He said that he was in deep trouble.
'They going to get you, Colt?'
He said that a man had been shot, likely killed, because they were trying to get to him.
'What you wanting from me?'
He said that the boys would have money, Billy and Zap, Charlie and Kev, Dazzer and Zack, Johnny. He said that without money he was gone, and she should try old Vic. He said that he needed five hundred.
'I can't get that sort of money, Colt, not quick.'
He said that if he did not have the money, then he was gone.
He said that he would be there in an hour, in the village, for the money. And they'd get it back, he'd see to that.
'They been here for you, Colt. You shouldn't be coming. They shot Rocco in the Top Spinney and they went into your house, Colt. They went into your mother's room with guns.'
He asked, were they in the village now.
'I been in all evening, I don't know whether they're back in Top Spinney.'
'One hour, and I'm sorry as hell about Rocco…' he said.
'Colt, you wouldn't have known, your mother died this evening.'
She heard in the telephone the sharp gasp of breath, and the purring when the line was cut.
Namir and Faud were seen arriving back at the Embassy. The time of their arrival was noted, they were photographed. The building was under observation by the Watchers from B Branch.
All calls into and out of the Embassy were intercepted. The urgent summons for the Military Attache to return to his office was picked up. A telex marked MOST URGENT – IMMEDIATE ACTION was sent to Government Communications Headquarters calling for exceptionally thorough monitoring of all frequencies used by the Embassy for transmissions to Baghdad.
The first transmission from the Embassy was sent 22 minutes after the return of the Military Attache.
In London there were no troops, no machine guns, no armoured personnel carriers, but the Iraqi Embassy was as effec-tively sealed as the British Embassy in Baghdad. B Branch Watchers were peeled off duty outside the Soviet Embassy, and the Syrian Embassy, away from the mosque that attracted the fundamentalist fringe in Holland Park, away from the Kilburn and Cricklewood pubs where the songs of Irish rebellion were sung. The Watchers gathered on the street corners near the building, and they sat in cars that were hazed with cigarette smoke. The building was surrounded, and a telephone call ensured that Faud's car, with one wheel on a double yellow line, was clamped.
It was not possible at that early stage in the operation to crack the code the Iraqis were using, but the volume of the radio traffic grew to an abnormally high level.
'We were betrayed.'
The Director had come from his dinner table. He had waved the Colonel to a seat, but the Colonel had preferred to stand, sensing that Dr Tariq had not understood what he had said.
'We were betrayed in London.'
'What…? And Bissett…?'
' They knew. It appears they would not have allowed our flight to leave. There was a shooting in the airport, at our airline's desk.
There were security men there, waiting for Bissett.'
' H e was shot? It is incredible.'
'It seems not. My information is that one of their policemen was the casualty. We have to assume that Bissett was arrested.'
'Betrayed… ' It was as a bell that tolled in the Director's mind, the chime of disaster. He was the man responsible for Tuwaithah. He had the plutonium; he had the yellow-cake from which the highly enriched uranium could be produced; he had the hot cell boxes; he had the engineering expertise; he had the technicians; he had the chemists. He lacked so little. He had given undertakings to the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. Dr Tariq felt the cold of the night around him.
'From within,' the Colonel said. 'It was why I telephoned you. It was a simple deduction. The leakage had to be from inside. There was a European we chased. I needed to know who, today, was absent from his work, and the description of your man who was missing. My mistake was to have rushed to his safe haven before I telephoned you.'
The Colonel spoke of the tall, gangling scientist, with the pallor of northern Europe, with long fair hair. The man who had taken refuge in the British Embassy.
The Swede had been the guest of the Director at dinner, and he had brought back delicacies from Stockholm for the Director's table.
It was Dr Tariq himself, a quarter of an hour later, who found the rifle microphone stowed inside the tubular metal walking stick. He held the rifle microphone in his shaking hand. He looked into the face of the Colonel. He saw the mirror of his own fear. They were both no more than servants of a regime that ruled by the noose and the accident and the bullet from close quarters in the nape of the neck.
The act that Colt feared was remorselessly put into place. The description and photograph of Frederick Bissett were sent to every commercial airport in the country. The same were despatched to every ferry port. With the photograph and description went the order that if any official slipped their detail to the media then retribution would be savage. There was no wish to boast that a Senior Scientific Officer of the Atomic Weapons Establishment had been lost. Firearms were drawn from police armouries by selected and trained officers. And the last thing Dickie Barker did before he left to offer his condolences to the widow of James Rutherford was to order the despatch of a team of Special Branch marksmen and detectives trained in covert surveillance to Wiltshire, to liaise there with his man, Hobbes.
There were six of them in the house, and Sara had seen that two of them wore holsters strapped to their chests underneath their jackets. She had seen the guns in the holsters when they had reached up to push aside the narrow hatch into the roof space.
They had begun the search without waiting for the Security Officer.
She was not asked whether she agreed, she was told that it would be better that the boys go to a neighbour's house, and she was told that would happen as soon as a woman police constable was available. It was quite systematic, the way in which they had begun to pull the house, her home, apart. When the woman police constable had arrived, let in by a detective because she was no longer mistress of 4, Lilac Gardens, she was asked which of her neighbours should have the boys. She pointed next door, not to little Vicky. She pointed to the plumber's house.
She could not protest when her boys were ushered out of her kitchen by the woman police constable. They were white-faced when they went, and she thought they were too much in shock to have cried. And the boys who were ten years old and eight years old held each other's hand, and the woman police constable had her cool uniformed arm round the younger, smaller, shoulder as she took them through the front door.
She felt the shame. She knew the awful, sick depths of despair.
Within a minute, two minutes, of the children being taken from her, the Security Officer had arrived. He had introduced himself and then clumped away up the stairs to assess the state of the search. Now he was back, now he crowded into her kitchen.
God, Frederick Bissett, you bastard… Her husband. Her choice.
Sara reached towards her kettle. She looked at the Security Officer. He nodded. She was permitted to make herself a pot of tea. While the kettle boiled, while she took her milk out of the fridge and a mug from the cupboard, he busied himself with the file that he had brought. She made her pot of tea. She poured a mug of tea for herself, and stirred in the milk. She didn't ask the Security Officer if he wanted tea, didn't offer it to him. Behind his glasses she saw the sharp bright blinking from small eyes. She saw that he wore old corduroy trousers, and that the buttons of his cardigan were tight on his gut. It seemed to matter to him not at all that she had not offered him a cup of tea.
Frederick Bissett, her husband, had brought this creature into her house.
She sipped at the tea. From upstairs she could hear the clatter of drawers being pulled out, and she could hear the whine of the vinyl being lifted from its adhesive, and she could hear the scream as the floorboards were prised up. It was her house, and it was being torn apart. Sometimes she heard laughter. It was just a job of work to
