Gerald Seymour - Condition black

He heard Carol say, " T h e problem is, Mr Rutherford, that Mr Boll may not be coming straight in. His diary's locked in his room. If he's a meeting first thing then I don't know when he'll be here."

He was at the door of his office, reaching for his keys.

A quiet, pleasant voice, " I ' m not in a hurry. On the other hand, if that's coffee that I see being brewed… "

He could listen. If he listened and did not like what he heard then he could walk away. Frederick Bissett was his own master.

He could control what he had begun. Why should he not be able to control his destiny?

A little past eleven o'clock, he left his office. He felt quite calm. He locked the door behind him and he walked down the corridor. He paused by Carol's desk. He didn't have to speak to her. The young man was still sitting in the easy chair near to Carol's desk. The young man was watching him. He didn't have-to offer an explanation to Carol as to why he was leaving H3 in the middle of the morning.

"I'll be gone for a few minutes, Carol."

The young man looked to Bissett like a civil servant, perhaps from the Property Services Agency, perhaps from the Directorate of Defence Services, another of the creatures who came down from London, knowing nothing, to pry into the efficiency of the Establishment. The young man was watching him.

He would only be a few minutes because that was all that it would take for him to drive across to the main canteen area where the public telephones were.

The telephone shrilled below him. The woman shouted at her baby to be quiet, and he heard her answer the telephone.

She came up the stairs to him. She knocked and opened the door. She seemed to him broken by the poverty, anxiety, of her life. She looked at him with a sort of longing. Not how Fran looked at him. It was as if she knew that he was free, and she was not free. She told him that there was a man on the phone for him. He went down the stairs fast.

Bissett, poor bloody Bissett.

"Hello, Doctor Bissett, very good of you to call me. Inconvenient, not a bit… You would? That's excellent. Of course not, no, just a talk… That's grand."

Colt said where they should meet, when they should meet. He put the phone down. She might have thought that he was free, but what did she know? Free to go back to Baghdad, to the Haifa Street Housing Project, when he had finished and there he would die a little until the next time he was called to the Colonel's office.

And his future? That was a big word, too big for Colt. Too far away, anyway, to think about.

The woman was still trying to calm the baby's crying.

It was Frederick on the telephone. It was so rare for him to use an Establishment telephone that her first reaction was that it must be catastrophe… He told her that he would not be home until late, that he had a meeting, that they were working through the evening. He was always curt on the telephone. She didn't quiz him, and she wasn't sorry that she would be spared the effort of making conversation with her husband that evening.

And she hadn't called Debbie. She would have to be braver before she could speak to Debbie, thank her for the party, tell her that Frederick had enjoyed himself.

The party was still just a bad dream, and in the nightmare was the beauty of Justin's loving. She went back to the kitchen, back to turning the collars on the boys' second school shirts. Odd, really, that Frederick had actually seemed to enjoy himself, hadn't bitched all the way home.

Oh, but he'd been good, better than anything ever before, Justin Pink and his loving.

Colt spilled his information. They heard him out. They talked between themselves. When they switched back to him they explained what they wished of him. Faud shook his hand. Namir kissed his cheek.

Faud's question. "But why, Colt?"

"Why what?"

"Why does he come to us?"

" M o n e y. "

"Just for that?"

"Well, he's flattered, too, but most of all he wants the money.

You saw the state of his accounts."

"You're of his country, don't you mind?"

An absurd question. Colt didn't care. "All that nationalist crap is for the birds."

They did not understand the world of the mercenary, they did not understand how a Senior Scientific Officer would agree to meet with agents of a foreign power. They couldn't understand it because in their own country the traitor was going to fetch up in the cells of the Department of Public Security and from there straight on to the Abu Ghraib gaol, and from there, no change, the Medical City Mortuary. Either that or they were shot in Athens, or in London. That's what they did to their own.

They said it would all be in place. They went over again what Colt had to do. They said the arrangements were in hand to provide him once more with a pistol.

Rutherford asked Boll to tell Carol that no calls should be put through. He reached for the radio on the window ledge, tuned it to classical, turned the volume half-way up. The Senior Principal Scientific Officer hadn't apologised for keeping him waiting the whole of the morning, so he didn't ask his permission to switch on the radio.

He hadn't messed with any Home Office nonsense. He had told Boll that he was from the Security Service, he had invited Boll to check his credentials with the Security Officer, which of course, he had.

"Frederick Bissett…"

The antagonism cut across the room. Nothing new and he could cope with it. Nobody loved the man from the Security Service.

"What about Bissett?"

"Just running a routine check."

" A s I understand it, the matter at the Gate was cleared up to the complete satisfaction of the Security Officer."

"Well, you know the form, you working for government just the same as me, these things sort of have a way of developing their own momentum… "

"Come to the point… What do you want to know?"

"I just want to talk about Dr Bissett."

Rutherford didn't have a notebook out, and he hadn't wired himself with the pocket cassette recorder that he carried in his attache case.

"What about Bissett?"

"His work."

"You're not cleared to hear about his work."

"Let's say, the quality of his work…"

"It is quite satisfactory."

"But he needed to take work home."

" W e are not all time servers, Mr Rutherford. When we have a job to do, then we get it done."

"Would it not have been more natural for Bissett to have requested permission to take those two files off the Establishment?"

"I can't recall exactly the circumstances that day, perhaps I wasn't here."

Rutherford noted it, the hesitation. He would remember that.

It was safe to assume that the Security Officer had spoken to Boll already. The man gave away that he had been warned.

"Is he a good worker?"

"I 've no reason to think otherwise."

"A good member of the team in this building?"

"Quite… satisfactory."

"A man who makes friends?"

"It's difficult, Mr Rutherford, to be well liked here. We're not a soccer squad. We are a group of expert nuclear scientists. We have our own work to get on with, that's how we live. Is this a social club? No, it is not. Do we prop up a bar all night? No, we don't. Most of us, from the style and nature of our work, are private people. I doubt, Mr Rutherford, that where you live you are the life and soul of your neighbourhood."

Point scored. Rutherford took it. Penny always said that he was so private that the rest of the street wouldn't know he was alive.

"I am merely trying to establish the motives of Dr Bissett, in taking classified files out of his office, in direct contradiction of standing instructions."

"Then you'd better ask him."

"I will. Is Bissett in line for promotion?"

"I don't know, not my decision."