CONDITION BLACK MASTER Read online

  Dr Tariq had rehearsed what he wished to say. When, eventually, he was admitted to the presence of the Chairman he would have perhaps fifteen minutes to explain himself. It was well known amongst that elite of which he was a part that the Chairman detested news of crisis. But the killing of Professor Khan, no doubt at the hands of Zionist agents, and a letter bomb to one of his scientists at Tuwaithah, that was crisis and had to be confronted. The defection of foreign personnel from his programme, that too was crisis. Like every man who had direct contact with the Chairman, Dr Tariq had a most sincere fear of his master.

  He knew of the disappearances, the torturings, the hangings. He had been told that the Chairman had with a handgun shot dead a general who had dared to argue with his strategy during the dark days of the war. So he had prepared his words with care.

  The officer approached him.

  Dr Tariq, five foot two inches in height, thin as a willow wand, stood erect. He raised his arms, to permit the officer to frisk him.

  Then, without fuss, Dr Tariq opened his briefcase for inspection.

  He followed the officer, stepping through the churned mud, towards the concrete steps down into the brigade post, and the presence of the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council.

  Not yet past the lunch hour, and Erlich had had his first argument of the day.

  It could have been the second, but he had swallowed his pride when they had shown him the room that was allocated him. It was scarcely a box. Just a table and a chair and a telephone that wouldn't be secure, and the room was two floors and the length of a ministry corridor away from the Operations Co-ordination Centre of the Counter-Terrorism section at police headquarters. He had accepted that. What he would not accept was the refusal to make available to him, face to face, the eyewitness. It was not suitable that he should meet the eyewitness, he had been told. He didn't know how much of his fury had been translated by the interpreter.

  The guys who had been up at Lockerbie, after Pan Am 103, working alongside the British police, they didn't know how lucky they'd been . . . Same language, same culture, same team . . .

  But they had given him photographs.

  He had on the desk the photographs that showed Harry and his contact on the grass and the pavement. Every goddam way they had taken Harry's picture, so that he saw the part of Harry's head that was intact, and the part that was blasted.

  They had given him one written statement. It was a photocopy and the name and address of the eyewitness had been omitted.

  He copied into his notebook all that his interpreter dictated.

  Harry and the contact walking and talking in 28th October Street.

  No traffic. Twenty-eight minutes to nine o'clock in the morning.

  The silver grey Opel Rekord pulling onto the grass verge, braking 20 yards away. No description of the driver. A fair-haired man getting out of the passenger seat, front. A shout from the fair-haired man. The targets turning. The fair-haired man opens fire.

  Pistol plus silencer. The contact hit. Harry blundering into the field of fire. The second shout, the driver's shout, "Colt". The car turning in the road, getting the hell out. Harry dead, and the contact dead when the first police and ambulance crew had arrived . ..

  He left his desk as bare as he had found it.

  He took a taxi to the Embassy.

  He had to wait for fifteen minutes before he was admitted to the Agency's annexe.

  Erlich told the Station Chief what he had. He was seeking to trade information, and he was going to be disappointed.

  " I ' m not opening up our file to you, Bill. It's nothing personal . . ."

  " A n d it's not co-operation."

  "It's the facts of life. I give you a file, it goes into your system.

  You nail a guy, weeks ahead, months, and my file is evidence.

  My file gets to be prosecution material. Any asshole who wants it gets to read my file."

  " I s that final?"

  " A s I said, it's nothing personal."

  Erlich stood. He had the cigar butt in the plastic sachet in his pocket. He had not spoken of the cigar butt to the Station C h i e f . . .

  "Bill, look at it our way, do me that favour. Harry Lawrence was your friend and I appreciate that, but Harry Lawrence was not the target. An Iraqi was the target, and it's your assessment and it's mine. We are in deep stuff, real deep. We have a big mission down in Iraq, during the war we did all we damn well could to make certain those boys didn't go under to the Ayatollah's shit-pushers. We gave them A . W . A . C . S . material, we put up satellites just for them. The enemy of Iran is our friend, got me?

  But we keep our hands dirty, we stay in touch with the regime's enemies. We don't make any noise about that . . ."

  "Investigating a murder is making a noise?"

  "You've a job to do, O . K . , but don't make waves."

  "I want to know the identity of a man, I want to reach him, I want to put him in handcuffs and read him a charge of First Degree murder."

  "Beautiful."

  "With or without help."

  "Brilliant. You're a detective, you don't mix easily in diplo-macy, neither does hustling for commendations . . . You go on like this and you'll find yourself short of help."

  "With respect, what I'm after is a result."

  Erlich walked out. Didn't even bother to close the door behind him. He walked straight through the outer office and out past the security gate and the Marine guard.

  He headed for the main building, and the area of the basement where secure matter could be despatched back home.

  As she filled in the forms for him, the girl in Despatch, big and black and at last a friendly face, told him she was from Mississippi, and sure as hell she hated Greeks, Athens, moussaka and retsina. In front of him, she sealed the cigar butt in the plastic sachet into a small tin box and then into the padded envelope. The package was addressed to the Laboratory Division of F . B . I . H.Q. Erlich, like every other Fed, had plenty to grumble about in the running of the Bureau, but the Laboratory was the best.

  " Y o u okay, Mr Erlich?"

  He'd slept poorly. He hadn't eaten breakfast. The coffee at Counter-Terrorism was ditch water, and he had been poleaxed twice. He should have been at the airport last evening to see Elsa Lawrence and her children off and the casket. For Erlich not much was allowed to get in the way of a job and he supposed that was why he had been sent.

  She said she would get him some coffee, proper coffee, coffee from home.

  While she was making the coffee, boiling her kettle, he glanced across at her Herald Tribune. He saw the Rome dateline. He read the name of the hotel, and the name of the street. He had been in that street two weeks earlier. He read of the death of the Pakistani nuclear scientist last seen in the company of . . . no leads . . . The coffee she brought him was great, kept him alive.

  All through the morning there had been detonations and gunfire. Of course there had to be detonations, and of course there had to be shooting practice, but Monday morning was hardly the appropriate time. On any other morning, Bissett would have been able to live with the thudding blast of the explosives and with the crisp rattle of sub-machine gun and pistol fire. But not that morning, not on the morning that the envelope marked Personal and Confidential had lain unopened in his briefcase.

  He had spent two hours in his room, at his console. By 10.30 he had gone down the full length of the corridor that ran past his office and he had then spent two and a half hours in H3's laboratory. He had achieved next to nothing in his own room, and in the laboratory he had been the victim of Reuben God Almighty Boll's sarcasm.

  So that every technician and every junior could hear him, Boll had enquired just how much longer before his present project would be completed, how much later than it was already.

  Lunch hour, and quite suddenly, when it didn't matter, it was perfectly quiet. Boll would be in the Directors' dining room, Basil would have gone to see his cronies in A area, Wayne would have gone out with th
ose as young and limited as himself to the Hind's Head in the village, Carol would be in the canteen wittering with the other Clerical Assistants and her husband.

  He had drunk his coffee. He had brushed the crumbs from his desk top into his wastebasket. He screwed the top, that served as a mug, back onto his flask. He was determined not to rush himself. He had deliberately not used his home address.

  He replaced the plastic sandwich box in his briefcase, and took out the envelope. He checked that his door was closed. He tore open the envelope. A fearful mess of it, he made, because his hands were trembling.

  There was the letter heading. Imperial Chemical Industries.

  'Dr Frederick Bissett, B.Sc. (Leeds), A . W . E . , Aldermaston, Berkshire.'

  He didn't look to the end of the letter first. He exercised his self-control. He began at the first line. He held the paper in both hands and he saw the paper waver in front of his spectacles.

  Dear Doctor Bissett,

  Thank you for sending your application for employ ment, dated October 19th. I do understand that because of the nature of your current employment your C.V.

  has remained narrower than would otherwise have been expected . . .

  Idiot. Of course his C.V. was narrow. He had worked for twelve-years on matters covered by the Official Secrets Act, of which, obviously, he was a signatory.

  . . . However, I understand from your application that you have been concerned in your A . W . E . work with the areas of Fiuid Dynamics and Plasma Physics, but with the necessary somewhat restricted interpretation . . .

  How in heaven's name could his interpretation be other than restricted? His work was concerned with the interplay reactions at the moment of implosion. The effect of micro-second synchronised detonation of chemical explosive onto beryllium, then onto uranium 238, then onto uranium 235, then onto weapons-grade plutonium 239, and then onto the innermost pit and the core of tritium/deuterium. In the innermost pit, if the work of the scientists in the H area had been successful, it would be assumed that a nuclear explosion would generate a heat in the core of tritium/deuterium of one hundred million degrees Centigrade.

  So, yes, it was somewhat restricted.

  . . Sadly, it has been our experience in the past that the most specialised work carried out at the Atomic Weapons Establishment leads scientists into a cul-de-sac of research that has little, or no, relevance to science as practised in civilian life . . .

  The science that was relevant to Frederick Bissett was the moment, too fast for any but the most powerful computer to register, when chemical explosive was driven by uniform spherical detonation against the fissionable material of highly enriched uranium and plutonium creating some millions of pounds overpressure per square inch . . . His head dropped. In front of him the page blurred.

  . . . With regret, therefore, I have to inform you that we are not in a position to offer you employment in any research division of the company.

  Yours sincerely

  Arnold R. Dobson, Personnel Director.

  (dictated, and signed in his absence)

  He felt sick. He took the letter and the envelope out of his office and down to the abandoned area at the end of the corridor. He fed the sheet of paper and the envelope into the shredding machine beside Carol's desk.

  He went back to his room.

  Later he would hear Carol's laughter, and Wayne's giggle, and the clumping tread of Basil's iron-tipped shoes, and the coarse grate of Reuben Boll's voice. And later he would hear the dull punch of explosive detonations. He would work until it was time to go home, on the new warhead design that would replace the free-fall W E - 1 7 7 bomb with an air-launched cruise system. He would work on the mathematics of implosion until, in the late afternoon, he cleared his desk, and took his briefcase, with empty sandwich box and empty coffee flask, to his car, and drove home.

  In crisp early morning sunshine the Air Force plane touched down at Andrews Air Base.

  Nothing hurried, none of the subterfuge of moving a body quietly and in the dead of night out of Athens. The networks were there, penned behind a steel barrier. The high-level officials from State Department stamped their feet on the tarmac and waited for the aircraft doors to open. There was a bearer party, old friends and colleagues of Harry's. The Director of the Agency and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were there.

  The F . B . I . Director said, " M y first man into Athens, a young man but a good friend of Lawrence's, has promised the widow that we'd go for the jugular on this one."

  The Agency Director mused, "But, whose jugular?"

  "Whichever."

  "Something tells me you may bump into a little politics on the w a y . "

  The F . B . I . Director said, "Just this once, fuck the politics."

  The Agency Director said, "I didn't hear that . . . but I wish you luck."

  They had brought Agency men back to Andrews, in caskets, from Europe, from Lockerbie, from Lebanon, from Central America. It was a regular run for the Agency Director, down the Capital Beltway from Langley to Andrews. He was used to shaking the hand, gravely, of a young widow. He was accustomed to dropping his arm round the shoulders of young and fatherless children.

  The aircraft door was open, and the cargo hatch.

  They saw, at the top of the steps, the small, intimidated figure of Elsa Lawrence, her children behind her. They saw the casket taken from the cargo hatch, and draped in their flag, and lifted onto the shoulders of Harry Lawrence's work friends.

  The Agency Director said, " Y o u know what? Half the C . B . S .

  story on Lawrence last night was time taken explaining where Athens is."

  When it came to their turn, both men shook Elsa Lawrence's hand, felt her limp grasp in theirs. And both men put their arms round the children, and felt them flinch from the touch of strangers.

  Dr Tariq, frail and looking as though the gentle zephyr that came in off the Tigris might flatten him, could muster a savage temper when attacked.

  He had been badly damaged when the Zionists had sent their commando squad with explosives to La Seine-sur-Mer, close to the French port of Toulon, to destroy the two reactors that were to have been shipped to Tuwaithah 48 hours later.

  That had been twelve years ago, just one year after the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council had promoted him to Director at the Atomic Energy Commission.

  They had hurt him again, killing el-Meshad in Paris in 1980, and frightening off the Italian companies who had been engaged to deliver hot cell boxes.

  And ten years ago he had been hurt worst of all when the Zionist Air Force, the F - i 6 s and the F-15S, had come to Tuwaithah out of the setting sun to put down 16 tons of explosive ordnance onto the Osirak reactor. He would never forget the great dust cloud that climbed over the reactor shell, broken like a duck's egg, after the jets had soared away into the June evening. Hundreds of millions of dollars blown away. Hundreds of thousands of working hours lost. And the ground defence system had not got one shot off in retaliation. He could remember lying on the floor of his office on a carpet bright with the shards of his shattered windows, and how he had howled in his frustration. Over long years, he had sought to rebuild the nuclear programme, as he had been charged to by the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. In those long years when the war had taken priority, Dr Tariq had rethought the detail of the programme.

  On the day alter the Cease Fire he had been granted an audience with the Chairman of the Revolutionary Council and he had argued his case for the revitalisation of his dream.

  And now the Zionists had attacked him again. Professor Khan had been a crucial cog in the great mesh of wheels that made up the whole for the creation of an Iraqi nuclear warhead. He was a foreigner, he had been bought, just as Frenchmen had been bought, and Italians.

  In the brigade post at Fao, Dr Tariq had won his day The Chairman gave orders for the military helicopter to fly the scientist back to Baghdad.

  In spite of the headset that he
wore for the flight, his ears were still ringing when he climbed down from the helicopter. Waiting for him was an army officer, squat and powerful, rocking on the soles of his paratroop boots.

  The voice of the Colonel was faint, hard to understand, as they scurried bent low from the helicopter's hatch door to safety beyond the reach of the thrashing rotor blades.

  "I am at your service, Dr Tariq. Whatever it is that you wish, I am instructed to provide."

  In the late afternoon, Erlich was back from the airport. Protocol and politeness had taken him out to the airport to meet the Temporary Duty men off the flight. It was what should have happened to him when he had come in from Athens, and hadn't.

  Nothing better than a smoothed way through Customs and Immigration, and ready transportation for the trip into a new city.

  They would be on the same corridor as him in the Embassy's accommodation annexe, and later they would talk through the case history together.

  The three T . D . Y . s were all senior to him, all had done more than ten years in the Bureau. He hadn't met any of them before.

  That was the way of these things. Only a small chance that an overseas liaison Fed would know the guys coming in as firemen from Stateside The one who was born Greek and fluent, had lost his baggage, presumably in transit in London, and wanted action, and seemed to think that young Erlich would do the needful.

  Erlich smiled coldly at him and said nothing. All three were exhausted, and two, the older two, would crash out and try and sleep away the jet lag, and the Greek ethnic could shout all afternoon and all night into the telephone for his bags. What it came down to was that Erlich had one last evening as an independent, and that from first light, from waffles and coffee time, he'd be part of their team and doing their bidding. The senior man, who had come in from Los Angeles to F . B . I . H . Q . after Erlich had left Washington, he'd be everybody's friend, he'd have them eating out of his hand down at Counter-Terrorism, he'd probably take out citizenship. The other older one had been in Chicago, moved to Washington less than a year back, and Erlich knew his name because he'd the distinction of having run the sting in the Board of Trade's soybean futures pit. He left them to get their heads down.