calculator and an accounts ledger and a book of receipt dockets. He sat, now, in the car in Lilac Gardens. He had positioned himself directly under a street light. He invented receipts, and he entered those receipts in the accounts ledger. He wore a clean shirt and a tie.
He was the sales representative clearing his day's paperwork. He was the rep who had found a quiet place to get his paperwork tidied up before his last appointment of the day.
He was 75 yards from the front of the house, under the light, positioned so that he faced the junction of Lilac Gardens with Mount Pleasant. He had seen the wife again. He had seen her go out in her car, and he had watched her back with her two small boys. It was important for him to know the numbers of the household, and later he would watch for the bedroom lights so that he would know where the family slept, but that would be later. He watched the men of Lilac Gardens coming home from their day's work. He saw a Cavalier pull into the forecourt of the house to the right. He saw a flash Ford, a newer model than he recognised, accelerate up the cul-de-sac, brake, and turn squealing into the opened garage of the house to the left. Colt thought that he had never before watched the herd of workers actually come home. He saw the lights of the Sierra. He had never, himself, worked in his life, he didn't count the part time that he had thrown in with the farmers around the village, harvest-time tractor driving. The Sierra was slowing. There had always been money from his mother for what he needed, beer money, cigarette money, petrol money. He had never gone short, even in Australia, always picked up a bit here and there. Now of course he had in his hip pocket the fat brown envelope that had been handed to him in the car park on Wimbledon Common. The headlights of the Sierra caught his face then swung away, turned onto the concrete and stopped behind the Fiat. He saw the man who came out of the car.
There was a light rain. He flicked the windscreen wipers across once, killed them.
He saw the sports jacket. He saw the dark hair. He saw the man run with his briefcase to the front door. Colt saw the face of his target.
An electric fan purred in the corner, its face traversing a narrow arc, and every few seconds the papers on the desktop gently lifted, then fell back.
There were filing cabinets, each drawer with a solid pad-lock fastening it. There was a floor safe, old enough to have carried the papers of the founding fathers. There was a desk, and hard chairs against the walls. No decorations of any kind.
Typical of them, Tork thought. That room symbolised everything that he admired about the men of the Mossad. No frills, no bullshit.
'What you are suggesting is blatantly ridiculous.'
'I'm not their apologist,' Tork said.
'Arc they too stupid to interpret the threat?'
'I simply cannot say what they have or have not read into it.'
'If the Iraqis were prepared to use chemical agents against their own people, their Kurds, would they hesitate to use a nuclear device against us? They have the Condor missile, capable ol reaching any of our cities. A missile with Condor's range is not designed to carry a sackful of conventional explosive.'
'We must assume that Century is au Jait on Condor and its current state of development.' With his hand Tork flapped away thr smoke from the Israeli's cigarette. If he ever developed cancer of the lungs it would be from passive smoking in the offices of the Mossad.
'And do they also know that Dr Tariq has recently purchased 15 kilos of weapons-grade plutonium?'
'Has he now?' Tork wrote a sharp note in his pocket pad.
'And they want an even bigger picture drawn for them?'
'I think what it is, is that Century, in consultation no doubt with the boffins, regards it as inherently improbable that the programme directors at Tuwaithah would dream of targeting a British scientist. So much so that they – well, obviously there are more plausible targets – want something pretty specific before they are willing to turn Sellafield or Aldermaston upside down looking for Iraqis under the bed. At least, that's the gist of it.'
'So, they will do nothing until there is a warhead on the Condor, the Middle East at Baghdad's mercy? Most politic.'
'In a separate communication,' Tork said, 'my own Desk Head asked particularly that I should say that he hoped very much that you would be in a position to give them something more. Then he'll go straight in to bat. That's to say…'
' Y e s, yes, we know all about batting, Tork. This is not cricket.
This is survival.'
There was a cursory handshake. He was escorted from the building.
He liked to walk. He felt that when he walked on Ben Yehuda, and on the other arteries of Tel Aviv, then he could soak up something of the atmosphere of the society on which he had reported to London for the last eleven years. There was much in that society which he disliked. His private opinion, never expressed, was that the Israeli military had demeaned its reputation in its handling of the intifada war against the Palestinian teenagers. And there was much in that society which he admired.
His private opinion was that the men and women of the Mossad left his own Service for dead. But they were ruthless, the case officers of the Mossad, and he wondered what poor devil, living a buried life of danger, would be ordered to produce 'more' that the hesitations of Century might be quelled.
'I'll take them,' Frederick said.
'Are you sure?'
' I ' d like to.'
'I've got a splitting headache.'
'I'll take them.'
' I t would be marvellous…'
'I'll do it.'
She couldn't quite believe it, that Frederick would take the boys swimming. He never took them. Not to Cubs, nor to the Saturday morning soccer.
'Has something happened?'
'Should it have done?'
' A t work?' Hope in her voice.
'Just another bloody day in another bloody factory.'
She turned away. She didn't want him to see her disappointment. She went to get the boys' costumes and their towels. When she came downstairs again the boys were at the front door, and she could see the way they looked at their father, hesitant because of the change in a precious routine. They were super swimmers, that's what she'd been told last month at the pool, and they should be encouraged. Well, that was encouragement, their father taking them.
'Watch Frank's freestyle, won't you? Adam, you'll show Daddy how you can do backstroke now?'
Sara kissed Frederick's cheek.
She saw them through the door.
She waved them off. It was three years since she had last packed her bag and started to fill suitcases with the boys' clothes.
It was before they had put the small house on the market and moved to Lilac Gardens. It hadn't been a particular row, just an accumulation of tension and frustration and the slow building of the ice wall that blocked communication with each other. As she had packed and filled the suitcases and bags she had not thought through where she would have headed for. Not her mother's home, where she would have been crippled by the recrimination of what had taken her into this ill-fitted marriage, God, no. Not any friend's home, because she had no friends with whom she was close enough to share the agony of a failed relationship. It would have been a bed and breakfast place somewhere. And that afternoon he had come home early because he was sickening with the 'flu that was going round, and she had kicked the bags under the bed. She had decided that she would stay, that they would exist together. There was still the sensation of Frederick's cheek on her lips. So stiff, so taut, as if the muscles of his face were in spasm. God, the poor man. Poor old Frederick…
He sat in the gallery above the pool, watched the man who walked alongside the pool calling encouragement to a small boy struggling with a backstroke. The man walked barefoot, carrying his shoes with his socks hanging from them.
He could have done with something to eat. He hadn't eaten that morning, nor that afternoon, nor that
