CONDITION BLACK (15 page)

It had all been stage-managed by the Mossad. By a chance remark in passing in the Sierra hotel bar where the foreigners were billeted, a remark in the hearing of a senior Iraqi scientist, the Swede had let it be known that he found the missile programme tedious, that he really needed more challenging work.

It had been true, and he often reflected, the work
was
challenging.

For a bachelor, too, the working conditions and the pay were well above what he thought he could command elsewhere. Barely a week later an invitation had been made to him. He had thought, naively, of the excitement, and of his sister. But the conditions and the pay were long since beside the point. The point was the barbed hook of the Mossad in his nervous system.

The Venetian blind was drawn down. The window was open.

The microphone rested on the window ledge. Sharp and much too loud in his ears, the evening song of the birds and, between the calls of the birds, voices. It was hard for him to catch the words, because the flowerbeds had just been hoed and the birds were raucous in their search for food in the fresh-turned soil.

" . . . Only H area, Colonel. Their A area, no, no, just engineers. Their B area, that we do ourselves. He must come from H

area, nowhere else . . . I don't want a chemist, I don't want an engineer . . . A scientist, Colonel, and he must come from H

area . . . "

The Swede never attempted to assess what he eavesdropped.

He passed it on verbatim.

Every shrill cadence of the birds' song, every soft utterance of Dr Tariq poured into him the high exhilaration of fear.

Colt flew into London on the last flight from Frankfurt. He had changed aircraft already at Prague. At Immigration he produced the Irish passport that the Colonel had given him.

He was nodded through.

No problem. And why should there have been a problem?

6

Saad Rashid was a shrewd man, good with figures, but it did not take his shrewdness to know that a sentence of death would have been passed upon him by those who had once been his colleagues in Baghdad.

It was a month since he had made the initial transfer. Twenty-nine days earlier he had personally visited the National Westmins-ter Bank in Lower Regent Street, and in the office of the Deputy Manager he had ordered the movement of 500,000 American dollars from the account of Iraqi Airlines (London) to a numbered account in Dublin. Twenty-eight days earlier he had travelled to Dublin to transfer that sum to a second numbered account in Liechtenstein. Twenty-seven days earlier he had, by telephone, moved that same sum out of Liechtenstein and into the secrecy-shrouded computers of the Credit Bank of Zurich. On the day on which Saad Rashid had received the confirmation of the transaction from Switzerland, he had tidied his desk at the back of the Iraqi Airlines office, taken what few personal possessions he kept there and placed them in his briefcase, locked his door, pocketed his key, and told his assistant manager that he believed he was showing the first symptoms of the 'flu that was sweeping London. He had gone then to the Syrian Embassy and had applied for a visa for himself, for his English-born wife, for his two daughters. On that day, twenty-seven days earlier, he had travelled from the Syrian Embassy back to his rented home in Kingston-upon Thames, and there he had, for the first time, informed his wife of their changed circumstances.

They had moved out that evening from the house in Kingston-upon-Thames. They had spent two nights in bed-and-breakfast accommodation before taking a month's let on a furnished flat close to Clapham Junction mainline railway station. Twenty-five days of suffocating in the one-bedroomed flat with his wife and the two children. He was a man used to taking his favoured clients to the Ritz or to Claridges. When he was on business away from home he stayed and entertained in the Hiltons and Sheratons and InterContinentals. The children wanted to go back to school.

Zoe wanted to go shopping in Knightsbridge. He was suffocated.

The third night, above the rattling progress of a late train, he had pummelled Zoe with his fists, and not heard the frightened crying of his children, when she had said that no fucking way was she going to be holed up for the rest of her days in bloody, bloody Damascus. It was the first time that she had forgotten the place of the Arab's wife. He had beaten her, cowed her, instilled in her once more the rule of obedience.

Zoe Rashid now accepted that she could not visit her mother before she flew out to Syria. She understood that she could only leave the flat to shop for food at the Indian-owned store at the end of the street. She accepted - rather, she understood - her position because she was never allowed from the flat with both daughters at the same time. Rashid had left the flat only once, to go by taxi to the Syrian Embassy to press further his application for asylum, and on that occasion, while he had talked and drunk coffee in an inner office his two daughters had sat outside with their colouring books and crayons.

It was prudent of Saad Rashid to hide himself and his faintly away. A Shia cleric, an enemy of the regime, had been shot dead in a hotel lobby in Khartoum. Qassem Emin, the political activist, who had made free with his denunciations of the Chairman ol the Revolutionary Command Council, had been tortured and had his throat slit in Turkey. There was the wife of a Communist who had been stabbed to death in Oslo. There was Abdullah Ali, a businessman in exile, who was known to Rashid, and who had eaten in a restaurant in London with men he believed to be his friends, who had died in St Stephen's Hospital of a rat poison that had been sprinkled on his food during a moment of inattention.

What decided Saad Rashid to steal half a million dollars and seek a life of exile in a country reviled by his homeland was the telephone call from his cousin's wife. On a poor line from Baghdad he had been told, in a voice distraught with tears, that his cousin was under arrest, charged with treason, held in the Abu Ghraib gaol. It was their way, the men from the Department of Public Security, to take one man, and then trawl through his family for any small hint of the cancer of dissent.

It was 27 days since Rashid had left his office at Iraqi Airlines for the last time.

With his two daughters, one holding each hand, he came down the long staircase from the top-floor flat. He had first checked from the window that the taxi he had telephoned was waiting.

The passports, with the visa stamps, were waiting at the Embassy.

He would fly that night to Damascus with his wife who had once been a dancer and with his children whom he loved. In his head was the account number at the Credit Bank of Zurich.

He closed the outer door behind him. He hurried with his daughters down the steps and towards the taxi.

He watched as the taxi pulled away.

It was 28 hours since he had driven the clapped-out Ford Capri into the street, and counted himself lucky to find a space to park that was pretty near opposite the front door from which the man had emerged with his two small girls.

He would hand it to the Colonel: given the motivation they could, by God, do things right. Colt knew that the target was a thief, that he had been observed entering the Syrian Embassy when that Embassy was under regular Iraqi surveillance. Colt knew that the target had been followed to the house in Clapham.

Colt knew his target at once from the photograph that he had been given. Colt thought it a serious mistake by his target to have gone in person to the Syrian Embassy.

He had found the Ruger under the mattress in his Bayswater hotel room, and with it the keys of the Capri, and the tool box, and the overalls, plus the scrap of paper on which was the street and the number. The bill was prepaid, so that he was away from the hotel before the front desk was manned, and the car had started first turn.

For the whole day and all the previous evening, he had the hood up and tinkered with the engine. He worked his way through a bag of sandwiches and four cans of Pepsi. When night fell, he had slept in the back of the Capri, slept and dozed.

They wanted it over and he wanted it over. It was his deal with the Colonel, that once the business was finished then he was free to go west, head back to his roots.

He lay on his back. His head was under the outside front wheel housing. He could not avoid it, he took a lungful of the diesel fumes from the taxi as it pulled away. The pistol was under the main chassis, in a plastic bag, and the magazine was in place, and the safety was off. He had reached for the Ruger as soon as he had seen the taxi pull up, and he had had the Ruger in his grip when the front door opposite had opened, and he had loosened the grip when he had seen that the target carried no cases, only had his daughters' hands in his. He'd be coming back . . . The time would be when the target returned.

When the taxi had cleared the street, Colt pushed himsell out from underneath the Capri. He pulled the woollen cap that had been in the pocket of his overalls further down over his close cut hair. When he had lifted the hood of the Capri, and fastened the arm to hold it open, then he bent again and readied under the chassis to retrieve the plastic bag holding the Ruger. He put the plastic bag on top of the battery, always close to his hand. The taxi, when it came back to the street, would be crawling because the driver would be looking for the number.

They were pretty children, Colt thought. Pretty clothes and their hair well brushed . . . Not easy if the target had hold of both the kids when he came out of the taxi.

It was as though he had come into work on a Sunday. Not that he had been to work on a Sunday for several years, but that was how he remembered it.

This one was a big strike. Different from the time the Radiologi-cal Protection Unit had been out, and different from the Boiler-makers' stoppage. This was the real thing. This was clerical staff and Health Physics surveyors and instrument technicians, even the 'Ploot' grinders. They were all at the Falcon Gate, banners and placards, with the Transport and General Workers Union convenors haranguing them over loudspeakers.

It was hushed as a mid-week chapel inside H3 because Carol and her typing tribe were all out in the rain with banners bearing crudely daubed exhortations to the government to raise their pay. Bissett had heard there was even talk of the fire cover being withdrawn.

Frederick Bissett was a member of the Institute of Professional Scientists, and a fat lot of good that did him. He had joined the Institute in his first year at the Establishment because at that time the organisation seemed to have some sinew to it. He had been to the Top Rank entertainment centre in Reading when all the scientists had gathered one evening to formulate a demand for a 40 per cent pay rise. Whistling in the wind, that had been, because they had settled for half, and never recovered from the shame of behaving in the same way as the typists and fitters and laboratory assistants. Waste of his time, the Institute of Professional Scientists, which was why the annual assessments, prepared in his case by Reuben Boll, were so crucial. Be interesting, of course, if fire cover were withdrawn, because then they would have to rustle up the R . A . F . crews from Brize Norton who wouldn't know their big toes from their elbows when it came to plutonium and highly enriched uranium and chemical explosive.

He had H3 almost to himself. Boll was over in F area because the Director had summoned all the Superintendents to a planning meeting. Wayne had rung in to say that he was sick, which meant that the little creep didn't want to drive past the picket line. Basil was in his office, probably hadn't registered that anything was different.

In the late morning he locked his safe, checked to see that all of his desk drawers were secured, and shut down his terminal.

Because there was a strike, because their own laboratories were idle, the high and the mighty of A area were prepared to squeeze in a visit from lowly Frederick Bissett of H3.

He drove across Second Avenue, and past the new colossus that was the A90 building. The building was a great show box of concrete. He had never been inside the box, nor had he seen the Decontamination Centre that was alongside, nor the Liquid Waste plant. At least they were working on the complex that day, at least the civilian contractors had been able to bribe their private work force to cross the picket lines. It was said that A90 and its ancillaries would end up costing the taxpayer £ 1 . 5 billion. He'd heard that stainless steel was going inside that box at such a rate as to absorb the country's entire annual output, and that the rip-offs were a scandal. It was being said that when A90 came on song there wouldn't be enough people to work it and there wouldn't be enough plutonium to make it work. Naturally, there was enough money for A90 . . . money, money, money . . . not a squeak out of the bank manager that week.

He cut across First Avenue. Ahead of him was what those who worked there called the Citadel.

The Citadel was the A area.

The Citadel was where nuclear warheads were made. Inside the Citadel, in Bissett's opinion, there was little that was innovative, much that was wasteful - but then what else could be expected of engineers? The Citadel was a sprawl of buildings, erected in various bursts of haste and always in secrecy since the early Fifties. Everyone who worked oulside it said that the Citadel buildings creaked with age, improvisation, and therefore danger.

There was AI, in at the birth panGs of the British weapon, where the plutonium was heated in the furnaces so that it could be shaped into the melon-sized spheres for the inner workings of the warheads, and it was no secret amongst the Establishment staff that a dozen years earlier cancers had been rampant amongst the technicians. There was A45, the Materials Assembly unit, where the plutonium sphere was wrapped in a second concentric sphere of highly enriched uranium before the sealing of the lethal elements in 22-carat gold foil. Bissett had once met the gaunt technician from A45 who had apparently received through a faulty glove a particle of plutonium the size of a pinhead and whose body had been cremated six months later before there could be an inquest. There was A 1 2 , Waste Management Group, where the plutonium and highly enriched uranium and beryllium and tritium were taken from weapons that had achieved their shelf life in the guts of submarines and the bunkers of Air Force camps, then reworked for newer and more potent devices. There were the open-air vats alongside A 1 2 where acid burned out the plutonium before the sludge could be reprocessed.