CONDITION BLACK MASTER Read online

  Zoe wanted to go shopping in Knightsbridge. He was suffocated.

  The third night, above the rattling progress of a late train, he had pummelled Zoe with his fists, and not heard the frightened crying of his children, when she had said that no fucking way was she going to be holed up for the rest of her days in bloody, bloody Damascus. It was the first time that she had forgotten the place of the Arab's wife. He had beaten her, cowed her, instilled in her once more the rule of obedience.

  Zoe Rashid now accepted that she could not visit her mother before she flew out to Syria. She understood that she could only leave the flat to shop for food at the Indian-owned store at the end of the street. She accepted - rather, she understood - her position because she was never allowed from the flat with both daughters at the same time. Rashid had left the flat only once, to go by taxi to the Syrian Embassy to press further his application for asylum, and on that occasion, while he had talked and drunk coffee in an inner office his two daughters had sat outside with their colouring books and crayons.

  It was prudent of Saad Rashid to hide himself and his faintly away. A Shia cleric, an enemy of the regime, had been shot dead in a hotel lobby in Khartoum. Qassem Emin, the political activist, who had made free with his denunciations of the Chairman ol the Revolutionary Command Council, had been tortured and had his throat slit in Turkey. There was the wife of a Communist who had been stabbed to death in Oslo. There was Abdullah Ali, a businessman in exile, who was known to Rashid, and who had eaten in a restaurant in London with men he believed to be his friends, who had died in St Stephen's Hospital of a rat poison that had been sprinkled on his food during a moment of inattention.

  What decided Saad Rashid to steal half a million dollars and seek a life of exile in a country reviled by his homeland was the telephone call from his cousin's wife. On a poor line from Baghdad he had been told, in a voice distraught with tears, that his cousin was under arrest, charged with treason, held in the Abu Ghraib gaol. It was their way, the men from the Department of Public Security, to take one man, and then trawl through his family for any small hint of the cancer of dissent.

  It was 27 days since Rashid had left his office at Iraqi Airlines for the last time.

  With his two daughters, one holding each hand, he came down the long staircase from the top-floor flat. He had first checked from the window that the taxi he had telephoned was waiting.

  The passports, with the visa stamps, were waiting at the Embassy.

  He would fly that night to Damascus with his wife who had once been a dancer and with his children whom he loved. In his head was the account number at the Credit Bank of Zurich.

  He closed the outer door behind him. He hurried with his daughters down the steps and towards the taxi.

  He watched as the taxi pulled away.

  It was 28 hours since he had driven the clapped-out Ford Capri into the street, and counted himself lucky to find a space to park that was pretty near opposite the front door from which the man had emerged with his two small girls.

  He would hand it to the Colonel: given the motivation they could, by God, do things right. Colt knew that the target was a thief, that he had been observed entering the Syrian Embassy when that Embassy was under regular Iraqi surveillance. Colt knew that the target had been followed to the house in Clapham.

  Colt knew his target at once from the photograph that he had been given. Colt thought it a serious mistake by his target to have gone in person to the Syrian Embassy.

  He had found the Ruger under the mattress in his Bayswater hotel room, and with it the keys of the Capri, and the tool box, and the overalls, plus the scrap of paper on which was the street and the number. The bill was prepaid, so that he was away from the hotel before the front desk was manned, and the car had started first turn.

  For the whole day and all the previous evening, he had the hood up and tinkered with the engine. He worked his way through a bag of sandwiches and four cans of Pepsi. When night fell, he had slept in the back of the Capri, slept and dozed.

  They wanted it over and he wanted it over. It was his deal with the Colonel, that once the business was finished then he was free to go west, head back to his roots.

  He lay on his back. His head was under the outside front wheel housing. He could not avoid it, he took a lungful of the diesel fumes from the taxi as it pulled away. The pistol was under the main chassis, in a plastic bag, and the magazine was in place, and the safety was off. He had reached for the Ruger as soon as he had seen the taxi pull up, and he had had the Ruger in his grip when the front door opposite had opened, and he had loosened the grip when he had seen that the target carried no cases, only had his daughters' hands in his. He'd be coming back . . . The time would be when the target returned.

  When the taxi had cleared the street, Colt pushed himsell out from underneath the Capri. He pulled the woollen cap that had been in the pocket of his overalls further down over his close cut hair. When he had lifted the hood of the Capri, and fastened the arm to hold it open, then he bent again and readied under the chassis to retrieve the plastic bag holding the Ruger. He put the plastic bag on top of the battery, always close to his hand. The taxi, when it came back to the street, would be crawling because the driver would be looking for the number.

  They were pretty children, Colt thought. Pretty clothes and their hair well brushed . . . Not easy if the target had hold of both the kids when he came out of the taxi.

  It was as though he had come into work on a Sunday. Not that he had been to work on a Sunday for several years, but that was how he remembered it.

  This one was a big strike. Different from the time the Radiologi-cal Protection Unit had been out, and different from the Boiler-makers' stoppage. This was the real thing. This was clerical staff and Health Physics surveyors and instrument technicians, even the 'Ploot' grinders. They were all at the Falcon Gate, banners and placards, with the Transport and General Workers Union convenors haranguing them over loudspeakers.

  It was hushed as a mid-week chapel inside H3 because Carol and her typing tribe were all out in the rain with banners bearing crudely daubed exhortations to the government to raise their pay. Bissett had heard there was even talk of the fire cover being withdrawn.

  Frederick Bissett was a member of the Institute of Professional Scientists, and a fat lot of good that did him. He had joined the Institute in his first year at the Establishment because at that time the organisation seemed to have some sinew to it. He had been to the Top Rank entertainment centre in Reading when all the scientists had gathered one evening to formulate a demand for a 40 per cent pay rise. Whistling in the wind, that had been, because they had settled for half, and never recovered from the shame of behaving in the same way as the typists and fitters and laboratory assistants. Waste of his time, the Institute of Professional Scientists, which was why the annual assessments, prepared in his case by Reuben Boll, were so crucial. Be interesting, of course, if fire cover were withdrawn, because then they would have to rustle up the R . A . F . crews from Brize Norton who wouldn't know their big toes from their elbows when it came to plutonium and highly enriched uranium and chemical explosive.

  He had H3 almost to himself. Boll was over in F area because the Director had summoned all the Superintendents to a planning meeting. Wayne had rung in to say that he was sick, which meant that the little creep didn't want to drive past the picket line. Basil was in his office, probably hadn't registered that anything was different.

  In the late morning he locked his safe, checked to see that all of his desk drawers were secured, and shut down his terminal.

  Because there was a strike, because their own laboratories were idle, the high and the mighty of A area were prepared to squeeze in a visit from lowly Frederick Bissett of H3.

  He drove across Second Avenue, and past the new colossus that was the A90 building. The building was a great show box of concrete. He had never been inside the box, nor had he seen the Decontamination Centre that was alongside, nor the Liq
uid Waste plant. At least they were working on the complex that day, at least the civilian contractors had been able to bribe their private work force to cross the picket lines. It was said that A90 and its ancillaries would end up costing the taxpayer £ 1 . 5 billion. He'd heard that stainless steel was going inside that box at such a rate as to absorb the country's entire annual output, and that the rip-offs were a scandal. It was being said that when A90 came on song there wouldn't be enough people to work it and there wouldn't be enough plutonium to make it work. Naturally, there was enough money for A90 . . . money, money, money . . . not a squeak out of the bank manager that week.

  He cut across First Avenue. Ahead of him was what those who worked there called the Citadel.

  The Citadel was the A area.

  The Citadel was where nuclear warheads were made. Inside the Citadel, in Bissett's opinion, there was little that was innovative, much that was wasteful - but then what else could be expected of engineers? The Citadel was a sprawl of buildings, erected in various bursts of haste and always in secrecy since the early Fifties. Everyone who worked oulside it said that the Citadel buildings creaked with age, improvisation, and therefore danger.

  There was AI, in at the birth panGs of the British weapon, where the plutonium was heated in the furnaces so that it could be shaped into the melon-sized spheres for the inner workings of the warheads, and it was no secret amongst the Establishment staff that a dozen years earlier cancers had been rampant amongst the technicians. There was A45, the Materials Assembly unit, where the plutonium sphere was wrapped in a second concentric sphere of highly enriched uranium before the sealing of the lethal elements in 22-carat gold foil. Bissett had once met the gaunt technician from A45 who had apparently received through a faulty glove a particle of plutonium the size of a pinhead and whose body had been cremated six months later before there could be an inquest. There was A 1 2 , Waste Management Group, where the plutonium and highly enriched uranium and beryllium and tritium were taken from weapons that had achieved their shelf life in the guts of submarines and the bunkers of Air Force camps, then reworked for newer and more potent devices. There were the open-air vats alongside A 1 2 where acid burned out the plutonium before the sludge could be reprocessed.

  Bissett had only to see the wire of the Citadel's perimeter, to see the smoke from the Citadel's chimneys, to feel a loathing for the place. He was required to leave his car outside the perimeter fence.

  In the walkway inside the high double fencing, an alsatian, an ugly and vicious-looking brute, dragged at its handler's leash. The dog, leaping at the wire, snarling its frustration, frightened him. The Ministry policeman, flak jacket unfastened over his chest, sub-machine gun hooked on a strap over his shoulder, checked his I/D

  card at the entrance to the razor-wire tunnel, consulted a list of the day's expected visitors, thumbed him through. The machine gun unnerved him, always had and always would.

  At the second check, at the end of the wire tunnel, his name was searched for again, and he had to hand in his H area card in exchange for a temporary pass, and a phone call was made ahead.

  He was kept waiting. He could never have worked in AIi or Ai/

  I or A45 or A 1 2 . Every time that he had been inside the Citadel he went home as soon as his day's work was finished and scrubbed his body from toe to scalp. He could never have taken his urine and faeces samples once a week to Health Physics. He could not have endured the clamouring siren bells that marked an alarm and that caused A area to be sealed down, passage in and out of the Citadel suspended until the malfunction was located. He was ushered forward after cooling his heels for four minutes.

  He met three men inside A45. For half an hour he took tea and biscuits with them, and discussed the problems of weight reduction through additional use of gallium worked into plutonium. Weight was the key to a warhead. He could have sat down with only one of them and achieved the same guidance on weight and machining capability, but three of them came to the meeting, which he thought typical of engineers. A sniff of tea, a whiff of biscuits, and there would soon be a crowd. Because of the shortage of plutonium, because of the call on plutonium by the Trident programme, he was required to reduce the warhead weight for the cruise system. As he left, the engineers were on their third cup and discussing last week's retirement party.

  But he had had some valuable help.

  He went out through the "airlock" system of the wire tunnel.

  He was handed back his identity card. The dog was still there, still straining to break through at him.

  It was always the same when he came out of there, he thought there was an itch at his back as if he had been touched. They actually wore, those engineers, four different samplers on their chests and pinned to their jackets or shirts.

  He drove back to H area.

  At least the post was not strike-bound. Carol, on her picket line, would be suffering in the knowledge that a whole delivery of post would escape her. A bundle of recycled internal envelopes for Boll, mostly journals and magazines for Basil, an O.H.M.S.

  for Wayne, a motley of envelopes for the technicians from H3's laboratory. He saw his own name on a plain white envelope.

  Because Carol wasn't there, wasn't arching her head to see the contents of a letter, it was not necessary for him to take the envelope into his own office.

  He read the neatly typed letter . . .

  Dear Frederick,

  Hoping this finds you well. As you will see, I am now the Professor of Physics here. In an effort to make life more interesting for our younger members of staff and our graduate element, I have been inviting past students back to lecture on any aspect of their current work.

  Obviously much of what you do is restricted, but come and give us a talk on anything unrestricted that you think would be of interest.

  You are something of a legend here still and would be assured of a fine welcome, a passably good dinner, and a bed at my humble abode - plus travel expenses.

  Perhaps you could test the water at your end, and let me know when you could come. Thursday evenings are our best.

  Yours,

  Walter Smith

  PS: What on earth do you do with yourself these days?

  Surely they must be about to close the bomb shop down.

  Sara could see the raindrops falling from the bare branches of the apple tree in the garden, and she could feel the freshness of the wind on her arms.

  She stood at the drying frame with her box of pegs and her tub of washing.

  It was a strange thing, really strange to her, that she could feel her underclothes against her body. It was the third day after she had dressed, gone out, without wearing her underclothes, into her car, driving on the main road through Tadley, driving all the way to Kingsclere, knocking at the front door of the home of a woman who was almost a stranger, going into a house that she hardly knew.

  Her underclothes had been neatly folded in the bottom of her handbag. No sketcher nor painter nor artist wanted to see the elastic weals on a model's shoulders and chest and hips and thighs, every model left her underwear off for as many hours as possible before posing.

  The eyes of the man in the doorway had been a reawakening for Sara. It was more years than she cared to remember since she had last seen a man stare at her in frank admiration. When had she last seen Frederick stare at her, worship her? Back beyond memory.

  When she had been at art college, but that was just kids hunting for trophies, and they hadn't meant a toss to her. She had turned her back on the lot of them, and married Frederick Bissett, from a terraced house in Leeds, bright boy of the street. That was her statement to her parents, to her school, to her upbringing. She could not remember when poor old Frederick had last gazed in lust at her naked body, not like Debbie's husband had.

  It had been better, a long time ago it had been better, when their loving had made Frank, and better up to the time of Adam's birth. Such excruciating pain and three weeks premature, and fast, but with the pain, and Fre
derick on his one and only trip to New Mexico.

  Alone in her agony, she had vowed that the responsible bastard would go short . . . He'd gone short and the trouble was - she pegged his flannel pyjamas to the frame - that he didn't seem to care.

  When she had finished hanging out the washing, before she went for the weekly shop at SavaCentre, Sara applied her lipstick, and around her throat she squirted the toilet water which she had had for three years and never before used.

  Debbie's husband would have cared if he had gone short, oh yes.

  Rutherford was in a poor humour, because the best that the pool could provide was a two-year-old Astra with 70,000 on the clock, and a ticket on the windscreen. He couldn't have been more than two, three minutes collecting Erlich in South Audley Street, but there it was. Accounts would be pleased.

  He couldn't use his own car because they were going to be way out of radio range, and he needed the car telephone with the scrambler attachment. He had argued with the pool supervisor, but it was the Astra or nothing. He detested starting the day with an argument. At least he hadn't argued with Penny. She never fussed when he said that he was going down to the country and didn't know when he'd be back. Best thing that had ever happened to him, Penny.

  Erlich had the passenger seat as far back as it would go and he still shifted his weight about as if he needed another six inches of leg-room.

  They had come off the M3 and were cruising on the dual carriageway A303. That was the Astra's optimum pace, a reasonably quiet 70 m.p.h. It had no guts left in it. Pool cars were watchers' cars, and were hammered.

  There was the fork ahead of him, and he slowed for a gap in the oncoming traffic.

  The stones were wonderful. There was light shafting off the Plain ahead, cutting down behind the stones. He loved that place.

  He had loved the magic and mystery of Stonehenge since early childhood. On the way down to their holidays in Cornwall his parents had always stopped at Stonehenge for a slow coffee break while he had crossed the road to walk around the stones. Penny only wanted a West Country holiday, not the least ingratiating thing about her, and they took the same cottage that his Mum had rented, and they stopped, he and Penny, for the same coffee and the same stroll round the monument. Well, nowadays you could get no closer than the wire cage around the perimeter, thanks to the hippies or the busloads of Americans or druids maybe, who knew? He pulled into the car park.