Gerald Seymour - Condition black

"Where the fuck is he?"

He saw the man's head turn. He saw the man look back towards the counter, and beyond the counter was the gape of the open door that led to the staircase and darkness. He could see the first steps of the staircase. The man's head swung back, as if he knew he had been caught out.

Erlich eased himself up from behind the cover of the jukebox.

He was panting… One thing to open the door and charge into the back bar, another thing to go walkabout up a staircase into darkness… He rocked again on his feet. His decision. Quantico teaching said that an agent should never, alone, follow a man up a staircase, and never, ever, into an unlit staircase.

He was on the line, he was alone.

"Good God," Basil Curtis was bemused. " You quite astonish me.

The Security Officer invited himself into the bedsitting room.

There was a strong smell of cat. He looked around him. More books than he had ever seen in such a room, three walls of them, from floor to ceiling and piles of them elsewhere. And a cat litter-tray in one corner. Quite extraordinary to the Security Officer that Curtis, famously the best brain at A. W. E., paid more, certainly, than anyone else there, should choose to live in a single man's quarters in the Boundary Hall accommodation.

" H e was going to Iraq, it's cut and dried."

He saw that Curtis had covered, with the newspaper he had been reading in bed, a half-written letter on his desk. The cat emerged from the wardrobe and observed the Security Officer with distaste. Curtis stood in his striped flannel pyjamas, holding a mug of cocoa.

"I wouldn't have believed it… but, of course, I didn't know him well."

He could see a pink hot-water bottle peeping from under the back-turned bedclothes.

The Security Officer said, "I am beginning to understand why Bissett ran."

"I think that we should allow events to run their course, away from view. I don't want anything public, Mr Barker. I only want a message sent in private to that regime of blood. My advice, go home, get a solid night's sleep."

"Very good, Prime Minister."

"Good night, Mr Barker."

Too old and too tired to wrestle through the night with the new world of the Rutherfords and the Erlichs, the Colts and the Frederick Bissetts. He would have one more word with Hobbes at the Pig and Whistle to let him know that both he and the Prime Minister required a total blanket over the outcome, tell him to push the goggling bystanders back another 200 yards, confiscate any cameras etc etc. As to the outcome, it scarcely troubled him to consider it. There was not a lot he could do to influence the outcome now. These sieges had a habit of going on for half a day, minimum.

Hobbes could, by God, earn a spur here after his craven performance at Century. Yes, he would go to bed and be ready to pick up the pieces in the morning. With Tuck's boy and the lunatic Erlich in the frame, there would, by God, be pieces.

Later, he would leave through the basement tunnel, he would walk out via the doors of the Cabinet Office. He would wait on the wide Whitehall pavement for a cruising taxi. And he would wonder if Penny Rutherford slept, whether she had taken the pill that the Curzon Street doctor would have left her. And he would wonder – if Erlich got the better of Tuck's boy – if he could persuade Ruane to send him away, right away, before Rutherford's funeral.

He could walk out through the back door and put his gun back in his holster, and he could tell the guys from the Special Weapons unit that there was no way Bill Erlich was going to do the right thing by his friend if it meant climbing a staircase into darkness.

His decision.

He could shift his ass up the stairs and search till he found the bastard, and hit down each door, and belt open each cupboard, and kick over each bed, until he found the mother.

He wasn't as good as when he had come in. It was going away from him, ebbing with each of the slow seconds as the time slipped by him. His eyes had never left the staircase. All the time he had expected to see the barrel that was the integral silencer and the fast-coming bulk shape of Colt behind it.

He started to move. The man was in front of him.

There was the raised hatch that cut off the barman's place from his customers. His route would be through the hatch and behind the counter and onto the bottom step of the staircase.

All the time watching the opening to the staircase…

He heard the crash of the breaking glass.

Erlich half swivelled.

The man had stood, and he had a glass in his hand with the drinking rim broken, and the man stood across Erlich's path and the broken glass was his weapon.

"Put that down."

"You're not going up."

"Get out of my way."

"Not going up."

The sound of their voices… Erlich thought Colt would be at the top of the staircase. It was goddam crazy. Why not send him a message Western Union, Federal Express…

"You'd better move, buddy, or you're going to get yourself hurt."

The man held his ground. Erlich hardly saw the broken drinking end of the glass. Eyes on the staircase. The staircase was Colt.

Colt was danger. Danger was not a nutcake with a broken glass, like he was high on smack or hash. Danger was Colt, sober and cold. He took a pace forward.

He saw, from the corner of his eye, that the glass was aimed at his face.

Erlich tried to sound calm, "Stand back."

The glass was held at arm's stretch. The broken end was a foot from his face.

"He's my friend."

"I don't even know who you are."

"I am Colt's friend."

He saw the veins in the man's throat, and he saw the tremble in the wrist that held the glass. This was the man he had seen at the airport. Then he had been a craven passenger of Colt's. He was a man with no pedigree of violence, who just once and only once had wound himself to the point of no return.

" H e ' s a psychopath, your friend. A killer, do you understand that?"

The glass was in front of Erlich's face.

" H e gave me a chance, no one else did."

"You're not my quarrel, buddy, so put that thing down and if you know what's good for you, you'll walk right through that back door with your hands in the air."

Erlich went forward. The glass rose towards his eyes.

" N o one else," the man screamed.

He felt the judder of pain at his cheek and his chin.

Erlich fired.

He saw the man pitch away from him. He could not remember the name that Rutherford had shouted at the airport. He heard nothing. He saw the glass fall and break apart. He heard nothing… He saw the blood dribble on the floor and the blood splattered on the wall and over a glass case with a pair of stuffed pheasants.

The rain fell hard about him. It ran on his face. The rain and the wind that drove it and the cloud mist were his freedom.

It was his joy when he had felt the sting of the rain as he had first pushed up the skylight window. The happiness had been with him all along the roof gulley, and after he had dropped down beside the old water barrel. He had rejoiced to be free as he had crawled flat on his stomach along the rows of cabbages and between the stems of the laurel bushes that made the overgrown edge between the outbuildings and the open field.

In the moment that he reached the tree line of the Top Spinney he heard the clatter of two shots.

He did not pause.

His freedom was the night around him.

It was only when all the other passengers had gone and he was left with the cabin crew that the three men came on board. They shook his hand.

It was the day before Christmas. There was a carol playing over the loudspeakers in Arrivals, and he saw through the tinted glass that there was a sleet storm blowing in from the west and towards London.