CONDITION BLACK MASTER Read online

Bissett hunched himself over his desk as Boll went by. Thanks to Carol's shattering revelations, thanks to the bank manager's renewed assault, thanks to his humiliation at Boll's hands over the lecture invitation, it had not been a productive morning. How would he, indeed, assess himself? " T h e work of this gifted, original physicist is undervalued in the Establishment." Was it?

  He was no longer confident of that.

  "I won't jump, not for those patronising bastards."

  "It's a simple warning, and one to be acted upon."

  "I wouldn't cross the road for them, not if one of them was being mugged for his last pound coin."

  Barker was head of D Branch. D Branch included the Military Security section. The Military Security section was Hobbes.

  Barker said, "Come off your cloud, young man."

  Hobbes said, "They snap their bloody fingers, those bastards, and they expect us to come running."

  Barker said, and it was not like him to be cruel, " N o doubt if they had accepted you then your attitude would have undergone the old sea change."

  Hobbes said, "Very catty. Anyway, I haven't the manpower left."

  Barker said, "I don't need a bulletin on the 'flu casualties. Do me a favour, stop fucking about, just nominate somebody." He understood young Hobbes's dislike of the Century House crowd, and in truth shared it to a degree. One day, someone would take the lad aside and tell him just how lucky he had been to be rejected by the Secret Intelligence Service and to have squeezed into Curzon Street instead.

  "I suppose Rutherford could do it."

  "What's he up to now?"

  "Nannying an F . B . I , fledgling."

  "That American thing . . . ?"

  Dickie Barker was 64 years old, one year off retirement. He would have served, to this day, 40 years in the Security Service, He had worked in the Watcher Service of A Branch, the Personnel Vetting section in B Branch, the Soviet Satellite Section of C

  Branch, the Political Parties (Left) section of F Branch. In his run-up to retirement he headed D Branch with sections working to him that dealt with the Civil Service, Government Contractors, Military Security and Sabotage Prevention. Many newer men, Hobbes among them, had not been too proud to seek him out for advice on this and that. He had a deep wellof experience and, when his P.A. wasn't off sick, a constantly patient and amiable manner He had helped Jim Skardon interrogate Fuchs, He had been among the watchers who had tailed Alan Nunn May. He had been in the team that kept the bungalow home of Peter Kroger under surveillance. He had observed Bossard, he had prepared the case against Bettany who had worked only two floors below him in the old Leconfield House building. If he had had a very good evening, he would talk of the day. when the F.B.I, heavyweights were over in Leconlield House, running riot through Registry, shitting on the Service and playing the game that every Briton was subversive. It was said of Dickie Barker that second only to his contempt for the Secret Intelligence Service was his dislike of the American agencies.

  "I could tell Rutherford to put the American on hold."

  "Yes, Rutherford would do. Tell him to park his pram, prefer-ably in the middle of Oxford Circus. Have him in here before the end of the day."

  Erlich spoke fast, didn't hide his excitement, said what he wanted . . . He listened. He replaced the receiver.

  Ruane was across the room, getting off his coat, back from lunch.

  "You all right, Bill?"

  Erlich looked up. He looked into Ruane's face. There was a quiver in his voice.

  " I ' m being pissed on, Dan."

  Ruane gestured him to follow, walked smartly into his office.

  He held the door open, closed it behind Erlich. A growl in his voice. "What sort of shit talk is that?"

  Erlich said, "They gave me a liaison. There is a shooting in London, an Iraqi, former government employee, is killed. I'm not informed, I am left to read it in the newspaper. I react. I ring my liaison and I tell him what I want . . . "

  "Want?"

  "Want, Dan, because I am here to investigate a murder. Yes, I tell him what I want. I tell him I want every detail on the investigation into this local killing. Anything they've got on identification, etc. etc. My liaison said he was unavailable. He said he had other work, and would be back to me when it was finished. What do I do, Dan?"

  Ruane had ducked out of sight. When he reappeared it was with the box of brushes and polish, and his stockinged feet swung to the desk top.

  "When I know what I want and no one will give me what I want, then I go and take it."

  "Thanks . . ."

  " Y o u screw up, and I never heard of you. You hear me?"

  Colt was still sitting beside his mother when his father returned to the bedroom in the early afternoon.

  When his mother had woken he had leaned forward to kiss her check, and she had smiled. Her eyes had closed again, but then, at least, her breathing had been steady, and from the time that she had woken he had loosely held her hand. Her peace brought a calm to Colt. His thoughts were of memories long buried, of the family holidays, and laughter and merrymaking at Christmas in the Manor House. Only good memories concerned him.

  It was good she was asleep. If she had been awake then she would have wanted him to talk. He would not have wanted to tell her of the two boys to whom he had taught English, and who had learned nothing, but who had shed their puppy fat and their conceit and learned to pitch tents and make camp fires and shoot a rabbit at a hundred paces with the Colonel's Kalashnikov rifle, and skin the animal and cook it and eat it. Through teaching those boys his own freedom he had further taken the eye of the Colonel and dictated his own transfer from the uplands of rock and desert around the army compound and the Colonel's bungalow to the prison cell that was the apartment on the Haifa Street Housing Project. She would not have wanted to hear that he had been taken from the wild happiness to the capital city to be trained as a killer of targets. Best that she was asleep.

  His father carried a tray into the bedroom. Three soup bowls, some buttered toast cut into fingers, a jug of orange juice and three glasses.

  His father said that he had been into Warminster to the bank, and that he had needed to do the shopping. Colt thought that his father had found an excuse to leave son and mother together.

  His father lifted his mother, propped her high against the pillows, fed her soup with a spoon, and he talked as if she could not hear him.

  "They were Security Service and the F.B.I. . . ."

  "I heard the voices."

  "I sent them packing."

  "You don't want those bastards in your house."

  " . . . I told the American to go down to the pub because I couldn't let him inside, because the lavatory door is beside the kitchen door and because this is obviously a non-smoking house, and because on the kitchen table you had left a saucer with a revolting little cigar end in it."

  Soft, murmured words, as he fed the soup into his wife's mouth, and after he had given her each spoonful he wiped carefully at her chin to remove what the shake in his hand had spilled.

  " T h a n k s . "

  " Y o u always were a careless little sod."

  "What did they want?"

  "When I'd seen you, where you were."

  "What did you tell them?"

  His father looked into Colt's face. "That I wasn't responsible for your actions. They said it was about state-sponsored terrorism, I said that you had made your own bed . . . "

  " D i d they believe you?"

  "I didn't ask them . . . " A coldness in the whisper voice.

  "Isn't political murder a cut above your league?"

  " I f you say so."

  "I mean, that's not running around with those animal loonies . . . "

  Colt said, like it was an explanation, " H e got in the way. He wasn't the target. He was C . I . A . "

  "They won't ever let up after a trick like that."

  Colt said, "I'll never be taken."

  " T h e idiots all say that."

  " Y o
u could have turned me in, when you were in Warminster this morning."

  "Could have done . . . should have done. Could have let the American in before breakfast, for that matter."

  "But you didn't."

  "During the war there were men who died under torture, rather than give my name - your soup will be cold - I would never inform, even on a stranger."

  Colt's glance caught the wartime photograph. There were the clear features of his father and behind were the fading faces of his colleagues in arms. One of them, on the extreme right, had been his mother's uncle. He wondered which of those blurred figures had been taken and tortured, and had held his silence that his father might live.

  "Thank you for sending for me."

  Erlich said, ever so gently, "That's just terrific, Miss Worthington."

  "It's only what I saw. You see it or you don't see it."

  " A n d again . . . "

  " S o that you can write it down, Mr Erlich. He had fair hair, cut close, not shaven like those skinhead types, I don't suppose you have them in America, cut very tidily. He was wearing this woollen cap. If it hadn't slipped, just for that moment before he straightened it, then I would not have seen his hair. Rather golden fair hair."

  " A n d you'd know the face again?"

  " O h , yes, Mr Erlich."

  "Positive?"

  " H e looked at me, he smiled at me. When you've seen a man kill another man, then that man smiles at you, well, you are going to remember that face."

  " A n d he said . . ."

  " H e said 'Hey, there'. That's when I looked up. The man, the foreigner, you see I thought that he was the worse for drink, and I started to cross the road. I had heard nothing. As long as I live it will be with shame, because I thought he was drunk and I started to cross over so that he wouldn't involve me. Then he fell and I saw the blood. Up to that time the man in the boiler suit had stood away from him, but then he went closer. I don't hear very well these days, I heard nothing. The man lying on the pavement, he just stopped moving, and I shall never know if I could have done something for him or not, but I was just going to get out of the way because I thought he was a drunk."

  It was the old training from Quantico that an interrogator never showed excitement. Didn't matter if he was getting the laundering system of a crack baron, or a confession to serial murder, the Fed was taught at the Academy not to show excitement. To show excitement was to lead. Never lead. He shouldn't have told Miss Worthington that she was terrific. That was a slip. It was the fifth house that he had called at in the street. He had knocked on the door. She was just inside the door and he could see her shape through the glazed glass. He had knocked and rung the bell, but she had been a long time answering. He had sensed she was faint, that the small dog was frantic. His intuition, that she was a prisoner in her own home. The shopping basket with the list in it had been on the carpet by the front door. It had been his intuition and his understanding. Nothing said. He had taken the basket, gone to the corner shop at the far end of the street. He had bought a packet of porridge, one pork chop, oven-ready chips, a carton of frozen broccoli, one apple, one orange, a small loaf of wholemeal sliced, and an 8oz tin of Pedigree Chum. And after he had ticked off each item on the list he had asked for two half LB bars of milk chocolate and a small bunch of chrysanthemums. He had come back to the house. He had allowed her to peck in her purse for the coins to reimburse him, but not for the chocolate and the flowers. He had cooked her meal, fed her dog. He thought that if she had not been standing near the door at the moment he had knocked, if she had been in the recesses of the house, then he would never have been admitted. She was 24-carat gold dust.

  "Miss Worthington, my paper says that the police do not have a description of the assassin."

  "I really couldn't say."

  "Haven't they been to speak to you, Miss Worthington?"

  "I wouldn't talk to them."

  "Why not, if that's not impolite?"

  "I wouldn't open the door to them . . . You're different, Mr Erlich, and you're American."

  " D o you have American friends?"

  "Two of my best friends are Mr Silvers and Miss Ball."

  Well done, Phil Silvers, well done, Lucille Ball, he thought, and he took the photograph from his inside pocket.

  Miss Worthington, I am going to show you a photograph of a man. You really have to he very honest with me. If you don't recognise him, yon must say so. If you do recognise him . . ."

  He laid the photograph on the table beside her, where there was her book and her reading light and her c l o s e w o t k spectacles.

  She changed her glasses, took off her heavici pair, replaced them delicately from the table. He didn't prompt If she said what she thought he might wish to hear, then he would face weeks of wasted effort. She glanced at the photograph She didn't bother to hold it and peer at it.

  "You're very clever, Mr Erlich."

  "Clever, ma'am?"

  "Of course that's him."

  He was up from his chair. He kissed her on both checks. When he stepped back he saw the flush of colour in her pale face.

  She said gravely, "It was a terrible thing he did in our street, and he could have hurt those dear little girls."

  " A n d before that he killed a man who was my friend."

  "You'll go after him?"

  "That was the promise I made to the widow of my friend."

  " D o you go to chapel, Mr Erlich? No, I don't expect you have time. I will pray for your safety, young man. Any person who can take the life of any of God's children, then smile at an old lady, he would have to be very dangerous. What is his name?"

  "His name is Colt."

  " T h e best of luck to you, Mr Erlich. I have so enjoyed your visit. And, I will be praying for your safety."

  "What are we going to do?"

  "I don't know."

  "Well, think, Frederick."

  "I don't know."

  ''That is just a pretty stupid answer."

  "If you shout, Sara, you will wake the children."

  "Just how bad is it?"

  "How bad . , , ?" He laughed out loud. His voice was shrill, matching hers. "How bad do you want it? I.C.I, have turned me down. That bloody man at the bank is turning the screws. Boll is doing annual assessments now and I'm behind on my work project, and getting nagged

  "They wouldn't put a bailiff in . . . ?"

  "For what?" he scoffed

  "Frederick, you have to tell me what we are going to do . . ."

  They could take the cars, his and hers. They could take furniture. They could take thei clothes off their backs. Christ, it was obscene . . . All the lights were off in the house except for the bedside lights in the children's room, and the strip light in the kitchen. The heating was oil, because the boiler was shuttown. They couldn't take the television set, because it was rented.

  "I'm going to say goodnight to the boys."

  "Frederick, we have to talk about ii "

  "Something'll turn up."

  He stood at the bottom of the stairs. He thought that she was beautiful with the tired frightened anger in her eyes. He did not know how to talk to her. A dozen years of marriage and he knew nothing that mattered about her. If she ever went away from him, abandoned him, he could not have survived. Yet he did not know how to talk to her, and he loved her. Yes, something would have to turn up.

  "Is that the best you can offer?"

  "That something'll turn up, yes."

  Bissett groped his way upstairs towards the bar of light under the boys' door. He had always provided for his family. He had not expected that his wife should go out to work. That was his upbringing. Old-fashioned, yes. Working-class, yes. He had been the bright star of his college, he had a first class degree in Nuclear Physics, he was a Senior Scientific Officer, he lived in the house that he and the building society had paid £98,000 to buy, yet he would never escape from his upbringing. It was his responsibility alone to provide for his family.

  Something wo
uld turn up, yes. He paused outside the boys'

  door. He could hear them larking about and giggling.

  Away up the road, up Mount Pleasant, up Mulfords Hill, across the Kingsclere to Burghfield Common Road, were the arc lights and the fences of the A . W . E . It was Boll country, Basil country, Carol country, a world of fraud and waste and burnt-out hopes, of excruciating effort, constant danger, trivial rewards, Ministry police with machine pistols country. Less and less did it feel like Frederick Bissett country.

  " N o w then, you naughty little blighters, time for sleep."

  1

  8

  He drove out of London, with a road map across his knees. He might just get the New York posting if he fouled up. Some of the instructors at Quantico said that hunches were good, and some - more - said they were crap. Ruane had been out when Bill had got back to the Embassy and his hunch told him to get down into the country again. New York-based Agents earned less than the city's garbage collectors, and the only worse posting than New York H.Q. on Foley Square was the regional office at Brooklyn-Queens. If he really fouled up it would be the fast heave out of Rome, and if he fouled up really bad then it could be Brooklyn-Queens, New York City.

  He edged his way along amid the commuter traffic flow.

  The Quantico bible, verse one, chapter one, said that Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. The seven big Ps. He had two P's worth on the back seat of his Ford along with his waterproof coat and the Wellington boots. He had bought himself some thermals and a sleeping bag and a camouflaged bivouac cover.

  The motor was fine, cramped but he could cope with thai and where he was going was just right for a dismal-looking little motor.

  Once he was past Reading the traffic had thinned. He drove care fully, and the light had gone by the time he could take the turn off the motorway for the cross-country route to Warminster.

  Erlich was a town boy. He had lived in Annapolis, Maryland, L

  with his grandparents, then he had gone to Santa Barbara, University of California, then to Battle Creek and the town school, then to Quantico and on to Atlanta and Washington. Country was not his place. There was big, raw, country where his mother now lived, out on the White Mountains and on the long trail, but he had never felt at home in country. He did not know the way of the country, nor the pace of the country. Or the suspicion of the country.