CONDITION BLACK MASTER Read online

  Over to the right of the dump was a high tree, holding the storks'

  nests. Erlich, rookie Fed, had demanded of the local police that they get a man up there, up to the nests, that they get each of the nests down, that they sift each of the nests on the very long chance that the storks had lifted a fibre of torn clothing to bind a nest wall.

  They'd done it, too, the police, and they'd found nothing . . .

  After fifteen minutes he was crouched over tyre marks on the grass verge between the pavement and the road. Possibly the tyre threads of the Opel Rekord, that was burned through and useless for evidence prints.

  After 40 minutes, on his hands and knees, peering into the-beam of his flashlight, he found the butt end of a small cigar. He had already found chewing-gum wrapping, sweet papers and cigarette filters faded by weather. The butt end of the cigar was fresh. Everything else he had collected he abandoned in the street drain. The butt end of the cigar was three paces from where the tyre treads were clearest, probably where the car had braked. He heard a shout.

  He looked up. On the pavement opposite a small boy watched him. The shouting grew fiercer, and the gates opposite were thrown open. It was the woman who had put the flowers on the place where Harry Lawrence had died, and there was a small toy dog, a Pekinese, yapping by her ankles. The child went to her, reluctant to leave. The gates closed.

  From his pocket, Erlich took a small plastic bag, and into it he dropped the cigar butt.

  It was a beginning.

  The wind came from the west. It blew hard on the beach and the militia men who kept guard, protecting the Sheraton and the Ramada and the Tel Aviv Hilton against a landing by guerrillas, turned their faces from the stinging sand.

  Two streets behind the sea front the cafes on Ben Yehuda were quiet. There were five of them at one table and they were the only ones still outside. The men drank beer from the bottles, and one of them passed round the cigarettes he had bought on the flight, and the blond girl contributed a half-bottle of Stock brandy. They no longer talked about the substance of the mission.

  The debriefing had gone on through the afternoon and early evening in the sound-proofed rooms of their headquarters. The mission was completed. They would probably not work as a team again, and certainly it would be many months before the girl, on any pretext, work or vacation, was permitted to leave the country.

  Drinking at a pavement cafe on Ben Yehuda was for each of them a way of signing off from the mission. There was the senior officer who had authorised the mission after assembling the detailed biography of Professor Zulfiqar Khan. There was his deputy who had collated the intelligence that gave the itinerary of the Pakistani. There was the girl who had played the whore and who would go home that night to her husband. There was the man who had killed Khan and who later would go barefoot into the children's room to kiss them and not wake them. There was the man who had been with him and taken the briefcase from the hotel room and who in the morning would go back to the Golani Brigade stationed on the Lebanese border and who would be chided by his fellow officers for having taken leave while the military workload was intense.

  Only when the cafe owner remonstrated with them did they leave.

  In the middle of Ben Yehuda they kissed each other. It was the only display, through the days and nights of tension, of their emotion. They kissed and they split.

  The senior officer walked with the girl. When he waved down a taxi, he saw that her hand ferreted in her bag. As the taxi stopped, he saw that she pushed back onto her finger her narrow and plain gold ring. He opened the door for her.

  "It was necessary," he said. " I f we do nothing, if we sit back and watch . . . the State is finished. If that dwarf, Tariq, is permitted to build them a bomb . . . "

  The senior officer of the Mossad drew his finger across his throat then quietly shut the taxi door, waved, walked away.

  Colt went to the Khan Murjan in the old quarter only when someone else picked up the bill. This time he had the table to himself. The Colonel was paying.

  Prawns and avocado, lamb, cheese, fruit, and French wine. It was his favourite eating place in Baghdad. There was a small band away from the tables, and the singer had started as he had begun his meat and called for a second bottle. He was not actually hungry, and it was rare for him to drink, but they were paying and he would make sure they noticed, and - apart from the singer the Khan Murjan was a hell of a fabulous place. A great arched ceiling of close brickwork, carpets too beautiful to put a dirty shoe on. The singer was crap, but he could handle the singer, just switch that amplified voice off in his head, just as he could shake out of his head the recoil thud of the Ruger on semi-automatic . . .

  He had walked through the old city with the guard a dozen paces behind. The city was his home, and the Ruger, and the Khan Murjan restaurant, they were as much of a home as he was now at liberty to make for himself. Light years ago, at his school, and Colt of course not a part of it but compelled to sit through it, Murder in the Cathedral. The troublesome priest. The Colonel had trusted him to rid the Chairman of the darts of the writer with the poisoned pen. Two had failed, he had succeeded. One had failed to penetrate airport security at Budapest, got himself arrested and deported. A second had failed on the streets of Zagreb, lifted by the Yugoslavs, locked up and the key thrown away. Colt had succeeded. He knew why he had been chosen.

  He was white, he was European, he had access. He had justified the Colonel's faith. He was the only European in the restaurant, because all the bastards who were in town to fight like cocks in a pit for the reconstruction contracts would be in the restaurants of the Babylon Oberoi and the Sadir Novotel and the Mansour Melia. He wore his better jeans and a laundered shirt, open at the neck.

  He had shot an American. So what?

  He drank deep.

  When he had finished his meal, when he had collected his guard from the hard chair by the entrance, then he would stride back to the Haifa Street Housing Project, and he would chew on the pistachio nuts that were loose in his trouser pocket, and he would write to his mother.

  2

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

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

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

  "Good morning, Fred."

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

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

  His other neighbour was twelve years younger than Frederick Bissett, wore white socks inside his black shoes, and sold Heinz products into local supermarkets. His other neighbour's child-

  bride kissed her boy hero each morning, in her floating web dressing gown, as if he were going to the Falklands for three months. He drove an Escort XR.3i complete with fluffy toys, and had moved to Lilac Gardens in the eye of the housing price slump, aided by the bequest of a dead aunt. Bissett had been told that often enough, about the dead aunt and her bequest.

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

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

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

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

  He was waved ahead

  He drove forward.

  He was inside the perimeter fence of his workplace.

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

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

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

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

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

  Bissett drove to the H area.

  His workplace was H3.

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

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

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

  "Morning, Dr Bissett."

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

  "Morning."

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

  "Morning, Frederick."

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

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

  "Morning, Bissett."

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

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

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

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

  "This got delivered here, Dr Bissett."

  The envelope was marked Personal and Confidential.

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

  Behind the grey wire, beyond the uniformed guards with their sub-machine guns and automatic pistols and attack dogs, 5000

  people daily go about their work, to research, design, test and finally manufacture an independent source of nuclear weapons.

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

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

  It was noon.

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

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

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

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