'Couldn't have been anything else?'
' Colt. '
He believed the boy. The belief was instinctive. He wrote the word ' C o l t ' in his notebook, and each time the boy spoke the word Erlich underlined it again.
'What sort of age?'
' Old. '
' How old?'
The boy turned to his mother. ' A s old as Nico.'
She said, smiling, 'Younger than you, Mr Erlich, perhaps 25 years.'
' How tall? Heavy or light built?'
The boy's response was immediate. ' N o t fat, just ordinary height.'
' Hair? '
'Fair, like Redford, but shorter.'
Erlich paused. He let the words sink, and he wrote sharply, and his eyes never left the boy.
' T h e other shout, the shout of the man with the gun?'
' It was ' H e y, there
' How did he say it?'
The boy shouted, ' H e y, there.'
Erlich tried to smile. ' D i d he say it like Harrison Ford would have said it?'
'English, not American.'
' You know that difference?'
' L i k e Nanny Parsons would have said it, English.'
'Andreas, this is really extremely important… '
'It was English, Mr Erlich.'
'I could waste an awful lot of my time…'
'English.'
The words ' H e y, there' were underlined and across the top of the page he had written in bold capitals E N G L I S H.
He apologised for his intrusion. The boy had been good. He had no doubts about the boy. Because he had taught school before becoming a Fed he had some experience of kids. Erlich helped out with the Little League team in Rome that played and practised at the American School on the Via Cassia most Saturday mornings. When he was in Rome, when Jo was off somewhere, he enjoyed being one of the helpers. The coach liked having him there. The coach was an Embassy staffer in Rome and said that it was twice as good having helpers who weren't parents. The Little League baseball squad was fine relaxation for Erlich. It had given him the chance to go on talking to and getting to know children and he was sure he would know if a boy was telling him the truth. He said no to tea, thank you, or a scotch and soda. He walked down the driveway to the main gates of the villa. He crossed the road. He bent by the flowers, and tidied them.
He went down the road to the junction to look for a taxi.
3
'That's all you've got, Bill, the testimony of an infant child.'
Don was a Fed from his shined shoes to the loosened necktie at his throat. Old guard, old school. Don had led the 'rotten apple' investigation five or six years back. The arrest of that worm had been the greatest cross Don had ever had to carry, the most dangerous traitor ever in the history of the government's security service. Erlich remembered his face from the network news, bleak and uncompromising and shamed, when the announcement was made. Don pushed away the breakfast plate and lit his pipe.
'Ninety-nine times out of a hundred a kid will tell you what he thinks you want to hear,' Vito said.
Vito was too sharp a dresser to look like a Fed. Gold bracelet, sports shirt, and a small crucifix dangled from a 24-carat chain round his throat. The soybean sting in Chicago had been his.
Fantastic to have run two agents inside the sealed world of the soybean futures pit. It was said in Washington, at the level that Erlich had worked, that Vito could tackle anything, other than Mafia. He'd have been good there, with his background, but his wishes were respected.
' Y o u take the kid's word and you're going down a tunnel, might be a wrong-way tunnel,' Nick said.
Nick, the Greek, was first-generation American. His parents had left a village in the mountains near the Albanian border just after the Civil War. He had the language. More important, he worked on Counter-Terrorism programmes specialising in the Middle East. In '87, Nick had been in Athens as one of the team k that lured Fawaz Younis to a boat out of territorial waters, and put the handcuffs on him, and read him the charges of Air Piracy and placing a destructive device aboard an aircraft and committing violence aboard an aircraft and aiding and abetting a hijacking.
Nick was wearing yesterday's shirt and the damp smell round the breakfast table told Erlich that Nick had washed his one pair of socks the night before. Nick wouldn't be contributing much that morning, he'd be out buying his changes. ' I f it's a wrong way tunnel,' he said, 'we start burning up man hours.'
' T h e boy is telling the truth,' Erlich said.
' You ' d go to the wall for the boy's story?' Don said.
' Yes, sir, I would, and before you dismiss that story, I'd like to take you out there to hear it for yourself.'
Don's eyes seemed to devour Erlich's face. They would have been told, all of them, before they left Washington that he was a friend of Harry Lawrence. Vito was eating, he'd left the decision to Don. Nick had his back to them, was trying to attract the attention of the waitress for his third can of Coke.
'Suppose we go with what the kid says, what do you see as the next step?'
' We have a physical description, we have a name or a nick-name, and I believe he's English. We have to start asking questions in London.'
Don said, ' S o go to London… '
Erlich took his hand, shook it. ' Thanks. '
' Nick, take him to the airport, give him what you can.'
And they were gone.
Vito had raised his dark brows in question.
Don said, ' I f he's right then that's the best. If he's wrong, so what's an air ticket? Catch on… Lawrence was his friend.
I don't want anyone with personal feelings stumbling across my path. Feelings is for Rita Hayworth, that's what I used to get told.'
They drove north out of the city, the guard, his sleepless ever-present shadow, at the wheel. The road took them between the old splendour of the Khulafa and the Gailani mosques, and across the railway track that wound half the length of the country to Arbil, and out through Housing Project Number Ten, and through the concretescape of Saddam City, the Chairman's way of marking the end of the Iranian war.
Colt had heard it said that after the war the country's debt was 80 billion dollars. Now, that was a sum of money to be reckoned with. Eighty billion dollars was a little more than the mind of Colt could cope with. Never mind the debt, the slogan seemed to be, get the show on the road. The show was all around, as far as the eye could see, any direction. New hotels, new fly-overs, new housing, new monuments to the Fallen Martyrs.
Back home, in a small Wiltshire town, dear old Barclays was nursing an overdraft in the name of Colin O. L. Tuck, which was ?248.14 at the last count. You'd have to add interest, of course, but even so he would take his hat off to a man 80 billion in the red who never stopped spending. On the other hand the great portraits of the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council were way over the top by Colt's reckoning. Usually he was in camouflage smock and holding an A . K. at the hip, and would probably have knocked half his pelvis off from the recoil if he had fired at that angle. Sometimes he was in the robes of a desert prince and the headdress of Joe Arafat, riding a white horse. Sometimes he was in a City of London pinstripe and showing off his new dentures. Colt
