Gerald Seymour - Condition black

"Where you come from, don't you have any respect for the sick? Go at once, and go quietly."

He didn't apologise. He had nothing to say. He turned and he went out through the door. He closed the door behind him. He came back down the stairs, stepping carefully in the wet mud footprints of his ascent. He thought he might faint. He steadied himself on the bannister rail. Rutherford was at the bottom of the stairs with a walking stick clamped into the back of the mouth of the dog and holding tight at the animal's collar.

Erlich walked past him out through the front door into the howling night.

That it was his last night in his own country had not at all disturbed him.

He had taken Bissett back to his train, his arm hugging his shoulders. Bissett had slurred his thanks. He had stood by the train's window until it had gathered speed, and he had seen that Bissett's eyes had followed him as far as it was possible to see him. He had gone back to the room in the Great Western Hotel, and he had taken a glass of mineral water with the men from the Embassy, and they had made their plans for the following day.

They couldn't do without him, Colt thought, but it was obviously as much as they could tolerate, having to work with him. His association with the Colonel bewildered them even as it discomfited them.

The house was dark when he came back. He had gone up the stairs to his room as quietly as when he had climbed the stairs in Bissett's house, and he did not think that he had wakened the couple and their baby.

It was his last night in England, and he had not cared to think that thought. He had tried to free himself from the thought of his mother and her bedroom that had become a sickroom, and from the thought of his father and the long, cold days of his vigil, and from the thought of Fran and her freedom and her love and her big dog and her snaring wires. Colt had torn the thoughts from his mind because they were danger to him.

His country was his mother and his father and his Fran, but he had turned his back on them. It would have weakened him if he had told Fran that he was hers, that he would come back, by Christ, some time, to his Fran. Might have told her, but he would have to have told himself first and he couldn't sap himself with such a thought.

Colt slept. The hard outline of the Ruger pistol under his pillow did not trouble his sleep.

At daybreak, the Swede drove the fast straight road that cut across the rich land between the great waterways of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Behind him was modern Iraq, the Atomic Energy Commission headquarters at Tuwaithah and the sprawl of the aL-Qaqa military industrial complex further south near al-Hillah where the rocket fuel was manufactured that would launch the Condor intermediate-range missile. And behind him was the ancient site of Babylon, where a thousand Sudanese labourers had worked all weathers for three years to recreate the citadel of Nebuchadnezzar.

It was an hour's run, the journey to Baghdad.

He saw the first giant-sized portraits of the smiling Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, and the streets were choked by the early traffic. His routine was that he went first to the coffee shop of the Ishtar Sheraton, to leave his car there for the kids to clean before he walked across the Jumhuriyah Bridge.

He ignored his usual route into the city, along Fourteenth July Street. He turned left onto Imam Musa, into the slow crawl amongst the lorries and the cars that pushed towards Al Kadhim Street, and the new Post Office.

He waved his identity card at the Ministry policeman, he was gestured on.

Bissett drove through the Falcon Gate at the normal time, the same cars around him that were there every morning. It was what they had said to him, a normal day, his last day.

But already he was the stranger. He drove down Third Avenue, seeing F and B areas as a stranger would, and the great grey box building that housed the laser equipment and then the four high-rise chimneys and then the bulk of the A area and then the colossus that was A90.

He no longer belonged.

Today he did not care whether A90 would come into service two years late or three years late. It did not matter to him whether the fourth Trident submarine were cancelled, whether the new cruise-launched missile to replace the WE-177 bomb ever reached development and manufacture.

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.