didn't hold with the personality bit, but he knew enough to keep his opinion to himself. Not least because – although Colt didn't suppose that the Chairman had an inkling of his existence – Colt owed the Chairman his liberty certainly, possibly even his life.
When they were clear of the city's traffic, Colt eased himself back in the seat and lit a small cigar.
He wore erratically laced army boots, and olive-green fatigues, and a heavy-knit dun brown sweater.
His eyes were closed. It might get to be a bit of a bastard, the next few days, and then it might just get to be amusing. But then, Colt liked fun, fun on his terms, and he'd give the bastards a run. It would be the third time that he had taken part in the escape and evasion exercises of the Presidential Guard.
He was one day past his 26th birthday. In two weeks' time it would be one year since he had first come to Iraq.
Colt would have liked his father to know how he was spending the next few days. It would give the old man pleasure.
At the village of Al Mansuriyah, below the escarpment of the Jabal Hamrin, as the sun climbed, they were met by a jeep. Colt was given a rucksack filled with a sleeping bag, field rations, water, and a first-aid kit. He was given a map, compass, and binoculars. He was shown on the map the village of Qara Tappah.
T w o of the Presidential guardsmen were giggling as they pointed to the name of the village that was his target.
He told the guard, his minder, to get back to Baghdad. He told the troops to go and scratch themselves somewhere else. In the centre of the village was the square, dominated by a portrait of the Chairman. Colt sat at a table outside the cafe that saw everything that moved in the village. He asked for coffee and fresh cake. He put his feet on an empty chair. He closed his eyes.
He would move at the end of the day. He was that rare person.
He was the person, taught by his father, who preferred darkness to light, night to day.
She was hurrying that morning. There was little enough in her life that she could honestly say was exciting, but that morning she was a little nervous, and, yes, a little excited. She wanted to get all of the washing out, then cross her fingers for a dry day with a bit of sunshine and a drying wind.
'Morning, Mrs Bissett.'
Little Vicky, and she'd be standing on tip toe to see over the fence, and not even dressed yet. God alone knew what the girl did after the golden boy had gone off to sell his 57 varieties, heaven only knew why she couldn't get herself dressed before ten o'clock.
She had a mouth full of pegs. 'I've told you, Vicky, I don't answer to that.'
A hesitation, a smaller voice. 'Morning, Sara…'
'Good morning, Vicky.'
It was her own fault. If she hadn't been an awkward, obstinate bitch of a teenager, it would all have been very different. If she hadn't sulked with her father, fought like a cat with her mother, she wouldn't now be hanging up Frederick's threadbare underpants on the drying frame in a tiny back lawn in Lilac Gardens, Tadley. There should have been a nice young man on the Sun-ningdale marriage circuit, and then a nice house in Ascot, and probably a cottage in Devon, and two boys at a good prepatory school in Surrey. But it had been her choice. She had turned her back on her upbringing, but it didn't matter how many times she told Vicky. She was always going to be Mrs Bissett to Vicky, and Mrs Bissett to Dorothy on the other side.
'Got none of this 'flu, then?'
'Wouldn't have the time for it, Vicky.'
' Y o u busy, then?'
She saw Vicky's face, over the fence, crestfallen. Poor little soul must be as lonely as sin. Come in, join the club…
She said cheerfully, 'Big day today, Vicky. I'm joining an art class.'
She didn't have to tell the girl. She didn't have to tell anyone.
She hadn't told Frederick, there just hadn't seemed to be the right time.
'Oh, that's clever, Mrs… Sara.'
'Probably be a bloody mess.'
She should have stayed and talked with the girl, but this morning, unlike most mornings, she had a deadline to meet.
Simply didn't have the lime to make soap-opera conversation over the fence. It was their fence, and it was coming down, and she had pointed that out to Frederick, and she had known he wouldn't do anything about it, any more than he would buy himself new underpants. He said that he much preferred the money they could afford for clothing to go onto the boys' backs, and onto her. She thought that her father probably now earned more than? 100,000 a year, but she did not know for sure because it was nine years since she had last visited him, four years since she had last received a Christmas card from him. Her mother didn't even telephone. No reason for either of them to write or telephone, not after what had been said.
'It would be wonderful to be able to do pictures.'
The telephone was ringing inside the house.
She had the last of the shirts pegged to the frame.
She should have stayed to talk to the girl, but her telephone was ringing.
'Sorry, Vicky, another time…'
She ran inside. She went through her kitchen, past the pool of water. Dorothy's husband had plumbed in the second-hand washing machine for her, and refused to accept money, taken all Saturday morning doing it. Because he had refused to be paid she couldn't ask him to come back again to deal with the seepage. So it would stay leaking. She went through the hall. They needed a new carpet in the hall, and on the stairs. She picked up the telephone.
' Yes? '
It was the bank manager, Lloyds.
' Yes? '
He had written twice to Mr Bissett.
'Doctor Bissett, yes?'
He had written twice asking for a meeting, and he had received no reply. There were matters to be discussed that were really quite urgent. Would Doctor Bissett be so kind as to call back and arrange the appointment?
'I'll tell him you phoned.'
He would be very grateful if she would do just that.
She rang off She had seen the two letters. The first had arrived ten days before, and the second had been delivered four days before. She had seen him, ten days before and four days before, scoop up the letters from the kitchen table and put them in his briefcase. He hadn't remarked on them, and she had not asked.
Each morning she had been too busy getting the boys ready to query the letters from the bank. It was years since she had last been to an art class. She didn't really know what she should be wearing, but that morning she put on an old pair of jeans. All of her jeans were old. She had dressed in a vivid red blouse and a loose woollen blue cardigan, and she had tied her long dark hair into a pony tail with an orange scarf. She hadn't been to an art class since she had been married.
She thought that she looked good, and she felt bloody good, and she wasn't going to let a telephone call from the bank manager interfere with her seldom-found excitement.
When it was dusk, Colt walked out of the village of Al Mansuriyah. The last light played on the cliff wall of the Jabal Hamrin, but by the time he reached the steep-sloping ground he would be covered by darkness. The sun's rays lingered on the one narrow minaret tower in the village behind him, and on the flat roofs where the corrugated iron was weighted down with heavy stones against the spring gales.
When he was clear of the goat herds and the sheep that grazed around the village, he moved down to the river that was a tributary of the distant Tigris. His boots were comfortable, had a deep tread. He scrambled down to the water's edge. With his fingers he broke away mud from the river bank and wet it in the river.
He smeared the mud across his face, and then across his scalp so that it matted in his close-cut hair. He layered more mud onto his throat and down to his chest and across his shoulders. Last, he rubbed it over his hands and wrists.
They had tested him in Athens, now they tested him again.
