CONDITION BLACK (35 page)

We're given carte blanche to track down Colt. This is my full-time priority. No more side-shows, you'll work alongside me because that's the way you'll get to Colt . . ."

Somewhat later, they both kissed Penny Rutherford goodnight, and slipped out through the front door into the street.

Rutherford let him drive. When he wasn't dozing, when he wasn't giving the directions for the turn off the M3 onto the A303

and the right-hand fork at Stonehenge, he thought of Penny.

That was the trouble, too much thinking about Penny, not enough time to do anything about Penny. Pretty Penny, the wife left at home . . . Bedrock of Curzon Street, the wives that were left at home. On his floor, in the D Branch, he knew of four men who had moved out of their suburban houses that year, and exchanged their own homes for an inner London bedsit, bachelor apartment, studio, or whatever . . . She could have warned him, she could have whispered and pointed to the sitting room door Perhaps it was her bit of fun, pretty Penny little laugh, to let him lead with his big foot. Actually, all jokes aside, they were washed up. All the excuses could be tripped off, But , no, she hadn't warned him because she hadn't given a toss that he had made a rude bore of himself. He just thanked his stars he hadn't given away the true gist of it. The hair rose on his neck at the thought of it. Still, some comfort there. Tight as an owl and still a good Service man. A good Service man and a piss-awful husband. Go on the way they were heading and he'd be for the bachelor flat in no time, sure.

They both pretended to be asleep, and they were both awake.

Midnight chimed on the clock downstairs in the living room.

Sara knew the problem was new. He had slept after the last session with the bank manager, and he had slept after he had come back from being held by the Establishment police. He had played Scrabble with them, and he had made sure that it was always either Frank or Adam who won. He had been like any other parent. He had been like the fathers she saw at the school gate meeting their kids. Beside her, he twisted and turned.

She reached to touch his shoulder, felt him start away from her.

"What is it, Frederick? What's happened?"

It flew from him in a torrent.

"Whatever I've done is for you and for the boys. Whatever I am going to do, is only for you and for Adam and Frank. Only for you, only for them. Whatever I've done, whatever I'm going to do, don't listen to anyone. It's only for you . . . " And then nothing more.

Her questions rebounded from his angular shoulder.

The car was where it had been the last time, in the driveway of the policeman's house, left in front of his darkened windows.

This night there was more light, half a moon and broken quick moving cloud, and they had skirted the village and come to the wood from the east side.

He heard the crushing of the dead leaves.

He lay in the wood loam. He was using his bivouac as his groundsheet. There was a big wind up high. but where he was the trees shielded him from the cold. There wern't trees heaving, not this night. He hadn't heard the collapse ol a lulling branch.

It wasn't a branch, broken off, that had crushed the leaves.

Rutherford was off to his left, beyond reach IFrom where he was, Rutherford could see the front gate of the Manor House, and could look over the outbuildings of the place, what had once been the pony and trap sheds, right to the front gate. Erlich watched the light on the stair window and he could see the kitchen door.

There was a light on in the empty kitchen

He heard the cracking of a twig.

He heard a soft, dried-breath throat growl

Fast, sudden movement. The weight buckled down onto Erlich. The blow of the weight onto his shoulder, and his back.

The stab of pain at his neck. Groping lot the holsiter. The weight was on his back and heaving down on the fist that scrabbles for the handle of the Smith and Wesson. The throbbing roar in his ears, and the torn hurt in his skin. Hand on the gun, the gun clear, twisting and rolling. The weight and the pain following him as he twisted, rolled. The gun put. The gun pressed against his chest. Foul breath spilling at his lace. The growl roar, and the weight, and the pain.

He fired . . .

Kept firing . . .

Erlich kept firing until there was no more noise, until the weight was gone, through the six slugs in the Smith and Wesson chamber, and on round, until there was just the sound of the hammer hitting dead cartridge heads.

Rutherford was above him, and Rutherford's torch played over the tree branches and roots around him, and over the bramble undergrowth. Rutherford asked if he were all right. He heard the concern in Rutherford's voice. Yes, he was O.K. There was pain in the hack of his neck, and the breath had been sucked clean out of his lungs by the weight, and his ears were blasted from the deep throat growl and the hammered gunfire, Bit he was O.K. The torch wavered, came close to him. The torch found it. God, the bastard was huge. Laid out, it's full length stretched, and there was blood at its mouth, blood on its teeth.

He'd only once seen a bigger German Shepherd, half pulling a warden over, at the Federal gaol at Marion, Illinois. There was a head shot and there was a chest shot, and there was a shot that looked to have broken the dog's right rear leg.

They heard the advancing footfall. There was no attempt at concealment. The footfall drove without hesitation through the undergrowth, from the depth of the wood. Goddam fingers shaking. Revolver up, cylinder out, palm of the hand belting the barrel to shake the spent cases clear. The footfall closing on them.

Prising the new cartridges into the chamber.

The torch picked her out. There was her dirt-smeared oil jacket, the jeans and the big boots. There was the rich red flame of her hair. Erlich went to the crouch and to the aim. He could see that she carried no weapon, but he went to the crouch and the aim and his right index finger was crooked level with the trigger. Rutherford held her in the beam of his torch. She never slowed. She seemed to see through the power of the beam that dazzled her. Erlich remembered, too damn well, the beating and the kicking. He remembered his own screams. He remembered the smell of her, when she was a foot from him as he crouched and aimed. She never looked at him.

She picked up the dog. She picked it up like it was a sheep, or a dead deer. It must have weighed 40 kilos. She slung it across her shoulders, and the blood from the dog's mouth dribbled down her jacket.

She looked at him then, and he felt the hate in her.

She walked away, back into the depth of the wood.

He was crouched, he aimed at her all the time that the torch brain held her.

The sounds carried over the fields where the light frost was gathering. He heard all of the shots fired.

He had only slept fitfully since his son had last sat with his wife, held her hand. Not a poacher's shotgun, not a hunting rifle.

He had recognised the full chamber of a revolver discharged.

There were no revolvers in the village, none that he had ever heard of. Revolvers were for soldiers, and for armed policemen.

He lay on his back in the cold and companionless bed.

A man had told him once, a friend of his father, a man who had shot game in Tanganyika between the wars, that the most dangerous animal in the bush was the leopard. The man had said that a leopard was only safe when its head had been sliced off.

He thought that the American at the Reform Club would have thought of his boy as a leopard. And if the bruises on the man's face were anything to go by and the screams in the wood in the night a week ago, then the American was right about the leopard.

And six shots were for killing. Six shots were what he would have fired, nearly 50 years before in France, for killing.

He lay on his back, he stared up at the darkness of the ceiling.

He would be told, they would come to tell him. He listened for the scratch of car wheels on the gravel of the drive.

The shots were heard all around the village.

Every living soul fed from the gossip that Colt had been home, that a car had been stripped of its tyres, that an American had been savaged until he screamed for his life in the high copse behind the Manor House, that Colt was watched for.

Billy and Zap and Charlie and Kev and Dazzer and Zack and Johnny, and the bank manager from Warminster, and the solicitor from Shepton, and the District Nurse, and old Vic in the pub, and the woman above the Post Office, and the tenant of Home Farm, they all heard the shots, and they all thought of Colt.

When Fran reached her home, the cottage on the dirt track past where the church bad once been, old Brennie was in his chair beside the stove. Fran stood in the doorway with the dog, her Rocco, on her shoulders and she saw the anger that he shared with her. They took a spade, and the flash that he used for pinioning rabbits in their fear, and they went to the old tumbled stone wall that marked the edge of the disused cemetery of the church. There had been enough rain to make it easy for deep digging. They took their turns, they dug in silence.

To Erlich it was pointless that they should stay, but he wasn't going to be the first to call a halt. He had picked up the cartridge cases, they had scraped leaves over the dog's blood, they had moved a hundred yards east. It was still just possible to see the kitchen door of the Manor House, and most of the driveway.

At the first grey dawn smear Rutherford broke the long silence between them.

"Where did you get that thing?"

"I got it, and I'm keeping it."

"It's a miracle half the county's police aren't scouring the woods for you. Perhaps they are. They won't make a hundredth of the noise you made."

"What would you have had me do?"

"Bloody good covert surveillance, a real A-team."

"Don't piss on me. I'm not some Rambo kid out of the mountains . . . "

" N o , indeed."

"You'd have had me use a kitchen knife? That monster would have had my throat."

"I was merely observing that we have gone rather public."

Erlich said, "But there's nowhere else."

Rutherford said, "That's the pity of it. It's where we have to stay."

"Every goddam night till he comes . . ."

She didn't have to look so damned surprised. He had only said that he would take the boys to the school gate, drop them, and then drive to the Establishment. She didn't have to look as though he had suggested running naked round Buckingham Palace.

It was Frederick Bissett's decision to take the boys to school and to arrive 15 minutes later than usual at the Establishment.

He would decide when he should telephone Colt. He would decide whether or not he would accept their offer of employment.

For once she didn't argue with him. Just that once she didn't dispute her husband's authority. She wasn't going to dispute
anything
when he was head of a department, when he was running a research unit, when he was rich and respected.

He drove the boys to the school gate. He did his best. He talked about the Liverpool team, and their new striker. He talked about the cricket side for Australia. He stopped at the newsagent on Mulfords Hill and he bought them each two comics . . .

They'd settle, they'd work it out. Plenty of families went abroad to work and took their children with them. It was their future that he was concerned with, their future and Sara's.

He dropped the boys. They didn't kiss him. He would have liked them to show him affection. They ran from the car and into the school playground . . . There was one thing he'd miss, by God, he'd miss it: the chance to see the faces of Reuben Boll and Carol and sickly little Wayne and the Security Officer when they discovered where he had gone.

On the first floor of a decaying building in the ancient Old City, the part of Baghdad settled twelve centuries before by Abu Jafar al-Mansur, the radio transmitter was found. It was the discovery of the transmitter in the room where he lived, alone, that re-doubled the torture inflicted on the Kurd, and doubled, too, the number of officers who now involved themselves in the investigation.

With the arrival of each new officer at the Department of Public Security's interrogation cells, so the demand for confession grew, so the screw was turned.

By the time that the Colonel reached the basement cells, the Kurd, and it was all he prayed to his God for, was close to death.

The Colonel had seen the carnage inflicted by the traversing machine guns on the human waves of the enemy outside Basra.

He had seen the heads of men blown apart by revolver fire; he had seen the kicking death throes of those hanged from make-shift gallows. But even the Colonel was nauseated, felt the bile rise in his throat, when he saw what had been done to the Kurd.

They had taken the fingernails from his hands, the toenails from his feet. They had beaten the soles of his feet with rubber truncheons. They had used the
al-mangana
, the clamp on his toes that was tightened. They had torn off one of his ears. They had pounded his penis to a bloodied prune. The cell echoed with the Colonel's fury. He had the Kurd taken down from the manacles that suspended him from the ceiling. He demanded that the doctor be brought immediately. He had no feeling for the Kurd, but he had uncontrolled anger for those who had supervised an interrogation that had lost them their suspect.

The Kurd had not talked. And even as he was lowered from the ceiling, his prayer was answered and, sinking deeper into wave after wave of pain, he died. It was 21 hours since his arrest.

The Colonel demanded continued discreet surveillance of the post-restante box. It was all they had. He promised a charge of treason for any man who failed in his duty.

There was a knock. His door opened. It was Boll in the doorway.

" A h , Frederick, you have a moment?"

Funny, but actually he wasn't frightened of the man any more.

They would make him suffer when it was discovered that he had lost a Senior Scientific Officer.

"What can I do for you, Reuben?" He heard the coolness in his own voice. There had been times when he had stood up when Boll came into his room.