London, and wanted action, and seemed to think that young Erlich would do the needful.

Erlich smiled coldly at him and said nothing. All three were exhausted, and two, the older two, would crash out and try and sleep away the jet lag, and the Greek ethnic could shout all afternoon and all night into the telephone for his bags. What it came down to was that Erlich had one last evening as an independent, and that from first light, from waffles and coffee time, he'd be part of their team and doing their bidding. The senior man, who had come in from Los Angeles to F. B. I. H. Q. after Erlich had left Washington, he'd be everybody's friend, he'd have them eating out of his hand down at Counter-Terrorism, he'd probably take out citizenship. The other older one had been in Chicago, moved to Washington less than a year back, and Erlich knew his name because he'd the distinction of having run the sting in the Board of Trade's soybean futures pit. He left them to get their heads down.

They were all top of the ladder. He didn't know their long-term histories, but each one of them would have had the break far back, hooked into it, started climbing. He didn't reckon to waste his last evening as an independent.

He had the Embassy driver take him out, again, to 28th October Street.

He told the driver that he would find his own way back.

He started 011 the left side of the road.

Some of the gates were electronically controlled. He had to identify himself from the pavement. "I am Bill Erlich, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States of America.

I would be most grateful if you could spare me a few moments of your time." One gate that he could open himself let him into a front garden patrolled by two Dobermans, but he was okay with dogs because there had always been dogs at his mother's home, and at his grandparents' home. He could talk his way past dogs. Some of the villa front doors were wide open to him. He talked to maids, struggling with his limited Greek, sometimes doing better in Italian, and to the camp boy servant of an old woman, he talked to wives and husbands and teenage children.

Some gave him their answer at the door, others invited him inside and sat him down to ask his question. To a few he was a nuisance, to most he was merely a curiosity. As each door opened to him, he made the same statement. "A colleague of mine, an American official of our Embassy, was killed here yesterday morning. Did you, or anyone in this household, sec anything of the incident?"

Some gave him their life history, then came round to saying that they were in bed, in the back of the villa, in the bath, already gone to work. Some were brusque. They had seen nothing, they knew nothing. It was dark by the time he had finished with the left side of the road. He thought that none of those he had spoken to could have told him anything of the killing. He believed their denials.

But there was fear there, shrouded by some with belligerence, hidden by others with courtesy. It wasn't any different from what it would be back home. None of them wanted trouble. Erlich had been on his last months in Washington when he had read the lesson, digested it, that safe folks crossed the road from danger, and didn't mind who they turned their backs on. He was in Washington, and Mrs Sharon Rogers was living her life out in San Diego, California.

Trouble was that Mrs Sharon Rogers' husband had been commander of the U.S.S. Vincennes. Down in the Gulf, the Vincennes had blown an IranAir jet liner out of the skies and killed more than 250 people. The hit squad blew her vehicle off the road, and she was lucky to have jumped clear before the main explosion. How did the good citizens of San Diego react? Erlich would not criticise a timid woman or a timid man in the Kifisia suburb of Athens…

The parents of the kids at the school where Mrs Rogers taught had her barred from the school, in case the hit squad came back for a second try. If Americans didn't stand up for Americans, why should Greeks stand up for…? He worked his way down the right side of the road.

Of course, he remembered the front gates. The front gates Were across the road from where Harry had died.

The flowers were still there. The rain and the wind had done them damage.

He walked through the gates.

He felt a stabbing pain at the back of his ankle.

A Pekinese had hold of his ankle. He kicked hard with his free foot. He heard the dog whimper. His trouser was torn, and there was blood on his fingers when he rubbed the wound, and he wiped it away on his handkerchief. He rang the front door bell.

"Good evening, ma'am. Do you speak English?"

It was the woman who had brought the flowers to the pavement.

He could sense her fear. She stood with her hands on the door latch, as if she were ready to throw the door back in his face.

" M y name is Bill Erlich. I am an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the United States. Yesterday morning, an old friend, an Embassy officer, was shot dead in this road… "

" Yes. "

" I t was very much appreciated, your flowers…"

"It was nothing."

She wore good jewellery, and her hair was freshly made up.

She was not attractive, her jaw was too prominent, and her eyes too close set… Steady, Bill… It was the 28th house he had called at. The pain had gone from his ankle, but a throbbing replaced the pain.

" I ' m looking for an eyewitness, ma'am."

"Somebody who saw…?"

"Somebody who saw my friend killed."

" Is that not the job of our local police?"

"Indeed it is, but it is also my job."

He saw that she hesitated. She wavered. Perhaps she recognised him from yesterday. The dog was at his ankle, and wary of passing him. She must have looked down at the dog, and seen the blood stain and the tear on his trouser. She must have understood why the dog hung back.

" Is it important to you, to find an eyewitness?"

" Yes. "

"Would you come in, please, Mr…?"

"Erlich, ma'am Bill Erlich."

She opened the door fully. He walked into the hall, and brushed his feet hard on the mat. This was money, serious money. He could see the money in the paintings and he could see also the alarm wires leading to them. Money in the drapes, and in the pottery that had a shelf to itself by the wide, dark wood staircase.

Money in the rugs over which her slippered feet moved. She didn't take him to one of the two formal reception rooms opening off the hall. She went ahead of him into the living room. A television set was playing Indiana Jones. The dog slunk past him and settled in front of the electric fire and growled back at him.

He saw a child's head peer round the wing of the comfortable chair, the child from last night. She switched off the film, she waved for him to sit down. She motioned for the child to sit on her lap. Erlich thought the boy was about eleven, could have been younger. She spoke quietly in Greek to the boy, soothing his annoyance at the turning off of the video.

" M r Erlich, more than forty years ago my country was divided by civil war. My father took one side, perhaps it was the right side and perhaps it was the wrong side. He was killed by the Communists. Mr Erlich, no one came to ask in that village for eyewitnesses… "

She held her child against her.

"… He is a bright boy, Mr Erlich. We had an English girl as a nanny for three years. Andreas learned good English from her."

Carefully, no sudden movements, Erlich took from his inside pocket his notebook, and removed the top from his ballpoint.

The boy talked.

It was before he had gone to school. He was in the front garden with the dog.

He had seen two men walking in the road. He had seen them through the gates.

A car had come fast behind them, a silver-grey car, and it had braked sharply.

A man had climbed out of the car. A whitc-faccd man, with fair to golden hair. The man had in his hand a gun with a long and fat barrel.

The man had held the gun out in front of his chest with both hands, away from his body.

The man had shouted. In front of him the two men had separated, reacted to the shout, and then to the sight of the gun.

The firing of the gun, a soft thudding. The smaller man was hit first, and then the taller man had seemed to move across to him, and then he had been hit.

The man with the gun had stopped, stared. And the driver had shouted. The man with the gun had run back to the car.

The car had turned and driven away.

That was it. The death of his friend, told in the simplicity of a child's-eye view.

"What were the shouts, Andreas?"

" T h e driver of the car, he shouted 'Colt'."

" You are certain?"

" Co l t. "

"Couldn't have been anything else?"

" Colt. "

He believed the boy. The belief was instinctive. He wrote the word " C o l t " in his notebook, and each time the boy spoke the word Erlich underlined it again.

"What sort of age?"

" Old. "

" How old?"

The boy turned to his mother. " A s old as Nico."

She said, smiling, "Younger than you, Mr Erlich, perhaps 25 years."

" How tall? Heavy or light built?"

The boy's response was immediate. " N o t fat, just ordinary height."

" Hair? "

"Fair, like Redford, but shorter."

Erlich paused. He let the words sink, and he wrote sharply, and his eyes never left the boy.

" T h e other shout, the shout of the man with the gun?"

" It was ' H e y, there

" How did he say it?"

The boy shouted, " H e y, there."

Erlich tried to smile. " D i d he say it like Harrison Ford would have said it?"

"English, not American."

" You know that difference?"

" L i k e Nanny Parsons would have said it, English."

"Andreas, this is really extremely important… "

"It was English, Mr Erlich."

"I could waste an awful lot of my time…"

"English."

The words " H e y, there" were underlined and across the top of the page he had written in bold capitals E N G L I S H.

He apologised for his intrusion. The boy had been good. He had no doubts about the boy. Because he had taught school before becoming a Fed he had some experience of kids. Erlich helped out with the Little League team in Rome that played and practised at the American School on the Via Cassia most Saturday mornings. When he was in Rome, when Jo was off somewhere, he enjoyed being one of the helpers. The coach liked having him there. The coach was an Embassy staffer in Rome and said that it was twice as good having helpers who weren't parents. The Little League baseball squad was fine relaxation for Erlich. It had given him the chance to go on talking to and getting to know children and he was sure he would know if a boy was telling him the truth. He said no to tea, thank you, or a scotch and soda. He walked down the driveway to the main gates of the villa. He crossed the road. He bent by the flowers, and tidied them.

He went down the road to the junction to look for a taxi.