boy who went from banner-waving at public meetings to protest at experiments on animals, all the way to incendiaries and assault and finally an attempted car bomb. And then the sudden flight and the disappearance of the boy from the face of the earth. He mentioned the request for information from the Criminal Investigation Division of the police in Western Australia, of a description received from Perth of a murder suspect, which might be relevant and might not, couldn't say.
' H e went to the pub in the village where his parents live the night before he disappeared. He was in the pub, that we know.
The next day his parents' home was searched, and the boy was gone. His parents have always refused to co-operate or even to discuss the boy.'
'Isn't that where we start?'
' The house is periodically watched, the mail is routinely opened, telephone calls are intercepted. We have no indication that his parents have had any contact with him since he disappeared two years ago.'
'It's still where we start, I'd reckon.'
Rutherford said, 'Would you not rather read the file first?'
Rutherford saw the determination, the jutted chin, of the American. If he had been working out of the Embassy in Washing ton, If he was being shunted round the F.B.I. and the Cental Intelligence Agency, if he had been twiddling his thumbs for a week, he might just have been a little determined himself. This was not a Lockerbie operator, that was clear. He had heard that the Feds at Lockerbie had been good as gold, working at the pace required, picking up on every small detail provided by the forensic team at Farnborough, where the 747 had been reconstructed.
This young man was a bull looking for a china shop. He assumed Erlich to be ambitious, looking for results that would lift his career forward. He didn't care for ambition, perhaps he should have done. Rutherford found ambition a little vulgar.
He pushed the file across to him. He saw it snapped open. The photograph spilled out. Rutherford saw the way Erlich's eyes focused onto the photograph. It was a vendetta, any child would have seen that. This was Bill Erlich versus Colin T u c k, and anything that was personal in an investigation was going to be a bloody nuisance.
'I'll leave you to it. Be back shortly.' Not good form to leave Erlich alone in his office, but his safe was locked, and the drawers of his desk were locked, and he wanted to get to Accounts before they closed, to draw a float before setting off.
T h e Swede's office was on the second floor of the building.
Outside his window there was a small garden, well watered on these warm evenings. The garden was often used by the target for a short relaxing walk. The distance between the Swede's second-floor office and Dr Tariq's ground-floor suite was 60 feet.
The Swede had measured it.
He was at Tuwaithah because his much-loved sister had married an Israeli Air Force pilot. On his last visit home, to the university city of Uppsala, he had met with countrymen of his sister's husband. When he had returned to Baghdad, he had limped through Customs and Immigration to the car sent by the Atomic Energy Commission. He had leaned heavily on a stick.
With his baggage had been a Sony music centre
The stick, after the apparent improvement of his pulled ten-dons, remained in his office, always in the corner by the door where he hung his coat.
The stick concealed a rifle microphone, which, after much debate – over the alternative merits of contacts, spikes, tubes, any number of possible bugs – had been manufactured for him.
He could only use the microphone after his two Iraqi assistants had gone home. It was a huge risk, each time he unscrewed the base of the walking stick, took out the rifle microphone, plugged it to the small receiver that by day nestled in the back of his music centre, put on the headphones which on most days he used to listen to classical music. The fear, the terror of detection, each time, left him physically drained. But the job he had been given by the Mossad agents, who traded ruthlessly on his love of his sister, was a narcotic to him. He had become addicted to the terror.
He had twice before seen the Colonel walk through the garden to Dr Tariq's office, but on each occasion his assistants had still been at work.
It was 17 days since he had last locked the door of his office, turned down the lights, and unscrewed the cap of his walking stick, and heard Dr Tariq and Professor Khan discuss a series of meetings in Europe.
He crouched now beside the window. It had seemed so very straightforward at first, at the time of his recruitment. He was a techno-mercenary in the laboratory at Alto Gracia under the Sierra Chica mountains of North-West Argentina. Their first approach, late at night in his hotel room, came a week after he had received his sister's long and excited letter telling him of her marriage. Perhaps he had been bored, perhaps he simply hadn't believed in the danger. There were a number of Iraqis at Alto Gracia. They were the banker of the Condor missile development on which Argentina co-operated, with the further expertise of Egyptian engineers.
It had all been stage-managed by the Mossad. By a chance remark in passing in the Sierra hotel bar where the foreigners were billeted, a remark in the hearing of a senior Iraqi scientist, the Swede had let it be known that he found the missile programme tedious, that he really needed more challenging work.
It had been true, and he often reflected, the work was challenging.
For a bachelor, too, the working conditions and the pay were well above what he thought he could command elsewhere. Barely a week later an invitation had been made to him. He had thought, naively, of the excitement, and of his sister. But the conditions and the pay were long since beside the point. The point was the barbed hook of the Mossad in his nervous system.
The Venetian blind was drawn down. The window was open.
The microphone rested on the window ledge. Sharp and much too loud in his ears, the evening song of the birds and, between the calls of the birds, voices. It was hard for him to catch the words, because the flowerbeds had just been hoed and the birds were raucous in their search for food in the fresh-turned soil.
'… Only H area, Colonel. Their A area, no, no, just engineers. Their B area, that we do ourselves. He must come from H area, nowhere else… I don't want a chemist, I don't want an engineer… A scientist, Colonel, and he must come from H area… '
The Swede never attempted to assess what he eavesdropped.
He passed it on verbatim.
Every shrill cadence of the birds' song, every soft utterance of Dr Tariq poured into him the high exhilaration of fear.
Colt flew into London on the last flight from Frankfurt. He had changed aircraft already at Prague. At Immigration he produced the Irish passport that the Colonel had given him.
He was nodded through.
No problem. And why should there have been a problem?
6
Saad Rashid was a shrewd man, good with figures, but it did not take his shrewdness to know that a sentence of death would have been passed upon him by those who had once been his colleagues in Baghdad.
It was a month since he had made the initial transfer. Twenty-nine days earlier he had personally visited the National Westmins-ter Bank in Lower Regent Street, and in the office of the Deputy Manager he had ordered the movement of 500,000 American dollars from the account of Iraqi Airlines (London) to a numbered account in Dublin. Twenty-eight days earlier he had travelled to Dublin to transfer that sum to a second numbered account in Liechtenstein. Twenty-seven days earlier he had, by telephone, moved that same sum out of Liechtenstein and into the secrecy-shrouded computers of the Credit Bank of Zurich. On the day on which Saad Rashid had received the confirmation of the transaction from Switzerland, he had tidied his desk at the back of the Iraqi Airlines office, taken what few personal possessions he kept there and placed them in his briefcase, locked his door, pocketed his key, and told his assistant manager that he believed he was showing the first symptoms of the 'flu that was sweeping
