CONDITION BLACK (2 page)

" Y o u poor old son of a bitch, Harry."

A hundred yards down on the other side of the road a knot of men were gathered. The girl with the flowers stopped, looked across at the men, then turned into a front drive and was gone from sight.

It would have been a pretty road in spring, with the blossom on the trees that lined it. The leaves were down now. He knew very little of what had happened, had been out of touch since the first report had reached the Embassy in Rome and he had started running. They always sent a Fed when an American citizen was killed, and the Rome office covered Athens.

The men grouped together ahead of him were hunched against the drizzle. Erlich recognised from his balding head Harry's Station Chief. If that was where Harry had died, there should have been a big area quarantined off with tape. There shouldn't have been a cattle herd of feet trampling over the grass.

Erlich walked forward. He reached the group.

The killing had been early in the morning. The Station Chief would have come from home because he wore no tie and he was draped in an old windbreaker, probably the first coat to hand on the pegs by his front door. Killings never came convenient. The Station Chief detached himself from the group. He took Erlich's hand, as if he were a priest, offering his condolences. The Station Chief would have known that Harry Lawrence and Bill Erlich were close, that their friendship crossed the divide of Agency man and Fed.

The Station Chief pointed between the trousered legs and the shoes of the Greek police and security officials. There was blood on the grass, thin darkened streaks. The pointing finger moved on, away from the grass and over towards the pavement.

On the pavement were two patches of blood.

The Station Chief said, "Harry had a contact with him - they were both taken out . . . Good to have you here, Bill."

He didn't have small talk, not his way. Erlich said, "This is unbelievable."

"It's their back-yard . . . "

"Has this place been cleaned up?"

"They got the cartridge cases . . ."

"What else?"

"I don't know what else . . . "

" Y o u happy with that?"

"Where was your Scene of Crime experience?"

"Atlanta, Georgia," Erlich said.

"Listen here, Bill, this is sure as hell not Atlanta."

" A n d you take that?"

The Station C h i e f s voice was low. " W e are foreigners, we are far from home. What I know from long and painful experience is this: we kick them, they go mightily obstinate. The harder we kick, the less we get."

"I hear you."

There was the rattle of iron gates behind him. Erlich turned.

A woman came from the villa to which the girl had delivered the flowers. She wore a tailored two-piece grey suit and deli cate shoes, and there was a scarf over her hair that came from Dior, minimum, and she carried the red roses. She walked in the rain across the road and round the group of policemen, Erlich watched her. She went to the stained pavement, where the blood pools were washed by the rain spots. She knelt. Her eyes were closed, her lips moved. She crossed herself. The woman laid the roses on the pavement. She stood. For a moment she stared down at the stains and the roses, and then she walked away.

Erlich said softly, "Thank you, ma'am."

He didn't know whether she heard him, she gave no sign.

Erlich said to the Station Chief, " I ' d like to see Harry."

Bill had been enough times to a morgue. He knew what they looked like, what the procedures were. A body didn't change if it had been blasted with an automatic weapon in a robbery on Lenox Square or gunned down on a sidewalk in Athens. Morgues were the same, bodies were the same. He fancied that the section of the morgue in Atlanta that dealt with violent death was cleaner, but it would be cleaner, had to be, because it was busier. The attendants stood back to allow Erlich and the Station Chief to go on their own to the centre of the room where the two stretchers were parked on their wheeled bases, draped with green sheeting.

The harsh central neon light glared down onto the contours of the sheeting, and gouged back at Erlich's eyes from the white-tiled wall. He lifted the sheet nearer him.

A pale, sallow face. A neat, dark moustache. A half-crescent of recently cut hair set round a receding scalp. A scraped dis-colouration on the left cheek.

"Where he fell they were all body shots that took him."

Erlich lifted the sheet further and studied the two gaping exit wounds.

" W h o was he?"

The Station Officer said, "Dissident, Iraqi. Price on his life, living in Damascus. Harry had met him before. The guy was back in town, rang Harry. Harry liked to pump him . . . "

He laid the sheet back over the face. He skirted the two stretchers, then raised the sheet of the second.

He swallowed back the bile in his throat.

It would have been a back-of-the-head shot. A low-velocity round tumbling against the toughness of the skull bone.

The exit was a mess where the eyes and nose of his friend had been.

The mouth was what he would remember. Where the laughter was, where the good cracks were. Only the mouth told him that he looked on the face of his friend.

The Station Officer said, "There are six wounds on the joker

- Harry just took the one."

"Which means?"

Erlich knew the answer.

The Station Officer said, "Almost certainly it means, wrong place, wrong time."

"Makes my day."

" H e wasn't the target, just in the way."

" T h e Iraqis do their own people . . . ?"

"When they step out of line, sure, why not?"

Erlich drew the sheet back over his friend's wretched face.

He would get autopsy details later. He didn't need more time in this chilled room. From what he had seen he estimated that the low-velocity rounds had been fired at a maximum of a dozen paces. It probably didn't matter whether his calculations were right or wild. A good man and his good friend was dead.

" A s long as I am allowed to, I will follow this, Elsa. That is my most solemn guarantee, no backing off. If it takes a month, a year, ten years . . . Elsa, I promise."

His friend's wife sat on the sofa. The two kids were against her, one on each side, and she had her small and narrow arms round her kids' shoulders and she pulled them to her.

It was five months since he had last seen her, since he had last been in Athens. Barbecue time late on a Sunday night on the balcony, and another Embassy staffer from the floor above leaning over his parapet and complaining about the smoke. She might have understood him, and she might not. She wasn't a pretty woman, but to Erlich's eye she was about the best there could be. Okay, so he didn't have a wife of his own - but of the wives of the men he knew, Elsa Lawrence was the first in line. She had been weeping, he could see that, but there was no chance that she would cry now because the apartment was filled with Agency staff, four men moving through the small apartment, packing the family's belongings. In the fifteen minutes Erlich had been there, not one of the men had come to Elsa to ask her what case which clothes should go in. They were shadow walkers, emerging every few moments with a suitcase, bulging, from one of the bedrooms, stacking it in the cramped hallway.

" A s long as it takes, Elsa."

She took her arms away from round her kids' shoulders and held them out for him.

Erlich came close to her, kneeling on the rug he knew that Harry had brought back from a fast run to Beirut. Her arms were round his neck. He kissed her cheek. He could feel the wetness of his own tears.

He broke away. When he looked back he could see that once more she hugged her children to her. In the hall the Station Officer said, "Good talk, fighting talk."

"Not a lot else to say."

"You're paid to do a job."

" Y e s . "

" N o t to play Victim Counsellor."

" Y e s . "

" T h e same job whether you knew him or didn't."

" T a k e n . "

'How many shots?"

"Twelve cartridge cases, seven hits."

" H o w many weapons?"

"One weapon. Pistol, .22 calibre, with silencer. A professional's."

" A n d are you sure that Harry Lawrence was not the target?"

"That's the way it looks."

Erlich wrote it all down in a pocket notebook, longhand. The policeman sipped coffee. He was not welcome, Erlich knew that.

He could hardly have been welcome, because when he had entered the senior police officer's room it had been with two aides trying to keep him out by every manoeuvre other than manhandling him. He'd got there, and he was staying . . . He hadn't been offered coffee.

" D o you have any evidence on which to base this supposition?"

" T h e aim of the shots."

" D o you have an eyewitness?"

The grating of the cup on the saucer. A pause. The snapping of a cigarette lighter.

"That is a very straightforward question, sir."

" Y e s , Mr Erlich, I have an eyewitness."

"Who saw it all?"

" S o I understand, yes."

" M a y I talk to the eyewitness?"

"Probably - at a suitable time."

" I s tomorrow suitable?"

" I cannot say . . . "

Again, a pause. The smoke curled between them, eddied to Erlich's face. A telephone rang in an outer office. The policeman glanced upwards as if he hoped that the phone would give him an excuse to get rid of this intruder.

"Well, sir, what do you have?"

"What do I have? Put simply, Mr Erlich, I have an intelligence agent of a foreign country going about his activities without informing the local authorities of his work . . . Do you think, Mr Erlich, that if I went to your Embassy to request a detailed briefing concerning the work in my country of Mr Harry Lawrence, Central Intelligence Agency, that I would be shown anything, other than the door . . .?"

" Y o u have the hit car?"

"Burned out, no help."

A welling frustration.

"We're on the same side." The last time he had been in Athens, when the group that called themselves "November 1 7 t h " had hit the Procter & Gamble offices with an anti-tank rocket, he had not been admitted to the presence of this big man. The warhead had not detonated, there had been no casualties. He hadn't been welcome then, wasn't welcome now, but he hadn't pushed his luck as hard when the target had been a corporation and no casualties, as when the target had been an American government servant, dead.

"Are we, Mr Erlich?"

"What do you have?"

"Lawrence and his contact walking in a quiet street. An Opel Rekord, stolen three days earlier in the Piraeus, pulls up 20 yards behind them. One man out, Caucasian, blond short hair. The contact shot. Lawrence blunders into the path of the bullets, is hit . .

"White?"

"Caucasian, Mr Erlich, white."

"IN that it?"

"There was a shout from the car driver."

"What was the shout?"

" The word 'Colt'."

"What?"

" T h e shout was the one word. Please, Mr Erlich, be so kind as to excuse me. The one word shouted was 'Colt'. Only 'Colt'."

He was Colin Olivier Louis Tuck.

Tomorrow would be his 26th birthday, but there would be no cards and no presents.

He sat and stared out over the skyline of the city in the chill of the evening. The first thing he had done when he had come into the apartment had been to turn off the heating system, and then he had opened the window in his bedroom and the window in the sparsely furnished living room. He hated to be boxed up.

What had gone wrong he did not know. He had been met by the Defence Ministry people, who had taken him directly from the aircraft steps, but no one had said a word on the way into the city. There had been no pumped handshakes, no kissed cheeks, no back slapping, so something was wrong. And there was a man at the door, standing as if on guard. A man in a two-piece suit, and a thin cotton shirt and his tie knotted at the second button of the shirt. There was little light in the room but he wore wrap-around dark glasses. Colt had his back to his watcher, but could hear him shiver in the draught. They would say whatever it was they had to say in their own time. There was no hurrying them, that's what he had learned since he had been in Baghdad.

He ran his fingers hard through the cropped growth of his fair, light golden hair. He closed his eyes. He'd wake when they came.

His day had started at 4.30 with the bleeping of his wrist-watch alarm. No breakfast, because he never took breakfast. No coffee.

No food, nothing to drink. He had dressed. He had stripped the weapon, rebuilt it, satisfied himself, and then unloaded and reloaded the magazine. He always checked the mechanism before firing because the Ruger/MAC Mark 1 was now vintage and occasionally liable to jam. At 5.30 he had left his room in the west quarter of Athens, in the student sector. The car had been waiting for him.

As he lolled in his chair, not asleep but relaxed, he could remember that he had felt no tension, less excitement, as he had thrown his bag into the back seat of the car, climbed into the front carrying the Ruger with the integral silencer in a large plastic shopping bag. The driver was good, no sweat. The driver was from the Colonel's staff, and he had travelled ahead a full month before so that he knew the city, the back-doubles they might need and the side streets. Colt had known the driver for eleven months, and he knew he was good because the Colonel had told him how the driver had once handled an ambush.

Colt had been taken to the hotel where the target was staying . . . He had seen the target leave the hotel . . . It was his decision as to when he should take out the target. As the target had come out of the hotel, his hand had stiffened on the grip of the Ruger in the plastic bag and he had eased his weight towards the passenger door. But the taxi rank outside the hotel had been full and idle and the target had been straight into a vehicle. They had followed, and he had let his feelings rip when the driver had lost the taxi at a traffic light. The driver had stayed calm and quartered the streets until the taxi was picked up again two full minutes later. The driver would have known it was his first time, didn't take offence at the yelling. The taxi had stopped eventually at a crossroads in a suburb, and the target had paid it off and walked straight to a man who waited on the pavement. The target and the man had walked away up a tree-lined road. It was as good a place as any. No cars parked in the road, no pedestrians.