CONDITION BLACK (38 page)

He saw the H3 building as a stranger would have seen it. It was no longer his place of work, no longer his second home.

If it had not been for the confidence he felt in the young man, then he would never have dared, he told himself, to come back, to play this last act, as a normal day. He showed his identity card again. He carried his raincoat and his briefcase, with his sandwiches and his thermos, into H3. He smiled at Carol, he nodded to Wayne, he acknowledged the chiming greetings of the Clerical Assistants. Basil came in behind him, shivering from the cold, peeling the bicycle clips from his ankles. Basil had never spoken up for him, and Basil's word could have turned the scale for his promotion. Carol and the Clerical Assistants had only ever paid him token respect. Wayne sneered at him. He was a stranger to them all, he had been for years.

" A h , Frederick . . ."

"Yes, Reuben?"

Boll, all bustling self-importance, came into the outer office.

"Tomorrow, listen, very oring, but will you attend the .P.S..O,/

S.P.E.O. meeting?"

" I don't . . . "

" N o problem, Frederick, they won't eat you. I'll have gone and Basil's much too busy. Just go and take a note, see they dn't decide anything stupid. It's in A45/3, at 9.15. You can do that for me?"

"Of course."

"Good man."

Of course he would agree to attend but the .Senior Principal Scientific Officers and the Senior Principal Engineering Officers would have to manage without him because he would be in Baghdad.

"Excellent, glad I caught you . . . Goodbye, eveiybody."

"Goodbye," Bissett said, and he shook Boll's hand. "Send us a postcard."

He went to his room.

It was to be a normal day, just that. He switched on his terminal and gave the screen time to warm. Just another day, the stranger's last day.

It was the time that Sara liked least at home.

It was the time after he had gone to work, and she was back from dropping the boys at school. The beds needed making, the boys' washing was on their bedroom floor, the breakfast things were still on the table. She made a mug of instant. She sat at the kitchen table. She had the radio playing a phone-in.

Drunk again, that's what he had been, and practically midnight when he had come home. She had been awake, of course, because she had reached the stage when she had wondered how much longer before she phoned the police, or started to ring round the hospitals. He had said that he had been late at work - she knew by now, surely, that he couldn't bring papers out - and that he had stopped off in the bar at Boundary Hall. But, he never worked late, and he never went to Boundary Hall, and the first and last time when he had drunk too much had been at Debbie's party when he had been in the corner, all evening, with the young man injeans.

It was the morning that she should have been at Debbie's. Her head was bent in her confusion, and the beds went unmade and the washing undone, and the plates were still in the sink. She had come upstairs, broken off from getting the boys' lunches ready, and he had been in their bedroom still. She had stood in the door, and he hadn't known she was behind him. She had watched as he put into a suitcase the suit that he had taken to New Mexico, the nearest thing he had to a summer suit. She had seen him open the second to bottom drawer of his chest and take out his summer shirts, and put these in the case, and the case back on top of the wardrobe.

The confusion boiled in her head, that Frederick should seem suddenly to have snapped, after the business with the police, the pressure, obviously, of his work, weeks of not hardly talking to her at all, now this odd business of taking the boys to school, taking them swimming, playing games with them. Was he saying goodbye? It was as if he had been standing in the door - just as she was this morning - watching her on Debbie's bed with Justin.

It couldn't be so, but she felt weak with the sense of having destroyed her home, maybe even driven Frederick out of his wits, certainly put the happiness of her children at risk by that one massive lapse, that great tumbling fall from grace. It was not enough. Not lapse enough. She craved a longer, more clarifying fall. Not enough, Justin, not by any means enough, and yet Frederick was on the point of abandoning her. Well, by heavens, he wasn't going without a word. He wasn't going to creep out without an explanation. She would wait until the weekend. She would wait no longer. She stirred herself to the routine of her day, her normal day.

As he walked up the wide steps he saw none of them. His right hand was on the tape spool in his jacket pocket. His left hand was in his trouser pocket, fingering the key to the post-restante box.

It was the start of the day's business in the new Post Office.

Noisy queues, shoving and pushing, had already formed. There were Egyptians thronging at the counters to send the registered mail to Cairo and Alexandria and Ismailia with the small amounts of foreign currency permitted. There were Kuwaitis in line for use of the international telephone cubicles. There were Sudanese shouting for the telegram forms. There were the men who stood by the walls and who watched.

The Swede never went directly to the box. He followed a procedure given him by his Control. He must always join the longest queue first. He should join the queue, shuffle forward, gradually turn this way and that, he should see everybody in the cavernous hall of the Post Office. He should never hurry when he came to deliver and to receive from the post-restante box.

He always played the game to himself that the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council was Sven . . . Each of the techno-mercenaries at Tuwaithah had their own name for the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. He was Gunther, he was Pierre, he was Giancarlo . . . They lived in a world whose every wall had ears, where servants were never trusted. They could talk openly of Gunther and Pierre and Giancarlo and Sven. It was the Swede's little joke to himself, that Sven had a new set of teeth.

The portrait poster was above the benches that were set the length of the wall opposite the post-restante boxes. The Chairman wore the heavily decorated uniform of a paratrooper and round his head was a
quaffiya.
His smile would have brightened a dark night. Sven's new dentures . . . There were two men sitting under the poster, and he saw that their eyes never left the post-restante boxes. The Swede's hope died a little. He stayed in the queue and he studied again every wall and corner of the interior of the Post Office. It was ten minutes before he was sure.

There were four more men, other than the two men who sat on the bench under Sven's broad smile, whose attention was fixed upon the post-restante boxes.

He was the only Westerner so far as he could see. He was tall, he was blond, he was pale-skinned. It was impossible that he had not been noticed. He had seen the men who watched the post-restante boxes, he could not know how many men watched him.

The sane thing to have done would have been to bend to his shoe lace, retie it, put the tape on the floor, kick it away amongst the sandalled feet, then to walk out. But the tape was too precious to him . . .

He made a gesture of impatience, he looked long and hard at his watch, he shrugged. He spun on his heel.

He tried to stop himself from running. The fear surged in him.

When he was close to the wide door of the new Post Office, he saw a man reach into his jacket pocket and take out a personal radio. Then he ran.

The bright sunshine, the white concrete dust of the unfinished pavement, blinded him when he came to the bottom of the steps outside. Fear pulsed inside him.

His eyes cleared, he blinked hard. He saw the two cars on the far side of Al-Kadhim Street, and there were men in each car. He ran.

The bungalow that had been home for the two Italians driven from Tuwaithah by an unexploded letter bomb was vacant.

Under the direction of the housing manager, a work force of women was brought that day to the bungalow. It was cleaned, it was scrubbed and it was polished. The rugs were taken outside and beaten. The kitchen was washed from ceiling to floor. New linen was put on the bed in the main bedroom. Fresh flowers were arranged in vases. In the refrigerator were put a dozen cans of beer and two bottles of French white wine and food and cartons of milk.

The Baghdad flight, it was announced, was delayed indefinitely for operational reasons.

A few of the passengers, the foreigners, the ones not already checked in and through to the duty-free lounges, vented their anger at the Iraqi Airlines desk. They were the minority. The majority accepted the situation and the free meal vouchers without complaint.

He was in the heart of the ancient round city. He ran, in fear of his life, in the narrow and dark-shadowed streets.

He had seen them last when he had stopped, panting, in the shelter of a black awning, and he had seen them quartering, searching, and a car drawing up at a crossing, disgorging others to join the hunt 50, perhaps 60 yards back down the alleyway.

The alley he was in was not wide enough for a car and down the middle of it ran a sewer carrying grey-blue slime. There were narrow and obscure openings, their steel shutters lifted, where melons and limes and tomatoes were sold, where the metal workers plied their trade, where iced lemon juice was poured into dull dirty glasses. These he passed, sometimes running, sometimes where the press of people was too thick walking briskly, his head down, as if on some anxious errand. Overhead, filtering the sunlight from the blond gold of his hair, were lines of hanging washing. This was the quarter of the poor, the crippled and the bereaved of the war, those ignored now by the regime.

No voice was raised to point him out to the dark-suited men of the Department of Public Security. The Swede was a fugitive.

He would not be helped and he would not be hindered.

It began to settle in the Swede's mind that even if he discarded the tape he could not ever return to Tuwaithah. He had been watched too long in the Post Office. He would be recognised.

Even if he could reach his car, he would be trapped at a road block. The gathering fear seemed to tug at his legs. The Swede stopped at a stall, bought a black woollen hat and an old khaki greatcoat. He paid for them three times what he would have if he had stopped to barter. He pulled the hat hard over his ears and shrugged into the coat as he left the labyrinthine alleys of the ancient round city. He prayed to his northern, foreign God for the preservation of his life and the safety of his tape.

It was as he crossed in front of the Central Railway Station forecourt that he saw the man with the personal radio that he had seen in the Post Office. He saw him and turned briskly away.

Too late. He had been recognised in his khaki greatcoat and his black cap. The man started towards him and then seemed to think better of it. The Swede could hear him shouting into his radio as he ducked into the crowd and began running as soon as he turned the first corner.

Bissett could imagine it, his situation in three months, six months, when he would be desperate for access to his computer terminal in H3/2. But he did not consider taking any material with him.

He would take with him only what he could carry in his head.

For his first week there he would sit alone and write out every small item from his memory. Maybe it would take him two or three weeks. When he had cleared his memory, then he would be free to set up his research unit and to plan the administration of his department.

All morning he funnelled his screen across past papers, past calculations, past reports.

And then he had concentrated on what they liked in H area to call the "physics of the extreme". Workings and statistics and figures tumbling up in front of his eyes. The heart core of a warhead detonation, reactions at 100,000,000° Centigrade, press ures of 20,000,000 atmospheres. Work from the lasers, studies from the "Viper" fast-pulse reactor that could produce peak power of 20,000 megawatts . . . So much for him to learn again, so little time before the end of his last day. It was like examination revision, which he had done so well at Leeds. Working quietly, methodically, at speed, he could nevertheless reflect that it would be peculiar to communicate his work to a stranger. It wasn't a question of morality, just that it would be peculiar. But then he had never worked anywhere except at the Establishment, had never had strangers as colleagues, never since he had joined.

He consigned to memory the charts, as much as he could, that dictated beryllium weights, how the tritium material could be melded in minute particles into the molten shape of ochre-coloured plutonium cores, the thickness of the highly enriched uranium that formed the concentric circle around the plutonium inside the quality gold crust.

There was a knock at his door.

He felt the frozen stampede of guilt. He swivelled to face the door.

Carol, hugging a plastic bucket to her waist. "Sorry to disturb you, Dr Bissett. You remember the electrician who had the accident on the A90 site, poor love, there's a collection for him."

He reached into his trouser pocket.

"He's paralysed, Dr Bissett."

He abandoned his trouser pocket. He had four ten pound notes in his wallet, no five pound notes. He took a ten pound note and dropped it into the bucket, amongst the pound coins and the 50

pence pieces. " O h , that's lovely, Dr Bissett, that's really nice of you. So sorry to have disturbed you. Thanks ever so much." He saw the way that Carol eyed him, like he'd cracked her image of him. It would be all round H3 that Dr Bissett had put ten pounds in her bucket.

He came out of the lavatory, in the early afternoon, not looking where he was going, struggling to retain the figures, graph shapes, calculation analyses, swimming in his mind, and walked straight into Basil.

They grabbed at each other. Bissett's hands had hold of the weathered old sinew of Basil's arms below the short sleeves of his shirt. Typical of Basil, late November and dressed as he would have been in June. They made their apologies. Bissett wanted to be away, but Basil would have none of it.