He had no hesitation in telling himself that he would win.
Failure, he had often said to himself, was not a part of his life.
He had sat forward, in Club, because Tourist was full. The whole plane was full and Nick had done well to get him a seat at all. He had never before been through Customs and Immigration at Heathrow. Not a bad experience, because there was an Englishman with Erlich's name on a sheet of cardboard waiting at the entrance to Immigration. That was good. He wouldn't have his suitcase to show. The man had a card that did the work at the desk, saved them the queue, and it did the business at Customs too. The guy let him carry his own case and led him through into the concourse where the English driver from the Embassy pool was waiting.
That was okay. He hadn't reckoned on one of the Liaison team coming down from Central London just to shake his hand, talk baseball results, and drive him back. It was a good run into the city, against the outgoing commuter traffic.
They ended up close to the Embassy in a road called South Audley Street.
The driver gave Erlich an envelope with his name and the South Audley Street address on it. Inside a glass door he was met by a security man, plainclothes, not at all talkative, probably from Kansas. He was given a key and left to find his own way up two flights of stairs.
It was a room like any other room. It was what Bill Erlich, the bachelor, was used to, clean and soulless. Inside the envelope was a note from the London-based Legal Attache. He was tied up that evening, apologies, and the rest of his team were out of town. Could Erlich be at the Attache's office at eight in the morning at the Embassy?
Erlich was alone in a city that he didn't know. He dialled Jo's number in Rome, and grew lonelier and sadder as it rang on and on, unanswered.
Colt could easily have killed him. Colt thought that 'elite' was the most overworked word in the military dictionary. He reckoned that the word elite was usually applied to those who had the best publicity machine. In the Baghdad Times, the English-language newspaper, the Presidential Guard were always written up as an elite force. They had all the kit, down to the nightscope. They had bivouacs, sleeping bags and cold-weather anoraks.
He had found the observation post two miles beyond the outer rim of the Jabal Hamrin. He had skirted it and approached them from behind. Three troopers of the Presidential Guard.
They did two hours on, four hours off. It was the first obstacle in his route from A1 Mansuriyah to Qara Tappah, and he could have ignored it, simply carried on, but that was not his way.
He had waited, motionless, until the frost had settled on his body.
The gag was across the trooper's mouth, and the pressure of Colt's knee was into the small of his back, and the sheer strength of Colt's arm took the trooper's wrists up into the blades of his shoulders.
He trussed the trooper so that he could not move his feet or his hands. On top of the gag, he forced into the trooper's mouth the trooper's own filthy handkerchief.
Where he had been a child, when the fox came at night around the barricaded chicken houses then the old bugger always scented the chicken house sides, left his stink, boasted that he had been there.
And it would amuse the Colonel to hear what he had done to the President's elite guard.
He would have a 90-minute start on them, maybe longer.
''I am afraid, Dr Bissett, thai ignoring facts does not make those facts go away.'
It was a quarter past nine. It was a clear hour after Bissett would normally have been at his desk.
'Now, if we could, please, just go over the figures…'
He hated to be late It was the way thai he had been reared.
'Your salary as a Senior Scientific Officer currently runs at ?17,500. I am correct
He had heard Carol, only the week before, say that the man who delivered coal to hn house was paid?345 a week. For loading and unloading sacks of coal, and driving a lorry round the villages, that was?440 per annum more than a Senior Scientific Officer earned slaving for the defence of his country. That was the society they lived in. No account taken of intellect and value.
'Your wife does not work Don't misunderstand me, I am not implying that she should be working… I sometimes feel that a great many of out social problems at the moment, young people rampaging, are brought about by mothers going out to work… So, there is no other source of income coming into the household? Correct again?'
She had worked in the supermarket off Mulfords Hill for five and a half month-. It had been t he first time that he had really seen Sara in tears. Adam had fallen over in the playground, hit his head on a bench, been taken to hospital. The school hadn't had his number at A.W.E. The teachers couldn't ask Frank where his mother might be because his class was out for the day on a Project Course. The first Sara had known of Adam's injury was when she had turned up to collect him at the school gate. She'd told him about the looks aimed at her by Adam's teachers. That was the end of her working, and anyway the money had been peanuts.
'Your mortgage is currently set at?62,500, Dr Bissett, which is slightly excessive for the salary you command, but I do quite understand that you bought at the top of the market and that interest rates were then not at their present level.'
They had made the move to Lilac Gardens in the summer of 1988. They had paid?98,000. They had known they were on the knife edge, and interest rates had been at 8 per cent. Sara had said that she just was not prepared to live any longer in the jerry-built little terrace at the bottom of the village.
' N o w, your salary works out at approximately?1460 per month, gross. Then, we've tax, insurance, local government rates, pension contributions, and the mortgage. I would estimate that, allowing for your outgoings, you have around?600 a month at your disposal.
But that, of course, does not take into account the loan we made you at the start of the year. Six thousand five hundred, repayable over three years, plus of course interest. That's another?180 a month, without interest. You are behind on the interest, Dr Bissett, and you are two months behind on the r e p a y m e n t… '
The loan had been to buy the second-hand Sierra, and then had been topped up to cover repairs required by the M. O. T.; and then increased again when Sara's Mini had just died on her, expired in the middle of the village with 110,000 miles on the tombstone. Sara had to have a car. And topped up again to pay for the repair of the flat roof over the kitchen, and the man who had done the work should have been prosecuted for fraud.
' D r Bissett, I hate to say this to a government employee, but
… private enterprise round here is on its knees for skilled and qualified people…'
'What I'm interested in is no use to the private sector. And I'm a research scientist, damn it, not a yuppie.'
'So be it… Can you look for promotion, a better salary scale, a higher grade?'
'I've been looking for it for years, but I'm not in charge of promotion and the people senior to me in my department are Home of the most brilliant minds in England, and elsewhere for that matter.'
The bank manager eased back in his chair. He was young and a Initially, flitting from branch to branch and all the time climbing.
His elbows rested on the leather padded arms of his chair, and his fingers were clasped comfortably in front of his chin.
'Something has to be done. We cannot go on like this, Dr Bisssett,'
Sara said that the exterior woodwork of the house was a disgrace and needed painting, and that the kitchen floor needed new vinyl, and that the hall carpet was awful. Sara said that if they couldn't do better than last year's holiday, a caravan in the rain in West Wales, then it wasn't worth bothering…
Bissett stood.
When he was angry then the Yorkshire surfaced again in his voice, the grate of the harsh streets of Leeds. So bloody hard he had fought to get those streets behind him. All that struggle, just to have this jumped-up little man lecturing him.
' T r y telling the government that 'something has to be done'.
Try telling bloody Downing Street 'we cannot go on like this'.'
'Nobody forced you to buy that house.'
Bissett stared at him. 'Don't ever say anything as stupid as that to me again.'
In his adult life he had never struck any person, certainly not Sara, not even his children in anger. He stood, looming over the manager's desk. His forehead beneath his curled brown hair was reddening. His spectacles had shaken down the arch of his nose.
