CONDITION BLACK MASTER Read online

  One for his mother. His mother had married Herbie Mason just three years after his father had been killed. They ran a hardware store and diner in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, serving the hikers and campers up on the Appalach-ian trail. He rarely heard from his mother, but he rang her each Christmas morning, wherever he was, and on her birthday, and he sent her maybe a dozen postcards a year.

  One for his grandparents. They were his mother's people, they had an old weathered brick house close to the harbour moorings at Annapolis, Maryland. He was fond of them both. A bit correct for a small boy, a little formal, but they had been his proxy parents for school terms after his father's death, and after his mother had taken off with Herbie. Good people. They had never once criticised his mother's behaviour in their grandson's hearing. School terms in Annapolis, and holidays in the White Mountains, it could have been a lot worse. His grandfather was retired Navy, action in the Pacific and off Korea, where he had his own command.

  If his father had lived he would now have been in his sixtieth year. Every time that he wrote postcards to his mother and to his grandparents memories of his father revived. Memories of a man going overseas in his best uniform. Memories of a man coming home for burial, with full military honours . . . Such a very long time ago.

  He had once heard an Englishman say that what he knew of nuclear physics could be written on the back of a blackcurrant.

  It was an expression that still gave him pleasure and he would have used it to describe his own limited grasp of the subject, but it would have been wasted on the sparrow-sized man across the big desk from him. The Colonel had swiftly appreciated that if he needed to describe Dr Tariq's sense of humour the backside of a blackcurrant was all he needed, and to spare.

  Soldiering was what the Colonel understood. As a young paratrooper he had fought in the north against the Kurdish rebels. It was where his reputation had been forged. It was his battalion's heroic defence of their positions on the Basra to Baghdad road, when the rats from Iran had swarmed in their thousands from the marshlands, that had given him his present renown. He had commanded a unit of the Presidential Guard which provided close escort to the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. When the traitor scum, the creatures of the Al Daawa al Islamiya, last tried to assinate the Chairman, six of the Guard had been killed, the Colonel had taken a bullet to the stomach, but the Chairman had survived untouched. Rewards followed. The rewards of the Chairman could be generous. But the Colonel had seen to it that his name did not go forward for promotion. He could learn from the fate of those who had climbed too high. He would never be a rival, he would remain the loyal servant of the Chairman. Now he directed a section of the Military Intelligence unit concerned with the security of the state from threats outside its boundaries.

  Dr Tariq told him of the death of Professor Khan, of the defection of the two French engineers, and of the Italian laboratory engineers, of a letter bomb that had been received, correctly addressed, to the same complex, to the very building alongside the one in which he now sat. He was told of Dr Tariq's passage throughout the offices and laboratories, his attempt to steady the morale of the Germans, the Austrians and of two more Italians and of a Swede. He was told that the fear must be cauterised, that the defections must be stopped.

  "I shall be frank, Colonel. I have no time to waste."

  "Of course."

  "We can delude ourselves, and we could delude others, as to the real situation here, and what do we achieve? Only a crucial loss of time."

  "I understand, Dr Tariq."

  "If this complex had not been bombed by the Zionists in 1981, then we would by now have the capability for the production of nuclear warheads. During the war with the Khomeini zealots, I could not command the necessary resources to reactivate the programme following the '81 setback. I now have the necessary resources. I have the commitment of the Chairman. But - and this is why I am obliged to require your co-operation - at a certain level there are gaps in my team. In specific areas of the programme I am short of men of the required experience. I had recruited abroad in those areas, Do you understand me?"

  "I understand you."

  "I had recruited Professor Khan . . . "

  "I understand you."

  The Colonel needed no instruction in the politics of fear. He had ordered firing squads into Kurdish villages. He had executed in public deserters from his battalion when it fought for its life on the Basra to Baghdad road. He had witnessed the death by hanging of two members of the A1 Daawa al Islamiya who were believed connected with the attempt on the life of the Chairman.

  Much of his present work was aimed at silencing, by fear, the community of dissidents in exile. Silencing them or killing them.

  "The Zionists murdered Professor Khan, they sent a letter bomb, simply to create an atmosphere of terror amongst the foreign nationals employed by me."

  "Professor Khan travelled . . . "

  "Covertly, of course. Yet evidently they knew his itinerary.

  Just as they were able to single out an important member of my staff here, and address him by name."

  The Colonel lit his cigarette. He blew the smoke to the ceiling.

  "Then you have more than one problem, Dr Tariq."

  Dr Tariq said, "Quite so, Colonel. I have someone leaking information from inside Tuwaithah. And I have the problem of lilling gaps from outside, from the top echelons of a scientific community that is growing more, not less, hostile. As I said, I will be frank. I recognise the extent of the problem."

  "Where can you fill such gaps?"

  " N o longer from France, I think. Nor perhaps from Italy, though these have been our best recruiting grounds to date. The Soviet Union and China are not impossible, but we have not been successful there before. The United States is difficult. Their security services are watchful and their private sector pays inordinately high wages. In Great Britain, on the other hand, the position is very different. I should look to Britain, Colonel. I should look to the Atomic Weapons Establishment in the village of Aldermaston in the Thames Valley

  The Colonel laughed out loud "I get a bus, do I? I drive a bus to the front door. I shout in a very loud voice that the Republic of Iraq will pay well for atomic scientists. I fill the bus and I drive it to the airport. Is that what you have in mind?"

  He had been right the first time. There was not a jot of humour in the man. There was the thin voice beating at him across the desk.

  " Y o u are reminded that I have the backing of the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. And the Chairman, who deigns to place a measure of trust in you, Colonel, antici-pates that what I want you will make it your urgent priority to find. I want a scientist who specialises in the physics of implosion."

  The Colonel took out a notepad. He wrote "physics of implosion".

  He arranged to return at the same time the next day to set about identifying the traitor in Tuwaithah.

  He left behind him the scene, still shockingly evident, of the destruction by the Israelis of the Osirak reactor, the flattened mound of concrete. When his car was past the missile launchers, past the guards, he demanded speed. He wanted to be through Baghdad before the evening traffic. He was quiet in the car -

  none of his customary banter with his driver - as he digested the consequences of failing Dr Tariq. The spy in Tuwaithah would be an interesting challenge. For once the wielding of fear as a weapon would certainly be counter-productive. But the procurement of scientists from overseas as a novelty intrigued him. It was somewhat outside his province and yet, he thought, anyone who was willing to leave a Western nuclear establishment to help Dr Tariq build his atom bomb was either an idiot or a traitor, and traitors were after all his special subject. And to solve Dr Tariq's problems all he had to do was to find two traitors. One here and pray he wouldn't be yet another scientist who needed replacing, and one in the West. The Colonel had a momentary vision of himself being captured by the Special Forces of a Western army as he tried to recruit a physic
ist He wanted to be at the village of Qara Tappah before dusk became night.

  The newest building in the centre of Qara Tappah had been built in 1934. It was the coffee house. There were oil lamps hanging over the verandah, and they threw black shadows towards the mosque entrance, and towards the shop where clothes were sold, long since shut. Across the square ran the open sewer of the village. The lamps from the coffee shop flickered on its silver, glistening surface. The coffee shop was abandoned, the square was empty. There was not one villager who had dared to emerge from behind his shuttered door, not since the foreigner had come to the village.

  At the edge of the sewer, Colt lay. The pain racked his whole body.

  The headlights of the Mercedes found him. He heard the slamming of the car door. He looked up into the face of the Colonel.

  "Did you win?"

  He had come to the village at last light bearing a balaclava helmet, a webbing belt and trousers, and a mess tin all belonging to the Presidential Guard. He had won because, over 20 miles of open country, he had eluded the patrols of the Presidential Guard.

  He had walked, disshevelled and mud-plastered, out into the square from the coffee shop and thrown at the feet of the Captain those trophies that he had lifted from three different observation posts along the way. He had come through the back of the coffee shop yard, through the kitchen, out onto the verandah. Colt had laughed at the Captain and the men around him, laughed until they took out their failure on him with the most savage beating he had ever received. He wondered how much the Colonel had wagered on his winning.

  His voice was a croak. " N o problem."

  4

  Erlich was content just to be on home territory. He couldn't imagine a government servant working abroad who did not feel that tug of pleasure when he walked up the steps of his embassy in a foreign capital. Past the locally employed security man, that didn't count, and up to the best-dress marine. The marine was where Erlich could believe he started to belong. Four minutes sitting in the big lobby and hearing the splatter of the ornamental pool and waterfall, and the lady coming to meet him. In each embassy he knew that had a Legal Attache's office there was a lady who looked like everyone's mother, and who did the confidential typing and the greeting downstairs. Just about time to take in the portraits of the most recent Ambassadors before she was at his side, hair in a bun, flat shoes, blouse and cardigan, and shaking his hand and making him welcome. Up three floors in the elevator, and away down the long corridor that was chaos because the electricians were rewiring the floor, and on to the security gate into Bureau territory. There must have been a blueprint in F . B . I . H . Q . for Legal Attaches' premises, because the set-up in London, the mechanism of the outer security door, was identical to the one in Rome.

  Occasionally, behind his back, subordinates called him Desper-ado, to his face he was always Dan. Feds all used their given names, whatever their rank. The Director was the only one who was called by anything but his given name, That was part of the folklore.

  Dan Ruane, the Legal Attache, was at home in his office, as if it was an extension of his comfortable house in North London.

  The Indian wars prints on the walls were his; he had his own bookcases, his own imitation Georgian partner's desk, and his own tilting leather-backed chair. He was politely apologetic at having had to cancel the day before.

  "What have you got, then, Bill?"

  "His accent is English. Either his real name, or the name he answers to, is 'Colt'. He works for the Iraqis. It's 99 per cent sure he was the hitman for the dissident. It looks like Harry simply got in the way."

  " H a r r y ? "

  "Harry Lawrence, Agency, also a friend."

  "Friendships should be side-lined for an investigation. But you'd know that. What else have you got on the killer?"

  "Nothing else, not yet."

  "What's the Agency say down there?"

  "They say it's the Iraqis, but no one is going to lift a finger of complaint even, until the case is watertight."

  "What do you want here?"

  Ruane's giant stockinged feet were on the desk. His chair was tilted back as far as it would go. From the cupboard beside the screwed down floor safe, he had taken a mess tin in which he kept his shoe-shining kit. He rubbed polish in little circles onto the shoes that Erlich thought were impressively polished. A West Point cadet would have been proud of those shoes already. It usually took Erlich little more than 30 seconds to get his shoes presentable, but Ruane was burnishing now with a golden duster.

  ''I want the bastard named, then I want to be part of a team that goes hunting him."

  "Sounds about right."

  ''And this should be the town where I get him named."

  ''Did you get much help in Athens?''

  ''Excuse me, they they pissed on me . ,''

  The polish and the dusters were folded neatly back into the mess tin. The mess tin went hack into the cupboard. He couldn't see Ruane's face because il was bent below the rim of the desk, as he put his shoes back on. The voice was a growl.

  " Y o u like that, Bill, being pissed on?"

  "Didn't bother me."

  "Won't lose you sleep?"

  "Not a lot does."

  Ruane took a key from his pocket that was fastened to his waist belt by a fine chain. He unlocked a drawer. He took out a small black leather address book.

  " D o you know what the form is in this country, Bill?"

  "Never worked here."

  "Right, okay, digest . . . "

  The shoes were back on the desk top. Erlich could only see the soles. At least the soles weren't polished.

  ". . . In London I work through three agencies - you note that I say that I work through - I don't know what you guys get in Rome, but here it is through . . . that's most of the time . . ."

  There was a dry smile. ". . . The three agencies are, first, Secret Intelligence Service who are involved solely in overseas intelligence gathering, same as the Agency. Second, the Security Service who are internal, have responsibility for counter-espionage and are deep into counter-terrorism. Third, Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police who have about the same job as Security but are more up-front, more visible. What sticks in their throats, any of those outfits, is if we start running around like it's our territory."

  "Meaning?"

  "It means that I am in a liaison role here. It means that I have to work through these guys. It means that I don't play round here like a Wyoming steer in a glass shop . . . unless I have to . . . Enjoy your day yesterday?"

  " N o . "

  "Pity, it may have been your last day off for I don't know how long,"

  The feet swung clear of the desk top. As his weight came off it, the chair heaved upright. Ruane had his address book in his hand when he went to the office door. Erlich heard his instructions to the lady who had brought him up to the third floor. Three names, three numbers, appointments required that day. No excuses, no nonsense about previous engagements, three appointments that day.

  Ruane turned back from the door.

  "i was your age once. I reckoned to get ahead. Back then, I'd have given my right arm to have had the opportunity you've collared. Do well and you'll be going places, cross me and you won't. You with me? Nothing personal, Bill, but just remember that i work in this town, and for me to work here then I need doors opening up for me. You foul my pitch and you'll be on the next plane back to Athens, whether Harry Lawrence was a friend of yours or not, whether that damns your record . . . Got me?"

  "Got you, Dan."

  The whistle on the kettle and the front door bell went off together.

  Major Roland Tuck swore peaceably under his breath. Nurse Jones was a busy woman and he valued the minutes he had with her over a cup of tea when she came down from the bedroom.

  He left her propped against the Aga. The kitchen was the warmest room in the house, apart from the sickroom. He went through the hall with the dog at his heels. The dog invariably followed him to the door, as if
she expected, with each visitor, that her master would be back.

  He opened the door.

  There was a young man standing in the porch and looking around him. Not much to look at, because the front lawn and the drive to the Manor were a shambles. The leaves hadn't been swept up, and the gravel was alive With weeds. Behind the young fellow was a small van belonging to a household cleaning firm.

  "Major T u c k ? "

  " Y e s . "

  "Could I come in, please?"

  "What for?"

  The man looked around him again, as if he expected that they were being watched. Tuck didn't think they were, not that day.

  "I have a letter for you . . . "

  "Good heavens, my dear fellow . . . come in."

  Each time it was a different courier, a different cover. The young man followed him into the hall, carefully wiping his feet on the mat. The dog had lost interest and was heading back towards the kitchen. There had been two letters that year. He wanted the letters, of course, yet each time they had the effect of shattering the quiet routine of the Manor. The boy was their son, God dammit, no escaping that. The courier took an envelope from his inside pocket and passed it to Tuck, and also offered him paper and a pen, so that the receipt could be acknowledged.

  Tuck held the envelope in his hand, and his fist was tight, screwing at the paper.

  "I've never asked this before."

  "Asked what, Major T u c k ? "

  "Could I send a reply back with you?"

  "Don't see why not. I'll give it them, can't promise more than that."

  He told the young man to wait in the hall. He went to the kitchen and asked if the nurse would be so kind as to wait, just a few moments, and he was out of the room before she could tell him how tight her schedule was. He left the young man to admire the ibex head that was mounted above the hall clock. He went into his study and shut the door behind him. He opened the envelope. He gutted the four sheets of his son's writing. He sat at the desk, a French antique, and took a sheet of notepaper. He wrote a single sheet. The boy was a wicked little bastard, but he-had the right to know about his mother's illness. He didn't know whether Louise would last until Christmas. He folded the paper and addressed the envelope with the one word COLT.