London. He had gone then to the Syrian Embassy and had applied for a visa for himself, for his English-born wife, for his two daughters. On that day, twenty-seven days earlier, he had travelled from the Syrian Embassy back to his rented home in Kingston-upon Thames, and there he had, for the first time, informed his wife of their changed circumstances.
They had moved out that evening from the house in Kingston-upon-Thames. They had spent two nights in bed-and-breakfast accommodation before taking a month's let on a furnished flat close to Clapham Junction mainline railway station. Twenty-five days of suffocating in the one-bedroomed flat with his wife and the two children. He was a man used to taking his favoured clients to the Ritz or to Claridges. When he was on business away from home he stayed and entertained in the Hiltons and Sheratons and InterContinentals. The children wanted to go back to school.
Zoe wanted to go shopping in Knightsbridge. He was suffocated.
The third night, above the rattling progress of a late train, he had pummelled Zoe with his fists, and not heard the frightened crying of his children, when she had said that no fucking way was she going to be holed up for the rest of her days in bloody, bloody Damascus. It was the first time that she had forgotten the place of the Arab's wife. He had beaten her, cowed her, instilled in her once more the rule of obedience.
Zoe Rashid now accepted that she could not visit her mother before she flew out to Syria. She understood that she could only leave the flat to shop for food at the Indian-owned store at the end of the street. She accepted – rather, she understood – her position because she was never allowed from the flat with both daughters at the same time. Rashid had left the flat only once, to go by taxi to the Syrian Embassy to press further his application for asylum, and on that occasion, while he had talked and drunk coffee in an inner office his two daughters had sat outside with their colouring books and crayons.
It was prudent of Saad Rashid to hide himself and his faintly away. A Shia cleric, an enemy of the regime, had been shot dead in a hotel lobby in Khartoum. Qassem Emin, the political activist, who had made free with his denunciations of the Chairman ol the Revolutionary Command Council, had been tortured and had his throat slit in Turkey. There was the wife of a Communist who had been stabbed to death in Oslo. There was Abdullah Ali, a businessman in exile, who was known to Rashid, and who had eaten in a restaurant in London with men he believed to be his friends, who had died in St Stephen's Hospital of a rat poison that had been sprinkled on his food during a moment of inattention.
What decided Saad Rashid to steal half a million dollars and seek a life of exile in a country reviled by his homeland was the telephone call from his cousin's wife. On a poor line from Baghdad he had been told, in a voice distraught with tears, that his cousin was under arrest, charged with treason, held in the Abu Ghraib gaol. It was their way, the men from the Department of Public Security, to take one man, and then trawl through his family for any small hint of the cancer of dissent.
It was 27 days since Rashid had left his office at Iraqi Airlines for the last time.
With his two daughters, one holding each hand, he came down the long staircase from the top-floor flat. He had first checked from the window that the taxi he had telephoned was waiting.
The passports, with the visa stamps, were waiting at the Embassy.
He would fly that night to Damascus with his wife who had once been a dancer and with his children whom he loved. In his head was the account number at the Credit Bank of Zurich.
He closed the outer door behind him. He hurried with his daughters down the steps and towards the taxi.
He watched as the taxi pulled away.
It was 28 hours since he had driven the clapped-out Ford Capri into the street, and counted himself lucky to find a space to park that was pretty near opposite the front door from which the man had emerged with his two small girls.
He would hand it to the Colonel: given the motivation they could, by God, do things right. Colt knew that the target was a thief, that he had been observed entering the Syrian Embassy when that Embassy was under regular Iraqi surveillance. Colt knew that the target had been followed to the house in Clapham.
Colt knew his target at once from the photograph that he had been given. Colt thought it a serious mistake by his target to have gone in person to the Syrian Embassy.
He had found the Ruger under the mattress in his Bayswater hotel room, and with it the keys of the Capri, and the tool box, and the overalls, plus the scrap of paper on which was the street and the number. The bill was prepaid, so that he was away from the hotel before the front desk was manned, and the car had started first turn.
For the whole day and all the previous evening, he had the hood up and tinkered with the engine. He worked his way through a bag of sandwiches and four cans of Pepsi. When night fell, he had slept in the back of the Capri, slept and dozed.
They wanted it over and he wanted it over. It was his deal with the Colonel, that once the business was finished then he was free to go west, head back to his roots.
He lay on his back. His head was under the outside front wheel housing. He could not avoid it, he took a lungful of the diesel fumes from the taxi as it pulled away. The pistol was under the main chassis, in a plastic bag, and the magazine was in place, and the safety was off. He had reached for the Ruger as soon as he had seen the taxi pull up, and he had had the Ruger in his grip when the front door opposite had opened, and he had loosened the grip when he had seen that the target carried no cases, only had his daughters' hands in his. He'd be coming back… The time would be when the target returned.
When the taxi had cleared the street, Colt pushed himsell out from underneath the Capri. He pulled the woollen cap that had been in the pocket of his overalls further down over his close cut hair. When he had lifted the hood of the Capri, and fastened the arm to hold it open, then he bent again and readied under the chassis to retrieve the plastic bag holding the Ruger. He put the plastic bag on top of the battery, always close to his hand. The taxi, when it came back to the street, would be crawling because the driver would be looking for the number.
They were pretty children, Colt thought. Pretty clothes and their hair well brushed… Not easy if the target had hold of both the kids when he came out of the taxi.
It was as though he had come into work on a Sunday. Not that he had been to work on a Sunday for several years, but that was how he remembered it.
This one was a big strike. Different from the time the Radiologi-cal Protection Unit had been out, and different from the Boiler-makers' stoppage. This was the real thing. This was clerical staff and Health Physics surveyors and instrument technicians, even the 'Ploot' grinders. They were all at the Falcon Gate, banners and placards, with the Transport and General Workers Union convenors haranguing them over loudspeakers.
It was hushed as a mid-week chapel inside H3 because Carol and her typing tribe were all out in the rain with banners bearing crudely daubed exhortations to the government to raise their pay. Bissett had heard there was even talk of the fire cover being withdrawn.
Frederick Bissett was a member of the Institute of Professional Scientists, and a fat lot of good that did him. He had joined the Institute in his first year at the Establishment because at that time the organisation seemed to have some sinew to it. He had been to the Top Rank entertainment centre in Reading when all the scientists had gathered one evening to formulate a demand for a 40 per cent pay rise. Whistling in the wind, that had been, because they had settled for half, and never recovered from the shame of behaving in the same way as the typists and fitters and laboratory assistants. Waste of his time, the Institute of Professional Scientists, which was why the annual assessments, prepared in his case by Reuben Boll, were so crucial. Be interesting, of course, if fire cover were withdrawn, because then they would have to rustle up the R. A. F. crews from Brize Norton who wouldn't know their big toes from their elbows when it came to plutonium and highly enriched uranium and chemical explosive.
He had H3 almost to himself. Boll was over in F area because the Director had summoned all the Superintendents to a planning meeting. Wayne had rung in to say that he was sick, which meant that the little creep didn't want to drive past the picket line. Basil was in his office, probably hadn't registered that anything was different.
In the late morning he locked his safe, checked to see that all of his desk drawers were secured, and shut down his terminal.
Because there was a strike, because their own laboratories were idle, the high and the mighty of A area were
