Condition black

3

"That's all you've got, Bill, the testimony of an infant child."

Don was a Fed from his shined shoes to the loosened necktie at his throat. Old guard, old school. Don had led the "rotten apple" investigation five or six years back. The arrest of that worm had been the greatest cross Don had ever had to carry, the most dangerous traitor ever in the history of the government's security service. Erlich remembered his face from the network news, bleak and uncompromising and shamed, when the announcement was made. Don pushed away the breakfast plate and lit his pipe.

"Ninety-nine times out of a hundred a kid will tell you what he thinks you want to hear," Vito said.

Vito was too sharp a dresser to look like a Fed. Gold bracelet, sports shirt, and a small crucifix dangled from a 24-carat chain round his throat. The soybean sting in Chicago had been his.

Fantastic to have run two agents inside the sealed world of the soybean futures pit. It was said in Washington, at the level that Erlich had worked, that Vito could tackle anything, other than Mafia. He'd have been good there, with his background, but his wishes were respected.

" Y o u take the kid's word and you're going down a tunnel, might be a wrong-way tunnel," Nick said.

Nick, the Greek, was first-generation American. His parents had left a village in the mountains near the Albanian border just after the Civil War. He had the language. More important, he worked on Counter-Terrorism programmes specialising in the Middle East. In '87, Nick had been in Athens as one of the team k that lured Fawaz Younis to a boat out of territorial waters, and put the handcuffs on him, and read him the charges of Air Piracy and placing a destructive device aboard an aircraft and committing violence aboard an aircraft and aiding and abetting a hijacking.

Nick was wearing yesterday's shirt and the damp smell round the breakfast table told Erlich that Nick had washed his one pair of socks the night before. Nick wouldn't be contributing much that morning, he'd be out buying his changes. " I f it's a wrong way tunnel," he said, "we start burning up man hours."

" T h e boy is telling the truth," Erlich said.

" You ' d go to the wall for the boy's story?" Don said.

" Yes, sir, I would, and before you dismiss that story, I'd like to take you out there to hear it for yourself."

Don's eyes seemed to devour Erlich's face. They would have been told, all of them, before they left Washington that he was a friend of Harry Lawrence. Vito was eating, he'd left the decision to Don. Nick had his back to them, was trying to attract the attention of the waitress for his third can of Coke.

"Suppose we go with what the kid says, what do you see as the next step?"

" We have a physical description, we have a name or a nick-name, and I believe he's English. We have to start asking questions in London."

Don said, " S o go to London… "

Erlich took his hand, shook it. " Thanks. "

" Nick, take him to the airport, give him what you can."

And they were gone.

Vito had raised his dark brows in question.

Don said, " I f he's right then that's the best. If he's wrong, so what's an air ticket? Catch on… Lawrence was his friend.

I don't want anyone with personal feelings stumbling across my path. Feelings is for Rita Hayworth, that's what I used to get told."

They drove north out of the city, the guard, his sleepless ever-present shadow, at the wheel. The road took them between the old splendour of the Khulafa and the Gailani mosques, and across the railway track that wound half the length of the country to Arbil, and out through Housing Project Number Ten, and through the concretescape of Saddam City, the Chairman's way of marking the end of the Iranian war.

Colt had heard it said that after the war the country's debt was 80 billion dollars. Now, that was a sum of money to be reckoned with. Eighty billion dollars was a little more than the mind of Colt could cope with. Never mind the debt, the slogan seemed to be, get the show on the road. The show was all around, as far as the eye could see, any direction. New hotels, new fly-overs, new housing, new monuments to the Fallen Martyrs.

Back home, in a small Wiltshire town, dear old Barclays was nursing an overdraft in the name of Colin O. L. Tuck, which was ?248.14 at the last count. You'd have to add interest, of course, but even so he would take his hat off to a man 80 billion in the red who never stopped spending. On the other hand the great portraits of the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council were way over the top by Colt's reckoning. Usually he was in camouflage smock and holding an A . K. at the hip, and would probably have knocked half his pelvis off from the recoil if he had fired at that angle. Sometimes he was in the robes of a desert prince and the headdress of Joe Arafat, riding a white horse. Sometimes he was in a City of London pinstripe and showing off his new dentures. Colt didn't hold with the personality bit, but he knew enough to keep his opinion to himself. Not least because – although Colt didn't suppose that the Chairman had an inkling of his existence – Colt owed the Chairman his liberty certainly, possibly even his life.

When they were clear of the city's traffic, Colt eased himself back in the seat and lit a small cigar.

He wore erratically laced army boots, and olive-green fatigues, and a heavy-knit dun brown sweater.

His eyes were closed. It might get to be a bit of a bastard, the next few days, and then it might just get to be amusing. But then, Colt liked fun, fun on his terms, and he'd give the bastards a run. It would be the third time that he had taken part in the escape and evasion exercises of the Presidential Guard.

He was one day past his 26th birthday. In two weeks' time it would be one year since he had first come to Iraq.

Colt would have liked his father to know how he was spending the next few days. It would give the old man pleasure.

At the village of Al Mansuriyah, below the escarpment of the Jabal Hamrin, as the sun climbed, they were met by a jeep. Colt was given a rucksack filled with a sleeping bag, field rations, water, and a first-aid kit. He was given a map, compass, and binoculars. He was shown on the map the village of Qara Tappah.

T w o of the Presidential guardsmen were giggling as they pointed to the name of the village that was his target.

He told the guard, his minder, to get back to Baghdad. He told the troops to go and scratch themselves somewhere else. In the centre of the village was the square, dominated by a portrait of the Chairman. Colt sat at a table outside the cafe that saw everything that moved in the village. He asked for coffee and fresh cake. He put his feet on an empty chair. He closed his eyes.

He would move at the end of the day. He was that rare person.

He was the person, taught by his father, who preferred darkness to light, night to day.

She was hurrying that morning. There was little enough in her life that she could honestly say was exciting, but that morning she was a little nervous, and, yes, a little excited. She wanted to get all of the washing out, then cross her fingers for a dry day with a bit of sunshine and a drying wind.

"Morning, Mrs Bissett."

Little Vicky, and she'd be standing on tip toe to see over the fence, and not even dressed yet. God alone knew what the girl did after the golden boy had gone off to sell his 57 varieties, heaven only knew why she couldn't get herself dressed before ten o'clock.

She had a mouth full of pegs. "I've told you, Vicky, I don't answer to that."

A hesitation, a smaller voice. "Morning, Sara…"

"Good morning, Vicky."

It was her own fault. If she hadn't been an awkward, obstinate bitch of a teenager, it would all have been very different. If she hadn't sulked with her father, fought like a cat with her mother, she wouldn't now be hanging up Frederick's threadbare underpants on the drying frame in a tiny back lawn in Lilac Gardens, Tadley. There should have been a nice young man on the Sun-ningdale marriage circuit, and then a nice house in Ascot, and probably a cottage in Devon, and two boys at a good prepatory school in Surrey. But it had been her choice. She had turned her back on her upbringing, but it didn't matter how many times she told Vicky. She was always going to be Mrs Bissett to Vicky, and Mrs Bissett to Dorothy on the other side.

"Got none of this 'flu, then?"

"Wouldn't have the time for it, Vicky."

" Y o u busy, then?"

She saw Vicky's face, over the fence, crestfallen. Poor little soul must be as lonely as sin. Come in, join the club…

She said cheerfully, "Big day today, Vicky. I'm joining an art class."

She didn't have to tell the girl. She didn't have to tell anyone.

She hadn't told Frederick, there just hadn't seemed to be the right time.

"Oh, that's clever, Mrs… Sara."

"Probably be a bloody mess."

She should have stayed and talked with the girl, but this morning, unlike most mornings, she had a deadline to meet.

Simply didn't have the lime to make soap-opera conversation over the fence. It was their fence, and it was coming down, and she had pointed that out to Frederick, and she had known he wouldn't do anything about it, any more than he would buy himself new underpants. He said that he much preferred the money they could afford for clothing to go onto the boys' backs, and onto her. She thought that her father probably now earned more than?100,000 a year, but she did not know for sure because it was nine years since she had last visited him, four years since she had last received a Christmas card from him. Her mother didn't even telephone. No reason for either of them to write or telephone, not after what had been said.

"It would be wonderful to be able to do pictures."

The telephone was ringing inside the house.

She had the last of the shirts pegged to the frame.

She should have stayed to talk to the girl, but her telephone was ringing.

"Sorry, Vicky, another time…"

She ran inside. She went through her kitchen, past the pool of water. Dorothy's husband had plumbed in the second-hand washing machine for her, and refused to accept money, taken all Saturday morning doing it. Because he had refused to be paid she couldn't ask him to come back again to deal with the seepage. So it would stay leaking. She went through the hall. They needed a new carpet in the hall, and on the stairs. She picked up the telephone.

" Yes? "

It was the bank manager, Lloyds.

" Yes? "

He had written twice to Mr Bissett.

"Doctor Bissett, yes?"

He had written twice asking for a meeting, and he had received no reply. There were matters to be discussed that were really quite urgent. Would Doctor Bissett be so kind as to call back and arrange the appointment?

"I'll tell him you phoned."

He would be very grateful if she would do just that.

She rang off She had seen the two letters. The first had arrived ten days before, and the second had been delivered four days before. She had seen him, ten days before and four days before, scoop up the letters from the kitchen table and put them in his briefcase. He hadn't remarked on them, and she had not asked.

Each morning she had been too busy getting the boys ready to query the letters from the bank. It was years since she had last been to an art class. She didn't really know what she should be wearing, but that morning she put on an old pair of jeans. All of her jeans were old. She had dressed in a vivid red blouse and a loose woollen blue cardigan, and she had tied her long dark hair into a pony tail with an orange scarf. She hadn't been to an art class since she had been married.

She thought that she looked good, and she felt bloody good, and she wasn't going to let a telephone call from the bank manager interfere with her seldom-found excitement.

When it was dusk, Colt walked out of the village of Al Mansuriyah. The last light played on the cliff wall of the Jabal Hamrin, but by the time he reached the steep-sloping ground he would be covered by darkness. The sun's rays lingered on the one narrow minaret tower in the village behind him, and on the flat roofs where the corrugated iron was weighted down with heavy stones against the spring gales.

When he was clear of the goat herds and the sheep that grazed around the village, he moved down to the river that was a tributary of the distant Tigris. His boots were comfortable, had a deep tread. He scrambled down to the water's edge. With his fingers he broke away mud from the river bank and wet it in the river.

He smeared the mud across his face, and then across his scalp so that it matted in his close-cut hair. He layered more mud onto his throat and down to his chest and across his shoulders. Last, he rubbed it over his hands and wrists.

They had tested him in Athens, now they tested him again.

He had no hesitation in telling himself that he would win.

Failure, he had often said to himself, was not a part of his life.

He had sat forward, in Club, because Tourist was full. The whole plane was full and Nick had done well to get him a seat at all. He had never before been through Customs and Immigration at Heathrow. Not a bad experience, because there was an Englishman with Erlich's name on a sheet of cardboard waiting at the entrance to Immigration. That was good. He wouldn't have his suitcase to show. The man had a card that did the work at the desk, saved them the queue, and it did the business at Customs too. The guy let him carry his own case and led him through into the concourse where the English driver from the Embassy pool was waiting.

That was okay. He hadn't reckoned on one of the Liaison team coming down from Central London just to shake his hand, talk baseball results, and drive him back. It was a good run into the city, against the outgoing commuter traffic.

They ended up close to the Embassy in a road called South Audley Street.

The driver gave Erlich an envelope with his name and the South Audley Street address on it. Inside a glass door he was met by a security man, plainclothes, not at all talkative, probably from Kansas. He was given a key and left to find his own way up two flights of stairs.

It was a room like any other room. It was what Bill Erlich, the bachelor, was used to, clean and soulless. Inside the envelope was a note from the London-based Legal Attache. He was tied up that evening, apologies, and the rest of his team were out of town. Could Erlich be at the Attache's office at eight in the morning at the Embassy?

Erlich was alone in a city that he didn't know. He dialled Jo's number in Rome, and grew lonelier and sadder as it rang on and on, unanswered.

Colt could easily have killed him. Colt thought that "elite" was the most overworked word in the military dictionary. He reckoned that the word elite was usually applied to those who had the best publicity machine. In the Baghdad Times, the English-language newspaper, the Presidential Guard were always written up as an elite force. They had all the kit, down to the nightscope. They had bivouacs, sleeping bags and cold-weather anoraks.

He had found the observation post two miles beyond the outer rim of the Jabal Hamrin. He had skirted it and approached them from behind. Three troopers of the Presidential Guard.

They did two hours on, four hours off. It was the first obstacle in his route from A1 Mansuriyah to Qara Tappah, and he could have ignored it, simply carried on, but that was not his way.

He had waited, motionless, until the frost had settled on his body.

The gag was across the trooper's mouth, and the pressure of Colt's knee was into the small of his back, and the sheer strength of Colt's arm took the trooper's wrists up into the blades of his shoulders.

He trussed the trooper so that he could not move his feet or his hands. On top of the gag, he forced into the trooper's mouth the trooper's own filthy handkerchief.

Where he had been a child, when the fox came at night around the barricaded chicken houses then the old bugger always scented the chicken house sides, left his stink, boasted that he had been there.

And it would amuse the Colonel to hear what he had done to the President's elite guard.

He would have a 90-minute start on them, maybe longer.

''I am afraid, Dr Bissett, thai ignoring facts does not make those facts go away."

It was a quarter past nine. It was a clear hour after Bissett would normally have been at his desk.

"Now, if we could, please, just go over the figures…"

He hated to be late It was the way thai he had been reared.

"Your salary as a Senior Scientific Officer currently runs at ?17,500. I am correct

He had heard Carol, only the week before, say that the man who delivered coal to hn house was paid?345 a week. For loading and unloading sacks of coal, and driving a lorry round the villages, that was?440 per annum more than a Senior Scientific Officer earned slaving for the defence of his country. That was the society they lived in. No account taken of intellect and value.

"Your wife does not work Don't misunderstand me, I am not implying that she should be working… I sometimes feel that a great many of out social problems at the moment, young people rampaging, are brought about by mothers going out to work… So, there is no other source of income coming into the household? Correct again?"

She had worked in the supermarket off Mulfords Hill for five and a half month-. It had been t he first time that he had really seen Sara in tears. Adam had fallen over in the playground, hit his head on a bench, been taken to hospital. The school hadn't had his number at A.W.E. The teachers couldn't ask Frank where his mother might be because his class was out for the day on a Project Course. The first Sara had known of Adam's injury was when she had turned up to collect him at the school gate. She'd told him about the looks aimed at her by Adam's teachers. That was the end of her working, and anyway the money had been peanuts.

"Your mortgage is currently set at?62,500, Dr Bissett, which is slightly excessive for the salary you command, but I do quite understand that you bought at the top of the market and that interest rates were then not at their present level."

They had made the move to Lilac Gardens in the summer of 1988. They had paid?98,000. They had known they were on the knife edge, and interest rates had been at 8 per cent. Sara had said that she just was not prepared to live any longer in the jerry-built little terrace at the bottom of the village.

" N o w, your salary works out at approximately?1460 per month, gross. Then, we've tax, insurance, local government rates, pension contributions, and the mortgage. I would estimate that, allowing for your outgoings, you have around?600 a month at your disposal.

But that, of course, does not take into account the loan we made you at the start of the year. Six thousand five hundred, repayable over three years, plus of course interest. That's another?180 a month, without interest. You are behind on the interest, Dr Bissett, and you are two months behind on the r e p a y m e n t… "

The loan had been to buy the second-hand Sierra, and then had been topped up to cover repairs required by the M. O. T.; and then increased again when Sara's Mini had just died on her, expired in the middle of the village with 110,000 miles on the tombstone. Sara had to have a car. And topped up again to pay for the repair of the flat roof over the kitchen, and the man who had done the work should have been prosecuted for fraud.

" D r Bissett, I hate to say this to a government employee, but

… private enterprise round here is on its knees for skilled and qualified people…"

"What I'm interested in is no use to the private sector. And I'm a research scientist, damn it, not a yuppie."

"So be it… Can you look for promotion, a better salary scale, a higher grade?"

"I've been looking for it for years, but I'm not in charge of promotion and the people senior to me in my department are Home of the most brilliant minds in England, and elsewhere for that matter."

The bank manager eased back in his chair. He was young and a Initially, flitting from branch to branch and all the time climbing.

His elbows rested on the leather padded arms of his chair, and his fingers were clasped comfortably in front of his chin.

"Something has to be done. We cannot go on like this, Dr Bisssett,"

Sara said that the exterior woodwork of the house was a disgrace and needed painting, and that the kitchen floor needed new vinyl, and that the hall carpet was awful. Sara said that if they couldn't do better than last year's holiday, a caravan in the rain in West Wales, then it wasn't worth bothering…

Bissett stood.

When he was angry then the Yorkshire surfaced again in his voice, the grate of the harsh streets of Leeds. So bloody hard he had fought to get those streets behind him. All that struggle, just to have this jumped-up little man lecturing him.

" T r y telling the government that 'something has to be done'.

Try telling bloody Downing Street 'we cannot go on like this'."

"Nobody forced you to buy that house."

Bissett stared at him. "Don't ever say anything as stupid as that to me again."

In his adult life he had never struck any person, certainly not Sara, not even his children in anger. He stood, looming over the manager's desk. His forehead beneath his curled brown hair was reddening. His spectacles had shaken down the arch of his nose.

His fists were clenched at the seams of his trousers. His breath came in short pants.

"Steady down, Dr Bissett."

He could see that his bank manager was further back in his chair, almost cowering.

The bank manager waited until Bissett was at the door, until he was sure of his safety.

"I have to say it again, Dr Bissett, we cannot go on like this."

The door slammed. The papers leaped on his desk. In fairness, the bank manager would concede, he could not see where the poor fellow could make another economy and continue to live a half-way acceptable life. But the man needn't have shouted…

Anyway, the whole thing was ridiculous, maintaining that white elephant when every school child knew that the Cold War was over and done with.

Erlich's morning was a write-off. He hadn't expected the red carpet to be unrolled for him, but he had thought that at last he would be at work, setting up his meetings, on the move. The Legal Attache 1 was once more apologetic, he had a late runner in his programme, a problem with a fraud extradition. There were problems with the warrant, and the Legal Attache was going to be down at New Scotland Yard for the morning, and probably for the afternoon.

Could Erlich manage eight o'clock the next morning?

He rang Rome, the Legal Attache's office, and spoke to the girl who typed his letters and answered his telephone. He didn't know when he'd be back and she should cancel everything for the next several days. A lunch with the Capo dello Squadro Anti-Terrorismo that he had been waiting a year for, a session with a good guy in the Guardia di Finanze, and a squash game with Dieter who was number two to the Legal Attache, and he just didn't know whether he'd be back before the Little League All Stars trip to Naples and the game against the Sixth Fleet which was the high point of the season which they played now courtesy of the Italian sunshine into late fall. Everything on his desk to go into Pending.

He had never been a happy sightseer and until his work was done, until Harry Lawrence's killer was identified and caught he couldn't see himself playing the tourist at the Changing of the Guard, or the Tower of London, even Poets' Corner which he had longed to see, as a passionate student of English poetry… that would have to wait. When this assignment was well and truly nailed he would ask Jo, long chance, if she could get over here. It would be a pleasure to share these glories with Jo. By mid morning he had been through the day's edition of the Herald Tribune. Under the dateline of Rome, that caught his eye, he read that increasing mystery surrounded the murder of Professor Zulfiqar Khan. It was now known that the body of the Professor who specialised in nuclear physics had been claimed by the Iraqi Embassy in Rome. It was not yet known what had brought the Professor to the city…

By the time he hud read the Herald Tribune from front page lead to back page comic strip, the maid had come to make up his room. There was a sniff of disapproval signifying that it was out of court for a grown man to be still in his bedroom in mid-morning, and not at a place of work.

Her vacuum cleaner drove him into the street, in search of a coffee shop.

Two espressos and a Danish pastry later, he was reduced to buying postcards. One for Jo. He had tried again in the early morning, and again the phone hadn't been picked up. He could have rung the C.B.S. office in Rome, and asked where she was, where they'd shipped her. But Jo never rang him at work, and he never rang her office secretary to find what flight she'd taken.

That was their way, their understanding. The Herald Tribune had told him that there was more confusion in Prague, more rioting in Zagreb, an O.P.E.C. meeting in Geneva, and a European summit starting that evening in Madrid. She could have been assigned to any one of them. He wouldn't have admitted it to Jo, but deep down he resented it when she was out of town and not picking up his calls. They met whenever she had a free evening and he had a free evening, and it wasn't often. It was even rarer that they could share a weekend in the villages round Orvieto.

They spent their evenings together in a trattoria on the square beside the Ponte Milvio or down in Trastevere, before a couple of hours at his place, or half a night at her apartment. They each said that it suited them, that kind of relationship. He wrote, 'Jo honey, will you pick up the goddam phone? It's me, your friend, and I need to hear your voice. Where are you? Maybe you're in London. Will look more closely at all the girls in future. Just in case.'

One for his mother. His mother had married Herbie Mason just three years after his father had been killed. They ran a hardware store and diner in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, serving the hikers and campers up on the Appalach-ian trail. He rarely heard from his mother, but he rang her each Christmas morning, wherever he was, and on her birthday, and he sent her maybe a dozen postcards a year.

One for his grandparents. They were his mother's people, they had an old weathered brick house close to the harbour moorings at Annapolis, Maryland. He was fond of them both. A bit correct for a small boy, a little formal, but they had been his proxy parents for school terms after his father's death, and after his mother had taken off with Herbie. Good people. They had never once criticised his mother's behaviour in their grandson's hearing. School terms in Annapolis, and holidays in the White Mountains, it could have been a lot worse. His grandfather was retired Navy, action in the Pacific and off Korea, where he had his own command.

If his father had lived he would now have been in his sixtieth year. Every time that he wrote postcards to his mother and to his grandparents memories of his father revived. Memories of a man going overseas in his best uniform. Memories of a man coming home for burial, with full military honours… Such a very long time ago.

He had once heard an Englishman say that what he knew of nuclear physics could be written on the back of a blackcurrant.

It was an expression that still gave him pleasure and he would have used it to describe his own limited grasp of the subject, but it would have been wasted on the sparrow-sized man across the big desk from him. The Colonel had swiftly appreciated that if he needed to describe Dr Tariq's sense of humour the backside of a blackcurrant was all he needed, and to spare.

Soldiering was what the Colonel understood. As a young paratrooper he had fought in the north against the Kurdish rebels. It was where his reputation had been forged. It was his battalion's heroic defence of their positions on the Basra to Baghdad road, when the rats from Iran had swarmed in their thousands from the marshlands, that had given him his present renown. He had commanded a unit of the Presidential Guard which provided close escort to the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. When the traitor scum, the creatures of the Al Daawa al Islamiya, last tried to assinate the Chairman, six of the Guard had been killed, the Colonel had taken a bullet to the stomach, but the Chairman had survived untouched. Rewards followed. The rewards of the Chairman could be generous. But the Colonel had seen to it that his name did not go forward for promotion. He could learn from the fate of those who had climbed too high. He would never be a rival, he would remain the loyal servant of the Chairman. Now he directed a section of the Military Intelligence unit concerned with the security of the state from threats outside its boundaries.

Dr Tariq told him of the death of Professor Khan, of the defection of the two French engineers, and of the Italian laboratory engineers, of a letter bomb that had been received, correctly addressed, to the same complex, to the very building alongside the one in which he now sat. He was told of Dr Tariq's passage throughout the offices and laboratories, his attempt to steady the morale of the Germans, the Austrians and of two more Italians and of a Swede. He was told that the fear must be cauterised, that the defections must be stopped.

"I shall be frank, Colonel. I have no time to waste."

"Of course."

"We can delude ourselves, and we could delude others, as to the real situation here, and what do we achieve? Only a crucial loss of time."

"I understand, Dr Tariq."

"If this complex had not been bombed by the Zionists in 1981, then we would by now have the capability for the production of nuclear warheads. During the war with the Khomeini zealots, I could not command the necessary resources to reactivate the programme following the '81 setback. I now have the necessary resources. I have the commitment of the Chairman. But – and this is why I am obliged to require your co-operation – at a certain level there are gaps in my team. In specific areas of the programme I am short of men of the required experience. I had recruited abroad in those areas, Do you understand me?"

"I understand you."

"I had recruited Professor Khan… "

"I understand you."

The Colonel needed no instruction in the politics of fear. He had ordered firing squads into Kurdish villages. He had executed in public deserters from his battalion when it fought for its life on the Basra to Baghdad road. He had witnessed the death by hanging of two members of the A1 Daawa al Islamiya who were believed connected with the attempt on the life of the Chairman.

Much of his present work was aimed at silencing, by fear, the community of dissidents in exile. Silencing them or killing them.

"The Zionists murdered Professor Khan, they sent a letter bomb, simply to create an atmosphere of terror amongst the foreign nationals employed by me."

"Professor Khan travelled… "

"Covertly, of course. Yet evidently they knew his itinerary.

Just as they were able to single out an important member of my staff here, and address him by name."

The Colonel lit his cigarette. He blew the smoke to the ceiling.

"Then you have more than one problem, Dr Tariq."

Dr Tariq said, "Quite so, Colonel. I have someone leaking information from inside Tuwaithah. And I have the problem of lilling gaps from outside, from the top echelons of a scientific community that is growing more, not less, hostile. As I said, I will be frank. I recognise the extent of the problem."

"Where can you fill such gaps?"

" N o longer from France, I think. Nor perhaps from Italy, though these have been our best recruiting grounds to date. The Soviet Union and China are not impossible, but we have not been successful there before. The United States is difficult. Their security services are watchful and their private sector pays inordinately high wages. In Great Britain, on the other hand, the position is very different. I should look to Britain, Colonel. I should look to the Atomic Weapons Establishment in the village of Aldermaston in the Thames Valley

The Colonel laughed out loud "I get a bus, do I? I drive a bus to the front door. I shout in a very loud voice that the Republic of Iraq will pay well for atomic scientists. I fill the bus and I drive it to the airport. Is that what you have in mind?"

He had been right the first time. There was not a jot of humour in the man. There was the thin voice beating at him across the desk.

" Y o u are reminded that I have the backing of the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. And the Chairman, who deigns to place a measure of trust in you, Colonel, antici-pates that what I want you will make it your urgent priority to find. I want a scientist who specialises in the physics of implosion."

The Colonel took out a notepad. He wrote "physics of implosion".

He arranged to return at the same time the next day to set about identifying the traitor in Tuwaithah.

He left behind him the scene, still shockingly evident, of the destruction by the Israelis of the Osirak reactor, the flattened mound of concrete. When his car was past the missile launchers, past the guards, he demanded speed. He wanted to be through Baghdad before the evening traffic. He was quiet in the car – none of his customary banter with his driver – as he digested the consequences of failing Dr Tariq. The spy in Tuwaithah would be an interesting challenge. For once the wielding of fear as a weapon would certainly be counter-productive. But the procurement of scientists from overseas as a novelty intrigued him. It was somewhat outside his province and yet, he thought, anyone who was willing to leave a Western nuclear establishment to help Dr Tariq build his atom bomb was either an idiot or a traitor, and traitors were after all his special subject. And to solve Dr Tariq's problems all he had to do was to find two traitors. One here and pray he wouldn't be yet another scientist who needed replacing, and one in the West. The Colonel had a momentary vision of himself being captured by the Special Forces of a Western army as he tried to recruit a physicist He wanted to be at the village of Qara Tappah before dusk became night.

The newest building in the centre of Qara Tappah had been built in 1934. It was the coffee house. There were oil lamps hanging over the verandah, and they threw black shadows towards the mosque entrance, and towards the shop where clothes were sold, long since shut. Across the square ran the open sewer of the village. The lamps from the coffee shop flickered on its silver, glistening surface. The coffee shop was abandoned, the square was empty. There was not one villager who had dared to emerge from behind his shuttered door, not since the foreigner had come to the village.

At the edge of the sewer, Colt lay. The pain racked his whole body.

The headlights of the Mercedes found him. He heard the slamming of the car door. He looked up into the face of the Colonel.

"Did you win?"

He had come to the village at last light bearing a balaclava helmet, a webbing belt and trousers, and a mess tin all belonging to the Presidential Guard. He had won because, over 20 miles of open country, he had eluded the patrols of the Presidential Guard.

He had walked, disshevelled and mud-plastered, out into the square from the coffee shop and thrown at the feet of the Captain those trophies that he had lifted from three different observation posts along the way. He had come through the back of the coffee shop yard, through the kitchen, out onto the verandah. Colt had laughed at the Captain and the men around him, laughed until they took out their failure on him with the most savage beating he had ever received. He wondered how much the Colonel had wagered on his winning.

His voice was a croak. " N o problem."