CONDITION BLACK MASTER Read online

  Two miles short of the village, his headlights picked out the gate. The entrance into the field had been solidified with stone chips. He reckoned it was a good place for him.

  He parked the Ford in the field, hard against the hedge. The hedge was thick holly and would screen his car from the road.

  In the darkness he put on his boots and slipped on his waterproof coat. He rolled his sleeping bag tight inside the camouflage bivouac screen. He felt in his pocket, checked that he had his monocular glass.

  Between the trees ahead he could see the dull gold glow of the village lights.

  When the Serious Crime Squad boys came down to the village and bothered to announce themselves then, they always asked to see Desmond's log. His wife was in the kitchen and his supper would be up in a quarter of an hour, and the small ones were in bed. It was a useful time for Desmond to get his log up to date.

  The log listed as many of the visitors to the Manor House as he knew of. Pretty dull reading it made, but it was what Serious Crime wanted.

  He knew about the flowers being delivered because the van driver had called in at the shop to ask directions. Desmond knew just about everything involving the shop because he had won Mrs Williams' gratitude when he had put two kids in court for breaking her plate-glass window the last New Year's Eve. Nothing surprising about the flowers because obviously Mrs Tuck was very ill. The young constable felt he was a coming man. How many policemen in the Wiltshire force could boast a visit from an F . B . I . Special Agent plus an officer from the Security Service?

  He wondered what poor Mrs Tuck's son had done to warrant the attention of the Security Service and the F.B.I. Properly speaking, that visit would have to go into the log too, and Serious Crime could make what they would of it.

  He wondered, too, whether that pig of a son would come back to see his mother before she died

  The flowers were on the compost heap and the voluminous cellophane wrapping and the ribbons were in the rubbish bin beside the back door, He wouldn't have the bloody flowers in a vase and on display She was upstairs and dying, his wife, and he was damned if he would allow their bloody intrusion into his life and into her death.

  " Y o u owe them nothing . . . They make a joke of your mother's illness. Flowers, damn them, just to get a message to you. How can you owe them more than you owe your mother and me? How could you involve us in the infernally dangerous mess you are in?"

  "I'll be gone by the morning," Colt said.

  He was involved, Major Tuck was most emphatically involved.

  He was involved because before he switched on the light in any room he first went to the window and drew the curtains closed.

  He was involved because he cared for his son's freedom. He was involved because in the late afternoon dusk he had walked the dog around the garden and known that the dog would show him if the house was watched from the kitchen garden wall and the paddock hedgerow or the front garden wall on either side of the front gates.

  "Will I see you again?"

  "Will I involve you again?" Colt asked, and there was the careless smile at the boy's mouth.

  God's truth, he'd miss the little bugger. God's truth, he wanted him gone because when he was gone then at least he knew the boy was safe and at liberty. God's truth, the smile on his wife's face, as the boy had sat with her and held her hand, had been the best thing in his life for months. God's truth, he could no longer remember how he had been at that age, in France, alone, a satchel of gelignite for company.

  " I f you can come again . . . "

  " I will."

  She took the pheasant from the snare. She loosened the wire from its throat. In three of her snares there were strangled pheasants, two cock birds and a hen. She could move in the fields without light, her father had taught her well - it was six years since the keepers had last caught him, since he had last been before the magistrates in Warminster. Her footfall was without sound, her breathing was silent. She was a wraith moving in the care of the darkness, back towards the village.

  He came past the empty keg barrels that were piled as haphazardly to await collection by the brewery as they had always been. He came past the oil tank and the rusted plough that had been at the back since he could first remember. He went through the outside back door and through the gents toilet.

  Colt came into the back bar.

  The beer smell was in his nostrils. The cigarette smoke was in his eyes. The jukebox music was in his ears. He paused in the doorway.

  He saw the faces and he saw the astonishment. He might not have been away. Two years back, and they had all been in the bar. Billy and Zap, the brothers who worked in the bike garage in Frome . . . Charlie on the dole and proud of it . . . Kev from the farm on the Shepton Road . . . Dazzer who had tried to be a postman but who wouldn't pack in the evening drinking and couldn't get up in the morning . . . Zack, who had done time for

  •

  sheep stealing from Home Farm, three months in Horfield . . .

  Johnny, whose grandfather had left the plough at the back to wipe off his slate twenty years before, at least . . . and old Brennie. He was back two years. Old Brennie by the guttering fire, where he had been two years back, where he had been with the German Shepherd sleeping on its side at his feet when Colt had last come to the pub. The village boys were around him.

  Billy and Zap, Charlie, Kev, Dazzer, Zack, Johnny, all around Brennie. Christ, and old Brennie had on the same brown Windsor soup jacket that he had worn that night two years back. Fran was the only one who hadn't seen him. She was beside her father, with her back to the door.

  They were all staring at him. As if he was a ghost. Not a word spoken.

  Fran turned. She swung her shoulders to see what had killed the talk around the fire. Her face lit up, then she frowned and her eyes blinked, like they weren't sure.

  As she stood, her heavy coat was caught for a moment against her father's leg, and the lining showed and the deep pocket and a cock pheasant's head jutting from the pocket. For a moment, Fran's fingers clung to old Brennie's shoulder, because it could not be real.

  He stood his ground in the doorway.

  Then the explosion of her movement. She ran across the room.

  Four feet from him, she jumped. Her thighs were on his hips, her arms were round his neck.

  Not a word said. Not a word from any of them.

  Colt kissed Fran. Fran kissed Colt.

  Old Brennie grunted something, and none of the kids knew what he said. But old Brennie went to the bar and he slapped down his pound coin, and told old Vic to get up a bitter dash.

  Colt felt the pulsing energy of his Fran and her warmth. And when he had let her down, then he held her face in his hands, let his fingers rest on her cheeks, and he kissed her lips and her chin and cheeks and her nose and her eyebrows and her ears. He kissed her until old Brennie shook his arm and handed him the pint. He held her against his chest, and he drank the pint straight down, and tossed the glass at the group of them, and Zack caught it, and old Vic was already pulling his pump.

  They were all on their feet and round him.

  Zack said, "Shit, boyo, you shouldn't be here . . ."

  Kev said, "Colt, the filth watch for you, they're here regular . . . "

  Dazzer said, "There was a Yank in the village . . . "

  Charlie said, "You show yourself here, Colt, you're for the fucking jump . . . "

  Billy said, "The pretty boy, the copper, he's always sniffing round your house . . . "

  Johnny said, "What we heard, they've guns when they come looking for you . . . "

  "Have you come back for your Ma, young 'un?"

  "Yes, Brennie, I came back to see her . . . "

  "I was sorry to hear about your Ma."

  "Thank you, Brennie."

  Old Vic had come into the bar from behind the counter. He carried the filled pint sleeve glass to Colt. Old Vic went to the main bar door and he pushed it shut and he set the bolt across.

  Colt saw it in old
Vic's face. He was expected to drink up, and he was expected to get his arse out. Old Vic wouldn't want trouble. Old Vic had taken his position by the counter, his arms folded across his chest. He was waiting for Colt to be gone.

  "Where you been, Colt?" Kev asked.

  Colt drank.

  Where he had been, what he had done, that would mean nothing to any of them. Old Brennie used to claim that he had never in his life travelled further than Warminster and the magistrates's Court. Billy and Zap had been as far as Southampton, to watch football, and given that up as a waste of weekend drinking time. Zack had been to Bristol for Crown Court and prison, Australia was the moon, Iraq was the stars. Kev had been to the special school in Warminster that handled pupils too disruptive for the comprehensive.

  "I've been around," Colt said. "Here and there . . ."

  His father would not have known the names of any of them.

  His mother would have known their mothers through the Institute. They were the dregs of the village, Colt's father would have said.

  Fran said, "Are you going to drink, or are you going to come walking?"

  She took off her heavy coat and slung it to her father, and the pheasant spilled on the flagstones.

  Nothing changed, not in two years. The poacher's daughter was tall, big-boned, big-hipped. She had red flame hair that would have been on her shoulders if it had not been caught in a pony tail with an elastic band. Strong as a bullock, old Brennie had said. She took Colt's hand and walked him to the door. None of them would tell on him. Most likely, they'd have one of old Brennie's snare wires round their neck if they did.

  They went out through the yard at the back of the pub. They crossed two fields, bent and close to the hedgerows.

  There was a pillbox on the high ground above the village, to the west. There were brambles across the entrance, and under one of the gun-slits there were the diggings of a badger sett. It was where they had always come, it was where they had been two years back.

  "Is the American for you?"

  " Y e s . "

  "What does he want with you?"

  "First choice would be to kill me, second choice would be to take me."

  "We'll give him a run," she said.

  It wasn't raining now and Frlich used the bivouac cover as a groundsheet. He was a lew yards back into the trees, but he had a clear view down the slope of the fields to the house. He reckoned that he was six hundred yards from the house. An image intensifier would have been a help, but he would have to make do with the monocular glass. From his vantage point he could see the high narrow window on the stairs and he could see the kitchen window, both lit. The rest of the house was dark. The bedrooms were on the front of the house.

  The isolation oppressed him. He must have been mad to have taken himself off to a God-awful lonely wood where the birch saplings were dripping and the cold rain water splattered from the big oak branches. He thought of Don and Nick and Vito and their so far empty bulletins, and imagined their warm, convivial evening in an Athens taverna. He saw Colt's father, clear, come down the stairs. He saw him framed in the back door at the kitchen, and he thought he saw the dog come past the man's legs, and a few minutes later the door was opened again, then closed.

  The kitchen light went out. And then the stair light. After those fights had gone Erlich's spirits sank. He felt dismally alone. The shouting from the car park at the pub carried to him, and the revving of car engines, and after that only deeper silence beyond the sighing of the wind in the trees above him. He was scared. He nearly jumped out of his sleeping bag when a young roe buck passed ten feet from him, hugging the edge of the field. And he muttered an expletive in fear when a pigeon, alarmed by the slight shift of his body, exploded out of the trellis of branches over his head. He heard a fox vixen call, and once he heard the death screams of a rabbit and didn't know what predator was at its throat. There had been a moon to start with, occasional and in between the fast-moving cloud formations, but that moon was lost in thick cloud.

  When it started to rain, he wrapped himself tight in the bivouac cover. He lay still. It was the first time since he had left Washington that he had missed the comfort of the sharp shape against his chest of a standard issue, .38 calibre, Smith and Wesson revolver.

  Good loving, just as it had been two years back.

  She said that she had known he was back when she found the car hidden away in the old barn at the edge of the twelve acre.

  She had known he was back and had carried three bales of straw to the pillbox.

  She had stripped him off, she had stripped herself off.

  They were on the rough straw in the pillbox.

  She was great and she cared about nothing, other than getting the condoms on him.

  The third time, she tickled him to life, so he could be useful to her again, with a stalk of straw.

  Her on Colt, Colt on her, her back on Colt.

  Soft and gentle loving, and fun.

  And the talk was soft and gentle. Not heavy and not serious, because that wasn't their way, but fun . . .

  " D o you remember . . . ?"

  When they had gone to the pheasant pens on the estate, let the lot out, screwed up the whole season's shooting for the posh crowd.

  When they had been out at night, the night before the hunt had been due on the estate and the Home Farm land, and they had laid the trails with the aniseed in the sacking bag, and they had sat the next morning on the high ground and watched and laughed till it hurt at the chaos, and the Master looking as though he'd do his heart.

  Fran hadn't joined the Front. Fran had said, after Colt had taken her to one meeting, that the A . L . F . were a load of ponces and poseurs. What she had meant was that the activists were too serious. She couldn't be doing with serious.

  When Colt was flat on his back with the goosepimples working up the bareness of his thighs, and when there was the big warmth ol her breasts on his chest, then Colt told his Fran where he had been and what he had done. It was natural for him to tell her.

  He told her about the rush out of the Manor House, and the flight out of Heathrow before the law was organised, He told her about Australia, and about the man who had tried to roll him when he was sleeping rough off the highway down to Fremanlle.

  He told her about his escape from Australia on the tanker where they used bicycles to get from bow to stern. He told her about Kuwait and making his way into Iraq. He told her about a job teaching English to the children of an Iraqi Colonel, about his friendship with the Colonel's family, about his recruitment and about the shooting of two men in Athens, and the shooting of a man in south London. He told her about his life since they had last been, naked and cuddling, in the pillbox overlooking the village that was their home.

  Fran told him what she knew, that there was a car parked behind the holly hedge of a field on the Frome road.

  Desmond was shaving and his wife was still in bed and the little ones were still asleep when he heard the rapping at the front door.

  If he hadn't already wiped his face then Desmond wouldn't have recognised him. Mud from head to toe, like he had been crawling in a gateway where the cattle had churned the ground. A line of rips in his coat, like he had been caught in wire and hadn't the calm to unpick the barbs. The American's chest was heaving. He was at the end of his tether. Obviously not a time for talking, because the American was already walking towards the panda car in the car port. Desmond grabbed his coat and his keys.

  The place was halfway between the police house and the village.

  The hatchback of the Ford had been forced. The jack from the Ford was abandoned in the mud beside the car. Close to the car, on the field side of the holly hedge, were the four wheels. The Ford was beached, stranded. He could have laughed, but he hadn't the nerve.

  Rutherford thought it was the sort of job that he would be looking for when he was that age, a cosy little number.

  He sat in the Security Officer's room on the top floor of the main block of F area. "I t
ell you, Mr Rutherford, we have a happy community here. Fm not talking about the general workforce, I am referring to the senior scientific and engineering staff."

  "Quite."

  "And you would do well to consider that while Defence has had traitors, so has your Service, so has Intelligence, so has G.C.H.Q. . . . Atomic Weapons Establishment has had no blots on its escutcheon at all."

  "Of course not."

  "The loyalty of our scientists and engineers is the last thing I shall be losing sleep over. They are first-class people. They know what their job is and they get on with it."

  "It's just a general warning . . . "

  To Rutherford, the place reeked of complacency, but it wasn't his concern. He was just the messenger, packed off on the errand of communicating a 'general warning'.

  " T h e Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, you say."

  "That's where we believe a threat to security might come from."

  " . . . They would need very specialised knowledge. They'd have to know who they were looking for, where that individual worked, and then they'd have to compromise him. Not the least of their problems, you see, Mr Rutherford, would be in identifying one of our scientists. Practically impossible. The Establishment prides itself on its discretion."

  "That's very gratifying."

  "They couldn't even trawl around and fail. The slightest approach made and that scientist, that engineer, would be straight in here, my door is always open. Government has done very well by this place. Conventional forces may be feeling the draught what with the changes in Eastern Europe, but we've been left untouched. Everybody here has job security."

  "It was a general warning and I've passed it on."

  "And I've noted it. . . Don't get me wrong, Mr Rutherford.

  Anyone, everyone, here would be appalled at the suggestion that a regime as bestial and madcap as that of Iraq could get its hands on nuclear weapons. They will not get any sort of help from anyone at A.W.E. Now the French, that's another matter. The Italians, I am afraid, quite a different kettle of fish. On the other hand, Mr Rutherford, if your people come up with something a little more specific, by all means be in touch again."