CONDITION BLACK (7 page)

" Y o u take the kid's word and you're going down a tunnel, might be a wrong-way tunnel," Nick said.

Nick, the Greek, was first-generation American. His parents had left a village in the mountains near the Albanian border just after the Civil War. He had the language. More important, he worked on Counter-Terrorism programmes specialising in the Middle East. In '87, Nick had been in Athens as one of the team k

that lured Fawaz Younis to a boat out of territorial waters, and put the handcuffs on him, and read him the charges of Air Piracy and placing a destructive device aboard an aircraft and committing violence aboard an aircraft and aiding and abetting a hijacking.

Nick was wearing yesterday's shirt and the damp smell round the breakfast table told Erlich that Nick had washed his one pair of socks the night before. Nick wouldn't be contributing much that morning, he'd be out buying his changes. " I f it's a wrong way tunnel," he said, "we start burning up man hours."

" T h e boy is telling the truth," Erlich said.

" Y o u ' d go to the wall for the boy's story?" Don said.

" Y e s , sir, I would, and before you dismiss that story, I'd like to take you out there to hear it for yourself."

Don's eyes seemed to devour Erlich's face. They would have been told, all of them, before they left Washington that he was a friend of Harry Lawrence. Vito was eating, he'd left the decision to Don. Nick had his back to them, was trying to attract the attention of the waitress for his third can of Coke.

"Suppose we go with what the kid says, what do you see as the next step?"

" W e have a physical description, we have a name or a nick-name, and I believe he's English. We have to start asking questions in London."

Don said, " S o go to London . . . "

Erlich took his hand, shook it. " T h a n k s . "

" N i c k , take him to the airport, give him what you can."

And they were gone.

Vito had raised his dark brows in question.

Don said, " I f he's right then that's the best. If he's wrong, so what's an air ticket? Catch on . . . Lawrence was his friend.

I don't want anyone with personal feelings stumbling across my path. Feelings is for Rita Hayworth, that's what I used to get told."

They drove north out of the city, the guard, his sleepless ever-present shadow, at the wheel. The road took them between the old splendour of the Khulafa and the Gailani mosques, and across the railway track that wound half the length of the country to Arbil, and out through Housing Project Number Ten, and through the concretescape of Saddam City, the Chairman's way of marking the end of the Iranian war.

Colt had heard it said that after the war the country's debt was 80
billion
dollars. Now, that was a sum of money to be reckoned with. Eighty billion dollars was a little more than the mind of Colt could cope with. Never mind the debt, the slogan seemed to be, get the show on the road. The show was all around, as far as the eye could see, any direction. New hotels, new fly-overs, new housing, new monuments to the Fallen Martyrs.

Back home, in a small Wiltshire town, dear old Barclays was nursing an overdraft in the name of Colin O. L. Tuck, which was £248.14 at the last count. You'd have to add interest, of course, but even so he would take his hat off to a man 80 billion in the red who never stopped spending. On the other hand the great portraits of the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council were way over the top by Colt's reckoning. Usually he was in camouflage smock and holding an A . K . at the hip, and would probably have knocked half his pelvis off from the recoil if he had fired at that angle. Sometimes he was in the robes of a desert prince and the headdress of Joe Arafat, riding a white horse. Sometimes he was in a City of London pinstripe and showing off his new dentures. Colt didn't hold with the personality bit, but he knew enough to keep his opinion to himself. Not least because - although Colt didn't suppose that the Chairman had an inkling of his existence - Colt owed the Chairman his liberty certainly, possibly even his life.

When they were clear of the city's traffic, Colt eased himself back in the seat and lit a small cigar.

He wore erratically laced army boots, and olive-green fatigues, and a heavy-knit dun brown sweater.

His eyes were closed. It might get to be a bit of a bastard, the next few days, and then it might just get to be amusing. But then, Colt liked fun, fun on his terms, and he'd give the bastards a run. It would be the third time that he had taken part in the escape and evasion exercises of the Presidential Guard.

He was one day past his 26th birthday. In two weeks' time it would be one year since he had first come to Iraq.

Colt would have liked his father to know how he was spending the next few days. It would give the old man pleasure.

At the village of Al Mansuriyah, below the escarpment of the Jabal Hamrin, as the sun climbed, they were met by a jeep. Colt was given a rucksack filled with a sleeping bag, field rations, water, and a first-aid kit. He was given a map, compass, and binoculars. He was shown on the map the village of Qara Tappah.

T w o of the Presidential guardsmen were giggling as they pointed to the name of the village that was his target.

He told the guard, his minder, to get back to Baghdad. He told the troops to go and scratch themselves somewhere else. In the centre of the village was the square, dominated by a portrait of the Chairman. Colt sat at a table outside the cafe that saw everything that moved in the village. He asked for coffee and fresh cake. He put his feet on an empty chair. He closed his eyes.

He would move at the end of the day. He was that rare person.

He was the person, taught by his father, who preferred darkness to light, night to day.

She was hurrying that morning. There was little enough in her life that she could honestly say was exciting, but that morning she was a little nervous, and, yes, a little excited. She wanted to get all of the washing out, then cross her fingers for a dry day with a bit of sunshine and a drying wind.

"Morning, Mrs Bissett."

Little Vicky, and she'd be standing on tip toe to see over the fence, and not even dressed yet.God alone knew what the girl did after the golden boy had gone off to sell his 57 varieties, heaven only knew why she couldn't get herself dressed before ten o'clock.

She had a mouth full of pegs. "I've told you, Vicky, I don't answer to that."

A hesitation, a smaller voice. "Morning, Sara . . ."

"Good morning, Vicky."

It was her own fault. If she hadn't been an awkward, obstinate bitch of a teenager, it would all have been very different. If she hadn't sulked with her father, fought like a cat with her mother, she wouldn't now be hanging up Frederick's threadbare underpants on the drying frame in a tiny back lawn in Lilac Gardens, Tadley. There should have been a nice young man on the Sun-ningdale marriage circuit, and then a nice house in Ascot, and probably a cottage in Devon, and two boys at a good prepatory school in Surrey. But it had been her choice. She had turned her back on her upbringing, but it didn't matter how many times she told Vicky. She was always going to be Mrs Bissett to Vicky, and Mrs Bissett to Dorothy on the other side.

"Got none of this 'flu, then?"

"Wouldn't have the time for it, Vicky."

" Y o u busy, then?"

She saw Vicky's face, over the fence, crestfallen. Poor little soul must be as lonely as sin. Come in, join the club . . .

She said cheerfully, "Big day today, Vicky. I'm joining an art class."

She didn't have to tell the girl. She didn't have to tell anyone.

She hadn't told Frederick, there just hadn't seemed to be the right time.

"Oh, that's clever, Mrs . . . Sara."

"Probably be a bloody mess."

She should have stayed and talked with the girl, but this morning, unlike most mornings, she had a deadline to meet.

Simply didn't have the lime to make soap-opera conversation over the fence. It was their fence, and it was coming down, and she had pointed that out to Frederick, and she had known he wouldn't do anything about it, any more than he would buy himself new underpants. He said that he much preferred the money they could afford for clothing to go onto the boys' backs, and onto her. She thought that her father probably now earned more than £100,000 a year, but she did not know for sure because it was nine years since she had last visited him, four years since she had last received a Christmas card from him. Her mother didn't even telephone. No reason for either of them to write or telephone, not after what had been said.

"It would be wonderful to be able to do pictures."

The telephone was ringing inside the house.

She had the last of the shirts pegged to the frame.

She should have stayed to talk to the girl, but her telephone was ringing.

"Sorry, Vicky, another time . . ."

She ran inside. She went through her kitchen, past the pool of water. Dorothy's husband had plumbed in the second-hand washing machine for her, and refused to accept money, taken all Saturday morning doing it. Because he had refused to be paid she couldn't ask him to come back again to deal with the seepage. So it would stay leaking. She went through the hall. They needed a new carpet in the hall, and on the stairs. She picked up the telephone.

" Y e s ? "

It was the bank manager, Lloyds.

" Y e s ? "

He had written twice to Mr Bissett.

"Doctor
Bissett, yes?"

He had written twice asking for a meeting, and he had received no reply. There were matters to be discussed that were really quite urgent. Would
Doctor
Bissett be so kind as to call back and arrange the appointment?

"I'll tell him you phoned."

He would be very grateful if she would do just that.

She rang off She had seen the two letters. The first had arrived ten days before, and the second had been delivered four days before. She had seen him, ten days before and four days before, scoop up the letters from the kitchen table and put them in his briefcase. He hadn't remarked on them, and she had not asked.

Each morning she had been too busy getting the boys ready to query the letters from the bank. It was years since she had last been to an art class. She didn't really know what she should be wearing, but that morning she put on an old pair of jeans. All of her jeans were old. She had dressed in a vivid red blouse and a loose woollen blue cardigan, and she had tied her long dark hair into a pony tail with an orange scarf. She hadn't been to an art class since she had been married.

She thought that she looked good, and she felt bloody good, and she wasn't going to let a telephone call from the bank manager interfere with her seldom-found excitement.

When it was dusk, Colt walked out of the village of Al Mansuriyah. The last light played on the cliff wall of the Jabal Hamrin, but by the time he reached the steep-sloping ground he would be covered by darkness. The sun's rays lingered on the one narrow minaret tower in the village behind him, and on the flat roofs where the corrugated iron was weighted down with heavy stones against the spring gales.

When he was clear of the goat herds and the sheep that grazed around the village, he moved down to the river that was a tributary of the distant Tigris. His boots were comfortable, had a deep tread. He scrambled down to the water's edge. With his fingers he broke away mud from the river bank and wet it in the river.

He smeared the mud across his face, and then across his scalp so that it matted in his close-cut hair. He layered more mud onto his throat and down to his chest and across his shoulders. Last, he rubbed it over his hands and wrists.

They had tested him in Athens, now they tested him again.

He had no hesitation in telling himself that he would win.

Failure, he had often said to himself, was not a part of his life.

He had sat forward, in Club, because Tourist was full. The whole plane was full and Nick had done well to get him a seat at all. He had never before been through Customs and Immigration at Heathrow. Not a bad experience, because there was an Englishman with Erlich's name on a sheet of cardboard waiting at the entrance to Immigration. That was good. He wouldn't have his suitcase to show. The man had a card that did the work at the desk, saved them the queue, and it did the business at Customs too. The guy let him carry his own case and led him through into the concourse where the English driver from the Embassy pool was waiting.

That was okay. He hadn't reckoned on one of the Liaison team coming down from Central London just to shake his hand, talk baseball results, and drive him back. It was a good run into the city, against the outgoing commuter traffic.

They ended up close to the Embassy in a road called South Audley Street.

The driver gave Erlich an envelope with his name and the South Audley Street address on it. Inside a glass door he was met by a security man, plainclothes, not at all talkative, probably from Kansas. He was given a key and left to find his own way up two flights of stairs.

It was a room like any other room. It was what Bill Erlich, the bachelor, was used to, clean and soulless. Inside the envelope was a note from the London-based Legal Attache. He was tied up that evening, apologies, and the rest of his team were out of town. Could Erlich be at the Attache's office at eight in the morning at the Embassy?

Erlich was alone in a city that he didn't know. He dialled Jo's number in Rome, and grew lonelier and sadder as it rang on and on, unanswered.

Colt could easily have killed him. Colt thought that "elite"

was the most overworked word in the military dictionary. He reckoned that the word elite was usually applied to those who had the best publicity machine. In the
Baghdad Times,
the English-language newspaper, the Presidential Guard were always written up as an elite force. They had all the kit, down to the nightscope. They had bivouacs, sleeping bags and cold-weather anoraks.

He had found the observation post two miles beyond the outer rim of the Jabal Hamrin. He had skirted it and approached them from behind. Three troopers of the Presidential Guard.